The Good Cop

CHAPTER 3

The anointed man of God prattled on for a while about Jesus, Lady Justice, heroism, and other topics on which he felt he could speak with some authority. There were a lot of pretty words and some fine elocution, though anyone listening carefully would have heard that he wasn’t offering any real information. To distill it to one sentence: the family of Darius Kipps didn’t know much, just that they weren’t buying the official version they were being sold.

Midway through the sermon, I saw Tina Thompson leave her roost and scurry three doors down to the corner office, where Harold Brodie presided. I wanted to alert her to what was happening, but she was heading in the wrong direction and I didn’t want to miss anything on the off chance the good reverend said something useful.

He didn’t, of course. But once he got himself wound down, he invited Mrs. Kipps to the podium. Next to him, she looked small, and she was partially obscured by the microphones, which had been set at the right height for a six-foot-six minister, not his five-foot-five parishioner. She was gripping a folded piece of paper, from which she read:

“Darius Kipps was a proud father, a caring husband, and a dedicated police officer. Under no circumstance would he take his own life. We are calling for this investigation in the hopes that the truth will come out.”

She stepped away from the podium, with nothing more to say. And, of course, the TV people didn’t need anything else: properly edited, she had just given them the perfect ten-second sound bite. She even punched the words “the truth” to give it the necessary bit of drama.

Shortly after she finished, the all-news station cut back to the studio, so I never got to see if there was anything more to the performance. Then again, I doubted that any of the questions and answers that followed-if there even were any-would have elucidated much. The Kipps family was making a big, public stink. That was the only takeaway that mattered.

I was still holding the remote control in my hand, figuring out what to do about any of this, when Tina emerged from Brodie’s office and walked straight for me.

“Brodie just saw that press conference and he’s decided we need to go after this, guns blazing,” she said. “I guess he feels like he owes it to this minister guy after the rough ride we gave him a little while back. You got enough stuff to put together something by maybe eight, eight thirty? Lead with the family calling for the investigation, get the AG’s office comment, then pad it out with all that touchy-feely stuff about him and the G.I. Joe dolls.”

I couldn’t help myself. I made a display of walking around her, bending down and pointed toward her behind.

“Oh, hey, look at that!” I exclaimed.

“What?” she said, trying to look back at what I was doing.

“I think there are some monkeys flying out of your ass.”

She stuck her hands on her hips and looked in another direction.

“I just don’t know if I want to waste my time on a nonstory like this,” I said.

As she sighed, I continued: “I have copy due on something else by the end of the week, and the editor, let me tell you, she won’t accept any excuses for it not being done because she’s never wrong.”

I stopped for a moment just to make sure, you know, we were still having fun with this. And I think we were.

Or maybe it was just that I was having enough fun for two because she finally said, “Are you finished?”

“Let me think about it,” I said, paused for five seconds, then added, “Yes, I think I am.”

“Great. Then please get to work. Brodie has a massive, throbbing woodie for this”-it was Eagle-Examiner tradition that Brodie’s interest in stories was often described in penis metaphors-“and he’s even talking about splashing it out front. He’s going to stick around to make sure it’s something he likes. So don’t dawdle.”

“Ja, mein Fuhrer,” I said.

I returned to my desk, glancing up at the clock on the way: 5:48. After hours.

Fortunately, the AG’s spokesman was a former Eagle-Examiner reporter. This was one of the few benefits of all the buyouts, layoffs, and other staff reductions that had ravaged our numbers through the years: many of the high-level public relations people in the state were former colleagues, having switched from covering the news to slanting it. Ben Hilfiker had left us a few years ago after a long and distinguished stint doing stories about the attorney general’s office and the state police, so I had his cell phone number programmed in mine.

“Uh-oh,” he said, “the state’s largest newspaper is calling. It must be very, very important.”

“Yeah, yeah. I know a lazy government bureaucrat like yourself probably left the office two hours ago, but you think you can give me a comment on something?”

“I wish I left two hours ago. I’m still here. I tell you, I can’t speak for the rest of Trenton, but there are still a lot of lights on in this place right now.”

I told him to save the spin for someone else, then enlightened him about the LeRioux-Kipps press conference-which, as I suspected, he hadn’t seen. He grumbled a few unmentionable words about how this better not screw up his date with a Devils game and a beer, then said, “Okay, let me check with my boss. I’m guessing you’ll need this for first edition?”

“Yep, Brodie wants copy by eight. That going to be a problem?”

With any other flak, I would have said seven thirty. That was the downside of dealing with a Ben Hilfiker: he knew our deadlines.

“No, that should be okay. He’s out of pocket right now, but I think he’s having dinner with Mrs. Attorney General later on. As long as I get him before his second martini, I should have something for you.”

I thanked him and got to work. I would be surprised if the AG wouldn’t at least pay lipservice to looking into it. The attorney general of the State of New Jersey is not an elected official. He serves at the pleasure of the governor. That might seem to make the position less political, but, if anything, it was more. An elected AG at least knew he had four years to do his job before he faced the voters. An appointed one could get bounced at any time.

And in this case, I knew that Pastor Al-whose eight thousand worshippers included a lot of old ladies who voted as religiously as they attended church-had stumped for the governor the last election. The AG would know that, too. Mimi Kipps had chosen her friends wisely.

Then again, politics cut all ways. The mayor of Newark was a Democrat, like the governor. And if Newark’s police director put in a phone call to the mayor, who put in a phone call to the governor? Well, it could complicate matters.

I left a blank spot in the story for the AG’s comment, then put in a perfunctory call to the Newark Police Department. Unsurprisingly, the spokesman on duty told me the department was standing by its statement that “Evidence gathered at the scene supports a preliminary determination that Detective Sergeant Darius Kipps died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.”

