The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella

by Steve Cavanagh

  I guessed that McAllister was in her late twenties, maybe early thirties, thin but physically strong. I could tell that she looked after herself. Frost had trusted her with the information he’d offered to me, so by definition she was a serious operator. There was no wedding band on her tanned fingers.

  Jack and I sat at his dining table. The large envelope McAllister had brought with her rested unopened on the table in front of us. There were only two dining chairs, so McAllister reached behind her, pulled a Glock that sat low on her back, set the weapon on the counter, and hopped up beside it. She popped the tab on the Bud and took a long drink.

  With her head back, eyes on the ceiling, the Bud to her lips, I noticed that her other hand strayed to the Glock on the counter. This was not a woman who felt safe. I got the impression she’d lived that way for a long time. And no amount of weapons on hand, or hours spent with the iron in the gym, would make her feel any safer.

  The envelope remained untouched.

  “Frost and Jones died to get you that envelope,” she said.

  “No, they didn’t,” I said.

  “How do you figure?”

  Jack got up and poured two mugs of coffee.

  “Before he died, Frost told me he had nothing on Marzone or the Morgue Squad. He knew they were keeping a tail on me because of the Hernandez case, and that’s why he set up the meeting. I guessed that Frost wanted Marzone to see us together. His theory was that Hernandez’s murder exposed Marzone in some way, and he wanted to make him itchy. Itchy enough to try to take me out. It was Frost’s plan. He wanted to catch Marzone making an attempt on my life. It backfired.”

  “Bullshit,” said McAllister.

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  She put down the beer and studied me.

  “You’re trying to tell me that the head of IAB deliberately put a civilian at risk to catch a dirty cop? I don’t buy it.”

  “I’m not selling it. Frost said he had the real statistics on choke hold complaints in the NYPD and the evidence to show that those complaints, even when they’re upheld by the Review Board, don’t result in disciplinary action against the officer. That doesn’t tie Marzone to a crime, but it’s useful for the Hernandez case. What did Frost tell you?”

  “Not much. I’ve only been in Internal Affairs three months; transferred in from Robbery Homicide. I’m trying for lieutenant, so I need the IAB detail to work up my application. I’ve got a decent amount of time on my badge, and I was new. Frost wanted a senior officer he could trust. He told me you could connect the dots from the Hernandez killing to the Morgue Squad. Exactly what that connection might be, I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. It sure as hell wasn’t to put a target on your back. Jones told me you might not even know what you have, so we wanted to set up an exchange of information. You show us what you got, we show you ours.”

  “What is the Morgue Squad?”

  Her eyebrows went north, as if somebody pulled the skin taut on the back of her head.

  “You don’t know?” she said, and turned to direct the question at Jack and me.

  “No,” we said together.

  She leapt off the counter, lifted her weapon, and slipped it into her waistband.

  “Then I’m wasting my time. And Frost wasted his life,” she said. She leaned over to grab the envelope.

  “Wait. We might have something that helps you nail Marzone. Maybe it’s like Frost said. We might not know we have it. You can appreciate we’re a little nervous,” I said.

  I told her about Roark choking me in Jack’s car. The ultimatum to take the settlement or a bullet.

  McAllister picked up the envelope and emptied a half dozen manila files onto the table. She flicked through them, found a file, and flipped it so that I could see the cover. A photograph was pinned to the top left-hand corner of the file.

  “That’s the guy,” I said.

  “According to Frost, this guy is Marzone’s right hand. The Morgue Squad don’t take on work unless Marzone and Roark both agree to accept it.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “You really don’t know, do you?”

  “No, we don’t,” I said.

  “Let me put it this way—the Morgue Squad run a cleaning service on contracts.”

  Jack and I exchanged glances. Neither of us got it.

  “What kind of contracts?” said Jack.

