The Price of Innocence

Read The Price of Innocence for Free Online

Book: Read The Price of Innocence for Free Online
Authors: Lisa Black
Tags: Fiction, Mystery & Detective, Police Procedural
wasted no time in ordering his staff back to work, but Leo stayed at her elbow. ‘You told him the truth, right? There’s nothing else you’re carting around?’
    ‘No. Thanks for sticking up for me to the M.E.’
    Her boss laughed, as if at her naivety. ‘Every once in a while I have to make him toe the line. No one can berate my people like that.’
    ‘Except you.’
    He didn’t hesitate. ‘Exactly.’

FIVE
Wednesday
    T he funeral took place in a sporadic rain, more like a heavy mist that provided a suitably grave atmosphere but also flattened some of her reddish curls and made others stick out in the wrong direction. It gave her yet another reason to hide underneath an umbrella, had she thought to bring one along with her inexplicable sense of guilt.
    A large crowd trampled the wet grass despite the short notice. The local Jewish community had vast experience in making sure the funeral took place within a day, according to their custom. They had quickly put together a proper ceremony for Marty Davis even though he had never, so far as anyone knew, attended temple. Nor did his fellow officers hesitate to brush off their dress blues in order to support one of their own.
    The men and women in uniform had all been decent to her, regarding her with more curiosity than censure, but still she felt culpable. She should have run, not walked, out of the house as soon as she heard the bang. She might have seen the guy, or guys. Why hadn’t she heard a car, why hadn’t she heard it pull in, or pull out? Had anyone been behind them when she followed Officer Davis’ vehicle to the scene? Could anyone else have been in the house, around the back of it? Why hadn’t she run down the driveway after seeing the cop was dead, even before calling Dispatch? Why hadn’t she been more observant?
    None of the cops at the funeral asked her those questions. That did not stop her from asking herself.
    Internal Affairs
had
asked, of course, immediately after the incident, whipped her into one of those bleak little rooms with the built-in cameras, the rooms they used to question criminals, but they had only wanted to dot every i and cross every t. Each man – and she didn’t remember any of their names hours later, she couldn’t tell Frank when he was finally permitted to see her – had been kind, even in their frustration at her lack of knowledge. It frustrated her, too, embarrassed her to have to answer continually, ‘I don’t know. I didn’t see, I didn’t hear, I don’t know.’
    One day later Marty Davis’ death remained a complete mystery. He had no spouse or angry girlfriend, wasn’t cheating with someone else’s wife, did not have any unexplained sums of money. It seemed an unlikely neighborhood for a cop-hating thug to pull a drive-by. Marty had arrested a lot of people in his twenty-odd years as an officer and received his share of threats from same, but none so far had panned out into a serious suspect.
    The Brooklyn Heights Cemetery thronged with blue uniforms, as well as civilian attire in respectfully dark colors. Theresa’s eye caught one person who didn’t fit in: hovering at the edge of the crowd stood a thin man whose clothes were dark but also worn and sloppy. He scratched at the fringe of a beard with the agitation of a drug addict and spoke to no one, indeed avoided the eyes of the men in uniform surrounding him. Theresa would have taken him for a cemetery employee or chauffeur, someone who did not wish to be there, were it not for the look of abject misery he aimed toward the open grave.
    ‘Officer Davis had a lot of friends,’ Theresa said to her cousin.
    ‘I’ll bet most of these people never met him,’ Frank said. He had gotten away from the Bingham with fewer scratches on his face than she did, but had one rather deep cut near his left ear. ‘But he was shot in the line of duty. It’s a cop thing.’
    ‘Well, of course—’
    ‘It’s also a photo op.’ He gazed without expression at several

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