by Carrie Smith
“Make the time,” she said firmly. “I want all the data up front. What about his phone?”
“He’s a Verizon mobile subscriber. We’ll have his records tomorrow.”
She got up and paced. “So we don’t have much. Just a dead body that looks like Jesus on a cross.” She leaned forward. “But there’s no mistaking the message in that body, is there? The savior is dead. Who would want to send out that message?”
“Someone really angry,” suggested Muñoz. “Someone who wanted to rub his reputation in his face.”
“Maybe. Or someone who wanted to use his reputation to cover a less obvious motive.”
Portino patted his stomach. “Was there any helpful trace at the scene?”
“The inside and outside doorknobs were wiped clean. Banks says most of the prints in the apartment belonged to Sanchez or that neighbor, the one who walked his dog.”
“Cameron Swain,” said Muñoz, remembering her yellow-green eyes.
“Did Haggerty file the canvass results?”
Portino held up a printout. “It’s not very helpful. No one saw anybody come or go. Nobody let someone in. Nobody heard anything.”
“So all we really have right now is a bunch of cranky educators like Bosco, Donohue, and Thomas.”
“And the angry blogging mother,” said Muñoz. “Helen Chambers.”
“Right.” Codella pulled out her iPhone and opened her notes. “The kindergarten teacher Vicki Berrard mentioned two teachers Sanchez may have fired in September. Ronald Davis and Imogene Burke. And Sanchez was working on apps with a guy named Ivan Schiff at some little Silicon Alley tech start-up—Apptitude. Run reports on them, Vic.”
Portino made a note.
“And what about cameras around his building?”
“There’s one on his corner,” said Portino. “I’ll have the data tomorrow. But the camera’s on a maintenance list,” he warned, “so I don’t know what we’ll get.”
“Let’s hope we get something.” She looked at her iPhone clock. It was 10:23. Then she looked at Muñoz. “You and I will see Bosco first thing in the morning. Ragavan will go back to the school. Portino, keep going here. Haggerty can help you. Now go home. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day.”
But she didn’t intend to go home, not yet. Ragavan had e-mailed her Sofia Reyes’s address, and now she got in her car and sped across Central Park to the literacy consultant’s brownstone apartment on East Ninety-Third Street. She rang the bell three times, but the woman wasn’t home.
It was almost eleven when she got to her own apartment. She hung up her jacket, stripped off her jeans and sweater, and climbed into the running shorts and NYPD T-shirt she slept in. Then she made green tea with honey, took her mug and takeout vegan burger into the living room, switched on the news, muted the volume, and got on her laptop. Muñoz had e-mailed her the article about Sanchez from the New York Times Magazine, and she took a bite of the burger and started reading where she’d left off that morning.
Few administrators threw their hat in the ring last December when district administrator Margery Barton fired then acting principal Dr. Peter Kelly for incompetence. “School leaders don’t get to let kids down on my watch and get away with it,” Barton said at the time, and she scored points with school board and central Department of Education officials for her candor and toughness. District parents weren’t as impressed. Many felt Barton should have acted a year sooner than she did. “PS 777 had been on the Schools in Need of Improvement list for a year with no actionable plan from the principal or district officials,” said one parent of a PS 777 student.
Barton plucked Sanchez out of the Queens International Academy, a middle school serving the needs of recent immigrants and refugees. He was shocked at the conditions in PS 777. Here was a school that, in his words, had “gotten the scraps far too long.” The staff consisted of tenured teachers clocking their time until retirement, new teachers no one had bothered to train, and an aging, undermaintained infrastructure.
By anyone’s standards, what he’s done in just five months at the school is nothing short of miraculous. He took the reins in mid-January. By the end of March, he had not only given the school a physical makeover but also raised fifty thousand dollars from corporate donors to purchase a new school-wide bookroom, written and received a small Gates Foundation grant, hired a part-time literacy consultant, and partnered with actress and public school advocate Dana Drew to create a technology-driven intervention program that will launch next fall with the help of tutors from nearby private high schools looking to fulfill community service requirements. And all the while, he was calling parents—as many as twenty a day—until he’d spoken with every one of them. “If you want the school to work, then you have to get involved,” he told them. And slowly but surely, attendance at the new weekly Parents as Partners workshops started to increase.
