Badge of Evil (11 page)

Fuck it
, Bishop thought,
might as well be direct
.

“Look,” he said, faltering, “I'm sorry I came out here and bothered you but I need some information. I'm not sure I can get it from anyone else. I'd never do anything to hurt an honest cop. I was on the job. I know cops make mistakes. Even the really good ones. Fuck, it happens. And if a good cop makes a mistake that's exactly what it is, a mistake.”

Pennetta's face seemed like it was carved out of granite. It didn't move. Not an eyelash, nothing. He didn't even blink. He just maintained that hard stare.

“I don't need to make blood money by hanging a good cop for some scumbag wannabe terrorist,” Bishop continued. “I'm just doin' my job here and trying to get the facts. So maybe you could cut me some slack and I'll owe you one.”

Finally Pennetta moved. He shifted his weight from one leg to the other and scratched the top of his head a little with his right hand. “I don't have anything to say about what happened that night. You need somethin', you know how it works. Contact DCPI,” he said, referring to the NYPD's deputy commissioner of public information. “And if that don't do it for you, talk to Commissioner Brock. I'm sure he'd be happy to give you every detail about his performance that night,” he said without a hint of sarcasm.

“I'm done talking,” Pennetta said. “I wish I could say it was nice to meet you. Now, if you get the fuck outta my face, I'll overlook the fact that you invaded my space on my day off. This time. But if you show up again, I promise I won't be so hospitable.”

Bishop held his ground. Rather than attempt some kind of smart-ass remark, he was respectful. He told Pennetta he was absolutely right. “I never should've come out here without giving you a heads-up first. I'm really sorry about that. And I respect your feelings about that night. But if there's anything I can do to get you to change your mind, to talk to me, to tell me if anything unusual happened, please tell me,” Bishop said as gently as he could.

Pennetta just stared at him. Bishop handed him his card. “Call me if you change your mind,” he said.

•  •  •

Pennetta watched Bishop walk out of the hangar. When he was gone, Pennetta took out his cell phone and started dialing. “Chief Fitzgerald? Yeah, it's me. Bishop just left. No, I completely gave him the cold shoulder. Sure, anytime. Thanks for the heads-up.”

Pennetta put the phone away.
At least the little fucker has balls
, he thought, and then he returned to his preflight safety check.

LAWRENCE BROCK WAS
staring at his face in the bathroom mirror with the intensity of a plastic surgery patient who's just had his bandages taken off. He was so close to the glass his nose was almost touching it. Piece by piece, the commissioner examined his face. Slowly and gently, his right index finger traced the circles under his eyes, which seemed to have gotten noticeably darker since the last time he looked.
Fucking stress
, he thought. It had been an especially tough couple of weeks leading up to the Brooklyn raid, not to mention the fallout surrounding it. Disgustedly, he pinched a fold of skin under his chin. His neck was starting to get a little jowly and his cheeks were too fleshy. No one liked getting older, but Brock was pathological about it. It struck at the heart of how he thought of himself. This was a guy who believed he was invincible, bulletproof, literally and figuratively. “I get shot at, but I don't get hit,” he'd often tell the guys in his detail. “I save other cops.”

Just thinking about getting older completely changed Brock's mood. He'd gotten up feeling refreshed and vigorous following a night of great sex with Lynn Silvers, his girlfriend—helped, no doubt, by her willingness to keep telling him, as instructed, that he was the toughest, strongest, and most fearless son of a bitch in the city. “It's all you, baby,” she'd panted as she pulled him into her mouth. “Eight million people in this city and every fucking one of 'em wishes they could be like you.”

But now, the air had gone completely out of his balloon. Every time Brock stepped out of the shower in Silvers' $4 million Upper West Side apartment, he was unnerved by all the mirrored glass.
Jesus, what kind of self-absorbed head case puts floor-to-ceiling mirrors in the bathroom?
As vain as he was, the kaleidoscopic, funhouse-mirror view of his soggy, forty-seven-year-old body was even too much for him.