  “The kind that get people killed,” said McAllister.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Like all of the most lucrative criminal operations, at its core it was simplicity itself. McAllister had not deviated from the story. Occasionally she would take a sip of beer, or sweep her dark hair behind her ear, but she spoke straight and clear, sparing no details.

  “The Morgue Squad came into being because the NYPD started getting real good at their job. Clearance rates for serious crimes hit all-time highs, with more murders solved than in any other years in recent memory. Plus the murder rate hit rock bottom. In the early nineties there were almost two thousand murders a year. That number dropped and has continued to fall. Last year there were just over three hundred, the lowest murder rate on record. Most murders in New York are domestics gone too far, but a good amount are drug or gang related. And we guess that around twenty to thirty murders in recent years are contract hits. In the nineties that number was well into the hundreds.”

  I’d heard this before, on the street. If you ran a con operation in New York, you had to know who was off-limits. I knew the guys who could put out contracts, and I knew, by reputation, some of the guys who accepted them. There was no doubting the economy—if you were a contract killer in New York, then all the good money was made in the nineties.

  “I’d heard on the homicide beat, from some of the twenty-year veterans, that there was a very real market for contracts. We’re talking high-profile hits. People with money and protection—informants in police custody, gangsters, other hit men, politicians, cops, lawyers, even top drug traffickers and cartel enforcers were targets. According to the cops I worked with, Kuklinski got most of the work in New York because he was thorough, reliable, and safe; he hid the bodies in his freezer for a few years to mask the time of death, or he made it look like suicide or slipped the corpse into the Hudson so it would never be found. The Iceman got the work because he ensured nobody ever came looking for him, much less the man or woman who put out the contract.”

  “Kuklinski got caught, didn’t he?” said Jack.

  “Sure did, in the 1980s. I worked with a cop who was on the Iceman taskforce. When Kuklinski went down, there was a gap in the market. A lot of people tried to fill that gap. Half a dozen emerged vying for the number-one spot in Manhattan. Only one of them is alive today. He’s still working, and he’s still number one.”

  “Because he disguises the kills?” I said.

  “He does a little more than that. We don’t know the exact setup. What we do know comes from convicted felons, lifers. A cop in IAB investigated a complaint raised by the Innocence Project. They were working a case for a guy named Jason Fenton. In 1994 Jason Fenton was convicted of the murder of his neighbor Doreen Bird. They lived a few floors apart in luxury condos on the Upper West Side. A janitor saw Doreen and Jason leave the building together one night, and Doreen never made it home. She was found a few days later in a motel room in Jersey with her skull beaten almost flat. The desk clerk remembered her but couldn’t remember what the guy she was with looked like. Luckily, a drunk from a local bar caught a good look at the man who accompanied her to the motel, as did the janitor. They picked Jason out of a lineup, and the DA ran with the case.

  “Jason protested his innocence, said he wasn’t with Doreen that night. Instead he’d gone to a movie and then went home. Jason had no priors and he was a pillar of the community. The DA ran with the eye-witness evidence and hair fibers from Jason that were found on Doreen’s clothes. He got twenty-five to life. The Innocence Project lawyers reinterviewed the witnesses about three years ago. While Jason
had always maintained his innocence, the Innocence Project lawyers had refused to file an appeal. That changed when Jason sent them a letter he’d received from one of the prosecution witnesses—the building janitor, Louis. By this time Louis was into his seventies, he was retired, and had survived his first heart attack. In the letter, Louis maintained that when he was near death in the back of the paramedics’ van, his only regret was giving false testimony against Jason. He wanted to change that. The Innocence Project sent an investigator to interview Louis, who in turn confirmed that he’d been threatened. Not by police, but by someone who’d told him to ID Jason or he would be killed. After a little more digging, the drunk confirmed that he’d been leaned on to pick out Jason and that it was a cop who’d told him to do it in exchange for a thousand dollars cash.”

  She took another pull on her Bud. Wiped her mouth and continued.

