The Fence Part 8

No matter how much he slept, he continued to feel sluggish. "I went out to a doctor's appointment, came back, and lay back down." In a way, not much had changed since right before he blacked out near the fence: He felt tired and just wanted to go to sleep. The last thing he wanted to do was talk about what happened.

Mike may not have felt much like talking, but others did. His mother, his sisters, and Kimberly were boiling mad about the beating and right away wanted Mike to do something, even if they didn't know specifically what that meant. Within days of his coming home, his sister Lillian wanted to photograph Mike's face to doc.u.ment visually the extensive swelling, bruising, cuts, and b.u.mps. She and the others told Mike that the police department was going to try to sweep the beating under the rug unless he took action.

Mike began hearing the same message from beyond his immediate family. Leaders from the local chapter of the NAACP and the Nation of Islam called the house. Mike had never been active politically or religiously. "I was amazed how many people got my phone number," he said. The groups had heard about Mike's beating through talk on the street, and they wanted him to do something about it. "What do you want to do?" they'd ask. One day Mike took a call from another black cop on the force. Mike didn't know the other cop very well, but that didn't stop the caller from getting into Mike's business. "He's asking me how I'm doing," Mike said, "and then his tone changed and he said, 'I've known you for a while and I've always respected you, but if you don't do something I've lost all respect for you, as a person, as a black man, as a police officer.'"

Mike didn't want any of it. To him, it was all noise and static. The ground beneath him was already unsteady-literally-and he was having enough trouble finding his footing. "I was just happy to be alive," he said. "I'm just trying to deal with the day-to-day, with my injuries." So he refused to let his sister photograph him. He rebuffed any other calls to action-there'd be no protests, no press conferences.

Instead, he told his wife, mother, and sisters it would all work out. They fired back that Mike was being naive. "They were like, 'Why are you so trusting? What's wrong, can't you see?'" But Mike would not budge. They didn't understand cops. They didn't understand the split-second decisions of a high-speed chase. They couldn't put themselves in the beaters' shoes as could Mike. "Maybe, you know, they thought I was the murderer," he said. "So maybe trying to arrest me was justified."

Mike's first instincts were true blue. The severity of the thrashing notwithstanding, Mike got that it had been a terrible mistake. Unlike his family, he didn't see making a federal case out it. Friends from the gang unit came by the house the first week to check on him. He wasn't up for talking much, but he listened, and Craig Jones told him what Dave Williams said about his partner, Burgio, messing up. Mike heard from Dave Williams, and Mike thought Dave sounded "very apologetic." From others he heard gossip the bra.s.s was giving those responsible some time-a grace period, of sorts-to come forward before any kind of intense internal probe was begun. The tidbits gave Mike the idea this was going to get resolved and settled in a way he preferred both personally and as part of the fraternity himself-quietly and within the organization. "I felt this loyalty to police in general." He was optimistic, knowing full well police officers tended to protect another suspected of misconduct. But he also believed this went beyond any unspoken code of silence. When the victim was one of your own, it was a different ball game.

Mike was figuring that within days he'd hear from the cops who'd beaten him. He was counting on an apology. "I expected the individuals to come forward and say what they had done." They'd get disciplined in some fashion. Then they'd all move on.

Mike didn't expect his wife, mother, and sisters to understand any of this.

"In the beginning I had a lot of faith," Mike said.

In law enforcement it's a well-known truism that the chances of solving a crime diminish the longer a case goes unsolved. For one thing, witnesses have time to think about what to say or to decide not to say anything at all. Offenders have time to work out the wrinkles in their cover stories. "The best moment for justice is right away," one prosecutor said.

In the c.o.x case, some Boston police officials may have been hoping the department's low-key response to the beating would result in a quick and quiet resolution that kept the matter largely in-house. They may have figured that given the unique circ.u.mstances-cops beating a cop-it was reasonable to expect the offenders to come forward. Mike had thought as much. They were wrong.

