Dead Meat

by Joseph M. Monks

  The thing was, a stranger killing didn’t make much sense, either. Weaver’s killer had not only planned the crime, but had gone to brutal extremes. Somebody had wanted to torture Weaver—not just murder her. That strongly suggested a personal component. Whoever had slain Weaver felt that a relationship existed, even if Weaver herself was unaware of it.

  Burton asked Littleton a few more questions before fishing a card out of his breast pocket. Littleton made no move to take it. He wasn’t being impolite, he was simply slipping away into a sea of memories. Burton placed the card on the bedside table and encouraged him to call if he remembered anything that might help us. The man promised that he would. Before we left, he noticed me looking at a small pot of flowers beside the phone.

  “Pretty, huh? Geraniums. Naomi told me she didn’t want to send no flowers that were going to die. Said as long as I tend these, they’ll keep coming back, season after season.” I recalled the photograph I’d seen in Weaver’s bedroom. Two little girls surrounded by these same flowers. Fresh tears formed in Littleton’s eyes. “They’re all I got of her now,” he said. “All anybody’s got.”

  CHAPTER 6

  I’d missed two calls during our interview with Littleton. The first message was from Jennifer Mojena, who’d found a contact number for Brendan Daughtry. I scribbled the number in my notepad and deleted the message. The second call was from Janet Bell. I dialed the lab as Burton drove downtown in search of sustenance. Janet picked up on the third ring.

  “Bell,” she said officiously.

  “It’s your late night chauffeurs. What have you got for us?”

  “Two things. Hold on a sec.” She switched to speakerphone. “You ready?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Okay. First things first. I think I’ve figured out how our perp appeared to have floated away.”

  “Astonish me, oh wise one,” I said. She snorted derisively.

  “We found a couple of discrepancies with the stuff we took out of there, so I went back this morning with Mike Sweeny. You rooted through Weaver’s bedroom closet, right?”

  “Yeah, top to bottom. Why, what’d you find?”

  “It’s not what we found, it’s what we didn’t. Weaver owned a Hoover upright vacuum cleaner. Top of the line package with all the attachments.”

  “She kept a clean home. So?”

  “So...one of those attachments is missing. The one that doubles for an electric broom is gone. I have Sweeny diving dumpsters now looking for it.”

  “Electric broom? You lost me. What’s it do?”

  “What it does isn’t important, but since you’re a man, I’ll explain. The vacuum itself is appropriate for most surfaces, but primarily carpet. But for hardwood floors or tile, the hose can be removed and attached to a low-profile broad head that works better on smooth surfaces. Perfect for a kitchen or bathroom. And—” I cut her off, seeing where she was going.

  “And for dragging behind you to erase footprints,” I finished.

  “Bingo. My Mom used to do the same thing when I was a kid. With me and three brothers, all the carpets took a beating, but she always tried to keep us out of the living room. We had carpet like Weaver, and Mom used the same kind of attachment to make it look like it’d never been walked on.”

  “And this attachment was in the back of the closet? You’re sure?”

  “Pretty sure. I checked the model number. It comes standard with one attachment. The only way to get the others is to order the whole shebang. The rest are all present and accounted for.”

  “In the back of the closet...damn.”

  “Hey, don’t kick yourself. I would’ve missed it too had I not grown up with a clean-freak for a Mom who only let us walk around in socks.”

  “You strutted around in your living room wearing nothing but socks?”

  “Har-har. You wanna hear the rest?”

  “Go on.”

  “Even though no money was missing from her wallet, we had Wally put everything under the scope.” Wally Enright was the lab’s resident fingerprint expert. It was said he’d once lifted a fingerprint off a rotting banana, but the case hadn’t gone to trial, so it was never introduced as evidence. I still wasn’t sure about that one, but I’d seen Wally perform enough miracles not to be too skeptical.

  “What’d he come up with?”

  “Again, it’s what he didn’t come up with. No prints at all. Not even Weaver’s.”

  “Meaning he wiped the wallet,” I said. “Meaning he was in the wallet.”

