richest data product ever provided law enforcement. COMSEC at Ft. Meade, the counterterrorism think tanks here and in Europe, the Academy at Quantico, DEA, the military, you had it all a fingertip away.
You could cross-reference crime-scene reports on a possible serial killing in Mississippi or plumb the incredible resources of some of NCIC's best-kept secrets, all in the push-button miracle of high tech.
For the last few years the paralyzing rivalries that had torn through certain areas of law enforcement had begun to disintegrate. A new director had revamped the FBI to the point where it was now dealing with both the locals and the gents in Langley, and there was some actual sharing of important collars, as well as information and evidence. It was truly without precedent, codifying computerized group-think and launching the new, emergent criminologist, which boded ill for criminals. The new spirit of liaison was especially important in narcotics-related cases, but it also meant that certain types of homicides had a much better chance of being cleared.
McTuff produced crime-profile printouts that reflected an unbelievable degree of sophistication. It structured threat-assessment work-ups that had enormously beneficial capability on many levels. And best of all to police, it was user-friendly. Jack was a believer. He thought that the Task Force's greatest strength was its subtle, implicit reliance on the human being. It seemed to understand there was only one way to really find out what somebody else was thinking or what they were going to do — and to find that out, you had to use people. Other cops. Informants. This was the area where McTuff worked its most fertile and productive soil. It could build you a snitch machine.
Life is a series of trade-offs. The art of compromise. The understanding of quid pro quo. One hand washing another. And in the strange, murky, quirky world of law and the lawbreaker, justice demanded the oily, slippery lubricant of the deal to continue functioning. If you accepted this you would make the system work for you. If you didn't your life on The Job could be a nightmare.
The complexities of the maddening legal system itself could hamstring a law officer to the point of paralysis. The jurisdictional intricacies, the opaqueness of the codes, the double-think of the statutes, the sheer insanity of the procedures, rules, postulates, and disciplines, could nail you through your shield; leave you rigid, desk-bound, static, immobilized by the bone-crushing weight of the paperwork, skewered by the uncompromisingly doctrinaire methodology of the frustratingly inadequate system that had failed the society it promised to protect and serve.
MCTF had been devised, implemented, programmed, and calibrated by people who had worked their whole lives within the system and they had used their hard-won knowledge. The computer knew how to search for potential information keys, and it gave a user the proper leverage with which to put a machine into motion. A lowly copper in Buchanan County-miles, histories, quantum leaps away from a powerful DA in Suffolk County, just as one example — could patch right into a heavyweight plea-bargain deal that would accomplish what only the best negotiators could pull off: make all the parties happy simultaneously. McTuff knew how to make a jam disappear, and crime is solved by snitches, never doubt it. It was the ultimate snitch machine.
The Task Force had no centuries-old tradition of policework as a heritage. Fathered by high tech, its mother of invention had been the bestial serial murders that had seemed to spring out of the poisonous karma of the 60s, like some mutation from Agent Orange. Zodiac, Manson, Gacey, a blood-soaked trail of bodies sweeping across the country, leaving a wake of grisly legend.
The Task Force, obviously, was a child of the times. So Jack Eichord, people-oriented copper, had become Jack Eichord, task-oriented organization man. These were not your run-of-the-mill bad guys, these serial kills. They were a new breed of evil mutant and they had to be found and stopped — at any cost.
It was to McTuff that Eichord turned first, with a fat dossier full of fact and conjecture and a dozen thankless tasks that could not be accomplished by computers and think tanks alone. PEOPLE would have to go interrogate all those TWA flight attendants and stewardii and gift-shop employees. Somebody had to ask all those questions and hear all those answers, and as always — in the end — it all came down to shoe leather.
And Big Mac failed him this time. SEE NO EVIL had, for all intents and purposes, vanished.
