Skeleton Justice

by Michael Baden

  “It’s all right, Deanie. I’m going to help you,” Jake said gently as he pulled a pocketknife from his jacket and prepared to free the girl. “I’m a doctor.”

  Manny watched with surprise as the girl cringed away from Jake at this news. She wore nothing but a halter top and a very short skirt. The ropes and glass around her bare legs and arms had chafed her pale skin raw. She trembled convulsively, both from fear and cold.

  Jake continued to speak to Deanie soothingly, telling her exactly what he was going to do. Manny saw him then as a medical doctor, trained to save lives. First, he cut her arms free, and Manny could tell that the pain of being released from this unnatural position was almost as great as the pain of maintaining it.

  Jake held the rope with his fingertips and jerked his head in Manny’s direction. “Find some clean paper to put this on.”

  Manny accepted the command. Jake the doctor had been replaced by Jake the forensic scientist, eager to preserve evidence. She ripped open a carton of paper towels and gingerly took the rope from Jake.

  Next, Jake cut the girl’s legs free, carefully guiding each one to rest on the bottom rung of the stool to keep her bare feet away from the remaining glass. Then he turned his attention to the tape across her eyes and mouth.

  “I have some hand lotion in my purse,” Manny offered. “You can use it to loosen the glue.”

  Jake shook his head. “I’m afraid not. This tape may contain traces of the assailant’s DNA, fibers from his clothes. I can’t risk destroying that.” He slit the tape at her temples and removed it with one quick yank. Manny winced. Deanie made a gasping sound from beneath the tape on her mouth, but compared to her joint pain, the tape removal must have been a minor discomfort. She seemed more bothered by the effect of light on eyes that had been in darkness for a long time. Her eyes peeked open briefly before she scrunched them shut again. Jake repeated the process with the tape on her mouth, leaving two angry red weals across her face.

  Deanie rubbed her face, then, shielding her eyes with her fingers, peeped at her rescuers. Recognizing Sam, she inhaled sharply, but she still did not speak.

  “Do you see her shoes?” Jake asked. Manny and Sam looked, but the shoes were nowhere in sight.

  “Well, let’s get you out of here,” Jake said. “I’ll carry you over the glass.” Putting his right hand under her arms and his left under her knees, he lifted her off the stool. As he did, a slip of paper fluttered to the floor. Manny stepped forward to retrieve it.

  “Don’t touch it,” Jake commanded.

  So she crouched over it and read aloud: “‘The innocent suffer when the guilty are allowed to go unpunished.’”

  • • •

  “What does that mean? Who are you? How did you know I was here?”

  Big hair flattened, long acrylic nails snapped off, eye makeup washed away by a river of tears, Deanie was no longer the jaunty Jersey girl who had given up secrets to Sam in a drunken night of dancing at Club E.

  “I got a call from your cell phone at nine-thirty this morning asking me to meet you here at eleven,” Sam said. They were all four sitting at the deserted bar, watching Deanie drink a big Diet Coke. “How long were you tied up back there?”

  She clutched her glass as if it alone were keeping her from keeling over. “Since last night. I got grabbed coming home from work. Someone came up from behind me and put this bad-smelling cloth over my face. When I woke up, I was in that storeroom.”

  Jake leaned toward her. “What can you tell us about your attacker?”

  Deanie edged away, obviously disturbed by the urgency in his voice, and pressed her back against the bar. “Who are you people?” She glanced at Sam, then peered down into her drink, as if eye contact with him scared her. “You got me into this. You killed Boo, didn’t you?”

  “I know it looks bad that Boo died a few days after talking to me,” Sam said, “but believe me, I didn’t kill him. We think …” he paused, silenced by his brother’s warning glance. “We think Boo was mixed up in something bigger than he realized.”

  “Well, whatta they want with me? I don’t know nuthin about Boo’s business.” Deanie hugged herself and began to cry.

  “Deanie, we don’t want you to get hurt again,” Jake said. “That’s why it’s important that you tell us everything you can remember about last night.”

