Most Wanted

by Michele Martinez

  “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go inside and examine the crime scene.”

  Rommie was taken aback. “You want to view the scene now? Melanie, this isn’t show-and-tell for the prosecutors. Besides, what’s your jurisdiction? Murder isn’t normally a federal crime. The state DA’s gonna go ballistic if I let you in.”

  “I could ask you the same question,” she replied evenly. “Why is a narcotics lieutenant running this murder scene instead of somebody from Manhattan North Homicide? But I figure you work out the politics on your end. I’ll handle them on mine. If we get to the scene first, we get first dibs. The state DA will have to live with that. There’s always a way to federalize a murder charge. I just need to hit the books and I’ll find ten cases to cite to the judge.”

  He shook his head uncertainly. “I don’t know, Melanie.”

  She had to find the right words. She risked playing the card of Rommie’s relationship with Bernadette DeFelice. “I understand. You want to make sure everything’s done right, out of respect for Jed’s memory. But remember, you have a special relationship with our office. If we get the case, we’ll handle it with kid gloves. We’ll consult you every step of the way. You won’t get that kind of access from the DA.”

  “You think your boss is gonna consult? Dream on, kid,” he said. But she read something different in his eyes. He was calculating the benefit of his direct pipeline to Bernadette. Melanie stood her ground, watching him, sensing that she’d scored.

  Finally he said, “I’m not gonna stand around arguing all night. We got work to do. If the state’s not here yet, that’s their problem. You’re faster, you get the prize. I’m warning you, though, it’s gonna be ugly in there.”

  “I’m a big girl. I’ll be fine.”

  That left only one logistical hurdle—what to do with Maya while she went inside. Sophie regularly baby-sat for Maya. Unhappily single and dying for a child of her own, she begged to, in fact. But Melanie couldn’t tell if she was too upset tonight. That reminded her—she’d promised to let Rommie know that Sophie wanted to help the firemen.

  “Rommie,” Melanie said, “before we go in, I need to introduce you to my friend Sophie Cho. She’s the architect who worked on redesigning the Bensons’ house. She knows it inside out. She wants to help any way she can.”

  “Architect?” That got his attention.

  “Yes,” Sophie answered.

  “Do you have the blueprints for this building?” he asked.

  Sophie froze up. “They’re on file with the Buildings Department,” she responded stiffly. “Why?”

  “I need them right away.”

  “I don’t have them,” Sophie said, shaking her head emphatically. “But I could go inside and—”

  “No civilians inside. You don’t keep a copy for yourself?” Rommie scrutinized her suspiciously, as if he didn’t believe her. He started to say something else, but one of a group of fire officials standing nearby called his name, gesturing toward the town house.

  “All clear,” Rommie said to Melanie. “I gotta get in there. I’ll follow up with you later about those blueprints, miss. Here, gimme your name and number.” He pulled a small memo book from his breast pocket. Sophie gave him the information. He jotted it down and disappeared back in the direction of the town house, leaving Melanie to follow.

  “What was that about? Why did he want the blueprints?” Sophie asked.

  “They’re probably trying to figure out where the fire started.”

  Melanie reached out and smoothed Sophie’s hair, studying her friend’s face. Sophie’s eyes were dry, but Melanie knew her well enough to understand she could be upset and never show it. Sophie kept everything bottled up inside. A short, intense Korean girl from Flushing, struggling to get to the top of what was, in New York at least, a cutthroat profession. She took a lot of things hard, and Melanie couldn’t quite tell how she was taking this.

  “Are you okay, chica?” Melanie asked gently.

  “Me? I’m fine. It’s the Bensons we should worry about. You need to do something, Melanie. I’ll feel so much better if I know you’re on the case. Let me take Maya home for you so you can do your job.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Well, if you’re really up for it. I know how good you are with her.” It was true. Melanie totally trusted Sophie with Maya.

  “Okay, then it’s settled. Don’t worry, take as long as you need. If I get tired, I’ll snooze on the couch.”

  “You’re the best, Soph! Thank you so much.”

  Melanie gave Sophie her keys and some quick instructions. They hugged, and then Sophie grasped the stroller handles and headed off.

