Innocence (34 page)

“Good,” Steele said, reaching out to close the door again. “Next time keep out of the way.”

“Please,” Finn said. “We need to know what you were investigating on the night you were shot.”

“Nothing,” she said. “Stay the fuck away from me.” She pulled the door back to gain some additional momentum and then swung it at them even harder.

Kozlowski stepped into the doorway, leading with his shoulder. In spite of the force with which she had pushed the door, when it collided with Kozlowski’s body, the door took the worst of the encounter, bouncing back with a heavy shake and a pained rattle. Kozlowski looked as though he hadn’t even felt it. He held her eyes with his, and the fear that Finn had sensed from Steele seemed to grow.

“Like the man said, Maddy, we’ve gotta talk to you. Turns out the fingerprints were faked; we’ve got the proof. You lied on the stand; you and I already knew that. An innocent man went to jail, and now other people are getting hurt. Bad.”

As he spoke, the fear on Steele’s face morphed into anguish. “No,” she said quietly. “He did it. I know it. They told me so, and I can see his face still.” The words came out as a whisper, with little force and no conviction. Then she dissolved into sobs.

Kozlowski let her cry for a moment. Then he pushed the door open wider, leaned down, and said softly, “It’s time for us to get clean, Maddy.”

z

Madeline Steele felt defeated. Worse than that, she felt betrayed. Worst of all, she felt responsible. “He told me Salazar was the one. He said they had the prints. He said there wasn’t any doubt.”

“Macintyre?” Kozlowski asked. “He told you they had a match on the prints?”

She nodded. “It was Mac. He was the one who was coordinating with the latent print unit. He was bagging most of the evidence.”

“What did he say, exactly?” Finn asked.

“He came to my hospital room,” she said. “In the first days—I don’t even know when, exactly—I wasn’t conscious most of the time, and when I was, I was so hopped up on the painkillers that I wasn’t really coherent. He told me they had the guy, said it was a lock on the fingerprints, but that the DA was still going to want more. He said the DA wanted eyewitness testimony. Then he pulled a booking picture of Salazar out of his coat and told me to take a good look. He told me to memorize his face. He told me to remember that this was the face of the man who had done this to me.”

“But you weren’t sure? You’re not sure now?” Finn pressed.

She looked at him, and then her gaze drifted out the window, out toward the street. “I don’t know,” she said. “For fifteen years his has been the face in my dreams. When I wake up sobbing at night, his is the face that I still see in my head.”

“But . . .” Kozlowski said. It was directed at Steele with force and purpose, and shook her.

“But I never saw the man’s face when I was attacked,” she said. It was a struggle to get the words out, and once she had done it, they lay there in the room like a dead animal, grotesque and compelling.

“But you testified—” Finn started.

She cut him off. “They told me they had the guy. They said there was no question. It all made sense—I was trying to have him deported. I couldn’t risk letting him walk, could I?”

Finn looked over at Kozlowski. “You knew.” Kozlowski nodded, and Finn’s head fell into his hands. “You knew the entire time.”

Kozlowski said nothing.

“He only knew after the trial was over,” Steele interjected. “I told him months later, and he told me I had to come forward. But what was I supposed to do at that point? Let them release the guy who had taken so much from me? Go through the trial all over again? I couldn’t.”

“It wasn’t him!” Finn yelled. “It wasn’t him, and you both let him go to jail anyway!”

“I had no way of knowing that,” Steele said defensively. But even to her, it sounded weak. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. Put yourself in my shoes—that was what I told Koz back then. He threatened to tell people, but I told him that I’d just say he was lying, and he would lose every friend he ever had on the force. We were never friends again.” She felt sick. “I’m sorry, Koz.”

The radiator in the corner of the room gave a squeal, punctuating a terrible silence.

“What were you working on?” Finn asked abruptly.

She looked at Kozlowski.

“You knew that, too?” the lawyer demanded of the former cop.

“Only a little,” Kozlowski replied. “Not the details.”

Finn turned back to Steele. “Well?”

“I was working on a joint task force with the INS, rounding up illegal aliens. In the course of that work, I kept running up against a new street gang that was just making headway in the Boston area.”

