“Anything from the daughter?” Phillips asked.
“Nothing.”
“Is she involved?”
“I don’t think so, but I’m checking her out.”
“Anyone else benefit from Laurent’s death?”
“Not that I can see.”
He grunted. “So if you’re right, this killing was random.”
If I was right. Sonofabitch had to stick that in there.
“Yeah. Look, it’s already four thirty and I’m still stuck on 95 North trying to get out of Jersey. As you mentioned to me the other day, I’ve already put in enough overtime this week. I’m calling it a day.”
“We’ve still got videotapes to look through,” he complained sourly.
“Good thing you’ve got other resources on this, huh? I’ll be in tomorrow at eight.”
I hung up before he could say anything else, and for good measure I turned off my phone.
With the rain beating down and the start of rush hour, traffic back to New York was brutal, and it wasn’t until eight that I was able to pick up a pizza and get back to my apartment in Flatbush. There were no messages from Bambi, not that I expected any. I took a couple of beers from the fridge, turned on the set, and saw that the Yankees game was being rescheduled for Saturday—that the weather in Boston had been just as lousy as it had been in New York.
I left the set on but barely paid attention to it as I ate the pie and drank my beer. I guess I wanted the background noise and wasn’t really up to being left alone with my thoughts. After a long while I turned off the TV. In the quiet of my apartment my thoughts started drifting to the murdered woman and the other bodies that were sure to be coming; to my partner, Rich, lying in his hospital bed encased in plaster but having something more wrong with him than just that; to Bambi and her discontentment; and finally to my failed marriage and my kids. The quiet became too much for me. I picked up the phone and called this guy I knew, Earl Buntz, who for the right price could get his hands on anything.
“Three tickets for tomorrow night’s game in Boston,” I said. “How much?”
“Ah, jeez,” he moaned. “Stan, that’s a tall order. It was a bitch of a game to get tickets for in the first place, but fuck, with tonight’s game rained out it’s going to be near impossible. Tickets have all been snatched up already, you know?”
“Find some.”
Earl sighed and told me he’d see what he could do. Ten minutes later he called back. He found three primo lower-box seats along the third base line.
“How much?”
“A future favor, that’s all. Enjoy the game.”
“I’m not doing that. How much?”
He let out a low painful moan, sort of as if he were having his teeth worked on. “Stan, if you want to pay cash I guess that’s your business, but it’s not going to be cheap.”
“How much.”
“A thousand bucks apiece. Three grand. And I won’t be making a dime off this. My good deed for the year. So you want them?”
Fuck. Three grand. My share of the cost of taking care of Mom as well as my child support payments had been bleeding me pretty dry. I wasn’t sure how I was going to come up with three grand, but I told him to get me the tickets.
“You sure you don’t want to owe me a favor instead?”
“Yeah, I’m sure. It might be a few days before I can get you the money, but I’m good for it.”
“Seeing how you’re Mike’s little brother, I can let it slide a week,” Earl said. “After that it’s going to have to be five points. You okay with that? You’re sure you’d rather not just watch the game on TV?”
I told him I was sure. He gave me another heavy sigh and told me he’d have the tickets run over to my apartment by ten the following morning. Before hanging up he told me to say hello to Mike the next chance I had. After I got off the phone with him I called Cheryl. This time she picked up first instead of making me go through her new hubby.
“I don’t know why Stevie said that the other day. I haven’t been saying anything about your girlfriend’s name—”
“Forget it,” I said. “She’s out of the picture now anyway. I want to take Stevie and Emma to the game tomorrow night.”
“What game?”
“The baseball game. Yankees, Red Sox.”
There was dead silence on her end while she digested that. When she finally spoke I could picture the tightness pinching her mouth as she said it was going to be around forty degrees out tomorrow night, and she didn’t feel the ballpark would be a good environment for a seven-year-old.
“Emma will be fine,” I said. “Just bundle her up. There will be younger kids than her there. And it will be a memory she’ll never forget.”
