The Good Cop

CHAPTER 6

Since they were scattered around Tina’s apartment, it took longer to find the various pieces of my clothing than it did to get into them. Around the time I finally discovered my pants-what were they doing out by the front entrance? — at least one of the problems of waking up in my boss’s apartment was beginning to become apparent. If I was in my own place, I would have at least grabbed a quick shower. Tina was of the mind-set I didn’t have time to brush my teeth.

I managed to win that battle, making use of a spare she had in her medicine cabinet. Otherwise, it was all go-go-go. On my way toward the door, Tina pressed a pear and an apple into my hand-the closest I was going to get to any fruit, forbidden or otherwise, on this morning-and shooed me out.

The address Tina gave me for Fusco’s place was in Belleville, a small but densely packed slice of New Jersey just north of Newark. It was just under twenty minutes away, and I knew I had to hurry. Still, I stopped for a Coke Zero. I had gotten four, maybe five hours of half-drunk slumber in someone else’s bed and, while wearing yesterday’s clothes, was being horsewhipped by my editor into frantic action. Such things are not meant to be borne without at least a little caffeine.

Plus, I needed to get my head working properly. It just couldn’t seem to swallow the idea that Fusco was dead. The killer had become the killed. Was Mike Fusco’s last act to give himself the ultimate punishment for the crimes he had committed? Or was this another staged suicide?

I had just gotten back on the road when I heard a news tease on the radio that ended “… and another police officer is dead in Newark, apparently by his own hand.”

This elicited a rare but emphatic swear from my lips. There would be no head start for me this time. To return to my pasture metaphor, there were few things worse than being part of the herd. There was no way to avoid smelling like dung.

It came as no surprise that when I pulled onto the narrow street in Belleville where Mike Fusco had lived, until very recently, three news vans were already there. Undoubtedly more were on the way. I parked outside one of the tidy little clapboard houses just in from the corner, then walked briskly toward Fusco’s place-the one with the crime scene tape strung along the outer edge of the property-about midway down the block.

Outside the house next door, two of the three cameras present were trained on a hirsute middle-aged white man who was telling a story that involved a lot of arm-waving and hand gesturing. I wouldn’t say the man was exactly ready for his fifteen minutes of fame-he had a three-day scruff and a torn New York Giants sweatshirt featuring Lawrence Taylor, which made it at least twenty years old. But I also wouldn’t say he struck me as the kind of guy who was too bothered about appearances. The slippers on his feet were one hint. The parachute pants were the dead giveaway.

I let the TV cameras finish up with him, then moved in. In short order, I learned his name and that he was claiming to have been the one who made the initial call to the police. He said he worked “in the sanitation industry”-like there was somehow shame in just saying he was a garbage man-which meant he was up early and just about to head out on his route. It was shortly after four when he heard gunshots.

“Gunshots with an ‘s’?” I asked. “As in, more than one?”

“Yeah. Two of them. It was a bang”-he waited for approximately ten seconds, his eyes wide and casting about the whole time, like he was still performing for the cameras-“and then a bang. Two shots.”

“Two shots,” I repeated. “What, did he miss the first time?”

“Beats me. I’m just telling you what I heard.”

I nodded and started taking notes. Sad to say, but if Mike Fusco lived in certain parts of Newark, his body would still be lying undiscovered right now. In a lot of neighborhoods, people long ago stopped bothering to call the police when they heard gunfire.

“So what happened next?” I asked.

“Well, it was tough to tell where the first shot was even coming from. But the second shot, I knew it was coming from Fusco’s place. I was paying attention at that point, you know? I didn’t know if someone was robbing the place or if it was some kind of gang thing or what. I didn’t think we had any of that out here. But sometimes a neighborhood can turn, you know? I mean, I heard some, you know, some blacks just moved in the next block over. I’m not racist, I’m just saying.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Because it was better than saying: “Actually, sir, that is the very definition of racism.”

“So, anyway, I went over to my window to have a look.”

“Did you see anything?”

“Nope. Nada.”

“And then you called the police?”

“Yeah, I figure that’s what I pay all those property taxes for, right? Let the police do their job. And I gotta give them credit, they were here in, like, two minutes.”

He continued: “So I went out and met them, told them the same thing I told the dispatcher. They asked me if I could hang out for a while, so I called into work-I got about a million sick days piled up anyway-and they went in. Ten minutes later one of them comes out and tells me what happened.”

“And what was that?”

“Well, Fusco was lying in bed with his brains blown out, that’s what. I guess he couldn’t take it no more.”

If there truly was anything Mike Fusco couldn’t take no more-sorry, any longer-the guy didn’t know. And neither did anyone else on the block. Over the next two hours of hanging out and chatting with various neighbors, I heard a lot of the same thing about Fusco. He lived by himself, no kids, no pets, no hobbies that took him outside with any great frequency; he would offer a nodding hello to people but otherwise didn’t say much; he drove a big red truck with jacked-up suspension; he had big muscles; and he was a cop.

At a certain point, I became satisfied there was really nothing more the good people of Belleville could tell me. And I was starting to consider pulling up the tents and hitting the trail when my phone rang.

The caller was Mimi Kipps.

* * *

I stared at the phone for one ring, two rings, trying to give myself a chance to come up with some clever idea how to play this thing. By the third ring, I hadn’t produced anything, but I answered anyway.

“Carter Ross.”

“Carter, it’s Mimi Kipps,” she said in a husky voice.

“Hi, Mimi.”

“Are you writing a story about Mike?”

“I am, yes.”

“Can you … can you come over? I was hoping I could … talk to you a little bit.”

“About what?” I said.

There was no immediate response. I thought I heard some hard breathing, definitely some sniffling. When she finally spoke, it was through a voice box squeezed with emotion: “I think … maybe the people who killed Darius might have killed Mike because he was … I don’t know.”