  Deanie wasn’t the brightest crayon in the box under the best of circumstances, and fear, exhaustion, and dehydration weren’t helping her reasoning abilities.

  “I don’t know nuthin,” she repeated sullenly. “I didn’t see them. When I woke up, that tape was already over my eyes.” Compulsively, her right hand stroked her left arm.

  “Them? There was more than one?” Jake’s eyes lighted up, but he was careful to keep the eagerness out of his voice.

  “A man and a woman.”

  Manny and Jake exchanged glances. They didn’t have to speak to know they were thinking the same thought: Maybe this was Tracy, the woman at the nursing home who had recommended Manny to Maureen Heaton.

  “Why did they torture you like this, Deanie?” Manny asked. “What were they trying to get you to tell them?”

  “They didn’t ask me nuthin.” Deanie slammed her glass on the bar. “They told me not to try to get away, that there was broken glass all around me. They tied my legs back like that, and when I started to cry, the woman said something. So I thought the guy was going to loosen the rope, but instead he made it tighter and then put the sharp glass underneath the ropes on my skin. They told me not to try to escape, said if I was still and silent, someone would come for me. That’s it.”

  Deanie continued rubbing her hands up and down her bare arms, trying either to stay warm or to massage away the pain of her bondage. Suddenly, she stopped and looked down at the crook of her right arm. “What the fuck? I must have cut myself after all. I’m bleeding!”

  Jake reached out for her arm and saw it: the tiny puncture of a blood draw, now oozing some fresh blood. He found a clean napkin and applied pressure. “They drew your blood. Were you aware of that?”

  “Drew blood? Why?”

  Jake and Manny exchanged a glance. Could Deanie be the only person in the entire metro area unaware of the work of the Vampire? If so, she’d be happier staying in that state of ignorance.

  “What did they say to each other?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know. They spoke to each other in Spanish.”

  “I gotta pee,” Deanie announced after finishing off her second glass of soda.

  “Manny, go with her,” Jake instructed.

  They had found Deanie’s high-heeled mules on the way out of the storeroom, and Deanie now clumped down the hall to the restroom, with Manny following. Making small talk seemed ridiculous, so Manny kept her mouth shut.

  She opened the door for her charge and followed her in. The Club E ladies’ room was as big, dim, and uninviting as the rest of the place. A grimy-looking divan stood against one wall. Not caring to dwell on the types of activities that might take place on it in the course of the average evening, Manny stood guard by the sinks as Deanie went into the last stall. Catching a glimpse of herself in the mirror, Manny pulled out her brush and lipstick and began to repair the damage of the morning’s excitement. In a few minutes, she heard the toilet flush. She put away her makeup and waited for Deanie’s stall door to open.

  It stayed shut.

  “Deanie? Are you okay in there?”

  No answer.

  “Deanie?” Manny strode across the bathroom and rattled the stall door. “Open up!”

  Only then did it strike Manny that the stall doors came all the way down to the floor and were at least six feet high, the better to protect their clubgoing occupants from prying eyes as they got high or got screwed.

  Heart pounding, Manny went into the adjacent stall and jumped up on the toilet. Propping one leg on the toilet back, she pulled herself up far enough to look over the top of the stall divider.

  Deanie’s st
all was empty. A small window facing the parking lot was open.

  Jake patted Manny on the shoulder. “Don’t beat yourself up. This may actually work to our advantage.”

  She eyed him suspiciously. It wasn’t like Jake to humor her. She had screwed up and she fully expected to catch hell for it.

  “How do you figure?” Manny asked.

  “Sam and I were talking strategy while you were gone. There’s no way we can avoid reporting this to the police and turning over the evidence, and we were both concerned about how this implicates Sam. But with Deanie temporarily out of the picture, we can bend the truth a little regarding how you and I came to be at Club E, and leave Sam out of the equation.”

  Manny nodded. “So we tell them what? That I got an anonymous call to come here and brought you along?”