In the first days after the beating, instead of launching a full-blown Internal Affairs inquiry, commanders in the field put out the word that officers in Roxbury and Mattapan who'd partic.i.p.ated in the chase and were at the dead end had to file a so-called Form 26 report. The officers were to doc.u.ment what they'd done and what they'd seen.

For two weeks the Form 26s trickled in-and the false notes struck the morning of January 25 in initial reports played on. Nearly sixty officers prepared reports-and not a single officer saw or knew anything about Mike's misfortune. The ultimate see-no-evil filings were done by the core group of officers who, along with Mike and Craig, arrived first to the dead end: gang unit officers Gary Ryan and Joe Teahan, Richie Walker, Ian Daley, Dave Williams, and Jimmy Burgio.

Ryan's report said he and his partner, Teahan, rode in "the fourth m/v [motor vehicle] on the scene," where they found "Michael c.o.x lying on the ground." That was about all he wrote; Ryan said he didn't see anybody else and had no idea how Mike got hurt.

Richie Walker, according to his written report, had not even seen Mike c.o.x: "I learned via my portable Boston Police radio that there was an injured officer at the location where the pursuit had ended."

Ian Daley drafted a brief, handwritten account in which he at least acknowledged a c.o.x sighting: "At the conclusion of the pursuit, Officer Daley did observe P.O. c.o.x laying on the ground bleeding." But Daley provided no meaningful details.

Dave Williams used a typewriter to fashion his report-all sixty-four words of it. He said he and Burgio were "involved in a foot chase," suggesting he was in no position whatsoever to see Mike. Williams even got Mike's name wrong, typing, "I was unaware of any injury to P.O. Richard c.o.x until later."

Jimmy Burgio, in the few sentences he prepared, avoided any mention of Mike by focusing singularly on his moment of putative glory: "Myself and P.O. Williams engaged in a brief foot pursuit ending with the arrest of two suspects."

Their supervisor, Sergeant Dan Dovidio, then extended the cloak of cover. He filed a report saying no other officers were at the dead end when he arrived, except for Williams and Burgio. Separately, he then sought honors for the two officers. He typed a "Recommendation for Commendation," writing, "Officers Williams and Burgio are worthy of recognition and should be commended for their excellent performance that without doubt instills public confidence to victims of violent crimes."

The collective exercise in evasion did little to shed light on the beating. The leaders of Mike's gang unit were growing restless. The unit's commander on January 30-five days after the beating-fired off a single-s.p.a.ced, three-page memorandum forcefully calling on the department's top bra.s.s to start an Internal Affairs investigation. "The most disturbing aspect of this," the commander wrote, "is that not only was Officer c.o.x a.s.saulted, but he was left on the sidewalk." The commander stressed, "as of the writing of this report, no officer has come forward, in spite of the fact that there were numerous officers involved in this initial vehicle and suspect pursuit."

Four days later, the Boston Herald ran the first story mentioning Mike in connection with the high-speed chase and capture of four murder suspects. The tabloid's early "bulldog" edition hit the streets not long after midnight and was usually read by the cops, firefighters, cabdrivers, and anyone else working in the dark. The story said Mike had been injured and the department was investigating whether he'd been beaten.

Later in the night, the telephone rang and awoke Mike and Kimberly. Mike turned carefully and grabbed for the receiver by their bed. He heard a voice grumbling. The voice was unfamiliar, and Mike had to hold the receiver away from his ear when the grumbling grew into a primal scream. The scream spread through the room. Then it stopped. The caller hung up. Mike put down the receiver. He was puzzled, but didn't think much of the weirdness. He and Kimberly tried to get comfortable again.

Then the telephone rang again-and again. Each time Mike picked up the receiver to hear the same animallike scream. Then the caller hung up. Toward dawn, Mike picked up the receiver, bracing for the scream, but it didn't come. Mike said, h.e.l.lo? The caller asked for someone by name, but uttered a name that made no sense. "It was a nonsense name," Mike said. "It was a name I couldn't even p.r.o.nounce."