  Melanie turned to the crew-cut cop, back at his post alongside the barricade.

  “I’m going in with the lieutenant.”

  She must have sounded more confident than she felt, because he immediately pulled it aside for her. He had no way of knowing this was her first murder scene. She’d seen autopsy photos, all right, but no matter how graphic or disgusting, pictures were pictures. Hardly the same as real human flesh, slashed, ripped, burned, staring you in the face. She hoped she wouldn’t gag or faint. It’s all part of the job, she told herself, nodding at him as she drew a deep breath and marched toward the town house to view what was left of Jed Benson.

  3

  THE FIREMEN PACKED UP THEIR GEAR, FACES weary in the glow of the flashing lights. Their job was done. The cops and prosecutors were in charge now. Melanie splashed through murky water, hurrying to the basement entrance where she’d seen Rommie Ramirez disappear a moment earlier.

  The wooden door tucked under the curving limestone staircase opened into blackness. As she approached, a Crime Scene detective clad in protective jumpsuit and face mask emerged, shutting off a heavy-duty flashlight. He yanked off his mask and hard hat and wiped his arm across his weather-beaten face, leaving a trail of black.

  “Butch Brennan, right?”

  “Hey, Melanie. Haven’t seen you since that grand jury. You the prosecutor on this case?”

  “Yes, I’m with Lieutenant Ramirez. I need to view the evidence.”

  “Seriously? Jeez, no offense, I know it’s your job and all. But what’s in there is nothing for a woman to see.”

  “I appreciate the concern, Butch, but I can handle myself.”

  “Okay, if you say so. The lieutenant’s toward the back with my team, where the body is. I gotta go talk to the fire chief, or I’d take you in myself. You better cover your nose and mouth. The smell is pretty bad for a kill this fresh.”

  Butch marched off, and Melanie stepped through the door into the darkness. The stench hit her instantly. A powerful combination of charred meat, burned hair, and blood. A human being slashed to bits, fried to a crisp. The smell stopped her dead in her tracks, throwing her right back to that night. The smell of blood, on that night she tried never to remember.

  “PAPI?” MELANIE CALLED, STARING AT THE sliver of light shining out from under the closed door to her father’s office. Something didn’t feel right here.

  She was thirteen. It was night, mid-January in Brooklyn. They lived over her father’s furniture store. She’d come downstairs to get away from her mother’s screaming, to do her homework in peace and quiet. Her father was in his office in the back, avoiding her mother as usual. But all the lights were off in the showroom, and she’d just heard a strange noise. Like a grunt of pain.

  As she reached for the door handle, a muffled thud sounded from behind the door.

  “Papi?” she called again, her voice trembling. No answer.

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open. Her father sat in his customary place behind the desk. But the overhead light was off. The desk lamp cast a yellowish glow on the desktop, leaving his face and the rest of the room in shadows. There was something odd about him, about his posture, his expression. And something smelled funny. Metallic, almost, yet gamy.

  She moved a step farther into the
room and squinted to see better. Her father’s longish black hair flopped over his brow as it always did, but beneath it an angry cut slashed downward across his forehead. Dark blood oozed down the side of his face, disappearing into his hairline, then reappearing again on his chin. He stared back at her, eyes glazed with pain, not moving.

  “What—” she began.

  “¡Corre!” her father choked out. “Run! ¡Fuera de aquí!”

  A STRING OF EMERGENCY LIGHTS FLASHED ON, snapping Melanie back to the present. The basement was intact, though damaged by smoke and water. Cops’ voices floated out from a room down the hall, so she headed for it. The odor got worse as she approached. She gagged, yanking the neckline of her white T-shirt up over her nose and mouth, just as Butch Brennan came up behind her.

  “Got the lights on,” he said.

  “Right.” Her voice was muffled by her shirt, so he didn’t notice its unsteadiness.

  “Here. I got a spare face mask,” he said, pulling one from a pocket of his jumpsuit. She put it on as they entered the room.

  The square, windowless space had obviously been a home office. The richly carved shelves lining three walls were filled with the charred remains of books. Inside, the room reeked of vomit more than anything else.

