immigration laws in 1965, allowing more Asian immigrants into the country, the population of Chinatown exploded. Now Mulberry Street, with its tourist-trap restaurants and sidewalk vendors hawking Bada Bing and Fuggedaboutit T-shirts, was the last remaining enclave of what had once been a real Italian neighborhood. And the Fifth Precinct now stood at the epicenter of an ever-expanding Chinatown.
Rogan parked the car on Elizabeth, just south of Canal, and began making his way north to the precinct.
“Hold up,” Ellie called out as she pulled open a glass door stenciled with gold Chinese lettering. She emerged sixty seconds later with a roasted pork bun wrapped inside a napkin, the first real food she’d seen since shunning the slop masquerading as lunch at the jail.
“A buck twenty-five,” Ellie said, popping a piece of the doughy ball of marinated meat into her mouth. “You can’t beat Chinatown.”
By the time they turned the corner to reach the sky-blue door of the white-brick building that housed the Fifth Precinct, Ellie had finished her makeshift lunch. A civilian aide with a round Charlie Brown head sat at the front service desk.
Rogan pulled back his jacket to reveal his detective’s badge. “Narcotics?”
The aide gestured toward a staircase just beyond the entrance. “Next floor up.”
A few years earlier, police assumed that all home invasions were drug-related. Teacher? Priest? Hero landing an airplane in the Hudson? Wouldn’t matter. Home invasion victims were always and automatically labeled as drug dealers. But in recent years, police had seen an increase in both home invasions and the number of tragic cases in which innocent people had found themselves targeted by the most predatory and violent offenders, simply because their address was one digit away from a reputed drug house.
On the second floor, Rogan asked a second civilian aide to see Sergeant Frank Boyle.
“The sergeant had to leave. Are you Detective Rogan?”
Rogan nodded. “And Hatcher. I called Boyle a little more than an hour ago. He was expecting us.”
“Something came up.”
“Like maybe five o’clock?” Rogan said, glancing at his watch.
The aide smiled politely. “Perhaps. He said to see Detective Carenza over there.” He pointed to a refrigerator-sized man standing over a desk toward the back of the squad room.
As they walked toward the man who was apparently called Carenza, Ellie noticed that his tanned, veiny biceps were challenging the seams of his fitted black T-shirt. The rest of the ensemble consisted of faded blue jeans, pointed alligator shoes, and a heavy gold chain.
“Ellie Hatcher,” she said, offering her hand. “Your sergeant left word to see you?”
“Tony Carenza.” The detective gave her a firm handshake and then turned to Rogan to offer the same. “Then you must be Rogan, because Boyle told me some guy from Homicide was coming.”
“You heading out on an undercover?” Rogan asked, eyeing the wardrobe.
Carenza glanced down at his own clothing and shrugged. “Nah, man. Just wrapping up some paperwork here, and then I’m audi.”
Rogan was nodding politely when Carenza broke out laughing. “Gotcha nervous there, didn’t I? Nah, my stuff might not be quite up to what you got going on here,” he said, pointing at Rogan’s three-button Canali suit, “but this getup’s definitely for the job. The mod’s running some buy-and-busts tonight at some of the clubs.” In addition to the teams of stop-and-frisk uniform cops that had made New York’s zero-tolerance policing famous, the narcotics division used so-called investigatory modules to run undercover operations.
Carenza pulled at the diamond-encrusted dollar sign dangling from his gold chain, most likely a trophy seized during a prior bust. “Too much?”
“Fierce,” Ellie said.
“Yeah, I thought so. So what can I do you for? My sergeant made a point of instructing me to be helpful, so consider me your most helpful helper.”
Rogan scratched his cheek while he spoke. “We’re still chasing a case from May—dead body left behind in a home invasion on Kenmare and Lafayette.”
“Yeah, I know that case. The 212. Should be called the 646. Last time I checked, no one could get a 212 number anymore. The place belonged to Sam Sparks, right?”
Rogan nodded, and it struck Ellie that Sparks might be better known to the general public than she had realized, even without the assistance of a reality show.
“We checked with Boyle at the time to see if we might be looking at a case of mistaken identity. He came up with nothing. Now Sparks’s lawyer says he hears otherwise. He claims you’re running an operation on one of Sparks’s neighbors.”
“I wouldn’t call it an operation,” Carenza said, handing Ellie a DD5, the departmental form used to report on ongoing investigations. This one related to for Apartment 702 at 212 Lafayette.
“It’s directly next door,” she said.
Rogan glanced at the sheet of paper over her shoulder. “The only other apartment on that floor, as I recall.”
The DD5 contained entries for three events—two in March, one in June.
“Two neighbors came to our front service desk in March, complaining about a drug dealer who had just moved into one of the luxury condos on the top of the building. You’ve seen that building?”
They both nodded.
“Okay, so you know the deal. It’s this old building, been there forever. Most of the tenants are rent-stabilized. Also been there forever. Then Sam Sparks buys up the roof space, stacks a few multimillion-dollar apartments on top, and calls the place 212. Two totally different kinds of tenants, now sharing one elevator and one lobby. You get your culture clashes.”
Ellie felt her cell vibrate against her waist but let the call go to voice mail.
“And where did these two neighbors fit into the clash?” she asked.
“The old ladies who eat dinner at four thirty at the corner-diner side. They’d lived a good century and a half between them. And I’m telling you, they were a hoot. Watched
“So why do you have a DD5 on the apartment?”
“Because the sweet biddies wouldn’t go away. God love ’em, they kept coming in and harping to the front desk with all their cop slang, cracking up everyone in the house but also being a major pain in the ass. So eventually the poor sacks in the community policing unit got dragged in to calm them down. You know what those guys are all about—it’s appeasement. So finally they put the old birds to work on a citizen-driven search warrant.”
“How come Boyle didn’t tell us about this when we called you guys at the end of May?”
“Because half the time when we start a citizen-driven warrant, the oh-so-concerned citizens get lazy and let it drop. We don’t bother logging anything onto a DD5 until they come back with all their paperwork. In this case, that didn’t happen until June.”
“What exactly is a citizen-driven warrant?” Rogan asked.
“No time in Narcotics, huh?” He said it as if no qualified cop could make it into Homicide without pulling duty in the drug squad. Given that Ellie made it to her current position after only five years in uniform and one as a detective in general crimes, she was thankful the question hadn’t been aimed at her.
“Major Case Squad, then SVU,” Rogan said.
“Okay, so a citizen-driven warrant is this thing we came up with, but it’s really a community policing tool. You know, after nine-eleven, we’ve got these ads all up and down the MTA, telling people, ‘If you see something, say something.’”
“But we’re not always talking about the next Zacarias Moussaoui.”
“No, knock on wood, not in most cases. Instead, we get these nosy neighbors convinced that someone’s up to something. So the citizen-driven warrant puts them to work. They write down every suspicious thing they see. They turn in the pages to us. If it adds up to probable cause, we ask for a warrant. If not—”
