Shadows Still Remain

by Peter de Jonge

  He glances at his screen. “One seventeen.”

  “Has anyone been here to look at it yet?”

  “Not that I know.”

  The student pages a burly Polish custodian, who finds O’Hara a pair of rubber gloves and a plastic bag. Rather than going with her, which would require closing the girls’ locker room, he gives O’Hara the master key. Number 117 is at the end of a row of full-size lockers allocated to varsity athletes. Several pairs of sneakers are piled at the bottom, and shorts, shirts, and running bras hang from the hooks. On an upper shelf beside some toiletries is a stack of expensive-looking envelopes, and when she pulls them down she sees that they’ve all been sent by one person. O’Hara carefully opens the top one. “I feel like I just got off a train at the wrong station and the joke’s on me,” she reads. “I think you made a hasty decision and you’ll regret it, but right now all I want to do is fuck you, plain and simple.”

  The blunt, aching horniness of that last line takes O’Hara by surprise and reminds her that it’s been too long since she’s felt anything like it. Then she opens and reads the four remaining notes, which are just as direct and unrequited. All five are signed “Tommy.”

  O’Hara carefully slides them into the plastic bag and walks out to her car. At this point, O’Hara is so exhausted she can barely see straight, yet one question bobs to the surface on its own. If Pena wasn’t impressed by a guy who can make turkey stuffing and cranberry sauce from scratch, and wasn’t stirred by expressions of honest heartfelt lust, what or who did she want?

  18

  Saturday morning, buoyed by a night and a half of dreamless sleep, O’Hara steers her Jetta onto the Henry Hudson Bridge and heads for lower Manhattan. With her homicide tour expired, it’s back to the usual Seventh Precinct bullshit, but as O’Hara drives past the George Washington Bridge and the Seventy-ninth Street Boat Basin and the latest crap from Trump, she doesn’t feel deflated. And when she exits at Twenty-fourth Street and flips open her cell and dials the number for the precinct, she understands why. She never intended to go back to work in the first place.

  “I need a day off, Sarge,” she tells Callahan. “I’m burnt to a crisp.”

  “Then take one, Darlene. You deserve it. More than deserve it.” If Callahan weren’t such a useless prick, she might almost feel bad.

  O’Hara continues east to First Avenue, her rattling Jetta showing its 97,000 miles, finds a space on Thirty-first Street and walks into the office of the medical examiner. Lebowitz’s door is closed, and when she knocks, she hears a drawer slide shut before he tells her to come in.

  “Working on your screenplay?” asks O’Hara.

  “No screenplay,” says Lebowitz as he opens his drawer and holds up the recondite medical journal he had been busted in the process of reading. If O’Hara is not mistaken, the thirty-two-year-old ME is blushing. “And I’m not consulting on Law & Order or The Wire. I’m the only one here who isn’t.”

  “You don’t like money?”

  “Never had any, I wouldn’t know. But I like my job as it is. I’m not trying to parlay it into something else. You here about Pena?”

  “Yeah,” says O’Hara. “I was hoping to take another look. I’m trying to make sense of all those wounds, the gouging in particular.”

  “It’s an unusual way to torture someone,” says Lebowitz. “And hard work.”

  As Lebowitz walks O’Hara down the hall, she gets her second surprise of the morning. Not only does Lebowitz blush and avoid eye contact, he moves well, like an athlete. In the morgue, he slides Pena’s body out of her refrigerated locker onto a gurney and unzips the heavy plastic pouch. Seeing the ghostly Pena on her back, O’Hara is struck by the distinct halves of a long-distance runner, the torso spare and delicate, the thighs sturdy and powerful. “A pretty amazing body,” says O’Hara.

  “If you like skinny dead girls,” says Lebowitz.

  “The problem,” continues Lebowitz, “is there are so many gouges, it’s impossible to focus on any of them. Let’s break her into quads and see if that helps.” He pulls the top zipper down to the middle of Pena’s neck and the bottom zipper up to her waist, so that only the area between her shoulders and hips is exposed. “This should make it less overwhelming.”

