Page 28 of Under Cover
Harding grunted. “I got word that his old partner got a promotion to a federal job. He’s some sort of internal affairs officer for joint special projects. I have no idea how that happened, and I’m not sure who he reports to.”
Garcia sucked air in through his teeth. “Man, that’s the worst. I hate it when good things happen to super shitty people.”
Harding snorted softly. “That’s one way to put it.” He frowned. “But it did give me the excuse to recruit Crosby. That work he did on the Brandeis case was top-notch.”
Garcia looked over to where Crosby was sitting on a table in the conference room, swinging his legs as though bored. “I couldn’t find much on it,” he admitted, because he’d done his best to research the incident. Crosby wouldn’t talk about it. “The only files I saw talked about kids getting abducted from bad neighborhoods and the local gangs blaming it on each other.”
Harding shook his head. “Fuckers. The cops were pissed, you see. He was still a rookie. From what I can gather, there’d been a local gang throwdown, a drive-by. The kid at the trigger was a mess. Too fucked up to hit anything and so, so angry. Our boy there—he was the one who did the takedown, and the kid yelled something about how he was trying to kill the fuckers who killed his sister. Now anybody else would have assumed it was another drive-by—makes sense, right? At least to a white cop in a nonwhite neighborhood. But Crosby, he’d paid attention. The kid was well cared for, and he had no gang activity whatsoever in his jacket. In fact he and his sister had been school superstars—they’d been going places—before his sister had been found dead in a playground the month before. So Crosby tells the kid that if he calms down enough for Crosby to get him representation, he’ll look into the girl’s murder.”
“Sounds like him,” Garcia said, and from across the room he noted the quiet unhappiness that seemed to emanate from Judson Crosby as he tried to wish his parents a Merry Christmas. Ouch.
“Yeah, to us it does. But apparently he had to go off book in Chicago. Nobody would talk to him. So he puts on his jeans and his T-shirt and goes door to door, talking to the kid’s neighbors about the girl and about the circumstances of her death. No gun. No uniform. No backup. Just that sweet little puss asking earnest questions, right?”
Garcia’s gut clenched. “He could have been killed.”
Harding shook his head. “Yeah, but I personally think he was safer in his civvies. Look at him—he screams sincerity, right? Anyway, he finds out a lot of stuff. First, the girl was on her way home for herbirthday, and she was apparently abducted after school. So the cops blew that off. They were like, ‘Kid probably just went somewhere besides home and ended up in the wrong place, wrong time.’ Crosby was like, no way. The other thing he found out was that she wasn’t the only one this had happened to. She was one of adozenBlack kids—boys and girls, ages twelve to fourteen—who had disappeared after school and had been found in another neighborhood, in a public place, with some big fucking knife wounds in their stomachs.”
“Bwah!” Oh God. Everything Garcia knew about law enforcement, about investigative technique, about profiling and running down suspects and perpetrators told Garcia that one lone rookie cop should not have been the only one to see that pattern.
But apparently Crosby had been the only one to care.
“So did they listen?” Garcia asked, although he already knew the answer.
“Fuck no,” Harding muttered. “No, but by this time, he’d started to contact people outside his department, ask some questions, poke some badgers, and he got the attention of one of the top profilers in the FBI, a friend of mine, Dr. Harman Blodgett—also works as an MD ’cause he’s Superman. So Harman calls me for a consult, and together we come up with an MO and a profile, and Harman starts feeding Crosby information. And Crosby keeps doing what he was doing, but now he’s asking specific questions, and he’s figuring out that the knife wounds are personal and they’re dominant, and that this is probably someone in authority who wants these kids to know he’s the boss. And then he starts trying to figure out the common denominator, because this perp is killing kids in different gang territories and then dumping them in enemy territory. It’s somebody who knows the gangs and who is trying to show he’s more powerful than them too. And then he figures out that this is someone the kids trusted, someone they felt comfortable around, because all of the abductions were from school, and these kids were told to be careful of strangers.”
Garcia’s blood was icy in his veins. School counselor? Doctor? Cop?
He said that last one aloud.
“SRO,” Harding said, shaking his head. “Student Outreach Officer. Knew how to do all the things that would make a racist white cop think this was gang violence except use a gun. Crosby ran him down on foot, alone, after he stalked the guy at one of the three schools he worked and saw Cordell Brandeis try to abduct his next victim. Called the takedown in on Brandeis’s own radio and had him confessing to every crime, all recorded on Crosby’s cell phone.”
“Jesus,” Garcia breathed. Then it hit him. “So… when McEnany shot that kid….”
“Oh yeah. Killed a kid in cold blood to bait Crosby into calling him out. Nothing can convince me otherwise. It was calculated departmental revenge.”
“And his department didn’t give himanythingfor the Brandeis collar?”
“A write-up for working the case alone,” Crosby said, coming in from the other room apparently in time to hear them gossiping about him.
“I’ll cut them,” Garcia promised, looking his boy in the eyes so Crosby would know Calix Garcia had his back.
Crosby gave a gentle, pained smile. “I’d rather arrest them,” he said gruffly. “McEnany, the union lawyer, the lieutenant—none of them should be on the streets or breathing free air. But given that McEnany is now IA for the feds and the others are retired and shit, I’ll have to settle for working here.”
“Ouch,” Harding said, giving Garcia a wink. “Talk about a scant second place.”
“Hey, if I’d known this unit existed, I would have applied here instead of Chicago and gone through FLETC right out of school,” Crosby said—not the for the first time. Then he sighed. “And that way I could have left my folks there and they wouldn’t be so confused as to why I can’t just apologize to that nice police officer I offended so they can move back home.”
“Gah!” Garcia and Harding both reacted pretty much the same way, but Garcia was the one who kept going. “Dude, why aren’t you spiking your eggnog!”
Crosby chuckled, but it sounded strained. “Because while you guys were gossiping about my painful past, I heard chatter from the radio in the conference room. I give it five—” He held his fingers out, counting down. Four, three, two, one, and at one, Harding’s cell phone squawked.
“Well done,” Harding said with a grim nod as he picked up the phone.
He didnotsay, “Merry fucking Christmas,” but Garcia could read between the lines.
“SCTF, Harding,” he said crisply. His craggy face had automatically assumed the hard planes of his “game face,” but as the dispatcher spoke, he grew a little softer and frowned. “Yes, you were right to call. Put her through.” He glanced from Garcia to Crosby and mouthed, “Chartreuse Victor?”
Garcia met Crosby’s eyes, both of them cocking their heads in concern. The club owner from the first case they’d worked—the one who’d been bleeding from a gunshot wound as Crosby ran to save the runner hiding under the bed—had recovered from surgery with flying colors. Garcia had gone to visit her, and so had Crosby. They had been in the hospital together after all. Chartreuse, who identified herself as “Classic queen, my darlings—everything your mother warned you about,” had been funny, even when in pain, and very, very grateful. Garcia had never made it to the club to dance—for a lot of reasons he didn’t want to put voice to—but he and Crosby had sent her a Christmas card from the both of them, knowing she’d gone back to work.