by Carrie Smith
Vivian didn’t seem to be listening. She was staring at the NYPD vehicles and news vans double-parked in front of the church. When she finally turned to Anna, she said, “I see our sad news has spread.”
Anna nodded. “They’ve been there since early this morning.”
“Have you spoken to them?”
Anna shook her head.
“I think we should,” said Vivian.
“You do?”
“I do.” The churchwarden crossed her arms. “To let the public know that St. Paul’s won’t bow down in the face of violence.” She descended the steps, turned, and stared up at Anna. “Come with me, Rector. Now’s not the time for us to be timid.”
Anna followed Vivian along the sidewalk. They passed the same police officer Anna had seen at the gate that morning. Vivian stopped in front of the news vans and Anna stood a step behind her. Within seconds reporters surrounded them. Vivian pulled Anna closer and placed her arm around Anna’s shoulder. The gesture, Anna recognized, sent the unequivocal message that they were a united front. In truth, however, she and Vivian had never been confidants. Anna had relied exclusively on Philip’s counsel, valuing his opinion even above her own, she thought now, as if he were the strong father she had lost so many years ago.
Vivian cleared her throat. “Rector Brookes and I are deeply disturbed by the killings at our church.” She spoke with the clarity and passion of someone preaching from the pulpit. “Never in our two hundred-and-twenty-five-year history has our little church experienced an unprovoked assault like this. We are shocked and saddened.”
Hands gripping microphones inched closer to the churchwarden’s lips as cameramen behind the reporters pointed lenses straight at her face.
“In the past year, we have been the target of malicious acts of intimidation,” Vivian continued. “Our church signs celebrating peace, love, and diversity have been defaced. We’ve received anonymous calls demanding that we evict our homeless guests or suffer consequences. Residents of Indigo Tower, the new luxury building on the corner, have falsely complained to our councilwoman that the hungry people who wait in line to dine at our Saturday Supper are an eyesore, a threat to their children. And we have been assailed by developers pressuring us to sell our air rights so they can raise yet another tower to overshadow our belfry.”
“Are the police investigating these acts of intimidation?” asked a reporter.
“They should be,” Vivian stated. “We’ve made our situation clear to them. But the detectives who came here last night treated us like suspects—not victims of a terrible crime. They weren’t interested in the leads we had. They were only interested in pointing fingers at us. Some members of the church were held in a room until three AM.”
Anna admired Vivian’s eloquent defense of their congregation—she too wanted to believe that no one in the parish was responsible for last night’s tragic events—but she wasn’t naïve either, despite Todd’s accusation this morning. She knew the people who filled the St. Paul’s pews each Sunday weren’t saints. Just last week, a parishioner had confided that her husband had a drinking problem and verbally abused her while he was drunk. Another parishioner had recently confessed that he’d used insider information to buy stock before an IPO that sent the stock price soaring. Even the vestry members had lapses in judgment, as last evening had so clearly proven.
“Do the police believe someone from the church is the killer?” a reporter asked.
Vivian ignored the question. “If outside forces of intolerance and intimidation succeed in destroying our parish,” she continued, “then this block, like so many others in the city, will become one more canyon of extravagant high-rise luxury apartments squeezing the soul out of a neighborhood.”
Vivian wished the reporters good day, took Anna’s arm, and led her back to the rectory. When they reached the brownstone’s front steps, she said, “Well done, Rector.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Your presence does more than words. You represent the soul of this church.”
Anna doubted that. She thought of the meeting last night and how she’d hardly spoken a word. She should have done something. “Don’t you think we should at least mention to the police that—”
“No!” Vivian cut her off.
Anna was startled by her brusqueness. “But—”
Vivian wrapped her arm around Anna. “Airing the church’s dirty laundry isn’t going to help the police solve this crime,” she said more gently. “It will only damage our credibility at a time when people already have too many reasons to walk away from the church.”