“He was what?” I pressed.

“I just … I think I may have gotten him killed,” she said. That was about as far as she made it before the sobs came. It was tough to tell what was coming out of her mouth. Words? Sentences? Random syllables? It was unintelligible.

I let her carry on like that for a little while. She was trying to compose herself, unsuccessfully. Finally, I said, “Mimi, I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes, okay?”

She blurted out something that might have been “thank you” and I hung up.

Say this much, she had addled my easily aroused curiosity. I wondered if she was warming up to make some kind of confession. She “may” have gotten him killed? What, exactly, did that mean?

I’m not saying I was ready to believe the worst about Mimi Kipps, but neither did I think she was just the pitiable, grieving widow. In a world where there are seldom coincidences, the two men she was sleeping with had both ended up taking bullets to the head. It was getting hard to imagine a scenario where she wasn’t involved in that somehow.

As I merged on the Garden State Parkway for the short trip down to East Orange, I called Tina just to check in and let her know I was on the move. I told her about how, other than the fact that there were two shots fired-which would require some explanation-I had gotten a whole lot of nothing from the neighborhood.

She informed me I had missed a similar amount of nothing in the office. The Belleville Police had promised some kind of statement in “a few hours,” though they had started making that pledge a few hours ago. The Newark Police were in total shutdown mode-Hakeem Rogers’s office was letting all calls go through to voice mail and no e-mails had been answered.

Even Buster Hays’s normally inexhaustible Rolodex was, so far, getting shut out. Not that I had lost faith in him. It was not quite ten o’clock, still early in the news-gathering day.

“So, anything else I need to know?” Tina asked, and I could tell she was in a hurry to get off the phone.

“No, I guess not … except … well, we never got a chance to, uh, talk about what happened last night.”

“What, the sex?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, it was fine. Better than fine. I’m sorry, I’m just distracted. It was great.”

“Well, thanks, but I wasn’t looking for a grade on my report card. I meant … are you, I don’t know, okay with everything?”

“Oh, honey,” she said with a chuckle, “I’m not in high school anymore. You’re not exactly my first. Daddy isn’t coming after you with a shotgun.”

“I just … After all this time, I didn’t expect … I didn’t go over there thinking anything like that would-”

“I swear, you’re more of a girl than I am sometimes,” she interrupted. “Look, we’re grown-ups. We had sex. It happens. Not to me a lot lately, but it does happen.”

I slid through a toll plaza going perhaps a little too fast, still not feeling I was getting my point across. “But did you, I don’t know, did you mean for it to happen? Was it the wine? Was it an accident?”

“What do you mean? Like did I just accidentally get naked and stumble onto your cock? No, I’d say that was pretty intentional.”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

Tina gave an exasperated sigh, then blurted out, “Look, you were a booty call, okay?”

“I was?”

“Yeah. I just wanted to have sex last night, and it was either you or a random bar hookup. I didn’t feel like going out. So it was you. My God, what did you think that was about? I was barely wearing any clothing to start with, and then I began taking it all off. I would have been offended if you hadn’t had sex with me.”

“Oh. Right,” I said, and the conversation took a moment to lag as I thought of how to form my next question in a way that wouldn’t make me sound like an insensitive lout.

“What, you feel cheap now?” she said.

“No, I … No, that’s cool. What guy doesn’t want to be a booty call?”

“Great. I’ll talk to…”

“Wait, just … we weren’t … we didn’t exactly use protection. Was this … are we … am I going to be attending Lamaze classes soon?”

“First of all, don’t be an idiot, no one uses Lamaze anymore. All it does is make the woman hyperventilate and deprive the baby of oxygen. Haven’t you read any childbirth books? Second, I’m on the pill. So you have nothing to worry about.”

“The pill? Since when?”

“Since … I don’t know, a couple months now.”

“But what happened to … all your plans? Last I knew, you had everything from a car seat to a Bumbo Baby in your closet.”

“Yeah, I regifted the car seat and gave the Bumbo Baby to Goodwill.”

“But … why?”

“I just decided I’m just not cut out for that,” she said. “Lately, I feel like I can barely keep my own stuff together. Somehow adding another life-form into the mix didn’t seem too smart, especially if it was a life-form that was going to be totally dependent on me for its physical and emotional development.”

“Oh,” I said, because sometimes I like to offer my friends and loved ones brilliant insights like that.

“Anyhow, I have to go,” she said. “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Okay, bye,” I said to an already empty phone line.

* * *

The Malibu had made enough trips to Rutledge Avenue in the past three days that I wondered if it was going to steer itself there. Still, I kept my hands on the wheel-just in case-and arrived a few minutes later.

I hastily ditched my car a few doors down, the only place I could find a spot, and walked briskly toward the front porch, where I was confronted by Mimi’s doorbell button. I pushed it and waited. At least I knew she’d answer this time.

As I looked down at her leaf-insulated flower bed, I pressed the button again, growing frustrated. She had invited me there all of fifteen minutes earlier. What happened? She slipped into narcoleptic slumber?

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.

I backed away from the porch and stepped down onto the sidewalk to have a look at the house. There were no lights on and no one making out in the second-floor windows, either. I whipped out my phone and dialed Mimi-maybe she had just taken the baby for a walk? — but didn’t get an answer.

Walking back up on the porch, I decided to knock this time. I did knuckles first, then switched to the butt of my palm, which is louder and, besides, it hurts less. But that got about as much attention from inside the house as the doorbell did.

“Mimi?” I eventually yelled at the door. “Mimi, it’s Carter. Are you there?”

A woman from the other side of the duplex appeared on her front porch, which was no more than ten feet away from the Kippses’ entrance.

“She ain’t here,” the woman said.

“But she just called me,” I said, as if this woman, upon hearing the injustice of this fact, could somehow change it.

