“A sexual sadist?” Dan asked. “That would fit with what he carved on her stomach.”
“Either way, it sounds like a random killing. I don’t like that,” Melanie said.
“Random is a lot tougher to crack than something targeted,” Dan agreed.
“What do you think, Butch?” Melanie asked.
“From what I’ve seen, nothing points to the victim knowing her attacker. The stun-gun mark tells me he had a plan to subdue her, so it’s not like he was somebody she trusted, who was counting on getting close before he attacked. As for the writing on her stomach, it’s hard to say. Could go either way—a robbery, a sex slay. Or even somebody who hated her show, though God knows, that don’t narrow it down much,” Butch said with a chuckle.
“I never saw that show,” Dan said. “High Crimes, right?”
“Yeah, what a load of crap,” Butch said. “She was always slinging the muck about famous people, digging around in their dirty laundry. But listen to me. I watched it.”
“You and a lot of other people,” Dan said.
“Hmm, I bet she had a lot of enemies,” Melanie said thoughtfully.
“Anyways, getting back to what I was saying,” Butch said, “after he stabbed her, he dragged her across this patch of dirt. We got a few footprints, so we’re making some casts for you for trial.”
Butch directed the flashlight beam down at a section of ground that was studded with rectangular wood frames containing hardening plaster.
“Then he tossed her over the edge of the ravine like a sack of garbage. Boom. She lands down there. He goes down after her. It’s nice and private down there. We believe the sexual assault took place in the ravine, after the stabbing. And now let’s go take a look at what’s left.”
Melanie nodded, and she and Dan followed Butch wordlessly down into the ravine. The bottom was soft earth covered in ferns and underbrush and bathed in cold white light from the klieg lamps. In the otherworldly glare, Melanie felt like she was sleepwalking. Space-walking was more like it. As Butch led them toward the body, and the gamy smell grew stronger, she felt numb. She’d been through the crime-scene wringer before on other cases. You’d think it would get easier, but far from it. Lately the job only got harder.
They were right upon the victim now, yet the body was barely visible. The ground sloped down toward the lake, and the victim had landed with her head pointing in that same direction. Her head, torso, and upper legs disappeared into the thick underbrush, obscured by low bushes and dripping ferns. Only her lower legs and feet stuck out, twisted oddly inward. The right leg was completely naked and glowed a dead white punctuated by dark clumps of dried blood. The left leg was partly bare and partly twined in a coiled mess of blood-sopped khaki pants and underwear, its foot still clad in a tan moccasin.
“We photographed the area with the leaves covering her, just like this, which is how we found her. Then we held ’em aside and took pictures of the wounds. After the ME bags her and hauls her off, we’ll cut away all the brush and do a final sweep for anything we missed because of the ground cover.”
“Okay, good,” Melanie forced herself to say. Part of her wanted to run, and part of her knew she needed to stay now and bear witness to this horrible crime. God, human beings were evil.
“He taped her hands and mouth. Plain packing tape like you could buy in any hardware or moving-supply store. We can try to print it, but again, he wore gloves, so my guess is we’ll come up empty. I’m gonna show you her face so’s you trust my ID, but I’m warning you, it ain’t pretty. Ready?”
Melanie nodded mutely, and Butch used his probe to sweep aside the wet ferns that obscured the victim’s head.
Suzanne Shepard’s mouth, visible through strips of blood-smeared plastic packing tape, was twisted into a grimace of the starkest horror. Her blue eyes were open and vacant, but wide with shock, and the black blood that had sprayed up to dot her face looked like so many flies swarming. She’d died in agony; you could see it in her expression, and yet the cool, beautiful TV star was still recognizable in the gruesome corpse. Seeing a celebrity in the flesh always felt surreal. Melanie’s occasional close encounters—Mary Tyler Moore buying a sweater at Bendel’s, Kelly Ripa eating ice cream with her kids—had been disorienting just because it was bizarre to realize that television stars existed in real life. But a famous person dead, and brutally, horribly so? Beyond weird.