Mike asked the caller, Who?

"You a.s.shole," the caller yelled. "f.u.c.k you!"

The line went dead, and that was it. The calls ended. They didn't belong to one of Mike's nightmares. The telephone calls had been real, and they left Mike and Kimberly bleary-eyed. But they weren't going to puzzle too much over a wrong number or sick prank, not with all they had going on in the family, given Mike's condition.

It was Friday, February 3, nine days since Mike's beating.

Later in the morning a friend of Mike's called to tell him about a story he should read in that morning's Herald. The story was on page 16, and it carried the headline "Alleged Beating of Undercover Cop Probed." It was a brief account-289 words long-reporting that the department was looking into the possibility that "an undercover police officer was beaten by other officers at the height of a chase following a shooting last week."

Mike read the story carefully. He noticed a mistake right away; he worked in plainclothes and wasn't an "undercover" cop. The mistake didn't matter at this point. What mattered was this was the first public disclosure that Mike had been a casualty in what so far had been heralded in the media coverage as a night of sterling police work.

Mike read on: "Officer Michael c.o.x, 29, a member of the AntiaGang Violence Unit, suffered kidney damage and head wounds in the Jan. 25 incident, which occurred as police pursued four suspects for a shooting at a Roxbury eatery, sources said."

The department's spokesman was quoted as saying, "This is serious."

Mike found himself thinking about the crank calls. He could hear the caller's voice in his head and it made him feel queasy. The calls were clearly connected to the story. He might be reading the story for the first time at midmorning, but Mike knew that cops working the overnight shift often grabbed the two morning papers, the Herald and the Boston Globe.

The caller, Mike decided, was not random, a n.o.body-he was a cop who'd read in the Herald that the department had started looking into the beating and that Mike was talking. He would never be able to prove it, but he knew it in his bones. Mike felt a panic. The newspaper story followed by the middle-of-the-night "f.u.c.k you." Juxtapose the two, and Mike knew the call was a warning: Keep your mouth shut.

The story itself presented another puzzle for Mike. In it, police sources were quoted saying they were trying to sort out what happened. One was quoted saying Mike "remembers being in pursuit, he remembers being struck, and that's all he remembers. Obviously something happened. But if he doesn't tell us, how are we going to know?"

If he doesn't tell us, how are we going to know? Mike reread the quotation. It was absurd, he thought, flat-out absurd-the notion only he had the key to the truth.

Then came this: "We have no official complaint yet. Michael has not come in and said he was beaten up."

No official complaint? thought Mike. The notion that police investigated violent a.s.saults only after the victim filed a formal complaint was flat-out absurd. "Hogwash," Mike said. The department was making it sound like the ball was in his court-to both pursue the case and solve it.

None of this sounded good to Mike. The story in the city's other daily newspaper, the Boston Globe, only added to his anxiety. Like the Herald, the story reported police officials were "trying to determine how plainclothes officer Michael c.o.x was injured in the line of duty last week." But comments by the spokesman were, once again, misleading if not outright false. "We're not sure-he's not sure-how he was injured."

Mike was confounded. The two newspaper stories were like a punch in the stomach. The way he read them, the message was at best mixed. Officials were saying his injuries were serious but they didn't know how he got hurt. They were flummoxed.

Then came this: "There is no a.s.sumption of any wrongdoing yet."

No a.s.sumption of wrongdoing? Mike couldn't get past that line. It was nine days since he'd been beaten, and everybody knew he'd been beaten-mistakenly, perhaps, but he was beaten, and the beating was overkill, a case study of excessive force.

"Everybody and their mother knew about it," Mike said. Yet there it was, officials telling the public, "There is no a.s.sumption of any wrongdoing." This did not sound like a department determined to get to the bottom of the beating of one cop by other cops.

