Free 212 LP: A Novel by Alafair Burke

forever. Most of the tenants are rent-stabilized. Also been there forever. Then Sam Sparks buys up the roof space, stacks a few multimillion-dollar apartments on top, and calls the place 212. Two totally different kinds of tenants, now sharing one elevator and one lobby. You get your culture clashes.”
    Ellie felt her cell vibrate against her waist but let the call go to voice mail.
    “And where did these two neighbors fit into the clash?” she asked.
    “The old ladies who eat dinner at four thirty at the corner-diner side. They’d lived a good century and a half between them. And I’m telling you, they were a hoot. Watched Law and Order and CSI reruns all day long on ‘the cable,’ as they called it. They had the lingo down: skels, perps, mary jane, CIs, gun run. I mean, you name it, and they knew it. They were ready to sign up as CIs themselves. But let’s say that as confidential informants go, they weren’t the most reliable profilers when it comes to detecting drug dealing. Dirty old men? Not pushing the garbage all the way down the chute? That, I would trust them on. But they were the kind of sweet innocent citizens who think anyone who’s got friends coming and going at all hours of the night must be up to no good. Let’s call it a generational divide.”
    “So why do you have a DD5 on the apartment?”
    “Because the sweet biddies wouldn’t go away. God love ’em, theykept coming in and harping to the front desk with all their cop slang, cracking up everyone in the house but also being a major pain in the ass. So eventually the poor sacks in the community policing unit got dragged in to calm them down. You know what those guys are all about—it’s appeasement. So finally they put the old birds to work on a citizen-driven search warrant.”
    “How come Boyle didn’t tell us about this when we called you guys at the end of May?”
    “Because half the time when we start a citizen-driven warrant, the oh-so-concerned citizens get lazy and let it drop. We don’t bother logging anything onto a DD5 until they come back with all their paperwork. In this case, that didn’t happen until June.”
    “What exactly is a citizen-driven warrant?” Rogan asked.
    “No time in Narcotics, huh?” He said it as if no qualified cop could make it into Homicide without pulling duty in the drug squad. Given that Ellie made it to her current position after only five years in uniform and one as a detective in general crimes, she was thankful the question hadn’t been aimed at her.
    “Major Case Squad, then SVU,” Rogan said.
    “Okay, so a citizen-driven warrant is this thing we came up with, but it’s really a community policing tool. You know, after nine-eleven, we’ve got these ads all up and down the MTA, telling people, ‘If you see something, say something.’”
    “But we’re not always talking about the next Zacarias Moussaoui.”
    “No, knock on wood, not in most cases. Instead, we get these nosy neighbors convinced that someone’s up to something. So the citizen-driven warrant puts them to work. They write down every suspicious thing they see. They turn in the pages to us. If it adds up to probable cause, we ask for a warrant. If not—”
    “You assure them you did everything you could, and then tell ’em to pound sand.”
    “Pretty much. So that’s what we’ve got here on the DD5. The two ladies walk in to the help desk in March. A couple weeks later, after a few more streetwise Laurel and Hardy routines downstairs, they hook up with the community policing liaison, who tells themabout the citizen-driven warrants. We take a look at it after a couple months, and there’s nothing there.”
    “You’re sure?” Ellie asked.
    “No doubt. You work drugs a little while, and you get super-honed spidey senses. Homeboy’s getting his party on like any other single man with that kind of money in Manhattan. And so we could say we did everything we could, my partner and I even did a little knock and