The next two hours fled by as they often do when you suddenly find yourself writing a thousand words on deadline. I was nearing the end when Hilfiker called back.

“Hey, got anything for me?” I asked.

“Yeah, you ready?”

“Go.”

He read: “The attorney general’s office is aware of the request for an independent investigation into the circumstances surrounding the death of Detective Darius Kipps. We hope to make a determination within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours as to whether such an investigation would be appropriate.”

I waited for the rest of it, but there was nothing more coming. “So in other words he’s waiting to see which way the wind is blowing?”

“More like how hard it’s blowing. But you get the idea.”

“I was hoping for something a little more definitive. You sure that’s the best you can do?”

“I got him midway through his second martini,” Hilfiker said. “You’re lucky I got anything at all.”

* * *

It took another half hour to finish the story, and Tina was doing what I call “the semihover” all the while. Basically, she didn’t want to make it seem like she was cruising over my shoulder. But she also seemed to be walking in my part of the newsroom more than she normally might.

I hit the Send button at 8:28, gave Tina a thumbs-up, then stretched my legs, doing a brief stroll just to get my circulation back. I was starving but stayed away from the break room. The thought of foraging dinner from the vending machines was too depressing. There had been too many vended meals in my past. Maybe I could convince Kira to grab a bite before we started sucking down absinthe. No reason she wouldn’t-the girl weighed ninety-eight pounds but ate like she had a tapeworm.

When I returned to my desk, I placed a call to Mimi Kipps, just to get the backstory on how Mr. Privacy, Pastor Al, talked her into a press conference. Her phone went straight to voice mail and I didn’t leave a message. My morning had given me enough quotes from Mimi and besides, if Brodie was as amorous toward this story as Tina suggested, there would be more time to talk to Mrs. Kipps in the coming days. Sometimes you have to avoid wearing out a source.

Mostly because I had time to kill, I started halfheartedly working some digital databases for more background on Darius Kipps-as if finding out he was a registered Democrat was going to make a large difference in my understanding of the man. I still had my head buried in my laptop screen twenty minutes later when Tina approached.

“Hey, nice job,” she said. “Brodie glanced at it on his way out and said it was fine. But you mind sticking around in case the desk has any issues?”

“Yeah, actually I do mind. Can’t they just call me?”

“What, you have a hot date or something?”

I shrugged. This is where my relationship with Tina was altogether too complicated-moral of story: never get involved with a woman who might end up being your boss-and I thought about keeping my mouth shut. Then again, having started work at the ungodly hour of 8:38, I felt the Eagle-Examiner had gotten enough of my time for one day.

“Yeah, maybe I do,” I said.

“Oh, what, with that mousy little thing in the library? What’s her name, anyway? Minnie? Maisy?”

Tina knew Kira’s name, of course. She was obviously trying to get a rise out of me, and I wasn’t going to take the bait. Don’t engage, don’t engage, don’t engage …

“You get her to go out with you by offering a wedge of cheese or something?” Tina asked. “You know, peanut butter works better. Or, wait, you’re using those little glue traps, aren’t you? Very humane of you.”

I kept my jaw clenched. She kept prodding: “Just to warn you, some Irish women don’t age well. I’m sure she looks fine now, but by the time she’s forty, she’ll have more wrinkles than a linen suit.”

Don’t engage, don’t engage, don’t engage …

“What do you see in her, anyway?” Tina asked.

Unable to hold myself in check any longer, I fired back, “I see someone who doesn’t try to screw with my head all the time and is actually interested in a normal, steady relationship. I see someone who doesn’t have a million ridiculous issues about commitment. I see someone who isn’t afraid to fall in love just because she may have failed at it in the past.”

Tina had been smiling-albeit maliciously-when she was making her mouse jokes. But now the smile had been replaced by this hard mask.

“Great,” she snarled. “Normal. Committed. Have fun with that, big guy. Does she make you turn the lights out during sex? Keep her eyes closed the whole time?”

I was going for blood now: “Actually, we mostly do it in public places. She likes it when people watch. She says it makes the orgasms better. Wanna bring your pom-poms sometime? Cheer us on?”

“If you’re involved? I think I’d rather watch bowling on TV. More action.”

I inhaled to respond-something about how the pins probably stood a better chance of getting knocked up than her-then stopped myself. I just couldn’t believe the venom that was coming out of my mouth. Why was I trying to hurt her? For whatever might have happened between Tina and I-and it had been too stunted and strained to ever really find out what it was-we were still friends, or something, at one point. We had cared about each other, or at least I thought we did.

Now here we were, going after each other like we were on opposite sides of the table in a divorce lawyer’s office, trying to singe each other’s skin with our words.

She was standing there, braced, like she was waiting for the next salvo. Instead, I said, “Tina, what the hell? Can’t we at least be civil to each other?”

“Relax. I’m just busting your chops. Don’t take it so seriously. There’s no need to get all girly on me.”

“Ah, so you’re not at all upset that I started dating Kira? Because, you know, the way you’ve been acting around me lately I would beg to differ.”

“What are you talking about?” she said, the mask still in place. “Because I asked you to stay late tonight rather than … whatever you were going to do?”

“Tina, we barely talk anymore…”

“You think I really care that much what you do after work? Don’t flatter yourself. Look, you’re a damn good reporter-my best, if you have to know. That’s the only thing that matters to me. Whatever chick you’re bouncing on your balls is none of my business.”

“You’re … you’re really going to play that game?”

“It’s no game, stud,” she said. “Anyhow, since you’re not sticking around, I have to. Someone has to make sure the desk doesn’t massacre this thing. Have a nice night. Just keep your cell on, okay?”

She walked away without bothering to hear my answer.

* * *

I was in such a foul mood about Tina, I forgot all about dinner-which would prove to be something of a mistake-and instead talked Kira into leaving five minutes early. It was either that or lure her into making out in Tina’s office. And I figured that would just make things worse.

