The Graving Dock Read Online Free PDF Page A

bullshit.
    “You want any help?” Daskivitch asked eagerly.
    “I don’t know.” Jack watched the big detective’s face fall, like a kid disappointed in his Christmas presents. “I’d be glad to work with you again, Gary, but you might wanna think before you get involved in this one.”
    Daskivitch sank back in his chair. “Why?”
    Jack leaned back against a wall. “Well, for one thing, the press might get all over this. Then we’ll have every kind of pressure to get results.”
    Daskivitch shrugged. “I don’t mind a tough job.”
    Jack nodded. “I know you don’t. But if you get tangled in a press case, it can really jam up your career. I don’t care much, myself—I’ve got my twenty, and I’ve got my rank.” (Out of some six thousand detectives in the NYPD, Jack was one of only a couple of hundred who had reached the top rank of First Grade.) “You’ve got your whole career ahead of you.”
    Daskivitch brightened. “Yeah, but if I helped break a case like that, it would do me a world of good.”
    Jack shook his head. “It’s not just the career thing. These jobs can do a real number on you. Up here.” He tapped his temple.
    Daskivitch waited, sensing that a tale was on the way. For cops, it was all about the stories. The Department offered all sorts of technical courses, but the real training happened like this: one cop talking to another, reliving a case.
    Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “You ever hear about Baby Annie?”
    Daskivitch shook his head.
    Jack sighed. “Back when I was a rookie on patrol in Bay Ridge, one morning we got an anonymous call. A couple of the guys went to check it out: In a vacant lot, they found a cardboard TV box. Inside it was a little girl, D.C.D.S.” Deceased, Confirmed Dead at Scene. “She was tied up. She was malnourished, and she’d been seriously abused.” He fell silent for a moment, remembering; he could picture the girl as clearly as the day he’d seen her. “We worked double shifts for weeks. Nobody worried about overtime.”
    There were all sorts of less-than-noble reasons why detectives wanted to close cases. There was pressure to keep the stats up. There was the salary increase that a promotion could provide. There was an intellectual pleasure in solving puzzles, and the satisfaction of proving that you were smarter than the bad guys. But a case like Baby Annie’s reduced the job to its starkest Biblical form: You just wanted to catch and punish the sick bastard who could do such a thing. You wanted to avenge the child.
    “We had no ID,” Jack continued. “No evidence, nothing…We got a thousand tips, but none of them led anywhere.”
    Daskivitch’s boyish face had taken on a rare somber look. “Why was she called Baby Annie? Did you find out who she was?”
    Jack shook his head. “We couldn’t stand calling her Baby Doe; we thought she deserved some kind of a name. We kept that case open for years, hoping somebody would give us a real tip; you know, try to plea down some other case, make a deathbed confession…”
    On TV, detectives solved every case by the end of the hour, but in real life, Jack knew, about a third of New York City’s homicides went uncleared. And those were just the known murders—there were plenty of crimes that never got solved because the police never even found out about them.
    He sighed. “After a while we took up a collection at the precinct and we bought that little girl a headstone and gave her a proper burial…We didn’t know when she was born, or when she died, exactly, so we put the only date on the headstone that we knew for sure: the day we found her. The lead detective retired years ago, but he’s still working on the case, hoping something will turn up…He’s never gotten over it.”
    He straightened up. “Anyhow, think about it before you get involved.” He realized that he was trying to protect the young detective from the hard realities of life in the same way that he had tried to protect