Escape

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  However, Jack Swanburg was a lot more than a right jolly old elf. He had been a forensic pathologist by trade, and after his retirement a decade or so before, he'd help found and develop the 221b Baker Street Irregulars.

  With him this day were two other members of the group, Charlotte Gates, one of the leading forensic anthropologists in the country, whose responsibility at crime-scene investigations was the meticulous recovery and identification of human remains and, if possible, determination of the cause of death. Karp estimated the petite Gates to be in her early fifties, though her age was difficult to gauge because her tan face and agile movements from a lifetime spent outdoors made her seem young. With other members of the Irregulars, she'd already assisted his office with several cases, but in her "real job" she was one of the first people the authorities called upon to respond to mass fatalities. She had assisted in the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks and in many other tragic situations.

  "How do you do it?" Karp had asked her shortly after she'd helped Marlene solve a murder case in Idaho that past spring. "How do you cope with all that hands-on experience with violent death?"

  "The honest answer is that I don't always cope with it—at least not very well," she'd replied. "There are plenty of sleepless nights and nightmares. But pretty early on in my career, I started making it a point to know as much about the victims when they were alive as I could. I'd ask to see photographs of them with their families and enjoying themselves; I'd ask the people who knew them what they were like, what were their dreams ... that sort of thing." She'd pointed to her head. "I put them up here in a village I've created, so that when I'm working with their remains, I'm seeing real people."

  Gates and Swanburg had been accompanied from Denver, where the group was headquartered, to New York by geologist James Reedy, whose tough grizzled face and wiry reddish beard reminded Karp of a miner in a western film. In reality, he was a Ph.D. who taught at the Colorado School of Mines. He, too, had been instrumental in the recovery of the murder victim's body in Idaho.

  Karp was shaking hands with Reedy when Kenny Katz walked into the room. "Sorry, I hope I'm not late."

  "Not at all," Marlene said. "This group usually arrives early so we can catch up."

  "It comes from some of us having nothing better to do than exercise our gums," Swanburg said, sticking out his pudgy hand. "Jack Swanburg, damn glad to meet you."

  "Speak for yourself about flapping gums, old man," Reedy replied. "Some of us aren't leading the life of leisure on the government dole."

  "Well-earned retirement, you mean, you young whippersnapper," Swanburg retorted and turned back to Katz. "I assume of the three beautiful women in the room, you know your boss's wife, Marlene Ciampi, and the even shorter one there is Charlotte Gates, one of the founding members of the Baker Street Irregulars."

  "The Charlotte Gates?" Katz asked, surprised. "I spent a lot of time when I was in the Rangers studying the Lockerbie airliner bombing. You really worked wonders putting that together."

  "Well, I'm flattered," Gates responded, offering a handshake that was surprisingly strong for such a small woman. "But handsome young men, even Rangers, ought to spend less of their time studying mass fatalities and more on young women. Got a girlfriend?" The anthropologist wiggled her eyebrows suggestively.

  As Katz blushed, Swanburg turned his attention to the last female in the room, an attractive black woman in her thirties. "I'm afraid no one has introduced me to this lovely young lady," he said.

  "My bad," Fulton apologized. "My manners go to hell if my wife isn't around to remind me I'm supposed to have some. Anyway, this is Detective Marj Cobing of the NYPD homicide division. She's the detective assigned to the Campbell case."

  The introductions over, Karp motioned for everyone to take a seat. "I don't plan on running this meeting," he said. "We're here to discuss the Campbell case and, in particular, what efforts we can make to locate the bodies of the three Campbell children. And since I've worked with the 221b Baker Street Irregulars, as has my wife, Marlene, I thought I'd start by vouching for their abilities and their integrity."

  Karp summarized the obstacles facing the prosecution of a "bodiless homicide." As with any murder case, the prosecution needed to be able to provide jurors with admissible evidence that proved beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant murdered the victim or victims. In a case in which the bodies could not be found, the first major obstacle was proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the victim or victims were in fact dead, and hadn't simply run off or been kidnapped.