For the first time, Mike wondered what was going on. One thing, he had not heard anything directly from the police commissioner. Paul Evans had not visited the house or called to ask how Mike was doing. Evans had not issued any clear signal inside the department that the brutal beating broke all the rules-written or unwritten-for which he was demanding accountability. In the newspaper stories, Evans was not even quoted; he'd let his spokesman handle what was at once a deadly serious matter and a potentially huge embarra.s.sment for the police. The commissioner was certainly busy with other ongoing embarra.s.sments-most notably the botched drug raid that had left an elderly Dorchester minister dead. The day after Mike's beating, Evans had had to stand before the reporters to announce the suspension of one lieutenant and reprimands of two supervisors. Then, after announcing the disciplinary measures, Evans faced criticism he'd done "too little, too late." Meanwhile, lawyers for the city and the minister's widow were locked in sometimes nasty negotiations to settle her wrongful death claim.

The commissioner apparently did not have time for Mike c.o.x. And his remoteness, along with his spokesman's wishy-washy comments, stood in sharp relief to all the public concern about police brutality fifty miles down the road in Providence, Rhode Island. The videotape showing an officer kicking a black man in the stomach during a melee after a concert was a big, ongoing story. The police chief had gone public with his concern and condemnation of the apparent misconduct, and he was soon joined by the city's mayor, Vincent "Buddy" Cianci. "Let the chips fall where they may," Cianci told reporters. "We will not tolerate excessive force. We will not tolerate any brutality."

When the stories about Mike ran in the Herald and Globe, Mike's family jumped all over them. They saw the stories as clear-cut evidence supporting the point they'd been making-the police department was in cover-up mode. They said, We told you so, Mike, you have to do something! Then lawyers began calling the house, despite the unlisted number, to discuss with Mike the possibility of legal action. "I was amazed about how many people had my phone number," he said. Mike was appalled by the unsolicited calls. No, he said, despite his family's protestations. No. Even if he'd begun to wonder.

His family persisted. To make them happy, Mike agreed to meet with an attorney one of his sisters had come across on her own. His name was Stephen Roach, a forty-five-year-old civil trial attorney. Roach had just struck out on his own, teaming up with another lawyer to start his own firm downtown. He had been practicing law for just over a decade, competently but without fanfare. He was not well-known in the halls of power or in the media as one of the city's go-to lawyers who could make things happen in the corridors of justice. In Boston, it was always said that personal connections and who you knew mattered-in business, in politics, and in law. Roach was not a member of this elite club of insiders.

Roach was originally from the town of Houlton in northeast Maine along the Canadian border. He came to Boston to attend Boston College, graduating in 1973, and began studying law in Boston at Suffolk University Law School in the fall of 1979. Roach apparently liked a full plate; he held a full-time job while attending law school. He was intense and indefatigable and, once he got a taste of law school, displayed a streak of feisty litigiousness. The year he began law school, Roach and his roommate got into a beef with their landlord. The bathroom ceiling leaked. Pieces of rotted wood and plaster came loose and fell on them. The landlord ignored their demands to fix it, so Roach sued him. He brought a small claims action in the city's housing court, seeking reimburs.e.m.e.nt for $750 in rent. He and his roommate won. The landlord appealed, and the two sides negotiated a settlement for $400. It was the kind of landlord dispute most tenants only grouse about. Not Stephen Roach. For him, bring it on.

Roach showed up at the c.o.xes' on Supple Road in Dorchester in early February. The meeting did not last long. "I just wanted him to leave as fast as possible," Mike said. "It was like, 'Hi, nice to meet you. I have a headache. Can you please leave?'" Mike had met with Roach mainly to placate his family, but the meeting did last long enough for Mike to realize Roach was an outsider. "He knew nothing about the Boston police," Mike said. "He had not worked for them, and he didn't seem to be part of that culture."

For Mike, this was good. Roach didn't owe anyone anything. "He seemed like a safe outlet." On his own, Mike had privately begun to question the low-key nature of the department's response. Maybe his family was on the right track. Maybe the "grace period" was not so much time to allow the wrongdoers to step up as to enable a cover-up to take root. Maybe the delay was to see whether Mike was going to push this thing; if Mike didn't, then maybe the debacle at the dead end just goes away.

