The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella (8 page)

She took another pull on her Bud. Wiped her mouth and continued.

“So, some of the lawyers from the Innocence Project make a complaint to IAB, and both the NYPD and the project’s volunteer lawyers go pay Jason a visit in prison. That was their mistake. Visits like that don’t go unnoticed. Within a week, the janitor, Louis, had another heart attack, the drunk who’d been clean for a year bought four bottles of Wild Turkey and choked to death on his own vomit. And Jason had a nasty fall in the showers at Sing Sing and cracked his head so bad he died instantly.

“All three of them gone inside of three days. Coincidence? Maybe. But I didn’t buy it. Neither did IAB, and they began running checks on all the detectives, experts, and witnesses who were involved in Jason Fenton’s trial and cross-checked them against their database. Turns out the complaints of false testimony solicited by police, of which there were around
ten separate complaints, shared a common theme. The coordinating detective was Marzone. IAB started to breathe down Marzone’s neck, but he played it smart. There was no direct evidence that Marzone had set anyone up, and eye witnesses in the other murder cases were questioned and continued to stick by their testimony.”

“But the doubt had been planted in that cop’s mind, right?” I said.

“The cop was Albert Frost, and his partner was Rick Jones. They both continued to dig, unofficially, while they rose through the ranks. Frost suspected a hit man had an arrangement with a small group of homicide detectives from a select number of precincts. Usually those in the Bronx, Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Harlem, the areas with the highest murder rates. For a fee, those detectives ensured that when a hit went down, somebody else got convicted.”

Jack’s coffee mug shattered on his tile floor, startling him. He jumped back, his hand covering his mouth.

“Eddie, what the hell have we gotten into?” he said.

I watched McAllister drain the last of her beer. When her head came back down, she looked at her boots, then looked at me. I’d seen this before—after a player had finished a performance. A lot of what McAllister had said sounded like the truth, but her look—she wasn’t telling us everything. In fact, she’d lied a little. In this situation, I could’ve gone one of two ways. Let her talk, hoping she’d give me a little more, or just call her out and see how she reacted.

I decided to give her a little more rope.

“The Morgue Squad?” I said.

She nodded.

“There are no more than half a dozen in the squad. Detective Marzone runs the operation. He calls the kills, sets up a suspect before the hit man carries out the murder, and puts the primary evidence in place. The secret is making sure the patsy doesn’t have an alibi—so the murder has to be timed perfectly. Hernandez is supposed to have knifed Genarro for his wallet, but the wallet was never recovered. It just so happens that Genarro was in the process of renegotiating his union’s terms with four of the largest construction firms in the city. Genarro was a hard-ass, and we understand he was ready to call a strike. He never got the chance. Frost thought Hernandez was the latest patsy for the Morgue Squad, but somehow it all went wrong when Hernandez got choked out. Your case is the key to blowing open the Morgue Squad investigation.”

“What’s your first name?” I said.

She was about to sit down at the table, but my question arrested her movement. Caused her to pause. Just half a second, but a pause no less. Her eyebrows rose, and her lips pursed together in a grimace that was there and gone in a moment, and as it left, she sat down. Crossing her legs, she looked at me again and spoke.

“Lilly,” she said.

In her boots, double denim, and with a gun in her waistband, she sure didn’t look like a Lilly. Not that she was unattractive—far from it.

“Short for Lilith or Elizabeth?” I said.

“Elizabeth,” she said, looking at the table and then at me.

Subtle differences in her tone, the speed of her delivery and eye contact. She was definitely lying. Not about her name, though. That was a control question—one that gave me a truthful answer.

I decided it was time to call her out.

Chapter Sixteen

I’d been a con artist for most of my life, and I could spot a lie, but the grifter life didn’t teach me how to read people. That was my mother. She was Italian and grew up in a household with eight brothers and four sisters. My father could con anyone apart from my mother. Growing up in that house, my mother had nurtured one of the world’s finest bullshit meters. The only thing my father successfully kept from her was the fact that he was teaching me his trade and letting me learn how to box. Even then, I suspected my mother knew all about it but was content to let her boys think they’d fooled her. Maybe she thought it brought me and my dad closer together and she didn’t want to break that pact.

