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having a fight?"
"Not at all. You'd know it if we were. How are you? I'm fine myself. You're
working too hard again. But you seem to thrive on it. Still the Dragonslayer,
right? Live by the sword and all that?"
I took the chicken out of the fridge. I was famished. Probably could have
eaten it cold. "Maybe this whacked-out case will be over soon."
"Then there'll be another one and another one after that. I saw a pretty good
saying the other day there's always room for improvement -then you die. What
do you think of that one?"
I nodded and let out a deep sigh. "You tired of being with a homicide
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detective, too? Can't say that I blame you."
Nana crinkled up her face. "No, not at all. Actually, I enjoy it. But I do
understand why it might not be to everyone's liking."
"I do, too, especially on days like today. I don't like what happened between
Christine and me. I hate it, actually. Makes me sad. Hurts my heart. But I do
understand what she was afraid of. It scares me too."
Nana's head bobbed slowly. "Even if it can't be Christine, you still need
someone. So do Jannie and Damon. How about you get those priorities straight."
"I spend a lot of time with the kids. But I'll work on it," I said as I
plopped the cold chicken and fixings in a pan.
"How can you, Alex? You're always working on murder cases. That seems to be
your priority these days."
Nana's statement hurt. Was it the truth? "These days, there seem to be a lot
of bad murder cases. I'll find someone. Has to be somebody out there will
think I'm worth a little trouble."
Nana cackled. "Probably some serial killer. They sure seem attracted to you."
I finally trudged up to bed around one o'clock. I was at the top of the stairs
when the phone started to ring. Damn it! I cursed and hurried to my room. I
picked up before it woke the whole house.
"Yeah?"
"Sorry. "I heard a whispering voice. "I'm sorry, Alex."
It was Betsey.
I was glad to hear her voice anyway. "It's all right. What's up," I asked.
"Alex, we have a break in the case. It's good news. Something just happened. A
fifteen-year-old girl in Brooklyn made a claim on the
9m insurance-company reward! This is being taken very seriously in New York.
The girl says her father was one of the men involved in the Metro Hartford
job. She knows the others involved too. Alex, they're New York police
detectives. The Mastermind is a cop."
Chapter Eighty-Two
The Mastermind is a cop. If it was true, it made sense out of a whole lot of
things. It partly explained how he'd known so much about bank security, and
about us.
At five-fifteen in the morning, I met Betsey Cavalierre and four other FBI
agents at Boiling Field. A helicopter was waiting for us. We took off into a
thick, gray soup that made the ground disappear seconds after we were
airborne.
We were pumped up and extremely curious. Betsey sat in the first row with one
of her senior agents, Michael Doud. She was wearing a light gray suit with a
white blouse, and she looked serious and official again. Agent Doud handed out
folders on the suspected New York City detectives.
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I read the background material as we flew steadily toward New York. The
detectives in question were from Brooklyn. They worked out of the Sixty-first
Precinct, which was near Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay. The crib notes said
the precinct was a mix of cultures and assorted criminals: Mafia, Russian mob,
Asians, Hispanics, Blacks. The five suspected detectives had worked together
for a dozen years and were reportedly close friends.
They were supposed to be 'good cops," the file said. There had been warning
signals, though. They'd used their weapons more than average, even for
narcotics detectives. Three of the five had been disciplined repeatedly. They
jokingly called one another'goomba. "The leader of the pack was Detective
Brian Macdougall.
There were also about a half-dozen pages on the fifteen-year-old witness:
Detective Brian Macdougall's daughter. She was an honor student at Ursuline
High School. She was apparently a loner there and never had many friends. She
seemed to be responsible and solid and
9m believable, according to the NYPD detectives who had interviewed her. Her
reason for giving up her father was credible too he drank and struck her
mother often when he was home. "And he's guilty of the Metro Hartford
kidnapping. He and his detective pals did it," said the girl.
Actually, I felt very good about this. It was the way police work usually
went. You put out a lot of nets, you checked them, and every so often
something was actually in one of the nets. More often than not, it came from a
relative or friend of the perp. Like an angry daughter who wanted retribution
against her father.
At seven-thirty, we entered the conference room at One Police Plaza and met up [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]