Murder in the Manuscript Room by Con Lehane

Author:Con Lehane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Chapter 22

Mike Cosgrove was about to do something he’d never imagined he could do. On the kitchen table in front of him were photographs of his daughter Denise making the sale of a plastic bag of marijuana to an informant wired for sound. Across the table from him, the evidence in front of them, Denise sat crying, terrified. His heart was shattered.

She liked to go to the city with her friends. He wasn’t happy about it. But he let her go as long as she continued to do well in school. A guy she met in her travels—a cool guy, she said, not a dope dealer—told her she could buy pot from him, sell it to her friends, and that would pay for her own pot. It wasn’t really selling—

Cosgrove interrupted her, bellowing, “You’re a dope dealer, you fucking idiot.” That’s when the tears started, a torrential downpour, crying harder than she ever had, even as a child when she gashed her head open roller-skating and blood streamed out of the cut. He watched her shuddering back as she bawled into her hands. A few minutes before, she’d been talking about babysitting Ray’s grandson and he’d told her she could kiss that good-bye, too.

An operative from Campbell Security, Ed Ostrowski, had pulled him aside on Monday after a meeting at One Police Plaza with the Intelligence Division on the Leila Stone murder. They went for coffee at a café on Chambers Street, where Ostrowski placed a manila envelope on the table between them and told him what was in it.

Ostrowski wasn’t anything like a friend—they knew each other from a few cases over the years before Ostrowski retired. Now, he came on like an old buddy helping out a pal. When a guy’s handed you evidence of your daughter’s crime, you’re not going to try to straighten him out on anything.

Square head, thick neck, gray hair, ruddy complexion—as Polish as a plate of pierogi—Ostrowski came across as oily when he tried for sincerity. Wearing a thin smile and pained expression of feigned sympathy that made you think of constipation, he folded his pudgy, hands in front of him on the table. “Brad says give you these.”

“How’d you get this?” Cosgrove waved the envelope.

“You know what we do—protectin’ people. Might be we were shadowing someone and ran across this. You know how it works.”

He didn’t like Ostrowski when he was on the force. He ran his precinct like a vigilante operation. It was in a tough neighborhood in Brooklyn that included the drug-infested Red Hook Houses. He made it worse—wrongful death suits; excessive-force complaints; cowboy cops shaking down drug dealers. The brass pushed him into retirement before the neighborhood revolted.

“What’s in it for Campbell?” He and Ostrowski eyed each other like stray mongrels. “Do you want to answer or do I talk to Campbell?”

“Brad turned this over to me; he washed his hands.” Ostrowski was a nasty man, the nastiness near enough to the surface that it flowed from his pores like the stench of body odor.

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