“Well, she left.”

“How long ago?”

“You just missed her. Two minutes ago, maybe?”

“Was she alone?”

“No, she was with a man.”

A man? Another one? I wondered if this guy knew what the life expectancy was for men who hung around Mimi Kipps. “What did the man look like?” I asked.

The woman shifted on her heels and appraised me with suspicion, giving me the kind of look you give someone who is suddenly asking too many questions and might actually be a stalker. So I added, “I’m a reporter with the Eagle-Examiner. I was supposed to be meeting her here for an interview.”

“Oh, well I think it was her preacher. It looked like they were in a hurry.”

Her preacher? What was he doing back here? I thought he was finally out of the picture. “Was he a big guy?” I asked, holding my hand above my head to indicate a man of some stature. “About yay high? Probably wearing a suit? Glasses?”

“Yeah, that’s him.”

The woman was leaning her weight back toward the door, giving me a “can I go now?” look. So I said, “Thanks for your help. Sorry for the noise.”

She disappeared inside, and I buried my hands in my jacket, hunched my shoulders, and began walking back down the sidewalk, feeling annoyed. I had told Mimi I’d be there in fifteen minutes. It had taken me maybe twenty. Where had she rushed off to with Pastor Al in such a supposed hurry? An emergency prayer meeting?

True, I was only coming to her house because I thought she was going to confess to murder. But still. Rude is rude.

I was still stewing about this when I saw a silver Mercedes cruising with quiet majesty down the street toward me. It was one of the larger kind, an E-class maybe, and it had tinted glass and tricked-out chrome wheels. I’m not sure what made me even give it a second glance-other than that its list price was probably about forty grand higher than any other car on the street. But I was still looking at it when its rear driver’s side window rolled down maybe six inches.

That, in itself, was curious. It was forty-five degrees outside, not windows-down weather. So I kept staring.

The next thing I saw was a gloved hand protruding from the window, holding a black, metallic object of some sort. It took me a long nanosecond to parse what I was seeing. Was it a length of pipe? It wasn’t registering.

The car had slowed to perhaps fifteen or twenty miles an hour as it came close to pulling even with me. I couldn’t see the driver through the front window or any of the passengers through the tinting. I was considering the vehicle with unguarded curiosity when, suddenly, I figured out what that black thing emerging from the backseat was.

That’s not a pipe, you idiot, my brain shouted, that’s a gun. And it’s aimed at you. Dive, idiot. Dive!

I was still in the process of making myself horizontal when a clap sounded in front of me and wood splintered behind me. The gun wasn’t silenced. It was the opposite of silenced. It was deafening. More bullets followed the first in a ceaseless and terrifying procession.

My dive had put me halfway between the sidewalk and the unkempt flower bed, in the middle of the small strip of grass that made up the Kippses’ front lawn. I was utterly exposed, and I was certain to experience the flesh-tearing agony of a bullet ripping into my body any moment. Perhaps, if I had any wherewithal whatsoever, I should have crawled closer to the cars parked along the street. But damn if I could shove myself closer to that Mercedes. I could barely move at all.

I tried to go flat, pancake flat-hell, tortilla flat-as the rounds kept coming. It wasn’t an automatic weapon, just the incessant fire of someone who was pulling the trigger as fast as his pointer finger could manage. I couldn’t even count how many times I heard that awful thunderclap of exploding gas and propelled lead. All I knew was it was more than five and less than twenty million. How much less? That I couldn’t say.

And it kept coming. I heard glass shattering behind me, parked cars being hit in front of me, and bullets ricocheting all around me. At some point, I covered my head with my hands-like that would somehow be good defense-and buried my face in the ground. I wondered if the last thing I would ever see in this world was cold, dead grass.

Then it ended. The quiet was, in its own way, as loud as the noise had been moments earlier. There was no squeaking of tires, no wailing of car alarms, no shrieking of wounded humanity.

Just silence.

* * *

The first thing I forced myself to do was crawl toward the curb and the parked cars. I wanted metal at my back and something to dive under should the need arise. I probably looked ridiculous, going on all fours across the sidewalk, but it would be a little while before I felt like having the precious contents of my skull more than about two feet off the ground.

Eventually, I reached a rusting Toyota Celica, against which I stayed huddled for a minute or so, trying to resist the involuntary shaking that was overtaking my body. Still dazed, I looked back at Mimi’s house, which was pockmarked with bullet holes like a modern-day Alamo. Several of the windows had been shot out. The siding was going to need a serious patch job.

Finally, I stood up on gone-wobbly legs. The Mercedes had disappeared. For now. Was it coming back? I didn’t have much experience with drive-by shootings-watching Boyz in the Hood twenty years ago just doesn’t count-but I sure as hell wasn’t going to stick around to find out.

I ran, or maybe just stumbled, to my car, fumbling nervously with my keys until I got the door open. I dove in, turned the engine over, and started driving. For the next few blocks, I have to admit I was rather generous with the accelerator, rather stingy with the brakes.

My first thought, once my heart rate returned to something like normal and my breathing was back under my own control, was that I ought to call the police. Shooting at someone, that’s illegal, isn’t it? I didn’t have a book called Being Target Practice for Dummies handy, but I was reasonably certain the law frowned on citizens discharging firearms in the direction of other citizens.

Right. Definitely. Once I put sufficient distance between myself and all those spent shell casings on Rutledge Avenue, I dialed the number for the East Orange Police Department.

A female voice answered: “East Orange Police, Officer Heyward speaking, may I help you?”

“Yes, I’m … I’m calling to report a shooting,” I said in a voice that sounded too faltering to be my own, almost like I was going through puberty again.

“What is your address?”

“Well … I … I live in … in Bloomfield, actually … but the shooting happened on Rutledge Avenue.”

