by Blake Banner
“See? There are too many problems with this theory, but the big one right now is this.” She turned to look at me and she was nodding, like she already knew what I was going to say. I went on anyway. “Did you notice in the crime scene photos where the block with the kitchen knives was?”
She pointed at the surface behind her. “The obvious place, by the cooker.”
“So to get the kitchen knife to kill you with, I have to go past you without being seen, and then come back behind you, to stab you in the kidney.”
She shrugged one shoulder. “It’s possible the knife was not in the block. It may have been on the table.”
I shook my head. “Even so, that’s just part of it, what nagged at me from the start was, I already have a weapon. I just used it to hack away the lock. Why do I wait for you to get all the way across to the kitchen, get a mug, get the instant coffee from the cupboard, spoon it into the mug, switch on the kettle and only then grab the knife and stab you in the back—all that instead of stabbing you right from the start with the tool I used on the door? What have I been doing all this time?”
We stared at each other for a moment. “After that point it works fine,” I said. “You’re about to pour the water onto the coffee, I come up behind you, stab you once in the kidney, you turn as you go down and I stab you once in the heart. But how and for what purpose I got hold of the kitchen knife is not clear. That period from entry to stabbing, that does not satisfy me at all.”
She nodded. “I agree.” She mimed killing Karl, stabbing him in the heart on the kitchen floor, then looked over at the bedroom. “So at that point, he moves quickly to the bedroom door. There is enough light from the kitchen for him to see that Christen is lying on the bed. We don’t know if she was face down or not to begin with. She took a hell of a beating. But she winds up face down and that’s when he goes into his frenzied attack with the knife. Then he returns to the kitchen, thoroughly washes the knife, leaves it in the rack, and goes.”
“But that brings us to the other problem.”
“Amy.”
I nodded. “Amy.”
“The crime scene report said the room was in a mess…”
“The room was in a mess,” I said. “But it didn’t look as though it had been turned over or ransacked. It just looked like the room of a young woman who doesn’t clean up often. It was like her parents’ room.” I shrugged. “The sheets on the bed were dirty, there were dirty clothes on the floor, dirty underwear. There was a bowl of cereal under the bed that had gone moldy, an ashtray on the bedside table that was brimming over. A lot of the butts were joints. There was, apparently at least, nothing essential missing, other than her cell and her purse.”
She pulled out a chair, sat and rested her elbows on the table. “So either she wasn’t here when the killing happened, or she was here and left with the killer.”
“Both of those scenarios beg questions.” I raised my thumb as number one. “If she wasn’t here when the killing happened, why didn’t she come back at some stage? Her closet was full of clothes, all her books, her iPod, as far as they could tell at the time, everything she possessed except her phone and her purse were in her room. And in six years she never showed up, never phoned, never contacted anybody…”
Dehan spread her hands. “But likewise, if she left with the killer, was it voluntary or involuntary? The very fact that she never took any of her stuff suggests she hadn’t planned for it and she wasn’t leaving of her own free will, right?”
I nodded. “Yeah, it does.”
“So, what I am thinking, Stone, is that he has abducted her, and he has either kept her against her will or, more likely, he has killed her and dumped her body somewhere.”
I shoved my hands in my pockets and moved across the room toward the two big windows. An afternoon breeze shifted the dappled shade on the blacktop. A hint of the approaching fall tinged the light with copper. I spoke aloud, staring out through the glass at the street. “Whatever it was, that was one messed up motive. The focus of his attack is the mother. He beats her, then stabs her fifteen or twenty times, all in the heart. That’s a lot of focus, all on her heart, and then he takes the daughter, without a struggle.” I turned. “He lets her take her cell and her purse, and then he kills her. I have a lot of trouble understanding what is motivating him.”
Her form was slightly hazy in the half-light, staring down at the tabletop. “I know,” she said. “I agree. But that’s what it looks like he did, right? So what that means is that there are bits missing from the picture. There is something that connects the mother, the daughter and the killer in a way that makes sense of the killer’s rage and his decision to abduct Amy.”
