Watching the Detectives

By Stephanie Martin Glennon

Reeling from the late-night knock on her own steel-reinforced door after her husband is murdered in Manhattan, homicide prosecutor Barbara Warren follows her grief-compromised intuition to Massachusetts. In the Commonwealth's "County of Vice Presidents," a sociopathic chameleon has launched her latest scheme, enlisting the protect a corrupt sma

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harborside Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798218011796

Stephanie Martin Glennon

Author Stephanie Martin Glennon was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and migrated south for college, where she met her husband Jim. They returned to the Boston area for graduate school. Jim trained in internal medicine, and Stephanie began her career as a prosecutor in the Commonwealth's County of Presidents. They lived in Dorchester and began their family, later moving to New Hampshire, where Jim became Exeter Hospital's first Chief Medical Officer and practiced as an internist. In addition to her legal writing, Stephanie writes a blog, "Love in the Spaces," and has spoken at hospitals throughout New England about compassionate care. Her story, "It's OK if you Meet Someone," appeared in The New York Times, and she appeared onstage at Boston's Shubert Theater to tell a Moth Radio audience her family's story about "Coming Home." Her first novel, Watching the Detectives, was published in 2022. She is a graduate of Princeton University and Harvard Law School.

Book preview

1

Somebody's Knocking on My Door

The days, and then months, blended and marched on in endless gray, but Barbara always knew it was Thursday by the shudder as she breathed in and the realization that her stomach had been empty since the morning before.

Although she never wore a watch, at 10:20 on every month's third Thursday night she would find herself with her eyes tightly closed, having extinguished every light and made her way to the window nearest the street. 

There, she imagined she was bathed in three strobes of searing cobalt as she listened for the phantom knock on a door she had left behind and three states southwest. 

On that Thursday night, Lieutenant Gover, Chief of the Homicide Unit attached to the District Attorney’s Office with jurisdiction over the intersection of 5th Ave. and 50th Street, picked up the cell phone the victim had dropped when he was shot at close range. The young man had been declared dead at the scene and his body had been transported to the ME's Office. Crime scene services had photographed every angle of the sidewalk where he had fallen.

Gover could still see every detail as it had been when he arrived. He was cursed with a photographic memory.

The cell phone had been lying face-up, still showing 100% full battery in green at the top right corner above a horizontal crack in the screen. Gover caught the first text message as it registered in a box on its locked screen. 

EVERYTHING OK?  

He had looked at the home screen photo, of two not-quite newborns in matching sleepers with a repeating print of small apples, red on one and yellow-green on the other. 

Three more text messages had stacked up over the photo by the time he sealed the phone in a clear bag at 2016 hours.

GETTING A LITTLE WORRIED 

GOING TO PUT BOYS DOWN

PLS CALL, PLS PICKUP 

Only as he glanced down through his bifocals, using a Sharpie to initial and label the tape he had used to seal the bag, did he more closely examine a tiny inset circular photo on the texts’ sending end. It was of a brunette wearing vivid red.

He knew the face, although he could not previously have imagined her either wearing red or looking as serene. 

He looked again at the surrounding home screen photo.

The two little boys.

Oh, shit. Jesus Christ. Shit. 

Gover stepped away and used his personal cell phone to call the District Attorney.

******

From the second Barbara looked out her first-floor window and registered those three silent flashes of blue light up the street, so closely spaced that most people would have registered only one, if that, she knew what was about to happen. 

Dan should have been home three hours earlier.

She had stood in the dark on the other side of her door for as long as she could before opening it. 

Just a few more seconds. 

She tried not to hyperventilate as she sank, her back rigid against the solid steel door she had insisted on when she and Dan had been looking for a larger apartment while she was pregnant with the twins.

Lieutenant Gover stood quietly on the other side, head bowed, trying to stretch out time. His fist was poised to knock more sideways than downward, to the door’s center mass, and much less sharply than was his habit.

It seemed to Barbara that from that unending moment her single remaining certainty was that she was very, very good at what she did. And this had to have been aimed at her and what she did. Dan had no enemies. After only five years in homicide, hers already were innumerable.

