The Squad Room by John Cutter Page B

a long morning for the Chief of Detectives.
    “All right, Chief,” Morrison said, finally breaking the silence. “Here’s what we have going. We’ve established a taskforce, pulling detectives from the SVU Robbery and Gang squads. It’s a full team of detectives we have working on this. We’ve expanded our canvas in both neighborhoods, and I just conferred with the District Attorney regarding a search warrant for the crime scene, just to make sure we don’t lose our evidence in court.”
    “What do you mean?” Arndt asked. “Why would we lose it?”
    “Well, you know Mincey v. Arizona. Or perhaps you’re testing my knowledge of it?” Morrison let the tension hang for a moment, savoring Arndt’s discomfort. “It was that case in the late seventies, when a copwas killed in a narc raid—they stayed there gathering evidence for a long time, but a lot of it was ruled inadmissible, since the perp lived there and they’d never gotten a search warrant. Since we don’t know who’s involved in our murders, and we’re definitely going to want to search the scenes more thoroughly, I consulted with the DA to make sure that doesn’t happen here.”
    “All right, good. How have the searches been going?”
    “We ended up spending plenty of time at the scene, and took the bedroom carpets out in twelve-by-twelve squares. We think we’ll probably get some decent samples from those—at least we hope so. We have a forensic odontologist working with us, too—with all the bite marks, we’ll probably need him down the road.”
    Arndt nodded, obviously happy for the reminder of what a forensic odontologist did. “Of course,” he said absently. “How about the husband from the Sutton Place case—any word on him?”
    “Dealing with that as we speak.”
    “Who is?”
    “Koreski and Hanrahan,” Morrison said, knowing full well Arndt would have no idea whom he meant. “Listen, we all understand how serious this case is, Chief,” he assured the Chief in a patronizing tone. “I can assure you, we’re pulling out all the stops.”
    “All right, Captain.” Arndt stood, again feeling sickeningly out of his depth. There had been too many blank spots for him today already; he knew he’d have to regroup himself in order to keep in control of the situation. “If everything’s going smoothly, I’ll be on my way. We’ve all obviously got a lot to do here.”
    “Obviously,” said Morrison. He smiled and eased back into his chair. “Hey, speaking of, how was your meeting with the PC earlier? I imagine he had a lot of questions for you, but knowing you, I’m sure you were ready.”
    Arndt spun around, his face reddening abruptly. “Just make sure you don’t slip up, Captain,” he hissed. “Mine isn’t the only ass on the line here.”
    The Chief of Detectives swung out in a rush, slamming the door on his way and leaving Morrison feeling better than he’d felt all morning.
    Back at Sutton Place, Detective Koreski and Sergeant Hanrahan were meeting with the first victim’s husband.
    Robert Adams, as it turned out, was a good-looking, very wealthy venture capitalist. He’d been in Venice at the time of his wife’s homicide, but had taken an emergency flight home upon hearing the news. His ten-hour trip had obviously been excruciatingly painful for him.
    Despite an evidently high degree of personal control, he was distraught, and could think of nothing that could have led to this. He’d always felt that Victoria and he had a good, if not picture-perfect, marriage: no affairs, no suspicious friends or party acquaintances. His wife, he said, didn’t even really have any girlfriends she spent a lot of time with, to say nothing of boyfriends. He gave the detectives all the information they asked for: telephone records, calendars, photographs of Victoria. Through it all they could see him trying to focus, and failing; he stared into space as Koreski and Hanrahan questioned him, and soon sobs overtook him.
    The