Once In, Never Out

by Dan Mahoney

  Vernon did that all the time, McKenna knew. He made his money on his seminars, but he enhanced his reputation by helping cops solve their difficult homicides for free.

  “Did you know Mullen, Vernon?” Thor asked.

  “No, never worked with him and I don’t think I ever met him.”

  “Then you probably never did meet him,” Hunt volunteered. “He was the kind of guy you’d remember.”

  “How long did you and Mullen work together?” McKenna asked Hunt.

  “Almost six years.”

  “Were you close?”

  “Yeah, we were close. I would have said I knew him better than anyone, but he still managed to surprise me.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “April twenty-first, 1991. I drove him home from court after he made bail.”

  “Did you know he was gonna run?”

  The question caught Hunt by surprise and he thought a moment before he answered. “No, but I wasn’t too surprised when he did. He was facing some time and his life was falling apart.”

  “Have you heard from him since then?”

  “Can we talk about this later?” Hunt asked. “I worked all day yesterday, it was a long flight, and I haven’t slept in a couple of days. Today is supposed to be my day off and instead I’m in Iceland on two hours’ notice.”

  This guy knows something that he doesn’t want to talk about, McKenna thought. But he has to. Protecting a murderer is different than standing by your old partner who just happens to be an extortionist, and Hunt knows that. But I don’t mind giving him the kid-glove treatment for a while. “Sure, it can wait. We’ll take you to the hotel for some food and rest. We can talk later.”

  After they arrived at the Saga, McKenna invited Hunt and Vernon to breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Hunt declined the offer, stating that he wanted to shower and then order from room service before his nap.

  Vernon also declined the breakfast invitation. Food and rest hadn’t been his reasons for coming to Iceland. He had come to work and started right in as soon as he checked into his room. Brunette had given him the old Dwyer case folder right before the flight, but Vernon had been sitting next to a teenage girl on the plane and he had known that the crime scene and autopsy photos would have horrified her. He had done no more than browse through that case.

  There was a lot to be done and Vernon preferred to work alone, so McKenna and Thor left him in his room with the three case folders and went to breakfast in the Saga’s restaurant. They ate and talked for an hour and were just about to leave when Janus found them and sat at their table. “I’ve got some news,” he announced.

  “Good or bad?” McKenna asked.

  “You tell me. The British government will go for your deal, but they’ve attached some stipulations.”

  “Have they implicated O’Bannion?”

  “Not enough to convict him in a court of law, and certainly not in an Irish court.”

  “Okay, what else do they want?”

  “A time limit. They say they’ll give you all the assistance they can, but you’ve only got a month.”

  “So if I can squeeze O’Bannion and get some help from him, then I’ve got just a month to get Mullen?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “And if I don’t get him in that month?”

  “Then they’ll repudiate any deal you might make with O’Bannion and go after him.”

  Very clever, McKenna thought. If I get O’Bannion to cooperate, then he’s implicated himself out of his own mouth. Either way, the Brits win. “Anything else?”

  “If you do find Mullen, they’re in on the arrest.”

  “No matter where I get him?”

  “No matter where. They don’t care about your extortion charges in the U.S. They want him before a British court.”

  “I don’t think Ray will be real happy with that, but I guess we’ll have to live with it.”

  “Good,” Janus said, standing up. “Inspector Rollins will be at your room at three with everything he’s got.”

  Dennis Hunt had given McKenna Mullen’s bulky personnel folder, but McKenna didn’t want to go over it with Thor; he preferred to examine the NYPD’s dirty laundry alone. He didn’t tell Thor how he felt, but the Icelander understood. After breakfast he told McKenna that he had some paperwork to catch up on. He would be back at noon to hear what Vernon had to say.

  McKenna sat at the desk in the presidential suite and placed Mullen’s folder in front of him. The thick manila envelope was taped and sealed with Brunette’s signature scrawled across the flap. That meant two things to McKenna: Brunette had taken the time to review the folder and there were things in it that he didn’t want Hunt browsing through on the flight.