Brock backed away from the glass and he could see his whole body now. He flexed a little and smiled at his thick, tumescent biceps and his hard, taut forearms. But the rest of his body was starting to look a little like the before photo in a diet ad. The good life was taking its toll. Too many fancy lunches and dinners had left his once rock-hard chest and abs a little too soft and doughy. He vowed, as he often did in this bathroom, to start being more careful about what he ate and more disciplined about working out.

Brock dried himself off, shaved, and brushed his teeth. Then he took a small black leather pouch off the sink and opened the zipper. Carefully he took out a syringe and a tiny bottle of clear liquid. It was human growth hormone, known as HGH, a steroid commonly abused by athletes and weight lifters. He filled the syringe and then injected himself in the fleshy part of his ass. He put the syringe and the empty HGH bottle back into the pouch and finished getting ready.

It was Sunday morning, so he dressed casually in high-ranking-cop chic—black cashmere turtleneck, charcoal-gray pants, and a black Armani leather jacket. He looked at his watch. It was a little before eleven. He'd gotten up much earlier; checked in with his detail of two detectives, who were downstairs sitting in the car in front of the building; and found out nothing was happening. Since his cell phone and BlackBerry were also quiet, he and Lynn had rolled back into bed for one more round of Brock worship. She was a great find. Brock had met her at a black-tie benefit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A fiery redhead with nice legs and full lips, she came on to him as soon as she spotted him in the glass pyramid that housed the Temple of Dendur. She walked over and introduced herself, but Brock already knew who she was from the gossip columns.

Lynn Silvers was one of the best-known people in the media business. She had started her own newsy website,
The Silvers Report
, before the explosion of blogs and Web spin-offs by established media, and it was an immediate hit. Turning a profit for the site, which was part news aggregator, part original commentary—often from celebrities of one kind or another—took a little longer, but eventually she was able to sell it to a digital media conglomerate for several hundred million dollars.

Lynn was rich, powerful, and, according to what he'd read in the tabloids, crazy. They regularly portrayed her as mean, impossible to work for, even harder to have a relationship with. Brock found her to be none of these things. In truth, he preferred submissive women—especially in bed—because strong, powerful women scared him. But they also turned him on. And Lynn was as strong a woman as he'd ever met. He had to work hard to maintain the upper hand and often he used fear to exercise control.

Brock was completely taken with her—well, not with Lynn so much as what she could do for him. To be fair, Brock did like her and actually enjoyed spending time with her. She was interesting, funny, and hypercritical of just about everyone, which he loved. Unlike most women (and most men, for that matter), she was totally without pretense. She said exactly what she thought and didn't really give a shit how it sounded. And she was great in bed—she'd do whatever he wanted, no matter how outrageous.

But it was her juice, her influence, that Brock was really interested in. Though he had extraordinary access as police commissioner to powerful people—politicians and businessmen in particular—Lynn was plugged into a whole other world. They had dinner with some of the biggest names in the entertainment business—producers, directors, writers, and television personalities.

And then there was the film. They had begun preliminary work on a treatment for a documentary about Brock's life and career, and she was even more aggressive than he was about “massaging” the facts to intensify the drama and to make Brock a larger, more appealing figure. And since no one knew marketing, promotion, and media better than Lynn Silvers, once they started shopping it to producers, a big payday was almost guaranteed.

The film was one more piece of Brock's increasingly ambitious master plan. Over time, he'd developed a deeply held belief in his own destiny. In his heart he knew he was meant to do great things, and it was all starting to happen for him. He was also convinced that by carefully crafting his image, he could create his own reality. From his very first days as police commissioner, his strategy was to market himself, not just to the public, but to the cops on the force as well. It wasn't enough to be police commissioner; he wanted to be a cop's cop. He wanted the guys on the force to think he was just like them, not some tight-assed, out-of-touch bureaucrat. And in many respects, he was like them. He was a kid from the Bronx whose father was a junkie and a thief killed robbing a cabdriver when Brock was only six. His mother had cleaned houses and suffered from sometimes-debilitating depression. One day when he was ten, he came home from school and found her lying on the kitchen floor, dead. She had closed all the windows and turned on the gas in the oven.

