The muzzle flash from Nesbitt’s pistol looks huge on screen, out of all proportion to the tiny size of his.32 caliber ammunition. The flash is caused by unburned power hitting the night air. Erupting in Silvestri’s face, it must have been blinding. He reacts like a blindman, stumbling backward, falling on his backside. Only after he’s on the ground does his gun clear the holster. I remember it differently, the training officer firing from the ground, but watching closely this doesn’t appear to be the case. It’s Farouk who flies into action, Farouk who’s already rushing forward, his bullets shattering the windows of Nesbitt’s Merc. As far as I can tell, the training officer never even fires. Nesbitt slumps forward, just the top of his head visible on camera. He’s dead, struck in the neck by one of Farouk’s.40 caliber rounds.
When the footage ends, I sit with the controller pressed against my cheek, contemplating a replay. I thought I knew what I was going to see. For the most part, I did. But that gesture of Silvestri’s, the backward glance, coupled with the release of his thumb break. . I’m starting to have my doubts.
Nesbitt was clearly worked up. Based on the way things actually went down, there’s no question he was also in the wrong. If I’m right about him seeing Silvestri release the thumb break, though, it helps explain why he thought his only course of action was a preemptive strike. And that backward glance really bothers me. It looks like the unconscious action of a guilty man.
Troubled by my new doubts, I shower and shave. The water makes the scrapes and nicks on my hands and legs burn, scrapes and nicks I didn’t realize I even had.
“You’re getting too old for this,” I tell the reflection in the steamy mirror.
I towel myself dry and do some stretching exercises on the bedroom floor, trying to limber my leg for the day. Bending over, I can just touch the ground without bending my knees, but there’s a nasty pull all down my leg. It feels like a bamboo shoot has been jammed down through the muscles. All I have to do is push the stretch a little further and the pain grows intense. The way it travels along the sciatic line, I imagine digging my hand through the tissue, grabbing hold of the nerve, and yanking it out.
The stretch exacerbates the discomfort at first. After I walk it off, I can feel the leg relaxing into a prickly numbness, about as functional as it gets.
I’ve known cops who had to retire based on back injuries. There’s so much weight to carry, so many demands that even a plainclothes detective can’t keep up. In my mind, there’s always been something pathetic about such cases. I’ve always wondered if the guys whining about their bad backs weren’t goldbricking. Now I’m one of them.
And the stupidity of the fall still gets to me. A man urges me to be careful, and because he’s younger than me and I’m feeling conscious of my age, to defy his expectations I take a leap that ends up confirming both his assumption and my worst fear.
Given time, a man can adapt to just about any pain. I can live with this if I have to. That’s what I tell myself. I can live with it until the day that I can’t.
After I’m dressed, I head downstairs again. Part of me wants to call Wilcox back and get him to watch the video with me. Either he will tell me I’m crazy or he’ll see what I see. If it’s the latter, I reckon he will feel duty-bound to take a second look at the case. I’ll warn him about giving out Tom Englewood’s number, too. That’s a good way to get people killed.
Not that I want to put ideas in Wilcox’s head.
Seeing him again stirred up some feelings. Maybe I’m yearning for the old days when we were still partners and the world seemed so uncomplicated.
The old days.
That was a phrase Jeff used last night. He had insisted that Nesbitt and I were acquainted, that we knew each other from “the old days,” whatever that means. Once the thought lodges in my head, I can’t get it out.
The only photos I remember seeing of Nesbitt were in the newspaper just after the shooting. They didn’t ring a bell at the time, but I wasn’t expecting them to. It’s always possible we knew each other by sight or that-considering his penchant for cloak-and-dagger-I knew him by a different name.
Back to the computer, back to the interminable search results. I click around until only images are displayed, then only the ones with decent resolution. There seem to have been two pictures of Andrew Nesbitt circulating at the time of his death. The more common one depicts a jowly, balding man of sixty with capped teeth and crow’s-feet. His button-down collar bulges at the sides, framing the knot of a regimental tie. I stare at the picture, but there’s nothing familiar.
In the second image, which appears only on a few sites and seems to have been produced in an effort to verify his intelligence claims, a younger Nesbitt stands in a receiving line, shaking hands with the first President Bush, former Director of Central Intelligence. The photo appears to date during Bush’s reelection campaign, so there’s no direct tie to the CIA. His face is leaner and more handsome, his hair thick and jet-black. He sports a full Tom Selleck mustache.
It’s the mustache that does it.
Old days is right.
The summer of 1986, to be exact. I was just twenty-four years old, younger than Jeff is now. A first lieutenant assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division at Ft. Polk, living off base in nearby Leesville, Louisiana. We all knew we had to assist him with whatever he requested, but none of us knew his real name. One of the sergeants, taking into consideration the facial hair, dubbed him Magnum.
I knew Nesbitt after all. And what I remember, I do not like.
Interlude: 1986
The housing block where the cabana boys were quartered wasn’t difficult to locate, not once I started looking. The trick was making do without the help of Sgt. Crewes or anyone likely to report back to him. The man had ears all over the base. I spent a few hours each night camped out in my car, keeping an eye on the block with a starlight scope, all without the sergeant’s knowing. My first surveillance.
