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I decided the crime scene I was headed to wasn’t going anywhere. I sat on the end of the couch.
Brian said, “You heading out to work?”
I nodded.
“I used to think I wanted to be a cop just like you. I guess that won’t ever happen now.” His voice had trailed off. With his prison record, he would never be able to get a police job. Another part of the high price he’d paid for his bad choice of working for a drug dealer.
I could sense his depression. I slid a little closer to him. “You know you can talk to me about anything.”
“Thanks. I know.”
“You want to tell me what’s going on?”
“Nothing. Nothing other than I ruined my life and now I’m trying to fix it.”
“I’ve got news for you, Brian, that’s all any of us are trying to do, all the time. Some of our mistakes might not be as obvious as yours, but we’re all out here trying to fix things.”
“Even you?”
“Especially me. Don’t think you’re going through anything alone.”
Then my son surprised me: he lean
ed over and gave me a hug. But for a moment, I felt like I was holding the old Brian. The cheerful kid who cared more about sports than anything else.
I left the apartment feeling remarkably good. At least as good as I could be, considering I was heading to a murder scene on only a few hours’ sleep.
Chapter 14
With no traffic, I was at the address on 30th Street in less than twenty minutes.
Brett Hollis met me at the front of the apartment building wearing a new bandage on his nose, not nearly as big and unwieldy as the previous one.
I couldn’t keep from pointing and saying, “It looks better.”
“I had to change it because I was having dinner with my mother. There was no way I would’ve survived her questioning if she’d seen a huge bloody mass on my face.”
“What did you tell her happened? Not the truth, I bet. You lied to make it sound less serious, didn’t you?”
Hollis shrugged. “I never lie to my mother. I told her I wasn’t paying attention while running. That’s accurate.”
Detective Dan Jackson from Manhattan South poked his head out of the front door. “You guys ready to come up? We’re trying to limit access.”
Jackson was known throughout the department for having once chased down and tackled a New York Jets running back who’d punched a woman. Jackson didn’t advertise that he had played college football and was a linebacker at Notre Dame—but that Jets running back would never forget. After he spent the night in the hospital with three broken ribs, the guy had had the nerve to claim he’d been hit by a car. Witnesses contradicted him—they all said Jackson ran him down and hit him like a car.
I got a feel for the victim’s apartment building as we climbed three flights of stairs to the crime scene. It wasn’t luxurious, but it wasn’t run-down either. Thin but new carpet, decent paint, and lights in the halls. Unremarkable, but better than a lot of Manhattan apartment buildings.
When we slipped out of the third-floor stairwell, I noticed two sets of crime-scene barriers. I expected the one at the door to the apartment. The other cut the hallway in half about ten feet from the door. I looked at Jackson.
The big man said, “You’ll understand when you see the scene itself. There’ll be a lot of looky-loos coming up here today once word gets around. I want to be able to stop them before they even get close to the apartment.”
It made sense. More than one crime scene has been contaminated by inexperienced officers wandering through it.
We paused by the apartment’s open front door as a crime-scene tech finished a video walk-through of the apartment. I asked Jackson the obvious questions. “Husband or boyfriend?”
“Roommates said she broke up with her last boyfriend about five months ago. No one serious since. Coworkers and neighbors all liked her but didn’t know her well.”
“I guess it’s too much to hope for any information from video surveillance cameras.”
