BACK IN THE good old days, every Monday through Thursday morning at nine o’clock, detectives from all over this fair city pulled what was known as “Lineup Duty.” This meant that instead of reporting to work at their respective offices, two detectives from each of the city’s squads trotted downtown or uptown or crosstown or across the rivers to the Headquarters building on High Street, where the Chief of Detectives presided over a parade of all the felony offenders who’d been arrested in the city the day before.
The purpose of these lineups was identification.
The Chief brought out the perps one by one, named the crimes for which they’d been arrested, recited a brief pedigree on each, and then conducted an interrogation for the next ten minutes or so. Most of these people were experienced thieves; the Chief didn’t expect to get from them any information that would convict them in later trials. What he was doing was simply familiarizing his detectives with the people who were making mischief in this city. On a rotating basis, every Monday through Thursday, his detectives were able to get a good long look at troublemakers past and present, with the idea that they’d be able to recognize them in the future and prevent them from making yet more trouble.
Once a thief, always a thief.
Today, the police still had lineups (or “showups” as they were sometimes called) but their purpose was identification of another sort. Nowadays, in a room at your own precinct, you placed a suspect on a stage in a row of detectives or officers in street clothes, and you asked the vic to pick out which one of them had raped her or stabbed her or poked out her eye on the night of January fifth. Back in the old days, the headquarters gym was packed with maybe a hundred detectives from all over the city. Today, sitting behind a protective one-way glass, you had the vic, and the arresting detectives, and the lieutenant, and maybe somebody from the D.A.’s Office if you were that close to making a case. Small potatoes when you thought back to the grand old days, eh, Gertie?
But nowadays, you had computers to tell you who the bad guys were. You didn’t have to eyeball all those evil-doers from a hard bench in an austere gym. You sat in your own comfy swivel chair at your own cluttered desk, and you popped the question to the computer, and hoped it came up with something good.
By that Tuesday morning, not a single one of the myriad doctors in this city had responded to the precinct’s medical alert for a man who might have sustained a recent injury to the right leg. While Eileen sent out a second alert, sounding a bit more urgent this time, Carella turned to the second supposition in Detective Oswald Hooper’s report on the footprints the MCU had recovered aboard the
The men and sole woman on the squad were now working on the premise that the men who’d kidnapped Tamar Valparaiso were no amateurs. In many respects, this assumption was a throwback to the days of the old Monday-to-Thursday lineups. See those guys on the stage there? Yesterday they committed murder, armed robbery, burglary, rape, auto theft, whatever, and it seems like they all have records of felony convictions as long as my arm here, so look at their faces and remember them well because tomorrow these same people will be committing the same felonies or different felonies all over again.
Once a thief, always a thief, right?
In America, kidnapping was rarely a crime anyone committed more than once. It was fashionable among certain criminal types in remoter parts of the world to capture businessmen and hold them for ransom, but that was there and this was here. It was fashionable in some countries to eat raw crocodile eyes, too. Nobody on the Eight-Seven had ever heard of a serial kidnapper. You either kidnapped somebody and got away with it, in which case you flew to Rio and danced the samba till dawn, or you got caught and spent the rest of your life behind bars. Either way, it was usually a one-shot crime.
So when Carella went to the computer that Tuesday morning, he accessed the state’s prison records by typing in first his name and then his password, but once he was cleared, he did not type in the key word KIDNAP because he didn’t think that would bear any fruit. In fact, he didn’t specify any crime at all. What he was looking for was a left-handed con who limped. In fact, what he was looking for was a left-handed con who’d limped his way out of jail and straight onto the deck of the
He called for a statewide search, but he limited it to just the past five years, otherwise he’d be here for the
Got a menu asking him to choose among HEAD, TRUNK, or EXTREMITIES.
Hit EXTREMITIES.
Was asked to choose between ARMS or LEGS.
Hit LEGS.
