Cold Blooded (Dennis McQueen 02)

by Randisi, Robert J.

  “Which would confirm your hook theory.”

  “And give us some place definite to look for,” McQueen said.

  Bannerjee looked at Sommers, who said, “Butcher shops, slaughter houses, like that.”

  “Ah . . .”

  McQueen put in a call to the lab and actually reached the technician from the first case, Marty Cahill. He told McQueen he’d be glad to take a look, but couldn’t get down there until the next morning. McQueen figured that would have to do and thanked the man. He then told Bannerjee to expect Cahill in the morning and give him access to the body.

  “Of course.”

  The doctor then offered them coffee or tea, choosing to look directly at Bailey Sommers while he made the offer.

  “I don’t have time to stay for coffee, Doc,” McQueen said, “but Bailey might—”

  “Sergeant McQueen is my ride,” she said, cutting him off. “Maybe another time?”

  “Of course,” Bannerjee said, with a charming smile, “another time.” He shook hands with Sommers, holding her hand a little longer than was necessary.

  Outside McQueen said, “I thought you were stuck on the doc. Why didn’t you stay?”

  “I never said I was stuck on him,” she argued, “all I said was that he was a gentleman.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re the type who likes bad boys?”

  “No, I’m not,” she said.

  “So your type lies somewhere in the middle?”

  “Why are we discussing my type?” she demanded.

  “I’m just trying to—”

  “You don’t like it when I try to discuss this kind of thing with you, do you?” she asked.

  “Point taken.”

  They got in the car and she headed them back to the office.

  “You’ll have to modify your list,” he told her.

  “I’ve already thought of that,” she said. “We need to look for large, walk-in freezers used by commercial meat-packing plants and—like I told the doc—butcher shops, slaughter houses . . . anyone who deals with huge slabs of meat hung on hooks.”

  “Rocky.”

  “What?” she asked.

  “Puts me in mind of the first Rocky movie, where he trained on slabs of meat.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “You have seen Rocky, haven’t you?”

  “Are we going to discuss my taste in movies now?”

  “Jesus, Sommers,” he said, “you haven’t seen Rocky? Any of the Rocky movies?”

  “Boxing is not my thing.”

  “They’re about more than just boxing.”

  “Dennis, let’s not get into a discussion about movies, now,” she said.

  “Yeah, but Rocky . . . next thing you’ll tell me is you’ve never seen the Star Wars movies.”

  When this comment was greeted by silence he said, “Jesus Christ, Bailey—”

  “Have you ever seen The First Wives Club?”

  “No . . .”

  “The Banger Sisters?”

  “No . . .”

  “How about Same Time, Next Year?”

  “Okay, okay, I get your point.”

  They drove along in silence for a few moments, then McQueen said, “Thelma and Louise.”

  “What about it.”

  “I saw that one.”

  She shook her head.

  “Jesus, Dennis . . .”

  “What?”

  Chapter 36

  The next morning McQueen was in the squad room alone when the phone rang.

  “Brooklyn South Homicide,” he said.

  “Sergeant McQueen?”

  “Speaking.”

  “This is Marty Cahill, from the lab?”

  “Hey, Marty,” McQueen said. “You got somethin’ for me already?”

  “I got a little chip of metal, if you call that something,” Cahill said.

  “Dug it out of the deepest part of the scratch,” Cahill said. “I was gonna call it a wound, but it ain’t hardly much more than a scratch.”

  “Did the doc tell you my theory?”

  “About the metal hook? Sure did. Makes more sense than mine did, about the ice blocks?”

  “Just a bit more, yeah.”

  “Well, I’d say you’re on the right track, Sarge,” Cahill said.

  “Can’t thank you enough, Marty,” McQueen said.

  “You’ll get me that report in writing?”

  “Soon as I can.”

  “Thanks, I owe you.”

  “I’ll collect,” Cahill said, “some time.”

  As McQueen hung up Sommers came walking in, deposited her purse and attaché case on her desk.

  She’d started carrying case files in the case so she could take them home and study them.

  “News?” she asked.

  “Cahill,” he said. “Looks like we’re right about the hooks.”

  “So what do we do now?” she asked. “Start hitting all the places on my list?”

  McQueen sat back and rubbed his eyes. He hadn’t slept much the night before. His stomach had been upset. He’d blamed it on the frozen dinner he’d eaten for dinner, but maybe it was these cases.

  “Your list is too long.”

  “I cut it down last night,” she said.

  “To what?”

  “Sixty-six.”

  “Sixty-six places in . . . what? Manhattan? Brooklyn?”

  “The five boroughs,” she said, with a shrug. “That seemed to make sense.”

  “So if he lives or works in Jersey, we’re fucked.”

  She perched her hip on his desk and said, “Pretty much.”

  “Okay,” he said, “procedure. We’ll take your list and split it in half.”

  “We’re gonna work separately?”

  “No,” he said, “we’ll give the other half to one of the other teams. The Double Ds when they’re working, Sherman and Silver when they are.”