“Let me guess: VDS, right?” Finn said.

She nodded. “I had never even heard of them at the time, but I kept hearing whispers that they were the ones bringing in many of the illegals from South and Central America. Word was they had a whole slave trade going.”

“Slaves?”

“Yeah, slaves. They’d offer to bring people across the border, then charge them more than they could afford. When they couldn’t pay, the gang would offer to get them work, but when the people got here, they were handed over to shady operations that didn’t pay them enough to work off their debt. They ended up literally as slaves; VDS took an up-front payment from the employers, plus an ongoing revenue stream from the interest on the debt. It was a neat little racket.”

“What happened to the investigation after you were shot?” Finn asked.

“It died. I was laid up for over seven months, and when I finally made it back into the game, the operation was shut down. They had been running it out of a bodega in Roxbury, but the place had closed up shop, and there were no leads. Plus, I was in no shape to chase them down at that point.”

“And you never put two and two together and figured out that they were the ones responsible for you being shot?”

“What was there to put together? As far as I knew, the guy who shot me was in jail, and from what I knew about him, he didn’t have any real connections to VDS. What was I supposed to think?”

The three of them sat there for several minutes, saying nothing. Then Finn stood up and walked to the door. He turned to her. “I want you to put all of this into an affidavit. We’ll pick it up later this afternoon.”

“I don’t know whether I can do that,” she replied.

“Bullshit,” Finn said. “You’ll do it.”

“I could lose my job.”

“An innocent man has been rotting in prison because of you. Your job security is the last thing I’m concerned about at this point. You’ll do it voluntarily, or I’ll see that formal charges are brought. You won’t just lose your job, you could go to jail for perjury.”

She felt like her world was collapsing, but she nodded. “I’ll do it.”

Kozlowski stood up and joined the lawyer at the front door. He looked back at her, and she found it difficult to look him in the eyes. “Looks like I fucked up, Koz. I should have listened to you.”

“We all fucked up,” Kozlowski said. “Now it’s time for all of us to set it right.”

z

Finn was already in his car with the motor running when Kozlowski squeezed himself into the passenger seat. He stepped on the gas and peeled out into the street.

“Three weeks,” Finn said, his voice slicing through the cold. “Three fucking weeks we’ve been working this case. Three weeks since Dobson first came to us—ten days since he was chopped into fucking pieces. During all that time, it never occurred to you to mention to me that you knew the guy was innocent?”

“I didn’t know he was innocent. I thought he was guilty. I just knew Maddy didn’t get a good look at him. I still thought the fingerprint evidence was solid.”

“You should have told me. We’re partners on this. More than that, I’m your boss.” Kozlowski gave Finn an ironic look. “Fine,” Finn eased back, “but we are at least partners; you can’t hold shit like this back from a partner.”

“I couldn’t tell you.”

“Why not?”

“I gave her my word. I can’t break my word.”

Finn sighed. “You know, these fucking rules of yours are for shit. You act like they’re all based on some black-and-white inviolable principles, but they’re not. It’s all a bunch of bullshit.”

“I do the best I can,” Kozlowski said.

“The world is gray, Koz. You gotta learn to live with that.”

“Maybe,” Kozlowski said. “Like I said, I just do the best I can.”

“Right,” Finn said. He pulled over to the side of the road.

“What are you doing?” Kozlowski asked.

“I just realized I have no fucking clue where we’re going now. Do you want to take a run at Macintyre? See what we can get out of him?”

Kozlowski shook his head. “We still don’t really have much on him. Even if he did step out of line with Steele, he’ll just claim that he thought he was doing the right thing. Unless we can tie him to the

faked prints, he’ll bob and weave, and we’ll get nothing. We need more to really rattle him.”

“Fornier?” Finn asked. “He’s the one who signed the fingerprint report.”

“Fornier,” Kozlowski confirmed. “But not yet. We’ve got to take him on outside the station house. He feels too safe there. We’ve got to make it clear to him that he’s not safe; not on this. We get him scared, and we’ll get the whole story—I can just about guarantee that.”

“Great. So how do we make sure he doesn’t feel safe?”