“We’re already responding to a report about shots fired on Rutledge,” she said. “Do you require officer assistance?”

“No … it’s … it’s over now. I was just on Rutledge Avenue when these guys started shooting at me.”

“Were you hit, sir? Do you require medical assistance?”

“No, I … I guess I just thought it was the sort of thing you guys liked to know about for, I don’t know, statistical purposes. I was shot at, you know?”

“Can you identify the person who was shooting at you, sir?”

“I didn’t really get a look at him. It was just these guys in a Mercedes and suddenly one of them started shooting at me”-I had said that already, hadn’t I? — “and, well, it was just a lot of bullets and…”

I could tell she was thinking, Yeah, and what do you want me to do about it? Instead, she said, “Are you still at the scene, sir?”

“No, I … I took off. I just … I wanted to get out of there.”

“I understand, sir. If you’d like, you can come into the station and file a report.”

A report? This wasn’t my briefcase being stolen out of the back of my car. These were killers who just happened to have bad aim. She wanted me to file a report?

I was building up some good, indignant outrage when I started thinking about this thing from the cop’s perspective. She was getting a phone call from a guy who was informing her of a shooting about which she already knew. And he couldn’t tell her much of anything new or useful. I realized that if our roles were reversed, I’d blow me off, too.

“Yeah, thanks. Maybe I’ll … maybe I’ll do that,” I said, and then hung up.

I became aware I had just run a red light-the honking of the person I nearly T-boned alerted me to this-and I finally pulled over. Like most guys, I’m a bad multitasker under even the best of circumstances. Thinking and driving were two things that weren’t going to be able to coexist for me at this moment, and right now I needed to think more than I needed to drive.

It is one thing to be shot at. It’s quite another thing to not know who’s doing it or why.

Everything happened so fast. I needed to slow down the scene. Maybe it would tell me something I didn’t know.

The first thing I saw was a silver Mercedes sedan with tinted windows. Immediate, knee-jerk reaction: it was driven by a drug dealer, a fairly high-level one-because the kids standing out on the corner selling dime bags for seven dollars couldn’t afford a ride like that. And it was obviously a drug dealer who didn’t particularly care about being too cliched in his vehicle choices.

But why would a drug dealer-or a drug-dealing gang, if it was one of those-want to shoot me? I wasn’t in the drug game. Guys who are don’t usually bother with civilians. And how would they have even known I was there? It’s not like I posted my itinerary online.

I thought back to my scene. The next thing that appeared was the gun. I am not any kind of firearms expert-I don’t know my calibers from my millimeters-but it was not a large gun. Then it started firing.

If it was supposed to be a hit, it was incredibly sloppy (as evidenced by the fact that I was still around to critique it). Maybe they were just trying to scare me off. The stubbornly high murder rate that persisted in urban areas-most of which related to the drug trade-suggested that when a professional wanted you dead, chances are you ended up dead.

Unless these weren’t pros. What if they were amateurs who happened to drive a nice car?

I tried to think back on the sequence of events that had led me there. I had gotten a call from Mimi Kipps asking me to come see her. I responded to the call, only to learn she had left in a hurry minutes before I arrived, escorted by the anointed man of God. Then someone was shooting at me.

Oh. Right. The weepy woman calls. The gallant, dumb man answers-never knowing he’s walking into a trap. That’s how the shooters knew I was going to be there. Mimi Kipps told them.

In the immortal words of former Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry: bitch set me up.

* * *

Having this knowledge, proving this knowledge, and then figuring out what to do with it were all distinctly different issues, of course. And I was stuck on the middle part. Could I prove that this was anything more than a bad coincidence? I knew better, of course, but there was nothing to definitively say the gangbangers weren’t just shooting up the duplex next door.

Another question: Was her pastor in on it? Since he showed up minutes before the shooting started to whisk Mimi away, it would suggest he was. Then again, was it possible Mimi was playing him like she was playing me? Maybe she called him all weepy, too, knowing he would come running just like I did?

Yet another question: Why would Mimi need me dead? How was I threat to her? Sure, I might be the only person who was really onto her. But how did she know that? I thought about my conversation with Pastor Al, where I had hinted about the affair but never directly stated it. Had he known what I was trying to get at and alerted Mimi?

But if that was the case, and Pastor Al was complicit in Mimi and Fusco’s conspiracy to kill Darius Kipps, then why would he have called for an independent investigation-and then dropped it? For that matter, if Mimi and Fusco had teamed up to kill Darius to get him out of the way-so their affair could blossom-then why was Fusco now dead?

Nothing made sense at all, unless … were Pastor Al and Mimi somehow romantically involved?

Now, that was just gross. He was old enough to be her father, and he hadn’t aged particularly well-he looked like he could be her grandfather. Merely the thought of them bumping uglies was revolting. Then again, could I rule it out? Not really.

Was it even possible-and, oh, this was really sordid-that Pastor Al was Jaquille’s real father? I thought all the way back to my first interview with Mimi, when she had told me about how much trouble she had getting pregnant, thanks to her one-testicled husband and his low sperm count. Had Jaquille’s conception been a bit less miraculous than originally advertised?

Short of getting Pastor Al to submit to a paternity test, I wasn’t sure how I would ever substantiate this theory. But it was a possibility I couldn’t rule out: that the call for an investigation had been a smokescreen, and that all these dead police officers were really just Pastor Al’s way of clearing away competitors for Mimi’s affections.

For all I knew, Mimi really was innocent-relatively-in everything. Maybe Pastor Al had called her, told her to invite me over, and then cleared her out of harm’s way just in time for me to get shot at.

These and other thoughts were doing laps around my cranium when I received a text message from Tina: “NPD presser @ 11. Command center. Can u make it?”

Could I make it? Yeah. Did I want to? Negative. I was starting to think the representatives of the Newark Police Department were the last people to know what was going on, so spending time with them seemed rather pointless. Given what I had just been through, shouldn’t I get special dispensation from having to attend pointless press conferences?