  “Ding ding ding. You must be a detective.”

  “I don’t suppose he got lucky, did he?”

  “Nope, no love there. But when we inventoried the contents and cross-referenced with her credit card statements, Weaver’s wallet came up one American Express platinum card short. Personal use, not for business.”

  “He took it. He fucking took the card.”

  “That’d be my guess. I got in touch with AmEx to put a track on the card.”

  “Fantastic! Thanks, Jan. Tell Wally I owe him a beer.”

  “And moi?”

  “I’ll cut out this Sunday’s New York Times crossword puzzle for you.”

  Burton turned his head, eyebrows raised. The string of profanities coming from the phone was impressive. Despite the outburst, Bell promised to get back to us if anything came of Sweeny’s dumpster-diving. I ended the call and filled Burton in. He looked to be deep in concentration when his eyes flashed to the right and suddenly he jerked the wheel. He cut across three lanes of traffic and edged out a Toyota Celica for a parking spot in front of a Tad’s Steaks. The Celica driver flipped him the bird, then got an eyeful of big, bad, hungry cop, and sped off. Doubting that Celica-man had the stones to key the unmarked, I plugged the meter, and followed Burton inside.

  We sat at a corner table, discount steak sandwiches filling our plates. I poked at some uncharacteristically soupy mashed potatoes while Burton tore into his meal.

  “What’s bugging you?” he asked through a mouthful of half-chewed food. “I mean, besides the fact we got some asshole walking around out there chopped somebody up.”

  I stole one of Burton’s steak fries, then took out my notebook, opening up to our timeline.

  “For starters, this. We’ve still got a pretty sizeable gap between the time she left Starbucks and when she got home. The D’Agostino receipt in the trash puts her in the market well over ninety minutes after she’d left Newcomb and Mojena. Where was she in between?”

  “Summer night. Friday. She lives in the Village. Maybe she browses. Walks through Washington Square park. The only thing waiting for her at home’s a couple of DVDs and microwave popcorn. She could’ve been doing anything.”

  “I’m going to talk to the Lieu about getting that kid Greene for a while. Have him show Weaver’s picture around. Walk the likely route she took home, fan out from there if need be. Maybe we can pin down her movements. It’s a long shot, but maybe somebody saw something.” Burton stifled a belch.

  “You honestly think Weaver got offed by some weirdo just noticed her in the wind chimes store?”

  “No, but whoever did Weaver had to have been following her for a while, watching her. That’s the other thing that’s bugging me. That thing with the vacuum cleaner. You don’t just tumble to that in a stranger’s apartment. He couldn’t have counted on that, or the carpet, unless he’d been there before.”

  “Makes sense,” agreed the big man. I jotted a note to look into whether Vicelli had a record of recent service calls to Weaver’s apartment. Maybe he’d let in a cable guy or refrigerator repair man. Somebody who had access to the apartment, likely undisturbed, long enough to familiarize himself with it. The scenario was plausible, but it still didn’t sit right with me. Burton could tell, and ran down the scenario so we could hear where it rung hollow.

  “Service guy comes in, lays carpet, whatever. He cases the apartment. Somehow gets Weaver to let him in on a Friday night, incapacitates her, butchers her, then uses the vac
uum to erase his footprints before making himself scarce.”

  Maybe for a rape-murder I could have believed it. A manual strangulation, a stabbing even. But Loscalzo hadn’t found any signs of rape, and Weaver hadn’t just been murdered. She’d been tortured by a sadist who’d planned the crime well. Demented sicko could account for the torture part, but the preparation and care taken not to leave any forensic evidence made that unlikely. As Burton and I pored over what we knew, one thing continued to resonate. Weaver had been stalked. She’d been selected for a reason. Her killer had known her patterns, and somehow, her apartment. He’d been able to gain entry, apparently without arousing her suspicion. There’d been no signs of a struggle. Weaver had well-manicured fingernails of average length. None had been chipped or broken. No foreign matter, such as fibers or skin cells, had been found beneath them. Despite the likelihood that chloroform had been used, chloroform wouldn’t have instantly rendered her unconscious. A surprise attack at the door was high-risk, even with the neighbor across the hall at work. A push-in with a chloroform-soaked rag certainly would have met with resistance. Being taken by surprise made the most sense. But would a woman like Weaver open her door to a stranger at that hour on a Friday night and then turn her back on him?