  “Sounds good to me,” she said, “but you have to clear it with the Looie, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, I do,” he said. “I’ll talk to him when he comes in. Meanwhile, see if you can split the list up geographically, so we’re not tripping over each other.”

  “Will do,” she said. “I’ll have to go downstairs and use the computer.”

  “They don’t mind when you do that?”

  She smiled and said, “I use my considerable charm to overcome any objections.”

  “And that works?”

  “Almost every time.”

  She grabbed her purse and case from her desk and headed out the door, almost colliding with Frankie Cataldo. He let her by, but turned to look at her ass as she went by.

  “You tappin’ that yet, Sarge?” he asked, with a wicked grin.

  “Go fuck yourself, Frankie,” McQueen said.

  “I don’t have to,” Cataldo said. “They’re standin’ in line ta do it for me.”

  McQueen ignored the man as he went to his own desk across the room. Cataldo seemed satisfied with the grunt work they gave him in the office. He apparently had no desire to go out on the streets again. McQueen knew that Frankie had worked for years undercover and was only a few years from pulling the pin, so maybe he was entitled to skate, but he didn’t have to be such a monumental asshole while he was doing it.

  He was still going through his pitch in his head when Lieutenant Jessup walked in. He decided to allow the man to settle in, have his coffee and whatever else was in the paper bag he was carrying before he hit him with this.

  Several minutes later the Double Ds walked in, debating something as they usually were.

  “Hey, Sarge,” Diver said, “can we ask you somethin’?”

  “Sure, why not?” McQueen said.

  “Come on . . .” Dolan said.

  “Naw, naw,” Diver said, “the Sarge is pretty smart. He’ll know the answer.”

  “I know the answer already,” Dolan said.

  “Sarge, is it ‘orient,’ ” Diver asked McQueen, “or ‘orientate’?”

  McQueen k
new this was important to them. He had no doubt that they’d been debating this as hotly as they would have debated a presidential election.

  He didn’t know which side they had each taken, but it didn’t matter to him. They were pretty much an interchangeable pair to him.

  “It’s orient,” he said. “There’s no such word as orientate.”

  “See?” Diver said to Dolan. “See? I told you.” He looked at McQueen. “We even looked it up in the dictionary and he said Webster was wrong.”

  “Well,” McQueen said, “if he won’t believe Webster why would he believe me?”

  “I’ll have to give it some thought,” Dolan said. He turned to go to his desk, then turned back to McQueen. “What about supposedly?”

  “What about it?” McQueen asked.

  “Is it ‘supposedly,’ ” the man asked, “or ‘supposably’?”

  “Oh, jeez,” Diver said, rolling his eyes, “I thought we had that one settled.”

  “Naw, flaw, let the Sarge answer that one.” They both stared at McQueen expectantly.

  “Okay,” he said, “but this is the last one.”

  They waited patiently.

  “It’s supposedly,” McQueen told them. “There’s no such word as supposably.”

  “I knew it!” Dolan said.

  “So, you believe him on that one?” Diver demanded, as they both walked to their desks. “How about nuclear and nucular . . .”

  McQueen stood up and hurried to the lieutenant’s office.

  Chapter 37

  “Loo, got a minute?”

  “Those two getting you involved in their insane debates?” Jessup asked.

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “Good,” the lieutenant said. “They were buggin’ me, and I told them to find somebody else.”

  “Thanks.”

  “What can I do for you, Dennis?”

  “It’s this case of Sommers’s, Loo.”

  “The stiff in Sheepshead Bay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well . . . there are a lot of similarities to the one we found on Coney Island last month.”

  “Not that again, Dennis,” Jessup said. “That’s Brooklyn North’s case.”

  “I know it is, I know it,” McQueen said, quickly, “but hear me out.”

  Jessup looked forlornly at his half-eaten Danish, then sat back in his chair and said, “All right.”

  McQueen laid out the theory he and Sommers had come up with about the hooks and the meat, then reiterated the other things that were the similar.

  “You’re tellin’ me what’s the same, Dennis,” Jessup said. “What about what’s different? Like what way they were killed?”

  “But that’s about the only thing that’s different, boss,” McQueen argued.

  “Look at the difference, Sergeant,” Jessup said. “One died in a fire, one had an ice pick stuck in his ear. Do you even have a link between the victims?”

  “What about the scratch on the back of the first victim?” Jessup asked. “Cow’s blood there, too?”

  “Yes,” McQueen said, triumphantly. “Yes, the M.E. says there was.”

  “And what’s the crime lab say about it?”

  “I . . . they didn’t check that on the first body, and now it’s too late. It’s been interred.”

  “Do you want to dig it up?”

  “Um, no, not at this point, but . . .”

  “Dennis, are you trying to make a case here for a serial killer?” Jessup asked. “Is that what you’re trying to do?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Then what do you want?”

  “I want to check out meat-packing plants, slaughterhouses, butcher shops, pretty much anywhere in the five boroughs where they hang meat up on hooks.”

  “What do you expect to find?”

  “More than I’d expect to find if we didn’t do it.”

  “You and Sommers are gonna do this?”