Then again, Tina didn’t know I had spent part of my morning ducking bullets. And maybe she didn’t need to know. For whatever her current feelings for me were-was going from potential baby daddy to booty call a promotion or a demotion? — she had shown the tendency to be plenty protective of me. If I told her about my little drive-by incident, she’d pull me into the office and not let me leave until I was eligible for Medicare.

And while I still aspired to reach a ripe and gummy old age, I didn’t feel like remaining at large was necessarily going to jeopardize it. As long as I didn’t agree to meet Mimi Kipps in any dark alleys, I would be okay. I just had to be a little more wary.

I texted Tina back, “On my way,” then shifted into gear, trying to pay a little more attention to traffic signals this time. The Newark Police Command Center was on University Avenue, not to be confused with its headquarters on Green Street. I guess whenever the Green Street facility had been built-by either the Holy Roman Empire or Alexander the Great, judging by how antiquated it was-no one worried about satellite hookups. The Command Center was, therefore, a little better suited to press events.

Arriving all of two minutes before it started, I was ushered to the conference room where they held these kinds of functions. The chairs in the middle of the room were filled with a variety of reporters. Along the back wall was a row of cameras on tripods, including some that belonged to cameramen I had seen earlier in the day on Fusco’s street. They were now going to have everything they needed-sound bites from the scene and from the police-in plenty of time for their noon broadcasts.

Hakeem Rogers was up front, fussing with something, but he still found time to shoot me a scowl when he spied me standing along the side wall. I nodded at him, but I was mostly distracted by who was-or, in this case, was not-alongside Rogers.

Typically, these press conferences consisted of Rogers introducing the police director, who, as an appointee of the mayor, wanted to be putting in a good word with the voters of Newark. The director usually appeared in front of a wall of blue-clad men, officers who were somehow involved in the law enforcement triumph the director was there to announce. The officers didn’t say much-they were just there for decoration-but they sure gave the director a good background for the cameras.

This time the director was nowhere around. Nor was there a wall of blue. Indeed, there was only one officer alongside Rogers: Captain Denise Boswell. She was in full dress uniform, right up to her hat, which she was nervously fussing with as she waited for the show to begin.

The other oddity about this was that I didn’t know what she planned to say. Generally at these kinds of gatherings, you had some inkling of what would be announced-a break on a case, a big drug bust, a fugitive from justice apprehended.

This time it was a total mystery. And as Rogers approached the podium, I found myself leaning forward, just a little bit curious.

* * *

Rogers opened the proceedings by introducing himself, thanking everyone for coming, and taking an unveiled swipe at me.

“There has been a great deal of speculation about the death of Detective Sergeant Darius Kipps, specifically in print,” Rogers said. “While ordinarily we prefer to let our investigation run its course before we make any major public statements, the Newark Police Department has determined that, in light of the death of Detective Michael Fusco and some apparent connections between the two investigations, it was time to put an end to the speculation.”

He looked up and rewarded me with another scowl. “Toward that end, I would like to introduce Captain Denise Boswell. After a long and decorated career with the Newark Police Department, Captain Boswell was placed in command of the Fourth Precinct late last year, becoming the first female officer in Newark history to attain that level. Since she was the commanding officer to both Sergeant Kipps and Detective Fusco, we felt it was appropriate for her to make this difficult announcement. Captain Boswell?”

The room was quiet as Boswell approached the microphone. She had a sheet of white paper that had been folded into quarters, and the rustling as she unfolded it was amplified by the conference room’s sound system. Captain Boswell was not a tall woman, far shorter than the men who usually appeared at these things, and the variety of microphones that had been strapped to the podium-representing various local radio, television, and Internet outlets-had not been adjusted properly. She was practically lost behind them.

Her voice, however, was not. It was strong and confident as she began reading from her sheet of paper.

“This has been a tragic week in the City of Newark, with the loss of two of our finest officers, Darius Kipps and Michael Fusco. It has been particularly hard for those of us in the Fourth Precinct who had the privilege of working alongside these officers as they attended to their duties. And I would ask that we all keep the families of these officers in our prayers during this difficult time.”

She paused for a quick moment of solemnity, then pushed onward:

“As many of you are aware, the department announced a preliminary determination that Detective Sergeant Darius Kipps died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. That will not be our final determination in this matter. And on behalf of the Newark Police Department, I would like to publicly apologize to the family of Darius Kipps for this error.”

My internal Surprise-o-meter was registering one of its highest possible readings. As a rule, police departments didn’t admit to botching anything, much less an investigation into the death of one of their own officers. Then Boswell pushed the Surpriseometer clear off the charts.

“Early this morning,” she said slowly, deliberately, “I received a call from Detective Fusco’s cell phone. During this call, he confessed to killing Detective Sergeant Kipps over a personal dispute and then to altering certain aspects of the crime scene to make it appear to be a suicide.”

She paused again, and some of the reporters actually squirmed in their seats. Professional decorum demanded that they not react in a demonstrable manner. But I knew that if this had been a movie they were watching at home, half of them would have been yelling at their television screens, “Whoa!”

Boswell continued her statement: “Detective Fusco informed me he could not live with himself as a result of this act but that he wanted to set the record straight. He then terminated the phone call. As we now know, it appears that placing that phone call was his last act before he turned his service weapon on himself and ended his own life.”

As soon as I heard the term “service weapon,” I felt a prickle from the base of my spine all the way up to my neck. In my head, I could hear the voice of tough guy Mike Fusco telling me about how he had been placed on administrative leave and lamenting, I even had to turn in my service weapon.

When had he told me that? Yesterday, when I came by with those photos of Kipps. Had he somehow gotten the gun back during the eighteen hours or so between when I last saw him and when he supposedly pulled its trigger? Did he have another department-issued gun that had simply been confused for his service weapon?