Then there came a second call several nights later, followed by a third. "Virtually every night," Mike said. Sometimes the caller didn't say a word, other times the caller screamed, and other times he yelled, "f.u.c.k you." Sometimes Mike lifted the receiver and left it on the floor. "An hour later I might put the phone back, and ten minutes after that the phone would ring." Mike became convinced the caller was a cop using blunt force-the linguistic equivalent to a nightstick or flashlight-to keep him down and silent. But if that was the intent, the hara.s.sing calls worked to an opposite effect on Mike: as a wake-up call from his deep slumber.

"It helped me to focus," Mike said. "This was not just gonna go away."

By the second week of February, investigators for Internal Affairs were working in earnest-an effort that began only after the initial newspaper accounts about Mike ran on February 3. The news stories might have been circ.u.mspect, but they had signaled the word was out. The department could no longer put off pursuing a formal look at the incident-and the first order of business was a sit-down with Mike c.o.x.

Mike arrived at police headquarters in downtown Boston late in the afternoon of February 9 and rode the elevator to the fourth-floor offices of Internal Affairs. For the division, the c.o.x case-officially known as Case #2795-was hardly standard stuff. When it came in, for example, investigators were checking out an officer who'd failed to report for duty on New Year's Day and apparently never called in sick. In another new case, investigators were sorting out who did what in a car accident involving a police officer and a retired city resident. The retiree complained the officer, while writing out a ticket, was abusive, yelling, "f.u.c.k" and "f.u.c.k you" at her.

In contrast, Mike's case was the kind of complicated and radioactive mess few investigators would want to touch-and, in the end, it was handed off to a relatively inexperienced investigator. Sergeant Detective Luis Cruz had only worked in the division for about a year. But it wasn't only his short service that stood out. Cruz had his mind elsewhere. The ambitious officer was wrapping up law school and looking to graduate in June. He also had been trying to get out of Internal Affairs. He wanted to work at the police academy training recruits. With a transfer imminent, Cruz nonetheless took the helm.

Mike's interview marked his first formal talk with investigators. His appearance actually may have surprised those in the department hoping Mike's fifteen days of silence signified he was going to do nothing. Indeed, Mike had been fielding regularly what he interpreted as messages to go this route. Some were crude-the crank telephone calls at night, for example. Others seemed more subtle. More than once, Mike listened while someone he knew on the force shared a story about being mistakenly roughed up by other cops. One was a fellow officer in the gang unit named Fred Waggett. "He had been hit with a baton before," Mike said. "The guy apologized and he let it go." Mike liked Waggett and was not offended by what he took as the theme to Waggett's first-person tale: Silence is golden. "He was giving advice he thought was legitimate," Mike said, "and he was sincere in how he thought I should handle the situation."

The truth was no one really knew what to expect from Mike c.o.x in the aftermath of the beating. He was a quiet man who guarded his privacy. Few on the force knew him besides his partner, Craig. Mike might have liked it that way, but the privacy came with a price. Indeed, going back to when he was a boy, his reticence was often misinterpreted. When Mike sat mute while his adviser at Milton Academy accused him of smoking pot, the adviser confidently took Mike's failure to speak up as confirmation. Now fifteen years later, Mike's silent ways were still being misconstrued. Colleagues who came to see him thought his low profile meant he was going to sit tight.

The week before the sit-down, for example, the department had issued a press release announcing Mike's promotion to sergeant-along with sixty other new sergeants, twenty lieutenants, and eight captains. Even though the promotion was long in the works, Mike immediately heard talk that the promotion was his payoff for not being pushy. "The rumor was they're gonna take care of me, not to worry." Mike should not have been surprised by rumors based on false interpretations of his silence, but he was.

"I'm like, 'What are you talking about?'"