  On the front of Pena’s torso, Lebowitz counts twelve gouges. “The wounds show almost no consistency,” he says. “In length they range from six inches to an inch and three quarters; in depth, from over an inch to little more than a scrape.”

  Lebowitz then covers Pena’s upper half and exposes her legs. This quadrant has fewer gouges (nine), and they’re smaller and shallower. “The blade was getting duller,” says Lebowitz, pointing at the rough edges. “The killer must have worked his way from the top down.”

  “And it looks like he was getting tired,” says O’Hara. “The work is getting sloppier.”

  “Or maybe he’s losing enthusiasm. By now the victim would probably have lost consciousness.”

  When Lebowitz rolls Pena over, they can see at a glance that the wounds on her back are larger and deeper than those on the other three quadrants, and the edges of the wounds are the cleanest, indicating that this is where the gouging began. “If someone was torturing someone,” says Lebowitz, “you’d think they’d start on the front, where the victim would be able to see what was happening to her.”

  “Is there any way of determining which gouge was made first?” asks O’Hara.

  “Not with certainty. But if I had to pick, it would be this one.” Lebowitz points to a rectangular wound about the size of a credit card on the right side of Pena’s lower back. “It’s deep, and the edges look especially clean. The attacker clearly took his time with this one.”

  Lebowitz pulls latex gloves over his long fingers and with a scalpel cuts a very thin slice from the center of the wound, places the cross section on a glass slide and walks it to a scuffed-up microscope on a nearby table. In high school, Lebowitz would have been the kind of nerd O’Hara would have shunned and, maybe even worse, given a hard time. But as he carefully takes off his wire-rimmed glasses, pushes back his dark unruly hair and bends over the eyepiece, O’Hara realizes she’s become more open-minded. What she would like to do to Lebowitz now is stick her tongue in his ear.

  “Sam?”

  “What?”

  “Thanks for calling me directly about the DNA and not just telling Lowry. I really appreciate that.”

  “I couldn’t help myself,” says Lebowitz. “I’m a Knicks fan. I root for the underdog.”

  “One other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Before, when you said you didn’t like dead skinny girls, were you just saying that? Or did you really mean it?”

  “Every word of it,” says Lebowitz, grinning but not turning from the eyepiece. “I’m a sucker for a pulse.”

  “One last thing, Sam?”

  “What’s that, Darlene?”

  “You see anything in there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What?”

  “Ink.”

  19

  If you don’t think women are suckers, check out the visitors waiting room at Rikers on a Saturday afternoon. The dingy space holds two hundred plastic chairs, and there’s a dolled-up woman in every one. The only male visitors are babies and toddlers. These girls can barely keep their own head above water, and they’ve all spent way more money and energy than they can afford to put on a good show for some punk. Even their kids are decked out in miniature shearlings and Baby Gap.

  In her standard-issue overcoat, slacks and sensible shoes, O’Hara is conspicuously underdressed, but most of the looks she gets are smiles, the girls assuming she’s in the same leaky boat as them until a guard escorts her out of the room. “What about me?” shouts a girl who can’t be more than nineteen. “I’ve been here two hours already. She ain’t been here twenty minutes.”

  “She’s a cop,” explains someone smarter.

  The guard leads O’Hara down a hallway smell
ing of watered-down cleanser and into a narrow room split in half by a Plexiglas wall. Inmates are on one side, their girls and babies on the other, and though the room is packed, it’s remarkably quiet, everyone, even kids, doing their best to help their parents carve out a little privacy.

  McLain’s got a spot near the center of the room. When O’Hara sits opposite him, she sees the deep bruise above his right eye, the swollen lip and the cuts on the side of his head. The only good news is he’s fighting back. The knuckles on both hands are swollen and raw.

  “I hope you’re holding your own,” says O’Hara.

  “Don’t have much choice.”

  “Sorry about that,” says O’Hara, “and sorry I couldn’t do more at the precinct. But I got to ask you something—did Francesca have any tattoos?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Where were they?”

  “She only had one…on her lower back, off to the right. When she came home at the end of September, she had just gotten it.”

  “You know what it was?”

