Chapter 6 - The Interrogation of Charles Vance
The interview suite at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan was eight feet by ten feet, painted in an institutional beige that had oxidized into the color of dirty mutton fat.
Charles Vance sat on the far side of the steel table, his right arm bound in a heavy white sling to immobilize the shattered collarbone. He was dressed in a dark blue inmate jumpsuit with orange slippers, his face pale, the dark stubble on his jowls showing silver where he hadn't shaved in forty-eight hours.
Across from him sat Sarah Miller and Special Agent David Ramos.
I sat in the corner of the room, behind the two-way glass partition, listening through the ceiling speaker.
"You have no case, Miller," Charles rasped, his voice sounding like dry gravel being turned with an iron spade. "You have the word of James Russo—a man who has taken kickbacks from every towing operator in Lower Manhattan since the Giuliani administration. No federal jury in the Southern District is going to convict a thirty-year decorated veteran on the testimony of a dirty captain."
Sarah Miller didn't look up from her legal pad. She turned a page with a sharp, dry scritch.
"We don't need Russo’s testimony for the murder count, Charles," Miller said.
Charles laughed—a short, wet cough that ended in a wince as his cracked sternum pulled against his ribs. "The drop-gun? You think you can tie a nineteen-ninety-eight property clerk voucher to me? The voucher was signed with an illegible squiggle. The physical logbook was destroyed in the precinct flood during Hurricane Sandy."
"The physical logbook was destroyed," Miller agreed, leaning back in her chair. "The paper voucher is gone."
She reached into her folder and pulled out an eight-by-ten photographic print.
"Do you know what this is, Charles?"
Charles didn't look. He kept his eyes fixed on the blank drywall above her head.
"This is an archival digital negative," Miller explained, her voice dropping into that smooth, clinical rhythm that precedes a death blow. "Extracted from an unlisted secondary backup server maintained by the New York City Department of Records and Information Services. In nineteen-ninety-nine, the city initiated a pilot project to digitize all property clerk intake records for three precincts in Brooklyn South. They used an early high-resolution optical scanner."
She slid the photo across the steel table until it touched the knuckles of Charles’s uninjured left hand.
"On line seven," Miller said, pointing with her gold pen, "the property clerk didn't just record a squiggle. He recorded an employee tax ID number. Your tax ID number: four-eight-two, nine-one, six-six-three."
Charles’s hand twitched.
His eyes dropped to the photograph against his will. His pupils contracted into tiny black pinpricks.
"And then," Miller continued, "there is the matter of the biological material."
"Biological material?" Charles whispered, his voice finally losing its brassy resonance, catching on something raw and frayed.
"The hammer," Miller said.
The word dropped into the interrogation room like an unexploded mortar shell.
"The twenty-four-ounce framing hammer our forensics team recovered from your deep freezer on Friday morning," Miller said, her eyes boring into his face. "The one you used to shatter your daughter’s metatarsals while your son held her by the hair."
Charles sneered, trying to summon the old, iron authority that had kept his family in check for thirty years. "That’s domestic assault. A misdemeanor or a low-grade state felony. Raymond will have that plead down to probation before the preliminary hearing."
"It isn't a state assault case anymore, Charles," Miller said softly.
She opened the second folder.
"When your son Mark shot Officer Thomas Diaz on the floor of the Avenue D warehouse," Miller said, "the bullet passed through Diaz’s right shoulder, ricocheted off the steel lift frame, and embedded itself in a vertical fir two-by-four supporting the office stairs."
Charles stopped breathing.
"The two-by-four," Miller continued, "was removed from the scene by you forty minutes before the crime scene unit arrived. You told the precinct detectives that you were securing the structural integrity of the staircase. You brought that timber back to your house in Clarkstown. You used your radial arm saw to cut it into four pieces. And then you used those pieces to build the work table in your garage."
She leaned forward, her face six inches from his.
"The framing hammer," Miller whispered, "had two distinct sets of microscopic transfer material on the hardened steel waffle-face. The first was the epidermal tissue of your daughter, Ella Vance. The second... was three microscopic flecks of lead-antimony alloy, embedded in the waffle-crosshatching from when you used that same hammer to pound the bullet out of the two-by-four behind the stairs."
The silence in the room was so complete that I could hear the faint, electrical whine of the digital recorder on the table.
Charles Vance’s mouth opened.
His jaw worked soundlessly, like an engine running out of fuel, his lower lip trembling with a sudden, violent spasm that he could not control. The deep purple flush of his skin drained away, leaving him the color of wet lime, his eyes wide and hollow, staring at the photograph of the voucher as if he were looking into the open doors of an incinerator.
"You used the same tool," Miller said, her tone devoid of pity. "You used the hammer you used to hide a cop-killing... to break your own child’s foot."
Charles didn't speak. He slowly pulled his hand back from the table, tucking his good arm against his chest, curling inward upon himself until his forehead nearly touched the cold steel surface.
May you like
Through the two-way glass, I watched my father—the giant who had ruled our home with an iron fist and a loud laugh—shrink into an old, broken man who was going to spend the rest of his life eating institutional beans off a plastic tray in an unheated cell block in Pennsylvania.
I stood up from my chair, adjusted the strap of my purse over my shoulder, and walked out into the corridor without waiting for the interview to conclude.
