It’s not exactly a huge shock that Margaret didn’t win. The polls were suggesting as much. I mean, it’s kind of hard to run a campaign with the slogan “I didn’t kill or blackmail anyone, I swear!” You have to admire Margaret for having the brass to continue the campaign at all after my trial and the release of the audio recording.
“…wasn’t just the contents of that audio recording, Mark. I think what really did Olson in was that she didn’t act on it over the last three weeks since it surfaced. She didn’t file charges against the officers implicated on that recording.”
“…agree with Linda, Mark. I think voters thought Margaret Olson was dragging out any further investigation until today, hoping that her denials would be enough to get her through this election.”
“Let’s turn to the newest member of our team, Kim Beans. Kim, no reporter was closer to this scandal than you. Your thoughts?”
Kim Beans, looking well scrubbed and beautiful, having benefited mightily from the suffering of many, looks into the camera.
“I think you’re all correct to an extent,” she says. “I do think Margaret Olson still had a hope of pulling out this election. But the real reason she did basically nothing about this audio recording over the last three weeks? More than anything else, what was the real reason?”
“She wanted Pop and Goldie to run,” I say.
“I think Margaret was hoping that Officers Daniel Harney and Michael Goldberger would run,” she says. “She wanted them to flee the jurisdiction, which they were perfectly free to do as long as they hadn’t been charged with a crime. She wanted them to run so there was no evidence against her other than a vague audio recording. She didn’t just want to win an election. She wants to stay out of prison.”
Patti runs a hand through her hair and blows out air like she’s inflating a balloon. Dark circles prominent under her eyes. Our sister was particularly crushed by our father’s betrayal. Aiden and Brendan had never had as close a relationship to Pop, and they didn’t follow in his footsteps as a cop or even stay in Chicago. Whatever grief they’re feeling they’ve channeled into helping Patti. It’s like when your first parent dies and all focus shifts to the surviving parent.
So we’ve made Patti our project. Aiden, the musclehead, always trying to tussle with her or lift her off her feet, which makes her laugh only because it’s so juvenile, or maybe because it reminds her of our childhood; Brendan, with the off-color humor that Patti always enjoyed. The three of us have made an unspoken pact over these last three weeks to stay near her, one of us always keeping an eye on her. It’s been our assignment. The distraction has been helpful. It’s easier to focus on someone else’s grief than cope with your own.
I put my hand on her shoulder and lower my head, look directly into her eyes. I want to tell her We’ll get through this or It’s gonna be okay, but I don’t have to say the words. It’s a twins thing—that’s about the only way I can put it.
My sister kept a lot of secrets and did a lot of things, all to protect me. Did she enjoy it, on some level, being the strong one for once? Being the one to help me instead of the other way around? I’m sure she did. But it doesn’t change the fact that she was there for me. She thought I was the dirty cop, the “Harney” in the little black book, and she thought I was guilty of four murders—but she still stood by me. We are family, and we always will be.
“Where do you think they went?” she whispers under her breath, words intended only for me, not Aiden or Brendan.
I shrug. “Does it matter?”
The audio recording I had made—which, by the way, has now received more than three million hits on the Facebook page put up by my lawyer, Stilson—should have been all Margaret needed to arrest both Pop and Goldie. But she dragged her feet, refusing to comment, citing the old “ongoing investigation” excuse. Kim Beans, on television just now, was spot-on about that: Margaret dragged her feet to give Pop and Goldie a chance to run. It would be hard to make a case against Margaret based only on that audio recording; if the star witnesses were sunning themselves on a beach in South America, she could probably avoid being prosecuted.
And it worked. A few days after the audio recording surfaced, Pop and Goldie went adios. They picked a Friday night, when the workweek was over and they wouldn’t be missed at the office.
Smart. They were always smart.
Patti gives me a long look, takes a deep breath, and releases. Maybe it’s just another twin-intuition thing, but it seems like something has lifted off her shoulders.
“You’re right. It doesn’t matter where he went,” she says. “He’s gone either way.”
“Hey!” Aiden shouts. “Enough of the serious whispering. Time for another group hug!”
He’s big enough by himself to draw the three of us in. Patti rolls her eyes, but she enjoys it, I know.
So the four of us Harneys draw together in a tight embrace. For just that moment, it feels like we’re kids again, in our backyard, when everything was simple and the future limitless.
One Hundred Eight
“UNITED STATES versus Michael Leonard Goldberger,” the clerk calls out. “United States versus Daniel Collins Harney.”
Margaret Olson had given Pop and Goldie a head start on an escape, but there is another gang of prosecutors in town who wear federal badges. The US attorney’s office loves to prosecute local cops. No way they were going to pass on this case.
Federal agents found Pop and Goldie in Playa del Carmen, Mexico. The word is that when the marshals kicked in the door, Pop was halfway out a bathroom window, and Goldie was hiding under the bed.
From a side door, Goldie and my father appear, dressed in orange jumpsuits, escorted by federal marshals, their hands in shackles. Patti draws a quick breath. So do I.
Goldie has shaved his head altogether and grown a goatee. His eyes briefly scan the room before they move downward.
