“I can also have you removed, if necessary,” Huizenga countered.

I couldn’t believe everything I was hearing. Everything that Guidice seemed to be getting away with here.

“Marti, what do you mean—take me in?” I said.

It could have gone one of two ways. Either they needed to talk to me back at the office, or she was actually putting me under arrest.

Huizenga ducked her chin and answered without answering.

“I’ll give you two a few minutes alone,” she said.

In other words, I wasn’t coming home that night.

CHAPTER

59

I WASN’T PRIVY TO THE CONVERSATIONS HAPPENING BACK AT HEADQUARTERS, but by the time I got released from the hospital, word had been handed down. There would be no special treatment in this case. The department couldn’t afford it. Not in the current environment. It was a game of political football, and right now, I was the ball.

Huizenga took me straight to headquarters. She bypassed the press gathered outside on Indiana and pulled into the parking garage without either of us talking about it. From the garage it’s a straight shot down on the freight elevator to Central Cell Block in the basement.

The looks on the booking officers’ faces when we got there were somewhere between dumbstruck and fascinated. I don’t think they knew what I was doing there, but they certainly knew who I was. I’d brought hundreds of arrestees through that facility over the years.

Now the tables were turned in the worst possible way. I was printed and photographed. My pockets were emptied and their contents were catalogued in a plastic bag. I was given a thin sandwich and a blanket and was walked down the row to the cell where I’d be spending the night.

Central Cell Block is seventy years old. The cells are just about exactly what you might imagine—steel bar doors that clang shut, concrete floors, steel cots with no mattresses, and a steel toilet in the corner. More than once I’ve locked someone up and thought about how glad I was that I didn’t have to spend the night down there.

Huizenga pulled enough rank to get me my own cell, and she offered to bring me some dinner from outside. But I couldn’t even look at her by the time she was on the other side of those bars.

“We’ll get this straightened out in the morning, Alex,” she told me. “That’s a promise.”

I think she was desperate to leave me with some shred of optimism. The truth was, she couldn’t possibly know how long this was going to take. When I didn’t answer her, she said good night and left.

I sat down on my cot with my head in my hands. This whole thing was verging on the surreal—or at least, the nightmarish. I truly couldn’t believe I’d landed here, much less for something I didn’t do.

I wondered what Bree was telling the kids. I wondered how Ava was doing. What Jannie and Ali were making of all this. I even wondered what was up with the double homicide on Cambridge Place, and if Valente had made any progress.

We’d arrived at the cell block after lights out, so there was nothing to do until morning but sit there alone with my thoughts. God knows, I wasn’t going to get any sleep.

In fact, every time I closed my eyes that night, I saw Ron Guidice’s face. I kept thinking about that bloody palm of his. The way he’d held it up for the cameras. That was going to play beautifully for him, wasn’t it? Especially alongside the stories about my arrest, which were no doubt all over the news by now.

If I could have wished that man dead, I just might have done it.

CHAPTER

60

IN THE MORNING I WAS ROUSED BY THE FIVE THIRTY CHANGEOVER, AS THEY brought in the overnight arrests from the districts and moved some others out for transport to the arraignment courts next door. Why they do that at five thirty, I’ve never been sure, but it wasn’t like I was sleeping, anyway.

A few hours later they pulled me out of my own cell, for a 9 a.m. interview with Internal Affairs. IAD has a main office in the old homicide division at Penn Branch, but this meeting was in one of the interview rooms right there at the Daly Building—three floors down from my own desk in the Major Case Squad room. It was bizarre to be escorted around the building this way.

When the duty officer brought me into the room, I didn’t recognize either of the investigators waiting for me. Neither of them moved to shake my hand. They just gestured to the empty chair on my side of the table.

It was a plain, small box of a room. A closed-circuit camera was mounted in the corner above the door, and on this particular morning, an AV cart had been wheeled in, with a DVD player and an old boxy television sitting on top.

The two suits introduced themselves as officers Wieder and Kamiskey from the Public Corruption and Police Misconduct Section. Even that was enough to set my teeth on edge, as if I weren’t already pissed off enough. Police misconduct? Unbelievable.

Still, this was a chance to tell my side of the story. Once I’d signed and initialed my Miranda rights card, I was ready to get straight to it.

“So, Detective Cross,” Wieder started in. “I understand that you’re alleging you were deliberately drugged during the incident in question yesterday. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” I said. I pointed to my hip. “I was stuck with some kind of hypodermic needle. The ER report can confirm the puncture mark.”

“Sure, but not who made it,” Wieder interrupted right away. “And was this alleged needle stick before or after you struck Mr. Guidice?”

“Directly before,” I said. “That was the reason I retaliated against him. The only reason.”

“Twice.”

“Excuse me?”

“You struck him twice. The first time, you broke his nose. Then you knocked him down.”

My heart was thudding. I didn’t like this guy’s tone, or the way the interview already seemed to be going.

“Let’s take a look, shall we?” Wieder said.

Kamiskey used a remote to start a video playback on the TV. It looked like a clip from Channel Five news. What it showed was Guidice and me, standing between the two parked cars on Cambridge Place.

There was no audio, but the two of us were obviously in the middle of a heated conversation. And then—seemingly out of the blue—my fists were up, and I was knocking Guidice to the ground, out of sight.

“That’s one camera,” I said. “There were at least a dozen others on-site.”

“All showing the same thing,” Wieder told me. He took a beat, long enough to give me a condescending look. “I’m not saying that your allegation about the needle stick is provably false, detective. And we do know about the case history between you and Mr. Guidice—”

“Technically, there is no case history,” I said. “It was his fiancée. And it wasn’t my bullet that killed her.”

But Wieder wasn’t about to let me take charge of the conversation.

“What I’m saying,” he went on, raising his voice, “is that our job right now is to focus on the possibility of police misconduct in yesterday’s incident. So far, we have no corroborating evidence to support your version of the events. But here’s what we do have.”

He opened his file. Inside there was an incident report clipped to the top of several other sheets. I didn’t recognize the handwriting, or the signature at the bottom.

“We have a short but marked history of unflattering articles about you, by Mr. Guidice. We have a documented altercation, up at Lock Seven the other day, where by all appearances you behaved aggressively toward Mr. Guidice and threw a piece of his recording equipment. We have this, of course,” he said, pointing at the frozen image on the TV. “And finally, we have a positive tox screen for opiates in your system, with a chemical match to the pills found in your pocket yesterday.”