Silent City: A Claire Codella Mystery

by Carrie Smith

  Codella knew what he was thinking. “No arterial spurts.”

  “Right.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It means he delivered the head blow before he cut her throat. Her heart was still pumping but it wasn’t very strong.”

  “Maybe he had to subdue her before he could make her look like Mary Magdalene.”

  “He definitely tied her wrists first. Her hands are clean. If her hands had been free, she’d have raised them to her neck and tried to staunch the bleeding.”

  Codella stared at the frozen terror on Sofia Reyes’s face. The woman had died a much slower and gruesome death than Sanchez. But why? What had she possibly done to incite her killer? What motive could explain her barbarous death, and how was it related to Sanchez’s, because certainly it had to be related. Were there other decomposing disciples rotting in yet-to-be-discovered locations?

  “I hope you can find me some clues, Rudolph. I really need something to go on.”

  “We’ll see,” was all Gambarin said. “Call me in the morning. I’ll do the autopsy tonight.”

  Chapter 39

  “Where’s Haggerty?” she asked as soon as she got to the precinct.

  “He’s down at the prosecutor’s office. They’re getting ready for Queen Smith’s arraignment.”

  She pulled up a chair next to Portino. “Can you show me the street cam footage?” She dropped into the chair and closed her eyes while Portino cued it up.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” he warned.

  One by one he showed her the segments Muñoz had carefully documented. When they were finished, he sat back and rested his folded hands on his stomach. “Not much help, huh? Nothing here that a grand jury’s gonna use to indict anyone.”

  “Was there a camera in the laundromat?”

  “Muñoz checked it out. Nothing. What are we going to do? We can’t show these to the public.”

  “Maybe. But if we hold onto them, it could look like we’re hiding something.” She sighed and pointed to the screen. “Which one do you think’s the killer?”

  “Well, Red Cap got there first. Overcoat never shows up on the camera again. He might just live around there.”

  “What about Laundromat Guy?”

  “I don’t know. He’s in that window the whole time. He can’t be the killer. He could be a lookout, I suppose.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. I want you to call Detective Colleary at the 145th. Ask him to check the street cams near the Reyes brownstone as soon as possible. Maybe we’ll get lucky and spot Red Cap or Overcoat there. We’ve got to find out how these murders are connected.”

  After Portino made the call, she asked, “Did you look into iAchieve and Chip Dressler?”

  He grabbed a file off his desk. “There’s a ton of information about iAchieve on the Internet. It’s supposed to be this amazing new learning and assessment system. The word they keep using is adaptive.”

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “The program tracks each kid’s scores and adapts the instruction based on their performance. One article called it the one-on-one cyberteacher of the future. I like that.”

  “Sounds a little too good to be true, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know. McFlieger-Walsh partnered with major technology companies and brain researchers at Johns Hopkins University.”

  “That must have cost them a pretty penny.”

  “One source says they invested more than two hundred million in a push to lock up the elementary and high school market for technology-based learning. McFlieger-Walsh is owned by Hemisphere Media Holdings, and now they’re under pressure from Hemisphere shareholders to see some upside, but the program’s not getting the traction they expected. McFlieger-Walsh is dragging down Hemisphere’s stock price. They want to spin it off, but there are no takers yet.”

  “Why isn’t the program getting any traction if it’s so scientifically proven?”

  “Seems it’s a little bleeding edge. A lot of districts still haven’t installed the sophisticated learning management systems and hardware needed to run a program that requires whiteboards in every classroom linked to tablets in every student’s hands that feed data into a database that can diagnose individual student needs and provide reteaching on the spot at the right level.”

  “It’s a lot more complicated than when I was in school.”

  “And last year McFlieger-Walsh was cited for unethical sales and marketing practices. Their nonprofit division sent twenty-five big shot school administrators on an all-expense-paid trip to Oahu. Supposedly, it was a ‘training’ seminar for educational leaders—nothing to do with product sales—but every administrator who participated was a long-standing McFlieger-Walsh customer, and it was obvious the company was softening them up for an iAchieve sale. McFlieger-Walsh’s competitors cried foul play, and a big investigation was launched. The company got fined and had to back off on the hard sell. They lost a lot of momentum and credibility.”

