The Fence - Dick Lehr [2]
Kimberly Cox was confused. She was looking at someone suffering from multiple injuries—serious injuries. She thought, “It didn’t look like he had slipped and fell.”
When Boston police officer Craig Jones stepped through the curtain and into the tiny ten-foot by twelve-foot bay, Kimberly recognized him right away. Craig was Mike’s partner and good friend. Kimberly saw that Craig was agitated, even upset. There were other officers with him whom Kimberly did not know. One or more of them crowded inside too. Kimberly and Bertha Cox were seated by Michael’s side.
Then another police officer, a black officer, tall and dressed in uniform, appeared at the curtain. He did not actually step inside, but poked his head into the bay. The officer was addressing Craig Jones, but Kimberly heard him say, “I think I know who did this.”
Craig Jones and the others stepped outside. To Kimberly, the talk was mostly in covered, hushed tones. But this she was able to hear: “I think cops did this.”
Kimberly was speechless. Bertha Cox was not.
“What?” she asked. “Police officers did this?”
The question hung in the air.
“Oh my God,” Bertha Cox said.
By dawn, the morning TV news stations in Boston were broadcasting reports about the shooting of Lyle Jackson, the high-speed chase that followed, and the dramatic capture of four men suspected in the shooting. The city’s leading newspaper, the Boston Globe, also ran a story in its morning edition about a shooting that turned into a homicide case when Lyle Jackson was pronounced dead at Boston City Hospital. The newspaper stories mentioned officers Rattigan and Freire and the injuries they had sustained.
But no story mentioned anything about Michael Cox.
PART I
Two Cops and a Drug Dealer
CHAPTER 1
Mike Cox
Boston police officer Mike Cox directed his partner to swing by his house before heading over to check out the scene at the club Cortee’s. The apartment at 52 Supple Road in Dorchester was only about a mile from the club. Mike ran inside and pulled off his black nylon Windbreaker, the one with his unit’s patch stitched on the left breast beneath the Boston PD emblem. He changed and hustled back outside.
It was just before midnight. The below-freezing weather wasn’t the reason for the clothing switch. Mike needed to fit in, and within minutes he and his partner were walking into the low-slung building with its unwelcoming dirty brick exterior. The club resembled a warehouse about to be condemned. The three windows in front were so narrow and smeared that inside they guaranteed darkness, not light. The only touch of style was the rooftop sign—with the name, Cortee’s, written in a swirling red script across an orange background.
The club was smack in the middle of a neighborhood known as Four Corners, which was targeted periodically by city leaders and neighborhood advocates for urban renewal. The newspaper article announcing one such effort described Four Corners as “a neighborhood where mothers do not let young children play in front yards. Where nearly 40 percent of families with children under age five live in poverty. Where teenagers keep their eyes open and routinely throw furtive looks over their shoulders. Where empty lots and ‘for sale’ signs scar almost every block. Where street justice is the law of the land.”
At the club on a Saturday night two months earlier, a near-riot had broken out; a young Dorchester man was stabbed in the butt and the back and taken by ambulance to Boston City Hospital. When police arrived they found a crowd outside shoving and fighting and throwing bottles. Three men were arrested in connection with the stabbing, and police caught two other men slashing the tires of a cruiser.
Mike Cox squeezed past patrons to make his way deeper inside. Next to him was Craig Jones. Right away they liked what they saw: The club was running at full throttle, the music blaring across a large room jammed with at least a couple hundred people. Hip-Hop Night guaranteed a crowd, even on a weeknight in January