No one in the department ever described Brand as easygoing. So much in life consists of looking the other way, and this was especially true in the day-to-day grind of a police detective in New York City. In her rise through the ranks from patrol to anti-crime to work on a dedicated sex crimes unit, Brand balked at the code of silence. She refused to wear the blinders that were as much standard issue for cops as a duty belt and a countdown calendar to retirement.
Over the recent winter holidays came a series of actions that wound up effectively derailing Detective Brand’s career after a decade and a half on the force. In retrospect she at least partially blamed her devotion to amphetamine. She was just coming off a twelve-hour watch, crashing from a speed high. Maybe her judgment was a little off. Maybe she rushed a very delicate and explosive rape investigation.
Brand caught the case by chance, interviewing young Bristol Chambers at the Six-Oh precinct house in Coney Island. The duty sergeant tossed her the complainant who had come in the night before. Brand sat across from the teenage victim, just the two of them in the windowless interview room.
She recited the date, time, and place. “On camera is Bristol Chambers,” Brand intoned for the record. “Am I correct, Bristol, in saying that you are eighteen years old?”
“I’m nineteen next month,” said the kid.
“You told Patrol Officer Padilla that last night two men assaulted you in Vaux Park.”
“They took me out of Tina’s car and put me in their van,” the girl said.
Bristol wore an extravagant fade haircut shaved down almost to the skin on both temples. Not for the first time, Brand thought the style didn’t work. However much teenagers tarted themselves up to look like gangstas, their kid innocence usually shone through.
“Did anyone use force or intimidation to get you into the other vehicle?” Brand asked.
“I was with my girlfriend Tina, sitting in her Toyota. We were in the park and we wasn’t doing anything wrong. They drove up on us in a white van, all of a sudden like.”
“I see,” Brand said.
“I got the license plate number,” the girl added.
Brand concluded that Bristol Chambers was not as stupid as her haircut made her look. She had the girl write down the information. Leaving the room briefly, she requested a plate search from a police clerk. Brand returned with the cop’s traditional interview offering, a can of soda and a bag of potato chips.
“Could you tell me what happened?” she asked Bristol, pushing the snack across the table to the girl. “Take your time and put it into your own words.”
“They made a lot of comments about why I was with a girl that night and was I a lesbian. They were going to show me the right path, not the gay path, and all that. They told me they were ‘freaks,’ like real sex freaks, is what they said.”
According to Bristol, the male in the driver’s seat addressed the one in the front passenger seat as “Richie,” and suggested he join “our little rug-muncher friend,” in the back of the van.
“So this Richie climbed over from the front and made me do oral on him,” she continued. “I was crying all the time and telling him to stop, but he didn’t. Then he turned me over and raped me.”
Bristol Chambers remained dry-eyed throughout her account, though Brand judged the young woman to be just on the edge of losing it.
In Veronika’s mind the incident sounded like a prostitution encounter gone wrong. In her early years on the force, she had been enlisted as a decoy in prostitution busts. She knew the scene well.
“Bristol, why would you get into a vehicle with a couple of strange men?”
“Well, they flashed their headlights at us, and came up to the window and said they were po-po.”
Brand felt a jolt pass through her. The fact of alleged police involvement had somehow previously been left unmentioned in the girl’s account. “The men told you they were police officers?”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think so,” Bristol answered. “They were nasty looking, didn’t have no badges or nothing. I smelled, like, alcohol on their breaths. I mean, around the block and everything, there’s always some chud or another trying to pass himself off as undercover, you know? I thought these guys were fake. They chased Tina off, saying she was too fat, and just took me into their van.”
Brand interrupted the proceedings to answer a knock on the door of the interview room.
A clerk handed a piece of paper to her, whispering, “one of ours.” The registration of the white 2013 Dodge van turned out to be linked to a police confiscation case. The vehicle had recently been transferred to the anti-crime motor pool for use by plainclothes. The previous night, undercover officers Richie Miles and Devane Berline signed it out for a narcotics operation in the Coney Island neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Then came a series of decisions that Brand might have wanted to take back later, knowing beforehand what she was getting herself into. Even while she was caught up in her actions, she understood there were formal procedures that she ought to have been abiding by, boxes to check off, a chain of command to follow.
Brand didn’t know Berline, but Richie Miles was a very familiar name to her, a living embodiment of everything she hated about the NYPD’s
