Roses Are Red

Chapter Eighty-Two

The Mastermind is a cop. If it was true, it made sense out of a whole lot of things. It partly explained how he'd known so much about bank security, and about us.

At five-fifteen in the morning, I met Betsey Cavalierre and four other FBI agents at Boiling Field. A helicopter was waiting for us. We took off into a thick, gray soup that made the ground disappear seconds after we were airborne.

We were pumped up and extremely curious. Betsey sat in the first row with one of her senior agents, Michael Doud. She was wearing a light gray suit with a white blouse, and she looked serious and official again. Agent Doud handed out folders on the suspected New York City detectives.

I read the background material as we flew steadily toward New York. The detectives in question were from Brooklyn. They worked out of the Sixty-first Precinct, which was near Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay. The crib notes said the precinct was a mix of cultures and assorted criminals: Mafia, Russian mob, Asians, Hispanics, Blacks. The five suspected detectives had worked together for a dozen years and were reportedly close friends.

They were supposed to be 'good cops," the file said. There had been warning signals, though. They'd used their weapons more than average, even for narcotics detectives. Three of the five had been disciplined repeatedly. They jokingly called one another 'goomba'. "The leader of the pack was Detective Brian Macdougall.

There were also about a half-dozen pages on the fifteen-year-old witness: Detective Brian Macdougall's daughter. She was an honor student at Ursuline High School. She was apparently a loner there and never had many friends. She seemed to be responsible and solid and

9m believable, according to the NYPD detectives who had interviewed her. Her reason for giving up her father was credible too he drank and struck her mother often when he was home. "And he's guilty of the Metro Hartford kidnapping. He and his detective pals did it," said the girl.

Actually, I felt very good about this. It was the way police work usually went. You put out a lot of nets, you checked them, and every so often something was actually in one of the nets. More often than not, it came from a relative or friend of the perp. Like an angry daughter who wanted retribution against her father.

At seven-thirty, we entered the conference room at One Police Plaza and met up with several members of the NYPD, including the chief of detectives. I was the representative from the Washington police, and I knew Kyle Craig was instrumental in getting me into the meeting. He wanted me to hear the girl's story first-hand.

Kyle wanted to know if I believed her.