  “So, some of the lawyers from the Innocence Project make a complaint to IAB, and both the NYPD and the project’s volunteer lawyers go pay Jason a visit in prison. That was their mistake. Visits like that don’t go unnoticed. Within a week, the janitor, Louis, had another heart attack, the drunk who’d been clean for a year bought four bottles of Wild Turkey and choked to death on his own vomit. And Jason had a nasty fall in the showers at Sing Sing and cracked his head so bad he died instantly.

  “All three of them gone inside of three days. Coincidence? Maybe. But I didn’t buy it. Neither did IAB, and they began running checks on all the detectives, experts, and witnesses who were involved in Jason Fenton’s trial and cross-checked them against their database. Turns out the complaints of false testimony solicited by police, of which there were around ten separate complaints, shared a common theme. The coordinating detective was Marzone. IAB started to breathe down Marzone’s neck, but he played it smart. There was no direct evidence that Marzone had set anyone up, and eye witnesses in the other murder cases were questioned and continued to stick by their testimony.”

  “But the doubt had been planted in that cop’s mind, right?” I said.

  “The cop was Albert Frost, and his partner was Rick Jones. They both continued to dig, unofficially, while they rose through the ranks. Frost suspected a hit man had an arrangement with a small group of homicide detectives from a select number of precincts. Usually those in the Bronx, Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Harlem, the areas with the highest murder rates. For a fee, those detectives ensured that when a hit went down, somebody else got convicted.”

  Jack’s coffee mug shattered on his tile floor, startling him. He jumped back, his hand covering his mouth.

  “Eddie, what the hell have we gotten into?” he said.

  I watched McAllister drain the last of her beer. When her head came back down, she looked at her boots, then looked at me. I’d seen this before—after a player had finished a performance. A lot of what McAllister had said sounded like the truth, but her look—she wasn’t telling us everything. In fact, she’d lied a little. In this situation, I could’ve gone one of two ways. Let her talk, hoping she’d give me a little more, or just call her out and see how she reacted.

  I decided to give her a little more rope.

  “The Morgue Squad?” I said.

  She nodded.

  “There are no more than half a dozen in the squad. Detective Marzone runs the operation. He calls the kills, sets up a suspect before the hit man carries out the murder, and puts the primary evidence in place. The secret is making sure the patsy doesn’t have an alibi—so the murder has to be timed perfectly. Hernandez is supposed to have knifed Genarro for his wallet, but the wallet was never recovered. It just so happens that Genarro was in the process of renegotiating his union’s terms with four of the largest construction firms in the city. Genarro was a hard-ass, and we understand he was ready to call a strike. He never got the chance. Frost thought Hernandez was the latest patsy for the Morgue Squad, but somehow it all went wrong when Hernandez got choked out. Your case is the key to blowing open the Morgue Squad investigation.”

  “What’s your first name?” I said.

  She was about to sit down at the table, but my question arrested her movement. Caused her to pause. Just half a second, but a pause no less. Her eyebrows rose, and her lips pursed together in a grimace that was there and gone in a moment, and as it left, she sat down. Crossing her legs, she looked at me again and spoke.

  “Lilly,” she said.

  In her boots, double denim, and with a gun in her waistband, she sure didn’t look like a Lilly. Not that she was unattractive—far from it.

  “Short for Lilith or Elizabeth?” I said.

  “Elizabeth,” she said, looking at the table and then at me.

  Subtle differences in her tone, the speed of her delivery and eye contact. She was definitely lying. Not about her name, though. That was a control question—one that gave me a truthful answer.

  I decided it was time to call her out.

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’d been a con artist for most of my life, and I could spot a lie, but the grifter life didn’t teach me how to read people. That was my mother. She was Italian and grew up in a household with eight brothers and four sisters. My father could con anyone apart from my mother. Growing up in that house, my mother had nurtured one of the world’s finest bullshit meters. The only thing my father successfully kept from her was the fact that he was teaching me his trade and letting me learn how to box. Even then, I suspected my mother knew all about it but was content to let her boys think they’d fooled her. Maybe she thought it brought me and my dad closer together and she didn’t want to break that pact.