  “I thought we’d bring in another team,” McQueen said. “That is, if they’re available.”

  Jessup studied his sergeant, then picked up his cardboard cup of coffee. He sipped it, made a face as he realized most of the warmth had gone from it. He had a microwave in his office, a small one right behind him on a table. He swiveled around, stuck the coffee inside, set the timer for a minute and then turned back.

  “I can’t let you do that, Dennis.”

  “It’s Sommers’s case, boss,” McQueen said. “She’s got a right to run down leads.”

  “Then let her run them down, but don’t drag anyone else into it,” the man said.

  “Loo—”

  The timer went off behind him and the man said, “That’s all, Sergeant.”

  McQueen hesitated, then said, “Yes, sir.”

  As he got up to leave Jessup removed his coffee and swiveled back around.

  “Dennis, come up with a third body that has that scratch, and some of the other similarities, and maybe you’ll have something to hang your hat on.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Although if that one is killed in still a different way . . .”

  Chapter 38

  McQueen and Sommers spent the final week of February checking out places that hung meat on hooks whenever they could. They kept the list in the car with them so that if they found themselves near one they could stop in. If they weren’t working a case, then they went out specifically to check places out. They managed to get through Brooklyn that way, but they also knew there were bound to be places that weren’t on their list. This was a real long shot, but McQueen had followed long shots before and had them pay off.

  Of course, usually they didn’t pay off, and that’s pretty much why they were called long shots.

  McQueen also got another call from Lydia Dean during that past week.

  “Sergeant, I was just checking in with you to see if there’s been any progress in finding my brother’s killer.”

  “I’m afraid not, Mrs. Dean,” he said. “Have you spoken to Detective Northrop about it?”

  “I’m afraid if I’m not standing directly in front of Detective Northrop so he can look at my tits he doesn’t want to have anything to do with me,” she said, frankly.

  McQueen promised to call her if he found out anything. “Or even if you haven’t,” she said, before she hung up.

  He decided not to tell Sommers about the call. She always managed to make him feel silly, after a call from Lydia. He still thought the woman had her own agenda, but the murder of her brother was not officially his case. All he could do was work it with Sommers from the Sheepshead Bay angle, but without identification of the victim there wasn’t much to work on, there. All they could do was run down their meat hook theory whenever they could.

  “This is hopeless,” Sommers said. “At this rate there’s no way we can check all these places before spring.”

  “Not as hopeless as you think,” McQueen said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Leap year,” he said. He pointed to the calendar on the wall behind his desk. “We’ve got one extra day of February, tomorrow.”

  “Oh great,” she said. “With our luck February twenty-ninth will only serve to muddle things up even more.”

  When she went home that night, she had no idea how right she was going to turn out to be.

  The call came in to McQueen at home the next morning, before he even had a chance to get dressed.

  “What?” he said into the phone, which rang five minutes before his alarm was due to.

  “Sergeant McQueen?”

  “That’s me.”

  “This is Detective Stamp, from the six-nine squad?”

  “There’s gotta be a good reason you’re callin’ me at home, Stamp.”

  “Yes, sir,” the man said. “I got the word you’re interested in bodies found in the water?”

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “It’s on our bulletin board,” Stamp said. “A Detective Sommers was cal
ling around askin’ about it a few weeks back.”

  “So?”

  “So, uh, we got one.”

  “Who gave you my home number, Detective?”

  “Somebody workin’ the night watch in your squad,” Stamp said. “A detective named . . . uh, Catalano?”

  “Cataldo.”

  “Right, that’s it.”

  McQueen knew that Frankie would have delighted in giving out his home number.

  “All right,” he said, swinging his legs to the floor and hitting his alarm button before it could go off, “give me the location.”

  He wasn’t about to be the only one awakened early, so he put in a call to Sommers and gave her the information as well. After all, it was her calls that resulted in this early morning wake-up.

  They arrived on the scene at just about the same time. The body had been found half in and half out of the water beneath a Belt Parkway overpass between the Rockaway Parkway and Pennsylvania Avenue exits, technically still in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, and within the confines of the 69th Precinct.

  They pulled off the highway onto the shoulder amid all the other emergency vehicles and got out of their cars.

  “Happy Leap Year,” Sommers said. “You didn’t know about this when you made that comment yesterday, did you?”

  “Hardly.”

  They walked down the embankment together and joined the party.

  “Sergeant McQueen?” a man in his thirties asked.

  “That’s right.”

  “Detective Stamp.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “This is Detective Sommers, from Brooklyn South Homicide,” McQueen said.

  “A pleasure, Detective,” Stamp said, shaking her hand.

  Sommers was surprised. No leer, and he didn’t look her up and down.

  “Detective,” she said. “What have we got?”

  Stamp’s words came out amid the cold mist of his breath. His eyes were shiny and his nose red. He quickly replaced his glove after shaking hands with both of them.

  “Female DOA, half in, half out of the water,” he said.

  “She wash up?” Sommers asked.

  “Unlikely,” Stamp said. “The water level’s real low here. No, judging from the indentation she made in the mud seems like she was dumped from the overpass.”