  “Jesus, which one of you faggots lost his lunch?” Butch called to three crime-scene cops who stood in a loose knot around Jed Benson’s blackened corpse.

  The corpse sat, contorted yet upright, in a chair pulled into the middle of the room, in front of an imposing wooden desk covered with the sticky ash of burned papers. Melanie didn’t understand how he, it, was staying vertical. Jed Benson’s face was a death’s-head, blackened skin singed off in places, the skull a bloody unrecognizable pulp with a gaping hole in the forehead, crowned by pathetic patches of burned hair. The jaw hung open, as if in midscream. She found herself staring into his mouth, numb and nauseous, fixating on his dental work. His teeth were capped. So not all of Jed Benson’s glamour came naturally. What he’d been wearing when he was killed, you couldn’t tell. Shreds of fabric hung off the shiny mass of his flesh, scorched and bubbling wherever it wasn’t obscured by sticky, dark blood.

  One of the cops threw a cautionary glance at Butch, then jerked his head toward Rommie Ramirez, hunched over, just finished retching in the corner of the room. Melanie felt like throwing up, too, but she fought the urge. She didn’t want them to think she couldn’t handle this.

  “Oh.” Butch raised an eyebrow. “Been a while since you did a murder scene, huh, Lieutenant?”

  Rommie straightened up, his swarthy skin now green, sweat standing out on his brow, and wordlessly marched out of the room. Everyone stared after him in surprise.

  “What the fuck!” Butch exclaimed. “I heard that guy was in a tailspin. Now I see what they’re talking about.”

  Melanie knew the gossip. At one time Rommie had been on the way up, getting named to high-profile commissions, even being mentioned as a possibility for deputy chief. Now he ran a respectable but run-of-the-mill drug squad. A decent position, but a demotion. She’d never really heard the reason. She liked him well enough to be concerned, but it wasn’t really any of her business.

  “That was plain unprofessional, if you ask me,” Butch said, turning to her. “Him leaving makes you the lead investigator in the room, Melanie. My money says you got more balls than him anyway. Let me run through how we usually handle stuff. You let me know if it suits you, or if there’s anything else you need.”

  Crime Scene cops are technical experts. They provide a crucial service to the investigators running a case, but they expect to be given a certain amount of direction. In Rommie’s absence, that direction would have to come from Melanie. The need to focus saved her. She mustered her courage, walked right up to the body. A real prosecutor was hardened like a cop. Blood and gore were part of the job description.

  “Jesus,” she said, looking at it.

  “Yeah,” Butch said. “What kind of animal does this to another person?”

  “Whoever he is, we’ll get him,” she replied, her voice calm and resolute even as her legs trembled. “Introduce me to your troops, Butch, and let’s get to work.”

  “Castro and Jefferson here work for me. Dr. Joel Kramer is from the ME. We start with the body and work our way outward. Make, like, a grid of the room, then go over the floor real careful for hairs, fibers, blood spatters, what have you. Make notes of what’s located where in the grid, photograph everything. Sound good?”

  “Makes sense. You’re the supervisor?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Butch said.

  “Then you’re the one I’ll call to testify in court, so you should take the photos of the body. Castro and Jefferson can do the rest of the room and the house.”

  “Sure thing.” Brennan knelt down and unzipped a duffel bag sitting on the floor, removing cameras and notebooks and handing them around. He doled out assignments to Castro and Jefferson, who went off to fulfill them.

  “What can you tell from the body about how the murder happened?” Melanie asked Kramer.

  “Quite a lot, actually,” Kramer replied. “The Fire Department responded quickly. The fire was out in time to save most of the flesh, so there’s plenty left to work with. I’ve done a preliminary examination. Here, I’ll show you.”

  Kramer walked up to the chair, extracted a collapsible metal pointer from his pocket, and opened it. He waved it over Benson’s corpse like a magic wand. “First of all, you see the way the body has contorted. That’s what we call pugilistic positioning. A natural contraction of the muscles that occurs when the body is burned. The fact that we see it indicates that rigor mortis hadn’t set in at the time of fire. That’s important, because we also see clear evidence of a gunshot wound to the head. Given lack of rigor, we can assume that the shooting and the burning of the body occurred within a relatively narrow time frame.”

