The Execution by Dick Wolf Read Free Book Online Page A

thought that maybe the battle wasn’t worth fighting, that it would be easier to look the other way, to stop fighting this uphill struggle.
    During Garza’s college years, her mother and sister were kidnapped and held for ransom. The ransom was paid, but they were never returned. Suddenly the dry academic grind of writing contracts and filing real estate deeds had seemed to her an absurd waste of time. Despite the fervent opposition of her wealthy father, she joined the PF, naively determined to find her mother and sister’s killers. While she soon realized that the task was probably hopeless, she also realized that she had inadvertently found her calling. She had a natural talent for police work. But along the way she lost a marriage to a sweet young lawyer, became estranged from her father, and lost a lot of her old friends . . . and still found herself a social outsider in the lower-middle-class boys’ club of the PF.
    Sometimes she wondered: What is the point?
    MacClesh looked down expressionlessly at the dead. Finally he crossed himself. “I don’t mind when these animals kill each other. But this . . .” He shook his head. For a moment his face showed a rare expression of emotion: a mixture of sadness and disgust. “Who could possibly think this madness was a good idea? What kind of mind dreams up an abomination like this?”
    Garza agreed. “I ask myself, if this is the face they want to show publicly . . . what then is their private face?”
    MacClesh nodded. “Uglier still.” His face hardened, as though he had let more of his emotions show than he wanted to. “Well, I better get to work.”
    “Thank you, Major,” Garza said.
    MacClesh turned and looked at her with curious expectancy. “For what?”
    “For reminding me why we do this.”
    He looked at her without expression for a moment, then nodded bitterly. “Animals belong in cages. I don’t see why people find this so hard to understand.”
    He walked away from her then, barking at his men as he moved toward the other side of the plaza.
    Garza took a deep breath, tugging a pair of blue latex gloves from her belt and pulling them on her hands. Now came the hard work. She had a theory about this crime scene. The divots out of the pavement: that was something she had seen many times before. But there was one thing she hadn’t found yet . . .
    She began walking up and down the row of bodies. She had been comandante of Unit 9 for about a year, but she knew that many of the men still didn’t quite believe in her. Not only had she been promoted from outside the unit, but she was the only female member in the history of Unit 9. Any sign of weakness and they would pounce. This she carried with her everywhere. So she had to be tough all the time, even when toughness was not needed.
    She knew what they said about her, that she was a bitch, that she was cold and unfeeling, that she only cared about her career, that she was ruthless. . . . They called her the “Ice Queen.” The list of her supposed character failings was a long one. But she knew, too, that they respected her. These men, most of them, were like MacClesh: men with a simple and instinctive sense of morality, men who respected strength and courage.
    But to keep that respect, she could never show weakness. Never.
    She waved her blue-gloved hand at the two nearest PF officers. “Roll them over,” she said.
    “Pardon, Comandante?”
    “On their stomachs, cabrones !” She made her tone as cold and impatient as she could muster. “Roll these corpses over on their stomachs. Don’t make me say it again.”
    She was perhaps overcompensating for letting down her guard a bit with MacClesh. She was imprisoned in her role, not unlike a telenovela character actor doomed to repeat the same leer, the same squint, the same grimace in performance after performance. But there was no going back. Not now. Too many bridges had been burned.
    This character Garza had forged out of necessity had