9
SO IS this a dunker or what?” ADA Danielle Castelluccio asked. Detectives Jaworski and Gomez exchanged a quick glance before Jaworski answered. “It’s pretty much a dunker,” he said.
Castelluccio and her second chair, Andrew Bream, were meeting in her office with the detectives on the Fowler shooting. Castelluccio was a rising star in the DA’s Homicide Division, boasting an undefeated trial record going back to her five years in sex crimes. She wasn’t a favorite among cops, with a rep as an arrogant and abrasive micromanager and second-guesser, but she prepared for a trial like an elite marathoner for a race, and her winning percentage earned her grudging respect.
“I’ve gone through the file,” Castelluccio said. “Solid eyewitness, forensics on shooting the gun. That’s enough to make the case, but there’s also some things I expected to see that I didn’t.”
Jaworski held her gaze, keeping his expression neutral. This was the kind of crap you got with Castelluccio: you brought her a gift; she bitched about the wrapping paper. “Like what?”
“Where’s the gun?”
“The gun’s a puzzler,” Jaworski said evenly. “We took the kid’s apartment apart; we did three different canvasses of the area.”
“What’s your theory on where it went?”
Jaworski shrugged; he wasn’t much concerned about the gun. “I can give you a few, but they’re just guesses. Could be he dropped it right near the scene, some joker from the neighborhood snatched it up before our canvass. If so, it might surface, but no way to know until it does or it doesn’t. Could be Nazario stashed it somewhere that we missed. Could be he threw it down a sewer, something like that. Guns go missing; guns get found.”
“What about video?”
“The shooting itself was in a dead zone in terms of cameras,” Jaworski replied. “There’s video from the perp’s building, but it basically just shows Nazario walking through the lobby. It gives us when he got home, shows he had time to do the shoot, but nothing else.”
“How’s he look on the video?”
Jaworski shrugged. “It’s grainy as hell, not going to get the look in his eyes.”
“He’s not running or anything,” Gomez added. “Just looks like anybody else coming home from work.”
“The Housing Bureau has cameras all over the projects,” Castelluccio said. “How’d Nazario know where to shoot Fowler so it wouldn’t be on tape?”
“The cameras are focused on the buildings more than the surrounding area,” Jaworski said. “Don’t think he had to be a criminal mastermind not to get caught on tape.”
“Did the construction crew have cameras posted?”
Jaworski nodded. “The security company uses cameras, but again they’re pointed in at the construction, not out at the street. The head of the security company, Darryl Loomis, was in gang intel on the job before he took his twenty. He reached out to us first thing, sent us over everything they had, but nothing that helps.”
“I never met Loomis, though I know the legend. Either of you guys have dealings?”
“Haven’t ever met him,” Jaworski said. “But I’ve heard the stories, sure.”
“What about other witnesses?” Castelluccio asked. “I know it was fairly late, but this is the East Village we’re talking about. There had to be some people still up and about.”
“The uniforms who were first on the scene hooked a couple of project touts who were outside Tower Four at the time of the shoot. They saw it as snitching and refused to say anything about seeing anybody. We leaned on them, kept them at our house overnight, but they didn’t budge.”
Castelluccio leaned forward, her interest sparked. “The dealers would’ve seen Nazario running from the scene?”
“They were in place to, and assuming they were on duty they would’ve had their eyes open for somebody running past. But these aren’t citizens we’re talking about.”
Castelluccio was not ready to let it go. “They have jackets?”
“Juvie stuff,” Jaworski said. “Nothing pending.”
“Any point in leaning on them again?”
Jaworski shrugged, restraining his desire to tell her that if he’d seen any point in leaning on the dealer kids again he would’ve done so without prompting from the DA’s office. “Even if we get an ID from them now, it’ll be compromised by their earlier lack of cooperation. We can brace them, see if anything spills, but we don’t have much in the way of carrots or sticks.”
“An additional witness or two wouldn’t hurt. We have anything we need to turn over from the initial interviews?”
Jaworski glanced over at Gomez, whose mouth offered the slightest flicker. “We didn’t get a statement from either of them,” Jaworski said carefully. It was bad enough that the dealer kids weren’t helping to make the case; he had no interest in having them actively hurt it. “One of them denied seeing anybody run past, but it’s surrounded with this stop-snitching bullshit.”
Castelluccio frowned, not liking this. “You’re telling me he didn’t make a statement?”
Jaworski got that the ADA was establishing her own plausible deniability, but decided he’d have to live with it. He met her stare with his own. “That’s what I’m telling you.”
Castelluccio held the look for a moment before nodding. “Anything else I should know?”
Jaworski hesitated; Castelluccio caught it and raised an eyebrow. Jaworski looked to his partner, the ADA following his gaze. Gomez looked unhappy at the attention. “It’s nothing,” he said. “Nothing solid anyway. It’s just that I heard some talk about Fowler a little bit back when he was on the job.”
Castelluccio was not liking where this was going. “You heard Fowler was dirty?”
As she’d expected, Gomez immediately started backpedaling, shaking his head and putting a hand up. “Dirty I’m not saying. He was talked about is all.”
Castelluccio was irritated by Gomez’s vagueness, though she was plenty familiar with a cop’s reluctance to talk any kind of shit about another cop. “So what was said when he was talked about?”
“That he didn’t live on a cop’s salary. But this is just word ’round the campfire.”
“Any reason we should go down this road?” Castelluccio asked, her focus shifting back to Jaworski.
“Fowler left the department years ago,” Jaworski said. “Even if we knew he’d been dirty, which we don’t, there wouldn’t be a reason to think it’d gotten him shot.”
“Then let’s not make a simple case complicated,” Castelluccio said.