  “Can you tell which happened first?” Melanie asked.

  “Not without completing the actual autopsy. Now, take a look right here,” Kramer said, directing his pointer at the large hole in Benson’s forehead. “A gunshot entry wound. We know it’s entry based on beveling we observe to the skull and the remaining flesh. The beveling points inward, indicating the bullet going in. The entry wound matches up to an exit wound right here.” He walked around and pointed to a hole in the back of Benson’s head, at about the point where the skull met the neck. “Again, we know it’s exit because of the direction of the beveling, which points outward, thus the bullet going out. And from the relative positions of the entry and exit wounds, we can conclude that the shooter stood above the victim and fired downward, at relatively close range. The handcuffs the victims is wearing also suggest he was shot while sitting right here in this chair.”

  “Handcuffs? So that’s what’s holding him upright,” Melanie said, studying the plastic twist-tie handcuffs that slashed deep ligatures into Benson’s wrists. Chunks of flesh appeared to be missing from his hands. What remained was gouged in a familiar-looking way. “His hands. Are those—teeth marks?” she asked, gulping.

  “Yes, not human, though,” Kramer replied. “Animal, probably dog bites. They’re all over the legs, too, and look. There’s a similar-looking deep puncture wound in the remaining flesh on the neck. See, right here,” he said, pointing to a deep gash in the charred skin of the corpse’s neck.

  Melanie nursed her growing rage, using it to fight back a wave of nausea that threatened to overwhelm her.

  “On the gunshot, Melanie, we bagged the spent round,” Butch said. “Nine-millimeter.”

  “Wouldn’t common sense say the dog attack came first?” Melanie asked. “The gunshot to the head, at close range, finished him off? Then the fire was set to destroy evidence?”

  “Makes sense,” Brennan agreed. Kramer nodded.

  “Okay, so let’s talk motive,” she continued. “Why sic a dog on him?”

  “So many bites,” Brennan said. “It’s almost like he was tortured.”
>
  “Just what I was thinking. Lieutenant Ramirez said Benson’s daughter was maimed. Tell me about that.”

  “Perp cut off some of her fingers. Fucking savage,” Butch said bitterly.

  “Was she shot?” Melanie asked.

  “No, thankfully. She’s in serious but stable condition,” Butch said.

  “So Benson was tortured,” Melanie said, thinking aloud. “His daughter was tortured. Why do that? A grudge, maybe? The perp hated Benson so bad that he tortured his daughter in front of him, then tortured him before killing him?”

  “The viciousness of the attack supports that,” Kramer said.

  “Or maybe the perp wanted something,” she continued. “Money, information—who knows? Benson wouldn’t give it up.”

  “Would you hold out if somebody was doing that kind of shit to you?” Butch said.

  “Maybe Benson didn’t hold out in the end. When Castro finishes dusting for latents, he should look for evidence of robbery. Open safes, jewelry boxes, drawers that are normally kept locked—that sort of thing,” she said.

  “You really think the motive could have been robbery?” Butch asked.

  “Sure. You see carnage like this sometimes in a typical home invasion, where the perps force their way into a house to steal something they know is there. Whether it’s drugs or money or expensive jewelry. Then again, you wouldn’t expect something like that to happen in a neighborhood like this.”

  “You wouldn’t expect the animal who did this to be walking around such a nice neighborhood in the first place,” Butch said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “Tell me about it. I live a few blocks from here,” Melanie said, going cold at the thought. A few blocks from this carnage, her daughter was sleeping.

  “But he was here,” she said. “We know that. And we know something else, something even worse. He’s still out there.”

  4

  THE SEVEN BLOCKS BETWEEN THE BENSONS’ TOWN house and Melanie Vargas’s apartment were long and desperate ones for Sophie Cho. She trudged, hunched over, clutching the stroller handles for comfort, trying to keep visions of the Bensons’ faces at bay. She had the baby to think of. She was very conscientious with Maya. She forced herself to pay careful attention to the traffic lights.