  “Yes,” Jake said. “And that after we freed her, she immediately needed to use the bathroom. It never dawned on us to guard the victim, and she ran away. We called nine-one-one immediately. We don’t know who the victim was.”

  “That’ll work. But wait—they’ll want to see my cell phone to trace the call. All it shows is a call from Sam at ten this morning.”

  Sam grinned. “A call I made from a pay phone at Penn Station. I couldn’t get a cell signal in there today.”

  Jake clapped his brother on the back. “Man, you travel under a lucky star. Get rid of any signs that we were in this bar area. Wrap up the glass that Deanie used and take it with you, then disappear. Manny, give me five minutes, then call nine-one-one.”

  “Where are you going?” Manny asked.

  “Back to the storeroom. I plan to borrow one small piece of evidence.”

  “You wanna know what?”

  Pasquarelli’s voice came through the phone line loudly enough to make Jake move the receiver away from his ear. He and the detective had spoken only briefly since Manny had reported the incident at Club E to the police in Hoboken. Jake knew his friend was frazzled, but he needed his help. “I want to know who published the cookbook I found hidden in Ms. Hogaarth’s kitchen,” Jake repeated.

  “Cut me a break, will ya. I got my hands full here. I thought once we discovered the link between the Vampire and the Judge Brueninger bombing, the mayor would finally let the FBI have this case. But no, he still wants to keep a hand in it, even though the feds are the ones with a database full of information on Islamic terror groups that they won’t let me see.”

  “Look, Vito, if the Vampire and the Preppy Terrorist cases are really tied to Islamic terrorism, then you’re right—you don’t stand a chance of solving them,” Jake said. “You might as well lie low, shuffle papers, and wait for the feds to clear it up. But if my hunch is correct, something entirely different is behind these cases. If you work on my leads, maybe you’ll have a chance to score the coup the mayor’s looking for.”

  “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then you’re screwed,” Jake admitted cheerfully. “But you’re screwed right now anyway. Seems to me you’ve got nothing to lose.”

  A long silence filled the phone line.

  “Talk,” Vito said finally.

  “I want to find out where the Spanish-language cookbook we found in Ms. Hogaarth’s apartment was published. I suspect it was Argentina. Argentina could be the link that ties all the victims together.”

  “Did I miss something here? There is no link between the victims—they’re totally random. And none of them is Argentinean. Number three was Chilean, but that’s as close to Spanish as we get.”

  “We may not see the link between the victims yet,” Jake said. “But it’s there. We have to keep digging.”

  “Nixon made a speech about the place more than twenty-five years ago, and you think that’s the key to our Vampire? C’mon, Jake, get real.”

  “Nixon’s speech and the fact that the Sandovals are Argentinean. If it turns out that Hogaarth’s Spanish-language cookbook was published in Argentina, that would be three links in the chain. Then we could ask the other vics if they have any connection in their lives to Argentina.”

  “You think these people are all withholding information from us?” Vito asked. “No way. I interviewed them. They’re scared, freaked-out by the fact that they were randomly targeted by this nut. You can’t fake that five times.”

  “No, I don’t necessarily think they’re hiding information. The victims themselves may not be aware of the significance. You didn’t ask any of them if they had ties to Argentina.”

  “You can ask. As for Hogaarth’s cookbook, the apartment’s been released as a crime scene. We had no reason to keep the cookbook. It’s all part of her estate. If you want access to it, you’ll have to contact her lawyer yourself. Frankly, I think this case might be easier if the Vampire is a terrorist.”

  “The Vampire is a terrorist all right, but not an Islamic one,” Jake said. “And just like Osama or the Taliban or the Palestinians, he’s trying to get publicity for his cause. He’s trying to lead us toward something. I’m sure of it. And somehow, Argentina is part of the puzzle.”

  Jake pressed against the eyepieces of his microscope and studied the pattern of the long, thin single hair with a central nonpigmented line, dye-stained for two-thirds its length. This long blond strand, which he’d retrieved from the tape used to bind Deanie’s eyes, was almost certainly hers. Jake had found it on the end of the tape, near where it had touched her hairline. The tape was also filled with skin cells, but it showed no fingerprints. Deanie had never been able to touch it, as the tape had gone on after her hands were tied, and the Vampire had obviously worn gloves when applying it.