It was not so much the defendants themselves, but the eyes she sometimes sensed upon her from the gallery as she faced the bench. And it was the unseen and unknown people outside the courtroom who might have some vested interest in the outcome—family members and associates and lovers and friends she would have no way to recognize and might never see coming.

It was precisely because she was so good at her work that she was unburdened not only by hope that an investigation would result in any resolution she could live with, but by hope itself. 

Although she had not consciously known it that night, her mission already had narrowed to keeping her sons safe. Ensuring that no one would come after them, too. That whoever did this to their father could never be in their orbit.

She already bore the deep undertow of experience and knowledge, surpassing dread, that whoever had done this would never face the limited kind of justice her work yielded on even the best days.

But there were other ways.

2

Red Rain

The wall spatter still carried bright cardinal-red sprays of arterial blood not unlike the swirling spirals on the painting Markey’s three-year-old had handed him on Father’s Day.   

Red-brown didn’t quite cut it. 

A professor who lived with cats named Fermi and Enrico in a modest house still easily twice the size of the victim’s one-bedroom ranch had called 911 to report a kerfuffle at his elderly next-door neighbor’s house. 

It was muffled, he later told Adams Police Detective-Sergeant Cosgrove, who had since been unable to recall the description muffled kerfuffle without having to look down and wrestle his face back into its resting stern mode.

Cosgrove had at first surmised that the caller was an English professor, although the feline names gave him pause.

His first brief face-to-face with the neighbor, whose hair was edged in blinking scarlet as a nearby cruiser's lights strobed, and who was holding Enrico—or possibly Fermi—would solidify Cosgrove’s uncharacteristic initial misread: this was clearly an engineer of some sort. He knew not only the exact time of the sounds which had signaled a disturbance in the soggy pre-dawn miasma, but had gauged their distance. He told Cosgrove they likely had emanated from the far side of his neighbor’s house, which included the bloody kitchen where forensic analysts were still collecting samples and taking measurements.

Sure enough, another neighbor’s outside surveillance camera had been poised by its owner to be alert to cops she feared might be returning the favor by keeping an eye on the low-level narcotics distribution enterprise being carried on within. Its audio disgorged a burst of shouts and screams even louder than the downpour, just eleven seconds before the professor’s 911 call. She was glad to hand over her front porch camera’s SD card to Cosgrove, for any good will her chipper, if limited, forthcoming behavior might later engender. She wisely did not invite further conversation.

Happy to be of help, Officer.

******

Morning commuters were already becoming restive by the time Cosgrove had been at the scene for an hour-and-a-half. They were warming up for the honking and swearing crescendo that would carry over from I-95 once the rising heat obliged aggrieved drivers to crack their windows and share their feelings about fellow travelers' driving acumen. 

For now, however, they might as well have been in New Hampshire. Peeper frogs shrieked bloody murder in undraining roadside ruts. The outside air was an unpleasant muddle between irritated skunk and grass cut down past its prime. 

Still dark, raining and gusting hard. A traffic light creaked as it swung off-kilter at the intersection, where neon cones had been set up and every available uniform was checking storm drains. Rainwater running down the bowed kitchen window branched into ruby veins each time the light turned red. 

Cosgrove’s paperwork so far was thin: impeccable notes and an on-scene criminalist’s rough sketch of the floor plan. A realtor might say the house was dated, before vectoring back to the Town of Adams' plusses. These included the few sturdy brick public schools which had not yet been partitioned into condos, and surrounding Bellham County’s theretofore lowest quarterly homicide rate. Adams, prospective buyers would be told, was the hidden jewel of Bellham, the County of Vice Presidents.

The Chief would not be pleased to add another murder to the stats, and the First Lieutenant even less so.

Cosgrove nodded at Markey as Markey emerged from the adjoining living room. 

Nothing out of place here, boss.

Sir is fine. Or ‘your eminence.’ Cosgrove nodded. He disliked being called boss.

No sign of a struggle, uh, Sir. Not that he was really equipped to, even if there’d only been one intruder, and it looks like there were at least two, maybe three. Nothing out of place outside the kitchen, nothing tracked in the other way. Front door’s dry and locked, no impressions, no mud. Looks like they came in through the side door right into the kitchen. It’s pretty flimsy, could have just been pushed in. It was open when EMS got here, patrol's a little unclear on that. 

