Brad Parks - The Good Cop

Here goes: “Because I saw it with my own eyes. I was with Paul late last night when he took these pictures.”

Brodie raised his scraggly eyebrows but kept his mouth closed. It was Tina who blurted out, “You were what?!?”

“I was with him,” I repeated.

“Carter, you can’t go breaking into the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office!” Tina moaned. “Jesus, why are you wasting our time with this? You know we can’t use these. You better hope…”

“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “We didn’t break in. Paul is an employee. He told me he had a key and offered to take me in for a little show and tell. Look, I know it’s a little shady, but we’re not teaching Sunday School here. We’re putting out a newspaper.”

I decided to skip the backstory of how he had acquired the key. Tina and Brodie didn’t need to be bogged down in such petty details. The fact is, while we were strictly concerned that our staff members didn’t break the law in their reporting of a story, we were somewhat less concerned about that where our sources were involved.

“Okay, okay, I know,” Tina said defensively. “I’m just trying to make sure our ass is covered here.”

“There’s no need to mention in print that I was there, obviously,” I said. “We can just say the photos came from a county employee who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisal and that the photos have been independently verified as being authentic. All of which is true.”

Brodie was watching us go back and forth without comment. He often let his underlings slug it out before he decided what to make of something. We were expected to make a good show of it. But, in this case, we were done.

“A tour of the morgue late at night, huh?” Brodie said, chuckling.

The old man leaned back, tented his fingers, and closed his eyes, his signal that he was ready to render a decision. In our shop, this was a celebrated pose known as the Brodie Think. Often imitated by staff members, though never perfectly duplicated, it made him look something like a praying mantis-albeit a praying mantis in need of a face-lift and eyebrow tweezing. He could go into this state for a minute or more, to the point when you could wonder if he had drifted off. It was unsettling, even when you knew to expect it.

This one seemed particularly lengthy, and at one point his breathing got so slow and steady I thought maybe he really had fallen asleep. But there was nothing to do except wait it out and hope for the best.

The fact was, I needed a win here. There were few things more agonizing for a reporter than knowing something-especially something as incendiary as this-and not being able to put it in the newspaper. And in this case it wasn’t just my big scoop and my interests as an ambitious reporter being served. It was a lot bigger than that.

It was Mimi Kipps’s husband being thought of not as a suicidal coward but as a murder victim. It was a killer-or killers-being brought to justice. It was his children getting to know the truth about their father someday. It was the Newark Police Department’s credibility, to say nothing of the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. Maybe it would all come out eventually, if the Attorney General’s Office did decide to conduct an independent investigation, but there was a chance it would bow to political pressure and take a pass. There was a lot on the line here.

Finally, the old man opened his eyes, untented his fingers, and said, “Okay. Let’s go for it.”

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, the road that begins at Route 1 in Miami and terminates 1,952 miles later at the Houlton/Woodstock Border Crossing in northern Maine is called Interstate 95.

In law enforcement circles, it’s got another nickname: the Iron Pipeline. It earns the moniker each year by being the most heavily used gun-running road in America, serving as the quickest conduit from states with lax gun control laws to states with strict ones.

As such, the associates of Red Dot Enterprises-who took turns making the drive south to pick up the latest shipment-knew the road well. Take the New Jersey Turnpike south, through the merge around Exit 8 that always backed up on weekends. Go over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, through that congested stretch of Delaware. There was usually a brief break from traffic through the northeastern part of Maryland, but that ended outside Baltimore. Then it was the Harbor Tunnel, the Capital Beltway, and the hellish run south of the Springfield mixing bowl, which could back up at anytime-not enough road for way too many cars.

Then, after traveling over the Occuquan River, through Prince William County and past Quantico, it was onto what the rest of the state referred to as “the real Virginia.” It’s no accident that you don’t reach the Virginia Welcome Center until you’ve been in the state for more than forty miles. Whoever built it there knew what they were doing.

The Virginia Welcome Center was, at minimum, how far south the associates of Red Dot Enterprises went.

Then the mission became: find the straw buyer. They always set up the rendezvous ahead of time, having found the buyer on Craigslist and given him the usual instructions. But nothing ever felt routine about it. They rotated which area they used, so they were never going to the same place twice. And it was always a bit of a trick finding the buyer’s car in a busy parking lot, even when they knew the make and model.

Next came the wait for the buyer to do his end, which was usually a nice excuse to grab a meal and relax, albeit not for long. Then it was time to swipe the guns and begin the trip back north.

The drive back was what really took forever, especially the way they did it. They kept it exactly five miles above the speed limit, so even when traffic was moving, they still weren’t making great time. They didn’t dare use E-ZPass. Each tollbooth cost ten minutes or more-and if there is anything more frustrating than waiting around just to pay some highway authority money, it hasn’t been invented yet. They took frequent breaks and drank a lot of caffeine lest they nod off or get into an accident while distracted.

The whole goal was not to be noticed in any way, which-on one of the busiest roads in America-wasn’t terribly hard. You just had to be smart about it: drive a bland car, something solid and domestic, without tinted windows or a tricked-out exhaust; wear the kind of clothes that can be bought at an outlet mall, something like Old Navy or Van Heusen; act like every other road-weary traveler at the rest stops; and make sure the trunk stays shut.

There are people who say I-95 is one of the most boring roads in America, and they’re right. But for Red Dot Enterprises, boring was good.

A boring trip was a successful one.

I’ve never been pregnant-just not my thing-but I’ve entered the phase of life where enough of my friends have borne fruit to know how they agonize over how they’ll handle the Big News. Oh, eventually they’ll do the mass Facebook blast. But there are some people who need to know first, and there’s a certain order in which they must be informed: her parents, his parents, the best girlfriend, and so on. The hope is that no one high on the list slips up and tells someone who’s lower on the list, like Aunt Kathy, who then blabs it to everyone else and ruins the precious surprise.

Being a reporter with a big scoop can feel like being pregnant. Eventually, you’re going to tell everyone; in truth, you’re dying to tell everyone. Still, you need to be careful about how you dole out your information. You have to play fair with the various parties involved and give them time to properly digest your surprise. But you also have to be discreet lest some other media outlet gets wind of it and blows your big scoop. And until you do the equivalent of the big Facebook blast-in our case, putting it online and in the newspaper-you’re constantly worried about that damn Aunt Kathy.