“You’ve decided she was abducted?”
“That’s putting it a bit strong, but I am pretty sure of it. I’m having trouble making sense of any other explanation. If she’d run, she would have called for help, or called the cops. If he’d killed her here, there’d have been a body, or blood, or signs of a struggle…”
“And you think you know what this missing piece is?”
She sighed, made a doubtful face and got to her feet. “Maybe. Let’s say I have a hunch that I know the kind of area where we might find it. You done here?”
I nodded.
“Good. C’mon, I’ll buy you an ice cream in Central Park.”
“In Central Park…”
“Sure. It’s Sunday. We go to the park. Live a little.” She went and opened the door, holding it for me. “See, that’s the problem with you, Stone. It’s always work, work, work. My father would have told you: ‘Son, take a rest on the Sabbath.’ He was a wise man.”
I sighed, shook my head and followed her out to the car.
We drove twenty-five minutes to Manhattan. All the way, she talked about everything you could possibly imagine talking about in the short space of twenty-five minutes, while I thought about the crossword I’d been planning to do, drinking lemonade in the back yard.
We dropped the car near the corner of East 106th and crossed Fifth Avenue at a slow lope. We found the Conservatory Garden gate and went in among the lawns and the trees around the Harlem Meer. There, we stopped at the kiosk. I told her I didn’t want an ice cream and she ordered two vanilla cones, then slapped me on the chest with the back of her hand. “C’mon, loosen up. Have some fun. When was the last time you had an ice cream, pendejo?”
I smiled and after a moment asked her, “Do you know what pendejo means, Dehan?”
“What do you think?” She put money on the counter, took the two cones and handed one to me. She started licking as we started to walk. “My mother was Mexican. All her family are Mexican. Of course I know what it means. It means asshole, idiot, dickwad. It’s a serious insult in Mexico, but the way I use it, it’s not. It’s like, ‘hey, asshole’, ‘hey, pendejo’. It’s like a term of endearment.”
I shifted my fingers to avoid the drips of melting cream. “It means pubic hair.”
She raised an eyebrow at me.
I went on. “You call somebody a pendejo and you’re calling them a pubic hair. So what’s this hunch you have?”
She switched eyebrows, sighed and returned to her cone. “Jeez… So, all that time ago, when I was a rookie, I never got the chance to talk to you about the case. It wasn’t my case, you were kind of this senior, forbidding guy who was always busy; plus, now you’ve mellowed a bit, but back then you had this real bad attitude. And I was just… you know… a rookie. Then, by the time I’d screwed up enough courage, Bob got shot, Sanchez took over and sat on the case. It went cold… So, I never got to discuss it with you and I don’t know if you were aware of it.”
“Aware of what?”
We were following the path along the water and I was wondering if I could drop the cone in and make it look like an accident.
“Six, almost seven months before Karl and Christen were killed, some time in March, he was badly beaten and put in hospital.”
I stopped and stared down at her, awar
e that she had said something important but not aware why. “By whom?”
She grinned and started walking again. “Whom? It kills me when you say that. I always wanted a partner who said things like ‘whom’ and quoted Conan Doyle. ‘Eliminate the impossible, Dehan…’.”
I caught up with her. “Dehan! What has got into you today? Who beat him up?”
She shrugged, still grinning. “He refused to testify, said he didn’t see who it was, but it seemed like a big coincidence, you know what I mean?”
“Wait a minute, slow down.” I stopped again. My hand was covered in melted cream and I switched the cone to my other hand so I could lick my finger. “How did you find out about this…?”
“What can I tell you? I liked the case. I was curious. You going to eat that?”
“No.”