We got in my Malibu and started driving toward an address just off University Avenue. I half expected she might have changed into after-work garb-Kira seemed to celebrate Halloween roughly a hundred times a year-but she was still in the dark pink sweater set she had worn to work.

“So tell me about this party we’re going to,” I said as I maneuvered out of the parking garage.

“Well, it’s hosted by this guy named Powell.”

“Powell? Is that his first name or his last name?”

“Actually, his name is Paul,” Kira said. “But he prefers people pronounce it Powell. Like he’s foreign. He’s really from Mahwah. I guess he thinks it gives him mystique.”

“Ah, mystique.”

“Yeah, he’s a bit of a character.”

“You don’t say.”

“Wait until you meet him,” she said, lightly tracing the bones of my right hand with her fingers. “He is getting a Ph.D. in what he calls ‘Death Studies.’”

“I didn’t realize Rutgers-Newark offered courses in Death Studies.”

“They didn’t until Powell came along. I’m not sure how he talked them into it. He’s basically just making it up as he goes along. He takes courses from the School of Criminal Justice, the Law School, even the Nursing School.”

“The nursing school has a course on death?”

“Oh, I have no idea. I met him because he was taking a library sciences class at the New Brunswick campus. I think maybe he just likes being a student.”

“I’m sure his parents love that,” I said.

“I think they have enough money that it doesn’t really matter.”

“Mmm,” I said, and left it at that. A guy with my background couldn’t exactly make a wisecrack about the Lucky Sperm Club simply because I didn’t have a trust fund waiting for me.

We drove until I pulled up in front of a five- or six-story industrial-looking building badly in need of a paint job. A hundred years ago it might have been some kind of flourishing factory. But now it was dark and appeared to be abandoned.

“What is this place?” I asked.

“Oh, it’s the coolest thing. It’s this loft. I think the lower floors are still being renovated by someone who is going to turn it into condos or something. But they started with the top floor and that’s where Powell lives.”

An artist’s loft. In Newark. Could trendy, overpriced boutiques be far behind?

We rode a creaky elevator up to the top floor, which, sure enough, looked like it had been transplanted from Greenwich Village, with high ceilings, hardwood floors, and exposed brick. There were no lights on, just votive candles set in the broad windowsills. Most of the furnishings-what little I could detect in the dark-were milk crates that had been creatively stacked together. I detected a few life-forms sprawled on pillows and blankets on the floor. It was all very bohemian.

“Welcome,” I heard someone say. It was the voice of a man trying to sound like Vincent Price but failing.

“Hi, Powell!” Kira chirped out.

A young man with perfectly mussed dark brown hair and black eyeliner approached and kissed Kira on the cheek. He was about my height but scrawny and ghostly pale, perhaps with the aid of foundation makeup. He wore skinny black jeans and a tight black T-shirt and also had a variety of piercings on his face and ears. His neck and arms were festooned with tattoos, not that I could discern the significance of any of them. He reached out to shake my hand, and I saw he was wearing black nail polish. It was a look that used to be called goth. Now maybe it’s called emo. My parent’s generation would have just called him a freak.

But I’m open-minded enough to give anyone a try. And, hey, freaks are fun.

“I’m Powell,” he said.

“Powell, this is Carter, he works at the paper with me,” Kira said.

I couldn’t help myself: “Powell. What an unusual name. Spell it for me.”

Kira stuck an elbow in my side as he said, “P-A-U-L.”

“Isn’t that … Paul?” I asked innocently.

“Yes, but it’s pronounced Powell.”

“How exotic,” I said. And I knew-because I was a few years older than him and dressed like one of those squares who didn’t understand his music-he couldn’t tell that I was messing with him.

“Come in,” he said. “Can I offer you something to drink? We have beer and wine or, if you’re not afraid, we also have what the French would call la fee verte-the green fairy.”

If I’m not afraid? I thought. I felt like telling skinny jeans boy that I trafficked in a part of Newark that was far more frightening than anything doled out by some hundred-and-forty-five-pound guy who wore eyeliner. But that might get our relationship off to a bad start. So I just said: “Sure. I’ll try some of your poison.”

“Kira?”

“Of course!” she said.

Paul/Powell led us over to a stack of milk crates that was serving as a bar. From one of the crates, he extracted a bottle of mint green liquid that was either absinthe or mouthwash. From another crate, he removed two glasses, each of which had a bubblelike bulge toward the bottom, which he filled with the liquid. Then he produced a flat utensil that reminded me of a pie cutter-albeit with holes in it-a jar with cubes of sugar, a lighter, and a bottle of Dasani water.

He did this all with great flair-Paul/Powell was clearly one for the dramatic-then, in that Vincent Price voice, announced, “You might want to stand back.”

He positioned the pie cutter over one of the glasses, placed a sugar cube on top of it, then sparked the lighter. The sugar must have been treated with something because it caught fire, much to the delight of Kira, who started clapping. He let it burn for a moment or two, then dumped it into the glass-which also went aflame.

He quickly doused the flame with a shot of Dasani water, then handed it to Kira. “Ladies first,” he said, before performing the same magic trick on my drink.

As he handed me the concoction, he said, “You know, legend has it this is what van Gogh was drinking when he cut off his ear.”

“I’ll try to stay away from sharp objects,” I said, accepting it. “Prost.”

I downed a large gulp. It tasted kind of like burnt licorice. But all things considered, it went down pretty smoothly. So did the second one. Kira and I had joined the party, which included maybe ten other people arrayed on pillows. All of them were younger than me, much more casually dressed, and talked to me like I was their father. In truth, it didn’t bother me because without anything in my stomach, the alcohol in the absinthe had temporarily muddied most of the synapses in my brain.

