Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  He ducked under the yellow tape, walked up to the white Escort that was parked deep among the trees, and rested his hands on the windowsill as he peeked inside.

  The half-life of last night’s excitement lingered in the air. He felt like an athlete watching a highlight reel from last night’s game. There were spots of dried blood on the steering wheel and the dashboard. A single cork-heeled shoe was lying next to the brake pedal. The ashtray was full of cigarettes with pink lipstick stains. She must’ve been smoking up a storm between Dobbs Ferry and here, listening to heartbreak songs on AM radio in the middle of the night. And of course, her purse was open with all of her stuff spilled onto the floor mat by the passenger seat: makeup compact, hairbrush, and a tube of Ortho-Gynol—a souvenir he thought of collecting and a sign that at one point she had thought the night would have a happier ending.

  He leaned further into the car, sleeves rolled down to cover the scratch Stephanie had left on his right arm. Then he reached into his shirt pocket, took out the packet of Bambú rolling papers that he’d confiscated from a drug dealer named Trevor Knightsbridge and had deliberately avoided vouchering two weeks before.

  He flicked it onto the floor mat by the passenger seat. But as soon as it left his hand, he saw movement from the corner of his eye. He leaned back too quickly and banged the back of his head. A cop who was supposed to be guarding the perimeter with nitwit Charlie Maslow was coming over. Amy Nelson. A new female officer they had working day tours. They called her Half-Nelson because she was so short. Probably had no business being a police officer, barely making the height requirement. But God knew she didn’t have the looks to be anything else. Pointy-nosed little bitch with short hair and big ears. She looked more like a high school hall monitor. But they all had to prove something these days.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  “Yeah, why?” He rubbed the back of his head, dull stars bursting before his eyes.

  “Looked like you hurt yourself.”

  He turned his grimace into a grin, not sure if she’d seen what he did. “I’m okay. How are you?”

  “You shouldn’t be touching the car,” she said. “The crime scene unit hasn’t even got here. They’ll have to get a set of prints from you to make sure they don’t mix them up with whoever killed her.”

  “Shit.” He pretended that hadn’t occurred to him. “Don’t get me in trouble for it. Okay?”

  “What are you doing here anyway?” she asked. “I thought your tour ended three hours ago.”

  “This is my road. I was on patrol last night. Somebody gets hurt on it, I feel responsible.”

  Her hazel eyes stared at him for a beat and then dropped to the interior of the car. Right where he’d dropped the papers. “You heard they found the driver strangled a mile and a half up the road?” she asked.

  He shook his head and put his hands on his hips, looking up and down the road with a hard-ass Clint Eastwood squint. “I don’t know what we’re coming to here. A girl can’t drive on her own?”

  She pulled her eyes out of the car and tugged down the brim of her hat. “I’m out driving by myself all the time. And I never stop unless I need gas. So what could have forced her off the road?”

  “No telling.” He shrugged. “That hour, there won’t be too many witnesses.”

  “How do we know what hour it happened?”

  She aimed her pointy nose at him and cocked her narrow little pasty face at an angle. Man, you rarely saw a girl with ears that big. Most would have enough sense to grow their hair longer. It was almost like she was intentionally confronting you with the size of those flaps.

  “Just a figure of speech,” he said. “I’m sure it didn’t happen in the middle of rush hour. Someone would have noticed.”

  She held his gaze for a beat longer than she should have. Then looked back inside the car, the corners of her thin-lipped mouth turning down.

  “Where were you patrolling last night anyway?” she asked.

  “Down by West Babylon. Quiet night.”

  He didn’t appreciate how she kept looking just to the side of his face, like she was trying to see something behind him.

  “And you didn’t see this car go by with a female driver?” Half-Nelson raised her eyebrows.

  “If you’re not breaking the law, I’m not interested in you.” He shrugged.

  Billy the Kid had come staggering over. Even more hungover than usual, and wearing his tinted aviators. The man was getting to be an embarrassment, but Joey wasn’t sure how much he might have seen. There was just enough detective left in him to sometimes know when to hang back and observe.

  “What do we got, officers?” He patted his pockets for a notebook.

