Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  "The hips on this one give her away."

  "Why's that?"

  "See where this flares out over here?" Andy said, pointing his finger to the large bones coming out of the lower vertebrae. "Nature's way of accommodating childbirth. The sciatic notch spreads as a young woman matures, and the pelvis gets wider to be able to hold a fetus. Look at the forehead, too."

  "What?"

  "Vertical. Straight up and down. Men's foreheads tend to slope more, form a brow ridge above the eye sockets, while women's generally are like this." He turned to one of the techs. "Want to pass the big torch?"

  "What are you looking for?" Mike asked.

  "You want to know who this is, right? We've got a start on gender. We need to figure out her age, race, height-anything that will direct the scope of your investigation."

  "How about when she went missing behind the wall?"

  "That's what I'm about to dig for." Andy turned on the light and moved it slowly over the surface of the crude wooden floor behind the remaining few inches of bricks.

  He lifted out some tiny sepia-colored chips, pieces of bone that seemed to have absorbed color from the brown earth on which they had rested. He turned them over and examined them, placing them next to the digitless hands. "Fingers, probably. Toes are down there, too. Camera, please."

  The tech passed the equipment back to Andy, who took the shots himself. When he finished that task, he bent down close to the wall and reached in again, sifting through some of the remains and scooping a small sampling into a glassine envelope, which he studied before passing it on to Mike.

  "See those little fragments?" Andy asked. "Like small caramelized bits?"

  "Yeah."

  "Good chance they're her fingernails, broken off when the bones dropped to the ground years ago. Submit them to the lab along with one of the older bricks. Betcha fifty bucks you'll find some of that sealant stuck to them."

  Mike looked up at Andy. "You're telling me this lady was clawing at a brick wall to try to get out from behind it?"

  Andy nodded.

  "So this isn't just a coffin, right? You're saying she was probably still breathing when she went in here, just from what you think is underneath her nail bed?"

  Buried alive. I shuddered at the terrifying thought of such a ghoulish demise, at the hopelessness of her delicate fingernails scraping against the stones that had been cemented in place. Nan and I exchanged glances.

  Mike was pumping Andy for his techniques, unfamiliar as we both were with skeletal remains.

  "Last year's case in midtown, some hard hats found the bones in a concrete slab when they were digging a storage room for an Eighth Avenue pizza shop," Andy said. "The girl still had the hair on her head and some ligature around her wrists. Hey, can you get a shot of this?"

  One of the techs moved closer and focused his camera on an object on the ground.

  "What do you see in there?" Mike asked.

  "Looks like a sock. Like a man's sock. I was hoping it would be something of hers."

  Clothing would be a big help in the identification process, Andy explained. If it had great age or distinctive markings, it might lead the detectives to a specific period in time. Modern pieces with logos, labels, and trademarks could pinpoint a year and guide them directly to the place of purchase.

  "Big enough to be a restraint?"

  "I'll let you see it in a few minutes. Maybe a gag, stuffed in the mouth, but nothing long enough to tie her up, I don't think," Andy said, as he painstakingly covered every crevice of the small space with his light.

  Mike was readying a brown paper bag. "That'd be good. Get some saliva off it for DNA evaluation."

  "Don't be too excited about that until we know how long she was in here. There are some holes in the back wall of the building. Professor, you still here?" Andy called over his shoulder.

  "Yes."

  "What abuts this basement on the outside?"

  "A small yard, actually."

  "That's why she's picked clean, Mike. May not mean she's been here two hundred years."

  "Maggots?"

  "More likely mice have gotten in and out. Field mice, squirrels, some kind of vermin could have squeezed through these crevices. Picked the flesh clean, but the ligaments would have been left just like they are. Kind of dried out, almost mummified."

  "How'd you date the bones you found uptown?"

  "One shiny dime," Andy said. "A 1966 ten-cent piece in the cement coffin. We knew that wasn't necessarily the year she was killed, but it couldn't have been any earlier than that."

