AS HE WAITED FOR FULTON’S CALL THAT MORNING, ROGER “Butch” Karp perused the New York Times, which had been delivered that morning to the family’s suite in the Kit Carson Inn, a luxury hotel in Taos, New Mexico. The Times and the presidential suite were both courtesy of a man he’d never met, who owned the ranch west of town where Ned Blanchett, his daughter’s fiancé, was foreman. The generous offer had been tendered after their wealthy benefactor had learned the family would be staying in Taos over the holidays.
Karp had resisted the trip to New Mexico. After all, as he’d pointed out to Detective Fulton and his wife, Marlene Ciampi, they’d just weathered another terrorist attack conceived by his diabolical archenemy, Andrew Kane, who’d joined forces with Islamic terrorists and tried to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. To make sure that Karp understood the personal nature of Kane’s animosity toward him, the sociopath had also abducted Karp’s daughter, Lucy, in an effort to make him choose between her and many other innocent lives. Fortunately, as a result of the heroics of some brave men, it hadn’t come to that, but it was one more reminder that evil seemed to have a personal vendetta against the Karp-Ciampi clan.
And if the terrorist attack had not been enough to deal with, Karp had just finished up with a high-profile murder trial. An eccentric, well-known theater producer, F. Lloyd Maplethorpe, had murdered an actress in his Tribeca hotel penthouse but then claimed that she’d committed suicide. Karp had presented a bare-bones, “just the facts, ma’am,” case based on the incontrovertible evidence and then counted on the jurors’ common sense to cut through the defense’s endless string of “expert” witnesses—with his guidance. In the end, the jury had sided with the prosecution and convicted Maplethorpe.
Karp had looked forward to the sentencing, but then Maplethorpe had been murdered in the Tombs, as the Manhattan Detention Complex was known. Thinking about Maplethorpe’s death now caused him to frown as he glanced back down at the Times. The suspect in the killing was a member of the Inca Boyz, a Hispanic gang out of Spanish Harlem, whose one-time leader, Alejandro “Boom” Garcia, was yet another of the unusual characters whose fate seemed woven into the fabric of his and his family’s lives. It didn’t take Sherlock Holmes’s assistance for Karp to suspect that Garcia had ordered the hit.
Alejandro’s girlfriend, Carmina Salinas, another aspiring actress, had also been assaulted by Maplethorpe and testified to that effect after the producer tried to have her killed to silence her. Garcia had wanted to go after Maplethorpe himself, and only the intercession of Marlene and Carmina had persuaded him to let Karp and the justice system handle it. But apparently, the gangster-turned-rap-star had decided not to wait for a judge to pronounce sentence. Maplethorpe had been stabbed to death while waiting in line with other inmates.
Nothing could be proved regarding any involvement Garcia might have had in Maplethorpe’s death—saving Karp the dilemma of having his office prosecute a young man who’d risked his own life for Karp’s family in the past. He just hoped that the truth that he suspected was buried with the producer.
Karp shook his head at the thought. There’d been a time—back when the color of his hair was still dark coffee, not pewter, and the lines around his gray gold-flecked eyes were far fewer—when the concept of hoping that a murderer would go unpunished was unthinkable. However, somewhere along the line, he’d reached an uneasy compromise with his sense of justice. So long as it did not impinge on his duty as district attorney to prosecute crimes committed in New York County, he wasn’t going to shed tears for the violent end of evil men and women.
He still abhorred the concept of “street justice” (though there’d been plenty of it meted out by his own wife), and if the evidence ever warranted charging Garcia, he wouldn’t interfere. Maplethorpe’s death had occurred in his jurisdiction, and if a case could be made against Garcia, he’d have no choice but to ask that a special prosecutor be appointed and then step out of the way. But until, and if, that day arrived, Garcia’s involvement in the death of Maplethorpe was nothing more than a hunch.