I didn’t know. But it was another inconsistency. That and the two shots that had been fired. I still didn’t know of any cop-or anyone who knew which end of a gun fired-who could miss his own head from six inches away.

Meanwhile, Captain Boswell was finishing up, “I’m sure many of you will have questions about how such a tragedy could have occurred and about whether it could have been prevented. We in the Newark Police Department are asking ourselves the same questions today. Unfortunately, we may not have many answers, as so much of this seemed to involve issues known only to these two officers.”

Boswell lifted her head for the first time, refolded her note, then stepped aside so Hakeem Rogers could take her place in front of the microphones.

“We will now take a limited number of questions,” he said. “Please wait for me to call on you.”

I immediately raised my hand in the air, but Rogers motioned to one of the television guys, who asked, “Captain Boswell, can you describe the nature of this personal dispute between these two officers?”

Boswell didn’t make a move toward the microphone. Instead, Rogers handled it: “That’s not something we’re going to be able to discuss. It was a personal dispute of a personal nature.”

A personal dispute of a personal nature. Well, that sure cleared things up. A reporter from one of the New York tabloids-who would probably be getting on the front page if he was able to discover this was the result of a sordid love triangle-got the next question. “Can you say how the crime scene was altered? Does this have something to do with the rope burns that were found on Officer Kipps?”

Good question from the Murdoch minion. I was expecting another dirty look from Rogers, but he was too busy conferring with Boswell. Eventually, he came back with “We don’t want to get into specifics. We’ll just say that as an officer who was well trained in our investigative techniques, he was able to use his insider knowledge to mislead us.”

There were several more queries from the press, none of which elicited anything in the way of new information. I had continued trying to get in my question about Fusco’s service weapon-as in, why did a suspended officer have one? — but Rogers had been ignoring me. I usually didn’t ask questions during these sorts of events. I tried to get the cops on the side, after the cameras stopped rolling, when they might be more likely to loosen up. But in this case I knew I wouldn’t get another chance. You only got that on-the-side time when the cops had something to brag about.

But even when there were no more hands being raised except mine, even when some of the other reporters were looking at me in the expectation I’d be called on, Rogers didn’t so much as glance in my direction. It was my punishment, obviously.

In some ways it was just as well. I doubted I was going to get a straight answer.

* * *

From the way everyone was packing up after the press conference-hastily, without much lingering or second thought-I could tell the assemblage of notebook holders and microphone monkeys were satisfied by what they had heard. Cop A personally kills Cop B over personal dispute of personal nature, becomes personally overwhelmed with guilt, turns gun on own person, end of personhood.

It was obvious the police director wanted this embarrassing story to become yesterday’s news as quickly as possible, so he offered up Captain Boswell, the most sympathetic emissary he could find, and had her tie up the whole sloppy mess with one neat little bow.

But I just wasn’t accepting the package. There were too many inconsistencies, too many things that didn’t fit into the narrative.

Did Fusco really call her moments before committing a two-bullet suicide? Maybe. Had Fusco somehow repossessed his own gun? Maybe. Had Fusco acted alone in killing Kipps and then been able to fool the entire Newark Police Department? Maybe.

There were just too many maybes. And, all the while, the roles of Mimi Kipps and Alvin LeRioux-who was up to his sanctimonious jowls in this somehow-were left undefined.

It was all still out there for me to discover, but in the meantime, I had a story to write. Regardless of whether I fully believed what the Newark Police were saying, I still had a duty to report it. And, at the very least, I could lend some understanding to the dispute between the officers. How I would word it might be a bit thorny. The truth-“A reporter spied Detective Fusco and Mrs. Kipps in the smoldering beginnings of what was undoubtedly going to become scorching, unbridled, hot-hearted passion”-would probably make it past the editors on the All-Slop, who didn’t bother to read stuff before posting it online, judging from the typos they let through. It might even get me a contract to write romance novels. But I would still probably need to find a better way to word it.

After making the short drive back to the office, I had barely settled into my desk when I was accosted by Ruthie Ginsburg, the twenty-two-going-on-thirteen intern. He was looking typically chipper and fresh-faced, and for a moment I wanted to turn him over to some of the more curmudgeonly members of the copy desk for a wedgie and a chocolate swirly, just to put him in his place a little. I’m not exactly sure when, during the decade or so I had been hanging around this place, I had switched over to the side of the grizzled veterans. But with my unshaven jaw and bloodshot eyes, I certainly fit the part.

“Hey, I’ve been looking for you! I got some great stuff, it’s really going to blow your mind,” he chirped.

“Sounds swell, Jimmy. We’ll be sure to get it in tomorrow’s Daily Planet.”

“Huh?” he said, adding a head tilt. The Superman reference was lost on him. I was beginning to realize why these interns made me feel so old.

“Never mind. Why don’t you step into my office?”

He looked around, confused.

“It’s an expression,” I said and pointed to an empty chair across from my desk. “Take a seat.”

Jimmy-uh, sorry, Ruthie … uh, I mean, Geoff-gleefully took his place and opened up his notebook.

“Okay, first, let’s just get something out of the way,” he said. “Pregnancy tests don’t come back positive in toilet water. I spent two hours last night on Google researching it. I even tested my own toilet. It came back negative.”

He looked at me earnestly and I thought about trying to convince him it was just Newark toilet water-you know, something in the aquifer that supplied the city’s drinking water. But it was time to let him off the hook.

“Yeah, you got me,” I said.

“Why would you do that to me?”

“Look, Ruthie … first of all, you know everyone is calling you Ruthie, right?” I asked.

He gave me a dejected look and said, “Yeah.”

