James nods, then tosses the newspaper on Waltemeyer’s desk. D’Addario ends the roll call and Worden wanders out of the coffee room, looking at the faces of at least a half-dozen men who were tight with some of the Western and Central District officers now under investigation for the Scott killing. Worden allows himself a hard thought: Any of them could be a source for the newspaper story.
Hell, Worden feels some obligation to put his own sergeant on the list. Terry McLarney had no stomach for chasing other cops, particularly those he had worked with in the Western District. He had made that much clear from the moment John Scott hit the pavement, and it was for that reason that the Monroe Street probe had been taken away from him.
For McLarney, the notion that his own detectives were being used to pursue his old bunkies from the Western was obscene. McLarney had been a sector sergeant in that godforsaken district before returning to homicide in ’85. He was damn near killed in that district, shot down like a dog while chasing a holdup man on Arunah Avenue, and he’d seen the same thing happen to some of his men. If you were going after cops in the Western, you were going without McLarney. His world did not allow for that much gray. The cops were good, the criminals bad; and if the cops weren’t good, they were still cops.
But would McLarney leak? Worden doubts it. McLarney might bitch and moan and keep his distance from the Scott case, but Worden doesn’t believe he would undercut his own detectives. In truth, it was hard to imagine any detective consciously leaking details to thwart an investigation.
No, thinks Worden, dismissing the thought. The newspaper story came from within the department, but probably not directly from a homicide detective. A more likely source would be the police union lawyers, trying hard to portray the fresh witness as a suspect so as to take the heat off any officers. That made sense, particularly since one of those lawyers was quoted by name near the end of the article.
Still, Worden and James both know that the newspaper story is largely accurate and up to date-a bit leaden in its suggestion that the new civilian witness is a suspect, but otherwise on the mark. And both men know, too, that Twigg’s source is therefore close enough to the investigation to get the facts straight. Even if the union lawyers are the reporter’s primary source, they’re still getting inside information on the status of the investigation.
For Worden, the newspaper article is part and parcel of the larger problem with the Monroe Street probe: the investigation is taking place in a fishbowl. And no wonder. When cops investigate other cops, it’s usually the work of an internal investigations unit, a squad of detectives committed to prosecuting fellow officers. An IID detective is trained for the adversarial role. He works out of a separate office on a separate floor of the building, reporting to separate supervisors who are being paid to make cases against sworn members of the department. An IID detective is unaffected by station house loyalty, by the brotherhood itself; his allegiance is with the system, the department. He is, in patrolman’s parlance, a cheese-eating rat.
Because the uniforms who chased John Scott were all potential suspects, the Monroe Street probe was, for all practical purposes, an internal investigation. And yet because John Scott was murdered, the investigation could not go to IID. It was a criminal case and therefore the responsibility of the homicide unit.
Worden had to contend with his own divided loyalties as well. A quarter century was no small thing in any profession, but for Worden, the years in uniform meant everything. He carried a little bit of Norman Buckman with him, a little bit of Scotty McCown, too. Yet he was committed to the Monroe Street investigation because it was his letter up on the board, written in red next to the name of John Scott. It was a murder-his murder. And if some cop out there didn’t have brains and balls enough to turn in that body, then Worden was willing to write him off.
It somehow made it easier on Worden that many of the officers involved had behaved like witnesses in any other murder. Some had willfully lied to him, some had been purposely ambiguous; all were reluctant. For Worden and James both, it hurt to sit there in an interrogation room and have men wearing the uniform piss up your leg, then tell you it’s raining. Nor was there any outside cooperation coming in from the districts. The phone wasn’t ringing off the hook from uniforms who feared being jammed up in another cop’s shooting, who might be trying to keep out of a jackpot or cut deals for themselves. Clearly, Worden realized, the word on the street was that homicide didn’t have enough to charge anyone. If a cop was responsible for this murder, no one would come forward as long as it was believed that the probe had bottomed out.
That, too, was a result of too much talk, too many connections between the homicide unit and the rest of the department. For two months, Worden and James had conducted a criminal investigation in full view of the potential suspects and witnesses, their every move telegraphed through the department grapevine. Today’s newspaper account was only the most graphic example.
What the hell, thinks Worden, walking toward the men’s room with a cigar clenched between his teeth. At least the bosses can’t ignore the problem. When half your fucking case file is floating around in newsprint, it’s time to change tactics. Already that morning, Tim Doory has called twice from the state’s attorney’s office to set up a morning meeting with Worden and James at the Violent Crimes Unit offices.
Still pushing pieces around in his mind, Worden walks out of the bathroom just as Dick Lanham, the colonel in command of CID, rounds the corner on his way back to his office. Lanham, too, is in high dudgeon, a copy of the newspaper rolled up tight in one fist.
“I’m sorry, Donald,” says the colonel, shaking his head. “You’ve got your work cut out for you now.”
Worden shrugs. “Just one more thing to deal with.”
“Well, I’m sorry you have to deal with it,” says Lanham. “I tried like hell to get Twigg to hold off on this thing and I thought he was gonna do that.”
Worden listens passively as the colonel launches into an extended account of his efforts to delay the news article-an account punctuated by his assertion that Roger Twigg is the most stubborn, arrogant, pain-in-the-ass reporter he has ever known.
“I told him what it would do to us if he put that stuff in the paper,” the colonel says. “I asked him to wait onit for a couple weeks, and what does he do?”
As a major, Lanham himself ran the IID and in that post had dealt with Twigg on a series of sensitive stories. So it is no surprise to Worden that the colonel and the reporter had a long conversation before the article was published. But would the colonel purposely leak this investigation? Probably not, Worden reasons. As the CID commander, Lanham doesn’t want an unsolved police shooting on the books, and as a former IID man, he certainly doesn’t have any problem with investigating other cops. No, Worden thinks, not the colonel. If Lanham was talking to Twigg, it was only to try to stall the story.
“Well,” Worden says, “I’d sure like to know who his source is.”
“Oh yeah,” says Lanham, turning toward his office, “I’d like to know that myself. Whoever it is knows what he’s talking about.”
Three hours after digesting the newspaper article, Worden and James walk the three blocks from headquarters to the Clarence M. Mitchell Jr. Courthouse on Calvert Street, where they badge their way past sheriff’s deputies and take the elevator to the third floor of the city’s judicial palace.
There, they walk through a cramped labyrinth of offices which houses the Violent Crimes Unit and settle in the largest cubicle, the office of Timothy J. Doory, assistant state’s attorney and the head of the VCU. On Doory’s desk is, of course, a copy of the Sun’s metro section, folded to Roger Twigg’s exclusive.