Slow Kill - Michael Mcgarrity [129]
Johnny hid his disappointment. He hated being alone in hotel rooms. Maybe he should have tolerated Brenda’s chitchat and kept her around instead of sending her back to Denver. He pushed the elevator call button and said, “You’re no fun at all, Kerney.”
“Don’t take it personally,” Kerney replied. “I’ve got a busy day tomorrow. Next time, if you come to town on a weekend, I’ll lift a glass or two with you.”
“It’s a deal,” Johnny said. “When I get back to Denver, I’ll send you a copy of the shooting script for the movie by overnight express, so you can see exactly what I’ve been talking about. You’re gonna love it.”
The elevator doors slid open, and the two men shook hands and said good night. Kerney left the hotel thinking it might be best to check out Johnny and his offer before making up his mind about the proposal. On appearances, Johnny seemed to be successful and living large. He drove an expensive car, stayed in the best hotel in town, and had treated Kerney to dinner at a pricey restaurant.
But Kerney wondered about Johnny’s drinking. He’d studied Johnny’s face carefully for any telltale signs of alcoholism—pasty gray skin, bloodshot eyes, the broken spider veins that showed on the cheek and nose—and had seen none. But that didn’t prove anything.
He shrugged off his unanswered question about Johnny. Best to wait and see if he followed up and sent him the script. If he did, Kerney would talk to Sara about the idea of spending their vacation playing cowboys on a movie.
Actually, to Kerney, in spite of his reservations about Johnny, the idea sounded like a total hoot.
By morning the April snowstorm had passed, the sun had burned away the last traces of snow, and trees were greening up, about to bud. After a presentation to a civic organization at a breakfast meeting in downtown Santa Fe, Kerney hurried back to headquarters for a regularly scheduled monthly meeting with his senior commanders and supervisors from all shifts.
Always on the lookout for new ways to combat and reduce crime, Kerney had recently instituted a computer-based system that identified patterns of criminal activity based on the types of offenses committed, the dates and times of each occurrence, and the specific locations of the crimes. Basic information from all incident reports and traffic citations were fed into the system, analyzed, and broken down into ten geographical areas within the city. The program allowed Kerney and his commanders to shift resources, set goals, coordinate case planning among the various divisions, and track progress.
The department had field-tested the system over the previous holiday season and had reduced auto burglaries at shopping malls by fifty percent. Now that it was fully operational, each commander was responsible for establishing monthly targeted goals to reduce crime on their shifts or within their units based on the current trends.
More than twenty senior officers were crowded into the first floor training room, filling the chairs at the large conference table and sitting against the walls. Kerney’s deputy chief, Larry Otero, ran the meeting as the commanders discussed the data, reviewed their current activities, and set new case plans and special operations to be put into place during the coming month.
At the end of the table, a slide projector connected to the computer displayed the area maps of the city on a screen that highlighted high crime activity. In the downtown area, early evening, strong-arm robberies and purse snatchings were up, and in a public housing neighborhood near St. Michael’s Drive, criminal damage to property and residential burglaries had risen by ten percent on the weekends. On the southern end of the city, motor vehicle crashes were down on all shifts. But a perp had surfaced who was baiting patrol officers into high-speed chases and had yet to be caught.
The meeting wound down with a report on the completion of the latest citizen police academy program, and a decision was made to run a DWI blitz on a Saturday night during spring