The body had been removed from the kitchen floor, where a woozy patrol officer responding to the 911 call had spotted it, a blur of vivid red coming into view after he wiped away a fist-sized circle in the condensation clouding the kitchen window. He had recoiled, his hands backlit in the traffic light’s ghastly green as he leaned over and retched onto the saturated ground, barking into his radio for backup.

"Now, now, now!"   

An overturned wheelchair was stained with a Rorschach of blood. One wheel still seemed to turn even after the door had been closed against the elements while techs examined the floor for footwear impressions and residue. The wheelchair was angled away from the Formica-topped kitchen table. Its thick, nicotine-yellowed surface was veined with shallow rusty rivulets where shards had gone missing. Unopened can of Campbell’s on the counter. Classic tomato. Boxes of mac and cheese mix rendered in three garish shades of cheddar in perfect formation behind it. Cosgrove's stomach began growling despite his revulsion at the boxed pasta, a staple in Markey's household. Cosgrove, a transfer from the County seat in Bellham who had been surprised to learn Markey was old enough to be a detective, had been paired with the younger man. He was the only old-timer who had apparently already pissed off the powers-that-be in Adams sufficiently to be regularly drawing the midnight shift.

While Cosgrove sometimes betrayed signs of a soft heart, he had about a 95% iron stomach. Markey had a perfect score. When Cosgrove had first worked a homicide with him only a few months earlier, he had collected Markey outside the Medical Examiner's building near Boston's Hospital Row to ferry bags back from the autopsy suite to the APD evidence room. As Cosgrove gestured for Markey to get in the passenger seat, he had nodded towards the watery pink stain under Markey's shirt collar.

Markey glanced down. Oh, roast beef. 

"You ate fucking roast beef, pardon my indelicacy, during an autopsy?"

I can eat anything but macaroni and cheese in there. You know... Markey had pointed at his own forehead, made a sound like the whir of a bone saw, licked the tip of his index finger as he twirled it to approximate a skull’s circumference at the cap, and rubbed at the stain.

Cosgrove shook his head now, as he had then, and recommitted to offering his excuses were he ever offered pasta in one of those decapitated bread bowls.

He looked down at his own sketch of the kitchen, which lacked the shading and flair his own Caran d’Ache pencils would have afforded, but was serviceable.

The driving rain somehow picked up its pace outside. 

The victim had probably already arrived at the Medical Examiner’s building by now. Cause and manner would not be among the mysteries. Cosgrove eyeballed a handful of Polaroids Markey had handed him. He looked through the lower half of his bifocals—a recent adjustment that made him wonder if he should be inquiring about retirement once his current work, both authorized and less so, concluded.

He had counted more than thirty wounds, probably from at least two weapons. A cluster of stab wounds on the upper left torso had left triangular imprints at most of their peripheries. Cosgrove had seen enough similar patterns to recognize it as likely being damage from a hilted hunting knife. 

He was content to let Markey be point man when the autopsy eventually got underway downtown, and go home to Lucas and Nolan and his reading chair instead. A Michael Connelly novel awaited.

******

In what now made up the victim’s estate, a stainless steel pan remained out on a gas burner, blue and purple-black streaks coiling up the sides, indelible tentacles from decades of boiling over. In a tiny adjoining living room there was a wood-framed photograph of a young bride and groom, and another of the same couple about twenty years later with two small dogs, terrier mixes. She had a nice smile. He stood, dark eyes almost glaring at whoever wielded the camera. 

A pile of carefully sliced-open envelopes on the counter indicated he was a veteran, lived alone, and kept his savings in a low-interest savings account. His big-ticket item seemed to be a monthly donation to the SPCA, although there was no sign of any animal currently or recently in residence.  Cosgrove did not betray that he, too, was a sucker for those ads.

