The Fence - Dick Lehr [106]
If it all sounded defeatist, Peabody wasn’t ready to fold yet. Williams, he said, was the key. “I think he saw it and has convinced himself that this is the story he is going to give, or he really didn’t see what happened, believes that his partner was probably involved and has decided to protect him as best as he can.” Peabody said he had an idea. “It is time to confront Williams. Lay our cards and theories on the table and see what he says. There are sufficient contradictions now on the record to smoke him out if he’s hiding it.” Peabody wanted to arrange a meeting with Williams and his attorney.
He wanted to let it all hang out. It would be a Hail Mary.
Mike jerked upright and leaned over the back of the couch. Groggy with sleep, he took a split second to get his bearings. Then he carefully pulled back the curtain to peek outside. He was convinced he’d heard something. But Supple Road was quiet. He looked up and down his street. He saw nothing, at least not what he was looking for. His unmarked police cruiser sat in front of his house, untouched.
Mike had taken to sleeping on the living room couch after finding the first tire slashed one morning when he left the house for work. “I was trying to catch them.” But he hadn’t, and over the next few weeks, the other three tires were cut up. His car was clearly targeted; it was the only one on the street that was hit. Mike was certain cops were the culprits, cops who’d adopted yet another technique to communicate what they thought of him, “that I was becoming some type, you know, of rat.” In the police world, tire slashing was known to be one way cops expressed displeasure with one another.
The harassment started as officers received subpoenas in late summer to appear before Peabody’s investigative grand jury. Mike’s return to work was not going well. “I’d just walk into a room and, you know, people look at you like you’re dirt.” Mike listened to some commanders reassure him his beating was unacceptable, but the talk was empty, particularly when he could just look around and see actual suspects still on the job. No one had yet been disciplined in any way, despite all the lies the investigation had already established. Some were even promoted. Sergeant Dan Dovidio, for one, rose to the rank of sergeant detective. Not only that, he was transferred to Internal Affairs. It couldn’t have gotten any more bizarre—the supervisor who’d retreated to the police station when nearly every cop on duty was racing to the shooting at Walaikum’s, the supervisor who’d told Williams and Burgio at Woodruff Way to lie about riding in the same cruiser, was now seen by the commissioner as having the right stuff to uphold the department’s integrity and standards of conduct.
It was all a bit hard for Mike and Kimberly to take. “Life for me became more and more difficult,” he said, “and I just didn’t understand, you know, why? What did I do to create all this hostility?” Mike had several times changed their telephone number and had it unlisted, but that didn’t matter. The crank calls continued, albeit with periodic breaks. Then one night a crew of Boston firefighters and fire trucks arrived in the middle of the night, apparently summoned by a false report that the Cox house was on fire.
Now there were the tires. When Mike lay back down on the couch, a video camera, pointed out of the living room window, continued making its slow, whirring sound. The camera was aimed straight at Mike’s cruiser. The car’s shadowy image was displayed on a monitor attached by cables to the camera.
Farrahar’s Anti-Corruption investigators had installed the camera. It was a primitive setup, requiring Mike to actually “do a lot of rewinding and setting up of this equipment, turning it on and off.” Kimberly was unimpressed; the setup, she said, was a “joke. It’s like it was something from 1950s. The picture was so unclear, it was just basically fuzz.” It seemed so ineffective. “See a picture? I mean, looking at it, I couldn’t make out much of anything; maybe shadows.” Within a