  He lifted the dark sock with a pair of tweezers and passed it out to be bagged.

  "Any pocket change?" Mike asked.

  "Nope. But there's something cylindrical standing on its edge." He reached in again and removed what appeared to be a small ring. An assistant sealed and labeled the package before passing it to me.

  The gold-toned band was now tarnished and caked on its surface with some sort of debris. At its widest place, I could make out an engraving in cursive black lines. "Could be initials. Maybe an A and a T. "

  There was no date, no hallmark. It looked like an inexpensive ring that a young woman would wear.

  "Come in close on this, will you?" Andy said, lying prone and making room on the basement floor for Mike as he passed the flashlight to him. "There's some writing."

  "Where?"

  "It looks like a piece of canvas that got caught in the cement on one of the bricks over to the left. See it?"

  Mike focused the beam into the recessed brickwork and read aloud: "'Cappozelli's Rat Poison. Manufactured in'-first three letters are all I can get-probably going to be Detroit. I'm making out the d-e-t. "

  "Does it show a date?"

  "Patience is a virtue, blondie." Mike had his nose pressed against the bottom edge of the wall. "It's got one of those drawings of a skull and crossbones. 'Keep out of reach of children.' Looks like Poe is exonerated. The poison was packaged in 1978."

  6

  Dorfman's team continued to work at dismantling the bricks above the scrap of canvas so that it could be inventoried with the other items. "So I'm thinking this lady went behind the wall no earlier than 1978."

  "Gagged and naked?"

  "Probably. Although that kind of poison is so caustic it could have eaten away clothing or paper, anything that might have been in there with her."

  "You're convinced she was alive when she was bricked in?" I asked. I couldn't shake the image of this woman's final torture, a premature burial evoking a very primal fear.

  Mike and Andy looked at each other before answering me. "Doesn't seem any point in gagging someone already dead, does there, Mike?"

  "Depends what kind of games they were playing. What's next?"

  "We close up shop for the night," Andy said. "You get the PD to secure the building. I come back tomorrow and start a head-to-toe workup on the skeleton. I don't even want to turn her over now."

  "Looking for what?"

  "Signs of blunt force trauma. Broken bones from old injuries. Anything that might help determine cause of death, in the unlikely event it wasn't a shortage of oxygen. The kinds of fractures or dental work that can be compared against existing medical records for identification purposes."

  "So sometime about twenty-five, twenty-six years ago, MissA.T. disappeared, and all we have to do is figure out who she is and why somebody put her here," Mike said.

  Now I was looking for the identities of both Jane Doe and the rapist we were calling John Doe, even though they bore no relation to each other. I'd like to be able to put names and faces to both of them.

  "The working conditions are far from ideal here," Andy said. "We'll get a team in and then transfer her back to the morgue in the morning."

  Mike called his lieutenant to get the local precinct commander to send patrol cops to safeguard the site. Waiting for them, we walked outside to put Nan Toth in a taxi for the ride home to her husband and kids.

  "You got your car?" M
ike asked.

  I shook my head.

  "Put your mittens on. I'm parked around the corner. Aren't you hungry?"

  It was after eleven and the audible rumbling from my stomach reminded me that the dinner hour had long since passed.

  "Borborygmi."

  "What's that, the Jeopardy! final question?" I asked. "I'll give you twenty bucks without even guessing. Just feed me as fast as you can."

  For as long as I could remember, Mike and Mercer had bet against me on Jeopardy! 's final question every evening that we were together. Whether in a bar or at a crime scene, Mike found a way to interrupt the proceedings to step to the television. He had studied military history in college and could detail more battles, biographies of generals, and the colors of the horses they rode in on than anyone I had ever met.

  "Double or nothing. Borborygmi."

  He had seated himself in the driver's seat and wasn't about to let me in from the cold unless I gave in to him.

  I banged on the car window. "I'll buy dinner. I don't have a clue. Open up, okay?"

  He unlocked the door and tossed several case folders onto the backseat. The half-eaten bologna sandwich at my feet had some other cop's bootmarks all over it.

