Roses Are Red

there’ll be another one and another one after that. I saw a pretty good saying the other day —
There’s always room for improvement — then you die.
What do you think of that one?”
    I nodded and let out a deep sigh. “You tired of being with a homicide detective, too? Can’t say that I blame you.”
    Nana crinkled up her face. “No, not at all. Actually, I enjoy it. But I do understand why it might not be to everyone’s liking.”
    “I do, too, especially on days like today. I don’t like what happened between Christine and me. I hate it, actually. Makes me sad. Hurts my heart. But I do understand what she was afraid of. It scares me, too.”
    Nana’s head bobbed slowly. “Even if it can’t be Christine, you still need someone. So do Jannie and Damon. How about you get those priorities straight.”
    “I spend a lot of time with the kids. But I’ll work on it,” I said as I plopped the cold chicken and fixings in a pan.
    “How can you, Alex? You’re always working on murder cases. That seems to be your priority these days.”
    Nana’s statement hurt. Was it the truth? “These days, there seem to be a lot of bad murder cases. I’ll find someone. Has to be somebody out there will think I’m worth a little trouble.”
    Nana cackled. “Probably some serial killer. They sure seem attracted to you.”
    I finally trudged up to bed around one o’clock. I was at the top of the stairs when the phone started to ring.
“Damnit!”
I cursed, and hurried to my room. I picked up before it woke the whole house.
    “Yeah?”
    “Sorry.” I heard a whispering voice. “I’m sorry, Alex.”
    It was Betsey.
    I was glad to hear her voice, anyway. “It’s all right. What’s up?” I asked.
    “Alex, we have a
break
in the case. It’s good news. Something just happened. A fifteen-year-old girl in Brooklyn made a claim on the insurance company reward! This is being taken very seriously in New York. The girl says her father was one of the men involved in the MetroHartford job. She knows the others involved, too. Alex, they’re New York police detectives. The Mastermind is a cop.”

Chapter 84
    THE MASTERMIND IS A COP.
If it were true, it made sense out of a whole lot of things. It partly explained how he’d known so much about bank security,
and about us.
    At five-fifteen in the morning, I met Betsey Cavalierre and four other FBI agents at Bolling field. A helicopter was waiting for us. We took off into a thick, gray soup that made the ground disappear seconds after we were airborne.
    We were pumped up and extremely curious. Betsey sat in the first row with one of her senior agents, Michael Doud. She was wearing a light gray suit with a white blouse, and she looked serious and official again. Agent Doud handed out folders on the suspected New York City detectives.
    I read the background material as we flew steadily toward New York. The detectives in question were from Brooklyn. They worked out of the Sixty-first Precinct, which was near Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay. The crib notes said the precinct was a mix of assorted criminals, including the Mafia, the Russian mob, Asians, Hispanics, blacks. The five suspected detectives had worked together for a dozen years and were reportedly close friends.
    They were supposed to be “good cops,” the file said. There had been warning signals, though. They’d used their weapons more than average, even for narcotics detectives. Three of the five had been disciplined repeatedly. They jokingly called one another “goomba.” The leader of the pack was Detective Brian Macdougall.
    There were also about a half dozen pages on the fifteen-year-old witness: Detective Brian Macdougall’s daughter. She was an honors student at Ursuline High School. She was apparently a loner there and never had many friends. She seemed to be responsible and solid and believable, according to the NYPD detectives who had interviewed her. Her reason for giving up her father was credible, too — he drank and struck her mother often when he was home.
“And he’s guilty of the MetroHartford kidnapping. He and his detective pals did it,”
said the girl.
    Actually, I felt very good about this. It was the way police work usually went. You put out a lot of nets, you checked them, and every so often something was actually in one of the nets. More often than not, it came from a relative or friend of the perp. Like an angry daughter who wanted retribution against her father.
    At seven-thirty,