“Don’t worry about it. Around here, nicknaming is a form of flattery. Anyhow, I know I might have misled you a little bit, and I’m sorry. But I’m also not sorry. You were obviously spying for Tina, and I didn’t want her to know what I was up to.”

“It was kind of a douche move.”

“You’re right. And, okay, really I am sorry. But … look, I don’t want to sound like I’m lecturing, especially when I’m the one in the wrong, but you’ve got to understand that editors are … well, they have their usefulness at times. Then there are times when it’s best they not know everything. So I might have just needed you to spin your wheels for a little while.”

“And the Good Neighbors piece? Was that more wheel-spinning?”

“No, that was actually a big favor. And I appreciate it.”

“Okay, so maybe now you owe me a favor?” he asked.

He said it tentatively, like a good little intern should. But he had played me rather nicely. I was beginning to appreciate that Ruthie Ginsburg just might have the chops to make it in this business.

“Maybe I do,” I said. “What did you have in mind?”

“It’s what I was trying to tell you about before. It came from an interview I did with these kids who were hanging out on the corner by the town houses. Have you ever heard of red dot guns?”

“Uh, no.”

“Well, from what these corner boys were telling me, they’re all the rage in the hood. All the skels are using them.”

I laughed-albeit internally-at Ruthie using the word “skels.” He had been watching too many cop shows.

“So, what, Red Dot Guns is the hot new gun manufacturer? Like Magnum or Colt or something?” I asked.

“No, it’s an actual red dot that’s been branded into the butt of the gun handle. One of the kids showed it to me and that’s all it is, just a red dot. But they say everyone wants their gun to have one.”

“I still don’t get it. What’s so special about this red dot?”

“I don’t know,” Ruthie admitted. “Maybe it’s just one of those weird ghetto fashion things? I’ll ask the next time I see them. We’ll obviously have to do some more reporting…”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” making a “T” with my hands, the internationally accepted gesture to call for a timeout. “What do you mean ‘we’?”

“That’s the favor. I want you to work with me. I think this could be a really cool story and a great clip for me to have. But you know how things go around here. I’m the intern. They want me to do Good Neighbors, write about car accidents, and leave the heavy lifting to guys like you. But if you and I were to do it together…”

I grinned.

“Well played, young Ginsburg, well played,” I said. “I got a few other things on my plate right now. But as soon as I come up for air, we can work on it. It sounds like a fascinating glimpse into thug culture.”

“Okay. Great.”

Thinking our conversation was over, I began moving my mouse to knock the screen saver off my computer. But Ruthie was still sitting there, looking at me expectantly.

“One more thing,” he said.

“Yeeeessss?”

“I still have, like, half a dozen pregnancy tests in my car. I got them on sale and they can’t be returned. Do you know what I should do with them?”

I couldn’t help myself. “Yeah,” I said. “Give them to Tina.”

* * *

It took an hour to transcribe the tripe I got from the press conference and then mold it into something that would clear the very low hurdle of the All-Slop’s quality standards.

By the time I was done, I had concluded that my first order of business needed to be a visit to Dr. Raul Ibanez, the one man who might be able to enlighten me about my unanswered press conference question. I hoped he would be more talkative than he was the last time I had seen him. Alas, I was out of clever ideas as to how to make that happen.

So, lacking a better plan, I decided to go with a direct assault. I fortified myself with a stop at a local convenience store on my way-and, really, what’s wrong with having two MoonPies for lunch? — and was soon parked on the street outside the Essex County Medical Examiner’s Office. I was going in the front door this time.

I’m often astounded by what you can get away with when you’re a well-dressed white man who moves fast and acts like he knows what he’s doing. As I got out of my car, I reminded myself I had faked my way into tougher places than this. So my plan, quite simply, was to keep walking toward Ibanez’s office until someone stopped me.

Hence, I didn’t pay attention to the security guard at the front desk, and he returned the favor. Then I passed a pair of people in lab coats who didn’t give me a second glance, either. I took a guess that Ibanez’s office would be on the top floor, but I eschewed the elevator-the passengers would have too long to study me-and instead took the emergency stairs, charging up them without hesitation.

And that, conveniently enough, is where I bumped into Dr. Ibanez, standing on the third-floor landing, talking on his cell phone. He wasn’t looking at me any more carefully than anyone else, and I practically had to plow into him to get him to stop.

“Hi, Doctor, nice to see you again,” I said.

The reaction I received assured me Raul Ibanez’s startle reflex was in perfect working order. He even jumped back a little.

“I have to go,” he said into the phone, then stammered, “Did you … how did you get in here?”

“With my legs. No one stopped me.”

“I told you last night I can’t comment.”

“Things have changed since last night.”

“I still can’t … it’s … it’s improper for you to even be here.”

“Doc, just give me a second,” I said. “I’m sorry to ambush you like this, but I really don’t have a choice. If I try to go through proper channels, I’ll get blown off.”

“Well, that’s not my problem. You’re still going to have to-”

I cut him off: “Captain Boswell said at a press conference just now that Fusco killed himself with his service weapon. He didn’t have his service weapon, okay?”

“What are-”

“The day before he was killed, Mike Fusco told me he had been placed on administrative leave. His captain made it out like it was some kind of mental health thing. Maybe she just wanted him out of the way so she could investigate him for Kipps’s murder. I don’t know.

“Point is, when he was placed on leave, he was forced to hand in his gun. He told me that, explicitly. So I guess I just want to know: Are you absolutely sure that was his service weapon?”

Ibanez studied me for a moment, and I watched as his posture made the subtle shift from defensive to accepting. Finally he said, “The better question is: Are you absolutely sure he was the one who fired it?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look, it’s probably good you found me here. This just happens to be where the cell phone reception is best. If you had made it all the way up to my office, I would have had to throw you out. There’s a damn leak in this place somewhere, and I sure as hell don’t want anyone thinking it’s me. So I can’t-”

“No one will ever know we spoke,” I assured him. “Just like no one has figured out-or will figure out-who my last leak was.”

