The Big Fear

by Andrew Case

  The night was just beginning.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WARRANTS

  It had all finally come in. Bankers’ boxes, binders, spools of illegible dot-matrix splatter. Every scrap of paper that the New York Police Department had ever collected on Ralph Mulino, Brian Rowson, or any officer on the scene that night had been dumped somewhere in Leonard’s office. At least he had taken over the commissioner’s suite, so there was a conference table to smear it over. No one would be having a conference there for a while. From the table, the files metastasized across the chairs, the floor, the shelves. The whole room seemed to be pasted with a thin flutter of paper. You couldn’t even see how dirty the rug was.

  Leonard had started his way through the mess, but he already knew the most important part. He knew what he wasn’t going to find. There was no photograph, no daily activity report, no memo book, no inventory log, no evidence of any kind that Brian Rowson was holding a gun when Mulino shot him. Leonard would have to do interviews for that. He had already scheduled the sergeant to come in the next day. There were some techs coming in, but they would stick to the script. Exactly what was in their written report but no more.

  He had already found one thing, though. Mulino had been in the trial room before. Over a decade ago. Leonard reminded himself to put in a call to the trial room to always make sure they give him everything on the subject officer before the interview. He shouldn’t have had to wait for this. Leonard had chuckled when he read it. The whole thing had happened in the Ebbets Field Apartments. His own building now. A few floors below him, recent enough that people would remember. But even ten years ago it was a different world, a different building, a different kind of fear in the hallways.

  Mulino had been a witness to a higher-ranking officer who had botched an arrest and killed a guy in the process of pepper spraying him. Give the old-school guys new toys and someone is likely to wind up dead. There are pretty clear instructions on the back of the canister of the spray about how you’re supposed to treat someone when you douse them. But old-school guys don’t read the instructions on the canister. Fortunate, Leonard thought, that Mulino kept his revolver. No telling how many people he would have killed with the nine.

  But a funny thing about that old case. Mulino got a decent rip, a couple of weeks’ suspension, and he basically kept his mouth shut. He had offered no evidence whatsoever that could help the DA, even though he had to have seen exactly what was going on as Ramsay sprayed and tackled and cuffed the big guy, and then probably kicked him and twisted his neck to boot. The PD usually rewards that kind of silence. They close the wagons and make life a little easier for you. But no one had made anything easier for Mulino. No promotion to a task force, no comfortable desk at 1PP. Just wake up every day and hit the streets.

  The scoop on Mulino and the color of the day had been on page three of the Daily News. Leonard was glad that Ells had done him that favor. Keep a little pressure on the case. Prep the city for a finding. The detective was sloppy, he hadn’t been paying attention, he saw something he thought was a gun. In this environment, no one would raise a stink. The police unions wouldn’t hold a march across a bridge in solidarity. They were becoming cowed by the new administration themselves. Leonard turned to the files on the other officers, picking apart their histories. He wanted to be sure on Mulino; he wouldn’t draft his conclusions until after another half-dozen interviews and after every piece of paper in this office had been scoured. And he maybe felt bad for the guy. Maybe it wasn’t Mulino’s fault that he had stayed on the force a little bit long and lost a step along the way. But if Leonard was going to prove himself to Ells and the guys above him, he was going to have to bring in a trophy sooner or later, so he couldn’t avoid the one that was tied up on his desk with a bow.

  After Rowson’s brush with IAB, he had been swept clean and parked at Harbor. And as soon as Leonard opened the files piled around his office he had found more. The command was full of them. Guys who avoided the trial room after reaching into someone’s throat for a piece of gum they mistook for a glassine envelope. Guys who had shown their badge one too many times at a bar that didn’t think it had to give every cop in town free drinks. One guy who fronted the money on a drug buy and swore up and down the kid had pulled out a box cutter on him, the box cutter never found. All of these guys had been cleaned up and shipped to Harbor to work for Sergeant Sparks. Not a peep from any of them since.

  Sergeant Sparks. His history was baffling enough, as well. Until about eighteen months ago, Sparks had leapt wildly through the ranks, had received all the badges and pins that his superiors could throw at him. He had the highest score on the sergeant’s exam of his class, not to mention higher arrest totals and a near-perfect physical exam. And then out of nowhere he had been sent off to Harbor. Unlike the rest of them, there wasn’t any trip to the trial room or DIMAC or IAB or any of the dozens of agencies assigned to tweak NYPD officers first. Just a sudden detour to a forgotten command, and then radio silence for close to two years.

  Maybe someone thought Sparks was good for the troubled kids. The Harbor Patrol was being used as a kind of rubber room to see if Sparks could whip the bad eggs back into shape, or at the very least keep them where they couldn’t hurt anyone. But that didn’t explain Sparks himself. You don’t give up your chance to march through promotions in the Patrol Services Bureau to supervise a bunch of screwups in Harbor without getting something back for it. Maybe he had wanted to go. Maybe Sparks had done something wrong, but had impressed his bosses so much since that they’d just slipped it right out of his file. They were just pieces of paper in a cabinet after all. Whatever had happened, there was a big gaping why gnawing beneath.