Another hesitation. Then her voice even more pinched she asked, “Do you already have tickets?”
“Yeah. Lower-box seats along the third base line. They’re supposed to be good seats.”
“How can you afford them?”
“That’s my business,” I said. “I’ve never been late with my child support, have I?”
“I’ve never said you have. I’m just asking, that’s all. If you want to do something for Stevie and Emma there are better ways to be spending your money.”
“Not for me. Not right now, anyway. Look, I’ll be picking them up at three so I can take them out to dinner before the game.”
I could almost hear the thoughts running through her head while I waited for her to answer me. When she finally did her voice sounded brittle and with that edge to it that I knew so well.
“I don’t want to get their hopes up,” she said. “I don’t want to tell them about this only to have you cancel at the last second.”
“I’m not going to be canceling.”
“You better not. You have this one last chance, Stan. Not just with me but with them. If you let them down on this—”
“Chrissakes, give me a break, okay?” I told her, and then got off the phone before she could raise my blood pressure any higher than she already had. The only times in the past I had ever disappointed my kids by not showing up to something was when I was on the job and had no choice about it. She knew that as well as I did, and I was sick of her throwing it in my face.
I was too worked up to hang around my empty apartment. I got in my car and drove back to Manhattan. Joe Ramirez seemed surprised to see me when I walked into his office.
“You can’t keep away, can you, Stan?” Joe said, shaking his head, a thin smile showing.
“Not tonight anyway.” I filled him in on what I learned from Lynch’s neurologist and my gut take on Rachel Laurent. He nodded, only half paying attention to what I told him since Phillips must’ve included all of that in his day report.
“We’ve still got a stack of videotapes,” Joe said. “If you want to help out I’ll sign off on the overtime.”
“Nothing yet, huh?”
“Nothing.” Joe shrugged and gave me a tired look. “Assuming that Lynch is right about what our perp was wearing, we’re still wasting our time. Odds are our guy ditched his Mets sweatshirt after he was spotted. We’ve been checking trash receptacles in the area, and nothing yet, but city trash collection in that area was last night so we’re pretty much fucked there. Checking those tapes is about as useful as sitting around holding our dicks, but I guess right now that’s the best we got.”
I thought he was being overly pessimistic, but given the mood he was in I wasn’t going to argue with him. There was a chance we’d catch the sonofabitch on tape.
“I’m surprised we haven’t found any more bodies yet,” I said.
“Yeah, so am I.”
I told Joe that since the tapes were my idea I’d help out with them. I turned to head toward the video room, then asked him without much hope whether there’d been any luck tracking down sales for the make and model of the knife that the perp had used. Joe’s expression turned more dour as he told me that our Crime Center was still trying to track down Internet sites selling that model
, but we both knew it wouldn’t help much even if we were able to get all those sites to hand over their customer lists. We’d still have all the pawnshop and back alley sales that we would never find out about, and that would be the vast majority of sales. It would be an amazingly lucky break if we found our guy this way—about the same as drawing four aces from a pair—but sometimes you do get lucky.
What we used as a video room had been the smallest of our interrogation rooms when I started with the department fifteen years ago. Now it had four TV monitors and video players, as well as computer equipment for printing images from the video and for transferring the images to a format the computer could deal with. Matt Chase and Allen Wang were in there going through videotapes. Wang worked the same day shift I did. He gave me a bleary-eyed look and nodded to me before turning back to his monitor. He had a kid in college and could use the overtime. Chase appeared even more pissed off than his usual self as he stared at his screen. “What a way to waste a night,” he complained bitterly. “I heard this was your idea, Green. Thanks a lot, pal. I could be out there doing some good instead of this shit.”
“Anytime,” I told him. “By the way, Yankees game was rained out.”
“Yeah, I heard.”
“No Mets fans yet, huh?”
Chase didn’t bother answering me. Wang shook his head.