  Jake had left the other piece of tape for the Hoboken police, so they, too, had bits of Deanie’s DNA. Not that it would do them much good, as it was unlikely that the young woman’s DNA would be on file in any criminal database. But the tape held one other tantalizing piece of DNA evidence. Jake changed slides under the microscope and looked at this prize: a very short dark curly hair with a prominent central medulla line. DNA could be extracted from the hair root. Jake knew this couldn’t be Deanie’s hair. Her skin was quite fair, her arm hair light and downy. He suspected that the highly sticky duct tape had brushed against the Vampire’s arm as he bound his victim, pulling out an arm hair. Even the most careful criminal leaves behind traces of his presence.

  So he probably had a piece of the Vampire’s DNA. But what good would it do him in the short run? It would take days even for an expedited DNA analysis, and if the Vampire’s DNA wasn’t on file, the sample wouldn’t bring him into their sights. In the meantime, Travis was out there somewhere under the control of this killer. More than a killer—someone who didn’t hesitate to use torture to achieve his ends. Jake sighed and prepared the sample to be sent to the lab. They couldn’t afford to sit back and wait for results or count on the feds to find Travis soon. After all, they hadn’t been able to find a nearly seven-foot-man in a turban for years. Nor would the feds protect Travis. As far as they were concerned, he was another defendant who had violated house arrest. It was up to Manny and him to keep pursuing every possible lead.

  Jake stared at the phone, commanding it to ring. He’d called Ms. Hogaarth’s attorney earlier that morning to see if he could get access to the cookbook, but when did any lawyer ever accept a call on the first try? Jake grabbed the phone and dialed again. If he made himself annoying enough, eventually the lawyer would have to answer.

  “Achoo!” Manny dabbed at her nose with the crumpled remains of her last tissue. “The cloud of mold spores hanging over this place is visible to the naked eye. Tell me again why we have to be here instead of out looking for Travis?”

  “This is looking for Travis,” Jake replied as he pawed through a box of decaying books.

  “I had in mind something a little more action-oriented,” Manny said. “I’m really worried. The Vampire could be doing something awful to that kid right now, and we’re here poking through this mountain of crap.” Manny shoved past an ancient department store mannequin a
nd started in on the next table of books.

  “We have no solid leads on Travis’s whereabouts,” Jake said. “Until we do, this is as good a use of our time as any.” Before she could object, he continued. “Hey, look at this—Principles of Modern Microbiology, circa 1932. Can you believe this diagram of the swine flu bug?” Jake chuckled and shook his head. “That’s what it looked like many generations ago in the swine population before it morphed into the influenza A subtypes that exist now.”

  “Oh, those wacky Depression-era biologists. Always good for a few laughs.” Manny looked in disgust at her dust-blackened fingers and surveyed the tables and tables of books they still had to search through. “Put that down, Jake. We’re looking for a cookbook, remember.”

  As executor of her estate, Amanda Hogaarth’s lawyer had packed up the contents of her apartment and shipped them off to the St. Anselm’s Altar Society Thrift Shop in Chelsea. Jake and Manny had followed the stuff here. The church-lady volunteers at the counter had informed them that the delivered items had been sorted and put out for sale just the day before, so Jake was positive the cookbook would still be here. Finding it, however, wasn’t proving easy. Ms. Hogaarth had hidden the book in her apartment, but it was much more effectively concealed here, an old book among thousands of others just like it.

  Manny moved down the crowded aisle, starting on her third table of books. The smell of this place made her eager to find what they were looking for and get out. Forgotten lives, discarded objects, mementos that held no value for the people who’d inherited them—St. Anselm’s was the last stop before the landfill and it smelled only marginally better. Manny’s eyes scanned quickly, pausing to read titles only when the book met the physical description Jake had provided: thick, blue, no dust jacket.