  "In the Campbell case, I don't think we're going to have much of a problem there," Karp said. "We have three young children who have been missing for nearly six months, and their mother telling her husband that she 'sent them to God.' However, the defense attorney in this case is likely to try anything, including bringing up the possibility that an intruder took the children and that's what caused Mrs. Campbell to become delusional, as she believed the intruder was actually an 'Angel of the Lord.'"

  Kenny Katz looked shocked. "Where'd that come from?"

  Karp shrugged. "Actually, I read it in a National Enquirer article at the dentist's office a month ago. It was completely made up—no named sources—but I wouldn't put it past Lewis to give it a try. But in fact, we don't know where Campbell killed them—which could be a jurisdictional problem, if, say, she actually did it in New Jersey—nor do we know how. It's that second one that concerns me."

  "How do you mean?" Gates asked.

  "With an insanity defense, we're going to have to prove that Jessica Campbell was aware of the nature and consequences of her actions," Karp said. "Shoot somebody in the head, and the law assumes that you meant to kill them. But how about if she put the kids in a rowboat and shoved them out into the Atlantic so that God could pick them up? Or maybe she took them into the woods and left them in the car for God to find. Could it then be argued that she didn't actually intend for her children to die, but thought she was just leaving them in the hands of an Almighty babysitter? And would she therefore not have realized the nature and consequences of her actions, making her legally insane at the time?"

  "I assume the house was gone over meticulously, including testing for blood?" Swanburg asked.

  "Detective Cobing, you want to handle that?" Fulton said, looking to the young woman.

  Cobing had been listening politely, but with her arms crossed in the manner of detectives who don't like other people tottering around in their cases. "Crime-scene guys didn't find a thing," she said. "They practically painted the place with Luminol, which as you probably know reacts with material that has iron in it, like blood. Even the tiniest amounts will show up under a black light."

  "Nothing at all?" Swanburg asked.

  "Nothing significant. A few flecks on the bathroom floor, but that's not unusual. Kids get cuts and people nick themselves shaving. Nor was it a significant amount. We even tested all the knives in the house, including the steak knives. Sometimes a killer will use a knife and then run it through the dishwasher, but we'll still find blood up under the handle. In this case, nothing. The car's still missing, too, so no telling what we'd find there."

  "Even if the jury accepts that the children are dead and buys that their mother knew what she was doing when she murdered them," Karp noted, "we still have to show that she knew that what she was doing was wrong. I'm betting the defense attorney plans to use the 'sent them to God' statement to show that Mrs. Campbell, in her delusional state, didn't know that killing for God was against the law. So discovering evidence that she went to some lengths to hide the crime would go a long way toward countering that."

  "Let's start with finding the car," Reedy said. "I'm sure you've all checked with the chop shops. Sorry if that sounds like Detective Class 101, but you'd be surprised how some of the best cops overlook the easy answer."

  "We checked," Cobing said. "No Volvo station wagons have turned up. We have the VIN on the National Crime Computer just in case God drove th
e car to Ohio or somewhere, but no hits yet."

  Gates looked at Reedy. "You're thinking the car was used as the coffin, like in Idaho?"

  The geologist shrugged. "Maybe, but in Idaho, the killers had access to heavy machinery and buried the car in a gravel pit. Unless Mrs. Campbell had help, and it doesn't sound like it unless she's part of a cult or something, we're talking about one woman getting rid of a car with her kids' bodies in it. I doubt she has a backhoe and knows how to use it. But it's worth checking out." He turned to Cobing. "So she leaves the house and takes the kids somewhere—alive or dead we don't know—and then comes back home without kids or car? Do we know what sort of a window of time she had to do this?"

  Cobing opened her notebook. "According to the records of the cab company, Mr. Campbell was picked up at 7:15 in the morning. She then called the nanny and told her not to come to work. Mr. Campbell returned at 6 P.M. that evening; the children were gone and his wife was in bed sleeping. That gave her a window of about ten hours, a long time."

