T. Parker: Cold Pursuit

"I've got IAD at eight."

Hector was quiet for a beat. "Good luck, man. I forgot about that."

"Wish I could."

Internal Affairs Department was no San Diego cop's idea of a good time. Especially one who liked his job and thought he could make a good captain someday. Especially one who'd worked with Jimmy Thigpen in Metro/Vice, back before Jimmy got caught in a very expensive hotel room with a prostitute, a Sheriff's Department deputy posing as a prostitute, a big bag of Oaxacan weed and $324,000 in cash.

"Maybe you could run Miss Sally through NCIC while I'm getting grilled about Jimmy."

"Glad to."

McMichael made the IAD hearing on three hours' sleep and half a pot of coffee. Being tired strained his patience for men and women he didn't care for anyway. Cops who thought they were better than cops is how McMichael thought of them. And IAD was the incubator of the ambitious, the self-righteous and the power driven, because that was where you could protect the career of a friend or destroy the career of an enemy.

McMichael sat at one end of a long table in a headquarters conference room. No windows. There was a plastic pitcher of water and one glass at his place. At the almost comically faraway other end of the table were Assistant Chief Jerry Bland, IAD director Lieutenant Mitch Huzara, and IAD special investigator Sergeant Andrea Robb. McMichael saw his Human Resources file, positioned squarely in front of Robb. On top of that, a yellow legal pad.

He crossed his hands on the table and stared at his knuckles and thought about Sally Rainwater. He'd seen her face in a dream. What if she were telling it straight, that she'd come home and tried to resuscitate the old man? He wasn't optimistic about this, human nature being full of mostly disappointing surprises.

Bland and Huzara greeted him when he sat down. Robb positioned a microphone, glancing at him to get the angle right, but not bothering to acknowledge him. Then she fiddled with the recorder controls.

On her way up the ladder, he thought: files handy, blinders in place, ready to cream the opposition. What happened to the idea that cops liked busting dirtbags instead of each other?

"Voice check, McMichael," she said. "Say something."

"It's great to be here this morning."

"Again?"

"It's great to be here this morning."

She played it back. "Fine. It even picks up your sarcasm."

She was tall and red-haired and attractive, too, though it rankled him to admit it.

"We may as well get started," said Huzara. He was slight, bigheaded and balding, with a neat gray mustache. "Sergeant McMichael, just to let you know how it works around here, Jerry's representing the chief's office but he's not a part of the IAD. Andrea's going to lead the questions, but Jerry and I will have some, too. You're not being deposed or you'd have counsel here. That may be the next step. Or a polygraph. That's what we're here to determine. This meeting is called an Informal Hearing of Fact and that's exactly what it is. Give us facts, tell us the truth and we can all get to more important things in our lives. Got it?"

"Got it."

Andrea Robb clicked on the recorder and established date, time, participants and purpose of the hearing.

"Sergeant McMichael," she continued, "you worked in our Metro/Vice detail between nineteen ninety-eight and two thousand one, correct?"

"That's right."

"And James Thigpen was on that detail for how many of those years?"

"All of them."

"Did you work directly with him?"

"Yes, it's a small detail."

"What did you think of him?" she asked.

"Smart. High energy. Trustworthy."

"What else?"

"I worried about him because he was young and undercover. We all did."

"You and Officer Thigpen teamed up for a call-girl sting one summer, didn't you- they were working the convention center and the downtown hotels?"

"Yes. We made ten good arrests. Word got out and the rest of them beat it for a while."

"You and Thigpen made ten?" asked Robb.

"Working together. He was mostly trolling. When he got the right approach I'd come out from next door with the cuffs."

"Fun police work?" she asked.

"Humiliating for everybody is more like it."

"You didn't care for Metro/Vice?" she asked.

"Not really."

"Did Thigpen?"

McMichael poured some water and drank. He'd thought about this question almost every day for four weeks, since Jimmy Thigpen had been arrested. Chief Kerr, furious at the arrest, had issued a strict gag on all personnel, so not much was said about Jimmy Thigpen at the Fourteenth Street Headquarters. But that's all you heard in the cop bars- where'd he score the money, who else might have been in on it. Jimmy's lawyers and the district attorney's office had been negotiating for the better part of two weeks. Rumor had it that heads- cops' heads- would roll. Thigpen had been denied bail as a flight risk.

So it was all eyes on Metro/Vice Unit- past and present- and McMichael felt cornered. He couldn't say anything good about Jimmy because Jimmy looked rotten. He couldn't call too loud for Jimmy's head because it might look like he was eager to save his own.

So he went with the truth.

"Jimmy loved Metro/Vice."

"On what do you base that opinion?" asked Andrea Robb, pen poised above her notepad.

"Long hours. Good attitude. Little things, you know. Like he'd use his own car, so the girls wouldn't smell out one of our plainwraps. Or he'd put the wires on everybody if we were taping. Then he'd double- and triple-check them. He was our electronics guy when he was staying back. He took a lot of pride in hiding the wires, on getting good reception. You can tell when somebody likes what they're doing."

Robb looked at him doubtfully. "What about when he was undercover? Same good attitude?"

"Yeah. He played our young-and-innocent john and our desperate junkie or our yuppie businessman if he was out front."

"Played them well?" she asked.

"Jimmy only got blown once. That was his first year."

"Did you notice a change in him the last few months?"

Another question that McMichael had known was coming. This was where they moved their crosshairs from Thigpen to himself.

"No."

"Right up to the night the sheriff's undercover team took him down in that suite at the Hyatt?" asked Robb, with more than a trace of disbelief in her voice.

"Right up until then."

McMichael watched the silent flourish of eyebrows, glances, shaken heads.

Fuck you all, he thought, if you can't hack the truth.

"So, the new Porsche didn't make you wonder," said Huzara.

"I never saw it."

"And Thigpen's trips to Maui and Aspen and Key West – they didn't make you wonder?"

"I didn't know where he went. He never said."

"What about his moonlighting for Pete Braga?" asked Huzara.

McMichael hated being caught with his pants down. "I didn't know. Tell me."

"Yeah," said Huzara. "Jimmy trucked the new cars down to TJ for budget leather interiors, trucked them back up when they were finished. Saved Pete lots of money. Made some pretty good money himself."

McMichael thought about this, couldn't figure it into what had happened the night before.

"Though a part-time job might not account for over three hundred grand in cash," said Robb.

McMichael sat back and waited.

"Okay," said Huzara. "With all the things that Thigpen never said, didn't that make you wonder about him? Most guys, they'd talk about a new car, or a vacation or some easy money on the side."

"He was private. I never suspected a sixty-thousand-dollar car in his garage or those trips you found out about. Or working for Braga. He's a good actor. That's why you put him out there undercover at the age of twenty-one."