by Chris Mooney
‘Stats?’ Darby asked.
‘White male, sixty-eight years old, five-foot-eight.’
‘He’s not our guy. The gunman was at least five-eight. Where does he live?’
‘Twenty-two Fodor Road in Quincy. I wrote it down for you.’ Coop handed the card to Gelfand, who already had his cell phone out, ready to dial. ‘And I already sent someone over to check out Warren’s place, Jerry Pike. He was already at the blast site.’
‘Please tell me you told him to bring along some people from the bomb squad, have them check out Warren’s house before he goes inside.’
‘I told him.’
‘Good boy.’
‘Quincy,’ Darby said. ‘Same city as Mr Murder.’
‘Warren retired in ninety-three,’ Coop said. Then he looked pointedly at her and added, ‘His last job was the head of the latent-fingerprint unit.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ Darby said under her breath.
Gelfand’s gaze flicked between them. ‘What am I missing, kids?’
Darby motioned to Coop to explain.
‘In the eighties and nineties, forensics wasn’t what it is now, at least in Boston,’ Coop said. ‘BPD’s fingerprint unit was a known dumping ground for problem officers – mainly officers who were unfit for street duty. When Warren took over in the late eighties, he had no formal training in prints. What he did have, from what I was told, was a well-known and well-documented history of anger management issues, substance and domestic abuse – and witness intimidation.’
‘Where did he work before that?’
‘Homicide.’
Gelfand beamed. ‘How much you wanna bet Hill and Warren were partners at one time or worked together in the same unit?’
‘Rumour is the department forced Warren to retire in ninety-three because he either deliberately mishandled or falsified evidence.’
‘Which case?’
‘Cases,’ Coop replied. ‘I don’t know any names – Warren was long gone by the time I came on board in ninety-nine. Then, five years later, the fingerprint unit underwent a massive overhaul, started hiring qualified forensics personnel. Now let’s talk about Anita Barnes for a moment.
‘I searched NCIC for her grandson’s case. It’s not listed – and it should be listed because, if what Barnes told us is true, that the person or persons who killed her grandson weren’t caught, then it’s still an open case.’
The FBI’s National Crime Information Center operated under the concept of shared management. Local, state, tribal and federal data providers and systems users entered information into the NCIC, while the Criminal Justice Information Service (CJIS), which owned and operated NCIC, served as merely the custodian of NCIC records.
‘So it’s possible the case didn’t get placed on NCIC,’ Gelfand said. ‘No big deal, happens all the time. Besides, even if the record was there, all it gives us is the so-called ‘positive response’, and that’s not probably cause for any law enforcement officer to take action. NCIC policy requires we make contact with the agency of record to verify the information and then check to see if it’s up to date – and I don’t want to do that here because if we request the information from BPD, that tips them off to where we’re looking.’
‘They already know about Anita Barnes’s grandson.’
‘Right. But if I ask them to see the case file and materials, we lose the nexus of terror angle, which mean BPD can take this away from us, and I can’t allow that to happen. I’ll tell you something else. I have a hard time believing the gunman, who is white, is doing all of this because of some black kid from Dorchester.’
‘The gunman wants to expose BPD corruption, mishandling of evidence – whatever this is, Anita Barnes’s grandson is the starting point,’ Coop said. ‘He wants the Bureau to investigate this case and the others that are going to follow so we can get everything on record.’
‘Well, if he wants us to do that, he’s got to give us something more because Donnelly and his cronies want to take the case away from us – and they will, it’s only a matter of time. Right now, they’ve got Anita Barnes’s case. They’ve got a dead cop, Danny Hill. And they’re going to find out about Trey Warren, a problem cop who may or may not have botched cases. We give them any more probable cause, we’ll have to pack up.’
‘Not if we can show a conflict of interest here.’
Darby said, ‘Put Briggs on the phone with me.’
‘Why, so you can aggravate the shit out of him again?’ Gelfand said. ‘All we have right now is supposition and hearsay. We have nothing concrete to prove he’s involved in this – we don’t even know how he fits into this yet.’