  The office was big, but it was hot and the air conditioning was worse than usual. Leonard unlatched the big semicircular window overlooking West Street and tugged at it. Nothing. Probably had been painted shut decades ago. He gave it another push, his palm on the glass. It wasn’t moving. He could sense that he wasn’t alone. He was in charge now, for the time being, and had to put up with the civil service lifers floating around him. He let go of the window and turned around.

  “What can I do for you, Detective?”

  The guy at the door wasn’t wearing a badge or a uniform, but with some guys you can just tell. The jacket that doesn’t quite go with the pants. The pants that were bought two belt sizes ago. The twenty-dollar haircut that he spent half an hour trying to make look nice for the occasion. Behind him, an obvious lackey. They come in pairs.

  “Yeah, Leonard Mitchell? DIMAC commissioner?”

  “Acting commissioner. I’m kind of busy.” Across the floor, the desk, the table, all confidential NYPD documents. If the guy tried to come in the room, Leonard would really have to ask for ID. The man gestured to himself and the one over his shoulder at once.

  “Detective Harrison. And this is Officer Ricci. He’s with Warrants?”

  Police are used to showing up and telling you what to do. When they start off by asking questions, or worse yet, introducing themselves with a question, it’s never good. Usually it means they’ve been sent to you under duress, to run some menial assignment they think is beneath them. Or they are delivering bad news. Or both.

  There was another person behind Harrison. A lanky uniform guy barely twenty years old, his face still red from teenage acne. Over six feet tall but would fall on his face if the big one slapped him on the back. Five years of eating like a cop would cure that. The NYPD does not settle for donuts, what with the junk food of the world on every corner. It feasts instead on Jamaican beef patties, General Tso’s chicken, Cubano sandwiches, and Dominican pork knuckles. The kid would beef up soon enough. Shy too, standing tentative at the office doorway, afraid maybe he’d get a shock if he stepped in front of the detective.

  “Warrants, huh.” Leonard looked over the skinny kid. Maybe he was assigned there, but he wasn’t with them. Warrants officers started their day
at four, ferreting out guys who had skipped their arraignments. One guy would stand at the front door of an apartment and pound the hell out of it while the partner stood behind the building looking at the fire escape, waiting for a panicked criminal to jump out in his skivvies so they could cart him back before the judge. When you put in for warrants, the first thing they test you for is if you can scale an eight-foot fence in a second and a half. The kid may have passed that one, but Leonard didn’t have much hope for his prospects.

  “I hate to intrude on you and I know the situation is . . . sensitive.” The detective had that slow, fumbling way of trying to sound like he cared. It came off like he was sleepwalking through his job until the matinee started at Shea. “But I’m here to show you this.”

  The detective pulled out a piece of paper that had been folded, folded again, and then crumpled into his suit coat. Leonard smoothed it up against the office wall. It was a search warrant. From what Leonard could tell, it had been hustled together at six that morning; the NYPD must have wrangled a judge out of bed to sign it. The place to be searched: the offices of the Commissioner to Investigate Misconduct and Corruption. The items to be seized: relevant evidence. Leonard laughed at the last part.

  “Relevant evidence? That’s rich.” He would call the Law Department if he had to. Officers were not going to ransack his offices based on a shaky warrant.

  “You can see it’s from missing persons.” Leonard looked at the bottom of the warrant. So it was. Detective Harrison gained speed. “I didn’t want to tell you like this. Your ex-boss has gone missing. Yesterday morning about five o’clock, she told her husband and her kid all in a panic they had to leave the city. We’ve spoken to them. They said she was extremely agitated. She put them on a bus and then she disappeared. No word from her cell. No one at home. We got video of her getting on the Staten Island ferry at six eighteen last night. We got nothing of her getting off at the other end.”

  Leonard felt suddenly sick. A twist in his stomach, as though he had eaten something that had come back to life and was struggling to find its way out. This wasn’t a teenage runaway case, the cops waiting forty-eight hours to make sure the kid wasn’t coming home before they started looking. Leonard had his own problems with Davenport, leaving him stranded at DIMAC and in the crosshairs of the administration. And he hadn’t spoken to her since she’d left. He pulled himself up and looked at the detective.

  “Why are you on this? Why send warrants? Why not send in missing persons?”

  “Like I told you, Officer Ricci is warrants. I’m homicide.”

  With that, Harrison was already in the office, slipping on a pair of plastic gloves. And suddenly the place was full of them. Rookie cops carrying plastic bags, pretending that the ephemera they were itemizing could be dusted for fingerprints. Guys who had joined the police force after taking sixteen credits of forensic science at John Jay, who barely knew that the technology they saw on television was mainly fake. That a fingerprint isn’t going to come up unless the person had been pressing their hand against polished glass or lacquered wood while sweating, that hair doesn’t carry DNA, and that luminol picks up about fifty substances besides blood.

