The Investigators (Badge of Honor 7)

Dennis Coughlin and Michael O’Hara had apparently evicted the district captain from his office. O’Hara was sitting behind his desk. Coughlin was sitting in the one, somew

hat battered, chrome-and-leather armchair.

“Mr. Giacomo, Chief,” Danny announced. “Should I have his illegally parked car hauled away now, or wait awhile?”

“Declare it abandoned, have it hauled to the Academy, and tell them I said they should use it for target practice,” Coughlin replied. “Good morning, Counselor.”

“You heard him, Mickey,” Giacomo said. “Blatantly and shamelessly threatening the desecration of a work of art.”

O’Hara got up from behind the desk and walked toward the door.

“Somehow, I get the feeling that Denny would rather talk to you alone, Manny,” he said, touching his shoulder as he walked past him.

Danny the Judge pulled the door closed.

“There’s coffee, Manny,” Coughlin said, indicating a coffee machine.

Giacomo walked to it and helped himself.

“Being a suspicious character,” he said as he looked with distaste at a bowl full of packets of nondairy creamer and decided he was not going to put that terrifying collection of chemicals into his coffee, “I suspect that there may be more here than meets the eye. Or, more specifically, what I was led to believe by the vice president of the FOP.”

“What did he lead you to believe?” Coughlin asked.

“For one thing,” Giacomo said, taking a sip from his coffee mug—which bore the insignia of the Emerald Society, the association of police officers of Irish extraction—and deciding the coffee was going to be just as bad as he was afraid it would be, “the last I heard, Chief Inspector Coughlin was not running Internal Affairs.”

“What did they tell you at the FOP?” Coughlin repeated.

“That several all-around scumbags engaged in the controlled-substances distribution industry had made several outrageous allegations against a number of pure-as-freshly-fallen-snow police officers.”

“Well, they got the ‘scumbags’ part right, at least,” Coughlin said.

“I am now prepared to listen to—if you are inclined to tell me—the opposing view.”

He sat down at the district captain’s desk and looked at Coughlin.

“Off the record, if you’d rather, Denny,” he added.

“Thank you for off-the-record, Manny,” Coughlin said. “Okay. We have the entire Five Squad of the Narcotics Unit under arrest. The charge right now is misprision in office.”

“The entire Five Squad? That’s interesting. And so is ‘misprision.’ And what inference, if any, should I draw from ‘right now’?”

“One of the charges that may be placed against one of these officers is rape,” Coughlin said.

“ ‘May be placed’? Was there a rape? Can you prove it?”

“There was a rape. An oral rape. We have a witness to the rape.”

“ ‘May be placed’? I don’t understand that.”

“I understand, Manny, that you took Vincenzo Savarese to Brewster Payne’s office, where Savarese begged Brewster to lean on his daughter to treat Savarese’s granddaughter?”

“What we’re talking about here, Denny, is the Narcotics Five Squad,” Giacomo said. “Not Vincenzo Savarese.”

“Shortly after Dr. Payne took Cynthia Longwood under her care,” Coughlin went on, “a message was left for her at University Hospital—”

“I’m really disappointed in Dr. Payne. And/or Brewster Payne. If what you say is true, then either Payne told his son—which is the same thing as telling the police—or Dr. Payne clearly violated patient-physician—”

“Let me finish, Manny,” Coughlin said.