CHAPTER 44
Monique couldn’t find her insurance card or registration in the stack of papers she’d removed from her car’s glove compartment. Roger took the stack from her and started to look while the sales agent made a phone call.
“Why are you doing this?” she whispered.
“Doing what?” he asked.
“This.” Monique gestured around the showroom. “Buying me a car. I don’t need it.”
“Yes you do. That piece of shit you’re driving isn’t worthy of you.” He set her insurance identification card on the sales agent’s desk and continued to search for the registration.
“But why now?” she pressed. “Why today?”
He found the tattered registration. “That clunker’s going to die before much longer, and I don’t want you stuck on I-94 in Detroit when it happens.” When I’m not around to help you, he thought.
He handed the registration to the sales agent, a small man in an off-the-rack suit that didn’t fit him properly. As the agent dialed Monique’s insurance company, Roger stroked the leather upholstery of the armchair he was in. Kendra always loved when he bought her things. Nothing made her happier than expensive couture, designer shoes, or Tiffany jewelry. But Monique was wary of his generosity.
An hour later, she drove them to her little rented house on Chandler Park Drive. The new Ford Edge—she hadn’t let him buy her a foreign car—sat in the driveway like a diamond glistening in the dirt. The aluminum-sided bungalow reminded him of the dump in Allen Park where he’d grown up. The grass was patchy. The roof sagged. The houses on either side were in even worse shape. But he felt more at home inside this little bungalow than he did in his and Kendra’s apartment overlooking the Museum of Natural History.
Justin wouldn’t be home for hours—he had lacrosse practice—and Roger followed Monique into her back bedroom. The blinds were drawn, and as usual she struck a kitchen match and lighted votives sitting in little candleholders on the dresser and windowsills. Roger had always supposed the candles were meant to compensate for the room’s lack of elegance. When she finished this ritual, she stood in front of him at the foot of the bed and began to unbutton his shirt. Stop her, he told himself as he watched her hands move from one button to the next. You need to stop her. But he didn’t, and then Monique undressed herself. When she wrapped her fleshy arms and legs around him, he closed his eyes, and everything he was in New York, everything Kendra expected him to be, fell away like the shed skin of a snake. He felt the rawness of the past come back into focus, and he remembered who he had always been, and he didn’t want to give this up.
“You came here to say good-bye to me, didn’t you, baby?” Her words extinguished the mood.
“Shhh.” He pushed her onto the bed and pressed against her as if all his flesh, muscles, and tendons could disappear inside her.
She turned her head to the left. “It’s okay. You do what you got to do.”
“It’s just that—” What? What was it? Why didn’t he just stay here for good? Instead of giving up Monique and Justin, he could give up Kendra and Charlotte. He could disappear back into the enervating bleakness he’d emerged from decades ago, this place of beguiling deprivation that still strangely called to him. But he didn’t want to be trapped in his past. He merely wanted to inhale it in small doses, to resuscitate the part of his identify that felt numb when he wasn’t here. He coul
d have rescued Monique and Justin from their struggle, but he’d chosen instead to leave them behind over and over again, the way his father had left his mother and him all those years ago.
He touched the side of Monique’s face. “It’s just—”
“Shhh,” she said this time. “You just go on back.”
He heard what she was really thinking. Go on back to her. Monique knew him better than Kendra ever would.
He rolled off her and stood. “I’m sorry.” He supposed he wanted her to stop him.
“Not sorry enough,” she said, and her voice was so soft and resigned that all he heard was his own self-condemnation.
CHAPTER 45
Codella watched Rudolph Gambarin dig his gloved fingers into the incision and peel back the hair and skin from Philip Graves’s skull. Muñoz averted his eyes and winced. He looked down and shook his head. She could see that he was dizzy, so she pointed to the restroom. She watched him duck inside. Behind the door, he would either bend over the bowl, she thought, or touch his toes until the blood rushed back to his brain. Autopsies were difficult until you figured out your strategy for getting through them.
