Roses Are Red

we entered the conference room at One Police Plaza and met up with several members of the NYPD, including the chief of detectives. I was the representative from the Washington police, and I knew Kyle Craig had been instrumental in getting me into the meeting. He wanted me to hear the girl’s story firsthand.
    Kyle wanted to know
if I believed her
.

Chapter 85
    VERONICA MACDOUGALL was already in the large conference room. She wore wrinkled blue jeans and a ratty green sweatshirt. Her curly red hair was unkempt. The darkish, puffy rings under both eyes told me she hadn’t slept in a while.
    Veronica stared impassively at us as we introduced ourselves around a massive glass-topped mahogany conference table inside what the NYPD called “the Big Building.” Chief of Detectives Andrew Gross then introduced the girl. “Veronica is a very brave young woman,” he said. “She’ll tell her story in her own words.”
    The girl took a quick, deep breath. Her eyes were small green beads and they were filled with fear. “I wrote out something last night. Organized myself. I’ll give my statement, and then there can be questions if you want.”
    Chief of Detectives Gross broke in gently. He was a heavyset man with a thick gray mustache and long sideburns. His manner was subdued. “That would be fine, Veronica. However you want to do it. However it happens to go is perfect for us. Take your time.”
    Veronica shook her head and looked very, very unsteady. “I’m okay. I need to do this,” she said. Then she began her story.
    “My father is what you people call a man’s man. He’s very proud of it, too. He’s loyal to his friends, and especially to other cops. He’s this
‘great guy,’
right? Well, there’s another side to him. My mother used to be pretty. That was ten years and thirty pounds ago. She needs nice things. I mean, she physically needs things, possessions like clothes and shoes. She
is
her possessions.
    “She’s not the smartest person in the world, but my father thinks he is right up there and that’s why he picks on her unmercifully. A few years back he started to drink a lot. And then he started to get really mean, to hit my mother. He calls her ‘the bag,’ and ‘speed bag.’ Isn’t that clever of him?”
    Veronica paused and looked around the room; she checked our reaction to what she was saying. The conference room was eerily silent. None of us could look away from the teenager and the anger blooming in those green eyes.
    “That’s why I’m here today. That’s how I’m able to do this terrible thing — to ‘rat out’ my own father. To break the sacred Blue Wall.”
    She stopped and stared defiantly at us again. I couldn’t take my eyes away from her. No one in the room could. This made so much sense: a break coming from a family member.
    “My father doesn’t realize that I’m actually a lot smarter than he is, and I’m also observant. Maybe I learned that from him. I remember when I was around ten or so, I just knew I was going to be a police detective, too. Pretty ironic, huh? Pretty pathetic, don’t you think?
    “As I got older I noticed — observed — that my father had lots more money than he ought to have. Sometimes he would take us on a ‘guilt trip’ — Ireland, maybe the Caribbean. And he always had money for himself. Really good clothes, fancy threads from Barneys and Saks. A new car every other year. A sleek white sailboat parked in Sheepshead Bay.
    “Last summer my father was disgustingly drunk one Friday night. I remember he was going out to Aqueduct racetrack with his running-dog detective pals on Saturday. He took a walk to my grandmother’s house, which is a few streets away from us. I followed him that night. He was too far gone to even notice.
    “My father went to an old gardening shed behind my grandmother’s house. Inside the shed, he moved away a work bench and some wooden slats. I couldn’t tell exactly what he was doing, so I came back the next day and looked behind the boards. There was money inside — a lot. I don’t know where it came from, still don’t. But I knew it wasn’t his detective’s pay.
I counted almost twenty thousand dollars.
I took a few hundred, and he never even noticed.
    “I became more observant after that. Recently, over, say, the past month or so, my father and his friends were up to something. His goombas. It was so obvious. They were always together after work. One night I heard him mention something about