Read Online The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella by Steve Cavanagh - Free Book Online Page B

criminal operations, at its core it was simplicity itself. McAllister had not deviated from the story. Occasionally she would take a sip of beer, or sweep her dark hair behind her ear, but she spoke straight and clear, sparing no details.
    “The Morgue Squad came into being because the NYPD started getting real good at their job. Clearance rates for serious crimes hit all-time highs, with more murders solved than in any other years in recent memory. Plus the murder rate hit rock bottom. In the early nineties there were almost two thousand murders a year. That number dropped and has continued to fall. Last year there were just over three hundred, the lowest murder rate on record. Most murders in New York are domestics gone too far, but a good amount are drug or gang related. And we guess that around twenty to thirty murders in recent years are contract hits. In the nineties that number was well into the hundreds.”
    I’d heard this before, on the street. If you ran a con operation in New York, you had to know who was off-limits. I knew the guys who could put out contracts, and I knew, by reputation, some of the guys who accepted them. There was no doubting the economy—if you were a contract killer in New York, then all the good money was made in the nineties.
    “I’d heard on the homicide beat, from some of the twenty-year veterans, that there was a very real market for contracts. We’re talking high-profile hits. People with money and protection—informants in police custody, gangsters, other hit men, politicians, cops, lawyers,even top drug traffickers and cartel enforcers were targets. According to the cops I worked with, Kuklinski got most of the work in New York because he was thorough, reliable, and safe; he hid the bodies in his freezer for a few years to mask the time of death, or he made it look like suicide or slipped the corpse into the Hudson so it would never be found. The Iceman got the work because he ensured nobody ever came looking for him, much less the man or woman who put out the contract.”
    “Kuklinski got caught, didn’t he?” said Jack.
    “Sure did, in the 1980s. I worked with a cop who was on the Iceman taskforce. When Kuklinski went down, there was a gap in the market. A lot of people tried to fill that gap. Half a dozen emerged vying for the number-one spot in Manhattan. Only one of them is alive today. He’s still working, and he’s still number one.”
    “Because he disguises the kills?” I said.
    “He does a little more than that. We don’t know the exact setup. What we do know comes from convicted felons, lifers. A cop in IAB investigated a complaint raised by the Innocence Project. They were working a case for a guy named Jason Fenton. In 1994 Jason Fenton was convicted of the murder of his neighbor Doreen Bird. They lived a few floors apart in luxury condos on the Upper West Side. A janitor saw Doreen and Jason leave the building together one night, and Doreen never made it home. She was found a few days later in a motel room in Jersey with her skull beaten almost flat. The desk clerk remembered her but couldn’t remember what the guy she was with looked like. Luckily, a drunk from a local bar caught a good look at the man who accompanied her to the motel, as did the janitor. They picked Jason out of a lineup, and the DA ran with the case.
    “Jason protested his innocence, said he wasn’t with Doreen that night. Instead he’d gone to a movie and then went home. Jason had no priors and he was a pillar of thecommunity. The DA ran with the eye-witness evidence and hair fibers from Jason that were found on Doreen’s clothes. He got twenty-five to life. The Innocence Project lawyers reinterviewed the witnesses about three years ago. While Jason had always maintained his innocence, the Innocence Project lawyers had refused to file an appeal. That changed when Jason sent them a letter he’d received from one of the prosecution witnesses—the building janitor, Louis. By this