Chief Horlocker

Redmond Horlocker is the Chief of Department for the New York City Police Department—its highest ranking uniformed member—during the events of Relic and Reliquary.

His dimly-lit office at One Police Plaza is decorated in faux-mahogany, with heavy drapes on the windows and Mediterranean-style ironwork fixtures. The decor prompted Vincent D'Agosta to liken it to "a suburban steakhouse trying to go upscale" upon his first visit.

He was mentioned only briefly in Relic when he was name-dropped by Spencer Coffey while threatening D'Agosta, who later reported that Horlocker had in fact been rather complimentary when recommending D'Agosta's promotion to captain.Horlocker had a much larger presence during the events of Reliquary. Facing public and political pressure in the wake of several particularly grisly high-profile murders, he turned to D'Agosta and inept precinct captain Jack Waxie. When D'Agosta's investigation proved promising but drawn out, Horlocker not only placed Waxie, a notorious yes-man, in charge of the case, but continued to support him despite mounting evidence from Special Agent Pendergast and then-Sergeant Laura Hayward that the floundering captain's theories and conclusions were ill-founded.

When Pendergast's solo excursion to the Astor Tunnels confirmed that they had, in fact, been inhabited by the ones responsible for the recent string of murders—including the notorious Subway Massacre—Horlocker adopted Waxie's plan to flood the tunnels with water from the Central Park Reservoir. The plan required several squads of officers to clear the homeless from the rest of the underground tunnels beneath the park prior to the flooding, and the chief himself addressed the assembled teams during the briefing. The timing of the operation, however, coincided with a massive protest organized by the mother of one of the victims, and a violent riot broke out as streams of underground homeless suddenly emerged in the midst of the march, and to make matters worse, Pendergast and Margo Green confirmed that the reservoir was full of the Mbwun lily, making its release through the tunnels—and subsequently into the Hudson River and the Atlantic Ocean—catastrophic. As the clashes continued and Pendergast and D'Agosta rushed to find a way to seal the tunnels before the contaminated reservoir water began draining, Horlocker found himself face to face with the event's organizer, who berated him even as he tried to explain that it was her people who had incited the rioting. The day's events left him, by Hayward's description, looking "like a fighter who'd finished a bad twelve rounds." He watched expectantly as the reservoir began draining, and was last seen looking on gratefully alongside Hayward as the water level finally stopped and began rising before cresting and flooding the Great Lawn almost to the 79th Street Transverse.