The Fence - Dick Lehr [123]
While his lawyers worked on his case, Mike worked on holding his world together. His resolve to get to the bottom of the attack didn’t change the mixed bag of setbacks and successes making up the day-to-day. He took the examination for promotion to lieutenant in late 1996. It was like the Mike Cox of old—the one with a once-and-future distinguished police career. But Mike flunked the test, a first for him. His concentration wasn’t the same; he’d robotically gone through the motions. The next year, though, he achieved a personal milestone when at long last he finished Providence College, earning a bachelor of science degree in business management. He and Kimberly were also able to enjoy Craig Jones’s wedding, where Mike served as best man, and then, in the spring of 1997, the Coxes celebrated their own good news: Kimberly was pregnant. In January 1998, they had their first girl, a baby they named Mikaela, joining nine-year-old Mike Jr. and eight-year-old Nick.
But all around there seemed to be reminders of the beating. Commissioner Paul Evans announced a new round of personnel changes in late 1996 that, for Mike, amounted to another bizarre and confusing signal about Evans’s supposed promise to get to the bottom of the beating. Evans transferred Sergeant David C. Murphy to the Internal Affairs Division. He then promoted him to sergeant detective. Murphy was joining Dovidio in the department’s Bureau of Internal Investigations—two sergeants who were part of the supervisory failure that saw the cover-up at Woodruff Way take off and flourish. Mike did his best to avoid them, but there they were, all in the same bureau.
Mike saw land mines inside his division and out. He sidestepped them as best he could. He would work police details while off duty to make extra money. But in April 1997, when Mike was assigned to supervise a contingent of officers from the C–11 station in Dorchester as part of the 101st Boston Marathon’s extensive public safety coverage, he backed out. Mike didn’t want to risk running into two of C–11’s finest, Jimmy Burgio and Dave Williams.
“Virtually everyone that I work with, it seems like, is involved in some way, shape, or form with this case,” Mike said, “whether they are friends with somebody who has been named, or whether their supervisor could be named.” The department “can be a very small place,” he said, and Mike saw trouble everywhere. “I don’t trust anyone.”
Mike and Kimberly had moved from their apartment on Supple Road into their first home. The couple paid $145,000 for the three-story, wood-shingled colonial on Rundel Park in August 1996, fixed it up, and moved in the next summer while Kimberly was pregnant. The six-bedroom house in Dorchester, on a short dead end atop a gentle slope that gave it a commanding presence, featured a picket fence, a gabled roof, and a large front porch. The house enjoyed the shade of two towering trees in the large side yard. But it wasn’t as if the relocation provided Mike any refuge from the storm. The harassment kept coming, despite a new and unlisted telephone number.
The nightmares continued as well, some seeming to come to life. Late one night the first summer in the new house, the doorbell awakened him. Mike climbed out of bed and reached for his Glock semiautomatic pistol. He tiptoed down the stairs. The front windows were open to the breeze, and through them Mike heard the crackle of voices