She finished half of the vegan burger, trying to convince herself that she liked it. Then she switched off the TV and got ready for bed. Nothing was going to keep her awake tonight, she told herself, not after her first seventeen-hour day in almost a year. But the instant her head hit the pillow, she imagined that same pole next to her bed, that same bag of Doxorubicin dangling from the pole. One bag of that drug, she remembered, had turned her into a trembling, frail shadow of a person.
She sat up and pulled back the sheet. When would she stop having these memories? When would she get a solid night of sleep in her bed? If being hooked up to chemo bags in a hospital bed had been prison, then these memories were like a permanent form of probation—the constant reminder that when she least expected it, her body could deploy another death squad of invisible cells.
But at least she had the luxury of worrying about the next death squad. The second roommate she’d had during her treatment, a woman named Patty, had not been so fortunate. Patty was also being treated for Burkitt’s lymphoma, but hers had spread to her bone marrow before it was diagnosed. She had been in the hospital for almost two months straight. On the third day of Codella’s treatment, she and Patty had taken a pitifully slow and short walk down the corridor together—the two Burkitt’s victims—rolling their chemo poles along the polished linoleum floor and comparing their worst treatment experiences. Mouth sores that wouldn’t heal, painful bone marrow biopsies and lumbar punctures, blocked chemo ports, deadened taste buds, middle-of-the-night sleep interruptions to get fresh bags of chemo, and the ultimate indignity of wearing adult diapers during C. diff infections.
The day after that walk, Codella had finished her second treatment and gone home with Patty’s telephone number in her iPhone directory. She never saw or spoke to Patty again. But three months later, just before her last treatment, when she already knew she was cancer free and would soon be able to focus on getting strong again, Patty’s son had called her.
“My mother had your number on a piece of paper by her bed,” he had explained. “I thought you might want to know that she died two days ago.”
Codella climbed out of bed and returned to the living room. Ironically, she knew, the only way she’d take her mind off her unpleasant past and her uncertain future was to think about someone else’s tragedy. She pulled up a photo of Sanchez on her iPhone. She zoomed in on his dark brows and his full lips. She focused on his Adam’s apple, which was made more prominent by the unnatural angle of his broken neck. She dragged the image upward to center on his hairless torso, his upward facing palms. She let her mind travel back to his apartment. She remembered his unmade bed, his suit pants neatly hung on a hanger dangling off a doorknob, his suit jacket on the back of a chair, jeans and T-shirt tossed across spin bike handlebars.
Where had he really been after school yesterday? Why had he lied to his AP about going to see Vondra Williams? When had he gotten home? Apparently he’d had time to change from his suit into casual clothes before 5:00, when his neighbor had brought him dog treats. That left about an hour and a half unaccounted for. What had he done in that span of time? When had he u
ndressed? Who had come to kill him, and why? Did it have anything to do with a boy’s head getting pushed into a toilet? A controversial program called iAchieve? The polarizing war between young and old teachers? She pondered these questions until she finally dozed off on the living room couch.
Chapter 20
Muñoz got off the A train at Thirty-Fourth Street and checked Grindr on his phone as he walked up the steps. For two years, he had arranged virtually every sexual encounter on Grindr. He could justify the random nature of his sex life with the rationalization that work prevented anything more. How could he commit to a relationship when he was working the streets at all hours, buddying up to dealers and junkies, making middle-of-the-night busts and searches? He had rarely seen the same man twice, and he had avoided guys who seemed to need something more than sex, and yet now he found himself wanting more. He sent a message to the software engineer he had hooked up with last night, and then he zipped his jacket and headed west facing the cold river wind.
