Alvin Olinsky took no pleasure in what he said to say. "We're missing several people from the Martinez crew. Some are likely back at the house, but..."
"Did we get Martinez or not?" Lindsay snapped at him, the tension taking it's toll on her patience.
"No. And we didn't get Raquel Gonzalez or Manu Diaz either. They go everywhere Martinez goes, so they would have been there."
"Shit! Shit! Shit!" Lindsay raged. With the final exclamation, she hurled the phone that she had used during the undercover operation at the wall. It disappointingly refused to explode into a hundred pieces, or indeed any pieces. It just clattered to the floor.
Halstead was somewhat surprised by the furious outburst, but he certainly shared the frustration. So much hard work had gone into putting Martinez behind bars, only for her to escape the raid.
"How the hell did you let that happen?" Lindsay demanded of Olinsky.
"We hit the front and the back, succeeding in taking them by surprise. But when the shooting started, Martinez used it as cover to get out of a side door, a fire escape. Burgess went after them and fired shots. She's confident she hit Gonzalez in the arm, but they managed to lose her. I shot one man in the warehouse, and Purrazzo shot another. They're both dead."
"I didn't want a couple of heavies on slabs, I wanted Martinez behind bars!" Lindsay thundered.
Olinsky clearly didn't like being berated. Halstead could sympathise with that. Lindsay was going in a bit hard for his liking. "We did what we could. We had previous little time to get there, and essentially none to prepare our assault. If that side door hadn't been there we would have had them."
"That sounds like a bunch of excuses. Can I assume you've at least put a BOLO out for them? Not that it will matter, they'll be halfway to Mexico by now."
"Yes, ma'am," Olinsky said tensely.
Lindsay took a moment to try and compose herself. "Right, get back to Intelligence and assemble everyone. I want a full run down of this mess when I get there."
"Right," Olinsky said, promptly opening the door and leaving.
"Erin..." Halstead said once the door was closed. His intention had been to calm her down, but she blew up again.
"Two months, Jay! Two months of work down the fucking toilet!"
"I know, Er. I'm pissed off too. But the team did what they could in the situation they were presented with. I don't doubt that, and I'm sure you don't either. They're all going to be pissed that we didn't get Martinez."
"You're telling me not to be hard on them, is that it?" Lindsay demanded, standing with her hands on her hips. "I hope you're going to say the same to Superintendent Kelton when he comes down here to tear strips off me over this thing?"
Now Halstead was getting annoyed with her, adding to his own frustration over the blown mission. "You heard what I said. You keep talking about wanting to do better with man management. Maybe you should actually start putting it into action?"
With that he stormed out of the room and banged the door shut behind him. In a way he felt bad as soon as he had done it, but at the same time he felt like he had said something that had needed to be said. Lindsay walking into Intelligence and flying off the handle at people who had done their best in far from ideal circumstances was not what was needed, at least in his opinion.
Both professionally and personally, he wanted Lindsay to succeed at her job. But he couldn't make her lead the team the way he would. When all was said and done, she was the sergeant. He was a detective on her team. If she was determined to be a boss who tried to draw performance from her people by fear of a roasting rather than by inspiring a sense of loyalty and teamwork, then that was the way it would be.
At least no one got shot, he thought as he made his way through the station towards Intelligence. For a moment he had wondered if something like that was going to be the bad news. A failed operation he could live with. One of the team dying would have been something else altogether.
Even with the bad outcome on the Martinez job, Halstead looked forward to seeing the Intelligence guys again. Without exception, they were his friends as well as his colleagues. True, some were closer to him than others, but he tried his best not to draw distinctions between them.
Before getting to Intelligence, he had to pass the front desk. As ever, Sergeant Platt was on duty.
"Welcome back. Sorry about the result," she commiserated.
"Thanks. Does feel like a kick in the gut," he replied.
Not stopping to chat, he continued through the entrance area and up the stairs to Intelligence. The room was quiet and sombre when he walked in, finding everyone at their desks. They did perk up a bit when they saw him.
Atwater was the closest to him. He got to his feet and they exchanged a fist bump.
"Glad you're okay. That was a long time to be under," Atwater said.
"Especially to end up with nothing to show for it. It's good to see you though, man. Everything okay here?"
"All good. We just cracked a drugs case yesterday," Burgess said. She approached Halstead, and they shared a brief hug. It was the kind of hug that close friends who weren't good a hugs shared when they didn't know what other gesture might be appropriate.
"Hey, Kim. How are you? How's Alex?"
"He's missing his uncle Jay."
"Well I'll be sure to come over and see him. I figure his old man owes me a few beers and a char grilled steak."
"That a fact?" Ruzek said with a laugh as the two men shook hands. "I think we could work something out."
Next up was Purrazzo, who seemed even more subdued by the mission failure than the rest of the team. "Hey, I'm glad you're back, and you're safe," she said, managing a smile.