  "If I remember right," Gates interjected, "it's possible to get from the home to the garage without being seen?

  Cobing nodded. "Yes. This particular brownstone has an enclosed three-car garage off the alley. Why?"

  "It has to do with the psychology of murderers," Gates replied. "If she intends to 'sacrifice' her children to God, I don't think she is going to take a chance on being detected and stopped. Yet she does this in the middle of the day in March. We checked with the National Weather Service, and it was actually an unseasonably warm day, so one might expect other people to be about. I also remember something from the police report saying there were signs that Mrs. Campbell had been in a struggle?"

  "Yes, scratch marks on her arms and a pretty good bite mark."

  "And I assume the bite wound was matched to the dental records of the children?" Gates asked.

  The detective paused and gave her a funny look. "You know," she said, "I'm not sure about that. It's a good question though."

  "It would definitely indicate which child bit her, and prove that she struggled with at least one of them. My guess is that the children were killed in the home and then taken somewhere."

  "How do you think she did it?" asked Cobing, who seemed to be gaining respect for the "amateurs" as the questioning went on. "There's too much blood to clean it up that well if she used a gun, plus the bullet will often go through a victim and we'd be able to find it or evidence of it. There's also a lot of blood with a knife."

  "But the house was spotless?" Swanburg asked.

  "Immaculate. And you can't just clean blood out of the carpet or even grout. Even if you can't see it, the Luminol will find it."

  "Unless the blood was contained somehow," Swanburg said.

  "The bathtub," Fulton said. "If she kills them in the bathtub, it's easy enough to wash any blood down the drain."

  "I think that's a good place to look further, detectives," Swanburg said. "There's a chance she drowned them. I saw the photographs of Mrs. Campbell's arms, and she did have some pretty good scratches—so one or more of those kids put up a prolonged fight. But forcibly drowning someone is tougher to do than you'd think, even with kids, so it would have taken a while for them to die. One of them may have put up a fight, and that fight may have occurred in or around the tub. There may or may not be any blood left there at this point, but it's worth checking."

  "Those poor babies," Marlene said.

  Karp put his hand on his wife's arm. She was as tough as they came and had been involved in her share of violent episodes, including a few where she'd been the avenging angel. But the tears were now coursing down her cheeks.

  "Sorry," she said. "I just got this image of those little children and the terror they must have felt."

  Swanburg looked back at Cobing. "Can you get a second warrant to search the house?"

  "Sure we can," said the detective, who was much more attentive now. "But what can you do that we haven't already done?"

  "I want to take apart that bathtub, get down into the drain, and see what Luminol finds. And there's one place that crime-scene techies sometimes forget to check in the tub—the plumbing—but it'll depend on just how good a job Mrs. Campbell did of cleaning."

  Katz summed up the discussion: "So we're working on the premise that Mrs. Campbell kills the kids in the house, makes quite the effort to clean up all the evidence, lugs the bodies down to the garage and puts them in the Volvo, and then drives them somewhere ..."

  "Sounds like she didn't want to get caught," Karp said.

  "Which shows that she understood that it was wrong," Marlene added. "And the consequences."

  "So she finds someplace to dump the car with the bodies," Fulton said. "And then gets back home before her husband shows up."

  "Anybody call the taxi companies to see if somebody dropped her off?" Marlene asked.

  "That we did do," Cobing replied. "No record of anyone fitting Jessica Campbell's description being dropped off in the neighborhood."

  "So she takes some other sort of transportation to get back," Reedy said. "Grand Central Terminal," Karp suggested. "She drives the car somewhere and then catches a train back to Grand Central and walks the rest of the way home. That's quite a ways, but again, demonstrates that she's thinking clearly enough to not take a cab and risk being tied to the brownstone."