I never saw Magnum there, but I spotted a couple of guys I took to be handlers. They escorted the group when it left the building, functioning more like tour guides than guards. Occasionally they went out on errands, returning with groceries or beer or, on one occasion, a van-load of women in high heels and skimpy dresses. Through the scope I couldn’t make out any features-either of the men or the prostitutes they’d procured. That night in particular I left with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach.
“Good-time girls on base?” Crewes said in mock horror. “Something’s gotta be done. Next thing you know, there’ll be dancing.”
“I’m just asking.”
I’d brought up the subject without explaining my interest, saying I’d heard from some of the investigators that it was getting to be a problem.
“You never struck me as the puritanical type, sir.”
“Last time I checked, it was illegal.”
“So it is,” he said thoughtfully. “So it is.”
A day later I was standing at attention in front of Maj. Shattuck’s desk, with the major looking right through me. He didn’t need to say a word, but he did anyway.
“March, I thought we’d gone over this. I told you to steer clear of the man. I told you to have nothing to do with him, that he was dangerous. Do you know something I don’t?”
“No, sir-”
“Because you must think you do, otherwise why go against me on this? I was looking out for you, son, and you’re throwing it in my face.”
“No, sir!”
“What other explanation is there?”
A long silence.
“Explanation, sir? For what, sir?”
Shattuck gave me a withering look of disgust. He opened a file folder lying on the desk before him, wrote a note inside, then slid it away. “From now on, Lieutenant March, you will follow my instructions. You will not have any contact with that man. You will not go anywhere near the housing where his people are quartered. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You mu
st have a pretty high opinion of your abilities,” he said, shaking his head. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”
I did, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted to ask who’d informed him, though I knew the answer had to be Sgt. Crewes. Subtle as I’d attempted to be, I’d given the game away with my questions. I also wanted to know what harm it did to keep an eye on things. Something was going on under our noses that the major didn’t like any more than I did. In fact, while my feelings had been conflicted, he knew that Magnum meant trouble from the start. So why warn me off like this?
“You have nothing to say?” Shattuck asked.
“No, sir.”
“Dismissed.”
I was tempted to drive by the housing block that night, not to stop but to roll by casually and give the place a glance. But I thought of all the other cars parked on the street and remembered the warrant officer who’d been trailing Magnum from the PX. There was no point in bringing aggravation down on my head.
I managed to clock César a couple of times on base, though. Whenever I did, tagging along to see where he was heading. In the mornings I jogged through the picnic tables in search of random encounters, but the cabana boys had moved their party elsewhere.
The one time I spotted Magnum, it was at a bookstore off base. He was browsing through the high-tone foreign policy journals shelved by the newspapers, the ones nobody ever bought, so I ducked into the history section to avoid being spotted. It didn’t work. When I looked up from a volume on warfare in the classical world, Magnum was staring at me from across the store. He winked, then disappeared out the door.
I dropped the picnic detour from my morning path, returning to my old route. On the sidewalk at a quarter past seven, I jogged past a couple of parked cars in front of an officers’ housing unit, swinging wide to avoid a woman who was slipping an overnight bag into an open hatchback. A few steps later I stopped and turned. She shut the hatch before noticing my presence. Her hand went unconsciously to the stud in her nose.
“Excuse me,” I said. “You remember me, don’t you?”
“Of course,” she said, smiling, though I could tell she didn’t. “Good to see you.”
I shook my head. “I’m not a customer, ma’am. We ran into each other about a week ago. You were bolting out of a car, and there I was.”
“Oh.” The smile faded. “That was you? Are you all right? I didn’t-no, of course I didn’t. How could I? Hurt you, I mean.”
“You didn’t hurt me. But I was concerned. You got out of there in a hurry.”
“Yeah, well. .”
“The man in the car. His name is César, right?”
She shrugged. “If you say so. Look, I should probably get out of here.” She nodded at the houses behind me. “This is supposed to be a surgical strike, you know? In and out. No witnesses.”
“How old are you?” I asked.
It was the wrong question to ask. Her cheeks flushed and she started digging in her purse for the car keys.
“No, wait. I’m just trying to help. I want to know what was going on in that car.”
She got the door open, then paused to laugh. “You really are sweet, you know that? I could tell you what was going on, but I wouldn’t want to corrupt your morals. . or put any ideas into your head.”
“You should be careful around that guy.”
“No kidding,” she said. She slammed the door and drove away. For the second time I watched her go. She couldn’t have been more than twenty. A student, maybe. She had a nice car, wore decent clothes, didn’t look at all like my idea of a prostitute. Not that I subscribed to any heart-of-gold hypothesis. Not that I romanticized the underworld or its inhabitants. She just seemed too. . something. Too real to do what she did.
I hadn’t gotten her name. I hadn’t written down her license plate number or anything like that. There was no way of tracking her down after the fact, declaring my identity and giving her some kind of warning to stay off base. With nothing but a sense of confusion, a sense of uneasiness to go on, I took a few steps and kept on running.
