Fallen Angel by Michael Vecchione

Author:Michael Vecchione [Vecchione, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Red Penguin Books

Chapter

Thirty-Two

As she sat burrowing through a pile of sexual assault reports, Dina Mitchell was being harassed by the precinct cops. They gave her no peace as she sat behind a desk in a small office lit only by an ancient desk lamp.

Dina was a beautiful African-American woman, and while some cops stopped by to flirt, one particular cop tried to distract her. In the basement locker room, Billy Scherr, the cop from the Bronx on temporary assignment in the 66th precinct, constantly mouthed off to his fellow officers that neither the cop-hater Gioca nor his people could be trusted to do the right thing.

“Don’t knock yourself out too much going through those reports. I’ll bet your boss Gioca is already thinking of how he can pin this murder on the husband,’’ Scherr said to Dina a few hours after she began her work.

She ignored him, but he kept at her.

After a while, his remarks and annoyance took their toll on Dina. She welled up and tried to hold back tears, but it was a losing battle. Finally, she lowered her head in her hands softly sobbing. She was shaken by the deep-rooted animosity and hatred for Michael voiced by this one cop. He had been so vocal that she could feel he was converting others to his way of thinking.

How could he be so ignorant? And why were these other cops listening to him? They can’t be that stupid, she thought to herself.

She liked cops and had been raised to respect the police, believing they would respect her in return. But here she was a college graduate, a detective investigator for the district attorney’s office, a crime fighter like them, and yet she was being treated like the enemy and made to feel that she was doing something wrong.

Dina admired Michael. She knew him to be a man who truly believed in the law. “A law-and-order guy,” is what the ADAs and investigators in the Rackets Division called him.

He’s more a cop than that pain in the ass and his friends, she thought. He follows the facts to get to the truth and fights for his beliefs. How could they hate him so much for putting a corrupt federal agent in jail? It did not make sense to her, confused her, and made her sad.

Tim Clark walked in on Dina as she was wiping away a tear. One look at her face and he realized what the situation was. In a fatherly way, he put his arm around her.

“Don’t let these morons get to you. As you move up in this business, you’re going to face a lot worse. The kind of pressure surrounding this case often brings out the worst in people. You’ll learn to ignore it and do your job,” he said.

Tim sat down next to her, told her about the timid neighbor, Agnes White, and made her laugh with his recounting of the meeting with Buck and his owner. They agreed that both witnesses would be valuable when an arrest was made.

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