Page 33 of The Writer
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Excerpt from The Taking of Maggie Marshall by Denise Morrow
WHEN DOES A good cop go bad? I’ve asked myself that particular question often while writing this book. I like to believe none of us enter this world bad, that we’re clean slates, empty chalkboards waiting to be filled with ideas, loves, wonders, and hopes until there is no more room to write. We erase our mistakes and replace them with lessons learned. Our sorrows become stepping stones. We grow. We hurt. We heal, the new skin thicker than the old.
The cards dealt to Declan Shaw were pulled from the bottom of a stacked deck. No one would deny that. Declan’s father was a bit of a cliché. Irish Catholic, more muscle than brain. Between bottles, he had jobs in construction, ironwork mostly. In 1989, if you happened to look skyward at the skeleton of a building going up in NYC, there was a good chance one of the men you’d spot walking those steel girders fifty stories up was Declan Shaw’s father. I’m not going to mention his name here because, frankly, it’s not important, not when it comes to Maggie’s story. What you need to know is that some days he tried to provide for his family, other days he did not, and it’s those other days that tend to shape the minds of children. Those are the days they remember. No arrest reports exist for Declan’s father. During his forty-one years on this planet, he was never picked up for so much as jaywalking. On paper, I suppose, that makes him a good man. You track down any of his coworkers (I did) and they’ll tell you he was a good man. You talk to any of his old friends (I did), they’ll insist he was. But if you dig through some old file cabinets in the basement at Presbyterian General (I did that too) and happen to come across a very thick folder on a boy named Declan Shaw, you might think otherwise. Declan had his first broken bone at age three—his right index finger. He broke his left arm three different times over the next four years. During that time, he was also treated for a ruptured eardrum (right), a fractured cheekbone (also right), and numerous cuts, scrapes, and bruises. If you’d asked his mother, she would’ve told you he was a clumsy child. He stopped being a clumsy child in 1994, the year his father died. He was seven.
Declan’s mother cleaned apartments for a living. When I spoke to her friends, that’s what I was told. When I checked police records, I found four arrests for solicitation, two for possession, and one for child endangerment. Declan was twelve for that last one—his mother had gone to Atlantic City for two days and left her son back in the city with half a box of cereal, spoiled milk, and a television that received only two channels as a sitter. That’s when Declan began his life in the system. He bounced from foster home to foster home until the age of fifteen, when he landed with a nice family in Brooklyn who simply wanted a child and couldn’t have one of their own. They adopted Declan two years later. She was a waitress, he was a cop. They both died in a car accident three days after Declan’s eighteenth birthday.
Like I said—many cards dealt in the life of Declan Shaw, all from the bottom of a stacked deck. I imagine he credits his stepfather for driving him toward a career in law enforcement, and that may very well be true. But under the uniform, beneath his skin, is a broken boy. You’ll find he did his best to erase the worst of his story, replace it with something better, but those early words never quite went away. Although faded, they were still there, still legible, and still influenced all that was written later.
When does a good cop go bad?
The truth is it can happen anytime. Some cops, though, do start out that way. They’re rotten at the core, and eventually that rot finds its way up to the skin.
When I first heard the name Declan Shaw, I wanted him to be good. For Maggie’s sake, for the sake of justice, for the sake of the man Shaw put away for her death.
But that damn book.
I knew things would go sideways the moment I learned about that damn book.