Suburban Dicks
Page 14
Michelle placed her security badge against the back-door sensor. She passed the locker rooms. Chris Connors and Benjamin Dobeck were changing after closing out their shift. She went to the women’s locker. After changing, she logged in as they logged out. They didn’t exchange pleasantries. She wasn’t the pleasantry-exchanging type.
Niket was running late. Again. It gave her time to look for the files Kenny had requested. Requested? She smiled grimly. She made her way to the evidence archives, which were in the basement. Having never been down to the archives since she’d been given her introductory tour years ago, Michelle was frustrated to find the cage door was locked.
She looked at the rows of shelving holding neatly aligned brown storage boxes. Staring down the row directly in front of the cage, she saw they regressed chronologically, starting with 1979 closest to the door.
She went upstairs. Thankfully, the chief wasn’t in. Garmin and Rossi sat in their shared cubicle in the detectives’ section. Michelle entered the office of Alice Hurst, who ran administrative operations. The lie barely formed in her mind as the words came out of her mouth. “Can I sign out the keys for the evidence archives?”
“The archive or the lockup?” Alice asked, the rarity of the request leading her to make the distinction between recent and active evidence storage and closed cases.
“Archives,” Michelle said, then, laughing, added, “I know, I haven’t been down there since my original tour of the office. It’s stupid. I’m having an argument with my mother about something. She said the guy who owned the first Chinese restaurant in town wasn’t even Asian, but set up the paperwork under the name Fuk Yu. It sounded ridiculous. I think my mom is full of shit.”
Alice smiled and handed Michelle the keys.
“Thank you,” said Michelle. “A bottle of wine to the winner!”
As she walked away, Alice said, “You’ll owe me a glass.”
Downstairs, Michelle went to the second of three rows of shelving and backtracked through time to 1972. She found the box labeled “August” and took it off the shelf, fighting a sneezing fit as the dust from the top kicked into the air. Inside were twelve stuffed storage portfolio folders, individually string-tied and rubber-banded.
She flipped through them until she found the one she was looking for, from August 8. The adhesive label on the tab had the date, but the folder cover had a typewritten summary taped to it:
WWPD INCIDENT RECORD
Incident Date: August 8, 1972
Incident Report: 728-245R30
Persons: Ferris
Jonathan (husband)
Elizabeth (wife)
Rosemary (minor)
Frances (minor)
Address: 278 North Post Rd.
Incident Summary: Skeletal remains discovered on property. Forensics analysis conducted at Princeton University Archaeology Laboratory 8/14/72. Results concluded remains were animal bone.
Michelle took the rubber band off. It was so dry that it snapped apart in her hand. The folder was skimpy. She read the full incident report. There were six black-and-white photographs of the bone, taken at the old police station’s small lab, which had looked like something out of a 1930s Universal monster movie. There were two color Polaroids taken by the family, one of which had been reprinted in the Trentonian article. A tear sheet of that article had been clipped and inserted into the folder.
She snapped several pictures of the folder items with her cell phone. She took particular care to get as clear a picture as she could of the police photographs of the bone and the color Polaroids.
There was no lab report from the university.
And there was no bone in an evidence bag.
23
ANDREA Stern stood in the Sasmals’ backyard, avoiding responsibility for her children as they ran amok across the property. She could feel the disapproval emanating from Tharani and Sharda. She felt some disappointment at her failure to control her kids, and some fear they would ignore her if she tried, but mostly she just felt a lot of indifference. Doing nothing was the path of least resistance—a path she had abhorred until she had kids.
Kenny stood at her side as they watched Jimmy Chaney methodically walking east to west. Kenny’s high school friend was tall, and still carrying the lean, chiseled body of an athlete. His patience belied her initial impression of him when he had arrived in his loud car.
Sharda asked, “What do we do if he finds something?”
“We dig,” said Andrea.
Fifteen minutes later, Jimmy called out, “All done.” He stood at the back of the property line, which was defined by a faux white picket fence made of aluminum posts and vinyl panels. “No pings at all after I cleared the lines near the house.”
Kenny muttered, “Shit.”
“Can you go through the gate and sweep another ten yards off the property line?” she asked Jimmy, though it wasn’t a question.
He shrugged and opened the latch on the rear gate, wandering into the field of tall scrub behind the house. Andrea’s brood slid through the gate alongside him and started traipsing across the field grass.
“Watch out for ticks!” she called out. As they ignored her, she muttered, “Or get sucked dry of all your blood. Whatever.”
“We were not going to place our pool off the property line,” Sharda said with growing impatience.
“We’re talking about a single person or a small group of people burying a dismembered body part in the middle of the night across wide-open farm fields and woods,” said Andrea. “I doubt they originally planned it out to the inch.”
They were interrupted when Jimmy called out, “I got something!”
The four walked quickly to the back of the property. Kenny walked fast enough to almost achieve a brisk pace. All that recent exercising had him feeling fit. Jimmy showed them the line monitor screen. “Here. One point three meters down. That’s not a line readout or a pipe.”
