TYLER ROCHESTER’S fourth-grade picture had been destined to become part of the collective American consciousness from the moment someone with a hacksaw had fastened his sights on the boy. The information pipeline hammered every television, newspaper, magazine, tablet and smartphone with the boy’s school portrait. The Times had carried a front-page piece on him, below a crisp image of the smiling face. Dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Blue jacket. White shirt. Striped school tie.
Hemingway threaded the Suburban through the staggered gauntlet of news vans. The main event was in front of the police station, a scattered collection of vehicles with one distinct purpose—to entertain. With the daunting task of feeding the twenty-four-hour news cycle, fact had already succumbed to fancy footwork and finger pointing. The reporters would camp at the precinct’s doorway until the next tragedy scarred the American landscape and then they would move on.
Their first order of business would be to fault the police. Then, when they were done asking questions and pointing fingers, they would move on to the beefed-up police presence at schools in the city, signing off with the old barn door analogy, asking if the extra security was too little, too late.
Hemingway had slept for two hours, then gone back to the morgue to visit the Rochester boy before they released him to the family. She had been in homicide for ten years, promoted to violent homicide investigation almost seven years back. Not a lot of time under her keel in one respect. A lifetime in another. Many lifetimes, if she considered the dead.
Child killings were the worst. It was one of those things that always felt personal, no matter what you tried to tell yourself.
As a detective, she was, if not used to, then at least familiar with the twisted pathologies of killers; this was going to get worse before it got better. There would be no reprieve, no reassignment. The only break would come when they solved the case. Or it went cold. And if that happened, she’d lose everything she had worked for. She’d lose the street time and the exams and all the hard work—years of having to be just a little more careful than the other cops, always having to do something better than the men she worked with in order to get equal credit. If she messed up the investigation, the derogatory language would start. They’d call her scared or a pussy; the hardened lowlifes in the department would call her a bitch and a cunt. No way—she was not backing down. She’d stick this out because that’s what she did, what she had always done. When the status quo were howling in pain, she kept banging away at it. Another trait inherited from her father.
The case would be media heavy to the end. When it came to murders, the value the media puts on lives was directly proportional to the entertainment value of the victim; it was about ratings. Drifters and homeless people got the leanest media coverage and, often, little in the way of investigative resources. The next layer up—another lost cause—were drug addicts. Then came the prostitutes, a layer of individuals no one cared about until the third or fourth victim. After that were drug dealers, followed by felons. The further up the social hierarchy you climbed, the closer you got to the American Gold Standard in murder victims: the rich white child.
She pulled into a reserved parking place and realized that her left hand was on her stomach. She stared at it for a while. Was she trying to feel a baby she wasn’t sure she wanted? Or trying to shield it from the bad juju of the job? She rubbed her stomach, a new habit that felt oddly familiar. Then she grabbed her backpack and the Rochester file from the back and got out into the early morning.
She cut around back to avoid the news teams. She clocked through the gate and walked through the garage, nodding a good morning to Albert Chance, the car dispatcher. When she was inside she felt the familiar vibrations of the precinct, a building that never slept. But riding just below the familiar current of the place was a foreign species of white noise, that of interlopers.
The cops she passed on the staircase looked irritated, the natural defensive position of policemen under scrutiny. The morning was always busy as the collective mind of the hive geared up for the day but today it was in overdrive as the eye of the media dialed in on it. The usual hallway chatter was noticeably absent.
Hemingway climbed the back staircase to the top floor, doing the full five flights in a quick jog. With this case looming in front of her, she knew she would be doing little running and no kayaking. Spare time had just evaporated—what little would be left after the investigation was done chewing through her days would end up being spent on not enough sleep. And trying not to lose her mind. Stairs would be her only exercise for a while.
Phelps was at his desk, wearing another of his ubiquitous gray suits and a solid tie, this one a deep navy. He had a coffee in his hand and the same indignant look that the cops on the staircase had—siege mentality setting in as he prepared for battle.
“Detective Phelps,” she said officially, handing him a paper bag.
“Hey, kiddo.” He looked into the bag, finding four bagels stuffed with lox and cream cheese, all wrapped in wax paper. “Let me guess, one of these is for me, right?”
“Half of one.” She winked.
He unwrapped a bagel and began fueling for the day. “You’re the best.”
She went to the window and looked out onto the street. From up here it looked worse than it had at street level—cameramen running around pulling establishing shots; reporters preening in handheld mirrors; yellow power cables reaching over the ground like tropical vines, feeding electricity to the lights. She put her hands into her pockets and felt the stone from last night. She wrapped her fingers around it. “You ready for this?” she asked.