Nor had it kept Karp in New York over the holidays. His arguments that it was a bad time for him to go on vacation had fallen on the deaf ears of Fulton and Marlene. The stress was all the more reason he needed to go, they’d insisted, and they’d finally convinced him that the DAO would not collapse in the two weeks he would be gone.
Now, sitting in an overstuffed leather chair in the presidential suite of a New Mexico hotel, Karp turned back to his newspaper and noted that the attack on the Brooklyn Bridge and Maplethorpe’s murder had finally dropped off the front page. However, there was still plenty of carnage and scandal to report, alongside the annual feel-good story about some multimillionaire basketball player giving away a few toys to underprivileged children. The major political parties were, of course, blaming each other for the economy being in the toilet, while at the same time increasing massive government spending on entitlement programs and handing out taxpayer dollars by the billions to financial institutions, apparently to reward mismanagement and malfeasance.
As he turned the page, a photograph accompanying a short news story out of Westchester County, a suburb just north of Gotham, caught his eye. The photo was of the Westchester district attorney, Harley Chin, seated behind his desk during a press conference. According to the story, a young debutante named Rene Hanson, from the upscale town of Purchase, had been reported missing by her distraught, and wealthy, parents. The twenty-two-year-old had disappeared shortly before Christmas and had not been heard from since.
Chin had called the news conference apparently for the purpose of announcing that he was “putting all the resources of my office, working with the Westchester, state, and federal law-enforcement agencies, to locate Miss Hanson. And if, heaven forbid, her absence is due to criminal activities, to put the perpetrators on notice that this office will not rest until justice has been served.”
Karp rolled his eyes. There was no reason for a district attorney to be issuing statements at that point—or ever—in a missing-persons investigation. For one thing, there was no clear evidence that Hanson was the victim of criminal activity, and certainly no one had been arrested or charged with a crime that would have involved Chin’s office. There was simply no point to holding such a news conference and making those kinds of statements, except to grab the media spotlight, which, given the personality of the man involved, did not surprise Karp.
He had known Harley Chin for years. The tall, forty-five-year-old Chinese-American’s immigrant parents owned a small grocery store on the Lower East Side in Alphabet City between Sixth and Seventh Streets on Avenue B. They had scrimped and saved to put their only son through Harvard Law School. After graduation, he’d come to work at the New York DAO.
In fact, at one time, Karp, who was then head of the DAO Homicide Bureau, had taken Chin under his wing, intending to groom him to run the bureau himself someday. The younger man had seemed to have all the right stuff. He’d graduated near the top of his class, and he possessed a sharp mind, a keen intellect, and a willingness to learn. He was an eloquent speaker and a pleasure to listen to as he deftly put together his cases so well that much more experienced attorneys in the DAO were usually at a loss to find any flaws at the weekly meetings of bureau chiefs.
However, much to Karp’s disappointment, Chin also possessed an enormous ego, and a lot of gray areas when it came to his ethics eventually undermined his attributes. Although Karp wouldn’t learn the full extent for some time after his former protégé had left the office, Chin saw nothing wrong with taking “shortcuts” and using morally questionable tactics if that’s what it took to “win” at trial. Some of his former colleagues had later confided that Chin equated his success in the courtroom with climbing the ladder at the DAO—a means to an end rather than dedication to justice.
Chin loved the limelight. Nothing seemed to make him happier than getting his name and face in the newspapers or on television. He usually ignored, or tried to get around, Karp’s admonishments to stop talking to the media about his cases. That included one instance in which Karp suspected his protégé had leaked a grand-jury indictment, a misdemeanor, to a Times reporter before it was filed with the court. But Karp had no solid evidence to back up his suspicion.
Karp couldn’t prove it, and after another stern warning, he chalked the publicity seeking up to youthful immaturity and continued to work with Chin, hoping he’d wise up and see the light. But it turned out that Chin’s problem wasn’t just liking a little ink. He stepped over the line when he showed a witness to a murder photographs of a suspect before the witness was to view a police lineup. The witness then picked the man in the photograph and became adamant about the identification.