Gambarin picked up a precision saw and turned bone into dust as he sawed off the crown of Graves’s skull. He placed it onto a stainless-steel tray, where it wobbled like a primitive bowl made from a coconut. As he carefully detached the brain, Codella watched each snip of his surgical scissors like a transfixed neurosurgical resident. Her strategy for getting through autopsies was to focus so tightly on the medical examiner’s hands that she ceased to think of the person on the table.
When Muñoz emerged from the restroom, the gelatinous brain was fully exposed. Gambarin examined the surface, pointed an instrument at a dark spot, and described the clotting and swelling he saw into a voice recorder. Moments later, he lifted the brain into his hands like a delicate and precious newborn.
When the autopsy was complete, the medical examiner peeled off his gloves and dropped the mask from his gaunt face. He apparently hadn’t shaved that morning, Codella noticed, and his stubble was stippled with gray. He removed his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “This victim’s organs were perfectly healthy.” He spoke to Codella as if Muñoz were just an incidental fixture in the room, she noticed, making a mental note to tell Muñoz not to take it personally. Gambarin wasn’t the most socially adept person. “But he had a very nasty head wound.” Gambarin moved to the tray holding the sawed-off skull. “You can see the fracture. Right here.” He pointed. “The striking instrument was blunt.”
“When you examined him last night, you weren’t sure if he was struck once or multiple times,” said Codella.
“It was one blow,” Gambarin stated decisively now. “He suffered a subdural hematoma in the frontal lobe—at the impact site.”
“We found a shovel at the crime scene,” Codella said, glancing over at Muñoz. “Traces of blood and hair were visible on the flat side.”
Gambarin nodded.
“So I’m thinking either the killer stood in front of the victim and brought the flat side of the shovel straight down, or he stood to his side and swung the shovel like a baseball bat. Does that make sense to you?”
“If the killer swung the shovel in an arc parallel to the ground, he would have had to be almost as tall as your detective here to make contact where he did.” Gambarin glanced over at Muñoz. “Otherwise he would have struck the forehead, not the top of the frontal bone. I think it’s more likely he stood in front of the victim or just slightly to one side and brought the shovel in a downward arc.”
“Is the blow what killed him, Rudolph?”
“No.” Gambarin shook his head. “The victim was alive after the blow. You can tell from the bleeding and swelling in his brain—which isn’t to say that the head injury wouldn’t have killed him in the absence of medical attention. In fact, I’m confident it would have. But whoever administered the blow didn’t wait for that to happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“There’s evidence of mechanical asphyxia too.”
“What kind of evidence?”
“The victim’s nostrils appear to have been compressed—by fingers, I think, based on the external bruising. And there are ruptures of the small vessels inside the nostrils. I think someone pinched his nose—and perhaps covered his mouth too—in an effort make sure he died.”
Codella considered this information. “But according to a doctor on the vestry, he was still warm when she got to him. She performed manual CPR until the EMTs arrived.”
“Even if his body was warm, he could have been deprived of oxygen too long before she got to him. It’s also conceivable that his head injury impaired his ability to breathe so that CPR was useless.”
“Is it also possible the doctor didn’t really perform CPR?”
Gambarin frowned. “You’re suggesting maybe she only simulated her resuscitation efforts?”
Codella nodded. “I don’t want to overlook any possibilities.”
Gambarin rubbed his jaw as he mulled over the question. “I’ve never seen a case in which someone faked CPR. It could be done, I suppose—particularly at night, under minimal light—but this body won’t help you make that case.”
CHAPTER 46
Haggerty was beginning to feel impatient. When he’d gone by the rectory after lunch, Anna Brookes hadn’t been home, and now he was listening to Stephanie Lund’s voice mail message for the fourth time. “I’m either out or at the piano. Leave a message, and I’ll call you back.”