Phelps took a slurp of coffee from his mug and shrugged. “I ain’t never ready to deal with those pricks outside asking questions like ‘did we find anything in the boy’s ass?’ I spoke to Dennet. He’s making you PIO.”
Being dubbed public information officer was a thankless job that every detective dreaded—it took time that wasn’t available for people who didn’t appreciate it. In the broadest sense, her job would be to feed the press tidbits of information meant to solicit their help whenever possible. But as the official talking head for the investigation she’d also be the official whipping post if things went screaming off the rails. Besides adding a lot of weight to her workload, it would also put her under a microscope, something she had learned to live with in the wake of the Shea investigation.
Her phone went off at her hip and she checked the message. “Dennet’s here.”
The noise five floors below rose in pitch as the captain’s car pulled up in front of the precinct. From her bird’s-eye perch she watched him step out into the glare of lights and he lit up like the Silver Surfer. She watched him shake his head, ignore shouted questions, disappear up the steps and into the building.
“Let’s get this party started.”
Phelps stood up, grabbed the second half of the bagel and lox he was working on, and pushed the paper bag across the desk. “Load up, you ain’t gonna have time to eat after this.”
“I hate the press.” Hemingway kept her eyes on the group of reporters below. “Any suggestions?”
“With your education and family? Yeah. Go downstairs, resign, and become a Park Avenue plastic surgeon.”
“I meant about the press.”
“Just don’t shoot anyone.”
“Thanks.”
They took the back stairs down to Dennet’s office passing plainclothesmen and uniformed officers scuttling between floors, silent and on edge. Hemingway walked ahead of Phelps, a habit past the point of being unlearned; with Phelps in the back they both had a clear forward view—imperative in their line of work.
Ken Dennet was cornered in front of his office, trying to ease away from a duty cop hammering him with questions. When Hemingway and Phelps came out of the stairwell, he pointed at them, his thumb and forefinger miming a gun. “My appointment is here, we’ll talk later.” He ushered them into his office, waving Mike Babanel, the precinct’s lawyer, over from a corner. When they were all safely inside, Dennet closed the door.
The captain dropped into his seat and stared at Hemingway. From down here the chatter of the media outside had the windows vibrating. “Where are you with the Rochester kid?”
No one wanted to hear that more killings were probably on the way. “We’ve gone through everyone who was even remotely connected with Tyler Rochester, from the school’s personnel records to the Rochester family’s list of help, through friends and business acquaintances. No red flags. We’ve hit all the registered sex offender lists—federal and state—and the recent parolee alerts. No one in any of the databases fits the MO.”
Dennet looked up at the ceiling and the word sonofabitch came out of his mouth in a protracted hiss. “The good news is that the extra security we’re putting on the street will help bolster public confidence. We’ve got a little over a week until the schools are out for the summer and anyone walks within two blocks of a schoolyard between now and then, I want them to see blue.” Dennet leaned forward and pushed a security schedule across the desk. Hemingway picked it up and scanned it while he went on. “We’ve assigned a police officer to every school in Manhattan—our men are doing double shifts. After school’s out, there’s extra security around parks, day camps and anywhere else kids hang out.”
“For how long?” Hemingway looked up from the three-page schedule, a stopgap measure to make the media think things were under control. Which they were. For now.
“Until you get a break or we arrest someone. I don’t need to tell you that those news assholes outside aren’t going to get tired, do I?”
The inference wasn’t lost on Hemingway; for the three months the Shea investigation lasted, she had been under constant attack from reporters. “Nossir.”
“Phelps tell you that you’re public information officer on this?”
“Who do I clear my releases through?”
The captain reached for the coffee on the edge of his desk, took a slurp off the top, and nodded at Babanel on the sofa. “Mike will make sure you’re golden.” Then he made a point of looking at his watch and clapped his hands. “Okay, school duty starts. Go talk to Desmond downstairs—he’s got the assignments. You’ll handle the daily brief and we’ll send a summary out to the other precincts. Then it’s off to protect and serve the school children of this city—I want people to think that this is a police state. And above all, I don’t want anyone else disappearing. One fucking kid goes off the reservation and those cocksuckers outside will do more harm than good. If you need help, or don’t understand something, you ask. Clear?”
“Crystal, sir.”
“Good. After school duty, you and Phelps hit the lists again. Do the rounds and ask questions. Find this guy.”