In fact, Mike's showing up at headquarters to see Sergeant Detective Cruz did not const.i.tute a turnabout of any kind. He'd always wanted accountability-and nothing less. If he'd said little to anyone about his expectations, it was due to his nature and his injuries; headaches, for one, plagued him. The start of the Internal Affairs probe-however belated-was a good sign to him. Two weeks had gone by, and the offenders had had their chance to come clean. It was time for Internal Affairs to turn up the heat. "I had family members telling me nothing would happen, but I was sure they would get to the bottom of it," Mike said. "I believed that wholeheartedly."

The interview with Cruz was taped. Mike's recollection about what happened to him at the fence was still scant, but he tried his best to be helpful. He was adamant about some points and wrong about others. In the report he wrote for the interview, for example, he a.s.serted clearly the ice-fall story was fiction. "I did not slip on ice or any other substance." But he incorrectly told Cruz that when he first ran from his cruiser toward the fence, he was chasing s.m.u.t Brown and a second suspect. The mistake was one Mike was never able to resolve; a faulty memory told him he'd run after two suspects.

Mike provided other new information-bits and pieces of the night's events that were slowly returning to him in the two weeks since he'd been home recuperating. He recalled that before he lost consciousness a white man wearing black boots kicked him in the face. He couldn't describe the man's features, however, or recall whether he was in uniform. "It's possible that I might later on remember." For now, that was it.

Mike offered one other new lead-another moment that had come back to him. He described standing, blood-soaked, behind a police cruiser, when "I see a black officer." The officer, he recalled, was yelling and trying to arrest him. He wore a uniform and had a slim build. "I know he's smaller than me," Mike told the investigator, but that was all he came up with.

The taped interview ended at 5:15 P.M. It had not lasted even thirty minutes. Mike still suffered from huge gaps in his memory. But even if he could not identify any of his a.s.sailants, he felt he had provided investigators with some good leads about one of the men who'd beaten him and about another officer who then tried to arrest him. Mike promised to pa.s.s along any other details-if and when they came back to him. The short interview left him feeling exhausted. Mike headed home to rest.

The next week, Mike ventured out to attend the ceremony honoring the eighty-nine newly promoted officers. During the event, Police Commissioner Paul Evans spoke to Mike for the first time since the beating. The private conversation amounted to a pep talk. Evans asked how Mike was feeling and encouraged him to get better so he could return to work soon. He told Mike not to worry about the "incident" and that "he would take care of it." They were encouraging words that Mike wanted to believe.

But it wasn't so clear whether the case was a high priority to Evans yet-or ever would be. Three weeks had now pa.s.sed, and Evans had still not spoken out publicly about the beating. He'd certainly had the chance. The ceremony itself presented the latest opportunity. It coincided with Evans's first anniversary as "Boston's top cop," and the local newspapers used the occasion to write stories recapping his first year. In interviews with the Boston Globe and Boston Herald, the commissioner talked about the highs and lows. On the positive side, he noted the streets were safer as a result in a sharp drop in the city's crime rate, a decline he credited to putting more cops on patrol and forging alliances with neighborhood and religious leaders. The low point, he then said, was the death of the retired minister Accelyne Williams during a botched drug raid in Dorchester-a senseless tragedy that had been a headline story throughout the year.

Noticeable by its absence was any mention of Mike c.o.x. The c.o.x beating-one of the worst cases of police brutality in modern times-was a senseless a.s.sault that so far had only barely made the news, and the commissioner wasn't drawing attention to it.