  Watching my mom, I’d inherited that fine instinct for spotting a lie. And that’s all it can ever be. Lie detector tests can be beaten. You can’t take a course for lie detection. Either it’s in your blood and you grow up with it or you don’t.

  “Lilly . . .” I began.

  “I prefer McAllister,” she said.

  “Fine. You told us a lot. But you’ve glossed over a few things here and there, and lied a little, too,” I said.

  A slight tremble at the corner of her mouth. The muscle twitching to keep the face straight, to restrain the smile or the surprise of being exposed.

  “You didn’t join IAB to help you make lieutenant. You were drafted by Frost. In the first three months of IAB, you’d still be catching up on the caseload left behind by the cops who’d bowed out after their mandatory two years, you’d be learning how to conduct basic integrity tests and generally getting up to speed on the way things work in the rat house. No, Frost drafted you into IAB for a reason. I’m guessing it’s because you somehow made a possible connection between the top hit man in New York and Marzone. You went to Frost with it, as head of IAB, and he insisted you join him. Am I close?”

  She said nothing. Her dark eyes remained purposefully still, like the shadows of twin clouds on a sun-polished winter lake.

  “Whatever you had on Marzone and the hit man wasn’t enough for an arrest, but it was enough to get Frost and Jones moving. Come on, I’m not stupid.”

  “They didn’t get anywhere until I came to them. I’d been working on establishing a pattern of travel for a hit man. We had reliable intel from several snitches that this guy ran contracts on the East Coast. I began tracking his movements, working on his flight history, his credit card statements. All of it was clean, but at the same time, far too clean. The guy owned a chain of Laundromats, and he would regularly fly two thousand miles to check out how his businesses were doing. But he stayed in hotels that were too far away from the Laundromats, he paid in cash and didn’t submit receipts for travel expenses to the IRS, and he never brought a laptop or a cell phone with him. He was either the worst businessman in the United States, or a guy who liked to travel light and leave as little trace as possible.

  “I was able to link key dates from several different murders to coincide with visits from our out-of-town friend. This guy was like the angel of death. Every time he came to town, somebody got wha
cked. And Marzone or a detective with known links to Marzone made the collar for the murder. But that’s as far as it went. Weak circumstantial evidence and a solid conviction behind every murder.”

  “You discovered Marzone was watching us, and that set your little heads alight with possibilities. I suppose a review of the Hernandez murder didn’t link it to the hit man,” I said.

  A flash in her eyes. I was wrong. There was a link. Something I hadn’t seen or may have missed.

  “You didn’t have enough for an arrest, but you know that Marzone is concerned about the case. That’s when you went too far. I don’t believe for a second you didn’t know Frost was going to use me as bait, that the meeting on the ferry was anything other than a signpost to Marzone that I was a target that needed taking care of. You wanted to catch the hit man, or Marzone with a gun to my head. That was your only shot, wasn’t it? None of the other murders came to anything against Marzone because he controlled the investigation, the crime scene, everything. But what if you knew who his next victim was going to be? Then you could see the whole setup and catch the players as they made their moves—on me and Jack. Maybe even Maria.”

  She dipped her head, trying to find the answer on the floor, or maybe just immersing herself in an old feeling, an old emotion. The dark hair parted as she raised her head and nodded.

  “Yeah, I told Frost I wasn’t cool with it. I think I said something about putting civilians at risk in order to close an investigation, maybe I talked about ethics. But you’re right. I could’ve washed my hands and walked away. Instead I spoke my mind and did my job. You know what Frost said when I objected?”

  I cocked my head, leading her on.

  “He said lawyers aren’t real people anyway; what does it matter if we lose a few on the way.”