  As McKenna unwrapped the file, a white envelope fell out. Ray had scrawled “Bullshit” across the front of it, so he got McKenna’s curiosity right away.

  The envelope contained copies of Mullen’s birth certificate and his high school diploma. The birth certificate verified that Michael Mullen, the first child of Thomas and Anna Mullen, had been born in L’Hôpital du Sacre Coeur in Quebec on May 23, 1952. His diploma showed that he had graduated with honors from a Quebec high school, Lycée de Ste. Anne, in June of 1970. The two documents were titled and captioned in both English and French and both were certified copies.

  McKenna smiled as he replaced them in the envelope. My pal and I are on the same wavelength, he thought. Once Ray found out our Mike Mullen is an IRA bomber, he also suspects our Mullen is not the real Mullen. Ray knows that the IRA is a close-knit group who trust nobody they hadn’t grown up with, so he’s asking himself the same question that Thor and I asked ourselves: Why would the IRA, an organization with no shortage of bomb experts, take a chance on hiring an unknown crooked cop to pull one of their major capers? One likely answer is that whoever-he-is isn’t an unknown to them. He was always IRA and always would be, no matter what he was doing or how he felt about it. Ray knows as well as I do that the IRA’s motto is “Once in, never out,” and they live by that simple rule.

  As McKenna unwrapped the manila envelope, he saw that it actually contained two folders. The thinner one was Mullen’s personnel folder. More bulky was the case folder that documented the unsuccessful hunt for the fugitive undertaken by the Internal Affairs Division. McKenna decided to start with the thinner folder.

  Beginning the personnel folder were the worksheets compiled during Mullen’s applicant investigation, the first order of business as far as McKenna was concerned. As he had feared, he found that it was a shoddy job. There was a lot of information; all the boxes had been checked and all the bases had been covered, but it was still a shoddy job.

  As McKenna read, he learned that Mullen had taken the NYPD written test while still in the army. After his discharge he had moved to the Bronx and taken a job as an electrician’s apprentice while awaiting his appointment to the NYPD. The investigator had interviewed Mullen’s employer and had received a glowing report from him. He had also interviewed Mullen’s neighbors in the Bronx and got much the same information. Mullen’s driver’s license had been verified and his driving record was checked; he had never received any moving violations, nor even a parking ticket.

  Mullen had been fingerprinted and his prints had been checked nationwide and also submitted to the Canadian authorities. Once again, Mullen was found to be almost too good to be true. He had never been arrested or been in any trouble of any kind.

  Mullen had been naturalized as a U.S. citizen while he had been in the army and copies of his naturalization papers were attached to his background investigation. Also attached was a copy of Mullen’s DD-214, his separation certificate from the army. After inspecting it, McKenna found, as he had expected, that Mullen had been a model soldier. He had spent his entire four years in the U.S., attending the NCO Leadership Course and Demolition School during his hitch. He had earned the Good Conduct Medal and had been discharged from Fort Dix, New Jersey, in February of 1975. Th
e investigator had located and interviewed Mullen’s commanding officer at Fort Dix, a Major Schaeffer. According to Schaeffer, Mullen was one of the best soldiers he had ever seen: he was neat, well disciplined, personable, a good leader, and he knew more about explosives than anybody else in the unit. Just like everyone else interviewed, Schaeffer had thought that Mullen would make an excellent cop.

  Based on what he had read in the reports, McKenna would have agreed—except for one thing: Not one person who had known Mullen before he had come to the U.S. from Canada had been located and interviewed. As far as McKenna was concerned, that glaring deficiency characterized the investigation as a shoddy affair.

  As required, of course, the investigator had tried. But it had been a halfhearted attempt rife with documented excuses. The problem was that the excuses came, almost word for word, from Mullen. According to Mullen, he knew almost nobody in Canada and he couldn’t provide the investigator with many Canadian references. His story was that he had grown up in an English-speaking neighborhood in French Quebec; in 1970, right after his graduation from high school, his family had moved to Toronto because French had become the official language of the province of Quebec. He gave the names of a few neighbors in Toronto and Quebec who, he said, might remember him, but he was sketchy on their addresses.