“A rock?” asked Kenny.
“Could be, but not a lot of rocks in the soil once we get this far east in town,” said Jimmy. “Believe it or not, we’re exactly at the point where the rocky soil from the Princeton hills changes over into sandy soil heading to the shore. These flat fields are where it shifts. Two miles west and this thing would’ve been pinging like nuts.”
“Okay, Copernicus, thanks for the geology lesson,” said Kenny. “We have to get some shovels and start digging.” He turned to the Sasmals.
“I have one,” Tharani said.
Jimmy planted a flag marker in the ground at the spot. “Guess you get to dig then, Kenny. Have a good day, everyone.”
“You don’t want to see what’s down here?” asked Kenny. “Maybe help me dig?”
Jimmy patted Kenny on the shoulder, flashing a toothy grin, and said, “I don’t think you’re searching for gold, so maybe the less I know, the better.”
With that, he left.
Kenny looked around, hesitant, and asked, “How deep is one point three meters?”
“About four feet,” said Sharda.
Tharani said, “I’ll get the shovel.”
He returned and handed the spade to Kenny. “I brought a tape measure to see when we get close. I wouldn’t want the shovel to damage anything we find.”
“Good idea,” said Andrea. “Let me know when you tire out, Ken, I’ll take over.”
“Very funny,” he said.
Andrea kept an eye on the children, who had wandered to the wood line abutting the creek. If they found what she expected they were going to uncover, she didn’t want the kids to see it. A clump of dirt landed at her feet. Go figure, the soil was sandy.
She turned to Sharda and said, “I forgot something. Do you have a couple of mason jars? Or ziplock bags? If we find anything, I should take some of the surrounding soil as well.”
“Why?” Tharani ask
ed.
“I have friends—had friends,” she corrected herself. “They might be able to run tests that will give us a better idea of how long this has been in the ground.”
As Kenny got farther down, Tharani stretched the tape measure into the hole. He’d gone twenty-six inches. Kenny kept digging. He got to three feet.
“Slow down,” said Andrea. “Careful.”
Kenny wiped sweat off his brow with his forearm. He started to handle the spade more gingerly.
Sharda said, “I have a gardening kit. Let me get it and the other things.”
She returned with two empty mason jars and a shoulder-bag gardening kit. Kenny had reached the forty-inch mark. Sharda handed him a trowel. He knelt in the hole and started to remove smaller amounts of dirt. He hadn’t made one sarcastic comment or voiced one complaint the entire time.
They all jumped when they heard a soft scraping sound.
“I hit something,” Kenny said. He leaned in closer, his back covering the hole so the others couldn’t see. He carefully pushed dirt aside. “I think it’s a bone.”
“Let us see,” Andrea said.
He stepped out of the small hole. They saw part of a discolored, light brownish bone jutting out of the dirt. Based on its width and flatness, Andrea suspected she was looking at a human sternum.
“Clear it to the left and right,” she said. “Slowly, though. There are going to be more bones on either side.”
Kenny stepped back into the hole, knowing now that he was stepping on human remains. He used the tip of the shovel to find the compete outline of the sternum and then he began to clear dirt above it.
Andrea saw the delineation of the clavicle.
Kenny swept left and right with the trowel, exposing the rib bones on either side.
From the spread of the ribs and the size of the sternum, she thought it was likely an adult male.
How old?
Who were his parents?
Was he married?
Would his wife still be alive?
Did he have children?
What kind of a life had it been for the victim’s family? Decades without resolution.
She saw the vertebral column had been severed at the C7 vertebra above the clavicle and just below the first lumbar vertebra beneath the exposed rib cage, above the ilium. The victim’s arms had been cleanly severed at the shoulder. Though the bones were decades old, she could see the cuts were clean. They were the result of a quick, violent severing, from a guillotine or an ax, rather than the grinding process of a serrated blade or saw.
“Jesus, this is gross,” Kenny said.
They looked at the exposed skeletal remains five yards off the fence line of the Sasmals’ property. To Andrea, the rib cage looked like an open mouth of yellowed teeth, laughing. Her subconscious was goading her. She took any murder as a challenge to her intelligence, to her very existence.
“You think there’s more buried underneath?” asked Kenny.
“I doubt it,” said Andrea. “Too many questionable permit denials for the entire body to have been buried in one place. There’s more. We have to find them. We have to find out who he is. Why he was killed. And we have to find out who has been covering it up for decades. And once we’ve done all that, we’ll know who killed Satku.”
24
ANDREA had just settled into a comfortable bathtub filled with lavender-scented water when Jeff barged into the master bathroom.
“Are you out of your fucking mind?” he shouted.
She kept her eyes closed, wondering which of the kids had ratted her out.
Realizing her husband was actually expecting an answer to his question, she said, “I couldn’t pawn the kids off on anyone.” It wasn’t the right thing to say to avoid an argument, which showed just how much she hadn’t wanted to avoid an argument.
