The Fence - Dick Lehr [97]
Peabody chose not to dwell on comparisons between the two cases or reasons that police officers had not come clean. He viewed Mike’s case as a straightforward investigation of an assault and battery. “Our job was to try to figure out how he got hit and who hit him. That was our objective.” He considered instead the other obstacles—such as the nearly four-month delay in getting started. The first twenty-four hours after the beating, he knew from experience, had been the best chance “for people to figure it out and cut to the chase, and to be big about it.” Once lost, “It was every man for himself.”
Then the Internal Affairs investigatory materials were off-limits. “We were barred from obtaining any of the information from Internal Affairs.” Peabody and his Anti-Corruption investigators would be unable to challenge any changes in the officers’ tape-recorded statements—known as prior inconsistent statements. But it was more than comparing content. Interviews were about body language too, and experienced investigators studied words and body language in assessing an officer’s credibility. In this regard, the IA interviews were tantamount to dress rehearsals—a practice round for testing statements and delivery. Peabody’s interviews were not going to be fresh.
Despite his role in the Charlestown affair, Peabody was also the first to admit his own relative inexperience when it came to using the grand jury as an investigatory tool. Ordinarily prosecutors went before a grand jury to seek indictments based on evidence already assembled by the police. Typically, this legal step was brief and uncomplicated. In the Cox case, Peabody, as the lead prosecutor, would be trying to develop evidence in front of the grand jury, where he’d be calling witnesses to the stand and attempting to build a case by “probing and digging and pushing.” But if he lacked the sure-footedness of his later career, when he would run a number of investigatory grand juries, Peabody entered the Cox case eager and undeterred. He attacked the case with the same determination he showed while playing tackle on the offensive line of the Harvard College football team. “We’d start from scratch, ground zero, and build our own case.”
The game plan wasn’t fancy or revolutionary. Peabody began by reading the stack of police reports about Woodruff Way, underlining certain statements and jotting notes in the margins. As he began to reconstruct the night, he couldn’t help but get swept up in its high drama—the wildness of the high-speed chase for the four shooting suspects followed by the “fucking chaos” at the dead end. “The adrenaline was pumping like you wouldn’t believe.” It reminded him that life for street cops was “God-forsaken work. You’re working on the edge. Your life is in your hands. It’s scary. People don’t get that.”
Peabody was teamed up with the head of the police department’s Anti-Corruption Unit, Lieutenant Detective Paul J. Farrahar. The two men knew of each other but had never worked together before. Farrahar, about to turn fifty-four, was a commanding figure. Like Peabody, he stood more than six feet tall. But Farrahar exuded a physicality that Peabody did not, despite Peabody’s history as a college football jock. Peabody was a blue blood, with an Ivy League polish and hint of the Boston Brahmin in his voice. He was no snob, for sure; he was down-to-earth—he’d eaten his fair share of turf as a lineman—but his earth was different from Farrahar’s. The balding cop’s background was working class. His handshake was firm, driven by powerful forearms, and he possessed an unflappable demeanor. The inscrutable look, however, did not mask a hard interior. He had seen it all during his twenty-five years on the force—or thought he had until the Mike Cox beating. The more he learned, the more worked up he got. The silence that followed was beyond his comprehension. It turned his insides that cops had run from a fallen