by Tom Barber
Marquez and Josh pulled up outside the building six minutes later, their flashing lights cutting down travel time although they’d turned them off as they approached the address. They’d called ESU’s second team for back up, asking them to remain out of sight, not wanting squad cars showing up outside Polonsky’s home or task force officers arriving in trucks to spook him if he was in there. But they’d beaten the team to it.
‘Do we wait?’ Josh asked as they arrived.
‘We don’t have time,’ Marquez said, drawing her pistol as she got out of the car.
A minute later, the door to the rear room of the butcher’s shop was smashed back by Josh’s shoulder, the two detectives moving in, both strapped up in vests. They covered each other silently, following the golden rule of house breaching, which was to do the opposite of the person in front of you. If they looked left, you looked right.
The shop was dark and empty, but a light towards the back was on. Josh pointed towards it and Marquez nodded, indicating silently to her right and a room with a TV, some lamps and a couch.
She crept in silently then stopped dead.
There was dried blood all over the floor.
A trail of it led off down the corridor where Josh had just gone, and the place was a real mess, like there’d been a fight. Empty cans of beer and packets of foodstuffs were spilling out of the trash but her focus was drawn by a closed box in the middle of the floor, among the broken lamps, clutter and damage.
It was rectangular, about the size and length of a trunk or drinks cooler.
She could see it was made of carbon graphite, and immediately recognised it for what it was.
‘Lis,’ Josh hissed quietly. She turned and moved through the shop towards the back, the blood trail continuing. She felt a sudden chill and saw Josh had opened the door to the walk-in freezer.
Her colleague was in there staring at something and she saw from his body language it wasn’t good.
Checking behind her first, she walked forward.
A man was inside the freezer, hanging from a large meat hook which had been rammed through his upper back, the end projecting out through the right side of his chest. More blood had crystallised as it had run down his body, a frozen pool of it under him.
He had stab wounds to his neck and body, his dead eyes glazed with ice. Marquez stared at the corpse.
From the description, it looked like it could be Polonsky.
‘Come with me’ she said to Josh, after a few moments. He followed her back into the room and saw the box.
‘Don’t touch it,’ he said. ‘Could be rigged.’
Marquez walked around to the other side, and found some printing on the side of the case. Her fears confirmed, she looked up at Josh.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘Lettering and serial number. For a rifle.’
As fireworks continued to explode overhead, the ESU sharpshooter with Ledger was scanning the boardwalk near the girl. Beside him, the NYPD detective glanced up at the bright multi-colored lights shooting up into the sky.
He’d been in some tight spots in the past, and was only alive now because he was extremely observant.
And as a trio of fireworks exploded simultaneously with a crackle and shimmer, something caught his eye at the very edge of his vision.
There were people on rooftops around them watching the show, some setting off their own crackers and rockets, but in the light of those three bright fireworks from the main display, Ledger had seen a gleam from a rooftop to their east, a hundred and forty so yards away.
There were no dark shapes standing on that rooftop.
Marquez’ voice suddenly came over the radio. ‘Our guy’s got a rifle!’
The man who’d been trying to kill Isabel had already sighted the ESU shooter on the roof closest to him. Because he had no intention of being shot tonight, he knew the police marksmen needed to be eliminated before he could shoot the child, whose NYPD mother he’d followed down here earlier. He knew the kid would join her sooner or later.
As he sighted the weapon on the sharpshooter with the spotter beside him, he saw the spotter turn his head and look his way.
He squeezed the trigger, his own weapon’s report lost in the noise of the fireworks.
Ledger’s speed saved the sharpshooter’s life. Recognising the glint off the yellow scope for what it was, the detective rolled, grabbed the sharpshooter’s legs and pulled the man back as hard as he could, falling back as he used all his bodyweight.
A round pinged into the air vent behind them as the gunshot merged with the fireworks, another following almost immediately.
‘He’s got a rifle!’ Marquez said again. ‘Abort the operation! Get her out of there!’
‘Contact!’ Ledger said. ‘He’s on a roofto-’
Then Isabel was shot.
As Vargas turned on the boardwalk, her left hand remaining in her bag as the other gripped her daughter’s hand even tighter, Issy was hit twice in the chest. The bullets didn’t so much knock her backwards as cut through her, two flower blooms of red bursting out of her t-shirt as the bullets hit.
Twenty yards away, for a split-second Archer and Chalky were frozen in shock as the girl dropped. The two men sprinted forward as Vargas screamed, people turning from the fireworks in shock at the noise.
‘NO!’ Vargas shouted as Chalky caught her and held her back. Archer ran over to the child’s body and dropped down to check her, Isabel lying limply on the wooden walkway. ‘NO!’
‘He’s on a rooftop on Stillwell!’ Ledger said, crawling to the exit door to the roof then running down when he was clear, the ESU rifleman having taken cover, searching through his sights for the shooter as his colleagues fired on the man’s location, their gunshots mixing with the continued booms from the fireworks. Ledger got to the exit, then was out on the street. ‘Is he moving?’
