Free The Devil's Garden by Richard Montanari

for some reason the sense of unease had not.
    ♥ Uploaded by Coral ♥

PART TWO

SIX
    T he borough of Queens is the largest of the five boroughs of New York City, and the city’s second most populous. It sits on the westernmost section of Long Island, and is home to both LaGuardia and JFK airports, as well as the US Open for tennis. At one time or another the borough had been the residence of a number of celebrities, both famous and infamous, including Tony Bennett, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Gotti. It was by far the most culturally diverse borough, boasting more than one hundred nationalities.
    The office of the district attorney, a modern ten-story building located in Kew Gardens, looked as if it had been built by five different architects and builders, composed of a series of additions added in different eras, a pastiche of style, materials, and methods. One of the busiest DA’s offices in the country, it was home to more than three hundred attorneys, and five hundred support personnel.
    The Major Crimes, Investigations, Trials, Special Prosecutions and Legal Affairs divisions of the office were responsible not only for the prosecution of arrest cases brought to the office by the New York City Police Department and other law enforcement agencies, but also for proactively seeking out wrongdoers and aggressively undertaking investigations of suspected criminal conduct.
    The DA’s office, too, boasted its own stars. Frank O’Connor, a former Queens District Attorney, figured prominently in the 1956 Alfred Hitchcock film The Wrong Man.
    To some, mostly those who were not inside the elite divisions of the office, the building was called the Palace. Those who did work in Major Crimes never did anything to discourage the practice. And while a palace can really only boast one king – in this case it was the District Attorney, Dennis R. McCaffrey – it can have a number of princes.
    When Michael Roman, inarguably the most favored prince at the bar, arrived at the Palace on the day before the Ghegan trial was scheduled to begin, there were only a handful of people. If Saturdays turned the New York legal system into a ghost town, Sundays rendered it virtually barren. Only the newest and most ambitious young attorneys, along with royalty like Michael Roman, ventured into the office. The second floor was all but deserted.
    As much as Michael enjoyed the buzz and noise of the office when it was in full swing, he had to admit he liked having the place to himself. He did his best thinking on the weekends. There was a time when the DA’s Homicide division was located in a dumpy little building in Jamaica that looked like a check-cashing store and, for a number of prosecutors, Michael included, it was almost a pleasure to try cases out there, off the beaten path, away from the boss’s scrutinizing eye.
    After five years of working in these trenches, vaulting his way up from the Intake Bureau to the Felony Trial Bureau, Michael cemented his reputation with the trial and conviction of the Patrescu brothers, a pair of vicious drug dealers who had cold bloodedly murdered six people in the basement of a fast food restaurant in the Forest Hills section of Queens. Michael and Tommy Christiano had worked nights and weekends on that case, backed by a capital investigation team with hundreds of detectives from the DA’s office and the NYPD.
    Marku Patrescu was currently serving six life sentences in the Clinton Correctional Facility, better known as Dannemora. His brother Dante, who had pulled the trigger, had been executed that March. After Dante’s sentence was carried out, Michael began to hear interesting stories from DAs all over the city. It seemed that apprehended suspects, in a wide range of crimes – rapes, assaults, robberies – cited the Patrescu execution as a major reason not to carry a weapon, or use a weapon in their possession during the commission of a felony. It was this sort of evidence of cause