  “All I remember is a big heart with an S inside, but I barely saw it. Francesca said it had to do with her father and didn’t want to talk about it, which I thought was strange. I mean, don’t get a tattoo if you don’t want to draw attention to something. But with her father a junkie and dying of AIDS, that whole time in Chicago was pretty much off limits. So I let it go.”

  “Francesca ever mention a guy named Tommy?”

  “Who’s that?” asks McLain, struggling to keep the hurt from showing in his banged-up eyes and mouth.

  “I don’t know. I found a note in her locker.”

  When McLain shakes his head no, O’Hara takes a card out of her wallet and holds it to the glass. “I know the police got you a public defender, but here’s one that actually doesn’t suck. Her name is Jane Anne Murray. She’s expecting to hear from you. But don’t use my name on the phone. A detective will probably be listening to your calls.”

  20

  New York Hardcore Tattoos and Piercing is bowling-lane tight and deep, and set up like an old barbershop. When O’Hara steps in at 9:00 p.m., prime time for a tattoo parlor, the only people in the mirror-facing chairs are the three tattooed employees. At the front of the shop, O’Hara scans a shelf of hardcore magazines and CDs by bands called Turnpike Wrecks, Last Call Brawl and Heartfelt Discord. Then she thumbs through the stockpile of designs, set out row by row on large laminated sheets, attached to the wall by a hinge.

  The top sheet reminds O’Hara of those first cave drawings. Every creature in the food chain rates a design, although in the tattoo version a disproportionate number are rendered with a stogie jutting from the corner of their mouth. Others celebrate places of origin (Ireland, Puerto Rico) or institutions (the U.S. Marine Corps, Mom), but mostly they name the wearer’s poison, be it cheap liquor, hard drugs or bad girls. And bad girls are overrepresented. A saucy vixen wearing fishnets, horns and a long red tail winks over her shoulder from the center of a page and nearby an angelic-looking rival dangles the key to the lock between her legs. As O’Hara jumps from a page celebrating noir chicks to one lined with gun barrels pluming smoke and knives dripping blood, she realizes that what she’s really looking at is police work, or at least the incendiary crap that gets the ball rolling rapidly in that direction.

  The detail, wit and imagination of many of the designs make O’Hara smile, and one in particular makes her laugh out loud, because it reminds her of that loquacious little Irishman Russ Dineen. It’s a tat of the Grim Reaper, and obviously this one works the projects, because he’s packing a .45 along with his scythe. To Dineen, who regaled O’Hara with tales of corpses frozen in the act of hiding their faces, or fighting off phantom intruders, the Reaper is just one more municipal grunt riding elevators and knocking on doors, and as real as the Con Ed meter man.

  Eventually, a tattoo artist named Vincent gets off his ass and approaches O’Hara from behind. “Whatever you pick, you can’t go wrong,” he says. “On redheads the colors explode.”

  “Not quite there yet,” replies O’Hara. “but I’m tempted. No shit.” Instead of a wrinkled photo of a rose or butterfly, she pulls out her shield and a picture of Pena. She explains the reason for her visit.

  “The girl’s name was Francesca Pena. She was murdered last week, and we’re quite sure the person who killed her cut a small tattoo out of her lower back. She lived around the corner from here, so maybe she had it done here. It would have been just over two months ago. The end of September.”

  Vincent checks his records and comes back shaking his head. “We only did eleven tats the whole month. Even if she used another name, a pretty girl like her, one of us would remember her.”

  O’Hara isn’t surprised business is slow at Hardcore. On her way back from Rikers, she stopped at her place and printed out the names of thirty-seven tattoo parlors between Union Square and Canal Street, and can’t believe there’s enough empty epidermis left to go around. Fanning out from Pena’s Orchard Street address, O’Hara spends the rest of the night working through her list. She goes from tiny setups in the back of smoke shops on St. Marks to high-tech operations as chilly and antiseptic as operating rooms, but most fall somewhere between an all-night Laundromat and a dive bar. O’Hara is making stops well past midnight, and around 2:30 a.m., when the Manhattan parlors stop answering their phones, she crosses from Chinatown into Brooklyn and heads for Williamsburg.