“It’s definitely her,” Dan said. He took Melanie’s arm to steady her, looking concerned, and she managed a nod to let him know she was okay. Butch was right. She did have a strong stomach. She could handle this, and she liked that about herself. She took a deep breath through her mouth so she could get oxygen without inhaling the stench of blood.
“Here’s what we think is a stun-gun mark,” Butch said, using his pointer to indicate three tiny burn marks arranged in a triangular pattern on the side of Suzanne Shepard’s elegant neck. “Public place, it makes sense he would stun her and gag her to reduce noise.”
“How long would a stun gun knock her out for?” Melanie asked.
“It wouldn’t knock her out at all,” Dan said, shaking his head. “To make somebody lose consciousness, you have to maintain the electrical connection between the stun gun and the skin for several seconds. That’s harder than you’d think. Probably he just shocked her enough to get the jump on her.”
“Now get a load of this,” Butch said. “The main event. This part, I need to be careful, because it’s important. We took pictures, but the ME’ll want it clean for the autopsy.”
Butch knelt down and carefully held aside a low-lying branch that had concealed the woman’s torso, then shined his flashlight beam directly on it.
“Jesus!” Dan exclaimed, recoiling.
Melanie gasped and jerked her eyes away, closing them instinctively to shield herself from the monstrous sight. But it stayed with her anyway, vibrating against her eyelids, so after a moment she opened them again, swallowing hard to fight back the sour taste rising in her throat.
A pink cotton sweater was bunched up near the victim’s underarms, and a lavender brassiere hung loosely down from her right shoulder. She’d been stabbed many times with tremendous force. Her left breast was half-severed. Gaping slash wounds covered the rest of her upper chest, exposing internal organs that looked like nothing so much as meat at the butcher’s counter. But her stomach had been spared, and stood out white and unmarred except for the message the killer had sent. The letters were carved with unexpected precision: BITCH, in boxy capitals that had been formed by joining together straight-edged cuts that oozed smears of blood.
“Look how neat it is,” Butch said. “Like he had all the time in the world. I bet the autopsy’s gonna say the knife he used to write on her was different from the murder weapon. Something small and sharp, a box cutter, maybe, or a scalpel. We recovered the murder weapon, and just eyeballing it, it’s too fat to make those nice, neat cuts.”
Butch let the leaves fall back into place and stood up.
“You got the murder weapon?” Dan asked.
“Yeah,” Butch said. “Guy threw it down toward the lake and we found it lying on a rock. Sloppy. Typical resin-handled hunting knife with a ten-inch steel blade. Nothing unusual enough to trace easy. We’ll print it and all, but we won’t get anything, seeing as he was wearing gloves.”
“What about the stun gun?” Dan asked.
“That might be easier to bring back to an individual purchaser than a knife. A lotta guys hunt, but not too many electric-shock people,” Butch said wryly.
Somebody called to Butch from above.
“Oh, the footprint casts are set. I gotta go pull ’em up. But you two relax. Stay as long as you want,” Butch said, like he was inviting them to sit by the fire.
Dan turned to Melanie, who stood solemn and silent, her eyes glued to Suzanne Shepard’s blood-drenched legs protruding from the leaves. They reminded her of the Wicked Witch’s legs sticking out from under the house in The Wizard of Oz,
a sight that had never failed to make her tremble with fear as a child.
“I’m sorry,” Dan said. “This one was worse than I expected. You must hate me for bringing you here.”
It took her a second to pull her eyes away and meet his gaze. “I hate the killer, not you. Anybody who could do this to another person isn’t fit to be called human. I bet it’s some jerk who’s done this to other women, too.”
“That’s why I like what I do for a living,” he said meaningfully. “We make a difference. We can get him off the streets. You can.”
“You’re right,” Melanie said, sighing deeply. “I’m in.”