  “This is giving me a headache,” I said, stuffing the notebook back into my jacket.

  “Well, at least it’s not a hunger headache,” said the big man, dropping a bill on the table and getting to his feet.

  There was that, I supposed, but not much else.

  I checked in with the station. Only two messages, duplicating the ones left on my cell. As Burton drove, I punched in Brendan Daughtrey’s number. Four rings, answering machine.

  “Hey, you’ve reached Brendan. I can’t get to the phone right now, and my answering machine is on strike, but the ‘fridge has promised to write down your message and stick it to himself. Ciao.” The beep came. I identified myself and asked Daughtry to return my call, leaving both the station and my cell number.

  “Nobody home?”

  “Nope,” I replied, checking my watch. What did I expect? It was late afternoon. For most people, the work day hadn’t yet ended. I made a few more calls, used the reverse directory to get Daughtry’s address. His home was a private residence in Great Neck. Not exactly far removed from the city.

  “Want to check it out?” Burton asked, changing lanes and guiding us toward the Village. I shook my head.

  “No reason to run out there now. We’ve got zilch on him besides the fact he dated Weaver sometime last year. If he’s our guy, he’s as far off the radar as you can get without disappearing altogether. Let’s hit Weaver’s place, see if—“ just then, my cell phone sounded.

  “Whelan.”

  “Where are you?” It was Bell.

  “Headed downtown. Just passing 20th. What’s up?”

  “I’ll meet you in front of Weaver’s in ten minutes,” she said, then hung up. Burton shot me a questioning look, but all I could do was shrug.

  “Must be this job,” he huffed. “People think we actually like mystery.”

  As promised, Bell pulled up in a CSU SUV a few minutes after we’d arrived. She popped the tailgate, removing a flattened evidence carton.

  “Sweeny thinks he’s found it,” she announced.

  “Where?”

  “This way, c’mon.”

  She led us into the building, exiting through the back into an alley. She turned left, went past some trash cans and a dumpster that backed up onto another property, and eventually brought us into a dead-end behind a building some 500 yards from Weaver’s. Standing sentinel before an open dumpster was Sweeny, arms folded across his chest, being berated by an irate trash hauler. Sweeny was maybe five nine and one sixty. The carter topped out around six-two, three hundred. Nevertheless, Sweeny looked ready to throw down. Upon our arrival, it became apparent to the carter he wasn’t going to get his way. Sweeny never broke eye contact. Only after the hauler stalked off, mumbling under his breath, did Burton speak.

  “Were you really gonna tangle with that prick?”

  “Sure. You see the way he waddles? His knees are all fucked up. I do Tae Kwon Do three nights a week. Two heel kicks and the greaseball would’ve been using a walker.”

  “Shit,” lamented Burton, looking after the trash man. “I would’ve liked to have seen that.”

  “Maybe next time,” Sweeny offered cheerfully, turning to the dumpster. He leaned a rickety wooden pallet against it to use as a ladder, and scrambled up it like a teenager.

  “I already got pics,” he told Bell, his voice echoing inside the bin. All I could see from my vantage point was a sea of trash bags and loose garbage. The August heat had ripened the contents considerably. Sweeny pulled a particle filter across his nose and mouth. I would have demanded a scuba mask and respirator.

  Sweeny nudged aside a trash bag that had split open, moving it away from the vacuum cleaner attachment. Bell folded together the evidence carton and extended it to him. Sweeny used a pair of rubber-coated tongs to deposit it into the box. He handed it to Bell, who filled out a chain of evidence card and taped it to the lid. Sweeny pulled himself up out of the dumpster with the agility of a gymnast, foregoing the pallet ladder and dropping catlike to the ground. I, too, would’ve enjoyed watching him put a hurting on the trash goon.