There was still no message back when he got to where the High Line started south of the Javits Center. Muñoz walked home via this long, uplifted park as often as he could. He especially loved to walk the High Line after dark, when he could have it mostly to himself. Winding between West Side buildings above street level, the path—built on the disused tracks of an elevated railroad spur—provided a voyeuristic view into windows of anonymous city dwellers. Whenever he peered into one of those windows and happened to see people living their private lives, he felt as if he knew them and that they were connected in some strange way through the city they shared.
He checked his phone as he descended from the High Line at Twenty-Third Street, but the software engineer had still not replied. Muñoz was a little surprised by the extent of his disappointment. After most sexual encounters, he left the scene immediately and rarely thought about them again, but the software engineer had been different. He had not wanted Muñoz to leave right away.
“Stay,” he had said as he’d gotten out of bed. He had left the room and returned five minutes later with bowls of ice cream. His guileless enthusiasm as he’d crawled back under the comforter and handed over one of the bowls had charmed Muñoz and made him open up. He’d found himself recounting the episode with Blackstone, and he had felt better when the man—Kevin was his name—had said, “What a fucking asshole. They should make a separate state for people like that. Put them all in one place where they can feel superior together and pass their bigot laws without bothering the rest of us.”
Muñoz looked at his phone yet again. The message was still unanswered. Would he ever see the guy again?
He was standing in his kitchen sipping a bottle of cold water when the answer finally came. Are you still there? Did I miss my chance?
It was after eleven now, and Muñoz remembered Codella’s last words. Get some rest. Tomorrow’s gonna be a long day. He imagined Kevin waiting for his text right now.
I’m on a case, he wrote, but if you can wait a few days, I’ll bring the ice cream next time.
Chocolate, came the immediate reply. I’ll be waiting.
Wednesday
Chapter 21
Muñoz hopped in the car and held up the Post. The three-inch headline screamed, “PS Dead,” and below it was a photo of Codella climbing the steps to PS 777. “You made the front page.”
She glanced at the tabloid and rolled her eyes. “Who thinks up those headlines anyway?” She pulled away from the curb. “I always wondered. Do they have a special headline SWAT team that sits in a room all day trying to be offensively clever?”
“What do you think they get paid for that?”
“More than we do, I bet. You know about the Wainright Blake case, don’t you?”
“Sure. The one who killed and raped nurses.”
“That’s right. When we went in his apartment, there was this little box under his bed with locks of hair from all six of his victims. The next day, the Post headline was ‘Dead Locks.’ They must have been pretty amused with themselves.”
“Good thing they don’t know how Sanchez died.” Muñoz tossed the paper into the backseat. “I wonder what they’d say. ‘Father, Son, and Holy Sanchez’?”
“‘Holy Hector’?”
“‘Lamb of PS 777.’”
“‘Divine Sanchez.’”
“‘Sanchez of God.’”
“Hang it up,” she said. “We’d never get on that SWAT team.”
“Where are we headed?”
“Gambarin called me early this morning. He’s got preliminary autopsy results. We’ll visit him first and then go see Bosco.”
When they peered through the medical examiner’s door ten minutes later, he was incising the chest of an emaciated-looking corpse whose jaw hung open in a hollow position that reminded Codella of Edvard Munch’s The Scream. She watched him expertly lift and pull back a flap of the old man’s skin to expose the corpse’s sunken rib cage and lungs. Cherry-red blotches of lividity colored the victim’s stomach where he had lain face down after death while his blood had thickened and settled. He looked like a cancer victim, but she knew a different killer had ended his life. Gambarin only autopsied homicides.
She did not enter his autopsy room, and she held Muñoz back as well. Gambarin didn’t appreciate uninvited infringement on his territory. Instead, they waited in the doorway inhaling the strong odor of formalin and decomposed flesh until the medical examiner acknowledged their presence. Only when he lowered his instrument, lifted his goggles, and came toward them did she speak.