The one called Spain sat perusing his St. Louis dossier, now more of a scrapbook actually, and his gaze fell upon a small two-column clipping razored out of a recent
The Missouri Court of Appeals at St. Louis has reversed the conviction of a St. Louis man on a charge of dealing in narcotics and controlled substances. Andrew Dudzik, 28, of the 800 block of Bancroft Avenue, was accused of selling heroin and various stolen pharmaceuticals to an undercover officer posing as a Cairo, Illinois, drug dealer, according to Lawrence V. Goetz, assistant St. Louis circuit court attorney.
Goetz identified the accused man as Andrew 'Candy' Dudzik, owner of American Industrial Laundry, Inc., of Washington Park, and St. Louis organized-crime figure, with alleged ties to the Dagatina crime family, which authorities believe controls the narcotics and child-pornography rackets in St. Louis.
The Appeals Court ruled Tuesday that the crime had occurred in the state of Illinois, not Missouri, and writing for the court Presiding Judge Richard B. Brewer said he 'regretted that such a conviction must be reversed, particularly in light of the complex interstate transactions of our present day.' But that 'any change from existing law must be addressed by our legislature.'
'A written accusation submitted in the case was defective, it was also learned, because it failed to charge all of the elements of the crime,' Goetz added.
Noted criminal defense attorney Jacob Rozitsky, Jr., denied that the ruling was 'unduly restrictive' and 'highly suspect,' in the words of an unidentified source in the circuit attorney's office. 'This reversal of an unjust conviction showed great fairness and courage by the court,' Rozitsky said.
Concurring with Presiding Judge Brewer were judges Quentin R. Ide and James DeMournier.
He closed the scrapbook and underlined the name Dudzik, Andrew, on a loose sheet of yellow, lined paper and then added the names Rozitsky, Jacob, Junior, and Brewer, Richard B., printing in tiny, meticulously precise letters.
He opened the St. Louis telephone directory and searched through the Brewers until he found a Brewer, Richard B., and he made a note of both the office and home addresses by the side of the name Dudzik, next to his address at 827 Bancroft Avenue, connecting the two listings with a tiny double-pointed arrow.
He started to draw a tiny question mark beside the Brewer entry, but then he pursed his lips in thought for a moment and said softly, 'Fuck it.' And then he began to laugh.
Everything was working beautifully. He grinned with delight each time media headlined another mob-war story. He'd touched it all off himself with the two firebombings. The rest of it had been the two sides retaliating for imagined assaults by the opposition. He loved it. Perfect justice. The laugh dies. His face tightens again into a frown of hatred. Candy Dudzik. Candy fucking Dudzik wasn't even a maggot crawling on a piece of shit. And he could buy protection and claim to be tied to the Dagatina crime family. That was the precise reason even a greaseball like Gaetano Ciprioni had sense enough not to fool with scum like Jimmie the Hook and Blue Kriegal. Jesus. What had the family come down to? He couldn't believe it. He thought about the scum and what he was going to do when he took the big ones down — how he'd make their suffering long and hard. But it was making him sick to think about them, and he couldn't get the images of Tiff out of his mind and finally he forced himself to think of something else.
He looked back on the mob the way it had been when he had been elevated along with Ciprioni to the level of the top enforcer for the national organization. These so-called mob leaders had been the lowest rungs of the ladder back then. This Rikla and this Measure were nothing. He remembered
Measure, who he figured had to be seventy-four now if he was a day. Nothing but some muscle who'd had his eyes on die twat industry. His big deal was he came to the family twenty-five years back and they'd brought him in as a bodyguard. Then later they gave him a heavy sports book for his initial livelihood. But he was nothing but a glorified button man.
He'd been given some massage parlors, outcall houses, a couple of the sex shops, and an X-house — the porn thing. He'd brought William 'Blue' Kriegal in from Detroit to help him put it all together. A couple of ancient faggots. He'd whack them out in the most painful ways he could invent — and this fucking Rikla was the original town pervert. All garbage. He'd make them suffer the way Tiff had.
