Robert Tanenbaum: Enemy within

Robb returned his attention to it. It is a gigantic annoyance to the New York Police Department whenever one of its officers fires a gun in the line of duty. Cops say that the mass of paperwork generated by a police shooting weighs as much as the weapon that fired the shot. That annoyance becomes actual pain when the shot fired intersects any human flesh at all, except perhaps when the cop doing the shooting is obviously preventing a vicious, saliva-dripping felon from making off with a charming little girl, or similar. When the target dies, as here, and when the target is black and the shooter white, also as here, the pain reaches bone-cancer levels.

When they had finished speaking with the principals involved, Captain Robb pulled Lieutenant Maguire into the backseat of his car and asked, "What do you think?"

Maguire said, "Cooley's a good cop. Nash is very solid."

Robb sighed and said carefully, "I know that, Bob. I meant what about this piece of shit we got here, how are we going to play it?"

"Cooley said the perp charged him with the car. Deadly force. He acted to save his life and Nash's."

"That's the story we're going to go with?"

Maguire, like his immediate boss, was a comer in the department and understood the unspoken footnotes that hung from Robb's question. It is difficult to make captain before age fifty, as Robb had, without being able to speak and understand a language that none but other initiates can comprehend. Maguire confidently expected to make captain, too, within the next couple of years, and he was similarly fluent. Wanting another moment to think about it, he deflected with, "Have you called his old man yet?"

"No, I wanted to check the situation out myself and get our ducks in a row. Who's the stiff, by the way?" Robb was not pressing the question, yet.

"Lowlife. Not a citizen," said Maguire. "Got a nice sheet for grand theft and receiving stolen."

"Violence?"

"No, sir, unfortunately not. And the minority thing, of course."

"Yeah. That's the bitch of it. But Nash is solid behind this?"

"Nash will hold up," said Maguire. "Like I said." A pause. "What I think, sir, is that we should let the system work here. We'll do the normal administrative in the department, take their testimony, the four of them, which will all be consistent, like we just heard out there. Chase of a stolen vehicle, perpetrator's attempt to ram pursuit vehicle, credible risk to officer's life, not to mention potential for harm to innocent drivers, fucking guy roaring the wrong way down the road. Officer fired, killing perpetrator. A righteous shooting, end of story. No deep probing, no reason to believe there was anything funny. Cooley's record is clean as a whistle. Never any paper on him, brutality or whatever. Racism? Hell, his partner's black. So we're fine there."

"There'll be a report," said Robb.

"Yeah, it's a homicide, sir. I would expect the detectives involved to write it up to the best of their ability without fear or favor."

"Just like always."

"Just. And then it's the DA's ball."

"Right. Who caught the homicide, by the way?"

"Steve Amalfi and Oscar Rivera."

Robb consulted the card file in his head that held the names of the hundred-odd detectives who worked in his fief. Nothing popped up, which was good. Had either of the homicide cops been a discipline problem, or a whistle-blower, or under the personal protection of some significant PD rabbi, Robb would have known about it. So he would have a clean, competent report, written by men who could, if it came to that, be burned. Which report no one in the department would read in great detail. There was so much paper passing across the desks of the bosses. The main thing was to ensure that if any shit started flying around behind this, none of it could stick to him or his. He thought he was pretty safe. He could in reasonable conscience convey to Deputy Chief Inspector Gavin the results of his preliminary investigation: a clean shooting-fleeing felon, credible threat-not another case of a half a dozen heavily armed white morons blowing forty or so holes in a crippled Negro deacon or an old Hispanic lady or a mentally retarded, minority twelve-year-old.

Let the system work; good advice. The system would work and bring forth a result pleasing to the department and to the decent middle-class majority for whom it labored. That was mainly what the system was for, in Robb's opinion. And he would call former chief inspector Ray Cooley and tell him that his younger son had killed a perp, but that the preliminary investigation was finding the shooting clean. And he would discreetly check on Amalfi and Rivera, too, to make absolutely sure they were solid, that they would also let the system work.

The system now cranked into gear. The deceased was brought to the morgue at Bellevue, there to be probed by the medical examiner, whose duty it is to determine the manner and cause of death. The New York medical examiner is one of the best forensic medical shops in the nation, but even the best shops have difficulty attracting qualified personnel. Cutting up corpses is not what attracts most students to medicine, and most graduates of American med schools do not care to labor for civil service pay. The office was therefore populated largely by foreign born and trained, among whom, now wielding his knife through the chest of Cisco Lomax, was Osman Mochtar. Dr. Mochtar was from Afghanistan. He had escaped with his family during the Russian war and made his way to Libya, where he had obtained a scholarship to study at Garyounis University in Benghazi. He had been in the United States, in New York, for nearly five years. He thought cutting up corpses was a great job; you did not have to speak English to them, nor did they ever lay upon you unbearable insult, as was the case on the one occasion when he had sought work with patients at a public hospital. He was not a diplomate of the American Board of Forensic Medicine.

Dr. Mochtar extracted eight bullets from the body of Cisco Lomax and traced the course of two more. He determined that the cause of death was massive trauma to the brain from a bullet that had entered five centimeters posterior to the right zygomati arch, pierced the temporal bone, traversed an upward course, and exited through the anterior, left frontal bone. Even without this coup de grace, the subject, he concluded, was unlikely to have survived long. His seventh cervical vertebra had been shattered by a bullet that had torn through the spinal cord and exited from the right ventral surface of the neck, and there were two wounds in the left arm and six in the torso, the latter doing massive damage to the lungs and other internal organs. Dr. Mochtar dropped the last of these torso bullets into a kidney dish and handed it to the detective standing there. Detective Rivera bagged them in individual bags, sealed the bags, signed his initials and badge number over the seals, and had Mochtar sign them, too.

"So, tell me, Doc," said Detective Rivera, "you traced the path of these bullets, right?"

"Oh, yes. These and two others that I have not got here. They exit to outside, you know?"

"Uh-huh. And they came from the front, the back, what?"

"Oh, definitely all from back, posterior as we say. And perhaps, you see, a little to the side in these cases." The body was facedown. He indicated a wire sticking out of the skull wound, and another emerging from a black hole slightly to the left of the posterior midline of the neck. "The others are all directly from the rearward, except the shoulder wound, here at the left side. But this one to the skull is from the right, a fatal wound, do you see?"

"Right, got it."

Rivera left. Dr. Mochtar and a diener turned the body over, and Dr. Mochtar began to stitch up the corpse. The man had run from the police and had, most properly, been shot down. Dr. Mochtar did not think that a corpse shot in the back by police was worthy of much comment. Certainly he did not bring it to the attention of his superiors.