Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  O’Hara has no idea why she said that. She doesn’t have a dildo under her bed or anywhere else, but Krekorian’s junior-high leering, just like the tone of some of the newspaper stories, ticks her off and provokes a knee-jerk protective response. Those stories seem particularly unfair now that it looks like the only reason Pena was stalling at the bar was that she didn’t have the heart to face her puppy dog old boyfriend. Even after they leave McLain and hump down the stairs, O’Hara stays on Krekorian’s case about it. “The way you showed me that box was classic. It’s like you’re fourteen.”

  “That’s not fair, Dar. I was just surprised Nike made a butt plug is all. Who do you think they’re going to get to endorse it?”

  “Callahan,” says O’Hara. “This is Sergeant Callahan from NYPD, and I’m here to tell you about a remarkable new product that changed my life.”

  Outside, the lights have come on and the slushy rain has turned to light snow, and in the soft light the profiles of the narrow streets, with their tenements and synagogues, can’t look much different than they did a hundred years ago. A large pack of NYU students have walked down from the campus and poured into the neighborhood to pass out pictures of their missing classmate, and in their straightforward parkas and hiking boots, they resemble missionaries.

  O’Hara and Krekorian walk back through Rivington Park. This time O’Hara notices the crude sculptures rearing up in the weeds like downtown scarecrows, and when they get back to the Impala, O’Hara sees that Freemans has spawned a retail outlet, located at the mouth of the alley, called Freemans Sporting Club. The window is dressed with the same kind of old-timey props as the bar, and in the corner a sign reads, TAILORED CLOTHING, BARBERSHOP AND SUTLERY.

  What the fuck, thinks O’Hara. A condo called the Atelier. A store that sells sutlery. O’Hara has worked in the precinct for five years, but take away the projects on the perimeter and she could be in a foreign country.

  9

  Three hours later, just before midnight, O’Hara and Krekorian watch through the falling snow as hundreds of NYU students and faculty crowd under the redbrick overhang in front of Bobst Library. While more students stream in from all directions, those in front, closest to the glass doors, grab a lit candle off a long table and file into the southeast corner of Washington Square. The column moves silently past the leafless trees and white-limned statue of Garibaldi, and when a thousand candlelit faces surround the recessed circle at the center of the stone plaza, O’Hara and Krekorian leave their car to stand at the rear of the crowd.

  Unlike the Lower East Side, Washington Square doesn’t seem foreign to O’Hara at all. As high school freshmen, O’Hara and her best friend, Leslie Meehan, would often skip school and catch a train into big bad Manhattan. A sizable chunk of those happy truant days was idled away in this very park, drinking Bud out of paper bags and making out with older boys with sideburns and brave smiles. The first time she let a boy slip a hand between her legs was in the grass at the edge of the square, although when she thought back on it, it was probably she who took his hand and guided it there. Sex is the one realm in which she felt at ease from the very beginning, maybe because with your clothes off, differences in class and income and education seemed less important and the playing field almost level. O’Hara isn’t so naive anymore. She realizes now that death is the only leveler, and although some of these kids will undoubtedly get laid post-vigil, it’s the prospect of death, not sex, that’s brought them into the park tonight.

  At the center of the circle are five stone mounds often commandeered by tattooed jugglers, fire eaters and street comedians. When the crowd settles, some twenty students separate themselves from the pack, divide into groups of three and four, and climb onto the elevated platforms. Then a female student, small and blond, wearing a camel-hair coat, steps out from the crowd to face them. When she throws her arms into the air, twenty voices rise into the snow-filled night, and as O’Hara follows them upward, she looks north over the scaled-down Arc de Triomphe and elegant town houses just north of the park to the office towers of Midtown, where these same kids will soon be fighting hand to hand, cubicle to cubicle. In the middle of the dirge, which O’Hara is pretty sure is in Latin, her cell goes off.

  “Darlene,” says George Loomis, another detective in the Seven, “some skell in East River Park just stumbled on a body by the tennis courts. Me and Navarro are on our way over, but thought you’d want to know. The description sounds a lot like your girl.”