Sometime during the third drink, I decided that Paul/Powell-for as ridiculous as he looked, talked, and acted-was actually a pretty good guy, full of useful information. He told me, for example, that of all the currently accepted methods of state-sponsored execution, the firing squad was actually considered the most humane. (“They’re dead before they hit the ground,” he said cheerily.)

I wound up telling him about Darius Kipps and how I had my suspicion whether he had really killed himself. At the end of it, he said, “Well, you want to go have a look?”

“A look at what?”

“At this dude.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I have a key,” he said.

“To what?”

“To the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

* * *

As the party died down and the other guests went home, Paul/Powell explained how this had come to be. His “Death Studies” Ph.D. was, technically, in the School of Arts and Sciences, but it was multidisciplinary, looking at death through a variety of lenses, from social to financial to spiritual to literary. As such, it involved a lot of external study and cooperative learning experiences-including an internship at the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.

“It’s a perfect place to study the physical manifestation of the expiratory process at its end stage,” he informed me.

“You mean, it’s a good place to see dead people?” I translated.

“Exactly!” he said, gleefully.

Apparently, Paul/Powell liked hanging out with stiffs so much that he didn’t get enough of it during the day. So he sometimes snuck in late at night to spend time with them. He called it research. I called it creepy. Then again, I wasn’t the guy with “D” “E” “A” “T” and “H” tattooed onto the fingers of my left hand.

He wasn’t supposed to have a key, of course-they don’t just hand those out to interns. He explained that he and a janitor had made a swap: a copy of a key in exchange for some embalming fluid he had swiped from a funeral home. Believe me, this is not something I’ve experienced personally, but apparently when you dip a marijuana cigarette in embalming fluid, it gives it certain psychotic effects.

It also means you’re smoking chemicals that are only put in dead people for a very good reason. But, hey, to each his own.

So Paul/Powell had a key to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. It was all very shady and nefarious, and I’m sure had I been remotely sober, I could have come out with dozens of very good reasons why a responsible reporter for the state’s largest newspaper should not take advantage of it.

Except, of course, I had a head full of absinthe; and I had wild-child Kira goading me on, because to her it seemed like a fine adventure; and, well, to be honest, it was actually Paul/Powell who sealed the deal when he taunted, “Yeah, man, we can go see him. Unless you’re, you know, afraid of corpses at night.”

So, really, I had no choice. We waited to shove off until midnight, when the place would be empty. According to Paul/Powell, the midnight to 8:00 A.M. security detail-which he, naturally, referred to as “the graveyard shift”-had been axed in some recent budget cuts. In theory, the Essex County Police were supposed to have added the office to their patrol. But Paul/Powell said he had never seen them.

I drove-yet another stupid decision, but by that point I was actually the least drunk of the three of us. We were laughing the whole way, though for the life of me I can’t remember about what. Though I do seem to recall Kira making an off-hand comment about how she always wanted to have sex in a morgue, and I had to resist the urge to drive faster.

I managed to get us in one piece to the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office, a brick building at the corner of Norfolk Street and South Orange Avenue.

Paul/Powell instructed me to park in the employee lot, which I balked at. Then he explained that’s how he always did it, and I suppose illegal parking was chump change compared with the variety of crimes I was about to commit.

I felt incredibly conspicuous as we spilled out of the Malibu: three stumbling, giggling white kids in a Newark parking lot late at night. We went around to an unlit back door, where Paul/Powell seemed to know what he was doing. He slipped his key in the door in a practiced manner and turned it easily.

“I think if you tried the front one, the alarm would go off,” our tour guide explained. “This one isn’t wired, for whatever reason.”

With Paul/Powell in the lead, we went through a series of antiseptic corridors and then down some stairs until we reached the morgue, which was, appropriately enough, in the basement. He went through the door into a room that felt colder than the others. When he flipped on a light, I saw the bank of large, stainless steel drawers on the far side. They must have been refrigerated. Did each of them have a body inside? Or was there still room at the inn? I didn’t see any neon “No Vacancy” signs.

There were three stations in the middle-did you call them examining tables? chopping blocks? what? — all of which were, of course, empty at this time of day. But I could imagine that in a county like Essex-home to roughly a million people, at least a few of whom died each day under circumstances that required an autopsy-they could get fairly busy.

Paul/Powell had stopped at a clipboard that was hanging from the wall by a chain and he was flipping pages.

“You said his name was Kipps, right?”

“Yeah,” I said, still trying to take everything in.

Kira had hooked her arm in mine and was pressed against me, perhaps to get warm, perhaps because this whole thing was starting to get more than a little spooky. Maybe it was the cold or the brightness of the lights-or, you know, all the dead people-but I was definitely feeling much more sober than I had been just moments earlier. No one was giggling or talking about sex anymore.

Paul/Powell let the clipboard drop and walked calmly over to one of the drawers. Kira and I shuffled after him, both of us acting like we were trying not to touch anything. I’ve heard dead bodies are, in some ways, much more hygienic than live ones-it’s not like they can sneeze on you. But still, I didn’t feel like going around licking stuff.

“You ready?” Paul/Powell asked, his “D-E-A-T-H” fingers on one of the handles.

I nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Here goes.”

* * *

A photographer buddy of mine who did a lot of work in war zones once gave me some valuable advice when it came to the dead: look at their bodies all you want; just don’t look at the faces. The bodies you can forget. The faces, he said, stay with you forever.

So I tried to keep my eyes fixed on the drawer as the long tray containing Darius Kipps slid toward me. Only when it was fully extended did I let myself glance at him, and even then I looked only at his chest. It had a long, slightly uneven scar running up the middle of it. He had obviously already been autopsied, and whoever stapled him back together hadn’t been tremendously concerned about aesthetics.

Paul/Powell must have noticed me averting my gaze because he began lecturing.