‘He’s still there!’ one of the ESU marksmen responded, reports of rifle fire in the background. ‘Returning fire!’
Ledger sprinted down the street, using a cover-and-move technique as he tried to flank the shooter.
Back on the boardwalk, people were starting to realise what had just happened, some staring in shock while others snatched their children up and ran.
Archer bent over Isabel’s small, crumpled figure, Vargas joining him as Chalky started to herd people away.
‘ISSY!’ Vargas screamed in anguish, holding her. ‘ISSY!’
Ledger got to the building before anyone else, his pistol drawn. Shepherd arrived a few moments later with more back-up, roaring up in a 4x4 and additional officers who piled out of the police vehicle.
Shepherd nodded to a man with a bulletproof shield, the lead bunker, who went in first, Ledger behind him with his hand on his shoulder, the other men joining in a line as they covered each other. Officers peeled off on each floor, and Ledger, Shepherd and the bunker made it to the roof.
‘Police moving onto the roof on Stillwell!’ Ledger said over the radio. ‘Do not shoot! I repeat, do not shoot!’
The bunker breached it, Ledger and Shepherd clearing right and left behind him.
The place was deserted. Ledger moved forward, staying low, and saw shell casings but no blood; it appeared the man hadn’t been hit.
In the distance, he could see flashing lights near the boardwalk and heard the sound of people shouting.
Four figures were standing there alone, separate from the rest of the crowd, fireworks casting intermittent light over them, the joyful display suddenly seeming completely inappropriate.
Shepherd and the other officer walked up to stand beside Ledger and all three men stared down at the tragic scene below.
‘What the hell did we just do?’ Shepherd muttered.
FIFTEEN
At the Upper West Side butcher’s shop, now taped off and with investigators arriving outside, Marquez and Josh were standing on the sidewalk, both extremely subdued, the flashing red/blue lights from the parked law-enforcement vehicles cas
ting shades of color on their faces, and reflecting in their eyes. Neighbors had come out of their apartments or businesses to watch what was going on, and Polonsky’s next of kin had also just shown up.
‘After the ID was confirmed, I called around with Polonsky’s description instead of the man from the theater’s,’ the CSU investigator back at the lab told Marquez quietly. ‘Turns out it was him who bought the knives and springs, just after lunch on Saturday. From Gartner’s Hardware, caught right there on camera. Store’s on 72nd, not far from you.’
‘Thanks,’ Marquez replied, ending the call.
‘Looking at his face, we’re pretty sure the butcher’s the guy on the hook,’ a local precinct detective said, exiting the residence and walking over to them. ‘Owns the shop. Two younger men work for him. We got one on the phone and he said Polonsky called a couple days ago telling him they were closed for the week for a health violation.’
‘Under duress,’ Marquez said quietly. ‘I guess.’
‘Hard to tell how long he’s been dead until he…thaws. Once he’s defrosted, we can take fingerprints and DNA to confirm.’ He sniffed. ‘You two any idea why he was in there? Was he a suspect of yours?’
‘We’re trying to establish that,’ Josh said. ‘On Saturday, he bought supplies involved in an attempted murder in Queens.’
‘When was the attempt?’
‘Sunday night.’
‘He’s frozen stiff. Been hanging in there for several days, at least. Not sure it could have been him.’
‘We think he bought the items for someone else, and they killed him,’ Marquez replied. ‘There are a stockpile of pistols, rifles and other weapons hidden out back. Looks like Polonsky wasn’t just selling cuts of meat. Maybe he was killed by our guy once he got what he wanted.’
‘So he had his choice of firearms,’ the detective finished. ‘And knives. Without paying.’
‘Exactly.’ She glanced back at the man. ‘Any other usable evidence inside?’
‘Apart from the blood on the floor, some food boxes and empty cans of beer in the trash. We’ll bag and tag them, then get swabs for DNA. Don’t think whoever killed Polonsky was expecting us, or he’d have cleaned out.’
‘Doesn’t matter much now anyway,’ Josh muttered to himself, walking away.
On the boardwalk at Coney Island, Vargas was staring emptily ahead, her eyes glassy with shock. Behind her, still lying where she’d fallen on the wooden floor of the pier, Isabel’s body had been covered with a sheet, the scene taped off, the entire place closed until further notice. It was now a major crime scene.
Crowds of people were still hanging around, hastily-repositioned metal railings and officers acting as barriers to keep them back. A significant number were filming the scene with cell phones while others were being interviewed by reporters, telling them what they’d seen or made out they’d seen for their few moments of fame. NY One, ABC7 Eyewitness, Fox 5 and CBS New York had already had vans in the area for the celebrations and fireworks, but what had just happened was making the evening’s report a hell of a lot more eventful and exciting, although no-one would openly admit it.
A team working with the Medical Examiner Office for the city, OCME, rolled a sheet-covered gurney along the boardwalk. Issy’s body was eased into a body-bag, lifted onto the gurney then taken towards their open vehicle, the ME’s team sliding it inside.