  "But where'd she go?" Marlene asked, posing the big question. "How do you kill three kids, clean up the evidence, then drive the car and the bodies somewhere, bury the car so that it hasn't been found in six months, and still get back home in time?"

  "Well," Reedy said with a grin. "You don't bury it, you submerge it. Takes no time to cover a car with water. So, anyone think we can find a place where Mrs. Campbell could roll the family station wagon into the water and then catch a ride home?"

  "Maybe you didn't notice, Sherlock," Swanburg said, "but Manhattan is an island. You know, surrounded by water."

  "Very funny, my dear Watson," Reedy said. "But remember, this is the middle of the day and Manhattan is a very busy island crowded with people. Somebody's going to notice if Jessica rolled the Volvo off the Brooklyn Bridge. What I need is a map."

  "Be right back," Fulton said, leaving the room. He returned with a large rolled-up map of New York State, which he pinned up on the wall.

  Twenty minutes later, they all stood back and looked at the map and their handiwork. There were so many colored dots indicating possible locations where Jessica Campbell might have left her car and the bodies of her children that the map appeared to have come down with some sort of disease. The ten-hour time frame left too much of the area to cover, but there were other criteria for narrowing down the possibilities: The place where Jessica did her work had to be a body of water deep enough to submerge a car, either from some sort of platform, such as a bridge or dock, or from the shore; it had to be close enough to a rail or bus line that Jessica could have used to get home; and it had to be out of sight from possible witnesses.

  "Shit," Marlene swore, looking at the dots, which ranged from New Jersey and Connecticut to upstate New York and Vermont. "That's still a lot of ground to cover."

  "Well, let's try to narrow it down further," Swanburg said. Addressing Cobing, he asked, "Is there anything we know about her past that might point us in the right direction? Someplace she might feel comfortable; psychological profiles show that killers who hide their victims usually pick a spot they know or one that resembles a place they once felt comfortable in." Cobing told him what she knew. Jessica was raised in Harlem and later moved to SoHo with her wealthy parents. Then there was college in Poughkeepsie, graduate school at Columbia...

  "Poughkeepsie?" Swanburg said, peering at the map. "I remember seeing the name."

  "Yes, Vassar College." Cobing pointed to the place on the map.

  "Up north, eh?" Swanburg said. "And damn close to the Hudson River." He looked at the others. "Might need another one of those dots."

  Cobing relaxed. "I think I'll see w
hat her friends—not that she has many—and family have to say. So far I haven't had much luck with them, but who knows, maybe an innocent discussion about old favorite places for family picnics along the Hudson would break the ice."

  15

  "Look at this crap," Dean Newbury swore as he walked into the office of his nephew, V. T., tossing the Saturday edition of the New York Times on his desk.

  V. T. picked up the paper and scanned the front page. "Which article are you talking about, or is it all crap?" he said with a smile. "My guess is it's the story about the Yankees being five games back from the Red Sox?"

  The old man cackled. "Good one," he said. "Damn Yankees... no pun intended." Then his face returned to its usual blend of constipation and anger. "But you're right. It's all a bunch of left-wing drivel. There was a time when that rag, even as liberal as its editorial board has always been— bunch of Jews and faggots—at least kept most of the opinion stuff on the editorial pages. Now it permeates every single page like mold in bread. The only decent things in that old fish-wrapper are the crossword puzzle and the Sudoku."

  "I didn't know you were a fan of puzzles," V. T. replied. Such an innocent pastime seemed out of character for his no-nonsense uncle.

  "Since I was a kid," the old man snorted. "But that's not important." Dean Newbury stomped around the desk and stabbed a bony finger at the paper. "That's what I'm talking about," he said, bending over to read it out loud. "Listen to this from that goddamned pinko senator McCullum. He's constantly attacking the Patriot Act. 'The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become the instruments of tyranny at home.' What kind of bullshit is that?"

  "Actually, I think he's quoting James Madison," V. T. pointed out. "I think Madison also said, 'If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it mil be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy."'