“Why didn’t you just say?” She took it from me and started licking it. “We had a stabbed homeless guy, and a son of a bitch who beat his wife to death.” I crouched down to wet my finger in the meer. She went on talking. “I’m not saying they weren’t important. Everybody’s life is important, I get that. But they weren’t exactly sudoku, either. Plus, my partner was a real asshole. I’m not a feminist, but every damn word out of his mouth was about my ass or my boobs.”
I stood and we started walking again.
“So I took an interest in the Redfern case and I started snooping around. I’m good at snooping around. You know? Looking at the angles…?” She did a little duck and dive and stuffed the last of my cone in her mouth. “So I figured maybe I should find out a little about Karl and Christen. Maybe it was a ghost from their past that came and bit them in the ass.”
I nodded. “Yeah, I had wondered that.”
“Yeah, I figured. Then Bob got shot, and Captain Peralta didn’t want to know when I asked her if I could take the case.” She shrugged. “So I put the word out with a couple of informants. I wanted to know who put Karl Redfern in hospital.”
“And?”
She stopped and narrowed her eyes at me, poked me gently on the chest with her finger. “See? Like me, you think it’s going to be a big revelation, open up the case.” She shook her head and looked past me at where the midday sun was sparkling on the Meer. “Adolfo Davila and Mateo Bonilla, from the Bronx. Both members of the Chupacabras.”
I frowned. “Did you talk to them?”
She shook her head, still gazing out at the coppery water. “Both dead.”
“Both dead…?”
She thrust her hands in her pockets, hunched her shoulders and turned slowly on her heel to start walking again. “You’re going to ask me how and when.”
I fell into step. “Mm-hm…”
“They were shot point blank down by the Fish Market on Hunts Point. 9mm hollow points. One each to the chest, then one each to the head when they were down.”
“An execution.”
She stopped and wagged a finger at me. “An execution, but note, not execution style.” She shook her head. “Every badass kid from a ‘hood’ all across the U.S.A. who watches TV can’t wait to get out on the streets with his new 9 mm Taurus and kill some poor schmuck ‘execution style’.” She held out her hands like she was holding a gun and snarled, “Git on yo’ knees mother focker! BAM! Execution style!” She started walking again. “But this wasn’t execution style. This was… efficient. They didn’t see it coming. Bam! Bam! One each in the chest. Then he confirmed the kill. No waste of time, no waste of ammo. No evidence.”
“Shells? Slugs?”
“The four slugs. No shells.”
“When?”
“The night of the 26th to the 27th August, 2012.”
“Less than a month before Karl and Christen.”
“And neither Karl nor Christen owned a gun.”
I crossed the path on slow feet and sat on the bench that runs along the gardens opposite the lake. She came and sat next to me. I had my elbows on my knees, but she was leaning back with the ankle of her right leg on her left knee.
“And what you’re trying to do is show that these four murders are connected, and tie them to the Chupacabras.”
She sat forward and leaned gently against me. “Let’s take it one step at a time, partner. I am not trying to show that they are connected. They are connected, because the guys who got killed at the Fish Market are the same guys who put Karl in the hospital, that right there is a connection. What I want to show is that these are parts of the same crime. There are other connections, some are more obvious, others are more subtle.”
I frowned at her. “You been working on this on your own, without telling me?”
“Not exactly, but I have looked at it from time to time.”
“Huh… OK, tell me the more obvious connections.”
“Drugs.”
“Karl was a user, mainly weed…”
“Yeah, but also him and his old lady liked to snort when they could afford it.”
“OK, and the Chupacabras are major dealers. But that is tenuous at best, Dehan.”
“I know, but tenuous as it is, it is a damn sight more substantial than Bob’s best lead at the time. Am I wrong?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She knew she was right. She bulldozed on. “Now listen to this. The one thing that stands out about the killing of Adolfo and Mateo is the efficiency, right? The focus.”
I nodded.
“Now go back to the killing of Karl and Christen. There is no frenzy with Karl, it is cool and efficient, and note: one quick stab to a vital organ to incapacitate, and then confirm the kill with a stab to the heart. Exactly the same as Adolfo and Mateo. Then, he goes in to Christen and he goes crazy, but he goes focused crazy. Remember, the ME said he had never seen anything like it.”
