Westermann sat slumped, knee jiggling, in a windowless, third-floor conference room along with the deputy superintendent, a wraith of a man name Kraatjes, and a mathematician from the Tech who contracted part-time with the force.
Westermann was distracted, worrying about what his men might be doing in the field. Even if he weren’t in this meeting, he could do precious little other than monitor developments—he couldn’t be everywhere. This was the balance he had to find, giving his men enough leeway to conduct a real investigation while making sure they didn’t find the truth about where the body had originally lain. His chest was tight.
They sat around a detailed map of the City, divided into quadrants and covered in dots of various colors of ink. The paper was damp from the humidity, books on each corner keeping the map flat. The men had pulled off their ties and sweated into their open collars. Drops of perspiration fell on the edges of the map, raising little wet welts.
Kraatjes, who oversaw the compiling of the crime data that produced the dots on the map, talked in his high, nasal voice, identifying areas of the City that had seen a notable increase or decrease in crime over the past month. The mathematician took fastidious notes in the ruled notebook that he always brought to these meetings.
This was a System meeting. The System was Westermann’s brainchild and it had brought him equal measures of reverence and disdain. Fortunately for his career, the reverence mostly came from the administration and the disdain from the cops on the street.
The System was a mathematical method for deploying police assets throughout the City, putting police in high-crime areas. This idea, on the face of it, was simple enough. The problem was that if you moved the cops from low-crime areas to high-crime areas, you risked criminals’ becoming savvy to this redeployment and crime increasing in previously safe neighborhoods. The System was a complicated mathematical formula that prescribed police deployment largely to high-crime areas while also maintaining a presence in relatively safe ones. It also mandated that the presence in low-crime areas be deployed without a pattern, so that observant criminals were not provided predictable windows of opportunity.
The System was implemented as an enhancement to the traditional cop-on-the-beat modus operandi that had dominated the force for decades. But despite its maintaining a credible number of beat cops, the duties of a large group of uniforms were radically changed. This, along with a presumption that the System was an attack on the fundamentals of good traditional policing—community relations, instinct, presence—left Westermann deeply unpopular with a large percentage of the cops on the beat, particularly the old guard, who saw the minor corruptions of protection money and patronage suddenly become nonviable.
Westermann did not intend the System as an inherent criticism of traditional police work or an instrument to mitigate police corruption. It was simply a way to allocate resources, and the effect on crime rates since its implementation four years prior had been substantial. But, truth be told, he was ambivalent about his unpopularity in some quarters. He hadn’t sought hostility and did not feel he deserved it. Yet, in some way, it validated the profundity of the change he’d advocated. And he would rather be reviled than ignored.
The penance he paid for the System was this monthly meeting with Kraatjes, whom he genuinely liked and respected, and the mathematician. The irony was that while Westermann disliked these meetings, this work was where his talent lay—not the cop work on the street. He was self-aware enough to understand this and have it bother him.
The mathematician and Kraatjes discussed how the body found on the riverbank should be treated as an anomaly and not factored into the next month’s deployments.
Westermann’s mind was on the two detectives he’d felt compelled to send to the Uhuru Community to question anyone who’d been on the riverbank that night to find out if they’d seen or heard anything. There was no way to avoid taking this risk—the investigation required it—yet it was also the first and conceivably most likely point at which the original location of the body might be disclosed, and with it, the moving of the body. Souza and Plouffe, counting the weeks until their pensions, were the least likely of his men to uncover anything during a canvas. It was the best he could do at the moment. He turned his thoughts to the river and the flow of detritus caught in the current and how intently Grip had watched.
He shuddered involuntarily, realizing that he had, without their knowing, alienated himself from his own men.
“Too cold for you, Piet?” Kraatjes asked.