“Death is very natural, you know,” he intoned, again going Vincent Price on us. “In some ways, it’s the most natural thing that can happen to an animal. Yet there remains an irrational fear of death. You can touch him if you want. I really believe the dead like to be touched.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw he was running his hand along the corpse’s jawbone. I wouldn’t have stroked Darius Kipps’s cheek when it was part of a warm, pliant human being. Why the hell would I want to do it now that it was cold and stiff?

“The transformation to death-I call it the change from lucidity to morbidity-is one of the better understood biological processes, something that has been a subject of fascination for humankind throughout recorded history,” Paul/Powell continued. “Still, with fascination has always come fear. A study by Wickstrom and Zhuang out of Berkeley found that-”

It was Kira, who had been silent ever since we entered the building, who interrupted: “Powell, would you shut the hell up?”

“Fine, fine,” he said, returning to his normal voice. “Geez, I’m just talking.”

“I know,” she said. “But you’re freaking me out. This is weird enough. Stop it.”

I guess Kira was starting to come to her senses, too. And I was relieved she did. Paul/Powell was freaking me out, too. Plus, I wanted to get us back on track.

“So why don’t you tell me what you see here?” I said. “I really don’t know how much I want to look. This death thing is your business.”

“Yeah, although this particular part of the death industry isn’t really my area of expertise,” he said. “The people who do these autopsies are full-on MDs. They spend years studying this stuff. I just come to observe. They only called it an internship because my dad is a pretty big donor to the Democratic Party and, of course, the Democrats rule Essex County. So he, uh, you know, made a phone call…”

Ah, yes, politics in New Jersey-the money always comes attached with strings.

“Just do your best,” I instructed.

“Well, okay, you saw somebody already cut this guy open, right?”

“Yeah.”

“So that means they’ve already removed his internal organs. That’s part of the autopsy. They weigh all the organs and then study them to see if they had anything to do with the death. In this guy’s case, the cause of death was pretty obvious, right? But you learn all kinds of interesting things. I observed this one autopsy the other day where the guy died of cirrhosis, but he also had a major blockage in one of the arteries leading to the heart. Basically, if he hadn’t drunk himself to death, he would have-”

“Powell!” Kira interrupted again.

“Sorry, sorry. I’m just into this stuff, you know?”

“Let’s just try to stay focused,” I said.

“Well, okay. He, uh … I’m not sure the perfect phraseology, but the back of his head is a big, bloody mess. You need me to get graphic?”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “It’s an exit wound. I get the point.”

So Kipps had, in fact, been shot in the head. The only question now was whether it was self-inflicted. But how would I know? I guess if he fired the gun himself, there would be gunshot residue. But was that visible?

“Do you see any powder burns on his hands?” I asked.

“Nope,” he said.

Then again, the story-and no one had contradicted it-was that Kipps was found in a shower stall, with the water running. That might have washed off any powder. I was beginning to run out of ideas when Paul/Powell piped up.

“Well, this is sort of interesting,” he said.

“What?”

“There are ligature marks on both of his wrists,” he said. “Don’t worry. You can take a look. It won’t kill you.”

Paul/Powell held up the arm on the far side of Kipps’s body, and sure enough, the wrist had dark marks on it that were vivid even against his coffee-brown skin. The wrist on my side had similar wounds.

“These look like rope burns to me,” Paul/Powell said. “It’s almost like someone tied him to a post or a chair or something. It’s obviously premortal. That’s always a big distinction with these guys-pre- versus postmortal-because sometimes a body can get roughed up, especially if someone found it in a Dumpster or something. But these definitely happened while your guy was still alive. There was some bleeding and clotting on the parts that got rubbed really raw.”

“Yeah, I see that.”

“They’re fresh, though. This is just a guess, but this looks like something that happened shortly before death. Within six hours, for sure.”

Paul/Powell was on the move, heading down to the end of the tray. There was a sheet around the body’s lower half-someone thought the dead cop should have some modesty-but Paul/Powell was lifting it out of the way and studying Kipps’s feet.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “Check out the ankles. He was tied to a chair for a while. And he didn’t like it much.”

I went down and inspected. There were bruises just above the ankle bone that looked like they could have come from a rope. These didn’t break the skin. Maybe Kipps had been wearing pants or socks that cushioned the abrasiveness of the rope.

Whatever it was, something very strange had obviously happened to Darius Kipps in the hours before death, and it was now officially beyond making sense to me. As a reporter, I’m always telling stories. And I could tell a story where the detective, having decided to permanently lower his body temperature, got plastered on bourbon and then blew his head off. I had a harder time telling a version of the story where he also spent some time tied to a chair, struggling against his bonds so hard they made him bleed.

It introduced another actor-or, rather, several of them-into the equation. There had to be one person to do the tying and at least one other person to convince Kipps not to move while the tying was being done, presumably by aiming a weapon at him.

And in any reasonable person’s mind, it had to throw the Newark Police Department’s press release about a self-inflicted gun-shot wound into doubt. Serious doubt.

What’s more, it opened up another gaping, open question in my mind: If Darius Kipps didn’t kill himself, who did? And why?

* * *

I could tell Paul/Powell was of a mind to linger for a while, maybe visit with some of his other perished pals, but I have very strict rules about how many human remains I want to disturb in a day, and one is my limit.

Plus, Kira-now most assuredly out of the mood for love-was off in a corner by herself, taking occasional glances at a big biohazard container like maybe she wanted to make a deposit. I didn’t know if she was squeamish around the dead or around the 120-proof spirits we had just been imbibing. Either way, it was time to start bringing the illegal portion of my day to a close.

“You see anything else interesting?” I asked.

Paul/Powell spent a little more time looking under the sheet (better him than me), then went back up to inspect the head wound some more (definitely better him than me), before finally announcing, “That’s all I got for you.”