  "The muscular contractions and expansions of peristalsis that move the contents of your intestines up and down."

  "That was tonight's question?"

  "Nope. That's what my doctor told me that rumbling noise is I can hear your flat little belly making. When your stomach's full of food, it mutes the noise. But that disgusting sound you're making now? It's deafening. Can you hold out until we get to Primola?"

  "Sure. And there I was, ready to concede that the Battle of Borborygmi was the turning point in the Crimean War."

  Mike drove east and headed uptown to my favorite Italian restaurant, on Second Avenue at Sixty-fourth Street. The sidewalks were empty as predictions for frigid temperatures the next few nights seemed to have driven people inside earlier than usual.

  "Ciao, Signorina Cooper."The owner, Giuliano, called to Adolfo, the headwaiter, "Set up that table in the corner for Mr. Chapman. Subito. I'll have Fenton send your drinks right over."

  The restaurant had long been my favorite, not just for the good food, but because we were treated like family. It was always pleasant, at the end of a long day, to be greeted warmly by Giuliano, whose hard work and great kitchen made his restaurant a well-known watering hole for New Yorkers with fussy palates.

  "Kitchen still open?"

  "For you, Mr. Mike? Even if I had to boil the water myself."

  "Skip the usual cocktail, Giuliano. I don't want anything with ice cubes in it. Give us a nice bottle of red wine," Mike said.

  No matter how cold the weather, Mike never wore an overcoat. His navy blazer was a trademark, along with his thick head of dark hair and an infectious grin that only the most depraved crime scenes could suppress.

  "You know what you'd like to eat or you want to see a menu?" Adolfo asked.

  "Anything but ribs," Mike said. "I've had enough of them tonight."

  "I'll take the hottest bowl of soup you can cook up. Stracciatelle? And then some risotto with sausage and mushrooms."

  "A veal chop for me. Biggest one you've got back there. String beans, potatoes, throw everything in the kitchen on the side, okay? And tell Giuliano to come back and join us."

  The owner was as tall as Mercer-six feet six-with an expansive personality, at once charming and tough. He had come to the States from a small town in northern Italy and worked his way up from a position as a waiter in a well-known restaurant to running his own chic eatery.

  Adolfo poured the wine for us and went off to place the order. I told Mike about the new case with my old sick stocking nemesis and explained how Mercer and I had convinced Battaglia to let us go ahead with our idea to indict his genetic profile to allow us to connect the newest cases to the older ones.

  The soup arrived and I began to eat while Mike chewed on bread sticks. "Tell me how Val is," I said. "I thought she looked fantastic last week."

  Mike had fallen in love with an architect he met almost two years ago, while she was recovering from surgery for breast cancer. It was the first serious relationship he had been involved in since we started working together ten years earlier.

  "Yeah, she's in great shape. That was my best Christmas present, after the scare we had last fall. She got a clean bill of health in December."

  Mike Chapman had just celebrated his thirty-seventh birthday a few months back, half a year before I would. We came from vastly different backgrounds and had grown to be great friends. There were no two people I would rather have covering my back than Mike and Mercer, and I delighted in the happiness that had so radically changed both their lives recently.

  Michael Patrick Chapman was the adored son of a legendary cop who, as a second-generation immigrant, had returned to Ireland and married a girl from the family home in Cork. Their three daughters and Mike were raised in Yorkville, and Brian was fiercely proud that Mike chose to be the first in the Chapman line to attend college. While in his third year at Fordham, where he immersed himself in military history when he wasn't waiting tables to supplement his student loans, Mike's father suffered a fatal coronary the day after he retired and surrendered his gun and shield. Mike graduated the next year, but enrolled in the Police Academy immediately, determined to follow in the giant footsteps of the man he most admired.

  "Val looked like a natural with Logan in her arms," I said. We had all been together for dinner at Mercer's house in Queens. He and his wife, Vickee, were the parents of a little boy, born last year and named Logan.