  According to the investigator, virtually every English-speaking neighbor of the Mullen family had also moved. None of those mentioned by Mullen during his investigation could be located. Just weeks after the move, according to Mullen, his parents had been killed in a plane crash in the Canary Islands. Since he had no other family and knew hardly anybody in Toronto, Mullen had told his investigator that he had come to the U.S. to start a new life in the U.S. Army.

  To verify Mullen’s story, the investigator had done some research on the plane crash. After finding that a Thomas and Anna Mullen had indeed been listed among the victims, Mullen had been approved as a candidate for the NYPD and his investigation had been marked complete. Three months later Mullen was in the police academy.

  It was all as McKenna had suspected, with one ironic footnote. The sergeant who had supervised Mullen’s investigation in 1975 was George Mosley, the same man who had supervised Meaghan Maher’s botched missing persons investigation twenty-four years later. McKenna was sure that Brunette had also noticed the signature at the end of the applicant investigation report and was just as sure that Mosley’s police career was rapidly coming to a miserable end. Someone had to pay the price for letting an IRA terrorist join the NYPD, and Mosley was McKenna’s candidate for that dubious distinction. Worse yet, McKenna was certain that Mike Mullen was not the man’s real name. There had been a Mike Mullen who had been born in Quebec and who had gone to school there, a man whose parents had been killed in a plane crash shortly after moving to Toronto, but that real Mike Mullen was not the same man who had joined the U.S. Army and the NYPD. McKenna figured that young man was probably long dead, killed for his identity.

  After spending an hour going through Mullen’s two-month background investigation, it took McKenna only fifteen minutes to examine the rest of Mullen’s seventeen-year police career. After graduating from the academy near the top of his class, Mullen had been assigned to Fort Apache, the 41st Precinct in the Bronx. He had done well there, making many arrests and earning many medals. His sergeants had noticed and appreciated him, marking his evaluations “Excellent officer, performs above standards.” His precinct CO had also noticed him and had approved Mullen’s request for assignment to the Narcotics Division, thereby placing him on the fast track to the detective’s gold shield.

  Mullen did the rest. After two years of locking up and convicting drug dealers in Queens, he had been rewarded with the promotion and assigned to the 50th Detective Squad, once again back in the Bronx. His stay there had been short, but notable. His squad commander had evaluated him as “A hard-working, knowledgeable detective.”

  One year later Mullen had requested assignment to the Bomb Squad. After the required interview and aptitude testing, he had been accepted as a real find. He had then been sent to the Federal Ordnance and Training Center in Alabama for the standard three-month training course mandated for all Bomb Squad investigators throughout the country. In retrospect, McKenna noticed that it was in Alabama that Mullen’s pride caused him to step out of character. He did so well in the training that, upon graduation, his instructor had written on his evaluation, “This detective could have taught this course.”

  Right after his return from training, Mullen’s personnel folder documented a change in his social status and address. In 1982 he had married Kathleen Murphy and they had bought a house together in the Woodlawn section of the Bronx.

  McKenna found Mullen’s choice of neighborhood interesting. Woodlawn was a very middle-class, very Irish neighborhood, and it was also the neighborhood in which Dwyer’s killer had dumped the stolen car after the murder. If Mullen was an Irish-born terrorist looking to hide any connection to his past life, then ’82 was the year he had felt confident enough in his new identity to allow himself some small solace, a return to his roots. Living in Woodlawn was as close as one could get in New York to living in Ireland.

  The medical benefits records continued the story. In 1985, Kathleen delivered their first child, James, at Mount Sinai Hospital. In 1987 she was back again and left with their second boy, John. But it wasn’t always a happy occasion that brought Kathleen to Mount Sinai. In ’88 she had been hospitalized for treatment of a broken left forearm and a broken jaw, injuries that she had received when she had fallen down the stairs in their house.

