THAT NIGHT, JACK’S BED was a raft. He floated on a sea of memories: Michael Durkin’s miserable, guilt-wracked face; the view of Brooklyn from Governors Island; being ten years old and jumping off a pier in Red Hook, laughing with his brother Peter. But Petey was gone forever…
Michelle reached out in the dark and laid her hand on his shoulder, reminding him that he was not alone; they were on the raft together. He turned to her, caressed the side of her face. She hadn’t just stuck with him after the shooting—she had brought him back to life even before it, after all of those years when he had pretty much given up on love.
He leaned over and kissed her. He pulled the covers down off her body, slowly ran his hand over her flat warm stomach, over the round hill of a breast. Her nipple hardened under his palm. He eased her panties off of her hips. Soon he was inside her, diving in a warm blue sea, no memories now, just this eternal present moment. This time, everything felt right. She cried out; he joined her; they were the sea.
THERE ARE ONLY TWO kinds of problems in this world,” pronounced Detective Sergeant Stephen Tanney early the next morning. “There are the my problems, and then there are the not my problems. This is definitely the second kind.”
Jack sat up straight and clasped his hands in his lap; that helped keep him from strangling his boss. “But it relates directly to the Red Hook case.”
The sergeant’s office felt close and stuffy, especially with three people in it. Lieutenant Frank Cardulli, the head of the Homicide Task Force, was sitting in, listening to what his subordinates had to say. He was a stout, mustachioed fireplug of a man who had been in charge of the task force for years. Unlike Tanney, he inspired great confidence in his team.
Tanney frowned. “Aside from the fact that this has nothing to do with our task force jurisdiction, this isn’t even a New York City matter.”
A groan formed in Jack’s throat and he did the best he could to hold it back. “We’re talking about someone who committed two homicides.”
Tanney shook his head. “We’re talking about some nut bird who was holed up on federal property. If it wasn’t for some fluke water current, this whole mess would never have had anything to do with Brooklyn.”
Jack clasped his hands tighter. So typical. Yes, the new Compstat program was helping the NYPD target and deal with the areas of highest crime, and yes, crime rates across the city had plummeted. But it was hard to believe that the Department’s ultimate aim was reducing crime itself. The goal, as always, was making the stats look good. If the easiest way to do that was simply to move the crime elsewhere, so be it. If it could all be shifted out of state, the top dogs would have been perfectly happy. Who gave a shit what was happening in New Jersey or Connecticut? No Department jobs were riding on those stats.
Jack stared down at the floor. Count to ten, he told himself. “What we have here,” he said slowly and deliberately, “is someone who has killed two separate innocent people, including a child. And he did so in a way that’s likely to blow up in the media, as soon as some smart reporter makes the connection.”
Tanney snorted. “Give it a rest, Leightner. How many times do you think I’m gonna fall for that one? This new shit happened on federal property. It’s not our worry.”
Jack turned to Lieutenant Cardulli. “What do you think?”
The lieutenant leaned back in his chair and steepled his hands together. He deliberated for a moment, then leaned forward. “Well, I certainly agree with you that if we’ve got some wackjob running around out there, he’s gotta be stopped. But the sergeant is right: This is a federal case. And even if the city did have jurisdiction over the island, it would be a Manhattan thing.” He stood up and sighed. “We’ve got plenty to do without worrying about cases that aren’t even ours.” Jack started to protest, but Cardulli raised a palm. “I’m not saying you shouldn’t continue to work on this, but we can’t pull you out of the rotation. If you need some extra resources to work the Brooklyn side of it, I’ll do my best to help out.”
Jack nodded wearily. Like his elderly landlord was fond of saying about just about every problem, from potholes to bouts of the flu: “Whadda ya gonna do? Ya can’t fight City Hall.”
THE HOMICIDE TASK FORCE was like a crew of fishermen, only they didn’t even have to cast their hooks: Cases kept flopping over the side of the boat. You never knew what each day’s catch would bring.
There had been times when they flew in so fast that the detectives could barely keep up. Back in 1990, soon after Jack joined up, the precincts of Brooklyn South had seen two hundred and sixty murders. He remembered one crazy tour when the first call came just five minutes after his team punched in. Another came an hour later, then another. By the end of the shift, five fresh homicides had piled up, and the detectives could only stare at each other, amazed.
By this last month of 2001, the yearly count looked like it might reach only about ninety. Some attributed the drop in deadly crime to the waning of the crack epidemic, or changing demographics. Others pointed to the effectiveness of the Compstat approach. One thing was sure: No matter what, the commissioner and the mayor would claim the bulk of the credit.
And whatever happened, homicide never quite went out of style. People were not happy with each other, and they expressed their frustration with guns, with SUVs, with baseball bats, with electric carving knives, with their bare hands.
During the next three days, Jack and his team worked a couple of particularly pointless cases. First came a grim job out in Flatbush, a cocaine addict who had drowned her two young children in the bathtub. Then there was a middle-aged man in Canarsie who shot his friend and neighbor of thirty-five years in a dispute over dog poop on a lawn. There were no mysteries involved, other than the fundamental one: Why were people dropped on this earth, only to put each other to such sad or stupid ends?