Unfastening his eyes from Dakin's door, Janek glanced around. Perhaps, he thought, he might learn something about his quarry from a brief study of his neighborhood.
Cort City Plaza had been built on a forgotten strip of the Bronx separated by a narrow inlet from Pelham Bay Park. Until the day that someone envisioned it, it had been a swamp. Now it possessed the dismal aura of a hundred similar high-rise satellite communities constructed on the outskirts of major cities. In such places it didn't matter which part of the country one was in, because the satellite town always looked the same: bleak, gray, uniform, built on the edge of a great metropolis yet cut off from its rich offerings by high-speed roads on which cars hurtled day and night.
There was nothing in Cort City Plaza, it seemed to Janek, to become attached to; no corner of beauty to inspire a painter or a poet. The only texture was the lack of texture. The landscape was rubble and weeds, the spirit cheerless and forlorn. Yet such a place might well suit The Dark One, Janek thought; here he could brood in anonymity over the loss of his terrifying power and the awful spectacle of his fall.
Promptly at six, Dakin emerged. Janek locked his car and hurried over.
"Morning, Chief"
Dakin's yellow eyes sliced him like razors. "It's you, he snickered.
"Been expecting you."
"Can I-"
"Walk on my right. Hearing's better that side."
Janek positioned himself to Dakin's right, then glanced at his profile.
The thin red hair had mostly bleached to white, but the skin was pale as ever, the body was still ramrod straight and the voice was as reedy as the day Janek had heard it deliver T amp;C at the Police Academy twenty-two years before.
"You got something for me. Spill it."
The imperial manner, too, was still intact. It was as if the heroic days of Dakin's reign had never passed, days when the only thing that mattered was the merciless rooting out of corrupt cops. As they walked together toward the subway station, and Janek began to summarize his interview with Tania, another part of his brain thought back upon the Dakin legend.
There were the stories, told and retold countless times, of how, arresting a cop for corruption or malfeasance, Dakin would call the man aside, place his arm fraternally across his shoulder, then gently recommend that the poor slob blow his brains out. "It's the only honorable way. Spare your family and colleagues the disgrace," Dakin would counsel in a whisper. More than a dozen men, according to the legend, had followed that withering advice.
At the height of his power he had been master of the sting, dangling enticing goodies in front of desperate cops to tempt them down crooked paths. The better the man, so the stories went, the more elaborately Dakin would contrive to sting him. It was as if he had to prove that there was no such thing, as an incorruptible cop… except, of course, for himself. He, Dakin, was untouchable, inviolate, perfect in his virtue. Unable to face the darkness in himself, he hid behind a facade of rectitude, and from there searched out the weaknesses in others.
Looking at him now, Janek understood the role he'd played: He was our Robespierre.
"So, that it?" Dakin said when Janek finished summarizing. They were less than a hundred yards from the subway station. The towers of Cort City Plaza, blocking the rising sun, cast lengthy shadows on the stony terrain.
"That's it."
"When're you going to arrest him?"
"Who?"
"Sheehan, of course." "I'm not going to," Janek said.
Dakin gave him a sharp glance. His amber eyes flickered wildly. "I expect someone sure as hell is!"
Janek shook his head. "No one's going to arrest Timmy. Mendoza's got a new attorney, a brainy young woman with lots of brass. The information's been passed to her. It's up to her to decide what to do with it."
"You're kidding me!"
"I'm not."
"Who cares about Mendoza?"
"I would guess Mendoza does," Janek ventured.
"He's crap. It's us. We're what the case is about. NYPD. Who we are and what we stand for. Nothing less."
Janek exhaled. "I know you feel that way. But to me, that's just a part of it."
Dakin shook his head. Under his left eye a little muscle began to twitch; like an insect it jumped beneath the pale, sallow skin.
"I-" Dakin started to say something, then, unaccountably, he stopped. He stared at Janek, spat at the ground, then plunged forward toward the newsstand.
As Janek watched him buy his paper, he thought back seven years to the last time they'd met.
It was across an oval table in a nondescript conference room in the Headquarters building. A special departmental hearing was in progress.
The judges, three high-ranking officers impaneled by the commissioner to hear Timmy Sheehan's charges, sat at one end, Timmy and Janek sat facing Dakin, and a female police stenographer sat at a little portable table by the door.
The events that led up to that hearing were recounted:
A year and a half after Jake Mendoza's conviction, Mendoza's first appeals lawyer went into court with a statement sworn out by a middle-aged, frizzy-haired Brooklynite, a graphologist named Phyllis Komfeld. Komfeld claimed that an NYPD detective, whose name she didn't know, had. her a thousand dollars to forget Gus Metaxas's suicide paid note.
The judge convened the parties. Komfeld gave her testimony and was then cross-examined by the prosecutors. She could produce no evidence to support her allegation, and under harsh questioning admitted she had spent several years in mental institutions. Police handwriting experts reaffirmed that the note had been written in Metaxas's hand. The judge ruled that there were no grounds for a retrial. Mendoza hired a new lawyer. The Mendoza case ground on.
But then a strange thing happened. Six months after the hearing, Phyllis Komfeld was found tied to her bed, raped and strangled by an intruder.
Her apartment had been ransacked. Some valuables, mainly family silver, were taken.
At first the case was treated as a routine robbery-homicide, unconnected to Mendoza, perhaps one of a hundred similar crimes committed in Brooklyn that particular year. But then Dakin's office asked to take it over. The case was reassigned to Internal Affairs. For a while nothing more was heard about it, until one night a panicked Timmy Sheehan knocked on Janek's door.
IA was after him, Timmy said. Dakin was trying to prove that he, Timmy, had paid to have Komfeld assassinated.. They had a witness, a snitch named Ross Keniston, who would claim that Timmy had tried to hire him to do the job. According to Dakin's theory (leaked to Timmy by an old friend on Dakin's disaffected staff), Timmy found another killer, and the rape and robbery portions of the crime were added to divert attention from the motive: Timmy's need to prevent Komfeld from speaking further about her role as hired forger of the Metaxas note.
"I'm not worried about Keniston," Timmy told Janek that night. "He's an addict and a liar. What worries me is Dalcin. I hear he's around the bend, so crazy he's faking up evidence. He's claiming he interviewed Komfeld before she was killed, and that she IDed me as the one paid her for the forgery."
Janek and Timmy spent the rest of that night frantically war-gaming the problem. There were, they decided, two ways to deal with an IA investigation: The first and most common was to let it take its course, dealing with it when and if charges were formally filed; the second method, rarely employed and filled with risk, was to preempt by lodging counter charges first. This was the route they decided to follow, with Janek acting as Timmy's counsel under a special provision in police regulations.
When the day of the departmental hearing arrived, they were prepared.