“That’s your response?” he replied, startled. “They were an inconvenience while you wanted to play detective and dig up a dead body?”
She finally opened her eyes. “If I’d had a choice, I wouldn’t have brought them with me. They didn’t see anything and I didn’t tell them anything.”
“Ruthie saw something, Andie,” he said.
“No, she didn’t, because she was fifty yards away.”
“She saw you digging!”
“Oh my God, she saw dirt! She saw a twenty-nine-year-old man who hasn’t exercised for his entire life sweat a little. Fucking call DYFS.”
“She knew what you were doing.”
“I needed a cable sweeper to walk a backyard,” she said. “It was the only time he was available. We found something, we had to see what we found; otherwise none of it would have made a difference.”
“Difference to whom? What the hell is this all about, Andie?”
She hesitated. She thought about being honest, but wasn’t sure she could be. “It was about me,” she said. “Call it an itch, a disease, whatever you want, but I need to solve problems. Period. It’s who I have been since I was three years old. But there’s more. I hate criminals who get away with it. Satku Sasmal was murdered because of an old crime that people in this town have been covering up for decades.”
“Seriously?”
“The body part we found is proof.”
“So, now let the police handle this,” he said.
“The police may be the ones covering it up,” she said, instantly regretting it. He was right to be scared, but she had avoided addressing the issue herself because it led to nowhere good.
She stood up, fiercely exposing all five feet, three inches of her naked, pregnant, bubble-covered body. “I’m not going to stop,” she said. “I have a reporter and the mayor of West Windsor on my side. I’m protected. The kids are protected. And don’t piss in your pants, you’re protected, too.”
“That’s not fair,” he said.
She grabbed a towel and started to dry herself, angry that she’d had only two seconds in that nice, hot bath before he’d interrupted.
“I’m not going to stop now,” she said. “I’ll try my best to keep the kids away from as much of it as I can, but a lot of the people I need to talk to and places I need to see have to be done during the daytime.”
She put on one of his extra-large T-shirts she’d taken to wearing the past few months and wrapped her mass of hair in the towel. She put on a pair of stretch jeans. With no bra on, she felt like she might knock herself out if she moved too quickly. Then again, moving quickly wasn’t much of a concern at this stage of her pregnancy.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going out for a minute,” she said.
“Out? What? The stores are all closed,” he said. “Where are you going, Andie?”
“To take a walk in the woods.”
Andrea backed the Odyssey out of the garage, washing Jeff in the glare of her headlights as he stood in the doorway to the laundry room. He was confounded, and she didn’t care. He deserved it. He hadn’t earned the arrogance he brought to their interactions. And she knew the truth: his confidence was nothing more than a mask for his insecurities. It hadn’t always been that way. Yes, he had used confidence as a shield from the moment they’d met, but once upon a time that shield had been protecting self-awareness and sweetness.
* * *
■ ■ ■
THE FIRST TIME Andie Abelman saw Jeff Stern was in the Lion’s Head Tavern on Amsterdam Avenue in Manhattan. She stood at the bar in front of a display of Mets paraphernalia that was arranged above the row of tap handles on the back counter. It was a Thursday night and, she would learn, his Sigma Nu fraternity brothers were celebrating a birthday. He drew her eye as much for his relative indifference to the drinking shenanigans of his frat brothers as for his height. He stood off to the side of their cluster, pretending to be a participant, but his posture ratted him out: he was bored to death.
Other than his height, there was nothing particularly striking about him, good or bad. Thick dark hair made his pale complexion seem milky. Brown eyes darted away when he realized she had noticed him looking at her.
His bored demeanor changed to a curious one. He went from looking like he’d rather be anywhere else—and she assumed from his lack of melanin that “anywhere else” meant in his room with nothing but the glow of a computer screen to warm him—to looking very happy to be where he was.
He seemingly summoned up a reserve of courage and walked toward her. His lanky gait betrayed he was no athlete, and his attempts at commanding strides were interrupted several times by people moving about the crowded bar.
But Andrea had already given him credit for the effort.
As he walked toward her, he smiled nervously. He leaned into the bar to minimize the height difference. It made him look like a bent wire clothes hanger.
“We might be the only ones here not drinking,” he said.
“But you just got here and I’ve been at this for an hour,” she replied without looking at him.
“What does that say about us?” he asked.
“I know what it says about you,” she replied, looking up to catch his eye.
“And what’s that?” he stammered. He looked worried, but prepared for whatever she might say. Andrea thought: he handles no because he’s heard it all his life, but he hates both that he’s heard it so much and that he’s come to accept it.
“You don’t drink much to begin with,” she said. “You’re not interacting with your Neanderthal frat brothers, so you don’t socialize much either. Your skin is the color of paste so you’re a gamer, a weed boy, or biz-finance with your face buried in the market. And after you saw me, all your insecurities were overcome by a yearning desire to marry me.”