  The way most murders get solved is that an aggressive detective corners the dead guy’s most suspicious friend and badgers him until he confesses. The physical evidence is mainly just for show. Leonard shirked against the wall watching the carnival, the mountains of plastic baggies being stuffed with worthless junk, the papers he had been so looking forward to reading being trampled, the desk being rifled through. He watched the cops load up dozens of file folders and notepads into official-looking cartons. One cop stood dusting the windowsill. The one that Leonard had just tried to yank open for a bit of fresh air, on which he’d probably put his palm right up against the glass. The cop kept at it. If he noticed Leonard watching him, he didn’t let on.

  Leonard could tell that the whole search was only theater. If Davenport had been murdered in the office, the police would know it by now, and if she hadn’t, there wouldn’t be anything worth finding. Most people don’t hide evidence of the crimes that they are about to commit in their desks. Most people who get kidnapped or murdered don’t know in advance. They don’t leave clues on their bookshelves. Search warrants are good for getting the guns from a stash house or the kiddie porn off a home computer, but combing someone’s workplace is a pretty worthless way to look for what anyone wanted hidden. But searches can have other purposes, and theater has its uses. It can let everyone know that the police are serious. Or it can make the officers feel that they are important. Or it can surprise someone; the search itself can make a suspect nervous enough to blurt out something he shouldn’t.

  Standing by the wall, watching Detective Harrison chew on a mug of coffee, Leonard realized that the police have more than one way to intimidate you. They may close ranks when you have one of theirs under investigation. Or they may think that you didn’t much like the way your boss treated you on her way out the door. Surely you spoke to a couple of friends about what a pain in the ass she was. Surely one of those friends lit up a joint once, or smoked a cigarette on a subway platform, or did some other inconsequential little misdeed that he’d like to have wiped off his record.

  Police know that you can make anyone look guilty of anything. They only need to show that you have a motive. No blood? No body? That only shows how good you are at cleaning up the evidence. All they would need to do is start thinking about who might want to hurt Christine Davenport. Who had she most recently betrayed? Who had something to gain by having her gone? Leonard thought over each question. As he did, his stomach grew thicker and tighter. His eyes met the detective’s, staring at him over the rim of his cup. He knew that behind the coffee, Harrison was smiling.

  Harrison’s phone rang and he reached to his waist. He oozed a couple of monosyllables into the phone, his eyes on Leonard the whole time: “Yeah? When? Where? Sure.” He pocketed the phone and set down his coffee.

  “You wanna come take a walk over to the financial center with me? Harbor Patrol found something I’m gonna take a look at. I figure you may want to take a look at it too.”

  The blood rushed out of Leonard’s head. He nodded at the detective; he couldn’t do otherwise. He wouldn’t turn the police down now. It would look as though he was holding out on them. And holding out on the cops would have looked very bad that morning. After all, the whole pageant had been planned entirely for him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  PROPERTY

  Mulino walked the long corridor in the basement on Gold Street, wishing for a little more light. Most commands hold off the spittle and the chaos of an angry world with a firm shield: the desk, the gate, the place beyond which the general public does not go. And behind that door the officers keep their personal sanctuary. At OCCB, Mulino could find any case from the past thirty years by date, vic, or investigating officer in under ten minutes. It was all police property after all, and the police respect their own property.

  Everything packed in the basement on Gold Street was other people’s property. The officers stuck here had no use for keeping it tidy. Once upon a time, cardboard boxes had been stacked neatly on the iron racks. Now soaked in dust, the racks buckled with rust and the boxes threatened to vaporize at the touch. Every few weeks, someone came by and hauled the contents of another rack to the landfill. It didn’t matter, most of the crap that had been down here more than a year would never be found anyway. The labels had peeled, the boxes had faded, and most likely it had been put in the wrong place to begin with. Mulino turned down an aisle, making a go of it, checking the card that had been pawned off on him by the veteran at the desk. Someone had come by looking for his watch, which had been vouchered in 2012. When the news is going to be bad, the most recent assignee gets to deliver it.

  Not to mention that he had come in late, and every set of eyes that marked him had read about his DIMAC interview on page three of th
e Daily News. When your confidential statement ends up in the paper twenty-four hours later, they are after you. The meeting with Chief Travis hadn’t been the friendly heads-up he thought it had been. It had been a warning. Get ready. This time you’re taking the fall. And after the trip to Harbor, Mulino had just about believed it himself.

  But he hadn’t been ready to give up entirely. Which was why that morning he had parked in Cambria Heights, at a neat brick house with a steeply sloped roof and a lush lawn and aluminum awnings above the windows. The American Dream, inside the city limits. The walkway had been lined with dozens of bodega bouquets, already fading, as though lining the aisle to a grim wedding. He had made the unwelcome pilgrimage, rung the bell, then stepped down from the stoop. Give her a little space.

  She must be used to these calls. The flowers had come from somewhere, after all. One cop after another detouring out of his sector, his precinct, out of his borough if it came to that, to pay respect to the widow. The funeral wouldn’t be for two days and the line officers wanted to show their support. So did Mulino, but he wanted some answers as well.

  She came to the door in neat black slacks and a red blouse, dressed up like you would for a workday in Manhattan. Trim, conservative, anonymous. She was slightly older than her husband had been, her features and body soft from motherhood. Seeing her, Mulino thought of the kids. Best not to mention them. They would be staying with an aunt, a grandmother, trying to keep the school routine together.