“Would you have any way of knowing whether this guy was drunk when he was killed?”

“Well, they’ll test for that as part of the tox screen.”

“No, I mean right now.”

Paul/Powell rested his hand on Kipps’s shoulder-no, it hadn’t gotten any less creepy-and pondered this for a moment. “Well, maybe if we compressed his chest and forced some air out of him, you could smell his breath.”

“Ah, that’s okay. I’ll pass. It would be reported in the autopsy, right? The booze. The marks on the wrists and ankles. That would all be in there?”

“Yeah, definitely. Any kind of wound or scar, premortal, postmortal, it’s all in there. And of course the toxicology reports would be there, too.”

I knew that, of course. I was already thinking about ways to get what I had just learned on the record and in the newspaper. In this case, merely having observed it wasn’t good enough-it would raise the question of how the reporter had been in a position to see it. Journalism Ethics 101: you can’t commit a crime to get information.

The autopsy report was no good to me, either. Autopsies were not automatically public record. You could get them unsealed, but that involved making an argument to a judge that there was a compelling public need to view the information-a need that outweighed an individual family’s right to privacy. And you could bet Essex County, the Newark Police Department, and probably even the Fraternal Order of Police would have lawyers fighting like mad to keep it sealed. It would take forever, cost a fortune, and we might not even win in the end.

No, I had to find another way.

I looked at Paul/Powell, who was drumming his “D-E-A-T-H” hand on the metal tray.

“Your phone have a camera by any chance?”

“Yeah, of course.”

“Mind doing me a favor and taking a picture of his wrists and ankles and then texting them to me?”

“They’ll take pictures as part of the autopsy. They’ll be better quality than my cell phone.”

“Yeah, but the nosy reporter won’t be able to access them,” I said.

“Ohhhh,” he said, grinning.

As he set about his task, I congratulated myself on my small stroke of genius. My phone had a camera, too, but again that would have bumped into the problem of how I had gotten to the body in the first place. But that wasn’t an issue if Paul/Powell, a sort-of employee of the county, sent me the photos as a kind of whistleblower. With Brodie’s blessing, I could use them to anchor an explosive story about a police cover-up, with my angry family-and publicity-hungry minister-providing me all the needed outrage.

He sent the pictures one at a time, which meant the first was buzzing into my phone even as he was still taking the subsequent ones. They weren’t great quality, but they didn’t need to be. It’s not like we were going to run photos of a dead cop’s wrists in a family newspaper. We just needed to have them for verification.

Much to Paul/Powell’s dismay and Kira’s relief, I announced it was time to close up this little shop of horrors and head on home. We followed the same path out as we had going in, making a quick-and, hopefully, unobserved-dash across the parking lot toward the Malibu.

We rode back in silence, each of us with his own thoughts, and by the time I dropped off Paul/Powell at his loft/lair, Kira had fallen asleep in the front seat. Waking her and making her drive-still somewhat tipsy-back to Jersey City, where she lived, was out of the question. Then again, driving her there myself didn’t seem like much of an option, either.

So I made the executive decision to take her back to my tidy two-bedroom home in scenic Bloomfield. If you’ve seen The Sopranos, then you’ve seen a certain depiction of Bloomfield-or at least what is represented as being Bloomfield-on your television screen. And there are certainly parts of town that are like that: a little urban, a little gritty, very Italian.

But there are also nice, leafy little neighborhoods, and my house-nestled in one of those neighborhoods-was a welcome sight when I pulled into the driveway. Kira didn’t move when I turned off the car, so I went around to her side, unbuckled her belt, and lifted up all ninety-eight pounds of her. Having a girlfriend who is roughly half my weight has its advantages, especially when my beer muscles, courtesy of the absinthe, hadn’t quite worn off.

She began stirring as I brought her into the house, smiling and pulling herself closer to me, enough that I could tell she at least knew where she was and who she was with. I brought her upstairs to my room and lowered her gently on top of my bed. Deadline, who was in his usual spot-sprawled in the precise, geometric middle of my comforter-hopped down and meowed indignantly at being disturbed, finishing his protest by walking out of the room.

I was enough of a gentleman that I was going to leave Kira there and spend the night on the couch when she murmured, “Aren’t you going to help me get out of my clothes?”

I decided that would be gentlemanly, too.

* * *

The next morning, the Kipps story was stripped across the top of A1. We didn’t have a picture of the press conference-because we hadn’t been invited-so the only photo that ran was a canned headshot of Reverend Alvin LeRioux on an inside page. But that did little to diminish the impact of the story. We had gone big with it, which-along with the television news treatment of it the night before-would mean all the radio stations would continue to stoke it this morning.

Which meant, because media tended to feed on itself, Brodie would be hungry for a follow-up. And while ordinarily that might cause me some angst as I worked through my Frosted Flakes, Tony the Tiger and I were feeling pretty relaxed. If all went well, I had all the follow-up I needed stored on my cell phone.

Kira had woken up with me and was walking around my kitchen in one of my T-shirts-and nothing else-which soon led to a demonstration of the sturdiness of my couch. But, eventually, the fun and games had to end. I showered, did my blind closet grab, and came out with charcoal pants/blue shirt/yellow tie. See? Works every time.

After making sure Deadline had enough food to sustain a rigorous day of napping, I drove us to the office. Kira, who didn’t have to be at work until one o’clock, had plenty of time to head home and replenish herself for the day, maybe even take a nap.

But there was no rest for the wicked reporter. If the day was to end successfully-with me as the heroic journalist who had just delivered the big scoop-a number of things had to go my way. The first, and perhaps most important, was convincing the higher powers to let me use my (slightly ill-gotten) photos.

