While the City Burns (Flynn & Levy Book 2)

by David DeLee

  “I’ll tell you what,” Flynn said. “Mr. Goodall, you can come inside. Alone.”

  The crowd verbally protested.

  “Alone,” Flynn repeated, louder. “Otherwise, we’re done here.”

  Theodore Goodall took a moment to think, studying Flynn’s face as he did so.

  Flynn returned the unflinching stare, conveying his most serious expression. He lifted one eyebrow. “Agreed?”

  Goodall pressed his lips into a thin, unhappy line. “Agreed.”

  He stepped back from the door, pushing back some of his own people to make room so Flynn could swing the door outward. Goodall sidestepped through the narrow opening provided, even as a second man pushed his way in before Flynn could pull the door shut again.

  The guards rushed forward and relocked the doors using keys held on a retractable metal wire.

  Flynn turned away from the mob now pounding on the glass with their fists. He waved a hand toward the center of the lobby, away from the door and the news cameras.

  Goodall swished his wet trench coat around his legs like it was a cloak and crossed the lobby to where Levy stood. With each step, his expensive spit-shine black shoes clicked loudly over the polished tile floor.

  The man who’d slipped inside with him followed in lock step beside him.

  Flynn stepped up in front of Goodall, invading his personal space.

  Goodall had a skim of black hair dotted with rain pellets. Under his expensive trench coat he wore an undoubtedly equally expensive dark suit, a white dress shirt that was so white Flynn thought about putting on his sunglasses, and a red and blue striped tie pinned in place with an obscenely large gold and diamond tie tac. He wore diamond studs in his ears and Flynn checked the man’s sleeves. Yup, matching gold and diamond cufflinks, too.

  Flynn gave the second man a disapproving glare. “I said alone.”

  “I don’t go anywhere without Sonny by my side,” Goodall said.

  Sonny Tillman.

  He’d been Goodall’s sports agent back in the day. Lately, he served as the civil rights leader’s attorney and right hand man. Skinny as a stick, he wore an ugly brown-striped suit. Expensive, Flynn thought, but not as expensive as his boss’s. He had a white pocket square in his pocket and wore thick black-rimmed glasses that somehow managed to look fashionable on his dark face.

  “This is my partner, Detective Levy,” Flynn said. “We’re the lead detectives handling the investigation into DeShawn Beach’s death.”

  “Whitewash, you mean.”

  Flynn smiled. It held no mirth. “That’s a little premature, Teddy, even for you.”

  “Truth hurts.” Anger flared in Goodall’s eyes. “And don’t call me that. You know I don’t like it. It’s disrespectful.”

  Flynn stared back without saying anything.

  “Mr. Goodall,” Levy said, giving her partner a curious look. “We’re not adversaries here. We all want to know what happened.”

  “Says the fox guarding the hen house.” Goodall let his eyes roam over her, a smirk on his face. It didn’t take a mind reader to know what he was thinking. Flynn fisted his hand.

  “You couldn’t be more wrong about that, Mr. Goodall,” Levy said. “I’m with Internal Affairs. I’ve spent my career investigating corrupt cops, getting them to pay for their crimes. I can assure you, the NYPD is determined to know exactly what happened, and if we find any evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the officer involved, he will answer for it.”

  Goodall clapped. The sound echoed in the large open lobby. “Nice speech, Detective. If only I could believe one. Single. Word of it.”

  “You have my assurances,” Levy said.

  “Prove it,” he challenged. “Release the name of the officer.”

  “We’re not prepared to do that yet,” she said.

  “Making his case,” Tillman said.

  Goodall nodded. “So long as you speak for the NYPD, what you say means less than nothing.”

  “Let’s cut through all the bullshit, Teddy,” Flynn said. “What are you after?”

  “What I always want, Detective Flynn. For the NYPD to admit their officer willfully and intentionally gunned down yet another young black man in their never ending vendetta to keep the black community down.”

  “Even if that’s not the case?”

  “It’s always the case, Detective,” Goodall said.

  “Even you can’t believe that,” Flynn said.