Watching my mom, I’d inherited that fine instinct for spotting a lie. And that’s all it can ever be. Lie detector tests can be beaten. You can’t take a course for lie detection. Either it’s in your blood and you grow up with it or you don’t.

“Lilly . . .” I began.

“I prefer McAllister,” she said.

“Fine. You told us a lot. But you’ve glossed over a few things here and there, and lied a little, too,” I said.

A slight tremble at the corner of her mouth. The muscle twitching to keep the face straight, to restrain the smile or the surprise of being exposed.

“You didn’t join IAB to help you make lieutenant. You were drafted by Frost. In the first three months of IAB, you’d still be catching up on the caseload left behind by the cops who’d bowed out after their mandatory two years, you’d be learning how to conduct basic integrity tests and generally getting up to speed on the way things work in the rat house. No, Frost drafted you into IAB for a reason. I’m guessing it’s because you somehow made a possible connection between the top hit man in New York and Marzone. You went to Frost with it, as head of IAB, and he insisted you join him. Am I close?”

She said nothing. Her dark eyes remained purposefully still, like the shadows of twin clouds on a sun-polished winter lake.

“Whatever you had on Marzone and the hit man wasn’t enough for an arrest, but it was enough to get Frost and Jones moving. Come on, I’m not stupid.”

“They didn’t get anywhere until I came to them. I’d been working on establishing a pattern of travel for a hit man. We had reliable intel from several snitches that this guy ran contracts on the East Coast. I began tracking his movements, working on his flight history, his credit card statements. All of it was clean, but at the same time, far too clean. The guy owned a chain of Laundromats, and he would regularly fly two thousand miles to check out how his businesses were doing. But he stayed in hotels that were too far away from the Laundromats, he paid in cash and didn’t submit receipts for travel expenses to the IRS, and he never brought a laptop or a cell phone with him. He was either the worst businessman in the United States, or a guy who liked to travel light and leave as little trace as possible.

“I was able to link key dates from several different murders to coincide with visits from our out-of-town friend. This guy was like the angel of death. Every time he came to town, somebody got whacked. And Marzone or a detective with known links to Marzone
made the collar for the murder. But that’s as far as it went. Weak circumstantial evidence and a solid conviction behind every murder.”

“You discovered Marzone was watching us, and that set your little heads alight with possibilities. I suppose a review of the Hernandez murder didn’t link it to the hit man,” I said.

A flash in her eyes. I was wrong. There was a link. Something I hadn’t seen or may have missed.

“You didn’t have enough for an arrest, but you know that Marzone is concerned about the case. That’s when you went too far. I don’t believe for a second you didn’t know Frost was going to use me as bait, that the meeting on the ferry was anything other than a signpost to Marzone that I was a target that needed taking care of. You wanted to catch the hit man, or Marzone with a gun to my head. That was your only shot, wasn’t it? None of the other murders came to anything against Marzone because he controlled the investigation, the crime scene, everything. But what if you knew who his next victim was going to be? Then you could see the whole setup and catch the players as they made their moves—on me and Jack. Maybe even Maria.”

She dipped her head, trying to find the answer on the floor, or maybe just immersing herself in an old feeling, an old emotion. The dark hair parted as she raised her head and nodded.

“Yeah, I told Frost I wasn’t cool with it. I think I said something about putting civilians at risk in order to close an investigation, maybe I talked about ethics. But you’re right. I could’ve washed my hands and walked away. Instead I spoke my mind and did my job. You know what Frost said when I objected?”

I cocked my head, leading her on.

“He said lawyers aren’t real people anyway; what does it matter if we lose a few on the way.”

“Shame,” I said. “Up until that point Frost was really growing on me.”

It was the first time I’d seen her smile. She looked different. The hard aspect left every part of her. She suddenly became softer, and more dangerous. I’d seen that kind of smile before. It was the kind of smile that could set your house on fire.

