Deluge (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Depression,” said the boy’s father.

  “Depressed about what?”

  “We don’t know. The doctors didn’t know. They said it was teenager stuff. Loneliness. Loss of a sense of self-worth. Humiliation by a girl. Lack of friends. There’s a name for it. I don’t care what the name of it is. Giving it a name won’t bring Adam back. That answer your questions?”

  “Yes, thanks,” said Mac.

  “He hurt some more people, didn’t he?” Duncan asked.

  “It looks that way.”

  “If you find him…” Eve trailed off.

  “I’ll have him get in touch with you,” said Mac.

  He could hear the woman crying softly. Someone hung up the phone.

  You can’t protect a person if you can’t find him. By the same token, whoever was trying to kill Paul Sunderland probably couldn’t find him either. Mac was reasonably sure that the someone was Keith Yunkin.

  Twenty minutes later, in Sunderland’s apartment, which was in the same building as his office, Mac watched the therapist throw some things together into a worn leather garment bag, including cuff links and two watches, one of them a Movado, a real one, not a knockoff you could buy for fifteen bucks from a midtown sidewalk stand.

  “I could just take a train or get a flight out of town,” said Sunderland. “I could stay in touch and you could tell me when you’ve caught Adam.”

  “His name is Keith,” said Mac. “Adam was his brother.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Sunderland.

  “He wasn’t a sexual predator,” said Mac. “He was pretending to be one.”

  “I see,” said Sunderland, “but why can’t I—?”

  “We don’t know what his resources are,” said Mac. “I’d say he’s very resourceful. We’d like you where you can be under police protection.”

  “And if I don’t want to be?” asked Sunderland.

  “We’ll insist,” said Mac.

  Mac used Sunderland’s computer and found a Web site that sold military knives—American, German, British, Italian, you name it. Mac named it and searched the photographs. Two fit the rough description Keith Yunkin’s father had given. Mac called the number on the site. It was for an address in Queens. He ordered six knives at twelve dollars each and told the woman who took his order that he needed them sent to the crime scene lab by courier.

  “I’m not sure…” the woman who took his order said. She sounded young. She sounded New York.

  “I am,” said Mac flatly. “I’m a police office investigating a murder and I want to stop another one.”

  “I’m sending it,” the woman said. “Cash, check or credit card?”

  He gave her a credit card number and expiration date.

  Mac glanced out of the window. Even though the rain had stopped, the sky was still dark, rumbling, ominous. The black clouds moved quickly in from the ocean, threatening to release again. Water was still ankle deep or higher in the streets.

  Was it a June afternoon? Was it really nine years ago? He had taken an afternoon off. They had gone to the Central Park Zoo to watch the penguins. His wife was a penguin person. He was a seal person. They had been in no hurry. People passed them as they sat eating peanuts, saying nothing, deciding without saying it that this was a special day and they should celebrate with her favorite, Thai food. And then it had rained. Suddenly. They had been caught. Soaked. No umbrella. No cabs would stop on Fifth Avenue. Traffic was bumper-to-bumper and filled with frustration. They went to the apartment, stripped, made love. Eight years maybe. A June afternoon.

  An hour after he had called to place his order, Mac sat in white lab coat and carefully sheared off slivers of stainless steel from the tip of an Army Ranger knife. It was painstaking, slow, absorbing in its detail.

  He almost forgot about that day in June.

  Jackson Street was flooded, knee-deep, like many other streets in Queens. Kids in shorts had stripped the wheels from old skateboards and were trying with little success to surf down the empty streets.

  The water was overflow, sewer backup, filthy and dangerous. There were warnings on television and radio, but the kids of Queens were not paying attention. They were having fun.

  Sam Delvechio screamed, “Get out of my way,” and, board in hand, ran through the dark water as fast as he could. Then he plopped stomach down on the board and sailed surprisingly quickly down the middle of the street. He was going in the direction the water was flowing.

  His friends Doug and Al took their turns, gulping in bacteria and laughing.

  “Look,” Al called out.