He wasn’t in any mood to wait and call her back again. He stood up from his desk in the squad room, swung his jacket over his shoulder, and told Portino, “See you later.”
He signed out a car, drove across the park at Ninety-Sixth Street, and took the FDR to Houston Street. He rang the buzzer of Stephanie’s Clinton Street apartment, but there was no answer. Luckily another tenant arrived, a woman folding a stroller with one hand while she held her child in the other. He showed her his shield and said, “I’m looking for Stephanie Lund.”
“She’s probably teaching a lesson. She doesn’t answer her door if she’s teaching, but the door is probably ajar.”
Haggerty followed the woman into the building, carried her stroller to the third floor for her, and continued up one more flight.
Stephanie Lund’s door was indeed ajar, but he heard no piano sounds from within. He pushed the door open with the toe of his boot and stepped into a narrow living room with a tiny adjoining kitchen. He stared at two doors to his right. “Miss Lund?” he called, and when there was no answer, he opened one of the doors.
Behind it was a carefully made bed with three stuffed bears—papa, mama, and baby, he thought—propped against decorative pillows as if a child slept here. He tried to square the Goldilocks scene with his mental image of the hipster choir director at the church last night. Had she fucked the priest’s husband with these bears looking on? Were they props in some weird sex game? Before he backed out of the room, he scanned the bureau and nightstand just in case Stephanie Lund was the current keeper of Graves’s laptop or the missing vestry minutes, but nothing caught his eyes.
When he opened the second door, he saw Stephanie Lund lying on a fake Persian rug at the foot of a black upright Baldwin. His first thought was, What is she doing on the floor? Then he rushed to her side. Her eyes were open and glazed, her jaw was slack, and her mouth hung open so wide that Haggerty could see the fillings in her back molars. He pressed two fingers to her neck. She had a faint pulse. He tapped her cheek, but her head only lolled to the side. He scanned her body but saw no evidence of blood or injury. He looked around and saw no drugs that she might have swallowed. He clapped his hands near her ear, but she didn’t respond. He gripped her shoulders and shook her. “Stephanie, can you hear me?” When she still didn’t respond, he took out his phone and called 9-1-1.
He photographed the scene before he grabbed pillows from a sleeper couch and positioned them under her legs. And then he phoned C
odella.
“Yeah?” was all she said.
“Where are you?”
“With Muñoz at the ME’s. He just started Emily Flounders’s autopsy.”
“Leave Muñoz to it. Stephanie Lund is unconscious in her apartment. Ambulance is on the way. Looks like somebody tried to kill her but didn’t quite finish the job.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can,” she said.
CHAPTER 47
The rear doors of a red-and-white FDNY ambulance were open, and two EMTs were sliding a stretcher into the back when Codella’s taxi swerved to the curb in front of Stephanie Lund’s address. She climbed out. On the stretcher, she saw the contours of a woman’s breasts below a gray blanket. The face was turned away from her and obscured by an oxygen mask, but the hand dangling off the side of the stretcher had fingernails painted midnight blue. It was Lund. “How is she?” she asked one of the EMTs as she pulled back her jacket to show the shield clipped to her belt.
“Alive—barely. Unresponsive.”
“Where are you taking her?”
“Bellevue.”
Codella rushed past the gawking apartment dwellers congregated at the front door and climbed the four flights to Stephanie’s apartment. Haggerty filled her in.
“So what do you think?” she asked.
“It can’t just be a coincidence, Claire. I think Todd’s been here. I keep remembering the way Anna Brookes looked at me this morning at the church. She wanted to tell me something. I should have pushed her harder. Maybe she knows her husband was fucking around while she was at the meeting, but she can’t quite bring herself to share her misgivings.”
“You think he came down here and tried to murder her.”
“What if she was with him when he killed Graves and Flounders? What if he got worried that she’d lose her nerve and confess?” He shrugged. “By killing her, he makes sure no one’s alive who can tie him to the murders.”