“What now, Eddie? We can’t roll on these guys. It’s not worth it,” said Jack.

Both of them looked at me. I stared at the files on the table. Jack was right. Putting our lives on the line was stupid. We were lawyers. We didn’t owe Maria Hernandez our lives—just our professionalism.

I nodded at Jack. “I don’t care what you and McAllister want to do, but I’m not settling this case.”

“What? Are you stupid?” said Jack.

“I probably am stupid. But I’m not walking away. And I’m not taking the two and a half grand.”

“You’re not stupid. You’re just plain crazy. You’re really going to run this case in court after the warning we just had? After you saw two men shot in front of you?” said Jack.

“It’s not just about Maria and Chilli anymore. Think about the people Marzone has allowed to be killed and the people he’s put away. Innocent people. How many lives have been ruined? No, this has to stop. Tomorrow we take these bastards down.”

Chapter Seventeen

Two pots of coffee, a few more beers, and a few hours later, I had been through all of the files and data McAllister brought to the table. There was some juicy stuff in there—statistics that I could make work for Maria.

The files on the Morgue Squad made grim reading. Slab Marzone was forty-nine years old, a former linebacker for the Sentinels, and had a psychological profile that would frighten Hannibal Lecter. He was going through his second divorce, and thankfully he hadn’t yet had any children with either of the ex-Mrs. Marzones. Officially he’d killed three people in the line of duty. Two in one incident—a robbery in a liquor store. After each shooting he’d been cleared by IAB, but the force psychiatrist recommended that Marzone should not return to active duty. She said there were unresolved anger issues and that Marzone showed a lack of basic human empathy. So the commissioner’s office paid for a second opinion after the union kicked up a stink, and Marzone got a clean bill of health both times from a so-called independent head shrinker handpicked by the union. That’s the thing about police unions. They protect their own—even the bad ones. Although in this case, I thought the union might’ve changed its mind if they’d known what Marzone was really up to. But their doctor had come through for Marzone, anyway. I got the impression the union’s doctor of choice would tell you Charles Manson was a pussycat if you paid him enough.

His pal Roark was another guy who didn’t score too highly on the head exam. One phrase stood out in his most recent psyche report—“borderline sociopath.” Not the kind of
guy you want on the street to protect and serve. Again, union pressure and a second opinion and Roark was good to go.

There were a half dozen more files on cops who were suspected of involvement in the squad. They weren’t yet players in this game. I read the files and studied their pictures, just in case one of them tried to make good on their threats. Two of them looked like the cops who’d tried to grab me coming off the ferry.

The last file was the most interesting to me. It was a collection of the evidence that McAllister had presented to Frost in relation to the connection between a contract killer and the Morgue Squad. Pictures of the original crime scenes, some images from security cameras. I spread them out on the table.

“See if you can spot the connection. Keep in mind I had a couple dozen photographs per crime scene,” said McAllister.

In front of me there were only twelve murder scene photos. One picture from each scene. In some photos the body wasn’t even in the shot. They were each taken from a distance, showing the location of the crime: a stairwell, a men’s room, a street corner, an alleyway. In some shots you could see crime scene techs, or the ME, or cops, but in a lot of them there were no personnel at all.

I returned to the stairwell photo. A dark stain on the landing but no body. One of the lights on the wall was out. But below the unlit fluorescent tube, I saw something. A mark, beside a heavy piece of graffiti. I quickly scanned the rest of the photos. It was there, in all of them.

A small white cross, drawn in chalk on the wall. I thought about the cross Roark had drawn on my chest. The hairs on my hands stood up, and I felt a cold, sick feeling in my stomach.

“The crosses,” I said.

Her eyes were focused on the street below as she spoke.

“Some of these murders were almost ten years apart, and nobody thought to look at the marks on the wall. Sure, the detectives checked for gang tags, but nobody thought to look at the chalk marking. Or maybe they did and just ignored it. That was my thought. So I checked the files and found the same small group of detectives came up again and again as leads on these murders. Marzone, or cops with strong connections to him, worked these cases. This was the link,” said McAllister.