And my father. His hair is a different color, a bright red, and it’s the first time I can remember seeing a rough blanket of whiskers on his face. His eyes are so dark, it’s as if he’s wearing a mask. His shoulders are stooped, as if literally wilting under the weight of recent events.
And it goes beyond physical. His eyes remain on the floor. My father never walked into a room with his eyes down. Chief of Detectives Daniel Harney always held his chin up, the proud figure of authority and morality.
A shudder passes through me. It’s like our father is already gone, just as Patti said. I take Patti’s hand and squeeze it.
“Don’t feel sorry for him,” Patti whispers. We are both fighting that instinct. Pop brought all this on himself. He deserves the fall he has taken, the humiliation, the disgrace, every last bit of it. But he is still our father. He is still our blood. We are tied to him forever. You don’t flip a switch and turn that off.
How could you do it? I want to ask him. How could you shoot your own son?
I want so much to understand it. To see things through his eyes. I know I am dreaming of something impossible. There is no justification. I only had a child for three years, but I would have done anything for her. I would have taken a bullet for her.
Why didn’t you feel the same thing for me?
“Judge, with the obvious risk of flight and the corruption and murder charges that make the defendants eligible for the death penalty, the government requests no bond.”
One of them, if not both, will cop a plea, I assume, and they’ll give up Margaret. The feds like busting local cops, but they love getting local politicians. Whether it’s Goldie or my father or both, whatever deal they cut, they’ll still spend the rest of their lives incarcerated, but they could avoid the death penalty and might get their choice of prisons.
Pop and Goldie, standing before the judge, their backs to us, two broken, defeated men, listen as their lawyers express outrage at the notion of a no-bond order. The judge, on the other hand, doesn’t seem so bothered by the thought. With a bang of the gavel, he orders each of them held without bond.
And then, just like that, it’s over. My father and Goldie are led from the courtroom. The whole thing took less than twenty minutes. The clerk calls the next case.
The reporters rush out, one of them passing by us, already on her cell phone, calling in to her newsroom. “No bond,” she says into her phone. “Held until trial. Which means these boys will never see the light of day again.”
The way she said that, it hits both of us. Pop will spend the rest of his life in a federal penitentiary.
We are both quiet, taking that in, as everybody else files out of the courtroom, leaving Patti and me alone. The room feels odd like this, without a judge or lawyers or spectators, like a naked tree in the winter.
Then Patti says, “Well, on the bright side, it’ll save us some money on Father’s Day presents.”
I look at her, stunned. Then I burst out laughing. Don’t ask me why. There’s no script for how to handle shit like this. Patti and I will have plenty of ups and downs going forward. There will be lots of dark days. We have both changed and will never be the same. But we are still here, we are still standing, and we are still family.
One Hundred Nine
THE HOLE in the Wall, once my home away from home. Being here feels weird on many levels, one of which is that I’m here without Kate, my longtime partner, my friend, for a brief time more than that. My feelings for her, my memory of her, will always be complicated. She made life difficult for me at the end, but her heart was in the right place, even if her head was not. We never should have slept together. We never should have breached that wall. It colored everything. It made it harder for us to see what was going on around us. She deserved better.
Patti spins on her bar stool and gives me the once-over as I approach.
“How’re you doing?” she asks.
I shrug. “I’m a washed-out cop with a questionable future.”
She points a finger at me as she raises her beer. “But still a cop,” she says.
She seems happy that I’ve come out of this thing in one piece. Patti is always a mixed bag, a lot of work, but in the end, she was always looking out for me. Did she enjoy it, on some level, being the one helping me instead of the other way around? I’m sure she did. But in the end, what’s the difference? She was there for me when it counted.
Soscia, wearing a Hawks jersey, is so far into his pints that he can hardly stand. He falls into me and drapes an arm around my neck. “This guy,” he slurs to whomever is listening, which is nobody. “Best cop I know.”
“You’re a good egg, Sosh,” I say, then I catch someone else’s eye.
She walks up to me with a coy smile, her eyes down.
“Well, well, well,” I say. “Kim Beans, as I live and breathe.”
She looks up at me, the smile a bit brighter. “You heard about Margaret, I take it.”
“Of course I heard.” It was Goldie. My father is too proud to admit anything. But Goldie caved. The feds took the death penalty off the table, and he gave up Margaret. The FBI perp-walked her out of the Daley Center four hours ago.
“Congratulations,” she says.
I raise my eyebrows and smirk at her.
She nudges me with an elbow. “Ah, you’re not still sore at me, are you?”
I put a hand on my chest. “Sore? Why would I be sore? Because you were receiving those weekly photographs from Margaret Olson and forgot to mention it? Even though it would have cleared me?”
She wags a finger at me. “Just exercising my rights under the First Amendment,” she says.
“Yeah?” I lean into her. “Tell you what, Kim. Maybe someday you and I will meet in a dark alley, and I’ll exercise my rights under the Second Amendment.”
She deserves that, and she knows it. What does she care? This whole case rebuilt her career. She’s back on TV and has a great future.