  10

  Krekorian does a U-turn on LaGuardia, and with his siren pushing aside the sparse traffic, runs reds across town. Just short of the river, he takes the access road under the FDR Drive into the park and turns toward the pulsing lights in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. East River Park is a narrow strip of public recreational space squeezed between the highway and the river that no one at tonight’s vigil is likely to have set foot in, not because it’s a wretched place, but because the highway cuts it off from the city. During the day, families from the projects take the walkways that cross over the highway into the park, but at night, it’s a no-man’s-land. If you’re looking for a spot to dump a body, you could do a lot worse.

  Krekorian drives south past the soccer fields and the baseball diamonds, and pulls in behind the squad car parked between the tennis courts and an overgrown bathroom. Whitewashed by a couple of inches of fresh snow, the park looks as good as it ever will, but the snow can’t do much for the FDR over their shoulder or the black undercarriage of the bridge or the warehouses that form the Williamsburg skyline across the river. On the other side of the squad car, blocked in by a van from Crime Scene, is a piece-of-crap Impala as filthy as theirs, and standing beside it are Steve Navarro, George Loomis and Russ Dineen.

  Navarro and Loomis, who wear dark wool topcoats pulled off the same oversize discount rack, are fellow Seventh Precinct detectives who work the shift opposite O’Hara and Krekorian, and because this part of the park, the approximate latitude of Delancey Street, falls in the Seven, they got the call. The third, much smaller man, an unlit Camel bobbing precariously from the corner of his mouth, and wearing a leather jacket with a Grim Reaper patch sewn on the shoulder, is a medical legal inspector named Russ Dineen. Over the summer O’Hara and MLI Dineen worked on the suicide of a young female Indian intern. Before anyone bothered to pick up the phone, the body had been facedown in a tub for days, and thanks to Dineen, the straightforward but unforgettable phrase “Indian people soup” was added to O’Hara’s lexicon.

  Crime Scene has taped off a large rectangle around the bathroom, using the tennis court fence for one side. O’Hara wants nothing more than to duck under the yellow tape and see for herself if it’s Pena, but etiquette requires that she first exchange pleasantries with the men who got here before her.

  “Pretty horrendous,” says Loomis, an even-keeled big guy not prone to exaggeration. “How long she been here, Russ?” asks O’Hara.

  “It’s been cold,” says Dineen, and having squeezed whatever distraction he can from an unlit cigarette, finally cups his hands around it and fires it up. “Decomp is nothing like the summer, Dar. Based on color, smell, maggot activity and everything else, I’d say less than a week, but not much.”

  “That works,” says Krekorian. “Pena hasn’t been seen since early Thursday morning.”

  O’Hara takes out a copy of the picture on lampposts and doors all over the LES. “She look like this?”

  “This girl doesn’t look like anything, Dar,” says Navarro.

  “Whoever killed her had some fun first,” says Dineen. “Rape probably. Torture definitely. She’s carved up like a totem pole.”

  “Who found her?”

  Navarro nods at the backseat of the squad car, where a man in rags is having a heated conversation with himself. “The plumbing in the bathroom hasn’t worked for years, but sometimes the skels go in to get out of the weather.”

  “He goes by Pythagoras,” says Loomis. “Last known address, the planet Nebulo
n. We’d talk to him but didn’t want to interrupt.”

  “Fellas, I got to take a look,” says O’Hara. “Me and K. been working this all day.”

  Whatever excitement O’Hara feels at the prospect of catching her first homicide turns into something stronger and murkier as she and Krekorian stoop under the yellow tape and inch into the bathroom. The body of a naked girl, encased in a pair of clear plastic shower curtains, lies on its side under the urinals. The two techs from Crime Scene, who stare at them unpleasantly from where they are stringing lights, wear masks, but the smell—equal parts excrement, decomposition and brand-new plastic—is not as foul as O’Hara had braced for. Much worse is the way the victim’s final anguish is sealed and shrink-wrapped in bloodstained plastic. Her terribly constricted body is trapped exactly as the murderer left her, with her wrists bound behind her back and her legs bent slightly backward, tied at the ankles, her mouth sealed with tape, and her eyes wide open, as if still disbelieving what is being done to her. O’Hara feels as if she’s watching the crime itself, not the result.