  “Just maintaining the integrity of the scene for the big boys.” Joey nodded. “I hear CSU’s busy up the road.”

  “Yeah, it’s ugly,” said Rattigan. “Poor woman taken from her car, beaten, raped, and strangled. Her clothes are torn off and her neck is practically broken. It looks like wolves attacked her.”

  Joey cricked his neck, aware of how Half-Nelson was restlessly hitching up her belt and scratching a spot halfway down her throat. Like she had something she wanted to say in private. Joey put on his sunglasses to glare at her: I can see out, but you can’t see in.

  Rattigan clapped him on the shoulder. “Why aren’t you home sleeping?”

  “My road, my watch.” Joey bowed his head, like the mantle of civic responsibility was weighing heavily on him. “I figured it’s all hands on deck.”

  “Good man.” Rattigan said, turning to Half-Nelson. “Stick with this guy, officer, and you’ll be going places. He’s a comer.”

  She’d already gone to start putting orange traffic cones out on the road, to keep other cars away.

  Rattigan turned and gave Joey a faint smile.

  “Women,” he said.

  11

  AUGUST

  2017

  There were two ways of looking at it. From one angle, Long Island looked like a whale crashing headfirst into the rest of the United States. From another, the North and South Forks resembled the jaws of a raptor thrusting out into the Atlantic.

  Either way, in the room with the map at Queens Homicide, six red dots made it look like this was a body with a series of infections.

  “So what do we know so far?” Lourdes asked.

  She was talking to members of the so-called Cross Bay Task Force. Which at the moment consisted of Beautiful Bobby, Danny Kovalevski and Jason Tierney from the Nassau police, a bohunk state cop named John Gallagher, a Suffolk County police inspector named Charlie Maslow who wore a handlebar mustache and kept excusing himself to go to the bathroom, and an FBI profiler named Goran Bogdan, who couldn’t stop staring at his cell phone like he was either getting messages from HQ in Washington or following his stock market investments in real time.

  “I still don’t know if we’re looking at anything.” Gallagher, the state cop, dropped a pen on the gunmetal gray table. “Six dead, fifteen years? All hookers?”

  “The old days we’d catch that many bodies the night before the West Indian Parade,” Danny snorted, ignoring Lourdes giving him the death glare.

  “Word.” Bogdan, the FBI agent, was now furrowing his monobrow and furiously texting with both thumbs.

  Though most of these whey-faced boys didn’t look like they had enough time on the job to be talking like old salts, Lourdes thought, they just assumed that dismissive tone as their natural right, passed down through the lineage of Great White Supervisors. Charlie Maslow, the one who did look old enough, got up and muttered that he was going to take a leak.

  “Look, I didn’t ask you all to come to the party—they did.” She pointed at Danny and Tierney, both slouching in their chairs. “I would’ve been happy, minding my own, working my little Rockaway murder. Then Nassau raised their hand, said they had similar cases.”

  “Yeah, well, you think Long Island, you think serial killers.” Gallagher rolled the pen under his extraord
inarily flat and broad hand, ignoring the stack of files close by. “Joel Rifkin. Robert Shulman. Gilgo Beach. Doesn’t mean every case is connected.”

  Gallagher was the type of a man who seemed like he was wearing a state trooper hat and a tan uniform even when he was bareheaded and in a suit.

  “That’s true,” Danny said. “And I’m not even positive there is a connection—”

  “But when we hear about a body wrapped in plastic, washing up just across the channel, we’re obligated to check it out,” Tierney interrupted. “Especially if we know about similar cases.”

  Lourdes nodded, even though she hadn’t forgotten how pissed she was about his department not following up when Renee Williams was reported missing.

  “Bodies wrapped in plastic—not so unusual,” Bogdan said nonchalantly with a trace of a Slavic accent, still not taking his eyes off his phone. “What else?”

  Lourdes watched his monobrow go up and down as he typed. Probably it wasn’t fair to think this way, but he reminded her of some of the Balkan dudes you met in the Bronx who were a little too blasé when talk turned to ethnic cleansing and rolling bodies into sandpits with bulldozers. She tried to tell herself she wasn’t just being pissy because the Bureau hadn’t done jack to help her look for her sister.

