Free The Cross: An Eddie Flynn Novella by Steve Cavanagh

time Louis was into his seventies, he was retired, and had survived his first heart attack. In the letter, Louis maintained that when he was near death in the back of the paramedics’ van, his only regret was giving false testimony against Jason. He wanted to change that. The Innocence Project sent an investigator to interview Louis, who in turn confirmed that he’d been threatened. Not by police, but by someone who’d told him to ID Jason or he would be killed. After a little more digging, the drunk confirmed that he’d been leaned on to pick out Jason and that it was a cop who’d told him to do it in exchange for a thousand dollars cash.”
    She took another pull on her Bud. Wiped her mouth and continued.
    “So, some of the lawyers from the Innocence Project make a complaint to IAB, and both the NYPD and the project’s volunteer lawyers go pay Jason a visit in prison. That was their mistake. Visits like that don’t go unnoticed. Within a week, the janitor, Louis, had another heart attack, the drunk who’d been clean for a year bought four bottles of Wild Turkey and choked to death on his own vomit. And Jason had a nasty fall in the showers at Sing Sing and cracked his head so bad he died instantly.
    “All three of them gone inside of three days. Coincidence? Maybe. But I didn’t buy it. Neither did IAB, and they began running checks on all the detectives, experts, and witnesses who were involved in Jason Fenton’s trial and cross-checked them against their database. Turns out the complaints of false testimony solicited by police, of which there were aroundten separate complaints, shared a common theme. The coordinating detective was Marzone. IAB started to breathe down Marzone’s neck, but he played it smart. There was no direct evidence that Marzone had set anyone up, and eye witnesses in the other murder cases were questioned and continued to stick by their testimony.”
    “But the doubt had been planted in that cop’s mind, right?” I said.
    “The cop was Albert Frost, and his partner was Rick Jones. They both continued to dig, unofficially, while they rose through the ranks. Frost suspected a hit man had an arrangement with a small group of homicide detectives from a select number of precincts. Usually those in the Bronx, Manhattan, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and Harlem, the areas with the highest murder rates. For a fee, those detectives ensured that when a hit went down, somebody else got convicted.”
    Jack’s coffee mug shattered on his tile floor, startling him. He jumped back, his hand covering his mouth.
    “Eddie, what the hell have we gotten into?” he said.
    I watched McAllister drain the last of her beer. When her head came back down, she looked at her boots, then looked at me. I’d seen this before—after a player had finished a performance. A lot of what McAllister had said sounded like the truth, but her look—she wasn’t telling us everything. In fact, she’d lied a little. In this situation, I could’ve gone one of two ways. Let her talk, hoping she’d give me a little more, or just call her out and see how she reacted.
    I decided to give her a little more rope.
    “The Morgue Squad?” I said.
    She nodded.
    “There are no more than half a dozen in the squad. Detective Marzone runs the operation. He calls the kills, sets up a suspect before the hit man carries out the murder, and puts the primary evidence in place. The secret is making sure the patsy doesn’t have an alibi—so the murder has to be timed perfectly. Hernandez is supposed to have knifed Genarro for his wallet, but the wallet was never recovered. It just so happens that Genarro was in the process of renegotiating his union’s terms with four of the largest construction firms in the city. Genarro was a hard-ass, and we understand he was ready to call a strike. He never got the chance. Frost thought Hernandez was the latest patsy for the Morgue Squad, but somehow it all went wrong when Hernandez got choked out. Your case