“Where is he?” I repeated.
“I think they still have him over at the department,” Huizenga told me. “But no. He’s not arrested.”
“What are you talking about? I was in the middle of putting the cuffs on him when he stuck me.”
Marti took a deep breath and looked at Bree before she answered. They both knew something I didn’t.
“There was nothing on him, Alex,” she said. “Just ID, cash, and his camera.”
“Well, he must have ditched the needle,” I said. “I’m telling you—”
She cut me off. “Everything we found was on you. Including this.” Huizenga held up a brown pharmacy bottle. “These were in your pocket when we got here. And his prints aren’t on the bottle, either.”
“What?”
“Guidice is claiming you were on drugs—which you were, one way or the other. Also, that you attacked him for no reason. If he stuck you, Alex, nobody saw it.”
“Oh my God.”
I lay back again. The full twisted reality of it all started to sink in. Huizenga wasn’t done, either.
“He’s also filing assault charges against you. A restraining order, too. He says you’ve been out to get him ever since he started writing about you.”
I looked up into Huizenga’s eyes. “I’m being set up here, Marti. Jesus—do you even believe me? You know the history on this guy, right?”
She stood back from the bed, hating every second of this, I could tell.
“I don’t want to say too much, Alex. Not until we know more. But I am going to need your gun, badge, and ID.” She took another deep breath. “And I’m going to have to take you in when we’re done here.”
“Like hell you are!” Bree stepped in now. “You heard the man. He was attacked. Are you seriously questioning his word on this? He’s one of the best cops in DC.”
“I’m not questioning anything,” Huizenga told Bree. “But the department’s circling the wagons. We’ve got a whole city screaming for police accountability these days, and the fact of the matter is that—for whatever reason—Alex assaulted this guy.”
“I don’t believe this,” Bree said. “You people have lost your minds!”
For the first time, Huizenga raised her voice.
“Bree, you’re here as a professional courtesy, and I am your superior officer. You got that? Now dial it the hell back down, or I’m going to ask you to leave.”
“Ask all you like,” Bree said. “He’s coming home with me.”
“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.”
Wieder paused again and raised his eyebrows at me. He reminded me of every sanctimonious prick I’ve ever met—the ones who don’t even try to hide how much they enjoy their own power.
“So let me ask you,” he said. “You’re an experienced detective. What conclusion would you draw if you were sitting on my side of the table?”
“If I were you?” I said. “I’d be asking myself why Ron Guidice is writing those articles in the first place. And I might be thinking—isn’t this exactly what someone like him would like to see happen?”
The two investigators looked at each other.
“With all due respect, detective, that sounds like conspiracy theory to me,” Wieder said, closing his file.
The gesture wasn’t lost on me. These two weren’t even interested in my story. They’d already interviewed their witnesses, they’d built their narrative, and this meeting was just—what? A formality? A necessary step toward the indictment they so obviously wanted?
In which case, there was no reason for me to be here. I pushed my chair back, stood, and pounded on the interview room door.
“Excuse me—” Wieder said.
“You want to build a case against me, you can do it on your own goddamn time,” I said. “I’m ready to go back to my cell.”
It was time to lawyer up.
CHAPTER
61
AS SOON AS I WAS LED OUT OF THE INTERVIEW ROOM, I FOUND CHIEF PERKINS waiting there in the hall. Not exactly the last person I might have expected—but not the first, either.
“Chief?”
“Come on,” he told me and signaled to the duty officer that he’d take over from here.
Instead of heading back to the cell block, we walked around the corner, through a locked door, and out to the main elevator bank.
“Where are we going?” I said.
“You’ve been released,” he told me. “The press has gotten their pound of flesh.”
“What?” I wasn’t following. “Did Bree post bail?”
The chief’s features were set hard while he avoided my eyes. This wasn’t easy for him.
“I’m just doing what I can, Alex.”
I wasn’t sure what to say to that. Perkins could have kept me from getting thrown into the cell block in the first place. Now, it seemed, he was pulling strings to save me from any more time down there.
“Thanks,” I told him. “I guess.” He didn’t question my response, or say anything else until we were alone on the elevator. It was a strange vibe I was getting.
“Huizenga is expecting you back at the office. We’ve got you on noncontact status for the time being,” he told me.
“Noncontact?” I said.
Whatever relief I’d been feeling had just been cut in half. Noncontact means that you come into work every day, sit at a desk, and answer the phones, or do the filing, or any of a hundred other things nobody else wants to do.