  “Okay, so here’s what I see.” She passed her hand in front of the map. “I see six female victims so far, including our new girl, Renee. I see similarities in the way they were killed, according to the forensic reports Tierney has given us.”

  “Untrue,” Bogdan said as he continued texting. “Only your Rockaway Beach victim had stones in her throat. This seems like a signature or a one-time special event. One of the others was bludgeoned. One was stabbed. The rest were probably strangled.”

  “That’s still death by asphyxiation,” said B.B., who was usually the one getting distracted by calls from his own girlfriends or ex-wives. “Let’s not be so literal-minded. We’re talking about victims with a similar profile, Mr. Profiler. All under forty, unmarried, with limited family connections…”

  “All with arrest records for drugs or prostitution or both.” Gallagher shook his oversized head. “Sorry, folks. I’m still not convinced this is a pattern. These were throwaway people. Marginal women living marginal lives…”

  “Oh, so then they don’t count?” Lourdes looked around, daring one of them to argue. “Or are you guys just trying to keep a lid on this so it doesn’t look like the state and the feds missed a serial killer right under your noses when you should have been putting the pieces together? It’s your responsibility to track these things across jurisdiction lines.”

  Charlie Maslow and his sleepy cowpoke expression came back in the room. Bogdan finally put his cell phone facedown on the table. Now she had his attention.

  “Proceed,” he said.

  “Mire.” Lourdes pointed to the map again. “Look where these bodies turned up.”

  She put a chipped fingernail next to each red dot. Miriam Gonzales, age thirty-eight, found floating near Jones Beach State Park by swimmers six years ago. Yelina Sanchez, twenty-seven, stumbled upon by hikers in Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge in 2007. Anne Higgins, twenty-nine, encountered during a picnic at Westhampton Dwarf Pine Plain Preserve in 2006. Allison Forster, twenty-three, drifted up to fishermen in Sears Bellows County Park, 2005. Joyce Templeton, twenty-six, found in a Dumpster by West Babylon garbage collectors, October 2002.

  “Pretty wide distribution of bodies.” Danny Kovalevski shrugged. “Multiple towns and counties. It’s a tough case to make that it’s all the same guy killing them.”

  “It is?” Lourdes raised her voice. “Look at that map, sergeant.”

  She rubbed her finger back and forth across a long blue vein running the length of the Island. She saw Danny hoist one side of his mouth, like he was about to make a joke about the whole deal looking like a jerk-off rather than just sounding like one.

  “All the bodies were found within a mile or two of Sunrise Highway.” She raised her arms in exasperation. “The dots are all there, waiting to be connected.”

  Though it had actually taken her a few minutes to see it, once she put the pins in. The road, like her, began its life in Brooklyn. Then it ran all the way out, 120 miles, to the easternmost extreme of the state. Like most of the victims in the case, it changed its name and its look along the way: starting as bumpy NY 27, then slaloming out into South Condit Boulevard near the airport before smoothing and widening into Sunrise Highway, surrounded by chain stores and pain clinics in Nassau and then giving way to greenery in Suffolk as it traversed almost the entire length of Long Island, widening and narrowing along the way, before passing through the Long Island Pine Barrens and meeting up with Montauk Highway. And like the victim’s lives, it ran out too soon, just as the sun met the water, ending at the eastern edge of the continent.

  “I’m still not buying it,” Gallagher said, parkway eyes roaming the map. “Your last victim, Renee, doesn’t fit your own pattern. The beach in Far Rockaway is a good ten miles from Sunrise Highway.”

  “So what?” Lourdes let her arms drop. “Our killer is getting smart, finally altering his routine. Take the long view: He—and yeah, I’m assuming it’s a he—is broadening his outlook and choosing his victims more carefully. In the beginning his victims were mainly white girls, who might have had more people in their circle with the means to go look for them if they’re missing. As time goes on, he’s choosing darker girls with fewer ties. And on top of that, he’s crafty enough to dump the corpses close to the road without anybody seeing him. He does it near the highway so he can get on and get off in a hurry, be miles from the scene before anybody knows where he’s been.”