  Bedford Avenue is teeming, but the windy blocks by the river are empty. On a desolate warehouse-filled stretch of Wythe, above a basement entrance, O’Hara spots the skull, glowing orange like a jack-o’-lantern, and dangling from a creaking chain. Above it, swinging in the wind, is the crude wood sign for Bad Idea Tattoos.

  Inside, the cicada drone of a working needle fills the air, and an enormous man, whose bald beige head is as festooned as Melville’s harpooner, Queequeg, bends like a vampire over the pale neck of a skinny rock boy. A girl, every exposed inch inked and/or pierced, greets O’Hara at the counter. She is no more than seventeen, as elongated and lovely as a model, and O’Hara tries not to wince at how efficiently she has rendered herself unemployable at anything other than what she is doing now.

  “Theo,” calls the girl, and the room falls quiet, as the tattoo artist spins away from his client and rolls up to the counter in his wheelchair. For the twentieth time that night, O’Hara pulls out Pena’s picture, and Theo reaches for it with the biggest hand she’s ever seen.

  “I thought she might be a fainter,” says Theo. “It was her first one, and she wanted it just big enough to read. But I was wrong, and the tattoo was right. That little girl had a lot of heart, not to mention a world-class Puerto Rican behind.”

  Despite his barbaric visage, Theo runs a tight ship and keeps a copy of every piece of work on his laptop. A printer spits out a facsimile of what he etched on Pena’s backside. As McLain recalled and Theo alluded, the overall design is heart shaped. But that’s not an S at the center, it’s a $, and it’s surrounded by six letters. The design Theo hands her looks like this:

  The little lines, like quotation marks, rippling out on each side of the dollar sign, make the heart look like it’s pumping money instead of blood.

  21

  O’Hara stuffs the copy of Pena’s tattoo into her coat and steps back into the cold. The river is so close she hears it lapping against the breakwater, and looking across it, can take in the whole east flank of Manhattan from East River Park, where Loomis and Navarro found Pena five days ago, to the Triboro. How about that? thinks O’Hara. The Brooklyn girl, who didn’t even know she was smart until after she got kicked out of high school, knows something Manhattan doesn’t. It makes the city look different.

  O’Hara knows the paper in her pocket is significant. If the killer intentionally removed Pena’s tattoo, then maybe all the other gouges and burns are a misdirect, an attempt to make a coldly calculated crime seem random and psychotic. That could explain the discrepancy between the apparent rage of the
several-hour attack and the lack of any DNA evidence. With McLain in Rikers, Lowry has expanded his search for McLain’s 1986 Aerostar, sending NYPD detectives to Westfield and the surrounding areas and coordinating efforts with police departments in Boston and Springfield and Hartford. He even sent cops to Farmington, Connecticut, where Pena went to prep school. Take away McLain, and all Lowry has got is an opportunistic predator, someone who stumbled on a drunk girl on a dark corner and saw his chance. But if removing the tattoo was so important to the killer, killer and victim must be linked in some way. They can’t be strangers.

  Too amped to think straight, O’Hara races back across the Williamsburg Bridge. Homicide South is housed in the Thirteenth on East Twenty-first Street between Second and Third, buried in the back of the third floor in a space even smaller and filthier than the detective room at the Seven. At three in the morning, Lowry is the only one there. He sits at his desk and watches porn on his laptop, and although he mutes the moaning for O’Hara’s benefit, he doesn’t lift his eyes from the screen.

  “Girl on girl,” he says, “my Achilles’ heel.” O’Hara takes the copy of the tattoo from her pocket and drops it next to Lowry’s laptop. “What now, more receipts for brussels sprouts?”

  O’Hara knows she should grab her scrap of paper and bolt, but is too excited by what she’s just learned not to share it, particularly since it proves her right and Lowry wrong. Stammering in her rush to get it all out, she explains how Lebowitz found that the first and deepest of Pena’s gouges was the one that removed a tattoo, and also explains that she just got a copy of the removed design from the Williamsburg tattoo parlor where Pena had the work done. As O’Hara describes what she thinks it means, Lowry turns his attention back to his laptop and smiles appreciatively at the action. He never looks at the piece of paper.