Feast of Shadows, #1

by Rick Wayne

  If you believe the official statistics, just under 2/3 of all murders in this country are solved.

  If you believe the official statistics.

  They assume, for example, that all solved murders are solved correctly, which is horse shit. On top of that, the aggregate numbers hide a big difference between major metropolitan areas, like New York and Chicago, and the rest of the nation. If you live in a big city, a better rule of thumb is about half.

  50/50.

  Even with all the tools of modern forensic science, police still rely overwhelmingly on confession. Without one, the odds are poor. In fact, nearly one out of every two murderers is never caught—which means you probably know one, at your work or church or school, even though it’s inconceivable to contemplate.

  The difference between a cold case and a closed one isn’t skill or perseverance or even luck, which is all that brought Albert Fish to justice. Lots of guys I know have all three. No, catching the other half, the half that are almost never caught, requires something else. It requires you to contemplate the otherwise inconceivable—that there really was a voice emanating from Albert Fish’s Bible, an unnatural voice, perverting its word, driving him to kill.

  Or even that a body can want to be found.

  Take the corpse of one Jane Doe, nicknamed Bobbi Jo by the guys in white lab coats. Bobbi Jo’s killer took great pains to see that she would never rise from the watery tomb into which he’d placed her. He started by stabbing her thirteen times—after she was already dead from asphyxiation—in a rough checkerboard pattern up her torso and down her back, presumably so that the gas released during bacterial decomposition could escape rather than collect in her body cavities and so bring her to the surface, like a human-skinned buoy. Then he strapped exercise weights to her arms and legs, the kind athletes use during heavy workouts, and dumped her body in a drainage channel that emptied into the ocean. He was meticulous there, too. Rather than relying on Velcro, he wrapped each weight several times in clear plastic shipping tape, just to be sure.

  All other things being equal, she should’ve been fish food. It’s doubtful that even her skeleton would’ve been found since that channel, farther out on Long Island, deliberately faced an outward flowing current. But as luck would have it, Bobbi Jo’s body was dumped right before a significant late summer storm brought warm temperatures and several inches of rain. The medical examiner suggested the killer might’ve chosen that day specifically on the theory that more water would dispose of the evidence that much faster. If he hadn’t attached the weights, it might have, because while the channel flooded quickly, the weighted body moved slowly and was diverted at high water to a runoff reservoir, where it sat for days in highly acidic city wastewater, which ate the adhesive off the tape. Gradually over the next twelve hours, the rain subsided, the runoff reservoir slowly drained, and Bobbi Jo’s swollen, turtle-nibbled, yellow-blue body came to the surface, like a bobbing apparition. Hence the name.

  She was found by a pair of joggers running along the trail at the edge of the reservoir, which bordered a large city park, and although it was impossible to say where exactly she’d been dumped along the channel’s seven-mile stretch to the sea, everyone agreed it was something bordering on a miracle that she’d even been found at all.

  I’ve often wondered if that wasn’t what all the old books meant when they talked about the dead coming back and why people nailed bodies to coffins and weighed them down with stones and the rest. Not that anyone expected they’d rise up on two feet and start walking around and causing trouble for everybody. Rather, that they might simply make another appearance—by whatever means: grave robbers, flash floods, freak gales, what-have-you. That there are forces that can propel the dead back among the living for them to wreak a fresh hell. A dead body can cause plenty of trouble for people without ever moving a finger, believe me.

  Of course, everything the forensics guys needed to finish their job was either in or on that body. It was just a matter of diligence. My colleagues and I, on the other hand, were left the task of identifying her, of finding her killer, and of bringing some semblance of closure to her family. But just like the Grace Budd case, there wasn’t much to go on. The ME guessed she was in her early 30s—likely 32 or 33—that she was Caucasian, that she’d probably never had children, and that she’d been strangled to death and then mutilated postmortem with a kitchen knife in the manner I described. The only feature of real note, and the reason the case made its way to me, versus any other detective in my unit, was the strange knotlike mark that had been deliberately burned into the underside of her tongue, like a cattle brand.

  I was staring at my computer screen, tabbing tediously through missing persons reports, hoping for a quick match to her general description, when a package was plopped onto my desk. Plain manila envelope. Sealed with clear shipping tape. Machine-printed label. Unmarked VHS tape inside.

  And that’s how everything started.

  The package was addressed to me specifically. Not the NYPD. Not Homicide. Not “To Whom It May Concern.” To Detective Harriet Chase at the downtown office. The return label said it was from Floral Park. The address sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it, and Google didn’t help.

  There’s a checklist of things that are supposed to flag a package as “suspicious.” One of them is that the postmark doesn’t match the return address. That meant, following procedure, I was supposed to get the hazmat guys involved and fill out a bunch of paperwork. So I did exactly what any detective would do. I put on a pair of blue latex gloves and squeezed the darn thing from top to bottom like a kid on Christmas eve. Since it was pretty clearly a VHS tape—it even sounded like one when I shook it—and since VHS tapes are almost universally not explosive, or toxic, I opened the package with my trusty pocket knife.