It was important for Mike to attend the ceremony, but it wasn't easy. He didn't want to talk to anyone about the beating, and he felt people were staring at him. Some even seemed to be avoiding him. But Mike was proud of making sergeant, a rank he'd earned. The police world was still his world. And he knew others who'd won promotions. Mike was glad for them too. Diana Green, for one, also made sergeant. Mike had gotten to know "Dee" Green on the job working in Roxbury and Mattapan. She was originally from the South and had overcome a lot-childhood scoliosis as well as her father's accidental death-to become one of the top performers on the anti-crime unit. Like Mike's anti-gang unit, the a.s.signment was elite, high-powered, and high-pressured. Dee Green was popular, a big-hearted cop who, following the beating, sought Mike out and suggested, gingerly, that talking with a therapist might be helpful. "I don't really believe in that kind of stuff," Mike said. But Mike appreciated her interest and considered Green a trusted friend on the force. Going to the ceremony was a chance to see her and others whose police work he respected.

The February 14 ceremony actually turned out to be one of the few times Mike had left his house for something other than an appointment with either his primary care physicians or any number of specialists. Mike continued to see a battery of doctors for his headaches, fatigue, dizziness, and unsteady gait. He saw a neurologist for his "post-traumatic amnesia," and his doctors had another MRI done of his brain that, fortunately, "did not suggest intracranial bleeding or contusion." Concern about his "left flank discomfort" and "persistent hematuria," or blood in his urine, resulted in more blood tests and new examinations to a.s.sess possible damage. The day after his promotion to sergeant became official, Mike was on his back in another medical office while a urologist inserted a thin instrument called a cystoscope into his urethra and carefully pushed it up into his bladder. It was invasive, but the cystoscope allowed the doctor to look directly into his bladder into areas that typically did not show up well on X-rays. The procedure did not reveal any abnormalities in his bladder, urethra, or prostrate-which was good news. The bad news was Mike began peeing bright red blood and felt pain; the cystoscopy had caused a urinary tract infection. To his daily high dose of Tylenol and other medications, the doctor added antibiotics. It sometimes felt to Mike that he was still getting beat up.

One weekday near the end of February, Mike was walking down the hall at the police academy complex located in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood. He might have been off the street due to his injuries, but that didn't mean he was off the job entirely. Newly promoted officers had to attend cla.s.ses. "I was still required while I was out injured to go to the police academy for superior officer training," he said. It wasn't heavy lifting, and Mike found time to go "in between doctor appointments."

It was late morning, and Mike was headed toward the cafeteria.

"Hey, Mike, how are you doing?"

Mike looked up to see who was talking to him. He saw a black officer walking out of the cafeteria. "Mike," the officer repeated, "how you doing?"

Mike studied the officer, but drew a blank. The man stood a good six inches shorter than Mike. He had a slim build. The face looked vaguely familiar, and he was certainly acting friendly enough. But Mike could not place him.

"What's your name?" Mike asked.

"Ian," the officer replied.

"Ian what?"

"Ian Daley, sir."

It didn't help. The name meant nothing.

The exchange ended awkwardly. Mike headed home. He worried he was supposed to know the officer but was unable to because of his clouded memory. Then at home that night he thought more about the encounter and experienced an epiphany. He realized suddenly where he'd seen the officer named Ian Daley.

"It came to me about his face," he said. Daley, he realized, was the officer who'd tried to arrest him at Woodruff Way after he'd been beaten. It was as if Mike's heart skipped a beat-he'd solved a piece of the puzzle that muddled his mind. He needed to contact Internal Affairs. They'd surely want to follow up on his breakthrough.

CHAPTER 11.

Can I Talk to My Lawyer?

When investigators for the Internal Affairs Division of the Boston Police Department sat across from police officer Ian Daley on the morning of March 2, much of the nation was riveted by the daily Court TV broadcasts of the trial of O. J. Simpson, the former football star charged with the murder of his ex-wife and her friend. It was the most highly publicized trial ever-all day with O.J.-with nearly 24/7 coverage. Meanwhile, in Boston, the police probe into the beating of Mike c.o.x was a local matter unfolding in quiet and secrecy, with barely a mention in the media.