  At forty-three, Mercer had a new stability in his life, with his remarriage to Vickee and with fatherhood, a role he took so seriously. There were not many first-grade detectives in the NYPD, and Mercer was one of the few African-Americans to hold that distinction. He had once been assigned to homicide with Mike, but preferred-as I did-the opportunity to work with victims, whose recovery from their trauma could be aided by the relationship with a compassionate investigator.

  "Six months ago I probably would have snapped at you for going in that direction. Now I'm starting to think it wouldn't be so bad. A kid is all Val wants," Mike said.

  I smiled at him. "Think of all the broken hearts there'll be when she takes you off the market. Officially, I mean."

  "Yeah, well, I'm trying to buy up every deck of Old Maid in the toy stores around town. You're wearing that logo like it's embedded in your forehead. You don't even look upset about it."

  "I actually feel kind of relieved," I said, as Adolfo replaced the empty soup bowl with our entrées. My relationship with television newsman Jake Tyler had ended abruptly last October, after a long period during which I could feel our emotions unraveling and tangling both of us in their debris.

  "First-class jerk if you ask me. Shit, I would have married you just for the house on the Vineyard."

  "You still can," I said, reaching to refill my wineglass.

  "Too much angst, Coop. You and me? You'd probably cut off my balls the first time I rolled over in bed and closed my eyes. It's bad enough you're always telling me what to do on the job. Think what would happen the first time you tried that between the sheets. Talk about murder."

  I had grown up in a loving family, too, but came to public service from a completely different direction. My two older brothers and I were young kids when my father, Benjamin Cooper, revolutionized the field of cardiology with an invention that he and his partner created for use in surgical procedures. The small piece of plastic tubing known as the Cooper-Hoffman valve remained an essential component in every operation done in this country for the fifteen years thereafter.

  The trust fund that my father established for each of us was a cushion while he encouraged us to find ways to give back to society by working in the public sector. My schooling in Westchester was followed by a degree from Wellesley College, and then law school at the University of Virginia. It was in C
harlottesville that I fell in love with Adam Nyman, the young physician who was killed in an automobile accident as he drove to the Vineyard to be married at the beautiful old farmhouse we had bought together.

  "It's odd sometimes. So many of my pals saw that it wasn't going to work with Jake before I did."

  Nina Baum, my college roommate and closest friend, had been the first to tell me to step back. There had been a point early on when I was certain enough of my love for Jake that I had moved into his apartment so we could try living together.

  "Hard to miss the clues, kid. He just wasn't there when you needed him."

  "Or when you thought I needed him."

  Mike was devouring the chop while I pushed the risotto around my plate. "Eat up before I start on your meal," he said, pointing his fork at my food. "Mercer and I have it all figured out. What you need is a nice brainiac kind of guy who has a solid nine-to-five job, with no emergencies, no summit meetings in Asia to cover."

  Jake had been a reporter for network news. He spent more time on airplanes than I did at crime scenes. "It's not just the travel-"

  "Whoa, I'm not done. He's got to have a lot of self-confidence and-"

  "I can wait till you stop eating."

  "See what I mean? What you really wanted to say right now was to tell me not to talk until I'm finished chewing, right? You just can't help yourself, can you? Most important, this guy should be mute."

  "'Cause you think I don't let him get to say what he wants?"

  "No, 'cause I think the urge to tell you to shut up would be powerful."

  "What to know something interesting?" I asked.

  "Don't change the subject. You don't think that's going to stop me from starting a search committee to find a mate for you? Otherwise you'll take out all your frustration on Mercer and me."

  "I'm not the least bit frustrated at the moment. I've just been thinking about this. Tonight was the second time I've actually been in a room that Edgar Allan Poe lived in."

  "Body or no body?"

  "Guess we have to go back and check under the floorboards. He spent a year at the University of Virginia, 1826. I think it was only the second year Jefferson's school had been open. Poe lived on the west range of the Lawn. The room's been restored to look like it did when he was there: fireplace, small bed, chair, and desk. Number thirteen."