  As I carefully worked the strip of clear plastic tape off the fold, I noticed a few fingerprints on the inside. Whoever sent it either wasn’t trying to hide or else had made a serious mistake. I pulled out the cassette—which trailed all of its magnetic tape like intestines. Whoever sent it had yanked every last inch from the rollers and stuffed it into the bottom of the envelope. The cassette’s clear plastic window showed the interior wheels were pulled clean, although thankfully the tape was still attached at both ends, which meant there was a chance of speedy recovery.

  Upon closer inspection, there was also a trace spatter, about the size of a printed apostrophe, on the clear plastic window. Now that was a reason to get people involved. I got up and took the tape immediately to my boss, Lieutenant Miller. I stood with her in her office, leaning over her desk, where she was examining the tiny splatter from the distance of about an inch.

  “In my experience,” she said into her desk, “there’s two reasons people send evidence anonymously: guilt or vanity. They’re either afraid—for their safety, maybe, or of being implicated—or they’re frustrated that they don’t yet have an audience.”

  “Or they’re just crazy,” I added.

  “Or they’re crazy.” She smiled and stood straight. “Fine. Three reasons.”

  Lt. Shawna Miller was in her mid-40s with curly brown hair that was sandy gray at the roots. She was husky but not particularly overweight and always sharply dressed. Everything I knew about her had been pieced together from odd bits and ends she dropped in conversation. In the few years we’d been working together, she’d made offhand comments once or twice with the subject “we” in a way that led me to think she was married, probably with kids. But she didn’t wear a ring, she didn’t keep pictures in her office, she didn’t talk about her family, and she didn’t bring anyone to work gatherings. I’m certain all of that was so the men in her unit would have no reason to see her as anything but their manager. Not a wife. Not a mother. Just the boss. It kept her a bit at arm’s length from everyone. But in a public bureaucracy the size of the NYPD, that was the best strategy—if you could keep it up over the long haul. Shawna could.

  I had the envelope in my hand.
I held it up. “Worth checking out the return address maybe?”

  “Let’s make sure that’s blood first,” she said, slipping the tape into an evidence bag. “Human blood. And not the sloppy remains of someone’s chili dog.”

  “You think it’s a hoax?” I handed her the envelope, which went into a separate bag.

  “Probably not, but stranger things have happened. I don’t want to put another one up until we’re sure.”

  She nodded toward the big white board in the common space outside her office. It was stuffed end-to-end in multi-colored columns summarizing all our active cases. The label at the top read “The Killing Field.”

  She handed me the evidence bags in a way that made it clear they were my responsibility.

  “Since you’re here,” she said, nodding to a chair.

  My brain immediately started cataloging all the things she might want to talk about in that official way, not least what had happened at the apartment a couple weeks before, but ultimately there were too many, so I complied without pause or comment.

  She walked toward her office door. “I got an email this morning from Crowley, our erstwhile manager of evidence.” She shut it.

  I didn’t say anything. I knew where she was going.

  She walked around and took her seat. “He tells me you’ve checked out the same evidence from the Sacchi case seven times in the last few months.” She looked to me for a response. “A pendant or something like that? Is that correct?”

  “If he says so.”

  I was still wearing it.

  Lieutenant Miller scowled. “That case is seven years old, Detective. Do I need to be worried?”

  “About that? No.”

  “I didn’t think so. But I told him I’d talk to you about it. So there. I did.”

  I nodded and went to get up.

  “That’s not why I asked you to stay,” she said. Lieutenant Miller opened her desk drawer. “For the first three months, you wouldn’t say anything and I had to give an official reprimand.”

  So.

  It was that.

  She produced a thick envelope, the kind that could be sealed with the red string and routed around the office.

  “Now . . . you apparently don’t know when to shut up.”

  She tossed it across, and I caught it awkwardly, one hand pressing it to my chest. I unwrapped the red string and took out the folder. I flipped through it. I caught the words “grand mal seizures” and “wolf with three eyes” and what appeared to be several verbatim excerpts from a transcript.

  I closed the file.

  “Nothing to say?” she asked.

  I slipped the file back into the manila envelope. “Nope.” I wrapped the red string around the tab.

  She looked at me with a mix of confusion and frustration.

  I placed the envelope gently on her desk. “With respect, ma’am, I know what I said.”

  “Jesus, Hari, since when do you call me ma’am?”

  I shrugged. “It seemed like the right thing to say.”

  “It seemed patronizing. You had an obligation to disclose this to the department.”

  “I did. At the inquest.”

  “You said you had a seizure. Not that you had a history of them.”

  “It happened once,” I said.

  She pointed to the folder. “According to that, you had to be hospitalized for the better part of a year. I’d hardly call that ‘once.’”

  “I meant one episode,” I objected. “Thirty years ago. I was thirteen, for Chrissakes. No one could figure out why it happened and no one could figure out why it went away. It just stopped. And for three decades now, it stayed stopped. I had no reason to think it would ever come back.”

  She pointed to her desk. “You know what the Cormacks’ lawyer is going to say. That the department is liable. And you know what they’re going to say? That you’re liable. That you withheld vital medical history.”

  “I was thirteen,” I repeated.

