Cold Hit Read Free Page B

island. I continued past that underground entrance and jogged up the two tiers of granite steps, walking around in front of the building to display my identification to the cop at the door and run my shoulder bag through the metal detector.
    “Eighth floor,” the guard said. “Elevator’s behind the wall to the back.”
    I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now and then — under this administration’s budget-driven oversight — I walked over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.
    Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several times a month, at seven o’clock in the morning, bosses from one of the city’s geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza, to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public Information deputy.
    When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.
    Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. “Hey, Coop! Meet Lenny McNab. Just been transferred over to clean up the Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I doubt he’ll be able to sit down for a week.”
    McNab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in McNab’s territory. If he couldn’t account for progress in the investigation by this morning, he’d be made to look like a fool by the three grand inquisitors.
    Lunetta’s voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. “Let’s get it going, guys. We’ve got a lot to cover this morning.” His entourage brushed past us and we dutifully followed.
    Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths — to hold the crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more benign occasions — while the other wall was decorated with police shields and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies. Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear, around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that had attracted media attention.
    Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to display over their heads on the three screens — usually starting with a map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month’s crime statistics, and a