The sink was rank with residue on a vintage sponge that had probably started out bright pink. Looking out the kitchen window towards the parked cruisers, their lights no longer strobing at emergency pace, Cosgrove breathed in an additional note of nicotine, an earthy hit of still-pooled blood, and the burnt copper of already drying blood. Wallpaper strips met in a stiff brown caudal edge where they had lifted from the walls by the table opposite the sink, betraying hidden water damage from long ago. The pattern was a lattice of fruit baskets that had to have predated even the victim’s time. Its watery mustard background bore red streaks, spray, and cast-off patterns above the wheelchair. 

A neon yellow sticker 18 ⅛ high was the low mark on a rising arc of spray Cosgrove described in his notes as red-brown stains which appear to be blood."    

******

At the Adams Police Station twenty-three hours later, Markey looked at the nineteen-year-old’s freshly printed BOP, which included seven pages of sealed juvenile records. Not the longest he’d seen, but still impressive. He had run down the comfortable suburban address where the kid still lived. It was within walking distance of the victim’s house and next to Adams High, in one of the town's better neighborhoods—where parents may not be bribing the coaches at Yale or USC, but still managed to fund tutors and test prep to ease their kids into perfectly acceptable institutions of higher learning. 

No hint of DCF involvement. It appeared to be an intact family including two brothers who were either too young or were temperamentally disinclined to cause trouble. Because he had learned people were rarely too young, Markey assumed the latter. A driver’s license photo with a dour stare, like the retake on a visa shot for an authoritarian regime if the first bore a hint of a smile. Here it more likely had been a smirk. Clean-shaven, dark brown hair, brown eyes. Not an organ donor.  

Markey opened the door to the interview room. The kid—adult, by Commonwealth standards and for Markey’s immediate purposes—was unfazed by the warnings and signed the waiver.

Know why you’re here?

Kid shrugged, jacket zipped like he’d be going on his sullen way soon. He looked bored.

Markey put the first can of Coke on the table in front of him. 

So, your friend Chach talked to us. For quite a while. Markey let that one sit. It was Michael Ciocci’s nickname. He was in custody and his attorney had been in a similar room a few hours earlier, trying to convince Cosgrove that the young man was tremendously remorseful and would be a stellar cooperating witness, accessory after the fact to manslaughter tops. 

Talkative guy. And Troy, too, though I gotta say Troy strikes me as a guy who may sometimes be...a little out of it? Markey leaned back and pantomimed a few puffs from a joint. 

Kid chuckled.

"Yeah, Troy’s always out of it. Been stoned every day since fourth grade." 

Was he stoned last night?

Yeah. Stretched out to three-plus syllables, as he computed whether that would be good or bad for him in the context of the current conversation. 

"Were you high? Did you take anything before you went into the house? Markey already had the kid's signature on a no" to the same question when he had signed the waiver, but wanted his response on video whether it changed or not. Win-win.

Almost affronted. 

I don’t do any of that shit.

No question from the kid as to what house Markey meant.

******

Bingo.

The storm drains outside the victim's house had come up empty on a search a full block outwards. After the grid was expanded, a drenched patrol officer found the broken hilt from what looked like an old steak knife as he began checking drains a block away from where one of the suspects lived. Its blade had yet to be recovered. At Cosgrove’s direction, he bagged and sealed it for the State Police Lab. 

******

A second knife, a pricey Buck 907, appeared in a storm drain a little over a half-mile away, on the block next to Michael Ciocci’s. The distraught teenager had told police where to look when his parents had hauled him into the Station after he stumbled back home just before the sun would have risen absent the continuing deluge. Both weapons had been too wet to screen presumptively for blood, but even before the victim’s autopsy samples were collected and run there was little mystery who had likely contributed the major profile on any blade they recovered.

The suspects' buccal swabs would be taken and analyzed, along with 62 swabs from inside their homes and their curtilages. There is no such thing as overkill in forensics. One or more of their profiles might be found inside the victim's house, or the victim's profile might be found on items linked to the suspects. The victim's profile anywhere on the sneakers or clothing Markey had carefully appraised on the kid sitting across the table from him might have sealed the deal even without a confession. But he was pretty sure that confession was percolating along. And Markey enjoyed his work.

******

How’d you get there?

Walked from Troy’s.

Did you know Mr. Murphy?

Who?

