Chapter 15

The next morning I was back at the personnel records. It was the day after D-Day – or more precisely, the day after the 62^nd anniversary of Operation Overlord, the amphibious invasion of the continent of Europe. "D-day" was the name for the first day of any such invasion; there were d-days all over the Pacific, and for that matter there'd already been one in North Africa, and one in Sicily and on the Italian mainland, but this one's become the only one that anyone knows about. And 62 years later I was living in a world that didn't have to worry about the Nazis because of men who a lifetime ago had waded through bullets to reach the French beaches. We're now fighting our own world war – the fourth in history, for the Cold War was in actuality the third worldwide war.

And I was in a sense fighting a war. The scale was much smaller, and the stakes weren't life or death but simply integrity and public confidence. There's always a divide between cops and citizens – one which ought not to be there, since the cops are those we pay to do what we would have to do for ourselves if they weren't there. Those who hate the cops still feel free to call 911 when there's a break-in, for they understand that if there were no police, they themselves would have to track down the burglar and try to recover the stolen goods.

But right or wrong, the divide exists, and it works from both sides. Citizens look at cops largely as blue suits who hand out tickets and don't respond instantly to every call about a slashed tire, and cops eventually come to think everyone on earth is a congenital liar who certainly did something illegal even if they can't prove it. You can say something for both sides. Part of what I do is, I hope, to help my clients understand that law enforcement isn't the realm of ignorant, stupid thugs.

But if cops turn bad, or if they turn dirty, they turn the divide into an unbridgeable crevasse. No matter how much someone may badmouth the police, he has the confidence that if someone robs him or rapes his daughter or shoots his wife dead, the cops will do whatever they can – however little that might be – to bring justice upon the perpetrator. But if there are dirty cops on the force, that confidence dissipates. When the initial impulse to call the police springs up, immediately following that comes a contrary impulse, which we can phrase in these words: Why bother – if I don't pay him off he won't do anything anyway.

A dirty cop – even if it's just one on the whole force – erodes confidence in the police, and ultimately erodes the safety the police provide. Like it or not – and I don't much like it – today's police have so much to do that they can't get to know everyone in a particular area. All they can do is answer calls, take reports, try somewhat to moderate traffic insanity – and if they're detectives, struggle to keep an overwhelming caseload from getting bigger. In a small town like Red Hawk the problems aren't so bad, but they're still there. And if the citizens aren't confident that the officers will do their best without bribes, then the citizens don't call ... which means the police don't investigate ... which means the criminals get away with it ... which means more crime...

One bad cop, one dirty cop, can destroy a town. Oh, the people and buildings might still be there, but it'll be an anarchy in fact if not in name, instead of a civilized community of fellow citizens.

These are things I've been thinking about for years. But they ran through my head as I pored over the records, trying to find anything that might point me to some officer – while hoping that the end result of my tedious research would be conclusive proof that there weren't any dirty cops on the Red Hawk force.

Tedious research was right. Flipping through records is dryer work than swimming through the Arabian Peninsula's Empty Quarter. I kept at it as long as I could, and then a bit longer, and then a bit longer still. Finally I really couldn't take it anymore, and boxed it all back up, with my manila folder divider, and lugged it back to Harry's office. I'd gotten through fewer files than I had the day before; I just couldn't push myself any faster. I needed sunshine and air ... I needed to get away from the station. One of the reasons I'd quit being a cop was the interminable paperwork, which keeps cops from being as effective as they might be and especially keeps detectives chained to their desks more than any society ought to tolerate.

I drove my police vehicle to the Dairy Queen. I would have preferred a Blake's, but that's a New Mexico chain; they don't have 'em in Oklahoma. A Sonic or a Braum's would have been nice ... yeah, Braum's would have gone well. But Red Hawk doesn't have either one. One makes do. I made do pretty well; even when it's not the chain you would have preferred, Dairy Queen makes good burgers.