  “Maybe. But by not cooperating for the better part of three months of mandatory therapy, you made it look like you had something to hide.”

  I shifted in my seat. “Is that why you want to wait on the blood analysis? You’d prefer I take an administrative vacay?”

  “You’re like a dog with a new toy every time a case comes across your desk. You clamp down and shake and shake and shake until I have to pry it away from you. You’d still be working the Sacchi case if I let you, along with half a dozen other weird cases—all cold.”

  “I’ll talk to Dr. More. Fair enough?”

  Lieutenant Miller sighed.

  “I’m not going to intimidate the man,” I explained calmly. “I just want to make sure he understands the damage that report is going to do.”

  “You don’t think he did this on purpose?” She lifted the envelope by the corner and held it like it was a bag of dog poop.

  I shrugged. “I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt. Life seems simpler sometimes from behind a desk. No offense,” I added quickly. “It’s just, maybe he didn’t realize how it would be interpreted.”

  It was clear she was skeptical, not just about what I said but also whether I even believed it myself.

  I didn’t.

  She shoved the file in a drawer and I stood with the evidence bags.

  Lt. Miller watched me walk to the door. “You need to take this seriously, Detective. The Department will. A man’s life, his family, was already at stake. Now, so is your career.”

  I stopped with my hand on the shiny silver knob. I knew she felt trapped. On the one hand, I was one of her detectives and she wanted to help, and I appreciated that. On the other, she felt I should’ve known better and was frustrated with me for putting her in a bad spot.

  I opened the door.

  I didn’t make it back to my desk.

  The sign on the office door said:

  F. MARTIN CHASE, M.S., J.D.

  INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY ASSOCIATE

  I could hear the secretary calling security at the other end of the stately hall. I opened the door and Fred looked up at me, surprised. He’d gained a little weight. He was still thin, but he wasn’t quite as gym-rat-gaunt as he used to be.

  “Hi, Fred.”

  He didn’t like that name. He said it made him sound like a cartoon caveman.

  “How’s the life of the flesh?”

  He was just about buried in files. They were stuffed into five stacks of accordion folders and covered every open inch of his desk. The laptop off to one side didn’t even seem used. The power light was on but the screen was dark, as if he hadn’t looked at it in forever.

  “Funny.” He hit the intercom on his phone with a manicured finger. “It’s alright, Joanie. You can call off the hounds.”

  He let go of the button and motioned for me to sit.

  “Nice view.” Out the window was a stunning view of downtown and the East River. It was overcast and I could see the clouds roll. “Fifty-third floor. You’re moving up in the world.”

  I looked around the office. The sole bookcase was full of heavy law texts, the kinds that ran in series with identical colored bars across their spines, like encyclopedias. I’m sure everything printed in them was online somewhere, which meant they were just for show, something to put clients at ease, to make the good barrister look serious and well-studied. The legal equivalent of fake fruit in a bowl.

  I shut the door and sat down. “Heard from Mom and Dad lately?”

  “Really?”

  “Just breaking the ice. People tell me it’s polite.”

  “Then my answer is a very curt ‘not much.’”

  Freddie and I had both written our parents off years ago. To be fair, they wrote us off first. One has to be a little sympathetic, though. It had to be hard for a God-fearing couple to find out that not just one but both of their offspring batted for the home team. Not that our parents were Bible-thumpers or anything—just traditional folks who tried to raise their kids the way they’d be
en raised. Things might have worked out better if there hadn’t been such a gap between Fred and me. I was older so naturally I blazed the trail. With an eight-year-old son sitting in the wings, they could comfortably blame my illness and everything that happened the year I spent in an institution for turning me gay. Six years later, when Mom caught Freddie with his tongue down the throat of the junior varsity quarterback, the reason was equally simple: my “elective” gayness had clearly rubbed off on their baby—the Contagion Model of Homosexuality. Like cooties. It was either that, I suppose, or the belief that God was punishing them for something.

  As a young adult, I did what I could to protect Freddie from the worst of it, which meant intentionally stoking their anger so it stayed fixed squarely on me and not my teenage brother. As a result, he’d been able to maintain a strained but minimal relationship with them, whereas, for all I knew, they didn’t even acknowledge I existed.

  “Don’t be jealous,” he said. “It’s usually just for help with their phone or computer or something stupid.”

  “Since when do they call you for computer help? You’re a lawyer.”

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Come!” he called. “I’m an intellectual property attorney,” he said to me, “specializing in cybersecurity, fraud, and abuse. I know a thing or two. You might be surprised.”

  He took a file from an assistant and thanked her.

  “Still defending the corporations?” I asked as the door closed again.

  “Well, you know how it goes. The little guy doesn’t have any money. That’s your line of work.”

  “Not for much longer.”

  He squinted at me. “Meaning what?”

  “What would I do if I wasn’t a cop?” I asked.

  “Christ.” He glanced to the ceiling. “Hari, I don’t have time for existential discussions.” He motioned to the files on his desk. “We’re going to trial in three days. Do you have any idea what that means? Surely you do. You’re a policeman. Woman. Person. Whatever.”