Brock had come to love telling his personal story. And he was really good at it. He knew exactly when to pause, when to look sad, and when to appear triumphant to get the maximum impact. He could even produce tears. Over the years he'd refined his technique, added a few theatrics, and manipulated the facts to make an already moving tale even more dramatic. He never tired of watching people react, especially people like Lynn Silvers, upper-class white people, who, by being with the rough-edged Brock, seemed to get a little thrill from feeling like they were close, somehow, to the dangerous underbelly of the city. (New York's police commissioners had always found themselves condescended to by the city's elite. The prevailing attitude was “We'll invite you to our dinner parties as long as you have the job, but don't get too comfortable; we know you're still the help.”)

In truth, Brock's life was an amazing, only-in-America tale of success. The story of a kid born with nothing—no money, no connections, and no real home life—who triumphed through hard work, cunning, and determination. How could people not be moved by the story of a lost, parentless kid, a troubled teen who eventually finds himself, straightens out, and somehow years later ends up running the NYPD, the largest, most sophisticated police force in the world, with nearly forty thousand cops and a yearly budget of more than $6 billion?

Brock's success was made still more remarkable by the fact that he'd only served on the force for thirteen years, and hadn't come anywhere close to the elite upper ranks of the NYPD before Domenico had named him police commissioner. This meant that unlike past commissioners, he didn't have to struggle to understand what the average street cop was thinking, because he'd just been a street cop himself.

He cleverly turned this into a management strategy only several weeks after he'd been sworn in. Brock was at home one night when he got a call at two in the morning that every big-city police commissioner dreads. A white cop on routine patrol had shot and killed a sixteen-year-old black kid on the roof of an apartment building in the projects. From the preliminary details it didn't look good. No weapon was recovered. The kid appeared to be unarmed. After going to the scene and listening to the reports from his command staff, Brock held a press conference barely twelve hours after the shooting. He didn't hesitate, he didn't equivocate, and he made no attempt to gloss over what happened. Looking directly into the TV cameras he said it was, based on the information he had, a bad shooting. Everyone was shocked. It was the last thing they'd expected to hear from him. The accepted wisdom, given his reputation, was that he'd back the cops no matter what. His straight talk defused a potentially explosive racial incident that easily could've rocked the entire city.

His only problem was the cops. There were rumblings that they felt betrayed, that their guy had sold them out. Again, striking just the right note, he did what he thought he would've wanted the police commissioner to do when he was a cop. Rather than try to patch things up by telling his troops he understood the difficulties they faced, he'd show them. The hapless cop who shot the kid had been on a routine vertical patrol. Cops hated doing these. Done at all the public housing projects around the city, vertical patrols required a cop to enter an apartment building and go floor by floor, using the stairs, to look for trouble. The patrol ended with a search of the roof. It was a high-risk, low-reward activity. The buildings had too many dark corners, too much low-level drug activity, and lots of potential for trouble. Many of the cops were actually scared, or at least jittery, when doing these. And while they weren't supposed to, most of them walked these patrols with their gun drawn and cocked at their side.

So Brock told one of his aides he wanted to do a vertical patrol. Unannounced. Find the most dangerous apartment building in the city, Brock said, and that's where we'll do it. Two weeks after the press conference about the Brooklyn shooting, cops around the city heard something over their radios one night that they'd never heard before:
Car one is in the three-oh for a 1075-V. Repeat, car one is in the three-oh for a 1075-V.
Car one was the commissioner's car and the three-oh was the Thirtieth Precinct in Harlem. Within minutes, word had spread to cops all over the city.
“Holy shit, the PC's doing a vertical.”

The commander of the Thirtieth Precinct, who'd been notified with barely enough time to get to the building just as the commissioner was about to hit the stairs, was having what one of Brock's aides called a major sphincter pucker. Somehow he figured if anything happened to the commissioner it'd be his career.