It is perhaps assumed, thanks to some of the less scrupulous practitioners out there, that newspapers simply run anything they can get their hands on. That is far from the case. Readers would be stunned if they knew the stuff we had that never made it into print-bombshells that we leave unexploded simply because we don’t think it’s responsible to detonate them. We’re especially cautious when it comes to unnamed sources. Anytime I use one, I need to have it okayed by multiple editors. And they’re cautious when it comes to giving that permission. Anyone who’d like to understand why can Google “Janet Cooke Washington Post.”

As such, I knew having these pictures and being able to base a story on them were two separate issues. Paul/Powell hadn’t been savvy enough-or sober enough-to tell me not to use his name. But I knew the kid would get fired faster than a bullet if I put his name in the paper. Hence, I needed clearance to use him unnamed.

I went straight upstairs to the newsroom, got the pictures off my cell phone, blew them up the best I could and made printouts. Satisfied they would do the job, I took them into Tina Thompson’s office. I tapped on the frame to her door but hadn’t yet settled my butt into one of the two chairs in front of her desk when I was greeted with: “Uh-oh, Mickey and Minnie got busy last night!”

I thought about telling her we had actually gotten busy this morning, too, but instead took the high road: “I do not feel it necessary to dignify these spurious accusations with a response.”

“You don’t need to. I saw Minnie driving out of the parking garage wearing yesterday’s clothes, singing, ‘It’s a small world after all.’”

“Funny, last night she was singing the Hallelujah Chorus,” I said. “But I didn’t come to talk music with you. Check these out.”

I slid the photos at her. She spread them out, flinched when she saw the subject matter, then drew in for a closer look.

“What … what are these exactly?”

“Those are postmortem photos of Darius Kipps’s arms and legs, taken late last night in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. I know the quality isn’t superior, but let me help you out: they’re rope burns. Someone tied Detective Kipps to a chair shortly before he made his exit from this world.”

“Tied him to a chair? Holy crap. Do the police know about this?”

“I don’t know how they couldn’t know. Presumably, they saw the same dead Darius Kipps that I did.”

“But if that’s the case, how could they say he-” Tina began, then it dawned on her. “Holy crap.”

“Yeah, that about sums things up.”

“And if Kipps didn’t kill himself, then-”

“Who did?” I completed her sentence. “I really don’t have a clue. I figured I’d get this story in the paper before I worried about the rest of it.”

“Do we … how did you … hang on, I’m calling Brodie,” she said, picking up her phone and tapping four numbers. She waited for what sounded like two rings, then said: “Hey, it’s Tina. Carter Ross has something you’re going to want to see,” she began, then told him about the photos. She finished with, “We’ll be right down.”

“I’ll save you having to repeat yourself in explaining how you got this stuff,” she said, and before I could slow her down, she was already out from behind her desk and on the way to see our executive editor.

Harold Brodie had inhabited the corner office in our newsroom so long there weren’t many people around, besides perhaps Buster Hays, who remembered otherwise. He was a legend in the state of New Jersey and in the newspaper industry generally, a much-beloved patriarch.

In some ways, it was hard to take Brodie too seriously. He was now somewhere beyond seventy and he had this pleasant, grandfatherly manner about him, like he was going to offer you the maraschino cherry from his manhattan any moment. His high-pitched voice had gone raspy, as tends to happen to men of that age, and his wispy gray eyebrows were long enough to need braiding. A small man to begin with, he was now entering into the advanced stages of geriatric shrivel, such that I expected him to disappear altogether one of these years.

Still, for all that, something about Brodie scared the crap out of me. Hays had told me stories about him as a young editor that made my toes curl. And I had enough of my own experiences with his non-mellow side to know that he had the capacity to turn himself into a windshield-and me into a bug-at any time.

In truth, I had hoped that I could tell Tina the real story and then let her figure out what to tell Brodie. It wasn’t so much we wanted to lie to the old man. It’s just sometimes things needed to be, well, sanitized. Wasn’t that what direct-line editors were supposed to do for you?

But there would be no time to disinfect anything now. He was going to get the whole, dirty, absinthe-swilling truth.

Brodie was playing classical music, as was often the case, but turned it down when we entered. Tina didn’t even bother sitting down before handing him the photos. As we settled into the chairs in front of him, Brodie took his time studying the pictures, shuffling back and forth between them.

“So,” he said, in his old man falsetto. “How did we come into possession of these?”

* * *

Brodie had directed the question at Tina, not even looking at me. Brodie is big into chain of command, to the point you’d think he had a military background. On most matters, he preferred talking to the editors who reported to him, not the lowly reporters. It wasn’t unusual for Brodie to discuss things with his editor as if the reporter wasn’t even in the room. I think that’s part of the reason Brodie scared me: I almost never talked to the man.

“I actually haven’t heard the story myself yet,” Tina said, turning to me.

Brodie followed her gaze. Showtime. I cleared my throat and said, “They were sent to me by an intern in the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office.”

“Not for attribution, I assume?”

“Correct,” I said.

“And what is this person’s name?”

Another thing reporters owed to the legacy of Janet Cooke: editors insisted on knowing the identity of the unnamed source. They were then bound by the same ethics as reporters not to reveal it. Of course, I didn’t even know my source’s last name. I’m sure Kira did. But it was too late to ask her. So I just said, “Paul Powell.”

Whatever. We could sort it out later.

“And what do we think motivated Mr. Powell in sending this to us?” Brodie asked.

A lot of alcohol, I almost said. But that wasn’t the answer he was looking for. Brodie just wanted to know whether Paul/Powell had some kind of axe to grind, which was always something we had to take into account when using unnamed sources.

“Well, he’s a student, so I don’t think he has any ulterior motive,” I said. “He struck me as a kid who’s just trying to do the right thing.”

And besides, he had drunk enough absinthe to stone a horse.

“How do you know him?”