There was still a large stack of tapes to go through. I picked up three of them and took them to one of the open stations. Since, as Joe had pointed out, there was a good chance our perp had ditched his sweatshirt after the killing, the protocol we were using was to search through the tapes from two hours before the murder to a half hour afterward. It was tedious work. Even with fast-forwarding through the tapes, I still had to pause every time someone came into view wearing a dark jacket, sweater, or sweatshirt to make sure it wasn’t a guy wearing a black hooded Mets sweatshirt. It ended up taking four hours to get through those three tapes, and when I was done I was feeling as bleary-eyed as Wang looked. At that point it was one o’clock. Joe had brought in pizza and I ended up hanging around another hour and a half to help finish off the remaining tapes.
“Fucking waste of a night,” Chase muttered as he turned off his monitor. I couldn’t disagree with him, although given the mood I was in spending the night occupied with busy work was better than the alternative, namely sitting alone in my apartment and feeling like a failure. Anyway, at least I had a clean conscience that all current leads for the case had been explored, at least to the extent I was capable of doing. That would help when I saw Rachel Laurent at her mother’s funeral. The six hours of overtime would also help to make a dent toward paying off those baseball tickets—after deductions a smaller dent than I’d wish, but at least it’d help somewhat.
I left the station and was back in my Flatbush apartment by three, and in bed ten minutes later. As exhausted as I felt I was again too wired to sleep and had too many thoughts running through my mind. I couldn’t shake this uneasiness inside me. It had been two months since I had seen my kids, and the thought of seeing them the next day mostly scared the shit out of me, especially thinking about the indifference I’d been hearing in their voices lately. I couldn’t help feeling as if Cheryl was right, that this was my one last shot with them, that if I waited until Thanksgiving it would be too late.
At some point I must’ve dozed off for a couple hours. The last thing I remembered before the alarm woke me at nine was looking over at the clock and seeing it was past seven and thinking how I was going to be dead on my feet later. All the two hours of sleep did was leave me feeling drugged. I stumbled out of bed. I had a busy day ahead of me.
Chapter 10
Saturday, October 16, 2004
The tickets were delivered as promised, and by ten fifteen I was in my car trying to navigate out of Brooklyn and toward Rhode Island. It took me nearly an hour to drive the nineteen miles to get to I-95 North, but after that I was cruising along at a good clip. I felt nervous but also excited. I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to raise three grand, but I decided to worry about that later. At eleven thirty Phillips called me on my cell. I didn’t want to answer his call. Fuck, I knew it was a mistake, but I couldn’t help myself. I knew what it would be. Another body had been found. This time it was a man in his early to mid-thirties. He had been shot three times in the chest and both his ring and pinky fingers on his left hand were cut off. As with Gail Laurent, hollow-points were used and a good chunk of his face was blown off by a single shot fired at close range to the back of his head. Given the powder burns the muzzle was pushed up against his skull. In this case the body had been left in a dumpster behind a luxury apartment building at an Upper West Side address. The medical examiner was still working to narrow down the time of death, but it appeared the man had been dead for several days.
“How long had the body been in the dumpster?” I asked.
“Forensics is still working on that.”
“Okay, keep me informed,” I said. “I’ll be back in the city tomorrow. I’ve got Gail Laurent’s funeral in the afternoon, but I can spend some time on this tomorrow morning, at least as long as you’re okay with signing off on the overtime.”
In the background I could hear Phillips’s fingers drumming hard along his desk.
“Uh-uh,” he said, “I need you back here now. I’m putting together a task force, and I need you here for the debriefing.”
I almost hung up on him. I thought about claiming the cell signal had broken up and I couldn’t hear what he was saying. I wanted to. Fuck, did I want to. Instead I heard myself in a strained voice telling him I had plans that I couldn’t change.
“If you want to keep working for the department you better find a way to change them.”
“Are you serious?”
“What do you think.”