  A fish, about a foot long and moving against the flow, swam down the street.

  “Catch it,” Al called.

  They grabbed for the fish, but couldn’t hold it.

  “Hit it with the board,” called Sam.

  Doug swung at the fish with his board, missed. Al took a turn and hit the fish, which was just getting the idea that it wasn’t safe. It sped up.

  Sam took a turn, hit the fish. The fish turned on its side, still swimming. Sam was about to strike again when he stepped on something. No surprise. He was barefoot in the middle of the street.

  He was about to swing again when Al said, “Hey look.”

  Blood curled up to the surface of the dark water in front of Sam.

  Sam reached down and groped for whatever it was he had stepped on. The fish righted itself and swam away. Sam came up with something that looked like, and was, one of his toes.

  “Hey, shit,” said Al.

  Sam looked dazed and said, “It doesn’t hurt.”

  “Get your aunt,” said Al. “They can sew it back on.”

  “My aunt?” asked Sam, staring at the bloody toe in his hand.

  “No, Sam,” said Al, whose father was a paramedic. “The hospital.”

  Doug stepped forward, reached down into the murky water, cautiously moved his hand along the surface of the street and touched something. He lifted it and held it up.

  The open blade of the Army Ranger knife was stained with blood.

  It had been dark during and before the rain, but it was even darker now. Somewhere behind the ominous clouds and rumbling sky the sun was going down. Night was coming.

  “My first name’s John,” said Devlin as the board was eased into the pit by two other firemen.

  The board was blue, plastic, two and a half feet wide and seven feet long.

  “Stella,” she said.

  “Stella,” he repeated. “I’ll be right back up with your partner.”

  “Be careful,” she said.

  There was a metal coil hooked to the fireman’s waist. Devlin had removed his raincoat and put on a long-sleeved plastic jacket.

  Stella nodded and Devlin straddled the board. The two firemen at the surface started to ease him down by slowly releasing the coil as Devlin slid into a darkness broken only by the light mounted on his hat.

  The sides of the pit bled dirt and debris around him.

  Standing near the edge, Stella watched the light bob into the blackness and grow smaller as the fireman descended.

  Stella turned her eyes to the taut metal line and the two men who were easing it down. The line went slack and Devlin’s voice called, “I’m down.”

  There was little room for movement at the bottom of the pit. Hawkes was kneeling and holding Custus’s head out of the water. In the light from his lamp, Devlin could see the injured man’s pale face. The man wasn’t dead. Not yet.

  “Doctor?”

  “I’m okay,” said Hawkes.

  There was “okay” and “okay.” Devlin had seen them all. He looked at the beam that trapped Custus’s broken ankle. He unhooked the metal coil from his waist and reached over to hand it to Hawkes. Hawkes shook his head.

  “You’ll need my help,” he said, nodding toward Custus.

  “I know how to do this,” said Devlin.

  “And I know what his body can take. Let’s get it done.”

  It was Devlin’s t
urn to nod.

  “What’re you nattering about?” said Custus, eyes closed. “Can’t you see a man is trying to reach nirvana here?”

  “He has a morbid sense of humor,” said Hawkes.

  “I’m not easily amused,” said Devlin. “Let’s get him out of here.”

  He reached into the water, found the rubble under Custus’s ankle.

  “Can’t move the beam,” he said, pulling his hand out of the water. “We have to try to clear enough room under that ankle to pull him out.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Hawkes.

  “Let’s do it carefully,” said Devlin. “The beam is wedged tight. It’s not going to shift, at least not because we remove some of what’s under it. Slow so more debris doesn’t slide down when we work.”

  “There’s an irony here,” Custus said weakly, painfully, as the two men reached under his broken ankles. “But it eludes me.”

  “Under the circumstances,” said Devlin, “that comes as no surprise.”

  “Ahhh.” Custus groaned in pain as a chunk of plaster the size of a football crashed into the water near his head. “This,” said Custus, “is the moment in which I am to nobly tell you to save yourselves and leave me to my fate, but I have a secret.”