"Thanks, I'm glad to be back. Don't take this so hard. These things happen sometimes. We'll debrief it with Sergeant Lindsay, then we'll move on."
"Yeah," Purrazzo said, sounding unconvinced. She went back to her desk and sat down.
There was no sign of Zelina Vega, and he had already seen Olinsky, so Halstead went to his own desk. He wanted to ask Purrazzo what was wrong, getting the feeling something else might have gone on while he had been under. Now wasn't the time to get into it though. Besides, having had an extra minute to cool off a bit, Lindsay walked in.
For the boss, there was no group assembly to welcome her back. Everyone knew that the riot act was possibly, probably, coming their way.
"Okay everyone, we all know this was a big screw up today," Lindsay began as she walked to the far end of the room. Her tone was thankfully more measured than Halstead had expected, although it was evident that she was pissed off. "Let's talk about exactly what went wrong, and how the most important person we needed to arrest today managed to escape."
Olinsky took it upon himself to go first, since he had been in charge at the time of the raid. "Luckily, everyone was here at the 21st when the alert flashed up that you'd activated your tracker. We were able to get on the road and hurry in your direction. By the time you got to the warehouse, we weren't far behind. It gave us time to assemble the squad cars, and..."
To Halstead's surprise, Purrazzo pushed her chair back and stood up.
"It was my fault, Sergeant."
Everyone in the room looked at her with surprise, not least Lindsay. "What was your fault?" she asked.
"Martinez getting away was my fault. When we entered the warehouse, Officer Ruzek told me he was going left, and told me to go right. Detective Olinsky had gone straight forward, down the left side of a big stack of pallets. I went forward too, down the right side of the pallets. If I had gone right like Ruzek said, I would have been able to cover the fire escape door that Martinez and at least two other people ended up escaping out of."
Oh, man, Halstead thought. He was conflicted. The way his partner had just stood up in front of the whole team and taken responsibility had shown the remarkable guts that he already knew she had. But at the same time, she had made a pretty fundamental screw up, and it had blown two months of hard work. If she had done her part in effectively spreading the team out in the warehouse, Bayley Martinez would probably have been sitting in a cell by now.
"Why did you ignore what Ruzek told you to do?" Lindsay asked. Her voice was tight as she tried to keep her cool.
Purrazzo sighed, ashamed of what she had to say. "Because I thought I knew better, Sergeant. I take full responsibility for Martinez and the others escaping. You'll have my resignation from Intelligence on your desk tomorrow morning."
"No," Burgess said, shaking her head at the idea of resignation.
Lindsay kept her gaze locked on Purrazzo for a moment, giving herself time to decide how to react. When she did speak, she sounded angry, but she didn't fly off the deep end. "What did they teach you in the Marines, Purrazzo? Trust the person beside you, and make sure they can trust you, right?"
"Essentially, yes, Sergeant."
"You don't have to Sergeant me every time you answer. This is a team of elite officers and detectives, Purrazzo. Team being the operative word. On an operation like today's, if someone tells you to do something, you do it. We do not individually walk around choosing to do whatever the hell we want. You'll blow operations that way, and you'll get your teammates killed. Do I make myself perfectly clear?"
"Crystal," Purrazzo said humbly.
"It was my decision to take on a promising, relatively inexperienced officer," Lindsay continued. "When I did that, I knew there would be one or two rookie errors. This is a big one, Purrazzo. If something like this happens again, we'll be having a different conversation. But for now, you won't be leaving the unit. What you're going to do is sit down, take part in what is going to be a very thorough debriefing session, and learn from the mistakes that were made. This does not happen again," she emphasised.
"Yes, ma'am. Thank you," Purrazzo said, and retook her seat.
Halstead wanted to catch her eye and offer some reassurance, but she kept looking at Lindsay, probably too embarrassed to look at any of the others. He could relate. They all would be able to, having been inexperienced themselves and having made their own mistakes.
"Right then, let's get into this," Lindsay said, moving the large whiteboard into a position where they could all see what she was going to write on it.
Halstead felt drained by the end of the shift. When Lindsay had said she wanted to go over the botched operation analysed in detail, she hadn't been kidding. When her roasting from Kelton came, she was at least going to have answers for him.
"Right, I don't think there's anything else that can be said about this," Lindsay said eventually, to Halstead's relief. "Let's all go to Molly's for a drink. I know I could use one. The first round is on Purrazzo."
"Okay," Purrazzo said, smiling for the first time in hours. The small piece of humour had clearly lifted a weight off her shoulders.
"The only other thing I'm going to say is we should all watch our backs in case of reprisals, especially Halstead and myself. I have a feeling we've not seen the last of Bayley Martinez."
A/N: Do you agree with how Lindsay handled the situation? What would you have done? And have we seen the last of Bayley Martinez?