The Fence - Dick Lehr [80]
Roach showed up at the Coxes’ on Supple Road in Dorchester in early February. The meeting did not last long. “I just wanted him to leave as fast as possible,” Mike said. “It was like, ‘Hi, nice to meet you. I have a headache. Can you please leave?’” Mike had met with Roach mainly to placate his family, but the meeting did last long enough for Mike to realize Roach was an outsider. “He knew nothing about the Boston police,” Mike said. “He had not worked for them, and he didn’t seem to be part of that culture.”
For Mike, this was good. Roach didn’t owe anyone anything. “He seemed like a safe outlet.” On his own, Mike had privately begun to question the low-key nature of the department’s response. Maybe his family was on the right track. Maybe the “grace period” was not so much time to allow the wrongdoers to step up as to enable a cover-up to take root. Maybe the delay was to see whether Mike was going to push this thing; if Mike didn’t, then maybe the debacle at the dead end just goes away.
Then there came a second call several nights later, followed by a third. “Virtually every night,” Mike said. Sometimes the caller didn’t say a word, other times the caller screamed, and other times he yelled, “Fuck you.” Sometimes Mike lifted the receiver and left it on the floor. “An hour later I might put the phone back, and ten minutes after that the phone would ring.” Mike became convinced the caller was a cop using blunt force—the linguistic equivalent to a nightstick or flashlight—to keep him down and silent. But if that was the intent, the harassing calls worked to an opposite effect on Mike: as a wake-up call from his deep slumber.
“It helped me to focus,” Mike said. “This was not just gonna go away.”
By the second week of February, investigators for Internal Affairs were working in earnest—an effort that began only after the initial newspaper accounts about Mike ran on February 3. The news stories might have been circumspect, but they had signaled the word was out. The department could no longer put off pursuing a formal look at the incident—and the first order of business was a sit-down with Mike Cox.
Mike arrived at police headquarters in downtown Boston late in the afternoon of February 9 and rode the elevator to the fourth-floor offices of Internal Affairs. For the division, the Cox case—officially known as Case #2795—was hardly standard stuff. When it came in, for example, investigators were checking out an officer who’d failed to report for duty on New Year’s Day and apparently never called in sick. In another new case, investigators were sorting out who did what in a car accident involving a police officer and a retired city resident. The retiree complained the officer, while writing out a ticket, was abusive, yelling, “Fuck” and “Fuck you” at her.
In contrast, Mike’s case was the kind of complicated and radioactive mess few investigators would want to touch—and, in the end, it was handed off to a relatively inexperienced investigator. Sergeant Detective Luis Cruz had only worked in the division for about a year. But it wasn’t only his short service that stood out. Cruz had his mind elsewhere. The ambitious officer was wrapping up law school and looking to graduate in June. He also had been trying to get out of Internal Affairs. He wanted to