“Okay.” He stopped for another few seconds, then again said, “Okay. I’m only telling you this because the NPD is trying to jam stuff down my throat, just like they did with the Kipps case. They want me to shut the hell up and rule the manner of death suicide-even after I told them what I’m about to tell you. And I just can’t go for that this time. So I need you to take this and made a big stink with it.”

“I’ll do my best,” I promised.

“Okay, to answer your question, it is his gun. We matched the serial numbers and everything. We haven’t test-fired it yet, but I’m sure it’ll match the slugs recovered at the scene, just like I’m sure there won’t be any other prints on it besides his. Whoever did this was being pretty careful. Really careful, in a lot of ways. But not careful enough.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, let’s start with the obvious. The decedent had powder burns around the entrance wound, so we know the gun was fired from close proximity. The gun was discovered on the floor next to him, but that’s not unusual-the gun is actually only found in the victim’s hand in about one out of every four suicides. So this was set up to look like a suicide.”

“But you’re saying it’s not?”

“That’s right. A lot of things happen when a gun goes off. There’s gunshot residue. There are what we call cylinder gap effects from where exploding gas escapes the gun. The recoil of the gun can leave marks on the hand that, in a suicide, don’t go away like they do in a living person. The recoil can also cause injury to the hand, particularly in the webbing. You follow me?”

“So far, yeah.”

“Okay, in this case, did the decedent fire a gun? Yes, it would appear he did. The grip of the gun was clearly imprinted on his palm, as we would expect. There was also gunshot residue on the hand-I’ll get back to that in a second. But I’d bet my house that gun didn’t go off in his hand until he was already dead. The blood was wrong.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you bring a gun up under your chin and fire the trigger at close range,” he said, miming the act with his own hand, “there is going to be blood-kind of like a fine mist-that spatters back onto your hand. How much blood will change based on the caliber of the gun and the tip of bullet used. But my spatter analyst is telling me there’s no blood on Fusco’s hand. None.”

“And no blood means-”

“Wait, there’s more. We got this body early, and I made it our number one priority, so I’ve had people working it all morning. Okay, so no blood. Also, like I said, there’s a problem with the gunshot residue. This is a little more art than science sometimes, but this one was pretty clear. In a suicide you expect to see a certain pattern under the microscope from the swabs you take of the gun hand, particularly on the back of the hand. But in this case, there was a big area on the back of the hand where there was almost no residue at all. And you know what that, along with no blood, tells you?”

“Not … not really.”

Ibanez, who was relating all this with the joy of a scientist who has made a discovery, finished: “It tells you there’s only one possible scenario, or at least only one I can come up with. The perp had watched enough CSI to know there needed to be gunshot residue on Fusco’s hand. So first the perp killed Fusco, then he put the murder weapon in Fusco’s hand, wrapped his hand around Fusco’s, then fired the gun a second time.”

Which explains why Lawrence Taylor’s biggest fan heard two gunshots.

“You’d testify to that scenario in a court of law?” I asked.

“Sure would. And I’m sure the defense attorney would try to shred me,” he said, cracking a smile. “But the science is clear. Mike Fusco didn’t kill himself.”

They weren’t supposed to miss.

For the guys in the silver Mercedes, that had been a mistake. A rookie mistake, yes, but a mistake all the same. They weren’t trying to scare the newspaper reporter. They weren’t trying to shoot up the house behind him or the cars in front of him or any of the other numerous targets they hit. They certainly weren’t trying to merely scare him, either.

They had been hired to kill him. Their employer, Red Dot Enterprises, had been quite explicit: if they killed Carter Ross, they’d all be given brand-new guns. But they would only get paid if Ross was dead.

And they missed. Even when they had been tipped off as to exactly where Ross was going to be, they flat-out missed. Fifteen times.

It turns out drive-by shootings are not as easy as the movies make them look. Start with the “drive-by” part: it supposes the car is moving. And without the proper training, shooting someone from a moving vehicle is not easy. Most people have a hard time figuring out how much to lead a wide receiver in a game of touch football, and that’s just for a person running perhaps ten miles an hour. Trying to make the same kind of calculations in a car going thirty for a bullet that will travel faster than the speed of sound is that much trickier.

That was the first degree of difficulty. The second was that they couldn’t risk being identified. Kill some no-good punk drug dealer and most folks in Newark get a quick case of myopia. They figure he had it coming. Kill a newspaper reporter and someone is going to come up with twenty-twenty vision. So the Mercedes guys couldn’t afford to have the window rolled down more than just a crack, which made aiming a matter of guesswork.

The third degree of difficulty was the gun itself. In truth, they didn’t even know what kind of gun it was. Guns weren’t their thing. That was the Red Dot Enterprise guys’ specialty. All the guys in the silver Mercedes knew was that their piece was a bitty little thing, with a snub-nosed barrel-a Saturday Night Special, as the media so derisively referred to that kind of firearm. Even under the best of circumstances, it wasn’t particularly accurate.

Take all those factors and add their general ineptitude with this sort of thing, and it wasn’t hard to understand why they had missed so badly. It would have been something approaching a miracle if they had actually killed him-a hundred to one shot, especially with that popgun.

They knew before they even rounded the corner, as that fifteenth shot was still echoing, that they hadn’t killed him. They hoped the Red Dot Enterprise guys maybe wouldn’t find out, but of course they did; Red Dot seemed to know exactly where this Ross guy was at all times, so it knew quickly that Ross was on the move again.

The Mercedes guys worried that perhaps the Red Dot wouldn’t give them a second chance, that they had blown their one and only opportunity to get those free guns. But their contact at Red Dot had been very understanding.

His only request was that they not botch it the second time.