“Met him at a party last night. We got to talking. One thing led to another. He’s a little bit of an odd duck-if you met him and saw his tattoos, you’d understand-but all these kids have tattoos these days. There’s nothing he said or did that made me concerned about him. I think he was acting in good conscience.”

“I see,” Brodie said, his eyes again scanning the photos. “And how do we know for sure this is Darius Kipps?”

Here goes: “Because I saw it with my own eyes. I was with Paul late last night when he took these pictures.”

Brodie raised his scraggly eyebrows but kept his mouth closed. It was Tina who blurted out, “You were what?!?”

“I was with him,” I repeated.

“Carter, you can’t go breaking into the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office!” Tina moaned. “Jesus, why are you wasting our time with this? You know we can’t use these. You better hope…”

“Hold on, hold on,” I said. “We didn’t break in. Paul is an employee. He told me he had a key and offered to take me in for a little show and tell. Look, I know it’s a little shady, but we’re not teaching Sunday School here. We’re putting out a newspaper.”

I decided to skip the backstory of how he had acquired the key. Tina and Brodie didn’t need to be bogged down in such petty details. The fact is, while we were strictly concerned that our staff members didn’t break the law in their reporting of a story, we were somewhat less concerned about that where our sources were involved.

“Okay, okay, I know,” Tina said defensively. “I’m just trying to make sure our ass is covered here.”

“There’s no need to mention in print that I was there, obviously,” I said. “We can just say the photos came from a county employee who didn’t want to be named for fear of reprisal and that the photos have been independently verified as being authentic. All of which is true.”

Brodie was watching us go back and forth without comment. He often let his underlings slug it out before he decided what to make of something. We were expected to make a good show of it. But, in this case, we were done.

“A tour of the morgue late at night, huh?” Brodie said, chuckling.

The old man leaned back, tented his fingers, and closed his eyes, his signal that he was ready to render a decision. In our shop, this was a celebrated pose known as the Brodie Think. Often imitated by staff members, though never perfectly duplicated, it made him look something like a praying mantis-albeit a praying mantis in need of a face-lift and eyebrow tweezing. He could go into this state for a minute or more, to the point when you could wonder if he had drifted off. It was unsettling, even when you knew to expect it.

This one seemed particularly lengthy, and at one point his breathing got so slow and steady I thought maybe he really had fallen asleep. But there was nothing to do except wait it out and hope for the best.

The fact was, I needed a win here. There were few things more agonizing for a reporter than knowing something-especially something as incendiary as this-and not being able to put it in the newspaper. And in this case it wasn’t just my big scoop and my interests as an ambitious reporter being served. It was a lot bigger than that.

It was Mimi Kipps’s husband being thought of not as a suicidal coward but as a murder victim. It was a killer-or killers-being brought to justice. It was his children getting to know the truth about their father someday. It was the Newark Police Department’s credibility, to say nothing of the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. Maybe it would all come out eventually, if the Attorney General’s Office did decide to conduct an independent investigation, but there was a chance it would bow to political pressure and take a pass. There was a lot on the line here.

Finally, the old man opened his eyes, untented his fingers, and said, “Okay. Let’s go for it.”

According to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Federal Highway Administration, the road that begins at Route 1 in Miami and terminates 1,952 miles later at the Houlton/Woodstock Border Crossing in northern Maine is called Interstate 95.

In law enforcement circles, it’s got another nickname: the Iron Pipeline. It earns the moniker each year by being the most heavily used gun-running road in America, serving as the quickest conduit from states with lax gun control laws to states with strict ones.

As such, the associates of Red Dot Enterprises-who took turns making the drive south to pick up the latest shipment-knew the road well. Take the New Jersey Turnpike south, through the merge around Exit 8 that always backed up on weekends. Go over the Delaware Memorial Bridge, through that congested stretch of Delaware. There was usually a brief break from traffic through the northeastern part of Maryland, but that ended outside Baltimore. Then it was the Harbor Tunnel, the Capital Beltway, and the hellish run south of the Springfield mixing bowl, which could back up at anytime-not enough road for way too many cars.

Then, after traveling over the Occuquan River, through Prince William County and past Quantico, it was onto what the rest of the state referred to as “the real Virginia.” It’s no accident that you don’t reach the Virginia Welcome Center until you’ve been in the state for more than forty miles. Whoever built it there knew what they were doing.

The Virginia Welcome Center was, at minimum, how far south the associates of Red Dot Enterprises went.

Then the mission became: find the straw buyer. They always set up the rendezvous ahead of time, having found the buyer on Craigslist and given him the usual instructions. But nothing ever felt routine about it. They rotated which area they used, so they were never going to the same place twice. And it was always a bit of a trick finding the buyer’s car in a busy parking lot, even when they knew the make and model.

Next came the wait for the buyer to do his end, which was usually a nice excuse to grab a meal and relax, albeit not for long. Then it was time to swipe the guns and begin the trip back north.

The drive back was what really took forever, especially the way they did it. They kept it exactly five miles above the speed limit, so even when traffic was moving, they still weren’t making great time. They didn’t dare use E-ZPass. Each tollbooth cost ten minutes or more-and if there is anything more frustrating than waiting around just to pay some highway authority money, it hasn’t been invented yet. They took frequent breaks and drank a lot of caffeine lest they nod off or get into an accident while distracted.

The whole goal was not to be noticed in any way, which-on one of the busiest roads in America-wasn’t terribly hard. You just had to be smart about it: drive a bland car, something solid and domestic, without tinted windows or a tricked-out exhaust; wear the kind of clothes that can be bought at an outlet mall, something like Old Navy or Van Heusen; act like every other road-weary traveler at the rest stops; and make sure the trunk stays shut.

There are people who say I-95 is one of the most boring roads in America, and they’re right. But for Red Dot Enterprises, boring was good.

A boring trip was a successful one.