“Fair enough,” she says. “But if your attitude ever adjusts, Detective, you’ve got my number. This time it will be off the record.”
She gives me one last come-hither glance and walks away.
Did she just come on to me?
Whatever. I’m not touching that hot stove. I’m done with dangerous women.
Never again.
Not for a few weeks, at least.
The truth is, in that particular department, I’m in a weird sort of limbo. My memory is back, which means my feelings for Amy have returned. I remember and feel it more than ever now, how deeply I cared for her.
But it feels like another life to me. Like she’s a warm, loving memory, but without the piercing heartache. It feels like I’m starting over now, a clean slate, for whatever that’s worth.
The crowd around me is filled with familiar faces, but in some ways foreign. There are nods and averted glances. Nobody knows how to deal with me. The scandal that has rocked the department will be felt for years. That’s because of me. Three very popular cops—Kate, Goldie, and my father—are gone now, and in different ways they’re all connected to me. I’m not exactly a pariah; nobody can really blame me for anything. But I’m a symbol of the disaster, the last remaining freight car in the train wreck.
My eyes fall on Lieutenant Paul Wizniewski, nursing a glass of rye at a table, the stub of an unlit cigar in his mouth. When our eyes meet, he pauses. Removes the cigar from his mouth. Takes a deep breath.
The Wiz will always be an insufferable, self-promoting jackass, but he wasn’t a crooked cop. I thought he was. And he thought I was. We were both reporting our findings to Goldie, the head of Internal Affairs. Goldie played each of us against the other, a virtuoso puppet show.
I nod to the Wiz. He nods back. We will never be bosom buddies, but there is room for both of us in the department.
And then I find myself climbing onto the stage and picking up the microphone.
I click the mike on and stare out at the crowd. It takes a while for the noise to die down, but eventually it does, a nervous stillness hanging in the air, all eyes on me, the comedian, the guy whose name they used to chant.
“I just want to be a cop again,” I say, surprising myself. “That’s all I ever wanted. You guys okay with that?”
Silence.
I don’t have anything else to say. I start to drop the mike, then I hear somebody in the crowd clap his hands.
Then someone else claps. Then others join in, a trickle of applause slowly gaining momentum.
Pretty soon they’re all on their feet, cheering and clapping. I wasn’t expecting a standing ovation, but I’m getting one.
I don’t know if I’m going to get back to where I was before this all happened. I’m not sure I want to. But wherever I am right now—a roomful of cops letting me know that I’m one of them again—is just fine with me for the present.
“Listen, I can’t stay long,” I say, raising a hand to quiet the crowd. “I’m meeting Margaret Olson for drinks later.”
They like that, howls of laughter. It probably helps that half of them can’t stand Maximum Margaret and the rest of them are so drunk they couldn’t spell their own names.
“Just kidding,” I say. “But I have to say, my love life is doing okay these days. I’m losing track of all the women. In fact, you know what I could use . . .”
I look out over the crowd.
“I could really use a little black book.”
Laughter, even louder, hoots and shouts.
“I’ve been looking all over for mine,” I say, “and I’ll be damned if I can find it.”
Detective Lindsay Boxer investigates the most explosive case of her career.
For an excerpt, turn the page.
Chapter 1
THAT MUGGY morning in July my partner, Rich Conklin, and I were on stake-out in the Tenderloin, one of San Francisco’s sketchiest, most-crime ridden neighborhoods. We had parked our 1998 gray Chevy sedan where we had a good view of the six-story apartment building on the corner of Leavenworth and Turk.
It’s been said that watching paint dry was high entertainment compared with bei
ng on stake-out, but this was the exception to the rule.
We were psyched and determined.
We had just been assigned to a counterterrorism task force; reporting both to Warren Jacobi, chief of police, and also Dean Reardon, deputy director of Homeland Security based in DC.
This task force had been formed to address a local threat by a global terrorist group known as GAR that had claimed credit for six sequential acts of mass terrorism in the last five days.
They were equal-ethnicity bombers hitting three holy places; a mosque, a cathedral. and a synagogue, as well as two universities and an airport, killing more than nine hundred people of all ages and nationalities in six countries.
As we understood it, GAR, “Great Anti-establishment Reset,” had sprung from the rubble of Middle Eastern terror groups. Several surviving leaders had swept up young dissidents around the globe, including significant numbers of zealots from Western populations who’d cut their baby teeth in virtuality.
The identities of these killers were undetectable within their home populations since GAR’s far-flung membership hid their activities inside the dark web, an internet underground perfect for gathering without meeting.
Still, they killed real people in real life.
And then, they bragged.
After a year of burning, torturing, and blowing up innocent victims, GAR published their mission statement. They planned to infiltrate every country, and bring down organized religion and governments and authorities of all types. Without a known supreme commander or national hub, blocking this open-source terrorism had been as effective as grasping poison gas in your hand.
Due to GAR’s unrelenting murderous activities, San Francisco, like most large cities, was on high alert on that Fourth of July weekend.
Conklin and I had been told very little about our assignment, only that one of the presumed GAR chiefs, known to us as “J.,” had recently vaulted to the number one spot on our government’s watch list.