The defendant had an airtight alibi and proved it in court. Karp didn’t learn about the corrupted lineup until he read a posttrial article in the Times quoting the witness, who claimed to have been “intimidated” into identifying the wrong man. Karp was livid. Not only was the real killer still walking the streets—and probably could never be successfully tried because the defense would use the impeached witness—but an innocent man had gone through the misery of jail and a trial and had nearly lost his freedom for life.
Chin, in his arrogance, had explained it all away as a “gut instinct” that he’d had the right man, but the witness had been a bit iffy about his ability to identify the killer and needed a little help. “Win some, lose some,” he’d said, shrugging, as he sat in the chair across from Karp’s desk. Twenty minutes later, he was slinking out the door with his ears still burning and no longer employed by the New York District Attorney’s Office.
After leaving the DAO, Chin had gone into private practice, mostly minor criminal cases from well-heeled clients who liked the idea of a former hotshot with the New York DAO defending them or their kids. Then, several years ago, he’d popped up in Westchester County, where his sudden, well-financed entry into the district attorney’s race there had surprised the incumbent, a lazy, multiterm good old boy who didn’t recognize the threat until it was too late. Chin won the election handily.
Now, according to the office grapevine, Chin was angling to get the governor’s nod to replace the current New York attorney general, who was intending to run for the U.S. Senate in the spring. And, according to the Times article, the missing girl’s parents and their wealthy friends were major contributors to Chin’s political war chest.
Karp shook his head. That pretty much explains it, he thought, turning the page.
The antics of Harley Chin were hardly his concern. He’d awakened at four that morning unable to sleep, thinking about events that would soon be transpiring in New York City regarding one Sharif Jabbar.
Leaving the warm, gently serene presence of his wife, he’d wandered out onto the deck off the suite’s expansive living room and let the frigid predawn air shock him fully awake. Looking up, he’d marveled at the clarity of the New Mexico night sky. In New York, stars—if they could be seen at all—were dim facsimiles of these brilliant spots of light. On the high plains of northern New Mexico, stars stood out as individual entities, their light as crisp and as brilliant as diamonds even though they were millions of light-years away.
Karp lowered his gaze. The deck overlooked the snow-covered Taos Plaza, which he’d learned had been in existence since the late 1700s. The plaza was set up in the traditional Spanish style, with a park in the middle, surrounded by a narrow lane and an outer ring of shops and cafés occupying what had been the adobe homes of early inhabitants. It had once been the town’s and the region’s center of government and was still a favorite meeting place for locals.
A coyote howled in the desert on the outskirts of town. Karp shivered with the cold and with pleasure at the wild, independent cry. Ever since he was a child growing up in Brooklyn, he’d dreamed of someday visiting the wide-open spaces of the American West. In a neighborhood populated by immigrants and their children, most of whom had never been farther west than New Jersey, he and his friends had spent many summer days and evenings fending off Indian attacks and bravely dying in gunfights against the bad guys.
Karp had learned his moral values from his parents. But their values were reinforced and magnified by his heroes on the silver screen, such as Gary Cooper in High Noon and Alan Ladd in Shane. At the top of the list of heroes was John Wayne as he appeared in westerns and World War II movies. Karp had lived for the Saturday matinees at the Avalon and King’s Way theaters on King’s Highway in Brooklyn, just a few blocks east of Ocean Parkway, where he grew up.
They were simple stories pitting virtue against evil. Heroes were often opposed by their mirror opposites, evil that they had to destroy. Villains often had the advantage or cheated, but heroes played by the rules and were defined more by their integrity, courage, and toughness than by even their exceptional prowess with a Colt .45 Peacemaker. The hero was a leader of men, but if necessary—especially in the defense of those who had no one else—he would stand alone and never, ever compromise his principles for expediency, personal gain, or safety.