  “Was Margery Barton on that trip?”

  “Her name wasn’t mentioned in the articles. Does she have a suspiciously good tan?” He smirked.

  Codella visualized the unnervingly striking administrator. “Tans don’t last that long, Vic. Anyway, I have a feeling she would have spent her time under an umbrella at the tiki bar, not under the hot skin-damaging sun. She’s at least fifty, but she looks impressively put together. All I know is, she wants iAchieve in her district—she wants it badly—and Sanchez definitely didn’t want it in his school.”

  “Would she take him out for being an obstacle?”

  “Anything’s possible, I suppose. She could have hired someone to do her dirty work.”

  “Or McFlieger-Walsh could have done it,” said Portino.

  “They certainly have a financial incentive to keep that sale alive,” Codella agreed. “Selling to New York City would mitigate a lot of bad press. What did you find out about Chip Dressler?”

  “He’s the senior vice president and national sales manager for McFlieger-Walsh. He lives in Dallas, but he commutes to the New York office about once a month.”

  “He made a presentation to the principals in Barton’s district Monday morning,” said Codella. “I also saw a sign-up sheet on the PS 777 bulletin board about an iAchieve sneak preview this afternoon. I wonder if he went through with that. All the teachers that hated Sanchez signed up for the session. Anything to get under his skin, I guess. Tell me about Margery Barton.”

  “She’s a pretty ambitious woman if you consider she went from teacher to district administrator in eleven years. Last September the chancellor—Bernie Lipsie—tapped her to head up a citywide technology task force.”

  “What about her personal life?”

  “Married to a big-time surgeon. He’s the head of geriatric orthopedics at the Hospital for Special Surgery. He’s also a chief of orthopedics at NYU Medical School. He has a publication list a mile long. He’s involved in at least twenty research studies on various hip replacement procedures and hardware.”

  “So I take it she really did attend a fundraiser at Cipriani on Monday night?”

  “From beginning to end.” Portino sipped his coffee.

  She stood and grabbed her jacket from the back of her chair. There was something else going on here, and she couldn’t put her finger on it yet. Lies were flying in all directions, and she wasn’t even sure she’d heard them all yet. She pushed her right arm through her jacket sleeve. “Go home, Vic. Get some rest. We’ll go over the details tomorrow morning with a clear head. We’ll hold a briefing at Manhattan North. I’ll send a message out.”

  Then she left the squad room, walked downstairs, and rushed past the raucous front desk area, where even at this hour, Upper West Siders were waiting to file complaints and report incidents. Outside, a cold, misty rain was falling. She turned up her collar. She had to get a winter coat, she reminded herself again as she crossed the dark street to where her car was parked in a long row of
cops’ cars.

  She got in. It was after nine. She phoned McGowan’s cell. He would be home, she imagined, and he wouldn’t be happy to see her name pop up. Chances were she’d get an earful for standing up to him at the meeting. But he’d ordered her to keep him informed, and she was going to keep doing it.

  When he answered, she said, “Sir, I’ve just seen the video footage from Sanchez’s street the night he died. There are three persons of interest on that footage, but they’re all too blurred to yield any clear facial images. The camera was defective.”

  “Shit.”

  “It was on a maintenance list.”

  “Goddammit.”

  “I think we should release it to the press anyway.”

  “Are you serious? Can’t you imagine the headlines?”

  “I can,” she acknowledged calmly. “But if it comes out that we’re sitting on it, it could be even more embarrassing for us. It could look like we’re covering up. It could take the press’s attention off the murders and put it on us.”

  He was quiet. She waited. She listened to him breathe. “What are you suggesting?” he asked.

  “A news conference. We acknowledge the camera problem. We show the footage of the three persons of interest. We call for anyone who may have seen them to come forward.”