  A silence so complete settled over the room that Lourdes could almost hear the dust gathering. Ordinary indifference she was used to. But this felt more like active resistance from a single point being transmitted invisibly from man to man, like a signal from a wireless router.

  “Waste of time.” Charlie Maslow finally spoke up, turkey neck quivering. “You’re trying to jam square pegs into round holes to justify your budgets. Personally, I think we should be spending more money on military-style hardware, to fight urban insurgencies.”

  “Excuse me,” Lourdes said. “What does that have to do with what we’re talking about?”

  Maslow shrugged, touched his abdomen gently, and left the room again.

  “All due respect, I think we need to be looking at the bigger picture.” B.B. looked after him. “Robles and I used to work with an old-timer named Kevin Sullivan. And his mantra was always: Close your mouth and open your eyes. And follow the map to where the facts are leading.” He pointed to the pins. “And seems to me, Robles has given us a pretty good map to start with. Sully would be pleased.”

  Lourdes found herself shaking her head and getting a little choked up at the mere mention of her retired partner. Then cursed herself—again—for not having the nerve to call him in the last six months.

  “And not to put too fine a point on it, but if these cases have been falling between the cracks fifteen years, then it’s fucked up,” B.B. said. “And the worst part is we may not know about all the bodies.”

  Of course, now that Bobby was saying it, the others were taking it more seriously. It irked Lourdes to see them slipping down in their seats and steepling their fingers thoughtfully in a way that they hadn’t when she was speaking.

  “We’re already into our databases.” Bogdan chewed his lip, more engaged now.

  “Us as well.” Gallagher nodded.

  “You know where we’re at,” said Tierney.

  “Where did our friend from the mysterious east go?” Lourdes asked, looking at the seat Maslow had vacated. “I thought Suffolk County was going to be a serious part of this task force. At least three of these bodies are on their side of the line and they send us the Catheter Cowboy? What gives?”

  “Like I was saying.” Tierney’s large shoulders slumped. “A world of its own. They do thi
ngs on their time, not ours. And the more you squawk and complain, the less they care.”

  12

  AUGUST

  1984

  Ronald Reagan was on all the TVs above the bars at the banquet hall. He was smiling at a sea of waving American flags and upturned white faces, plastic-looking Nancy and the rest of his plastic family at his side. The Gipper said we were taking this country back. He said traditional values were returning. He said the people were in charge now. And when the crowd on TV chanted, “Four more years,” he smiled, tilted his head in the Big Daddy cowboy way and said, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  At the Shinnecock Manor Banquet Hall in Melville, the crowd roared its approval. On the stage, a podium was getting wheeled into place and a microphone was getting tested. Banners had been strung up and balloons had been hoisted to the ceiling. And Kenny Makris, who had just been elected to the office of district attorney, peeked out from the wings, caught Joey’s eye, and gave him a thumbs-up.

  They were both golden now. Kenny was the law of the land and Joey, his loyal acolyte, would surely reap the rewards. Twenty-five years old. A respected police officer with a half dozen legitimate commendations under his belt, a clutch of headline arrests, and his eye on the sergeant’s exam. With a Budweiser in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Wearing the first suit he had ever bought with his own money.

  He’d never be a pretty boy, but all the flab he’d used to have was gone, replaced by gym muscle. His stringy stoner hair was cut into a Stallone-style semi-mullet, and he wore a pair of aviator glasses about twenty dollars more expensive than the kind Billy Rattigan wore. Seventy-five dollars’ worth of confiscated cocaine, which had never been turned in from various traffic stops, was up his nose. Not that the drug dealers who coughed it up when he stopped them would ever complain.

  Yes, he’d been a little concerned when he’d heard that Trevor Knightsbridge’s lawyers were trying to stir the pot and reopen the investigation into the Stephanie Lapidus murder. And that concern had started to shade into worry when he read in a Newsday article that Kenny’s opponent had started talking about taking a harder line on corrupt police practices. But now the day had been saved, the investigation had presumably been quashed, and he was realizing that he might be bulletproof after all. So if he wanted to get a freeze on, who was going to stop him?