The guy in the wheelchair. In the house you broke into?  Dead dude?

"We didn’t break in. Full-on derision. Door wasn’t even locked. We walked right in."

Markey stared at the kid until he frowned and began talking again.

He was sitting right there.

You mean sitting in his wheelchair?

"Yeah, whatever. I ask where his money is and he just looks at me." In a tone, like Markey was an idiot for asking and the victim was unreasonable for not leaping up from his wheelchair and forking over whatever he had. 

Never moved from the kitchen table? Cementing where the victim had been when the kid first saw him.

If duh were a look, it was the look he gave Markey. 

"So, where are your friends while you’re having this conversation with Mr. Murphy around the table?"

"Chach is looking through drawers and shit. Troy’s so stoned he’s just leaning against the wall and complaining about how fucking hungry he is."

Cosgrove had given Markey several tutorials on The Look: suspects' eyes will consistently drift in the same direction whether describing something as it happened or as they alter what happened to their own benefit as they describe it, but there will always be a tell as they switch in and out of truth and improvised fiction. 

Don’t just watch their eyes, Cosgrove had told him. "Watch how they breathe. Watch their hands. Pay attention when they start tapping a finger or drumming or making a circle with their index finger like they’re trying to unwind the tape and edit it—sorry, you may be too young to know what tape was like. Let’s say, like swiping back on that sliding thing on the bottom of your phone.  Sometimes they’re so wired you can actually see their pulse pick up if you watch their wrist or their neck, right at the carotid, closely enough. Watch their legs. Pay attention to what they’re saying when they start jiggling or bouncing a knee. It’s a rare liar, even a good one—a rare human who doesn’t routinely give away more than he or she thinks." 

Radio on?

Yeah, some public radio shit.

Talk, classical music?

"Guy talking, fundraiser stuff. How do people even listen to that shit?"    

Cosgrove’s voice in Markey’s head again: "The little pieces of truth will also matter. They’re relieved when you lead in with questions they can answer without risking anything. But they’ll pause before they tell you the lies. The pieces of truth get offered up instantly even if there’s a lawyer at their side—and watch the lawyers, too, see if there’s a hand on the client’s arm, or a look, and pay considerable attention if there’s an elbow or a whisper or a quick look up from a notepad on a question and then keep boring in on that question until the lawyer says they’re done. Which will happen soon after you see the lawyer stiffen up, and nine out of ten times reflexively look at the door, telegraphing that it's time to wrap up the cooperation stage." 

And what did you do then? Did Mr. Murphy say anything?

"He just stares at us and starts, like, breathing loud? And he doesn’t say nothing. I ask him again what’s he got, where’s his money, ’cos I know he’s gotta have some. All he needed to do was give me something." 

The kid hiked his shoulders and held out his left hand, fingers pressed together and curved up as if he expected a wad of cash to be dropped into it. 

"And he just looks at me. So I’m getting pissed, right, and I get down in front of him and show him my blade, and I tell him all he’s gotta do is tell me where the money is and we’re outta there." 

Uh-huh. Switchblade?

"No, I don’t carry no fucking switchblade." 

"So, your blade? What was that, then?"

I, uh...it's not even, like,  a knife, it's, like, just a box cutter.

You always carry that? Markey made note of the appearance of filler words at about the same time the kid began flexing his fingers as he spoke.

I got it for work.

Where you workin’? Markey casually mimicked the kid’s speech patterns. Just one of the boys.

"It was when I was working. I had to, like, open boxes."      

Markey knew he would find that any legitimate employment of this kid's had been short-lived. How’d his chair get knocked over?

A pause. A couple of long gulps from a second Coke can. Markey had collected the first, which was in a sealed bag at his foot.

He, like, he reached for it?

What hand did he use?

Uh, right hand? Kid frowned and looked at his own dominant hand, probably replaying the way he had held the knives. I didn’t do nothing to him, just pushed his hand away from me and he fell over.

That knocked over the wheelchair? Markey raised a copper eyebrow and looked at him for a few beats.

Yeah.

He was OK then?

Yeah.

But he was on the floor? 

Yeah.

Conscious?

A pause. Looked down