  “More than one,” said Hawkes.

  “Well, yes, but you’ve penetrated some of my better ones,” Custus said. “No, the secret is that I’m not afraid to die, but I am very curious about the future I’ll miss if I do. Ah, the irony. Now I remember. You are risking your lives to save me so that I can be accused of a bevy of crimes including murder. If brought to trial and convicted, I will spend what remains of my life in what…?”

  Neither Hawkes nor Devlin answered.

  “In a dark pit,” Custus supplied.

  “Might be clear,” said Devlin, leaning back, knowing that they had been lucky so far, knowing there was only so much luck to go around for a fireman. “Let’s try it. I’ll take him under the arms and pull him slowly. You ease his leg under the beam. Let’s do it.”

  “Wait,” said Custus. “Doctor, you wouldn’t have something a bit stronger than those pills to knock me into oblivion?”

  “I’ve already given you enough morphine to knock out a horse,” said Hawkes.

  “Did you? Well, it must have been a Shetland pony. I suppose there’s no recourse other than to pass out or suffer. The choice now belongs to whatever gods may be who hold dominion over my impenetrable soul.”

  “Now,” said Devlin.

  They moved him. His ankle didn’t quite clear the beam. Hawkes moved Custus’s legs to the side, both hands on the ankle to feel where the bone was most vulnerable to further fracture.

  A wave of water seeped in from the jagged wall where the dark open part of the cellar had been minutes earlier. Devlin’s beam fell on Hawkes’s face. Hawkes shook his head. Both men knew that they were working against a ticking clock that had only a few minutes left.

  “Do your best,” said Devlin. “We’re trying again. And this time it works even if it isn’t pretty.”

  Devlin renewed his grip under Custus’s arms as Hawkes reached into the water under the beam.

  “Okay,” said Hawkes.

  “Now,” said Devlin, pulling.

  “Sweet Secret Jesus,” screamed Custus.

  Hawkes turned the ankle as Devlin pulled.

  Something cracked in Custus’s leg.

  “Let me be,” he said. “You torturous—”

  “You’re clear,” said Hawkes.

  Custus didn’t hear. He’d passed out.

  “Quickly but carefully,” said Devlin tying the coil around Custus.

  The two men eased his dead weight in the awkwardly tight space. They moved slowly, fighting the urge to hurry, an urge that could get them all killed.

  “Ease him up,” Devlin called to the two firemen above. “He’s not conscious.”

  The coil went tight and the limp, dripping man was hauled on the board slowly upward until he was no longer visible.

  “You’re next,” said Devlin.

  Hawkes didn’t argue. When the coil came down, he helped Devlin put it around his waist. Then Hawkes reached for his kit. He had placed Custus’s gun inside the kit next to the other evidence he had gathered. Custus had not been all that wrong in the assessment of his situation. The difference was that Sheldon Hawkes did not see the irony.

  “Let’s go together,” said Hawkes.

  “Too heavy,” said Devlin. “I’ll see you on solid ground.”

  Hawkes felt the pull around his chest as the coil dug in and he was lifted upward into twilight and the waiting face of Stella, who reached over with one of the firemen to help him over the brink.

  “You need a long shower,” she said with a grin as he stood on more-or-less solid ground.

  Across the bombed-out remains of Doohan’s, Hawkes saw an ambulance that had to be carrying Custus pull away down Catherine. The ambulance lights were spinning. Half a block farther the siren began to blare.

  Stella and Hawkes both watched the coil go back down the hole, clacking against the plastic board. A sound like the belch of a giant echoed from below.

  The coil dropped farther, went taut, and the two firemen pulled. Slowly, Devlin appeared. He was helped over the edge by the two firemen who had pulled him up.

  Devlin looked over at Stella and grinned.

  Stella grinned back.

  The monster from below bellowed and went silent.

  The walls of the pit did not suddenly collapse. Days later the hole remained and was finally covered over by a bulldozer, which flattened what was left of Doohan’s Bar and left the space free for a well-equipped workout center. It would be called Doohan’s Gym.

