I said, “About half of them.”
Macy gave me a disgusted look but didn’t say anything. Then he shook his head and started marching toward Harry Grissom’s office.
Brett Hollis stepped up next to me. “You just had to say something, huh.”
“Did you hear how he set me up? If this were a criminal case, that would’ve been considered entrapment.”
Hollis and a couple of nearby detectives started to laugh.
Harry trudged out of his office and gave me and Hollis a curt hand signal. We followed him and Macy to the conference room Hollis had turned into his tip-line headquarters.
At a nod from Harry, Hollis explained the operation to Macy. “We’re getting three to five thousand leads a day over the tip line. Eighty percent of them can be discounted immediately.”
“It seems a little arrogant to discount so many leads so quickly,” Macy interrupted.
“Think of it this way, Mr. Macy,” Hollis said. “How many calls a week does the mayor’s office get about problems?”
The sharply dressed man shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe five hundred?”
“And each of those calls is equally important?”
Macy pursed his lips. “I take your point, Detective Hollis.”
Hollis continued with his explanation. “About half the calls to the tip line are either encouragement—like someone saying, ‘You guys are doing a great job’—or insults. A lot of those are really nasty. Let’s say that leaves us with two thousand concerned citizens offering what they think is relevant information. More than half of those tips are something along the lines of ‘The guy who lives next door to me is creepy.’ Of the thousand or so tips remaining, about ten percent are new information. But that’s still a hundred leads a day for someone to follow up on, with either a direct interview or a phone call. So far, not one lead has been useful. But we still are doing everything we can.”
“Does this include leads on all the open homicides? Including the one on Staten Island?”
I stepped in on that one. “We have our doubts about whether the Staten Island murder is connected.”
Macy looked outraged. “How can that be? It’s clearly the same killer.”
I couldn’t stand it anymore. “What is that assessment based on, Mr. Macy? You don’t have any experience in homicide, even if you were a cop for, as you put it, about five minutes. If we homicide detectives don’t use our experience and instincts, nothing would ever get done. We’d waste our time following leads that clearly mean nothing. But we appreciate you coming from the mayor’s office and telling us which homicides are related and which aren’t.”
Macy scowled at me for a few seconds, then looked at Harry Grissom. “Is this what you call controlling your people, Lieutenant? When we met with the chief of detectives, you assured him I’d get full cooperation. I don’t think insulting me should be considered cooperation.”
Harry glanced at me, then at Macy. I knew the look on his face. He was choosing his words carefully. Finally, he straightened his tie and said, in the steady, calm voice of an FM radio host, “We’re trying to cooperate, Mr. Macy. You’re not making it very easy.”
“Task Force Halo is supposed to be a joint task force. Maybe you can tell me why the FBI is not involved in the case,” Macy countered.
I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t about to touch this, especially given the evidence we’d been pursuing that indicated the murders might be tied to similar crimes in Atlanta and San Francisco, and that we continued to work through media and police sources—not federal channels. Which reminded me once again that Emily had yet to come through with the information she’d offered to track down.
Harry said, “That’s an issue we’ll discuss. We’ll make a decision based on our discussions. We will apprise you of the decision once we’ve made it.” Then he turned and walked back to his office.
I tried to hide my smile.
Damn, my boss was good at handling assholes.
Macy looked at me and said, “You don’t seem to understand I speak to the mayor.”
I said, “And the coroner speaks for the dead. The difference is, I listen to the coroner.”
The moment I landed my zinger, John Macy stormed back into Grissom’s office.
I’d launched a grenade. This meeting could have gone better.
Chapter 36
I sat at my desk like a kid in middle-school detention. I tried not to focus on Harry Grissom’s closed office door, but it was tough to concentrate on anything else.
I could only imagine what the mayor’s aide, John Macy, was ranting about inside my lieutenant’s office. I assumed that by now he had called someone at One Police Plaza and told them how I was acting like a bratty child. I didn’t have much defense for that charge.
I was kicking myself for failing to reel in the worst of my smart-ass tendencies. If one of my kids behaved like this, I’d definitely punish them for it. I didn’t deserve anything less.
I noticed some members of the squad had found reasons to be elsewhere. Except for me and Brett Hollis, the office looked like a ghost town.
To help fill the time and ease my anxiety, I turned to Hollis and asked, “What are you working on?”
Hollis barely looked up. “My application to take your spot on the squad permanently.”
I sat in silence for a moment until a smile crept across the young detective’s face. He really was getting the hang of surviving as a cop: laugh at everything. I said, “Funny. Although it’s probably not a bad idea.”
“It’s a waste of time.”
“You don’t think I’ll get transferred to some precinct in the Bronx?”
“Nope. Because Lieutenant Grissom already told me I could have your spot.”
That made me laugh out loud. “Seriously, are you working on anything I can help with? I wouldn’t mind being distracted about now.”
“I’m doing more research on serial killers. There’s gotta be something in all the information and evidence gathered from the multiple crime scenes and calls to the tip line that fits some sort of pattern.”
“Isn’t that what the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico is for?”
“From everything I’ve heard, the FBI doesn’t always play fair. We could give them all the information we have and never hear back from them. Or we could give them all our information and then they swoop in and take over the case. I wouldn’t care if it meant they caught the killer. But if you haven’t noticed, their track record is mediocre at best.”
“You’re learning,” I said to my young partner. And I meant it.
I asked Hollis about his research on serial killers. Whether it was official or unofficial, his knowledge of the subject might come in handy.
Hollis lit up at the opportunity to share his research, now that he knew I was truly interested.
“Okay,” he began, “so first I was looking at debunking a bunch of stuff. Like, you know how everyone assumes most serial killers are Caucasian?”
I nodded, remembering how Dr. Jill St. Pierre had said just that to me in our earlier conversation.
“Well, the truth is that as more information becomes available, it turns out that the serial killer population mirrors the diverse racial makeup of the US population as a whole. In fact, there’s a black guy in his late seventies named Samuel Little who could be the country’s most prolific serial killer.”