Such morality tales were not lost on Karp as a boy, nor was their deeper meaning ignored by the man. Many years later, as an adult, he’d recognize these themes as allegories for the potential for evil that resides within every human. While most resisted their baser impulses, those who didn’t were the sorts of criminals he prosecuted on behalf of the People.
Karp’s appreciation for the romanticized hero of the Old West wasn’t the result of his belief that such a man had existed. It was what that hero represented. An ideal of living up to principles. A role model to aspire to. And if you failed at first, then, like one of Karp’s screen idols, you picked yourself up, dusted yourself off, and climbed back into the saddle again.
It had carried over into his choice of profession. His one goal upon finishing law school was to work for the New York District Attorney’s Office, where the legendary DA Francis Garrahy was the “sheriff” in town who ran his office according to a strict moral and ethical code, what Karp came to think of as the institutionalization of virtue. There would be no cheating, no shortcuts, no compromising of principles for the sake of expediency, self-aggrandizement, or glory. Ever since, Karp had made his living putting the guys in black hats behind prison walls, though even in his wildest dreams as a young assistant district attorney, he’d never imagined that someday he would be the old man’s actual, as well as philosophical, heir.
Karp had left the deck and retrieved the Times from outside the apartment door. As he began to read, he paused and noted the nearly absolute quiet surrounding him. Even with the windows closed in New York City, there was no escaping the sounds of traffic and the constant hum of the machinery that supported millions of people packed together on an island.
He liked it in Taos and had even entertained what it would be like to move there and go into private practice, maybe hang his shingle outside some small office down the street from the house where Kit Carson and his wife, Josefa, once lived. Or perhaps he’d apply for a job as an ordinary prosecutor for the local district attorney. Why not? he’d mused. What’s the difference between bringing a murderer to justice in New York City or in New Mexico? The victims were just as deserving of justice, the killer just as deserving of punishment.
The fantasy didn’t last long. It was a question of scale and of being where he was needed most. Certainly, a victim in New Mexico was just as deserving of justice, but there were a lot more of them on the island of Manhattan. And that was where he could have the greatest impact against the evil that lurked in some men’s souls. For better or worse, he was the chief law-enforcement officer for the County of New York, responsible for directing the efforts of some five hundred assistant district attorneys to prosecute more than one hundred thousand criminal cases every year.
In the years between the old man’s and Karp’s terms in office, Garrahy’s institutionalization of virtue had succumbed under the leadership of less principled men, who had precious little, if any, trial experience and who corrupted justice by engaging in excessive plea bargaining to manage the massive DAO caseload. So, believing that to return the DAO to its former glory he needed to lead by example, Karp took on high-profile, complex, and legally significant cases himself. Not for personal or ego-driven reasons, like Harley Chin, but to set the standard for what he expected of those who worked for him, as well as to take on such issues as organized crime, public corruption, terrorism, and disingenuous defense tactics such as the “big lie frame defense” and the “insanity of the insanity defense.” He hoped to leave a legacy of well-trained trial-lawyer prosecutors who would someday replace the old guard like himself, while carrying on the principles of Garrahy.
The article in the Times reminded him that he’d once imagined Harley Chin was one of those, only to be disappointed. Maybe Kenny Katz, he thought. So far, his new protégé, an Iraq War veteran and Columbia Law grad, seemed to have Chin’s legal brilliance without the warts. He could be impatient and brash, but to date, his ethics were beyond reproach.
Karp glanced at the clock on the wall. Six-thirty, eight-thirty in New York. At that moment, Katz was supposed to be working with Fulton to apprehend Sharif Jabbar. If the caller was accurate and had the time right. He rapped his knuckles on the wooden lampstand next to the chair. As if on cue, the telephone rang. He grabbed it before it rang again, hoping not to wake Marlene and his twin boys while he talked to his longtime friend.
“Merry Christmas, Clay, what’s cooking?”
