The Devil_s Garden

SIXTEEN

Desiree Powell was a striking woman – soft-spoken, fastidious in her dress and speech, a legendary ballroom dancer. She was of Jamaican descent, born and raised in a small village in the Blue Mountains north of Kingston.

Powell had now been a police officer for twenty-four years, the first seven in uniform on the streets of the 103, patrolling Hollis and South Jamaica in those hard years when crack came to south-eastern Queens.

When you’re a female police officer in your twenties you get it from all corners – suspects, witnesses, fellow officers, ADAs, judges, CSU techs, chiefs, captains, commanders and, providing it was not a homicide, quite often from the victims themselves. When you’re just shy of six feet tall, you get even more. More than once she’d had to mix it up, and in all the years, she had not lost that edge.

These days, on the good days, when the light hit her right and she put in her forty-five minutes on the treadmill, she could pass for a decade younger than her forty-six years. Other days she looked and felt every second, plus. She knew she could still turn heads, but sometimes the effort wasn’t worth the whistle.

Standing on the corner of Newtown and 31st Street, directing a perimeter, Powell knew that it may have been her gold badge that gave her access, but it was her manner that gave her authority.

What she had seen in that blood-splattered office was in every way wrong. The worse the scene, the more she wanted it.

Two men from the DA’s office approached. Michael Roman and Tommy Christiano. Powell had worked with both of them. The Glimmer Twins. They were stars in the office, and, although the police and DA’s office were in theory on the same side, sometimes ego trumped justice.

And, Detective Desiree Powell thought, there was definitely ego to spare on this corner, on this day.