I am twenty-eight years old, the youngest female in DivSix by nine years. My degree is a bachelor of science in criminal justice from St. John’s, plus three years as a patrol officer. I served in the Marine Corps for three years before that. I speak fluent Spanish and can get along in Portuguese and Tagalog. Like every other woman/minority in the division, I am presumed by the detectives hired before me to have slept my way into the job. That, or of being the beneficiary of the department’s antique and universally reviled affirmative action program. The second allegation may be partially true. There is no one in the division, however, who outworks or outhustles me. For this I receive, as expected, zero props and bupkis for credit. “Bupkis” is Yiddish for “nothing.”

DivSix’s reason for being is, as I said, the investigation of special-case and high-profile homicides. The division was set up because the department wanted to take potentially dangerous (for the department) cases out of the hands of precinct detectives, who could not be counted upon either to resolve the cases with sufficient dispatch (read: get convictions) or to comport themselves in a politically sensitive manner (read: keep the department out of the press), and to hold these sensitive cases in-house, under control of the Manhattan DA and the mayor.

To establish credibility for this new division, an “all-star team,” as the Daily News phrased it, of homicide investigators was assembled under the command of Lieutenant Francis T. “Frank” Gleason. Gleason had been the lead investigator in the mayor’s Anti-Terrorism Task Force from ’21 to ’27. He is regarded as a rising star not only in the department but in city and state politics as well. Gleason is a lawyer (NYU, ’14) and the husband of former Mayor D’Antoni’s daughter Miranda.

DivSix was given technical resources and advanced investigative tools that no single precinct could support. Each Third Grader like myself must complete a six-month course at the Academy Annex in College Point, Queens, learning to use these resources before he or she is cleared to join the division. Most of the senior detectives, in contrast, are traditional shoe-leather cops who either scorn or are intimidated by this new tech arsenal. The upshot for the young detectives is that, even though we are junior to all in experience and seniority, we play a disproportionately influential role in investigative work, empowered as we are by the new technology.