‘Which is all the more reason why we need to get him on the record. Does he know about Danny Hill?’
‘You want me to depose him over the phone?’
‘I want you on the phone when I speak to him. Coop, too. I want more than one witness to hear him say he doesn’t know anything. I want more than one person to hear the answers to his questions.’
‘How about I just record the conversation while we’re at it and not tell him?’ Gelfand shook his head. ‘Briggs is a politician, he knows how the game is played. Right now he’s being Mr Cooperative. I want to keep it that way for the moment. I don’t want him to lawyer up.’
‘He will. You can take that as a given.’
‘But he won’t play that card until he has to. Doc, I know what BPD did to you and your old man, I get it. And I’m sure on some level you’re wondering if Briggs might have been involved in your old man’s death in some way, maybe helped to bury the whole truth about what went down. If I were in your shoes, I’d want to nail his ass to the wall, too. Right now, though? Right now, I don’t want to tell him anything. I don’t want to tip our hand in any way. Let’s gather the facts and then we’ll talk to him together, here, face-to-face, and on the record.’
Coop’s phone rang. He answered the call without bothering to check the screen, listened for a moment.
‘Hold on,’ he said to the person on the other end of the line.
Then, to Darby and Gelfand: ‘Warren’s dead.’
32
+00.00
Darby and Gelfand took out their phones so Coop would conference them into the call.
The federal agent on the other end of the line was named Jerry Pike, and he had a lot to say about Trey Warren.
‘Guy was shot in the back of the head, about fifteen, maybe twenty feet away from his front door,’ Pike told them. He definitely wasn’t from Boston – or New England, for that matter. Darby heard the faint traces of a Texan accent in the man’s voice.
She took over the questioning. ‘Are you inside the house, Agent Pike?’
‘No. Bomb squad is still examining the perimeter, the doors and windows, to see if anything is booby-trapped – Ted Scott’s orders. I’m standing in the side yard, with a pair of binoculars, looking through the downstairs window at the late Trey Warren.’
‘You’re sure it’s Warren?’
‘White guy, about five-nine, bald, late sixties. Guy looks like a scrotal sack attached to a Q-Tip. Oh, and his face matches the photos I pulled up on this internet thing called Google.’
It appeared Gelfand hired agents who shared his same brand of sarcasm.
‘Warren’s dressed in a bathrobe, a wife-beater and a pair of boxer shorts,’ Pike said. ‘Judging from the position of the body and the blood spray patterns, I’d say he was shot in the back of the head first and then, after he collapsed against the floor, shot a second and final time at pointblank range against the temple. Given what I’m seeing, I’m guessing the homicide is recent, within a few hours. I checked the rest of the windows and don’t see anyone else in there.’
‘What about shell casings?’
‘None on the floor from what I can see, and I also checked out near the front door. I think the guy picked up his brass. No sign of forced entry either or any signs of a struggle. Everything points to Warren knowing the killer. Warren answered the door
, saw the guy and invited him in. Then, when Warren turned around, he got shot once in the back of the head and then had what was left of his brain splattered across the floor. Given the exit patterns, my money’s on a nine-millimetre hollow-point round.’
‘How far away is Warren’s home from Danny Hill’s?’
‘I was wondering that too, so I Googled it. It’s sixteen point nine miles.’
‘Are there bus routes in that area?’
Pike was quiet for a moment. ‘None that I can see from where I’m standing, but I’ll check it out,’ he said. ‘Neighbourhood is geezer central – blue-hairs and Buicks. Homes here are packed pretty tight together, so I’m sure someone must have seen something, provided he or she was wearing their glasses. And hearing aid. We’re going to start canvassing for witnesses.’
‘BPD?’
‘Not here yet. The EOD guys are a mix of ours and staties.’
‘Pull his phone records, see who may have called him this morning.’
‘Already on it. Howie, you still on the line?’
‘Still here,’ Gelfand said.