“I remember. That struck me at the time.”
“Fifteen or twenty blows, in rapid succession, all within a radius of four inches. Focus. I know it’s not a lot, Stone, but you can smell it as clear as I can, this is the same killer.”
I puffed out my cheeks and blew.
She shrugged. “Besides, it is all we got.”
I nodded. “Which is probably why the case went cold. What do you suggest? The Chupacabras are not going to talk to us.”
“What do you suggest?”
I made a face. “You won’t like it. It has nothing to do with the angle you’re looking at.”
She shook her head. “You don’t know that and neither do I because none of this makes any sense right now. Hit me.”
“The boyfriend.”
She blinked a few times to show her lack of enthusiasm. “Charlie.”
“Charlie. He disappeared at the same time, remember?”
She shrugged. “I know, it looks significant. It’s a hell of a coincidence, I agree, but at the time, Bob and Sanchez ruled him out.”
I nodded. “They did, but still, that’s where I would start.”
“How? He disappeared.”
“His mother. We go and talk to his mother.”
THREE
We went and had an absurdly expensive lunch first, and then I insisted on taking in the Rubin Museum of Art, a place I had been threatening to take Dehan since we’d been married. She was always keen to explore different ideas and cultures and I was pretty sure she would love the place, but that Sunday her comments on the Tibetan Buddhist Shrine room were, “Uh-huh…” her observation on the Gateway to Himalayan Art was, “Mm-hm…” and her thoughts on Art and Politics in Tibetan Buddhism were, “Huh…” So after an hour, I suggested perhaps we could come back some other time, after we had spoken to Pamela Albright, Charlie’s mother. She’d nodded with conviction.
“Yep, I’m down with that, Stone.”
“Dehan, you owe me a Sunday.”
“You got it, boss.”
It was five thirty by the time we pulled up outside Pamela’s large, handsome brownstone on East 127th. Two tasteful brass lamps flanked the large, highly polished mahogany door, and a large, brass disk housed the original, 1920s bell. A glance through t
he bay windows showed a number of what looked like genuine antiques. Unlike Amy’s parents, Charlie Albright’s mother was not poor.
Dehan rang the bell and after a couple of minutes, the door opened. The woman who opened it was a bottle-blonde, slim and well dressed, of average height and probably in her early fifties. She had once been attractive, but now relied on too much makeup and perfume to hide what age and alcohol were doing to her skin and her breath. Her smile suggested I could pour her a drink and Dehan could go play with the traffic. Dehan showed her her badge instead.
“I am Detective Dehan with the NYPD, ma’am, and this is Detective Stone. Are you Pamela Albright?”
She fingered a string of pearls at her neck. She didn’t seem sure whether to be belligerent or accommodating and settled for incredulous as a compromise. “What on Earth does the NYPD want with me?”
I said, “We were wondering if we could ask you some questions about your son.”
Her eyebrows shot up and she took half a step back. “My son? Now? After six years?”
I smiled understanding at her and said, “We run a cold case unit out of the 43rd precinct, Mrs. Albright, and we’re taking another look at Charlie’s case.”
She frowned at me with slightly unfocused eyes, then turned to Dehan. Her frown was deepening. “What can you possibly hope to learn after all this time?”
I answered again. “We are not sure, but it is possible that Charlie’s disappearance is related to another case. It’s too early to say, but it might be a lead. May we come in?”
She considered us both a moment, then stepped back without saying anything.
The difference with the Redferns’ house was striking. The layout was pretty much the same, with the broad staircase climbing the left wall of the substantial entrance hall, and a door on the right leading to a spacious, sunny living room and dining room. But where the Redferns’ house had been mauled and mutilated, and chopped into apartments without thought to its elegant proportions and size, Pamela Albright’s house had been left intact, and had preserved all of its 19th century elegance.