  “This case will get a fair and impartial investigation,” Levy added.

  “Yes, Detective Levy. It will.” Goodall smiled. “And I’m here to make sure it does. Mark my words, whatever it takes, black justice will be served. Now, take me to see Eleanor Beach.”

  Baruch Charney Vladeck II

  Jackson Street

  Lower East Side, Manhattan

  Monday, November 27th 11:47 a.m.

  WITH FLYNN ONCE MORE behind the wheel of their tired unmarked Charger, they drove from the ME’s Office, making their way to the Vladeck Housing Project crime scene.

  They’d waited until responding units had arrived and the uniformed show of force quickly dispersed the crowd of chanting Goodall supporters and the media from around the front entrance of the building. Then, reluctantly, Flynn and Levy left Theodore Goodall and Sonny Tillman in the company of Eleanor Beach and her son, Trey.

  The misty rain had picked up and was now a steady drizzle. The weather forecast on 1010 WINS warned the storm wasn’t over, that more blowing wind and heavy rain was to come. Flynn snapped the radio off. He refused to walk any further in the foul weather than he had to, so he hooked the car in close to the curb on Jackson Street, creating a parking spot that partially blocked a fire hydrant but put them directly across from where the road intersected with Cherry Street.

  Flynn threw the NYPD placard on the dash.

  Still they had to walk the half block to the fenced-off private roadway between the two buildings that would take them to the crime scene. Following the route Stokes had allegedly—Flynn reminded himself to be politically correct—chased DeShawn Beach. The access gate between the roadway and Cherry Street was open with yellow police tape strung across it. In his statement, Stokes reported that it had been chained closed, that he’d had to haul himself over the fence.

  A patrolman stood guard at the gate. He wore a rain slicker and looked miserable standing in the rain holding a plastic covered clipboard.

  Flynn and Levy signed the log-in sheet, recording their names and badge numbers.

  “Was this gate open when you came on duty?” Flynn asked.

  “Naw. CSU opened it up to bring their stuff through.”

  “Thanks.” He and Levy stepped through the twin stripes of wet yellow tape like boxers entering a ring.

  Midway down the roadway a large square tent was set up. The sides were rolled up on three sides. Underneath were two six-foot long folding tables where two heavy-duty, metal-encased laptops sat. The tables were also littered with a measuring wheel, notebooks, a utility tool, spray paint cans, flashlights, yellow placards, evidence seal and tape, boxes of gloves and booties, and two computer tablets in sealed plastic bags.

  On the corner of one table there was a steel coffee urn, a stack of overturned Styrofoam cups, a tray full of sugar packets, powdered creamers, and those little red plastic stirrers. Under the table was a plastic-lined garbage can. Power lines snaked from the tent to a small, blue and white trailer parked on the side of the pavement. It was marked “Crime Scene Investigation” with the NYPD logo on the side.

  Flynn noticed the far side of the roadway was also closed off with crime scene tape, two blue police sawhorses, and a second patrolman. A couple of onlookers huddled in the rain under a cluster of colorful umbrellas. The weather kept the regular lookie-loos away, and the news of what happened here—a white police officer shooting and killing an unarmed black youth—hadn’t hit the mainstream media yet.

  Two powerful work lamps were set up but turned off, unnecessary in the day
light hours despite the cloudy, rainy conditions. They faced the horseshoe indentation of the building where Stokes had shot and killed DeShawn Beach. The lights would have lit up the area like a night game at Yankee stadium during the hours before dawn.

  Several people clad in thick, rubber rain boots and blue CSU windbreakers covered with clear plastic rain ponchos moved about the scene, traversing pathways from the tent to the CSU trailer to a smaller tent erected over where DeShawn Beach had drawn his last breath.

  A detective-specialist first grade Flynn knew named Kate Gilbert stood under the tent. She leaned over one of the tables, flipping back and forth through soggy papers clipped to a clipboard.

  Unique to the NYPD, the Crime Scene Unit was not staffed by civilian employees, but with specially-trained police officers, detectives mostly. It operated under the Forensic Investigations Division run by a Deputy Commander, had city-wide jurisdiction, and was commanded by a Captain.

