Ghettoside by Jill Leovy

Author:Jill Leovy [Leovy, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-385-53000-2
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-27T05:00:00+00:00

“Code Four here!”

Skaggs was back in the squad room talking to one of his bureau colleagues on the cell phone during a break, his tone light with relief. He snapped the phone shut and surveyed his colleagues hovering nearby. One was readying six-packs—photo lineups for Jessica to identify the suspects. Another prepared to take Jessica out for a cigarette.

Prideaux also lingered. He had remained in the background, enduring spasms of anxiety as Skaggs spoke to Midkiff. By now, Prideaux knew he had made the right decision in selecting Skaggs for the case. He orbited the tall detective and waited for an opening.

“Hey John, you need anything?” Prideaux finally asked. He spoke with forced lightness. But his voice held a deferential note. Anyone listening would have thought Skaggs, not Prideaux, the superior officer.

“No, L.T.!” Skaggs told him. Securing Midkiff’s cooperation was game-changing, Skaggs knew he was in the home stretch.

There is little celebrating in homicide units. Even La Barbera and his crew, long known for irreverence that bordered on inappropriateness, did not generally high-five each other or appear jubilant when they solved cases. They indulged in pranks and black humor, and they posed every year for a grisly homicide-themed Christmas card from the unit—a faux crime scene with a dead Santa, for example. But day to day, homicide remained just too depressing to permit much gaiety in their ranks. Detectives walked out of meetings with suspects, witnesses, and survivors looking somber and spent no matter how well the interviews had gone. Grim faces accompanied even the most dramatic investigative triumphs. It wasn’t an affectation, it was a natural reaction to the cloud of agony that emanated from the Monster.

One could never feel good about solving a case. No sense of a mission accomplished could minimize the horror. Bryant’s death, no matter what the detectives did, would remain sickening and unspeakably sad to everyone who had dealt with the case, forever after.

So although Prideaux had been waiting for weeks for this moment—waiting to see Skaggs emerge from a key interview with a look of success—he allowed himself just two words to express his feelings:

“Good job,” he muttered.

Skaggs reflexively dropped his voice to match Prideaux’s.

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “It worked out.”

Up until then, Skaggs had betrayed no emotion about the favorable turn the case had taken. But the tactful respect in Prideaux’s voice seemed to catch him off guard.

Skaggs emitted a small sigh. Then he repeated his own words in a murmur, as if reassuring himself. “It worked out.”

That evening stretched for hours. Skaggs interviewed Midkiff in detail, then drove her past the crime scene. He searched her mother’s house. He became more and more certain that she was telling the truth. He was astonished by how well she remembered the sequence of events seven months before. He tested her, pretending he didn’t know certain details so that she would supply them. He lied to her, telling her he had a conflicting statement from another occupant in the car. He wanted to see if she would improvise.

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