Brad Parks - The Good Cop

The right corner of his mouth lifted-for Buster, that counted as a smile-and he said, “Good. You’re learning.”

He spent another five seconds scanning the copy, then proclaimed, “This’ll do.”

“Okay, so let’s have it.”

Buster removed the glasses, rubbed his face, then said, “At the time of his death, there was no IA investigation into Darius Kipps. Nothing. Zip. Zilch.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. My source is gold. IA is bound by an attorney general’s directive to investigate all complaints, no matter where they come from. If there was a complaint about him, there’d be a file. And my source said there’s no file. He did some checking with the other IA guys just to make sure. Kipps is clean, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Huh.”

“Now,” he said, grinning as much as Buster ever allowed, “ask me what else my guy told me.”

“What else did your guy tell you?”

“It’s going to cost you another Good Nei-”

I stopped him immediately: “Forget it, Buster. There’s quid pro quo and then there’s extortion. Don’t cross the line.”

“Okay, okay. Hang on,” he said, opening up a notebook and flipping to a page filled with random pen marks that may have been an attempt to represent actual letters. “Okay, according to my source, Kipps called an IA guy. My source wouldn’t say which IA guy, just that it was someone Kipps knew and trusted. The call came in late Saturday night so the guy wasn’t around. Kipps left a message.”

“What did the message say?”

“My guy said it was pretty vague. It didn’t make any sense to him. Something about…” Buster was looking at his notes like he was struggling with them. “It was something about … seeing blotches on something … or … I don’t know. Point is, Kipps wanted the guy to call him back.”

“And did he?”

“Nope. By the time the IA guy got to the message, it was Monday morning. Kipps was already dead.”

* * *

If nothing else, Buster’s source helped illuminate the rumors floating around the NPD about Kipps and Internal Affairs. I’m sure as the news about Kipps was getting out, the IA officer-whoever he was-had been telling people something along the lines of, “Wow, Kipps just left a message for me over the weekend.”

Once that got out into the wind, it could have blown in any direction-cops love gossiping as much as reporters, and gossip can always get twisted, advertently or otherwise. That’s why my guy Pritch would have heard that Kipps had contact with IA, which could turn easily into “Kipps was dirty.”

The more intriguing question was what he was calling to say. If it had to do with “blotches”-whatever that was-maybe Kipps had a health problem. Weren’t blotches on the skin a symptom of HIV/AIDS? That would certainly be something Kipps wouldn’t want to get out. And maybe he would rather kill himself than let the world know he had contracted AIDS.

That would still leave the matter of those marks on his arms and wrists, but perhaps there was something I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know that explained those.

Or maybe Kipps was calling IA about misconduct by a fellow officer: Mike Fusco. There’s probably nothing in the Newark Police Department handbook that expressly prohibits sleeping with another officer’s wife. But it was possible Kipps had some kind of other dirt on Fusco he was suddenly willing to spill. If that was the case, and Fusco found out about it, it gave him yet another reason to put Kipps on the dead side.

Or maybe, I realized as I returned to my desk, I could just face facts that I was still speculating. A larger truth was out there, waiting for me. I just had to keep plugging away until I found it.

In the time I had been gone, Tina had sent me another e-mail. “My place. Eight,” it said. “Bring a bottle of wine and your appetite.”

That sounded promising-for a skinny girl, Tina knew how to cook-and it certainly beat the repast I had waiting for me in Bloomfield, which would have involved a hasty phone call to Panda Palace. I wrote back, “Sounds great. See you then.”

I was clicking the Send button as my phone rang.

“Carter Ross.”

“Carter, it’s Powell,” he said. I could hear street noises in the background.

“Hey, what’s going on?”

“I saw you posted a story about those photos I took. Pretty awesome. But why didn’t you run the pictures? Did they not come out well or something?”

“No, they came out fine. We just … they might be a little graphic for some of our readers.”

“Would you have run them if that dude was still alive?”

“I don’t know. Does it matter?”

“Well, yeah it matters. See, this goes to one of the central points of the Death Studies movement, and that is challenging the irrational fear of death in our culture. Until we change some of the basic assumptions about what it means to make the change from lucidity to morbidity, we will never-”

“Right, Powell,” I said, because I didn’t need to hear the lecture he was going to give when he became Professor Death. “Kira said you were hot to talk to me about something?”

“Yeah, I, uh … I was at the M.E.’s office today-because my internship is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, you know? And I overheard him talking to someone.”

“Him? Who’s him?”

“The medical examiner. And he was pissed . I couldn’t tell about what at first. But I had never heard him that mad before. He was fired up . You could hear him going off. I thought he was going to have a conniption.”

I realized I needed to indulge Paul/Powell’s penchant for verbal meandering. So I said, “Okay. What was he mad about?”

“You couldn’t even really tell, at first. And I couldn’t, you know, just be seen hanging outside his office, eavesdropping. Technically, I’m supposed to be in the examining room, observing the autopsies, taking notes, you know? I have to be able to justify this internship to my adviser at the end of the term, and I can’t-”

I lost my patience: “Right, got it. Let’s get back to the mad medical examiner.”

“Oh, right. Well, it was tough to tell what he was pissed about, but I heard him say ‘Kipps.’ That’s the name of your dude, right?”

“Right.”

“Yeah, well, I guess somehow they had found out about the photos. I don’t know how they knew you had them-”

“I called them and told them.”

“You did?”

“It’s sort of what reporters do, Powell.”

“Oh,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why I would tip my hand like that. “Well, anyway, someone-like his boss or something-must have been asking him about the photos. And he kept saying stuff like, ‘I have no idea’ and ‘Well, they didn’t come from me,’ and ‘If I find out, I’ll fire the bastard,’ and all that.”

I smiled. I love it when government agencies go on witch hunts to figure out where a leak is coming from. It expends a tremendous amount of energy and almost never catches the real witch. Half the time the person who ordered the investigation into the leak is actually the person behind it-but knows he has covered his tracks well enough to never be caught. The other half of the time the source is someone they’d never suspect, like the intern who got the key from the janitor. They’d be better off trying to find Santa Claus’s workshop.

“So I had to walk away at that point because, you know, I’m supposed to be-”

“In the examining room, right.” I cut him off.

“Yeah, but anyway, everyone in the office was totally buzzing about it. It wasn’t hard to hear him. I was talking to one of the secretaries about it, and you know what she said she heard him say?”