Tony Crowley was known as straitlaced and exactly as she described her husband. He was also known to take that to extremes. This made him unpopular with his coworkers.
But you couldn’t argue what she was saying.
“They were racially motivated and racially profiling,” she declared. “And he saw that they were also targeting women. Mostly fellow officers.”
No one said anything.
So Lynn continued.
“That was what he thought it was. In the beginning, he didn’t know it was bigger. He didn’t know there were dirty cops. He just thought they were bad cops who had no business being on the force. So, whoever these guys are, they convinced others that Tony was the problem. And now, because they think Tony talked to me, they think I’d be the problem if this became a media nightmare because women are coming forward about stuff and Black people are having a moment.”
Mamá’s eyes moved to Hawk.
“A moment?” Hawk asked Lynn.
“Yeah, he said he heard Kevin call it that. Like four hundred years of slavery and lynchings then decades more of every Black parent having to have ‘the talk’ with their kids about what to do if a cop pulled them over isn’t worthy of a moment. When Tony was on the beat, he saw it happening. He could rant about it for hours. ‘That’s not protecting the people,’ he’d say. People of color would look at him in uniform with distrust and it broke his soul. He did what he did to keep them safe, not scare the crap out of them. He worked hard to become a detective and get out of uniform. And he wanted that element out. It isn’t all of them. It isn’t even half. But when the bad ones convince the other ones that you’re not one of them, you don’t stand a chance.”
She shook her head and her voice got small.
“Tony didn’t stand a chance.”
Fuck, Axl felt for her.
It had never been remotely okay, a good cop went down in all of this.
But seeing the aftermath in her, hearing the pride she had in her husband, pride that was deserved.
It was killer.
Hawk gave her a second.
Then he broke it down.
“So he was building a case of cops racially profiling, and he stumbled onto something bigger.”
“And the women,” she stressed, and the way she did made Axl’s neck itch.
“And the women,” Hawk confirmed he heard her, and the way he did that, Axl knew Hawk hadn’t missed her tone.
“Yes, and they killed him for it,” she returned.
“Did he mention any names?” Hawk asked.
“Lance Mueller and Kevin Bogart,” she stated.
Goddamn it.
Two dead men.
Nothing new.
“That’s how I knew about Heidi,” she went on. “Because, a couple of days before he died, he got fidgety. He said something wasn’t adding up. He said there were sex workers involved. He said it might be about skimming or kickbacks. Maybe blackmail. He said he found something out about Lance Mueller, and he thought that was why he moved from the DPD to Englewood PD. But everyone was talking about how Lance and Kevin moved departments because Kevin had so many sexual harassment strikes. But Lance moved first, and Tony said that didn’t jibe, which was part of what he was digging into. And he was finding something. So he told me he thought this was bigger than what he could do on his own and he might have to take it to his higher-ups.”
“Did he take it to his higher-ups?” Ally asked.
Lynn shook her head. “I don’t know. He was dead in a couple of days. And a day after that, I came home, my house was a mess, and there was a message written on my bathroom mirror in soap that told me to keep my mouth shut. My husband’s dead. My kids are asking for Daddy. I notice guys sitting in their cars outside my house. And then the rest begins. I kept my mouth shut.”
“Your house was a mess?” Cisco asked.
“They were searching for something,” Lynn answered.
“Do you know if they found it?” Cisco pressed.
She shook her head.
“He didn’t leave you anything?” Ally pushed it, and she did because it was important. “Notes? Files? Tell you he’d hidden something somewhere?”
“If he did, he didn’t tell me. So if he did, they probably got it,” Lynn replied. “And no, he would talk about it, but only minimally. Mostly, he kept me out of it.”
“The sex workers,” Cisco butted in. “Did he mention any names of sex workers? Or, perhaps, names of the men who ran them?”
She shook her head but then it ticked, and she said, “Maybe someone named Dynamite?”
“Why do you say that?” Hawk quickly pressed.
Lynn turned to Hawk. “Because he was on the phone, and when he got off, I noticed he’d doodled while he was talking. And in the scratching on the notepad, there was one word. ‘Dynamite’ with a bunch of question marks. Outside it being weird, and maybe about some case he was working on, I didn’t think anything of it. And in the end, it might not mean anything.”