Page 49 of The Writer

Cordova speeds up the recording until Denise Morrow finishes with the line and stands. She retrieves the bag and her coat, then says something to one of the bookstore employees.

“Who is that again?”

“Tom,” Otto says.

Tom leads Denise Morrow to the back of the store. When they enter a hall, Otto points at another camera icon on the screen. “You want that one. Double-click it.”

This brings up the narrow hall. Tom ushers Denise Morrow into a room, flicks on the light, and closes the door.

“Bathroom,” Otto tells them.

Tom leaves.

A few minutes tick by before Denise Morrow comes back out. When she does, she’s wearing her black coat buttoned all the way to her neck. The brown paper bag is clutched tightly in her hands. She returns to the main room of the bookstore, locates Geller Hoffman in the thinning crowd, and hands the bag to him. He leaves without another word. She starts working her way toward the entrance too, saying her goodbyes, and is gone a few minutes later.

Cordova stops the recording.

“Fucking three-card monte,” Declan mutters for the second time that night.

Cordova leans against the wall and looks up at the ceiling, putting all this together. “They’re about the same size, right? Morrow and Hoffman?”

Declan nods. “She might have an inch on him, but they’re close.”

“Hoffman could have killed Mia Gomez wearing the same outfit, changed, and brought his bloody clothes to her. She changed into them and wore them home under her coat. Probably had the knife at that point too, right? Must have. She walked it all into her apartment. Then what? It still doesn’t explain how she killed her husband without getting his blood on her.”

“Maybe Hoffman did him too. While she was here.”

Cordova shakes his head. “No sign of Hoffman on the building’s security footage until he shows up later. After you. We confirmed that with the doorman too. He knows Hoffman, said he’s there a lot. He wouldn’t have missed him.” He goes quiet, then looks down at the computer monitor. “We’ll pull his schedule. Find out where he was leading up to all this. Maybe he knows some way in we don’t.”

Caught up in this new evidence, they both nearly forget that Otto is standing there. Declan says, “You can’t mention a word of this to anyone—you understand that, right?”

Otto’s hands are up, palms out, in aWhatever you wantgesture. He turns and starts back up the steps. “I’ll leave you gentlemen to it. Take all the time you need.”

He leaves. Declan sits on a corner of the desk and absentmindedly scans the titles on the shelf as he thinks out loud. “The husband was a cheat, killing him lines up, but why kill…”

Declan doesn’t know books. There are few he’d recognize. He can count the ones he’s read cover to cover on one hand. So when his eyes land on a white spine with red print, a colorful image wrapped beneath the text, they lock on it. It’s one of the few titles he knows intimately. One he wishes he’d never heard of. He steps over to the shelf on wobbly legs.

Cordova doesn’t catch any of this; he’s still working the case. Declan barely hears him say, “The husband was a cheater, right? Could he have been sleeping with Gomez?”

Declan pulls the book from the shelf, takes in the familiar cover, then tosses it on the desk. The bang gets Cordova’s attention. The color melts from his partner’s face as he reads the title:Understanding Anatomy and Physiology.

He glances at Declan, then flips open the cover, probably expecting to find the library card. It’s not there. It’s not the same book. It can’t be. But they both know Denise Morrow left it for them because written on that page in carefree script are the wordsWhat goes around…

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Excerpt fromThe Taking of Maggie Marshallby Denise Morrow

WHEN DOES A good cop go bad? I’ve asked myself that particular question often while writing this book. I like to believe none of us enter this worldbad,that we’re clean slates, empty chalkboards waiting to be filled with ideas, loves, wonders, and hopes until there is no more room to write. We erase our mistakes and replace them with lessons learned. Our sorrows become stepping stones. We grow. We hurt. We heal, the new skin thicker than the old.

The cards dealt to Declan Shaw were pulled from thebottom of a stacked deck. No one would deny that. Declan’s father was a bit of a cliché. Irish Catholic, more muscle than brain. Between bottles, he had jobs in construction, ironwork mostly. In 1989, if you happened to look skyward at the skeleton of a building going up in NYC, there was a good chance one of the men you’d spot walking those steel girders fifty stories up was Declan Shaw’s father. I’m not going to mention his name here because, frankly, it’s not important, not when it comes to Maggie’s story. What you need to know is that some days he tried to provide for his family, other days he did not, and it’s those other days that tend to shape the minds of children. Those are the days they remember. No arrest reports exist for Declan’s father. During his forty-one years on this planet, he was never picked up for so much as jaywalking. On paper, I suppose, that makes him a good man. You track down any of his coworkers (I did) and they’ll tell you he was a good man. You talk to any of his old friends (I did), they’ll insist he was. But if you dig through some old file cabinets in the basement at Presbyterian General (I did that too) and happen to come across a very thick folder on a boy named Declan Shaw, you might think otherwise. Declan had his first broken bone at age three—his right index finger. He broke his left arm three different times over the next four years. During that time, he was also treated for a ruptured eardrum (right), a fractured cheekbone (also right), and numerous cuts, scrapes, and bruises. If you’d asked his mother, she would’ve told you he was a clumsy child. He stoppedbeing a clumsy child in 1994, the year his father died. He was seven.

Declan’s mother cleaned apartments for a living. When I spoke to her friends, that’s what I was told. When I checked police records, I found four arrests for solicitation, two for possession, and one for child endangerment. Declan was twelve for that last one—his mother had gone to Atlantic City for two days and left her son back in the city with half a box of cereal, spoiled milk, and a television that received only two channels as a sitter. That’s when Declan began his life in the system. He bounced from foster home to foster home until the age of fifteen, when he landed with a nice family in Brooklyn who simply wanted a child and couldn’t have one of their own. They adopted Declan two years later. She was a waitress, he was a cop. They both died in a car accident three days after Declan’s eighteenth birthday.

Like I said—many cards dealt in the life of Declan Shaw, all from the bottom of a stacked deck. I imagine he credits his stepfather for driving him toward a career in law enforcement, and that may very well be true. But under the uniform, beneath his skin, is a broken boy. You’ll find he did his best to erase the worst of his story, replace it with something better, but those early words never quite went away. Although faded, they were still there, still legible, and still influenced all that was written later.

When does a good cop go bad?

The truth is it can happen anytime. Some cops, though, do start out that way. They’re rotten at the core, and eventually that rot finds its way up to the skin.

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