  “I’ll think about it,” was all he said. “I’ll decide before tomorrow’s briefing.”

  He hung up. She sat in the cold car in silence for several minutes. She considered going home, but she didn’t want to go home. She wondered where Haggerty was right now. She pulled out of the parking space and headed toward the Ninety-Sixth Street transverse that crossed Central Park. Maybe, she thought, she could watch Sofia Reyes’s autopsy, but when she got to Gambarin’s office, Reyes’s body had already been incised; her tissue samples taken; and her organs removed, examined, weighed, and returned to her body. She lay quiescent on a stainless table, and her incisions were being sewn together by Gambarin’s autopsy assistant.

  The medical examiner looked tired, and he skipped formalities as usual. “I estimate she died between six and nine PM on Monday night. She had a deep, ten-centimeter slash to the left side of her neck suggesting a right-handed killer, consistent with Sanchez’s killer. The blade severed the sternocleidomastoid muscle; jugular vein; carotid sheath and artery; and everything down to the spine, trachea, and larynx. Her killer didn’t take any chances. The official cause of death is exsanguination. She bled out. No surprise, I’m sure.”

  “Anything else you can tell me?”

  “There was blunt trauma to her skull. The murderer hit her with a bronze statuette that was on the floor. CSU found her blood and hair on the base.”

  “He delivered the blow to her head before he slit her throat?”

  “Yes.”

  Codella pictured the bronze statuette. “What do you make of the head blow?”

  “I don’t think he intended to kill her with the blunt force, if that’s what you’re asking. It was just one blow. She may have put up a fight and incited his anger, so he reached for something in order to subdue her. Her hands were tied so tightly that they were getting no circulation at all before she died. He punched her in the face, too. She had a fractured cheekbone.”

  “What else?”

  “She was gagged, like Sanchez. I found the same kind of white cotton fibers in her mouth. CSU has them for analysis.”

  Codella thanked him and called CSU. Banks got on the line and confirmed that the fibers in Sanchez’s mouth were identical to the fibers in Reyes’s mouth. “They’re just a cheap cotton, the kind in a household rag,” he said. “So common they’d never be enough to convince a jury the cases are connected.”

  “We need more evidence to link the murders.”

  “I’m afraid you’re not going to get it from forensics,” he said. “Sorry.”

  When Codella got home, she rode the elevator with a woman doing late-night laundry, who said, “Hey, I really like your hair short like that.”

  Codella smiled. Get cancer, she wanted to say. You can have it, too. She got off on her floor. She stared at her neighbor Jean’s door and wondered if she was home. But it was too late to knock on her door, and she wasn’t really in the mood for conversation anyway. She let herself in and pulled off her boots in the vestibule. Then she flipped on the television, but all the basketball games had ended so she settled for a low backdrop of news while she cut up an apple.

  She plopped onto her couch and stared at the talking head. Now two people were dead, and somehow the deaths were linked, and she wasn’t going to solve either murder until she found that link. Hector Sanchez was turning out to have been a very complicated man. The so-called Savior of PS 777 had been quite the self-promoter, she reflected, running a major advertising campaign on the Upper West Side, starting parent groups, developing apps, and openly challenging Margery Barton’s technology plans for the district. Were his efforts really driven by superior educational vision, or had he been motivated by hubris and self-interest? Was it possible, as Christine Donohue had suggested, that all his grand initiatives were nothing more than performance art choreographed to distract the world from what was really going on between himself and Dana Drew?

  She took a bite of her apple. Milosz Jancek had called him a “good man,” she recalled, someone who wanted to make children’s lives better, but how could that be so when he had rushed out of school to go have sex with Drew and built his pretext on the sad circumstances of a child like Vondra Williams, a child who could have used a home visit from a concerned adult? How could you say he was a suitable protector of innocent children when he’d bullied his own assistant principal the same morning John Chambers’s head was pushed into a toilet? Wasn’t he really just a hypocrite? He had fired Eugene Bosco for closing his eyes in front of his class, but hadn’t he done something even more egregious, using children for his own glorification?