  The hotel Ellen Janecek and Paul Sunderland were taken to for the night was barely a two-star accommodation. Sunderland offered to pay for an upgrade to another hotel, but Mac had no time to make the move and besides, there were no other rooms available. People had been trapped by the deluge. Rooms had been gobbled. In other cities, the people might be irritable, complaining. In New York, they were resigned. New Yorkers were no strangers to disaster.

  Sunderland and Janecek had been transported to the hotel by Don Flack, who had made sure that they were not followed.

  Neither of them had objected, not when Mac gave them a hint of what Keith Yunkin had done to the three other people in the therapy group.

  Both of them had been told to stay in their rooms, use room service, make no phone calls. A uniformed officer was in place outside each of their doors.

  “How long will I have to do this?” Sunderland had asked.

  “Till we catch him,” said Flack.

  “What? A day? Two days?”

  “I don’t know. Enjoy the HBO.”

  Ellen Janecek hadn’t asked how long. She had nodded affirmatively to everything Flack said. She smiled that I-have-a-secret smile that made him uneasy, then announced she was going to take a shower.

  Flack named her Beautiful Dreamer. Mac thought it fit. Flack had left her after she locked the door behind him.

  He nodded at the burly dark cop outside her door. She was safe. At least for tonight.

  When she got out of the shower, Ellen’s cell phone was ringing. She had been told not to make calls. She hadn’t been told not to answer them. Besides, it was an automatic response on her part. The phone rings, you answer it.

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Ellen, I gotta see you. Where are you?”

  The line was bad, very bad. She could barely make out the words.

  “Jeffrey?”

  “My mom’s…tonight…never.”

  “I can’t hear you,” she said.

  “Please,” he said. “Where are…got to…”

  “The Hopman Hotel,” she said. “You know where it is? Can you get here?”

  “Room?”

  “Four seventeen,” she said.

  The line went dead.

  He was in trouble. Jeffrey was in trouble. Jeffre
y needed her. She couldn’t turn him away. She wouldn’t turn him away. She loved him.

  It was a little after nine. Mac rubbed his eyes, touched his face. He needed a shave. The lights flickered in the lab and made a crackling sound before returning to full strength.

  The storm was over, at least for now, but the standing water in streets, gutters and basements was shorting out electrical circuits. Subways stalled. Dirty rain gurgled up from sewers, and the rats, sniffing at the now-clear air, were rushing more boldly along the sides of buildings in search of food.

  Stella had called, told him the firemen had gotten Hawkes out safely. The force of Mac’s relief had been strong and it made everything a little easier to deal with on this wet and dismal day.

  Mac leaned over the table again and reached for a dropper. He put the dropper into a solution he had prepared with the shavings from the knife tip that had been taken from the body of Timothy Byrold.

  He walked across the room and placed the specimen into a spectrograph. Less than a minute later he had the information he needed. He couldn’t tell the age of the stainless steel, not with certainty, nor could he be sure of the exact corrosion rate because of the dozen factors that affected corrosion. What he could tell was the level of corrosion and the composition of the samples of stainless steel Sid Hammerbeck had taken from the wounds of the victims. If he found the knife the minute flecks of metal had come from, it would be easy to match them. The composition of the stainless steel and the level of corrosion would match the sample to the knife like a fingerprint. In addition, the microscopic ridges of the knife would match the ridges made by the knife when it struck the bone of each victim.

  And Mac was about to seek that match now.

  The knife that cut off the toe of the boy in Queens lay on the lab table. The hospital had turned the knife over to the police. The knife was an Army Ranger knife, not all that unusual. But what was unusual was that it was scalpel sharp, which accounted for its going cleanly through the boy’s toe. The Queens detective who had taken the knife remembered the bulletin, marked urgent, about three sexually mutilated victims who had been murdered with sharp, stainless steel. The detective had dropped the knife in an evidence bag and sent it to the CSI lab in Manhattan.