3
Melanie had a special talent for investigating the ugliest crimes—homicides, home invasions, narcotics, gunrunning—that stood in marked contrast to her good diction and fancy education. Indeed, people who met her often thought she seemed too nice or too polite or too feminine to succeed at such a brutal job. But growing up on the block had left her with special insight into how the criminal mind worked and a high tolerance for an environment that sometimes felt like the Wild, Wild West. For months now, she’d been coasting, handling a series of stultifyingly dull bank-fraud cases. The cases rarely went to trial, so she could count on a predictable schedule. They required her to wade through piles of sleep-inducing documents, but she could do that at night in the comfort of her apartment, wearing old sweatpants, after Maya went down to sleep. Doing those cases, Melanie hadn’t been within spitting distance of anything violent or gruesome in a long time, and being out here tonight was making her realize that she’d missed the rough stuff more than she’d imagined. She’d been bored out of her mind and hadn’t even known it.
When Dan went off in search of his NYPD counterpart, Detective Julian Hay, Melanie stayed behind in the ravine. She wasn’t alone. A junior crime-scene detective was stationed nearby, guarding the site so there could be no allegations later that unauthorized personnel had gotten access to the body. His reassuring presence gave Melanie the freedom she needed to stand and look, to think and analyze, to try to figure out what the forensic evidence said about this murder. It took her less than five minutes to come to some important conclusions. A couple of questions leaped out at her regarding the position of Suzanne Shepard’s corpse, questions she needed to pursue further by speaking to the deputy ME who’d examined the body.
Melanie found Grace Deng and an orderly on the paved path above the ravine, readying a stretcher and body bag to transport the corpse to their refrigerated van, and introduced herself. Grace had sharp features and a dramatic, angular haircut. They traded pleasantries about cases they’d worked with each other’s office and took a moment to exclaim over the brutal and disgusting nature of the crime. Then Melanie cut to the chase.
“I understand you conducted a thorough examination of the body,” she said. “A couple of things are bothering me about how and where she was found, but to figure out if I’m right, I need a time-of-death estimate.”
“I can give you one, but you understand it’s just an estimate, right? I base TOD on average rates of rigor mortis and decomposition applied to this corpse. It’s an educated guess at best.”
“Understood,” Melanie said.
“Okay, I got here shortly after nine-thirty, which put me at the scene about twenty minutes after the police arrived. At that point, the body was still warm and rigor was not established. The neck and jaw had slightly reduced range of motion, which suggested rigor was beginning to progress. But her limbs as well as her fingers and toes were still mobile.”
“Mobile, meaning…?”
“I could wiggle them. She hadn’t been dead for long. One to two hours, max.”
“And this was at nine-thirty?”
“Yes.”
“So that would put the time of death no earlier than seven-thirty.”
“Don’t hold me to it, but yes, that’s my hypothesis.”
“Thanks, you’ve been really helpful.” They exchanged business cards, and Grace promised to notify Melanie when the autopsy was completed.
Melanie sat down on a nearby bench to make notes about time of death and the weather.
At seven-thirty, the earliest moment at which Suzanne Shepard could have been attacked, Melanie had been doing her makeup and laying out her clothes for her date when rain suddenly spattered against her bedroom window. Melanie knew Dan would be coming up the FDR, which flooded in heavy rain, and she wondered whether he’d hit traffic. It was unusually dark outside for that hour in June, dark enough that she couldn’t see out because of the reflected light, so she walked over and leaned against the glass in order to see the street. It was pouring.
What did that tell her? Suzanne Shepard had ventured into the wilds of the Ramble on a dark, rainy night. The Ramble might be situated smack in the middle of Manhattan Island with its two million inhabitants, but it felt like wilderness. Any sane woman would have required a damn good reason to be there. Figuring out what had called Suzanne to that location was a top investigative priority.
But Melanie had spotted an even bigger red flag: the body wasn’t visible from the path above. Suzanne Shepard had been thrown into the ravine and covered by the underbrush. At seven-thirty and later, given how dark and rainy it was outside Melanie’s eighth-floor window, it had to’ve been pitch-black down in the ravine. Butch Brennan ad told her that the body was discovered by a male citizen who’d called 911. The caller had refused to give his name or stick around till the police arrived. How did he know the body was down there, lying under the dark leaves?