As I went out to the car after lunch, a cruiser pulled into the parking lot and into the slot next to me. The officer who got out had a couple of stripes on his sleeve, a stiff short mustache, and black hair. He had the cynical look of eternal observation that marks a cop; he saw it all, and none of it surprised him – nor would it, unless he happened to see people obeying the law and acting civilized. He nodded at me, and then stopped. As I reached into my pocket for my keys he said, "Aren't you the guy who's investigating us?"

"I'm investigating to see if there are any dirty cops on the payroll," I said.

He nodded once, as much to himself as to me. "Yeah, that's what I thought." And he brushed past me into the Dairy Queen.

I gave a mental shrug as I got into the car. I'd thought of having Harry arrange for me to talk to roll call on the various shifts, so I could explain to the officers what I was doing, but I'd decided against it. Cops everywhere hate the headhunters – though not all departments use that bit of slang for the officers who staff the Internal Affairs Department. IAD is a necessary part of a police department, but other officers look at it, naturally, as a bunch of sadists who are out to get them. Cops all stick together, unless one of 'em is an IAD officer; that guy's a "headhunter" and the enemy.

I'd never aspired to be a headhunter, and now I was doing that job. I'd known going in what I'd be facing, but that didn't make it any more pleasant. It's like going to the dentist – you have to do it, but you'd rather walk on broken glass.

I pulled out of the Diary Queen and headed north. At the northern end of town, not far past the Hawk House on the right and the 7-11 on the left, I pulled a U-turn and headed back south. I cruised along, a bit below the speed limit, amusing myself by watching people realize that I was a cop and slow way below the speed limit. For some reason drivers never get the point that if they just drive the limit, without speeding, they can pass every cop on the road and never worry about a ticket. Instead they zoom along until they see a cop, and then they get "black-and-white fever" and send the front of their cars diving towards the pavement as they drastically overcompensate for their violation.

At the south end of town, where the east-west road went by, I pulled into the parking lot of the Love's and went inside. I grabbed a Coke and went to the counter, where the clerk refused payment; like the 7-11, they gave a police discount. I passed the time with the clerk for a bit. I wasn't in uniform, but I was an officer with my shield in my pocket and my gun on my hip, and the car was clearly an unmarked police vehicle. Probably I wasn't doing any real good, but my presence would reassure the clerk and any customers, and maybe it would scare off someone with nefarious intentions. That's the idea of a discount – if a cop knows he can get his snacks cheap or free, he's liable to hang around and that helps the business. And it is, of course, a way of showing appreciation for the cop's work.

After 20 minutes or so I put the cap back on my Coke, which was down to half a bottle, and ambled out toward the car, which I'd left at the edge of the gravel parking lot; only the area around the pumps was cement. When I was about halfway there I heard an engine start behind me, a powerful engine, and tires began crunching gravel, slowly. I turned and saw another unmarked car coming toward me. I got to my car, opened the driver's side door, and stuck my coke on the seat, closing the door again. Meanwhile the other car had pulled up behind mine, and the engine shut off. The driver got out, and I knew I'd seen him a time or two around the station. He was wearing a rumpled gray suit with a white shirt and a maroon tie. He had a rumpled look himself ... not soft. He was carrying a bit of extra weight, as investigators commonly do from riding a desk so much, but he wasn't soft.

If you're a cop for very long either you're tough, or you learn how to appear tough. For patrol officers looking tough is easier these days; you just pump a lot of iron and wear armor under your uniform shirt, and you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's a little more difficult for detectives, who don't usually wear armor and aren't usually in as good a shape. But this guy did it. No, that's not quite right; he didn't just look tough, but was the genuine article.

He stopped in front of me, not too close – because he didn't want to be in range of what I might want to do – and pulled a pair of aviator shades out of his coat pocket. He slid them onto his face, until his eyes were hidden behind the dark lenses. Only then did he speak. "You're investigating us." It wasn't a question.

I leaned my left elbow on the roof of my car. "I must be a popular guy today. You're the second cop who's used that line on me."

"Shut up."

The last person who told me to shut up and made it stick was Cecelia – and she didn't have that contemptuous tone in her voice. "Last I heard, mate, this was a free country. You know, the first amendment and all that stuff?" My voice was mild; the last thing I wanted was a fight, especially with a cop.