  Against regulations, Detective Gilbert smoked a cigarette. She squinted against the curl of gray smoke drifting skyward. As she sucked in a lungful of poison, the cigarette flared. She noticed their approach and straightened up, scissoring the cigarette and taking it from her mouth as she did so. “Flynn. You caught this one?”

  He shrugged. “Pulled the short straw. You know my partner, Christine Levy?”

  Levy extended her hand to shake.

  Gilbert didn’t reciprocate. She glanced down at the cigarette between her fingers. “Partner? I heard you were back with IA again.”

  “How do you know anything about me?” Levy asked.

  “Word gets around,” Gilbert said. “And I keep up with what’s what.” Her voice frosty.

  Levy returned her hand to the pocket of her trench coat unshaken. Rain pelted the tent overhead and ran down in curtains off the sides. From somewhere a radio squawked. “Let’s hope you’re as good at telling us what’s what with the crime scene, Detective?”

  Gilbert threw her half-smoked cigarette like a dart into a half-empty cup of black coffee. It hit the cold liquid and sizzled. With a parting death stare at Levy, she led them toward the smaller tent, the primary crime scene, but stopped them at the sidewalk. “The grass is soaked and still soft from the rain, can’t have you mucking up the place with any more footprints than we’ve got already.”

  Flynn noticed what had looked to him like haphazardly placed steel plates stuck in the grass. Members of the evidence collection team and police photographers were hopping from plate to plate. No doubt the areas plated had already been checked and cleared and now the team had to play hop-scotch to get their jobs done.

  “What can you tell us, Kate?” Flynn asked.

  “Sadly, not much. The rain’s probably destroyed more trace evidence than we’ll ever find, but I’m not sure there was much here to begin with.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shootings like these are pretty straight forward. We found two 9mm shell casings, which ballistics will test and more than likely link to Stokes’ confiscated service weapon. That’s consistent with the initial statement he gave to the responding road supervisor. Two shots fired point blank range. Add to that we found two rounds missing from his magazine.” She shrugged. “Pretty much tells the story.”

  “And the slugs?” Flynn asked.

  “We’ll get them when the ME digs them out of the boy’s chest. A lot of the blood’s either washed away or soaked into the ground. We’re digging up samples of the contaminated soil. We’ll get enough to make a match to the boy, but I don’t see how that gives you anything you don’t already know. Oh, and we got trace amounts of blood on the fence over there.”

  She pointed.

  “Stokes cut his hands leaping over it,” Flynn said.

  Gilbert waved a hand, encompassing the crime scene. “We’ve got footprints galore, matched as many as we could to the perp’s sneaker pattern and Stokes’ Doc Martens. Both sets of shoes have been confiscated for evidence. We’ll do a soil match of course. As for the rest?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “Cops who responded to the shots fired call, paramedics on the scene, lookie-loos before we cleared ’em.” She shrugged. “We’ll collect what we find, match what we can, but none of it’ll be useful to your case.”

  “How can you be so sure?” Levy asked, leaning out to look past Flynn who stood between them.

  “Because,” Gilbert pointed. “It’s a cesspool of beer cans and whiskey bottles, food wrappers, and cigarette butts, and my personal favorite, more used condoms than you can shake a limp dick at. Sound like anything’ll help your case, Detective?”

  Levy leaned back without replying.

  “Okay,” Flynn said, both as an expression of gratitude and warning against anymore sniping between the two women. “You’ve got my number if anything useful does pop, Kate.”

  “I do.” She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her windbreaker pocket, shook one out, and jammed it between her lips. With a Zippo she lit it up as she returned to her work.

  He and Levy left the crime scene and walked back toward Cherry Street.

  Gilbert called out, “Frank! I heard about what happened, you know, with Jillian.” His wife. “That sucks, man.”

  “Yeah. Sure does.” Flynn waved and they left.

  Once they’d signed out of the crime scene with the officer at the gate, they walked to Jackson Street, retracing the chase route in reverse. At the corner, they stopped and looked both ways, like school kids getting ready to cross at an intersection. Traffic was light. A light rain still fell and turned the world gray.