Melanie spotted Dan O’Reilly over near the police barricades where they’d first come in. He was deep in conversation with a tall, handsome African-American guy who wore his hair in long braids.
“Hey, Melanie, meet Detective Julian Hay, my counterpart from Manhattan North Homicide,” Dan said as she approached.
Melanie and Julian shook hands.
“My boy Dan here was just telling me about you,” Julian said with a sparkly smile. He wore fake gold teeth of the type that street drug dealers called “fronts.”
“You guys know each other?” Melanie asked.
“Yeah, we worked cases together before, but I didn’t realize it was him till I saw his face because I never knew his real name,” Dan said. “This guy is one of the great all-time narcotics undercovers.”
“You embarrass me, brother.”
“It’s the gospel truth. They used to call him Suave Pierre. He does a dead-on West Indian accent. UC’d all the big Jamaican posse investigations in the nineties and cheated the Grim Reaper like a mother-fuck.”
“That’s in the past for me now,” Julian said. “I’ve retired from the front lines. Working normal cases like the resta you mutts.”
“Don’t knock it, it’s a living,” Dan said, grinning. “But why’d you retire, man? You were a legend.”
Julian held up his left hand and waved it at them. His ring finger sported a thick gold band. “The ball and chain insisted. My odds of walking back through the door at the end of each tour have now improved slightly.”
“Only slightly, I hope,” Dan said.
“Hell, yeah! I ain’t no desk jockey. I’m dying with my boots on.”
“Amen to that,” Dan said. “You miss it?”
“Like crazy. I still do an occasional hand-to-hand just to keep my wits sharp. Plus that way, they let me keep the hair.”
“Look, I hate to break up old-home night,” Melanie said, smiling, “but I had a thought.”
“What’d I tell ya?” Dan said to Julian.
“Always thinking,” Julian said, tapping his temple. “We like that in a prosecutor.”
“So here’s my brilliant insight,” she said. “We need to pull the 911 tape right away. Based on what the deputy ME told me about TOD, and what the weather and light conditions were at that time, I’m guessing our 911 caller witnessed the crime. Either that or he’s actually the killer. No other way could he have known there was a body down there in the dit
ch.”
Dan and Julian both stopped smiling. Julian shook his head until his braids swayed, making a soft clicking sound. Then he withdrew a slim silver tape recorder from the pocket of his black leather coat.
“I definitely see what you was saying about this girl, brother. From the get-go, she’s on the money.”
4
Detective Julian Hay held up the recording device and pushed a button. An ugly crackle of sound emerged, and he adjusted the volume. The call had obviously been placed using a cell phone. All three of them leaned in toward the tape recorder to make out the words through the cacophony of bad sound quality.
“Nine-one-one Dispatch. What is your emergency?” a woman barked.
More static, and what sounded like ragged breathing.
“What is your emergency, please?”
“I’m in Central Park. Something terrible happened.” The man spoke through panting breaths. He sounded as if he’d been running like hell and was now about to burst into tears.
“Sir?” the dispatcher prompted after a moment.
“I heard a woman screaming. She was being attacked. I think she’s dead. Jesus, she must be dead.”
“A woman was attacked?”
“Yes, I saw the whole thing. Just before.” His breath caught in a suppressed sob.
“Did you witness this attack, sir?”
“Yes, but it was dark. I saw…I saw figures. He had a knife. He was stabbing her. Oh my God, oh my God!”
“Where in Central Park, sir?”
“It happened in the Ramble, near the lake. About five minutes ago.”
“And what is your name, sir?”
“What?”
“I’m going to dispatch a cruiser immediately. What is your name?”
A loud click sounded.
“Sir? Hello?…Shit, he hung up. Male Caucasian, I think.”
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