It also meant I was removed from all investigative duties at a time when the squad could least afford it.
“I don’t suppose I can appeal to your better judgment,” I said. “We’ve never been busier.”
“Believe me, I wish you could,” he said, shaking his head. “You’re not out of the woods yet. You’ve still got these charges against you. If the US Attorney’s Office decides to hand down an indictment, then it’s out of my hands.”
“As far as I can tell, Internal Affairs is gunning for it,” I said.
“If the mayor had his way, you’d be sitting home without a paycheck. And not because he doesn’t like you,” Perkins said. “Dammit, Alex, I don’t believe that druggie horseshit for a second—but I wish to hell you hadn’t hit that guy.”
“He deserved it,” I said. “And then some.”
“No doubt,” the chief answered, just as the elevator doors opened onto the third-floor hall. “But that’s justice. This is politics.”
I think it might have been the most cynical thing I’ve ever heard from Perkins.
Which isn’t to say that it wasn’t also true.
CHAPTER
62
WHEN I WALKED INTO THE MAJOR CASE SQUAD OFFICE, I WASN’T EXPECTING much—a meeting with Sergeant Huizenga and a year’s worth of backlogged filing to do. What I found instead was more like a surprise party.
“Here he is!” Valente shouted as I came through the door. Suddenly, everyone was on their feet, either prairie dogging out of their cubicles or coming my way. All of them were applauding and cheering, and slapping me on the back. And all of them were wearing the same yellow T-shirts pulled over their shirts.
The T-shirts all said FREE ALEX CROSS. It felt like the first laugh I’d had in days.
“Got any new tattoos?” Valente asked, with an arm over my shoulder. Jarret Krause handed me a cup of coffee.
“Good to see you, Alex. Welcome back.”
“I wasn’t even gone,” I said.
“Close enough,” Valente told me.
The truth is, I was deeply touched by the whole thing. Lying in that cell all night, I had no way of knowing who stood behind me on this, and who didn’t. Now it seemed like a no-brainer. The Major Case crew is one of the best squads I’ve ever had the pleasure of working with. They gave me exactly the response I would have hoped for and the same support I would have given any of them.
Then I saw Sergeant Huizenga. She was standing in the door of her office, watching me as I came in. She wasn’t smiling, and she wasn’t wearing one of the T-shirts, either. But I did notice that she looked like hell. She was also wearing the same blazer and pants as the day before. It didn’t look like Marti had gone home at all.
When I came into her office, the first thing she did was extend her hand across the desk.
“No hard feelings?”
she asked.
I shook, gladly. “No hard feelings,” I said. If anything, I respected her for locking me up herself and not passing it off to someone else.
“Have a seat,” she told me. “We’ve got to do some technicalities here.”
She gave me two release forms to sign and then returned my personal effects, with the exception of my Glock. Then she ran down the particulars of Guidice’s restraining order. I wasn’t to come within five hundred feet of him for as long as the temporary restraining order was in effect. If that went through, and it became permanent, I’d be informed accordingly.
It was one of the strangest twists of right and wrong I’d seen in a while. All things considered, wasn’t it me who needed protection from Guidice?
“Have you seen the news?” Marti asked. “I think he gave a dozen ‘exclusive’ interviews last night. Plus, that goddamn blog of his.”
“I’m sorry about all this,” I said. “You’re going to be down an investigator for a while.”
“I don’t think I’ll be any worse off than you,” she said. “I can tell, just looking at your face.”
It was true. Maybe I was “free,” but I was still in a holding pattern. Cop purgatory.
“Now, why don’t you take the rest of the day off and go see your family?” Huizenga said.
“You sure?” I said. In fact, that’s exactly what I needed.
“I’m sure,” Marti told me, finally cracking a smile. “I think the filing can probably wait until tomorrow.”
CHAPTER
63
IT’S LESS THAN A TWO-MILE WALK FROM HEADQUARTERS TO OUR HOUSE, BUT Bree insisted on picking me up that morning. My car was still in Georgetown, and I’d have to go get it later. For now I just wanted to go home, shower, and give my family whatever they needed for the rest of the day. The kids would be in school until three fifteen, so there was plenty of time to regroup with Nana and Bree.
So I thought.
When I got into Bree’s white Explorer in front of the Daly Building, I expected her to be glad to see me but also still pissed about my arrest. What I got instead was tears.