Read Online The Big Fear by Andrew Case - Free Book Online

Scene Unit, roll calls from the Harbor Patrol, scans of memo books from patrol officers and daily activity reports from detectives, and every scrap of paper filled out by every cop that had stepped foot anywhere near the boat that night. The NYPD ran the full technological gamut. There were the elite security units with retinal scanners, the high-end narcotics squads with fifty-foot cranes mounted with ultraviolet cameras to look into your apartment, and the counterterrorism units with goodies galore. The evidence guys are fully capable of scouring a ship in the middle of the night and sending you a bundled e-mail with eighty-seven photographs to look at the next morning. But in its daily plodding heart, the NYPD is a pen-to-paper operation. There are dozens of carbon paper forms that haven’t been updated yet, so every precinct has to keep a typewriter on hand to fill them out. Personnel files are printed on immense rolls of paper, complete with hole-punched perforated edges clinging to a spool as the machine chirps away. The entry-level kid at most businesses keeps a digital calendar, but cops are stuck with memo books where they are supposed to ballpoint everything they do, from collaring a murderer to helping someone down a flight of subway stairs. Mostly the memo books are filled up with the phone numbers of girls who like a guy in uniform. Aided cards, stop-and-frisk forms, use-of-force reports, warrant execution reports: a cop has to write out every one by hand. So even though Leonard would get every piece of digital data sometime today, his file wouldn’t be nearly complete.
    In a week or two, the actual paper would come in. Leonard could smell the dusty residue of Ms. Mortiz’s third grade class whenever he opened a manila envelope from a local precinct. You need the hard copy. Even the pages that they scanned and sent ahead were all only one-sided. Whenever a cop needs to know something but doesn’t want someone to look at it later, he folds over a page of his memo book and jots it down on the flyleaf.
    He had done the interview too soon, he thought. He didn’t know enough. Mulino had been almost too bright and too eager. Showing up in the uniform when most detectives will roll into DIMAC in their sweatshirts. The detective had been smiling, trying to help, until Andropovic used his stupid tapping-on-the-knee stunt again. Leonard made a note to report that to the union.
    Mulino hadn’t looked like Leonard had expected either. Skeptical dark eyes on an otherwise broad sweet face, Mulino looked almost too nice to be a lifelong cop. He had shot another detective, he was answering for it at DIMAC, and he hadn’t hardened into the traditional scowl, even now. The skin around the corners of his eyes was still soft and his hair had only a hint of gray. The guy had spent most of the interview almost smiling.
    And the story had sounded good enough. But the story always sounds good the first time. Before you’ve gone back over it and checked against the logs and the other guy’s memo book and the security video if you can get it. It would all turn on whether the part about the gun panned out. If a gun turned up, Leonard wasn’t going to bask in City Hall’s glow after all. But if there was no gun, it wouldn’t matter what Mulino said.
    And it still didn’t make sense that Mulino was the guy who got this call. Plenty of detectives awake at one in the morning, regular day off or no. And it wasn’t like Mulino was some special firecracker, the guy you absolutely need to have when you’re stomping around a container ship.
    Maybe he would find some answers in the digital production. The least he could do was to start looking. The preliminary personnel records had shown that Rowson had a tussle with Internal Affairs about eighteen months ago. Now the whole thing was spelled out. A summary investigation for improper disposal of evidence—a euphemism for pocketing the profits of someone you busted. Rowson had taken