Free Close Case by Alafair Burke Page B

was unpersuaded. “Maybe I’d give the benefit of the doubt to another officer. But Geoff Hamilton’s a thumper. Something wrong with that boy upstairs.”
    “I don’t know anything about him,” I conceded.
    “Well, one thing about working in Gangs, you have witnesses and victims who are usually the defendants on our cases. I take most of it with a grain of salt, but, trust me, Hamilton’s name comes up so often there’s got to be something there. He came into Northeast Precinct a couple years ago, and it was, like, immediately the neighborhood knew his name. One story has him complaining when the precinct’s fleet manager cleaned blood off the hood of his patrol car after a resist arrest. He wanted to send a message to the rest of the neighborhood. If we let him off, we can forget about getting the people up there to work with us anytime in the near future.”
    “And that, ” Russ emphasized, “is exactly why Hamilton should probably start looking for a defense lawyer. The line officers will be pissed off for a while, but the alternative is pissing off the entire black community. We’ve sided with hothead cops in I don’t know how many police shootings, not to mention all the other use-of-force cases. But usually the victim was resisting arrest, or at least a wing nut. Tompkins seems pretty clean.”
    “If Tompkins wasn’t doing anything wrong, how did a cop wind up shooting her in the head?” I asked.
    “We’re still trying to figure out what happened,” Russ explained. “Hamilton’s union rep has him clammed up for now, and obviously the woman’s not around to tell us anything.”
    In other words, he had none of the details that might help him decide what was the right, not just the expedient, thing to do.
    “Well, I’m about to join the two of you in the hot seat because a bunch of kids can’t find anything better to do than run around making trouble.” Jessica’s change of subject was so abrupt, I wondered whether the thought of a single mother blown away, leaving a one-year-old and three-year-old orphaned, was too much even for her.
    “The protest cases again?” I asked.
    For Russ’s benefit, Jessica repeated what she had told me at the Justice Center about the property damage on Northwest 23rd. “I thought it was bad enough when a few of them looked like they might be felonies. But now it turns out that these losers did more than break a few windows. There were at least two random assaults: bad ones, too. A bystander took some home movies with his camcorder. Hopefully we’ll actually find the fuckers, but the media will have a heyday.”
    “It’s always a bigger story when there’s video,” Russ added.
    “Tell me about it. I’m getting calls from the press already, comparing it to the wilding in Central Park. Give me a break. The bureau’s telling me they’re still getting reports of other incidents up there, which are most likely connected, even though we’ll never be able to prove it. It’s a total nightmare. Duncan wants me to make sure we put a case together, and I can’t get the bureau to decide who’s going to do the work.”
    “What’s the problem?” I asked.
    “Typical bureaucratic bullshit. It’s not a major crime so they won’t do anything other than put the pictures out for the public. And the pictures aren’t worth a shit, so I know exactly what that’ll get us—a ton of calls saying maybe it’s this guy, maybe it’s not. I’ll be back to square one, begging the bureau to do the follow-up.”
    “What time did all this go down last night?”
    “It peaked around nine. Why?”
    I thought about the information we had so far on the Crenshaw case. Kids in the parking lot. “Nice car, Snoop.” Then I thought about my drive to Percy Crenshaw’s condominium earlier that morning, past the Zupan’s market on Northwest 23rd. It was only a short jump up the hill to the condos perched above.
    I also thought about the time Mike would have on his hands, since