  Codella turned off the television. And how did Sofia Reyes factor into the equation? Had she been a coconspirator in his self-aggrandizement, or was she an innocent casualty? Codella remembered the flagrant positioning of the literacy consultant’s body. In her mind, she could still clearly see the frozen fear in Reyes’s cloudy eyes. She could imagine her terrifying last moments of life, during which she must have known she was going to die and couldn’t do anything to alter the inevitable. Surely she would have pleaded. She would have screamed. But what chance had she had against her assailant?

  If you had to come face to face with a would-be killer, Codella thought, cancer had to be a better adversary than whoever had murdered Sofia Reyes. At least cancer gave you time to assemble an army and launch some sort of counterattack. And even if you lost, you still might have a week, a month, a year to reflect on your life and catalog all the small joys you had ever experienced.

  Codella remembered lying in the hospital and thinking about the simple perfection of Pink Lady apples and how she hoped she would get to taste them again when all the hideousness ended, if it ended in her favor. Sofia Reyes hadn’t had that privilege. She’d had no army of doctors to lob chemo agents and monoclonal antibodies at her killer. She’d had to die alone, defenseless, with no time for last reflections.

  Thursday

  Chapter 40

  Detectives Fisk and Nichols sat at the far end of the conference table, a nonverbal signal, Codella thought, that they did not intend to give her their full attention or allegiance. The uniformed officers had claimed the seats on the window side of the long table, and the precinct detectives—Muñoz, Haggerty, Portino, and Ragavan from the 171st and Colleary from the 145th—were sitting across from them. McGowan hovered near the door. Crammed into briefing room 2-B, they were an intimate yet uncomfortably segregated confederacy of crime solvers.

  “Let’s review the developments,” she said from her seat at the head of the table. “Gambarin has confirmed that Sanchez and Reyes were both killed on Monday night within a few hours of each other. Reyes was gagged just like Sanchez,
and the fibers found in her mouth match the fibers found in his mouth. That’s a link, but it’s the only link so far—that and the fact that they both looked like cast members in The Passion of the Christ. Beyond that, we have no physical evidence.”

  She picked up a dry-erase marker and stood in front of the whiteboard mounted on the wall behind the precinct detectives. She wrote Hector Sanchez in the middle of the board. Below his name she drew three spokes leading to the words Red Cap, Overcoat, and Laundromat Guy.

  “We’ve established that these three individuals were in the vicinity of Sanchez’s apartment before and during the time when he was murdered.” She turned to Muñoz, and he played key sections of the footage on the flat-screen behind her chair and described the sequence of events. When he finished, she turned to McGowan.

  McGowan cleared his throat. “We’re going public with this footage,” he said in his clipped, blue-collar accent.

  “But you can’t see anything,” said Fisk. “Are you sure that’s wise?”

  “If we don’t put it out there and the press gets hold of it, then they skewer us for the fuckup,” said McGowan, taking full credit for the insight and the decision. Codella didn’t care. By helping him, she had scored a victory and embedded whispers of doubt in his mind about Dan Fisk’s judgment. “There’s going to be a press conference at ten AM down at One Police Plaza,” he continued. “We’ll ask the public for help. That means the tip lines are going to be flooded, and most of what we get will be sheer crap, as you know, but you’ll have to sift through it, so get ready for a chaotic day.”

  When he was done, she turned back to her diagram. On the left side of Sanchez’s name, she wrote Dana Drew. “What everybody knows about her is that she has a child at the school, and she’s contributed thousands of dollars to fund Sanchez’s pet programs—Proud Families, Parents as Partners, Afterschool Apptitude. What they don’t know is that she and her partner Jane Martin split up last year. They’re living apart and pretending to still be a couple so Drew can avoid bad press while she’s on Broadway. There are rumors that Drew and Sanchez were having an affair.” She found Haggerty’s blue eyes. “And now we know that the rumors were true.”