  As O’Hara strains to take in the corpse in near darkness, the generator surges and the bathroom is flooded with light. Once her eyes adjust, she notices the missing tips from several toes chewed off by rats and at the other open end of the plastic tube, the missing tufts of short black hair. She now sees what Dineen meant by the totem pole. Livid circles cover the front of the victim’s body from ankles to shoulder blades. Before the lights went on, O’Hara thought they were bruises, the product of a terrible beating. Now she sees that they are gouges, some an inch deep. And although, as Navarro said, the victim has been far too brutalized to resemble a snapshot taken in better times, and in the harsh light her skin is ghostly pale, the victim’s height, weight, age and eye color all fit the description of the missing girl. O’Hara has no doubt she is looking at the body of Francesca Pena.

  Technicians work the crime scene for hours, taking countless measurements and photographs. A team from Forensics dusts the bathroom door for prints, and an hour later a second team unscrews the door from its hinges and carts the whole thing away. O’Hara, Krekorian, Loomis and Navarro spend much of the night in the Real Time Crime Van. This recent addition to the NYPD motor pool is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of nearly useless customized electronics and computers, but at least the coffeemaker works. At 3:15 a.m. Navarro snorts derisively at the sight of a Jeep Wagoneer pulling up to the crime scene, and the four detectives try not to laugh as their sergeant, Mike Callahan, walks toward the van in cowboy boots and a brand-new leather bomber jacket.

  “What are you two doing here?” he asks O’Hara and Krekorian, although the question would be better asked of him. “Busman’s holiday?”

  “O’Hara caught this as a missing person on Friday,” says Krekorian defensively. “We’ve been working it as a potential homicide since Sunday.”

  “I guess you saw how the papers are running with it, so you know it’s big.”

  Callahan, who made sergeant by scoring well on a test rather than distinguishing himself on the streets and augments his income by selling cop memorabilia out of his basement over the Internet, is the kind of house mouse no working detective has much use for, and O’Hara keeps her eyes moving in the hope it will make her disdain harder to read. She needn’t have worried, because her sergeant’s attention has already shifted to the black official-looking SUV that just drove up, and when Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Van de Meer steps out, the sergeant is gone without a word, ditching his detectives like four losers at a cocktail party.

  “So long, Sarge,” says Loomis under his breath. “It’s been real.”

  Just before 4:00 a.m. TV vans from five networks pull up to the scene together. They’ve obviously received the same call from downtown, because five minutes later, the police commissioner arrives to do a thirty-second remote. O’Hara knows for certain the case is top priority when a third banged-up Impala arrives and Detective Patrick Lowry extricates himself from the passenger seat. Six foot five and nearly four hundred pounds, Lowry resides ambiguously in that gray area between fat and big, playing it either way as the situation dictates, and his eyesight has deteriorated so badly in the last ten years, he can’t drive. And while both his epic size and his myopia have stoked the legend, as well as the fact that he was drafted out of Hofstra by the Philadelphia Eagles, there’s no denying his résumé. Lowry made it to Homicide by twenty-eight and made grade at thirty, and every major homicide in Manhattan in the last twenty years has crossed his desk. Without saying a word to anyone, Lowry, with the help of his partner-chauffeur Frank Grimes, somehow gets himself under the yellow tape and disappears into the bathroom.

  11

  Across the river, a milky dawn puddles up over Brooklyn and Queens as Dineen and his ghouls load Pena into a van, and a grubby phalanx of Impalas follows it out of the park. Twenty minutes later, at the office of the medical examiner, O’Hara and Krekorian jockey for sight lines with Lowry and Grimes and two other homicide detectives. In front of them on a steel gurney, Pena, still bound and encased in plastic, lies on her side, exactly as she has since Thanksgiving morning. When O’Hara arrived, she saw for the first time that the back of the victim is also covered with gouges.