‘If you can spare ERT, I’d recommend having one of the vans here ready and waiting for when the bomb guys release the house to us. That way we can get in and secure the scene, document everything hard and fast. After that, we can loop in BPD.’
Murder wasn’t a federal crime. Jumping on a homicide without first informing BPD would be a violation of protocol – and cause a major uproar. Gelfand, however, had some leeway. He could always tell Donnelly that the gunman, who was still considered a terrorist, committed the shooting. Darby, though, wasn’t sure the gunman was behind it, at least not yet.
‘A couple of our ERT vans, they’re unmarked, right?’ Pike asked.
‘Yeah. I’ll send one over,’ Gelfand replied. ‘I want them inside the house the moment you get the go-ahead.’
As Gelfand began to discuss the operational logistics, Darby pulled the phone away from her ear. She tapped it against her thigh as she gazed out at the early afternoon traffic moving beneath the darkening sky.
No criminal wants to get caught. The reality is that most have the IQ and organization and planning skills of a cucumber. They’re lazy and act on impulse, leaving a trail of breadcrumbs that lead right back to their doorstep.
All the cases Darby had worked on during her career revolved around two undisputable facts: the perpetrators were of at least above-average intelligence and they went to immeasurable lengths to make sure they didn’t get caught. They wanted to remain hidden, in the shadows, for years, if not decades, so they could do what they loved most: torture and kill with impunity.
But they all showed patterned behaviour. When threatened, they either adapted or they’d get caught.
Here, the perpetrator was front and centre. Here, the pattern was already known, and the perpetrator was deliberately spoon-feeding information to them. The gunman had seized control of the BPD lobby by force and taken three hostages. One of them, Anita Barnes, had been asked by an unknown male to meet a well-known attorney with a history of suing the city inside the police lobby to discuss the death of her grandson, a cold case dating all the way back to the early nineties. The suicide vest strapped to his chest, he claimed, was wired to his heartbeat, and one of several bombs he claimed he had planted around the city had detonated and killed Danny Hill, one of Boston’s most well-known, successful detectives.
And now there was another dead cop, a former detective, a man who, according to Coop, had a history of witness intimidation and evidence tampering. Instead of being booted from the force, Trey Warren had been made head of the Latent Fingerprint Division. Such a revelation would surprise the general public, but it didn’t surprise her. BPD, like any good law enforcement agency, had their fair share of problems. And like any good law enforcement agency, BPD would want to keep their sins private because at the end of the day what mattered most wasn’t right or wrong or punishing the guilty but keeping up appearances. She had the mental and physical scars to prove it.
Darby was watching a pair of pigeons fighting over what looked like the scrap of a hamburger bun when out of the corner of her eye she saw Gelfand pull the phone away from his ear and then rub the corners of his mouth with the back of his hand.
‘The gunman killed Danny Hill from a distance,’ she told them. ‘He didn’t get up all close and personal. Someone else shot Warren.’
‘Like Big Red’s partner?’ Gelfand asked. He and Coop had moved closer to her.
‘We don’t know if the gunman does, in fact, have a partner,’ Darby said. ‘If he does, then they’d be working in unison, not against each other – and the gunman left evidence behind to lead us to Warren.’
‘Not us. You. That’s an important distinction, Doc.’
‘He wouldn’t leave evidence behind with fingerprints on it to lead me to a dead body. He’d want Warren to suffer publicly just like Briggs, just like Danny Hill.’
‘Hill is dead.’
‘Hill was an accident. He wasn’t supposed to be home today – he called in sick, right?’
‘That’s what Donnelly said.’
The bigger of the two pigeons wrangled the scrap of food from the smaller one and then it jumped, its wings flapping, and took flight. Watching the bird, Darby found herself thinking back to the events this morning in Dorchester.
‘So if the gunman didn’t kill Warren, then who did?’ Gelfand asked. ‘Any theories?’
‘I don’t know. But I’m telling you it wasn’t the gunman. It doesn’t fit his pattern or agenda. He deliberately left –’ Darby cut herself off, straightening.