“And a Happy Hanukkah to you, too, boss,” came the reply. “And that burned smell is Sharif Jabbar’s chestnuts roasting. He’s being processed as we speak, and then, as per your instructions, Mr. Kenny Katz is waiting to see if he wants to answer a few questions before he lawyers up.”
“Beautiful,” Karp said. “Glad to hear that Mr. Katz was able to drag himself out of bed on a cold winter holiday morning.”
“As a matter of fact, he went above and beyond the call of duty,” Fulton answered with a chuckle. “He insisted on getting to be the guy who dressed up in a Santa Claus outfit and stood on the corner of Centre and Canal to watch for the motorcade just in case they took another route. I’m told he looked somewhat like a deflated red balloon.”
“Has to be the skinniest kosher St. Nick on record,” Karp said, and laughed. “So I take it Jabbar’s attorney wasn’t along for the ride?”
“Nowhere to be seen,” Fulton replied. “I thought it was a little odd, but I guess she figured she’d cut a deal and there was no reason to leave her cozy cave. It wouldn’t have mattered. Even if she could have found a judge willing to listen to her on Christmas morning, I was dragging Jabbar down to the Tombs and booking him. In fact, I was sort of hoping I’d get the chance to watch her face turn that lovely shade of eggplant when I bounced her boy off the hood of the car and cuffed him.”
Karp noted the bitter distaste behind Fulton’s words. The detective had been a rookie police officer walking a beat in central Harlem many years earlier when self-proclaimed black nationalists murdered four cops in cold blood. The killers had walked up behind the unsuspecting officers who were patrolling a section of the projects and executed them without warning. One of the murdered officers, a black thirty-year-old father of two, had been Fulton’s first cousin.
The killers’ defense attorney was Megan O’Dowd. She’d argued that the shootings were justified as self-defense, that the cops had “invaded” the projects for the purpose of harassing young black men like her clients because of their political beliefs. She’d also claimed that the police department had knowingly sent officers into the projects to incite a violent confrontation. And when the officers came out on the losing end, the department and the DAO had framed her clients to make it appear that “justifiable resistance to government provocation” had been an act of premeditated, cold-blooded execution.
Opposing O’Dowd had been a young, idealistic prosecutor named Roger “Butch” Karp, who had only recently been appointed to the DAO’s Homicide Bureau when the case fell to him. Surprisingly, because there were many more experienced assistant district attorneys in the bureau, Garrahy had gone against the advice of his senior bureau chiefs and put Karp on the case.
O’Dowd had since made a career out of defending every antigovernment, anti-U.S. group who’d have her. Communists. Black Panthers. And a plethora of terrorists from Puerto Rico to Croatia to the Middle East. After September 11, 2001, she’d been quoted in the media contending that terrorist groups like Al Qaeda were “national liberationists,” whose only option to defend Muslims against the military and economic tyranny of the West was to attack “by unconventional means.” Violence, she said, aimed at the institutions that perpetuate capitalism and contribute to the oppression of Muslims all over the world was “justified.”
“It turned out that the U.S. marshal in charge of the detail was an old friend, Jen Capers, and she was only too happy to cooperate,” Fulton said. “I think you met Jen at our house on the Fourth of July last year.”
“Yeah . . . tall, nice smile, striking eyes, looks like she could have been a model,” Karp recalled. “I didn’t get to talk to her much, but she seemed real sharp.”
“That’s her.” Fulton laughed. “And also tough as nails. If my memory hasn’t completely left me, she’s been shot twice in the line of duty, but both times the shooter came out on the losing end of the gunfight.”
“Well, glad it went smoothly, but sorry you had to do this on Christmas morning. Apologize to Helen for me.”
“Oh, I intend to as soon as I get home,” Fulton replied. “In fact, I’m blaming it all on you, so that maybe she’ll still give me that special gift she’s been promising.”
“Then by all means, I’ll take the rap,” Karp said.
“Right, so happy holidays to Marlene and the kids.”
“Thanks, Clay. Merry Christmas, and I’ll see you in a few days.”