Phillips didn’t utter the latter as a question. There was no misunderstanding the intent in his voice. Then again, we’d had an uneasy relationship from the beginning. There are some guys you just don’t like on sight, and for whatever reason that was the way it was with both of us, him maybe more than me, although not by much.
“You don’t need me for this,” I said. “You know everything I do.”
“You’ve been working the case full-time,” Phillips said, making no attempt to hide the exasperation in his voice. “You’re going to be here for the debriefing. Three o’clock. Understood?”
For a long moment I thought about telling him to go fuck himself, but I knew he was serious about drumming me out of the force if I didn’t show up, and the thought of not being a cop anymore hit me hard. What would I do? Private security, cab driver, office work? The idea of any of that left me in a cold sweat. Instead, I calculated out how much time I needed to drive to Cheryl’s, and then from there to Boston. If I kept a heavy foot on the gas and gave my best impersonation of Jeff Gordon I could make the drive from New York to Cumberland, Rhode Island, in two and a half hours. From there to Boston would be another hour, plus a half hour to park and get the kids into their seats. Things could still work out as long as I left Manhattan by four; it would just mean I’d have to buy the kids hot dogs at the game instead of taking them out to dinner first.
“Can you move the time up?” I asked.
“No. The time’s set. I’ve got FBI agents coming at three.”
Phillips hung up on me. I drove on for another ten miles trying to decide what to do, but every time I seriously considered leaving the force I began to panic, my heart pounding away in my chest like crazy. I called Cheryl and told her that I had to change plans and wouldn’t be there until six thirty.
“About what I was expecting,” she said, her voice oddly flat.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing, except that I was expecting this call, just like I’m expecting another one from you at six thirty.”
“Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you but I’m going to be there at six thirty like I’m saying I’m going to be.”
“Sure you will.”
I almost threw the phone out the window. Instead I gritted my teeth and flipped it shut. I pulled off at the next exit and headed back to the city.
A .40 caliber with hollow-point bullets had been used on the latest victim and the lab guys were still working on determining whether the same gun was used in both shootings. The medical examiner’s office was able to narrow the time of death to between one and four AM Wednesday morning, and they also were able to figure out that the body had been lying in the dumpster for at least forty-eight hours, untouched during that time except for being chewed up a bit by rats. Trash pickup for the apartment building wasn’t until Tuesday, and the body wouldn’t have been discovered until then if it hadn’t started to get ripe. Nothing smells quite as bad as a decomposing body.
So far that was all we knew: the caliber of the gun used, roughly when the killing happened, and how long the body had been sitting in the dumpster. That was it. There was no identification left on the body and the victim’s remaining fingerprints weren’t in the system, nor was there enough of his face left for us to do much without a forensic reconstruction drawing. No one had been found in the apartment building who saw or heard anything. There was no forensic evidence that the body had been killed at the site, and no idea where the victim’s missing fingers were. A canine team was brought to the area but found nothing related to the murder. All we really knew was that our killer had had a busy Wednesday.
Three rounds were used on Gail Laurent, four rounds on our new victim. I was still expecting another body to be found, maybe two, depending on whether the clip for our killer’s .40-caliber automatic held ten or fifteen rounds. And it would be far worse if our killer had two or more fully loaded magazines.
After being briefed on the second killing I sat at my desk, my leg bouncing up and down nervously as I kept glancing at the time waiting for three o’clock to come. The one thing this other killing showed was that the fingers weren’t cut off for expediency. If he was spending time moving a body to a dumpster, he wasn’t cutting off fingers because he was too rushed to pull jewelry off of them. He was doing it because he enjoyed it. This was his thing, his signature: cut off some fingers and blow away a good chunk of the victim’s face. There was no question anymore that we were dealing with someone who got off on what he was doing. The one saving grace was that he had been spotted. He didn’t know that we couldn’t identify him and maybe that would keep him holed up, afraid that we were out there after him. Maybe it would buy us enough time to catch him before he worked up enough nerve to go out hunting again.
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