Read Online Good Day to Die by Stephen Solomita - Free Book Online
Authors: Stephen Solomita
Ads: Link
patrol?” He waited for me to nod, then continued. “Bowman ran the task force up. I can still hear his voice. ‘The operant concepts are organize and prioritize. Don’t let the paperwork overwhelm you.’”
“That’s easy to say.” I interrupted. “But it’s like asking a turtle to fly. Did he tell you how? ”
“No, he didn’t. But part of it was obvious. Like the known sex offenders. We did that in spite of the profile. We also interviewed the victims’ friends, their pimps, if they had pimps, and every male whore we could get our hands on. But that only added to the basic problem. Everything we did generated more leads. Thousands and thousands of leads. Tens of thousands of leads. You think we could check ’em all out? Not in a fucking lifetime, Means. We had to put ’em in some kind of order and that meant we had to have some kind of a basic premise. A peg to hang the hats on. The profile became the peg.”
He fished a smoke out of a crumpled pack of Chesterfields and lit it up. “We divided leads into five categories, A to E. A few of them were easy to place, like ‘I was in a bar with so and so and he told me that he was the killer,’ but most of them were vague. So and so takes young boys into his apartment. So and so works with leather and goes out late at night. So and so is a faggot priest who gets off on male prostitutes.”
He was all excited now, jabbing at the air with his cigarette as he made his points. “After a couple of weeks, we finally got it through our heads that we had to do something. Half the task force was out on the streets harassing creeps. The other half was buried in paperwork. The whole fucking thing was getting away from us and if we didn’t make a move in a hurry, we were never gonna catch up.” He allowed himself to lean back, to relax a bit. “So we trained the phone men to ask hotline callers for age, weight, and height. What did he do for a living? Did he drive a van? Did he smoke? Was he married or divorced? Anyone who fit the profile automatically went on the A list. The idea was to check them out first, then move on to the Bs. Only we never got past the As.” He looked at his hands and shrugged. “And now it’s over.”
“How many, Pooch?” I asked casually.
“How many what?”
“How many prime suspects you develop from the profile?”
“Twenty-three.”
I shook my head in disgust. “You question their wives?”
“Naturally.”
“Their coworkers? Their bosses?”
“Yeah.”
“Their neighbors?”
His head jerked up. “Don’t cross-examine me,” he snarled. “What we did is called policing. It’s not something a psycho, like you, could appreciate.”
“Did you set up surveillance, Pooch? Twenty-four-hour surveillance?” I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give the knife another twist. “Did you follow them from their homes to their jobs to their churches to their relatives? Did you totally destroy twenty-three lives on the basis of some bullshit, fucking profile? ”
We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes. I don’t know if Pooch was contemplating his sins or getting ready to shoot me, but I was thinking about my years in Vice. About busting HIV-positive, drug-addicted prostitutes. About finding those same, sad, vicious whores back on the street before I finished the paperwork. One sergeant told me to look at it like I was a sanitation worker.
“The streets get dirty,” he’d explained, “so we sweep ’em clean. If they didn’t get dirty again, why would anybody need us?”
He had a point, but I hadn’t spent all those hours studying for the cops only to become a garbageman. Nor did I have a wife and kids and a house on Staten Island to support. I could’ve walked away from the paycheck, and I’d thought about it more than once.
The truth was that I’d come to New York to hunt. That was the long and the short of it. And not very surprising, because I’d spent most of my life hunting. I grew up in a house
“That’s easy to say.” I interrupted. “But it’s like asking a turtle to fly. Did he tell you how? ”
“No, he didn’t. But part of it was obvious. Like the known sex offenders. We did that in spite of the profile. We also interviewed the victims’ friends, their pimps, if they had pimps, and every male whore we could get our hands on. But that only added to the basic problem. Everything we did generated more leads. Thousands and thousands of leads. Tens of thousands of leads. You think we could check ’em all out? Not in a fucking lifetime, Means. We had to put ’em in some kind of order and that meant we had to have some kind of a basic premise. A peg to hang the hats on. The profile became the peg.”
He fished a smoke out of a crumpled pack of Chesterfields and lit it up. “We divided leads into five categories, A to E. A few of them were easy to place, like ‘I was in a bar with so and so and he told me that he was the killer,’ but most of them were vague. So and so takes young boys into his apartment. So and so works with leather and goes out late at night. So and so is a faggot priest who gets off on male prostitutes.”
He was all excited now, jabbing at the air with his cigarette as he made his points. “After a couple of weeks, we finally got it through our heads that we had to do something. Half the task force was out on the streets harassing creeps. The other half was buried in paperwork. The whole fucking thing was getting away from us and if we didn’t make a move in a hurry, we were never gonna catch up.” He allowed himself to lean back, to relax a bit. “So we trained the phone men to ask hotline callers for age, weight, and height. What did he do for a living? Did he drive a van? Did he smoke? Was he married or divorced? Anyone who fit the profile automatically went on the A list. The idea was to check them out first, then move on to the Bs. Only we never got past the As.” He looked at his hands and shrugged. “And now it’s over.”
“How many, Pooch?” I asked casually.
“How many what?”
“How many prime suspects you develop from the profile?”
“Twenty-three.”
I shook my head in disgust. “You question their wives?”
“Naturally.”
“Their coworkers? Their bosses?”
“Yeah.”
“Their neighbors?”
His head jerked up. “Don’t cross-examine me,” he snarled. “What we did is called policing. It’s not something a psycho, like you, could appreciate.”
“Did you set up surveillance, Pooch? Twenty-four-hour surveillance?” I couldn’t resist the opportunity to give the knife another twist. “Did you follow them from their homes to their jobs to their churches to their relatives? Did you totally destroy twenty-three lives on the basis of some bullshit, fucking profile? ”
We sat there in silence for a couple of minutes. I don’t know if Pooch was contemplating his sins or getting ready to shoot me, but I was thinking about my years in Vice. About busting HIV-positive, drug-addicted prostitutes. About finding those same, sad, vicious whores back on the street before I finished the paperwork. One sergeant told me to look at it like I was a sanitation worker.
“The streets get dirty,” he’d explained, “so we sweep ’em clean. If they didn’t get dirty again, why would anybody need us?”
He had a point, but I hadn’t spent all those hours studying for the cops only to become a garbageman. Nor did I have a wife and kids and a house on Staten Island to support. I could’ve walked away from the paycheck, and I’d thought about it more than once.
The truth was that I’d come to New York to hunt. That was the long and the short of it. And not very surprising, because I’d spent most of my life hunting. I grew up in a house
Similar Books
