under-whelmed by the victory.
Then I caught sight of Wheeler. He was standing, surrounded by supporters. Lawrence Ferrin and Tim Delaney from the night of the shooting were there along with a bunch of other cops that I hoped I never had to work with. There were backslaps and jokes all around.
I stared at Wheeler, not quite believing what had happened. He was shaking someone's hand, when Ferrin--grinning so wide the skin of skull seemed ready to split--nudged him in the ribs and he turned my way. His face was so self-satisfied, so full of triumph, I almost vaulted the railing to get at him. Wheeler was guilty as hell and we'd let him slip away. It was, perhaps, the worst moment of my professional life. I kept my cool, but while he was still turned towards me I cocked an imaginary gun, aimed, and shot.
He just smiled, a jackal's grin, and shook his head.
. . .
The rest of the year petered out, sluggish and uninspired. To a man, my department knew we'd blown it. Half the fault might be the DA's, but you don't look at it that way. As a matter of survival, I forced everyone to focus on the current cases and let Wheeler go. There was no shortage of people out there killing other people and they deserved our attention. Over time, the team let the case slide from the front of their mind to the back and eventually out altogether.
Of course, I didn't follow my own advice. Months after I watched Wheeler swagger out of the courtroom and Kransky had left Homicide cursing my name, I would go home and look at my personal file of the case, wondering where we'd missed the golden nugget that would've put him away. I never found it. Or we'd had it and lost it. I blamed myself, my fellow cops, the legal system, the government. I blamed Atwater and the whole sub-human race of criminal defense lawyers, then I blamed Landis and every federal prosecutor who'd ever lived. More than once I sat in my living room with a fifth of whiskey on the floor to the right and the phone to the left, got stinking drunk, then called Landis to heap abuse on him. To my surprise, he stayed on the line and took it, at least the first three or four times. Even after that, he would simply listen for a minute, then hang up quietly. Dods--newly assigned to me--got wind of what I was doing and threatened to cut my phone lines, then my fingers, if I didn't stop.
If there was any silver lining, it's that I didn't have to see Wheeler afterwards; he seemed to disappear after the trial. His cronies--Lawrence Ferrin and the others--gave me looks and threw some remarks in my direction when they saw me, but nothing ever came of it and they, too, seemed to melt away once the fireworks were over.
A year later, long enough that I didn't blame myself too much, Landis walked out of his brownstone in Old Town Alexandria, swallowed some pills, and laid face-down across the railroad tracks north of town. An exercise path runs alongside the tracks, separated by a narrow stretch of grass and a chain-link fence. His body, or what was left of it, was an early-morning find by two joggers I'm betting never took that particular trail again. The coroner found traces of alcohol and prescribed anti-depressants in his blood. In the wake of the Lane trial and bolstered by testimony from his coworkers and his psychiatrist, an inquest deemed it a suicide, no contest.
When I heard, I sat at my desk for a minute, saddened, then went to lunch. I had only recently managed to forget about the debacle when Don killed himself, so I'll admit with some guilt that, when he was gone, he was one less reminder of our inability to put Michael Wheeler behind bars. Memories of the trial and our colossal failure surfaced like sunken debris that had been temporarily dislodged. I gazed dispassionately at my anger and frustration…then let them sink back into the murky bottom of my emotions from where they'd come.
iv.
She was older, of course, and taller, but there was still a lot of the girl
Then I caught sight of Wheeler. He was standing, surrounded by supporters. Lawrence Ferrin and Tim Delaney from the night of the shooting were there along with a bunch of other cops that I hoped I never had to work with. There were backslaps and jokes all around.
I stared at Wheeler, not quite believing what had happened. He was shaking someone's hand, when Ferrin--grinning so wide the skin of skull seemed ready to split--nudged him in the ribs and he turned my way. His face was so self-satisfied, so full of triumph, I almost vaulted the railing to get at him. Wheeler was guilty as hell and we'd let him slip away. It was, perhaps, the worst moment of my professional life. I kept my cool, but while he was still turned towards me I cocked an imaginary gun, aimed, and shot.
He just smiled, a jackal's grin, and shook his head.
. . .
The rest of the year petered out, sluggish and uninspired. To a man, my department knew we'd blown it. Half the fault might be the DA's, but you don't look at it that way. As a matter of survival, I forced everyone to focus on the current cases and let Wheeler go. There was no shortage of people out there killing other people and they deserved our attention. Over time, the team let the case slide from the front of their mind to the back and eventually out altogether.
Of course, I didn't follow my own advice. Months after I watched Wheeler swagger out of the courtroom and Kransky had left Homicide cursing my name, I would go home and look at my personal file of the case, wondering where we'd missed the golden nugget that would've put him away. I never found it. Or we'd had it and lost it. I blamed myself, my fellow cops, the legal system, the government. I blamed Atwater and the whole sub-human race of criminal defense lawyers, then I blamed Landis and every federal prosecutor who'd ever lived. More than once I sat in my living room with a fifth of whiskey on the floor to the right and the phone to the left, got stinking drunk, then called Landis to heap abuse on him. To my surprise, he stayed on the line and took it, at least the first three or four times. Even after that, he would simply listen for a minute, then hang up quietly. Dods--newly assigned to me--got wind of what I was doing and threatened to cut my phone lines, then my fingers, if I didn't stop.
If there was any silver lining, it's that I didn't have to see Wheeler afterwards; he seemed to disappear after the trial. His cronies--Lawrence Ferrin and the others--gave me looks and threw some remarks in my direction when they saw me, but nothing ever came of it and they, too, seemed to melt away once the fireworks were over.
A year later, long enough that I didn't blame myself too much, Landis walked out of his brownstone in Old Town Alexandria, swallowed some pills, and laid face-down across the railroad tracks north of town. An exercise path runs alongside the tracks, separated by a narrow stretch of grass and a chain-link fence. His body, or what was left of it, was an early-morning find by two joggers I'm betting never took that particular trail again. The coroner found traces of alcohol and prescribed anti-depressants in his blood. In the wake of the Lane trial and bolstered by testimony from his coworkers and his psychiatrist, an inquest deemed it a suicide, no contest.
When I heard, I sat at my desk for a minute, saddened, then went to lunch. I had only recently managed to forget about the debacle when Don killed himself, so I'll admit with some guilt that, when he was gone, he was one less reminder of our inability to put Michael Wheeler behind bars. Memories of the trial and our colossal failure surfaced like sunken debris that had been temporarily dislodged. I gazed dispassionately at my anger and frustration…then let them sink back into the murky bottom of my emotions from where they'd come.
iv.
She was older, of course, and taller, but there was still a lot of the girl
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