The investigators set up in IA's interview room on the fourth floor of police headquarters, located on Berkeley Street a few blocks from the Public Garden in downtown Boston. The small room looked out onto a narrow side street and a Bertucci's pizza restaurant down the way. The lead investigator, Sergeant Detective Luis Cruz, was joined by Lieutenant Detective Jim Hussey. Hussey was in the process of taking over the inquiry from Cruz, who would soon be off the case with his transfer to the police academy.

Hussey was feeling terrible about Mike c.o.x. He'd met Mike at the academy in 1989 when he was an instructor and Mike was a new recruit. He'd followed Mike's start on the force and knew about Mike and Craig Jones's feats on the street. He'd learned recently from Mike that Daley was the officer who'd tried to arrest him after the beating. Mike told him a chance encounter with Daley at the academy had triggered his memory. Then, in interviews with other guys in Mike's unit, Hussey learned that after the beating, Daley told Sergeant Ike Thomas that officers working the streets in plainclothes needed to wear "jackets so people know who you are." To Hussey, it was certainly looking as if Daley knew something about what happened on Woodruff Way.

Daley arrived for the interview with an attorney provided by the police union. Although he'd been born in England, Daley, now twenty-nine, had grown up in Boston. Like so many officers involved in the chase, he'd been a member of the force for only about five years-a period during which the department's shortcomings had been subjected to intense public scrutiny, including the Brighton 13 police brutality trial.

Daley stood nearly six feet tall, but seemed smaller, given his slight build. He took a seat in one of the four chairs at the table in the center of the room. A tape recorder was on the table. Daley appeared uncomfortable. The truth was he'd been struggling. In the weeks since the beating, Daley had sought guidance-quietly and carefully. He turned to another officer from the Roxbury police station, Jimmy Rattigan. Rattigan, the driver of the cruiser that crashed to avoid a head-on with the gold Lexus, was a union representative. Rattigan said, "He approached me; I wanna say three or four, five different times. He even called me at home; he was very upset." Rattigan liked Daley. "He was a pretty nice guy, never a problem officer or anything, a good officer." The pressing question Daley had for him: What if-what if someone saw something?

Rattigan's gut told him Daley was not one of Mike's a.s.sailants, but had information about the beating. "I felt he probably, maybe, observed something." It was a hunch based in part on Daley's anguish. "He was really bothered by this, and really worried," Rattigan said. "If he was any more upset he would have been bawling." If Rattigan was correct, Daley was caught in a no-man's-land where no cop wanted to be: torn between telling all and fulfilling his duty as a police officer sworn to uphold the law, and telling little and fulfilling his duty to the unwritten police code of silence. "He wanted to tell me, you could see it," Rattigan said. "It was in his face." But Daley never went beyond the hypothetical with Rattigan, and Rattigan told him he needed a lawyer.

The two investigators Hussey and Cruz turned on the tape recorder at 9:20 A.M. Daley began at the beginning of the night, explaining he rode alone that shift in a marked police cruiser known as the Bravo 431 unit from the Ba2 station. He described his involvement in the chase for the gold Lexus, and he used a diagram of the dead end at Woodruff Way to indicate where cars stopped. His cruiser was right behind the Lexus.

Daley said he ran to the left side of the cul-de-sac, then to the right, then back and forth. While running up and down the fence, he said, that was "when I saw the person bleeding." He didn't recognize the man. "I said, 'Who are you? Who are you?'" The man did not answer. When the man unzipped his jacket, Daley saw that the man was a cop. He didn't know the cop and afterward learned his name was Mike c.o.x.

Daley was pretty much finished. The investigators warned Daley, "If it's proven you are being untruthful you can be terminated."

Hussey, for one, was incredulous that Daley had not seen Mike c.o.x when Mike began chasing s.m.u.t Brown toward the fence. Daley had come to a stop right behind the Lexus and Mike's cruiser. "You never saw anybody run right in front of you?" Hussey asked. "You didn't see him run right in front of you, is that what you are telling me?"

"Yeah. I can't see everything."

"Right in front of you."

"I don't know. I said, I don't know."

Daley's answers grew increasingly halting.