Kozlowski shrugged. “There’s really only one way to do that.”

“That’s what I thought,” Finn said, pulling out onto the street again. “Looks like those lines of yours are getting grayer by the second.”

Chapter Thirty-thre
e

At eight o’clock that evening, Eddie Fornier sat on a bar stool in a pub on Columbus Avenue, just off Massachusetts. There were only two other patrons in the hole-in-the-wall tavern, and they were at the other end of the heavy, scarred wooden bar, minding their own business. The bartender was a tall, solid-looking man in his late forties who wore a crew cut, a goatee, and faded black tattoos on his forearms that Fornier recognized as of the prison variety. He was just attentive enough to keep Fornier’s glass full without being nosy. The place had the decrepit feel of hell’s waiting room, with its darkened windows, yellow lights, and torn upholstery. In short, it was exactly the type of place where Fornier felt most at home.

There had been a time in his life when he’d preferred the noise and action of the cop bars nearer the station house. Back then he’d enjoyed the camaraderie of the force and loved to trade stories over an endless stream of drinks with the others of the rank and file as they blew off steam. He’d even enjoyed watching as the younger, bigger cops—most of them chunks of angry muscle marinated in steroids—drew women to them like cripples to faith healers. It always amazed him how some women fell for cops without condition or demand, ignoring the violence visible on their faces and the wedding rings on their hands. It must be something about the power they exuded, he supposed—the invincibility of
being
the law rather than living under it.

The women had never been drawn to Fornier, of course. Everyone had always joked that with his narrow shoulders and thin frame, he was barely big enough to hang a badge on. He’d always felt like an outsider, drinking to capture a hint of the confidence those around him seemed to feel.

Those days were over. Now drinking was an end in itself. Sometimes it felt like the only end. It was all he cared about, and having people around him when he drank was nothing more than a distraction.

He pulled out his wallet and looked inside. Two crumpled tens and a five stared out at him with sad resignation. He did a slow calculation in his head; he’d been at the bar for five Scotches—he no longer counted time in minutes, but in drinks. They’d all been well drinks, the bargain brands, and two of them had been poured during happy hour. He’d have enough to cover the tab, though the barkeep would hardly be thrilled with the tip.
What the fuck
, Fornier thought. The man was clearly an ex-con, and he’d never given Fornier a free pour anyway.

Fornier counted out the money and left it on the bar, focused on getting home. It was around ten blocks for him, and he was trying to convert the distance into time to determine how long it would be before he could pour himself a glass of the discount vodka he had in his apartment. If he hurried, it wouldn’t be long.

He took ten steps toward Washington Street, keeping his head down to pick his way around the pockets of snow and slush that quickly soaked through his shoes. His head was still down when the first punch took him in his stomach, just below the rib cage, driving the air from his lungs.

z

Finn and Kozlowski watched from the street as Fornier exited the bar. They had been trailing him since he’d left the station house after his shift, and they’d been trying to keep warm inside Finn’s car for over two hours.

Kozlowski waited until Fornier was even with a narrow passageway between buildings to strike, and then approached him from the side, swinging his fist hard and low into the man’s stomach. Fornier crumpled on impact, and Kozlowski pushed him into the little alley, out of sight from the street. Finn followed.

“Tell us about the Salazar case,” Finn said as Kozlowski held the diminutive cop against a brick wall.

Fornier was still doubled over, but he managed to look up, and he recognized his attackers. His face showed both fear and anger. “Fuck you!” he spat out, still coughing.

Finn looked at Kozlowski. “Looks like he still needs encouragement.”

Kozlowski punched Fornier in the stomach again, harder this time. Fornier’s eyes bulged, and his tongue, swollen and bluish, wagged from his mouth. Kozlowski stepped back and hit him in the jaw, knocking him to the ground.

Fornier lay in an icy puddle up against the wall, spitting blood. “I’m a cop!” he yelled, a note of panic ringing in his voice. “You can’t do this to a cop!”

Finn squatted in front of him so they were almost at the same level. “You’re a cop who shit on his badge,” he said. “You lost the right to claim any special status. Because of you, an innocent man has been sitting on his ass in prison for fifteen years.”