Robert Tanenbaum - Outrage

“That guy gives me the creeps, Vinnie,” Lydia said after the door closed. “I don’t care how much he was tweaking, what he did to those women was bad, real bad.”

“It ain’t our business, Mama,” Vinnie replied. “If we started cutting the killers and creeps from our so-called clientele, we’d have no one to sell to anymore.”

“Did you get that recorded?” Lydia asked.

Vinnie smiled and picked up the fake pack of cigarettes from the coffee table that held a small digital recorder. “Right here,” he said.

After he saw the newspaper article about a suspect being arrested in the Atkins murder, he got an idea. He was pretty sure Kadyrov was the real killer, based on what he’d told them about the killings in Manhattan. He also knew that he’d be dropping by for drugs as soon as he could get the money together. “It wouldn’t hurt,” he’d told his wife, “to get a little something on him in case I ever need to pull an ace from my sleeve with the cops.”

Vinnie pulled the recorder out of the cigarette case, pressed the rewind button for a second, and then played it back. “Whether I did or didn’t, I think both of you should watch your fucking mouths. And remember, snitches end up in ditches. Or maybe a little bird will start singing to the cops about what you do in this rat hole you call home.”

“It ain’t much,” Vinnie said. “Wish I’d thought of it the first time back in July.”

“Well, he’s by here every few days,” Lydia said. “Maybe next time, you should get him really high-he’ll get talkative again.”

Vinnie winked at his wife. “That’s what I’ll do, Mama. We’ll get his ass in a sling pronto.”

Entering the forty-eighth precinct house, Detective Joey Graziani made a face as if he’d tasted something bad. He hated working the Bronx, especially as his last assignment had been at the Twenty-sixth Precinct on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Any NYPD detective worth his salt knew that working any borough after Manhattan was a step down. Hell, he’d have rather worked in Harlem than the Bronx.

Graziani knew he’d brought it on himself, though he thought exile had been a bit extreme for his transgression. He considered himself to be a good cop- Fuck that, a great cop, he thought-who had put his life on the line numerous times for Gotham’s taxpayers and his fellow officers. A lot of bad guys were off the streets because of him. And he’d earned his detective’s shield the hard way; he was the son of a Brooklyn butcher with no “rabbi” to grease the skids to the high echelons of NYPD officialdom.

He just got a little greedy, that’s all. Working narcotics, it was common practice for the guys to “split the pot”-some drug dealer would get popped with $20,000 in ill-gotten gains, and maybe only $10,000 went on the official report and into the evidence locker. It was one of the few perks of a dangerous job-“hazard pay,” so to speak.

Graziani’s troubles arose when a coke dealer he busted turned out to be a midlevel operator the DEA had been watching for a year, hoping he’d lead them to “Mr. Big.” Unfortunately for Graziani, the feds’ snitch had just made a buy from the guy using bills whose serial numbers had been recorded. So when half of it went missing and was deposited instead in the bank account of Mrs. Graziani, his ass was in a sling.

The feds were pissed-not so much about the money (they had their own “hazard pay” system) but because of all the time they’d wasted with nothing to show for it. So they wanted Graziani’s head. But the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had stuck up for him and a compromise was reached. Instead of booting him off the force, they sent him to hell in the Bronx.

Graziani looked at the clock above the fat desk sergeant’s dais. Eleven.

“Sleep in this morning, Graziani?” the sergeant said.

“Fuck you, McManus,” Graziani said without stopping. Even if he hadn’t been hungover, he would have been in a surly mood. He was ruggedly handsome with a perpetual tan, though the drinking was starting to sag his once-chiseled Italian features and the gray was a lot more prevalent than it had been a year earlier. But that didn’t bother him as much as being forty-three years old with twenty years on the job and a career that had taken a giant step backward.

“Fuck you, too, Joey.” McManus shrugged and went back to studying the racing form for the Meadowlands Racetrack. If Graziani wanted to be a prick, let him; he made no attempt to make friends with anyone at the Four-Eight, and the sergeant was more interested in the horses.

Graziani couldn’t have cared less what McManus or anyone else thought of him and made no pretense that he was doing anything other than biding his time until he could get out of there. He didn’t like the people of the Bronx; he didn’t like his fellow officers. Everything was low-class to him and he’d been looking for a way back across the East River since the day he arrived. He figured it was going to take breaking a big case or maybe a commendation for heroism, but so far all he’d managed were a few minor-league drug busts.

As he got to his desk in the squad room, he noticed a small crowd, including some of the top brass, had gathered over in the corner of the large detective bureau room, where the guys in homicide sat. A lot of the attention was directed at Phil Brock, one of the older detectives. The mood seemed jovial, with a lot of back-slapping and handshakes, although, Graziani noted, Brock himself seemed more subdued.

“What’s going on over there?” Graziani said to the young detective sitting at the desk across from his.

“You been on another planet this morning or something?” the younger man replied. He tossed the morning edition of the Post across the desks.

Graziani noted the headline:

POLICE ARREST SUSPECT IN BRUTAL BRONX SLAYING

“This Brock’s case?”

“It is now,” the young detective, a red-haired freckled newbie named O’Connor, said. “He caught a break on the Atkins murder-some asshole the guys in patrol picked up yesterday morning after he tried to jump some girl student in Mullayly Park. She made him at a lineup, then Brock stayed on him until he confessed to the assault and then spilled his guts about the Atkins murder.”

Graziani felt his heart skip a beat and then quicken its pace. He had a theory about the Atkins case and the two Manhattan murders that had happened near Columbia University when he was still assigned to the Two-Six detective squad. He’d never shared his theory with anybody else, hoping against hope that if he kept his ear tuned to the drug world, he might be able to break both cases open. And that would mean a transfer back to Manhattan. The Atkins case appeared to be solved, but that still left Yancy and Jenkins.

He’d still been working Narcotics out of the Two-Six when the Columbia U Slasher struck that past July. After a couple of weeks with virtually no leads and the public, egged on by the press, clamoring for an arrest, the brass had put together a small task force comprised of the homicide detectives working the case as well as detectives from other squads.

Graziani had been sent over from narcotics because the shrinks in the NYPD behavioral sciences unit thought there was a high probability that the killer was a junkie. Basically, they said there were two main reasons for their conclusion.

One, the perp robbed his victims but took only items that were easy to locate in purses or in plain sight on dresser tops, or took jewelry from the bodies. He was only after cash or items, like jewelry, that could be quickly converted into cash. But he’d missed a lot-including jewelry and money left in bedroom drawers-and avoided such items as laptop computers and cameras that a professional burglar would not have overlooked.