  Conducting the survey of Pena’s multiple wounds is a tall skinny thirty-two-year-old ME, Sam Lebowitz. As he circles the gurney, trailed by a forensic photographer, he jots notes on a long yellow pad, then reads them aloud to the detectives. “Lacerations and trauma on the back and top of the skull,” he says, points at them with his pen, then backs up out of the photographer’s viewfinder. “The skull does not appear to be fractured.” Not to disturb a nearby colleague, who is performing an unattended autopsy of a middle-aged black man, Lebowitz makes his observations in a quiet conversational voice.

  “There is extensive evidence of torture…The victim has been repeatedly and systematically gouged, cut and burned, front and back, from ankles to shoulders…blunt trauma around vagina, anus and inner thighs suggests rape…or multiple rapes.”

  After Pena has been examined and photographed on both sides in the condition in which she was found, Lebowitz, using long thin surgical scissors, cuts away the bloody shower curtains. When he peels the silver packing tape off her lips and removes the panties that had been stuffed into her mouth, O’Hara can see the gap between Pena’s two front teeth that McLain couldn’t stop himself from pointing out in his wallet snapshot that first night in the station house. Finally Lebowitz severs the plastic ties that bind Pena’s wrists and ankles. It’s about time, thinks O’Hara. But by now rigor mortis constricts her body instead, and untethering her limbs does nothing to release them.

  “The shower curtains are an inexpensive common style and brand-new,” says Lebowitz. “I’m not holding out much hope for them.” He slips the four sections of shower curtain, along with the ties, tape and panties, into a large plastic evidence bag and returns to Pena for a second, less obstructed, tour.

  “Closer examination of the head shows trauma was induced by a single blow from a small hard round object and confirms the lack of skull fracture. If the assailant intended to torture the victim, the limited damage of the blow may have been intentional…the body is covered front and back with approximately sixty gouges made with a crude serrated blade…gouges range widely in size, shape and depth…body has also been repeatedly burned with a cigarette lighter and sliced with a second knife, although the number of slicing cuts and burns is significantly smaller than the gouges…the gouging alone would have taken several hours and caused considerable loss of blood, but not necessarily a fatal one, and although the victim has been subjected to overwhelming homicidal violence, there is no clear single cause of death…The lividity, or bruising, suggests the victim did not bleed to death…I think she was tortured until her heart stopped.”

  O’Hara likes the sound of the city in Lebowitz’s shy voice and appreciates the way his mind and body work in sync—his cautious understated observations
matched by the precise movements of his long fingers and hands. And unlike the ME at O’Hara’s only other autopsy, it’s not a performance. Lebowitz doesn’t seem to be playing himself in an episode of CSI.

  “There are abrasions and bruising to the victim’s right wrist and abrasions to the fingertips and heel of the left hand. They could indicate the victim was dragged by her feet over pavement or other abrasive surface.”

  Having completed a second pass of the body, Lebowitz takes out a rape kit and does bucol swabs of Pena’s vagina, anus and mouth, again noting the evidence of trauma to all three. He notices something caught in Pena’s teeth and examines it with a magnifying glass. “Chocolate,” he says, and scrapes it into another plastic envelope.

  Lebowitz then takes a steel comb from the rape kit and runs it through Pena’s pubic hair, which strikes O’Hara as longer and fuller than the current fashion. Lebowitz packs the comb in another plastic bag, then scrapes and cuts Pena’s fingernails, hoping that like the pubic hair and packing tape, they may have snared some small part of her attacker. Having packed them away too, he points out the evidence of tearing in Pena’s anus and vagina and the bruising in her throat.

  To some degree, all this is preamble. The autopsy itself, which consists of the surgical removal and weighing of Pena’s brain, heart, liver and other organs, is yet to begin. When Lebowitz makes a long incision just below the hairline on Pena’s forehead and with a brisk tug peels back her scalp, all six detectives, from O’Hara to the most hardened homicide guys, have seen enough and head for the exit.

  In the waiting area outside, a shattered couple occupy one corner. Although they are nothing like what she pictured, O’Hara knows they must be Pena’s parents. Both are in their late thirties. The mother is tall and blond and looks eastern European, the stepfather compact and swarthy. His thick workingman’s hands lie palm-up at his sides. Only O’Hara stops. She introduces herself as the detective who spoke to them on the phone a couple of nights before.