The Borzoi Killings

22.

The videotape was grainy. Bo Halsey had spent hundreds of hours in his career staring at blurred photographs and then, with the advent of surveillance cameras everywhere, the faint images of people on tape. After five repetitions of the three-minute tape, he recognized the men depicted on it. They were Cerullo and Cohen. They were hastily moving cash from the Richardsons’ stately bedroom to the bathroom. While there was no surveillance tape of the bathroom, Cerullo and Cohen weren’t carrying it out of the house then. Bo Halsey knew they were hiding it.

“When did you see this tape?” Halsey asked Ang Tien, the youthful Asian technician who, two days earlier, had asked for an appointment with him.

“Last week.”

“Why were you looking at tape from the bedroom? He was killed in his office on the first floor.”

“Someone from the security company must have been like curious. She would have known the locations in the house where the security systems were. It’s a subtle system, kind of beyond the state of the art technologically, you know. Like very advanced. It doesn’t rely on cameras. It relies on sensors that aren’t like visible to anyone looking for them. So she probably thought it would be like interesting to review footage from a house where, you know, a murder happened.”

“And she knew to look in the bedroom?”

“Apparently.”

“Why would anyone in his right mind have a surveillance camera in his bedroom?”

Ang Tien was young, geeky. Halsey knew that Ang spent hundreds, possibly thousands of hours every month gazing into computers. He had no friends or girlfriends; his computer life was the only life he wanted to lead. Bo Halsey was once impatient with the young generations of police officers who worked for him and who used like and you know in every sentence. But, despite that annoying tic, many of them were smart and hard-working. Ang Tien, the grandson of a Vietnamese soldier who had fled Saigon in a helicopter in 1975 as the North Vietnamese army rolled to victory, was very smart: he had helped Bo in other cases, and his information and results were always reliable.

“Have you shown this to anybody else?”

“No. You’re in charge of the investigation. I thought, you know, I should go directly to you.”

“Do you recognize the men in the tape?”

“No.”

“Do you see what they’re doing?”

Ang Tien was struck by the question because it was so unnecessary. He wondered for a moment whether Bo Halsey was taunting him. It was obvious what the men were carrying.

At last Ang said, “They’re like carrying cash.”

“Is there any other footage of them later that night?”

“No, just as there’s no footage of them before this scene. The sensors in Richardson’s office were turned off like about five minutes before he was killed. But not in the bedroom, like whoever turned it off in the office didn’t, you know, do it in the bedroom. The surveillance system is in zones, and the service can be turned off with a password in a keypad, but there were like different keypads in that house.”

Halsey had Ang replay the scene. At the start of the sequence, Cohen and Cerullo were repeatedly glancing toward the ceilings, searching for telltale camera eyes. Bo Halsey was disturbed by the scene, but not surprised. Years earlier, when he was a narcotics detective in Manhattan, Cerullo and Cohen had risen quickly through the ranks and become detectives. Neither of them worked for or directly with Halsey, but the word on the job was that they were rogues, executing search warrants for drugs and cash in targeted apartments and entering on the inventories only half the cash and drugs. They kept the rest. Halsey was already working for the Suffolk County Police when first Cerullo and then, a year later, Cohen joined the department. They came from politically connected families in Suffolk County. They now reported directly to Bo Halsey, and the three of them were the ranking homicide detectives in the county. They annoyed him, he thought they were jerks, and he no longer tried to conceal his contempt for them.

Ang Tien asked, “Who are they?”

“How the fuck do I know?” Halsey asked. “Sit on this until I tell you what to do.”

Ang Tien was very obedient. “Sure, Detective. It’s easy to save. I’ll give it to you when you need it.”