  Levy said, “You okay?”

  It took Flynn a minute to respond. When he did, he said, “Yeah. Why?”

  “Being reminded of…Jillian.”

  Reminded that his wife had killed a cop earlier that year. A cop she’d had an affair with and who’d dumped her for their teenage daughter. Reminded that she’s sitting in Riker’s Island, awaiting trial for murder. Flynn wiped rain from the corner of his mouth.

  “It’s not a reminder, Levy. It’s never not on my mind. Come on.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “To find the apartment DeShawn burglarized.”

  They turned south on Jackson and crossed over to the west side of the street.

  “We don’t know what apartment he burglarized. How’s that?”

  “No burglary report was made last night. Our canvas was focused on finding someone who heard or saw the shooting. Nobody’s bothered to go look for the apartment that was broken into. What I want to know is why no one’s reported the break-in or having had anything stolen.”

  “We don’t know anything was stolen. Maybe DeShawn only broke the window, got interrupted by Stokes. Or maybe the apartment was unoccupied. No one’s home yet to realize it’s been hit. Maybe it wasn’t an apartment at all,” Levy pulled her trench coat hood up against the rain. “A storage or boiler room, nothing to steal and no one to notice the broken window.”

  “All reasonable scenarios, so let’s find out.” Flynn didn’t have a hood to pull up. He popped his collar around his neck instead. They walked at a fast pace.

  “You want to talk to me about Goodall?”

  “What about him?” Flynn asked.

  “You two know each other.”

  “Everybody knows Goodall.”

  “But you two have history. That much was obvious.”

  “More like we had a run-in.”

  He didn’t elaborate, so Levy said, “Want to tell me about it?”

  “It was a few years back. A case I worked when I was up in the two-six. A young girl—black—was raped and stabbed to death. Zari Cooke. Her body was left concealed in the bushes in Central Park, near the 7th Avenue entrance.”

  “Uptown. I think I remember it,” Levy said. “Papers ran the story for weeks. A couple of preppy white kids were good for it.”

  Flynn stopped. “That’s just it. They weren’t. Jefferson Wright Ames and Reginald Arnold Preston. Papers loved using their full n
ames like that. Fit their privileged white narrative perfectly. They were just a couple of college kids named Jeff and Reggie. And sure, they were persons of interest initially. Columbia freshmen from Westchester money, they knew the victim. She worked as a barista at the Starbucks nearby. She and Ames had gone on a couple of dates. That’s what put him, and by association Reggie, on our radar. We brought them in for questioning, but they had solid alibis. Unshakable. And we believed them.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Goodall got involved. He made it his vendetta to get justice for this girl, all well and good, until he went to war against the one-percenters and put the NYPD in his cross-hairs. Ranting about how we were paid stooges for the privileged upper class. How we were circling the wagons and concealing evidence to protect the rich, white boys. The media eagerly went along with it because it sold newspapers and boosted TV news ratings. It’s the case that Goodall made his bones on.”

  “So the boys didn’t do it?”

  “Nope. They were just a couple of really good kids, caught up in the mess. They got railroaded in the press. The media was relentless in their coverage. Goodall and the press dug up every bit of dirt they could find. Their families buckled under the strain. An affair was uncovered between Reggie’s dad and his secretary, I think it was. That blew up the marriage. Jeff’s mom got picked up for a DWI. She blamed the attention, the stress of it all, for her heavy drinking.”

  Flynn started walking again. “For the boys it was worse. Their reputations were ruined. They got kicked out of school, even though there was not a shred of evidence against them as the doers. They never escaped the accusations. A perception of doubt followed them everywhere after that.”

  “Even though they were completely innocent?”

  “Yup. We’d interviewed them because they’d known the girl. That was the extent of it. But after the job Goodall and the press did on them, nobody remembers anything about the case except a young girl was brutally raped and murdered—a girl whose name most people can’t remember—and two young men named Jefferson Ames and Reginald Preston were accused of doing it so they must’ve been guilty. They had to be, right? The newspapers said so.”