I should have tried harder than that.
CHAPTER 18
My union attorney, no stranger to officer-involved shootings, meets me in advance of my official sit-down with Internal Affairs, telling me he’s expecting a walkover. “You’re in the clear on this, no question. If they want to make out that excessive force was used, the fact that you were unfamiliar with the weapon should answer that.” I wish I could share his confidence. As we file into the interview room, I scan the IAD office for Wilcox. He’s nowhere to be seen.
The detective with the tan lines on the side of his head conducts the questioning, with a colleague waiting in the wings to take notes. I brace myself for a grilling, remembering his demeanor at the hospital, but my attorney’s assessment proves prophetic. We work through the events leading up to the shooting step-by-step, without hostility. He asks the questions, I answer, and he moves right on without challenging what I’ve said. After a few minutes, we’re in a comfortable rhythm. My attorney relaxes into his chair.
“Let’s take a break,” the detective says once we’ve gone through the story beginning to end. He sends his colleague out for coffee, then splits for a bathroom break.
The attorney smiles. “I think that went well.”
“I’m just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
When the interview resumes, three more IAD personnel sit down across the table, bringing their total to five. The newcomers are armed with old case files, every shooting I’ve been involved in going back to my days on patrol.
“You’re no stranger to this process,” the tan-lined detective says. “Some cops go through their whole careers without firing a shot in anger. You’re not one of them.”
The attorney’s done his homework. “All of those shootings came back clean according to this very department. You’re not suggesting Internal Affairs dropped the ball, are you?”
“I’m not suggesting anything. It just seems like, if you’re accustomed enough to the process, maybe it gets easier and easier to pull that trigger.”
“It’s hard to imagine any officer in Detective March’s situation acting differently.”
“Perhaps. We’re just concerned that what we’re seeing here is a pattern.”
The lawyer suggests this is something to explore in post-trauma counseling, not an IAD interview room. They spar back and forth in a passionless, technical way, like chess players making well-known moves, fully anticipating each rejoinder. I’m not sure exactly what purpose is served. After ten minutes, they arrive at a draw and agree to suspend the match-for now.
“What was that all about?” I ask in the hallway.
The attorney shakes his head. “What they’re saying is, We’ve got nothing, but we’re not ready to let it go. I was hoping we could get you back to work. Unfortunately they’re going to drag things out as long as possible.”
“And how long is that?”
“It all depends,” he says.
“On what?”
“On whether they find anything or not.”
Wanda receives my update on the Internal Affairs situation without surprise, thanks me for dropping by, and dismisses me with a wave of her hand. “Until they give you a clean bill of health, I don’t think you should be seen around here.” I ask halfheartedly about administrative duties, not wanting to be stuck at my desk. She doesn’t even respond.
“I’m just gonna check in with Cavallo,” I say. “Make sure she doesn’t have any questions about the case load.”
Cavallo’s work space looks serene and tidy, all the paperwork stacked just so. She motions for me to wait as she finishes up a phone call. From her end of the conversation I surmise she’s going back and forth with the crime lab about the priority of evidence. She hangs up the phone with a satisfied smile.
“The thing I love about homicide is all your requests go to the top of the list.”
“Theoretically,” I say.
T
here hasn’t been any progress on the Ford homicide, she tells me, and the last she heard from the team investigating Lorenz’s death, they hadn’t come up with an identification on the man with the skull ring, either. “Your open IAD case is the only thing keeping them from declaring victory. If they could, I think they’d just as soon call it even and go home.”
“Theresa, I need to bring you into the loop.”
Her eyebrows rise. “Meaning what? You’ve been holding something back?”
“We can’t do this here. Can you get away sometime? And I need you to do me a favor, too. I’m a little wary about approaching Wilcox directly, but you two got along when we were all working to bring down Reg Keller. I want you to set up a meeting with him so I can crash it.”
“You’re asking for a lot.”
“In return I’ll give a lot back. I have some new information that leads me to believe we missed something the first time around with Keller. It might have a bearing on your case. Since Wilcox did all the digging into Keller’s finances, we need his cooperation.”
“You think ambushing him is the way to get it?”
“I tried knocking on the front door.”
“He wouldn’t answer?”
I catch Wanda watching us through her open door. “I’ll tell you later. Just set something up and call me, okay? I’ll be eternally grateful.”
To her credit she doesn’t make me beg. We’ve been down this road before. Without losing any of her skepticism or even bothering to hide it, she still agrees to help out. “But if you have been holding back on me. .”
The meeting takes place in a downtown deli, one of the many that serves the lunch throng before closing up shop at three o’clock. They’ve commandeered a table for two and pulled up a third chair as if expecting someone. Wilcox doesn’t look surprised to see me. Cavallo must have tipped him off to the plan, uncomfortable with the idea of luring him under false pretenses. The fact that he’s still showed up is a good sign.
“You want anything?” Cavallo asks, lifting a half-eaten sandwich.
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