  “There are some dark flecks near the top of the tube,” Sweeny said, peeling off his gloves and tossing them into the dumpster. “I’d guess it’s blood.”

  “You see any prints on it?” I asked.

  “Nothing I could eyeball in there,” Sweeny told me. “That surface is pretty good for latents, but I doubt we’ll pull anything. This guy’s too careful to do something as stupid as toss this bad boy all the way out here and leave prints.”

  I shared Sweeny’s doubts. This killer had gone to extraordinary lengths to avoid leaving any physical evidence. Finding a print on the attachment was a long shot.

  I studied the alley. Neither the building the dumpster was set against nor the one across from it had windows. Not a surprise, really, it was hardly the kind of view you’d boast about. I noticed a security light above the rear door to one of the buildings was missing. A two-lamp floodlight attached to the wall sported shattered bulbs.

  “How many dumpsters did you search before you got to this one?”

  “Three. The first is the one right behind Weaver’s building, but there are two more you pass before this one.”

  And this one just happened to be in a dead end, I thought, with all the lights either burned out or inoperative. It was doubtful that vandals were responsible. I made a mental note to talk to the building managers for both properties. I had a pretty good idea about when the floodlights and the light over the rear exit had mysteriously gone dark.

  “You thinking what I’m thinking?” Burton asked, Bell and Sweeny having departed to return to the lab.

  “I think so.”

  “Man plans something this careful, goes through all this trouble... Might develop a taste for this sort of thing.”

  That was precisely what was going through my mind. If Weaver’s murder hadn’t been a crime of rage, it was possible she’d been targeted by someone who simply needed to satisfy a violent and sociopathic urge.

  The rest went unsaid. How long would the killer’s sense of relief last? How long could reliving what he’d done to Weaver satisfy him? Memory alone wouldn’t be enough to sate him indefinitely. Sooner or later, he would again seek gratification.

  Off to the west, a bolt of heat lightning split the sky. Eerie quiet settled in before the subsequent clap of thunder. A storm was coming, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that a far worse one was already upon us.

  Loscalzo’s preliminary autopsy report was waiting on my desk when we got back to the station. There were also photocopies of the evidence inventory from the Weaver crime scene, the fax Bell had sent concerning the missing American Express card, and patrolman Luke Greene’s collection of statements ta
ken the previous night. The final item was a printout of incoming calls to Weaver’s apartment in the 24 hours preceding her death. There had been four. Ike Littleton from his hospital phone. Two toll free numbers that backtracked to telemarketers. And one placed Thursday night from a number I recognized as belonging to Terri Newcomb. There had been no outgoing calls during the same period. Paper, paper, paper. It was already beginning to pile up.

  I slipped the phone records into a manila folder, rubber banded the entire stack of documents, and set them aside. I booted my computer, and transcribed my investigation notes. By the time I was finished, my fingers were hitting more wrong keys than right ones. After overworking the spell check, I sent the document to the printer so I could stick a copy in the murder book. I’d had enough. It was time to go home. Behind his desk, Burton was leaning back, his feet propped up on an open drawer. I thought his chair might snap in two.

  “I’m for packing it in,” I told him. I didn’t have to say it twice. A pair of rings, dark against dark, hung beneath his eyes. We’d gotten five hours of shuteye, if that, in the past 36 hours. I scooped up the stack of reports, tucked them under one arm, and we headed out.

  Though it was barely eight, when we pulled up in front of my place it felt like four a.m. Before Burton left, we settled on a loose game plan for the morning. We’d try contacting Daughtry again, touch base with Ike Littleton to see if Weaver had mentioned what she’d been doing during the hour or so we couldn’t account for, and check in with Charlie Nolan.

  I dug a pizza from the freezer and threw it onto a sheet of aluminum foil, dumping the whole thing in the oven. To hell with pre-heating.