“I got your message, Rudolph. Thanks. This is Detective Muñoz. What can you tell us about our principal?”
“He’s an interesting case.” Gambarin emitted no emotion.
She waited.
“His killer didn’t leave so much as a finger impression on the neck. It was a very clean kill.”
“What do you make of that?”
He shrugged. “Either he got lucky or he was a trained professional.”
“As in military?”
“Possibly.”
“You say he. So you’re convinced it was a man?”
“I can’t be positive, but it takes enormous strength to snap a neck. Your victim isn’t going to stand still while you do it. This victim was six foot two. I don’t know many women who would have the strength to subdue a man that large and get the right angle to snap a head so cleanly.”
“So we’re looking for a tall man?” said Muñoz.
“Not necessarily as tall as the victim. Certainly not as tall as you. Average to tall, I’d say. Five foot nine or more. But I couldn’t get on the stand and say any of this with absolute certainty.”
“But you’d say the killer was physically very strong?” asked Codella.
“I’d say that.”
“That describes an awful lot of men in New York City,” observed Muñoz.
“How exactly did Sanchez die?” Codella took out her iPhone to take notes.
“Technically, heart failure.”
She looked up. “Heart failure?”
“Stemming from the spinal cord fracture. His third cervical cord was snapped clean.”
“Would that have resulted in immediate death?” she asked.
“Probably not. But as soon as the cord was snapped, he would have been incapacitated. He either fell right to the ground or was lowered there by the killer. In a C3 fracture, all the motor functions below the fracture site are compromised. Shoulders, arms, chest, diaphragm, legs. He would have been struggling to breathe, but he could have still been conscious for a while. Interestingly, the killer was prepared for this. He stuffed a cloth or rag of some kind in the victim’s mouth.”
“A rag?”
“White cotton.”
“It wasn’t there when we got to the scene.”
“I know. He’d removed it and apparently took it with him since CSU found nothing. But there were fibers in the mouth.”
“Any trace that might indicate who stuffed it there?”
“Nothing I could see, but I sent the fibers to the lab for analysis. This killer must have been wearing gloves, and assuming he brought the cloth with him, he must have carried it in a sealed bag or envelope. The fibers weren’t tainted with hair or other particles.”
“So Sanchez was immobilized but possibly conscious when the killer staged his crucifixion.” Codella tapped open one of the photos she’d snapped at the crime scene.
“That’s my guess. It could have taken several moments before he stopped breathing completely, lost consciousness, and died from heart failure. It’s likely he watched—in total paralysis, of course—as the killer positioned him into that pose.”
Codella considered. “So based on the autopsy results, would you say this was a planned, premeditated murder?”
“I would. Because of the lack of fingerprints and the cloth he used and then took away. I’d testify to that.”
“Are we looking for a serial killer?” asked Muñoz. “Some psycho with a Jesus obsession who was out trolling and followed Sanchez home?”
“I’m not the detective.” Gambarin looked over his shoulder at the waiting corpse.
“I don’t think so,” said Codella.
“Why not?” asked Muñoz.
She magnified the same photo she’d studied on her iPhone last night and stared at Sanchez’s splayed arms on the living room rug. She held it up for all of them to view. “This doesn’t look to me like the work of a deranged serial killer. I could be wrong, of course, but I’d expect a serial killer living out a Jesus obsession to take the staging much further. I’m thinking he would have brought nails, for instance, and hammered the hands to the floorboards, or put a crown of thorns on his head, or carved a biblical passage into his chest or written it on the wall in his blood. This staging seems, I don’t know, tame. Too tame.” She turned to Gambarin. “You’ve described a quick, surgical killing that a trained professional would do—an execution. This staging feels more like a sane person’s deliberate message. A giant fuck you. The New York Times had dubbed Sanchez the ‘Savior of PS 777.’ I think whoever did this was telling the world, Here’s what happens to saviors.”