David Jackson - Pariah

‘ You heard what I heard, Schneider. He wanted Tony there alone. He didn’t want any other cop there, not just me. He used my name explicitly because Tony brought it up that he should call me. If you’d have been working with Tony yesterday, it would have been your name on that recording.’

‘Oh yeah. That’s right. You and Alvarez were working together. Just like you were working with Joe Parlatti, who also happens to be dead. And if we all care to cast our minds back a little further . .’

‘Oh, fuck you, Schneider,’ Doyle says.

‘Fuck you too, Doyle. All’s I’m saying is that it don’t take no Sherlock fucking Holmes to see a pattern developing here. .’

‘All right!’ Franklin yells. ‘Can it, you two, for Christ’s sake. I lost two of my finest detectives yesterday. Two people I was proud to call my friends. They were your friends too. Bickering like schoolgirls is going to get us nowhere.’ He aims a finger at Schneider. ‘If you think that Detective Doyle had anything to do with the death of any police officer, in this squad or anywhere else, then you put it in writing. If you don’t want to do that, then I don’t want to hear any more insinuations.’ He takes his eyes off Schneider, addresses the whole group. ‘From any of you. Understand?’

He gets a few nods in return.

‘That said,’ Franklin adds, ‘there’s a bit more I need to tell you. This may be nothing, but it may be important, so you need to hear it.’

Doyle catches a brief, almost apologetic, glance in his direction. Shit, he thinks. What now?

‘When Tony was being put in the ambulance, he said a name, “Doyle.” Then he said three more words: “Got too close.” Like I said, Tony was on the edge of dying right then. He may have just been rambling. Any thoughts?’

Schneider’s response is to expel air from the corner of his mouth in a kind of pfff sound — his way of letting the room know where his opinions lie.

Holden’s comments are a little more lucid. ‘Maybe Cal and Tony were on to something without even knowing it. Too close . So close, Tony had to die.’

Schneider decides he needs to be vocal again. ‘Yeah. You need to be careful, Doyle. You could be next.’

Holden ignores him and presses on. ‘That stuff from Cavell about some heavy shit going down. If he really was about to toss something juicy to Tony, that could have been a good reason for someone to whack both of them.’

Franklin nods thoughtfully. ‘That’s assuming Cavell really did have something to deliver. If this went down the way the hit on Joe did, Cavell was probably just being used as bait. Any other theories?’

‘A cop killer.’

This from LeBlanc, an ambitious young cop who only recently traded in his white shield for a gold one. Always sporting the most fashionable spectacles, although Doyle suspects that he wears them only to appear brainier than he is. Older, wiser heads might not have dared to voice LeBlanc’s idea, but Doyle is sure that it has entered the minds of all of them.

‘For some reason,’ LeBlanc says, ‘the killer just doesn’t like cops, period. He’s working his way through them, one by one.’ He looks across at Schneider. ‘In which case, maybe it doesn’t have to be Cal who’s next. Maybe it’s any one of us.’

‘Nice thought, kid,’ Schneider answers. ‘Cheer us all up, why don’t you?’

‘Even so,’ Franklin says, ‘we have to take it into consideration. Could just be we have a psycho cop killer on our hands.’ He raises a warning finger and wags it at each man in the room. ‘I don’t want to lose any other members of my squad. From now on, you have to be on your guard at all times, you hear me?’

He gets nods again, but more vigorous this time. Now and again, it’s nice to hear how much your boss loves you.

And then there is another period of silence, while every detective here weighs up the implications of having to be aware of everything around them, at all times of the day. The killer has shown himself to be a person of astounding ingenuity and resource. From now on, even taking a crap could be fraught with danger.

Who says a cop’s life is dull?

‘There’s another possibility,’ Doyle says. He has been thinking about this ever since the wake-up call from Franklin. What the lieutenant said about the last words of Alvarez lends it even more currency.

‘Maybe I really am the link in this. Maybe this is some warped way of trying to hurt me. Those words of Tony’s, using my name and then “got too close”. Maybe what he was saying was that he got too close to me.’

Franklin is staring at him, his expression grave. ‘You know anyone might want to get at you like that?’

Doyle looks round at Schneider. ‘Outside this room, no.’

This raises a couple of snickers, which tells Doyle that there are at least one or two people on his side.

Franklin says, ‘That’d be one crazy way to hurt somebody, Cal. I hope to God you’re wrong about that.’

Not as much as I do, Doyle thinks.

Barely five minutes after the men in the squadroom finish trying to fathom what is happening to them, the lieutenant takes a phone call from the Chief of Detectives. The Chief of Ds tells Franklin, amongst other things, that even though the death occurred within the confines of the Eleventh Precinct, the Alvarez case now officially belongs to the Eighth, being as it seems to have a solid link to the Parlatti case, which was already theirs. In his turn, Franklin relays the word from above to the squad, and it’s all systems go.

Doyle makes it his first task to learn what he can about the events of last night. It’s a job that takes longer than he hoped, mainly because the required information seems to be distributed across about a dozen people from the Eleventh Precinct, the Manhattan South Homicide Task Force and the Bomb Squad, not all of whom are immediately contactable.

Next, Doyle calls the Medical Examiner’s office for a prelim on the Alvarez and Cavell autopsies. He manages to speak to Norman Chin, who informs him that Alvarez’s fatal injuries were sustained solely as a result of a massive explosion, the epicenter of which lay in the immediate proximity of one Tremaine Cavell. It is Chin’s conjecture that the bomb was either being held by Cavell, or was somehow attached to his upper torso, this being difficult to confirm owing to the current absence of said upper torso.

The conclusion being, Doyle thinks as he ends the call, that Cavell had somehow been turned into a human bomb. So, strike the notion that Cavell had any hot information to reveal. He was being used, just as Scarlett had been used to kill Joe.

Tired of having a phone clamped to his ear, Doyle abandons his desk and heads out to the apartment of Cavell’s girl on West Seventeenth. There he speaks with the building superintendent, whose primary concern seems to be that his warning about making holes in his walls was ignored, his building now possessing one very large hole where a third-floor window used to be, thank you very much.

There is only a handful of tenants in the building when Doyle is there. Others are out at work; some have evacuated and are refusing to return until they are 100 per cent certain they are not likely to have their asses blown off. From those remaining, Doyle extracts nothing in the way of a lead.

His next visit is a return one to the Pit Stop. He finds a few of Cavell’s buddies there; others require further legwork. To each of them he puts the same questions: Do you know where Tremaine went last night? Do you know who he met with?

These boys are incensed. They want revenge. They will do whatever they can to track down the motherfucker who smoked TC. But as far as how to carry out that mission goes, it’s clear to Doyle that they don’t have a clue where to start.