The Midnight Club_ A Novel - James Patterson [63]
It just couldn’t work. They couldn’t work. Stefanovitch was as sure of it as he was that the realization was one of the most painful of his life.
The sixth floor inside Police Plaza was choked with activity at nine in the morning. Like the seventh and eighth floors, the sixth was subdivided into departments. Outer offices were partitioned by enameled steel wall units to create compact but at least windowed offices. Each was large enough for a small sofa, work desk, and a chair or two. Stefanovitch wheeled past his own office, without bothering to look inside.
He was a few minutes late arriving at the commissioner’s briefing. Captain Donald Moran was delivering a postmortem on Atlantic City. Two dozen high-ranking cops were huddled around, listening. They were mostly stone-faced, looking about as awful as Stefanovitch felt.
“Vincent Poppo died this morning. That’s seventeen dead in Atlantic City. Santo Striga and Sammy Chum aren’t expected to live. Despite the allegations in the newspapers, no one’s been able to identify the hit men at Trump’s. This police vigilante thing in the papers is total bullshit. We don’t know why Aurelio Rodriquez was in Atlantic City. It’s possible he was part of the team that hit Trump’s, but not as a cop.”
Stefanovitch didn’t want to, but he also got the opportunity to speak to the group about the investigation.
“I don’t have a lot to tell,” he said. “We’re trying to cooperate with the FBI, and the Atlantic City police force. They’re doing hotel-by-hotel checks up and down the boardwalk. There are special detective teams operating in Newark, Philadelphia, Miami, here in New York.”
Stefanovitch raised his hands palms up. He felt burned out, frustrated, and he knew it showed. What he wasn’t telling the others was that the FBI and the local police had tied his hands in Atlantic City. They were playing jurisdictional games, which was why he’d left Atlantic City on Saturday night. The questions in his mind were: Why had the travesty down there been allowed to happen? Why was the N.Y.P.D. being pulled back from the manhunt at this time? It was one more thing that didn’t make sense.
Herbert Windfield, Stefanovitch’s captain, got to speak next. “We’re pretty sure whoever hit Trump’s knew we were right there at the Tropicana,” he began. “One of the hitters closed the drapes before the shooting started. Coincidence, right? So we have no videotapes of the shooting. The recordings show that none of the hitters said anything once they were inside. Another coincidence? On the tapes, there’s shouting from the mob bosses, gunfire. The hitters didn’t say a word. Cold as ice. The whole thing was like a hit by a gang of fucking Darth Vaders.”
Following the round of Monday morning quarterbacking, Stefanovitch was one of the first out of the briefing room. He was surprised that the commissioner hadn’t shown up. Why was that? Not enough teams had been assigned to do the follow-up work down in Atlantic City. Something had changed.
Back in his office on the Homicide floor, Stefanovitch flicked on the overhead lights. A familiar hum came with the lights. He hated the fucking buzz, hated everything mechanical in his life.
Suddenly he stopped. He stared at a man sitting in the wooden chair by his desk.
The man had a brown leather shoulder holster over a T-shirt that said “P.A.L.,” a police organization for helping kids around New York.
“Hello, Lieutenant Stefanovitch,” the man in the chair said. He didn’t bother to get up.
Detective Isiah Parker had come to visit.
62
Isiah Parker; One Police Plaza
“I’M ISIAH PARKER, I work in Narcotics uptown. Nineteenth Precinct? We’ve met a couple times over the years. I don’t know if you remember me or not?”
Stefanovitch shut the door behind him. He wasn’t even sure why. “Yeah, sure.