Gelfand was about to speak when Coop silenced him with his hand.
Something was circling her mind, something to do with what happened this morning in Dorchester. What about Dorchester?
The phone, an inner voice answered. What about it? He placed it deep inside a city-owned garbage can. First, he placed the burner inside a bag that already had her name written on it. Warren’s prints were on the phone and on the bag. Either the gunman knew Warren or he had followed Warren – and why did Warren own a burner?
That same inner voice spoke to her again: The burner doesn’t matter.
Okay, fine. But why?
The answer wouldn’t come to her. Don’t chase it. Wait for it. But she couldn’t wait. Time was moving forward and they had forty-seven minutes until the next bomb went off. Knowing that – thinking about it – didn’t help matters. The answer slipped away like a snake retreating from sudden daylight.
Gelfand’s phone rang and he answered it. Darby closed her eyes for a moment and tried to shut out all the noise, tried to focus on the gunman walking up the street. The man had called for a taxi. Then he hung up and wrapped the burner in a paper bag with her name written on it. Then he stopped at a city garbage can and –
No. No, he passed another garbage can first, remember?
She did. She did remember. On the convenience store’s security video she saw him pass another garbage can. Why would he do that? Why place the burner in a specific garbage can, what was there? A sidewalk and a brick wall painted with graffiti. Meaningless words and a mural – a big mural of a black man wearing a hoodie with doves flying around his shoulders and something else there, too, a name: Sean Ellis.
Darby was about to tell Coop to run a name through NCIS when she cautioned herself to slow down. She wasn’t sure, not yet. Don’t run anything thought NCIS or the BPD computers until you know for sure.
Phone in hand, she called up the Google app. A search of ‘Sean Ellis Dorchester’ came back with a page of headlines, all of them having to do with a Dorchester man who was seeking a new trial. One headline jumped out at her: ‘Judge To Rule On Possible 4th Trial For Man Based on Trouble with Fingerprint Evidence.’
Darby tapped the Google ‘images’ tab on her screen. She saw a mix of white and black faces, but mostly black, several of which bore a strong resemblance to the mural.
Darby turned to G
elfand and said, ‘What’s going on with Rosemary Shapiro?’
‘Still not answering her phone,’ Gelfand replied. He stepped closer, pulling back his cuff and shirtsleeve to check his watch. ‘We have thirty-one minutes until the next bomb. If you’ve got something, Doc, we have –’
‘I’m well aware of how much time is left, you don’t have to remind me,’ Darby snapped. She wasn’t irritated at Gelfand and he knew that, so there was no need to apologize. ‘I need to talk to Shapiro’s secretary first, see if I’m right.’
33
+5.16
Coop dialled the secretary’s phone number and then conferenced them into the call.
The woman’s name was Deborah Young. After Coop did the quick introductions, the woman informed him that Ms Shapiro still hadn’t called the office and asked if something was wrong. Coop told her they didn’t know anything yet and shuffled her off to Darby.
‘Does Ms Shapiro represent an African American man from Dorchester named Sean Ellis?’ Darby asked.
Young had a matronly voice and spoke in a crisp, cold tone that reminded Darby of her grammar school principal, Sister Agnes. ‘Mr Ellis is – or was, I should say – a client. He died last year, in November.’
‘Died where?’
‘MCI Cedar Junction Prison in Walpole. That information is available on the internet, so I’m not speaking out of school.’
‘Family? Where do they live?’
‘They’re dead, all of them. Mr Ellis’s mother was the last to go. There’s no one left here, as far as I know. You’ll have to ask Ms Shapiro. Have you located her?’
‘We’re working on it. Did you see the news about Detective Hill?’
‘Yes,’ the woman replied, her voice pinched tight. ‘On the Boston.com website. It keeps crashing.’
Darby imagined the woman clutching her string of pearls. ‘What about a former Boston detective named Trey Warren? He’s retired now, worked in Fingerprints.’
‘If this is in regard to the Sean Ellis case, you’ll have to ask Ms Shapiro. I can’t discuss such matters.’