  In 1989 Mullen had been promoted to detective second grade. It was also the year in which Kathleen had her first nervous breakdown. Her treatment had required three weeks in the psychiatric ward at Mount Sinai and another four months as an outpatient.

  In 1990 the city paid for a year of marriage counseling for the Mullen family, but the marriage was apparently a lost cause. Kathleen’s address had remained the same, but Mullen had a new one by the end of the year. He had moved to an apartment in Woodlawn, two blocks from his home, his wife, and his kids.

  In 1991, right after Mullen’s arrest, the city had picked up one final tab when Kathleen had suffered her second nervous breakdown. She had spent another month in Mount Sinai and had left the day the benefits ended, the day Mullen was fired. The last items in the folder were Mullen’s arrest report and his Notice of Dismissal.

  All the good things that McKenna had expected to see in the personnel folder of a rising detective were there, but there was one unexpected item that caused McKenna some concern—in his seventeen years with the department, Mullen had never failed to shoot anything less than a perfect 100 during his annual pistol training and qualification.

  McKenna had learned enough to recognize that the man would not be taken without a fight. Given a choice, fisticuffs with the bruiser or even a knife fight would be preferable to a gunfight with him. McKenna made himself a cup of coffee at the service bar before he opened the thick folder and began going through it.

  The IAD hadn’t done a much better job than the Applicant Investigation Section had done seventeen years before them. They had put in a lot of time and had generated a bundle of reports justifying their efforts, but McKenna concluded that they had failed because their hunt had been based on an erroneous assumption. IAD had figured that they were simply looking for a good cop gone bad, and that was why they had never gotten close to capturing Mullen. They had taken him at face value. Making matters worse, McKenna quickly saw that IAD had relied on his applicant investigation as a reference point, believing everything in Mosley’s inept investigation long ago.

  For three months after Mullen had jumped bail twenty investigators, supervised by an Inspector O’Shaughnessy, had been assigned to find him. They had taken all the logical steps. They contacted the U.S. State Department and were told that Mullen had never applied for a passport, so they had assumed that he must have been hiding out somewhere
in the U.S. or Canada and had concentrated their efforts there. They had interviewed his wife and had found her to be uncooperative, so they had speculated that she might have had some idea of his whereabouts. Following that line of reasoning, they had put a tap on her phone and had surveilled her for months, but got nowhere.

  It seemed to McKenna that IAD had interviewed every person who could possibly have known Mullen in New York. In the folder were the reports written following the interviews of thirty-four cops he had worked with over the years, including every member of the Bomb Squad. Each had stated that they had no idea where Mullen was.

  Mullen’s friends and neighbors in Woodlawn had also been interviewed, with the same results. No one had seen him or heard from him since he had jumped bail.

  Mullen had been described by many who knew him as a social drinker, a man who liked to while away a few spare hours in the Woodlawn bars, so every place he had been known to frequent had also been placed under periodic surveillance. Still no Mullen. After two frustrating months, IAD had subpoenaed Mullen’s banking, credit, and telephone records. What they had found led them no closer to him. Mullen had cleaned out his bank account prior to skipping, but that only yielded him two thousand dollars. At the time he still had credit cards and telephone calling cards, but wherever he was, he hadn’t been using them.

  By the end of the third month O’Shaughnessy had been at his wit’s end. In desperation he sent two teams to Canada, one to Toronto and the other to Quebec. They had returned two weeks later without having found even one person who remembered Mullen, no less seen him.

  The hunt for Mullen had been a bust, an expensive and embarrassing affair for the Internal Affairs Division. The report scaling down the investigation was near the end of the folder. O’Shaughnessy had stated on paper that the expense and manpower involved in trying to apprehend a man who was, after all, only a con artist and an extortionist, could no longer be justified. He had recommended that, pending further developments, the case be marked “Inactive, subject to annual evaluation and review.” He had concluded by stating that a character like Mullen, with no apparent means of support, was bound to reveal his location by getting into trouble sooner or later. When he did, IAD would be there to apprehend him.