Turning, Vargas noticed people leaning forward and jostling each other to capture this moment on their phones. She also felt someone join her, and saw it was Archer.
He put his arms around her and she hugged him back, neither of them caring that their every move was being filmed by hundreds of phones.
‘What did we do, Sam?’ she sobbed, burying her head into his shoulder. ‘What did we do?’
‘He had clear sight of our guys and everyone on the boardwalk,’ ESU Sergeant Hicks said to Ledger, the two men on the rooftop of the building on Stillwell Avenue where the unknown rifleman had positioned himself to take shots at the ESU sharpshooter and then Issy.
Ledger scanned the landscape. ‘This is an inferior position. Rooftops all over the city had people on them to watch the fireworks.’ He pointed ahead, at a low building seventy yards away towards the beach. ‘If anyone’d come up on that one and let off fireworks, his line of sight of the boardwalk was gonna be impaired bad. He got lucky.’
‘Shows he ain’t got training, maybe. Or couldn’t gain access to a better spot. Probably too big a risk, carrying a rifle with no boxing. Must have had it wrapped in something.’
‘These weren’t hard shots,’ Ledger said. ‘No wind tonight, stationary targets. We expected he could make an attempt…but not like this.’
Hicks looked over at the boardwalk; the fireworks had stopped now, although they were going off elsewhere, quiet thuds and booms followed by the occasional cheer, the revellers with no idea what had happened until the next time they turned on the news.
That an eleven year old child had just been murdered on the boardwalk.
It was definitely headline news.
‘…I was ‘bout to take a photo with my husband and then this girl got shot right in front of me,’ an emotional woman said to a news correspondent on the midway, Renee Margolise, Eyewitness the name on the TV screen.
‘Did you see where the shots came from?’ a reporter asked.
‘I don’t know what happened. We were just there, over there, by that railing and my husband saw her go down.’ She started to cry. ‘Why would someone kill a child down here? Why would you do that? It could’ve been us!’
Sitting alone and listening to the news, the man from the rooftop who’d fired at the ESU sharpshooters poured store-bought vodka over a wound across his torso and hissed in pain. Ledger had been correct; the man hadn’t been hit by any rounds from the NYPD riflemen, but he’d jumped off the roof when the volume of return rifle fire from police had become overwhelming and he knew they’d be closing in. He’d planned ahead and prepared one of the large dumpsters that sat outside these buildings by opening the lid, just in case for any reason he couldn’t use the stairs to get away. He’d landed in the open receptacle, his fall cushioned by the mass of trash bags he’d already checked were inside, but what he hadn’t anticipated was someone had placed some broken glass in one of the bags, which had sliced into his torso as he landed.
He continued to watch the TV as he started to wind a bandage around himself, not taking his eyes off the images. He was in Manhattan in a place rented for him by his employers while he completed this job. All the time he’d been on the roof in Brooklyn, he’d been monitoring NYPD radio via an earpiece and heard the call go out for backup to the dead Jewish butcher’s location.
He hoped that wouldn’t be a problem. After he’d arrived in New York City, the tall man had been set up with Polonsky, a gun dealer, by the people who’d hired him. Once he’d used the man to get him the weapons and materials he needed, and despite knowing it would piss off his employers, the tall man had killed him, not wanting loose ends. He’d tried to do it quiet, after getting the butcher to call his employees with a knife to his throat and tell them the store was closed, but Polonsky had taken him by surprise and put up a fight, coming after the tall man with one of the knives he’d bought for him, pulling it from its box mid-fight. Not that it helped him much. The tall man had stabbed him sixteen times, then when he was still alive, impaled him on a meat hook in the freezer to finish him off and make sure the location didn’t start to smell. He’d wanted to be far away by the time they found the butcher’s body.
He’d intended to return to Polonsky’s shop after finishing the girl, sanitise the place, then skip town, but now hearing the radio, he knew he could never go back there. He’d left evidence behind too which they could potentially extract DNA from, saliva from some empty cans of beer for a start.
That wasn’t good.
The news was now showing the OCME coroner’s van and taped-off crime scene. He clicked channels, finding every
outlet was covering the story, not just local New York. It had even reached CNN and Fox, on the ticker for both. He stayed on a live feed on NY One, which was zoomed in on the woman who the tall man knew was the girl’s adoptive mother. She was standing with a blond man, who had his arm around her, both of them with badges and sidearms on their hips. He was aware of both their identities and had followed the woman down to the boardwalk tonight from their HQ, but they’d never been of interest, unless they got in the way. The child had been the prize.
A cell phone on the armchair of the seat started flashing silently with an incoming call. The tall man held the end of the bandage in place and answered.
‘You still in New York?’
‘I’m getting out tonight.’
‘We’re watching CNN,’ the voice said. ‘Congratulations. You just became a rich man.’
The tall man didn’t reply and hung up, looking at the screen. She was dead.
But there was no sign of the smile he’d had on his face inside the theater the day before.
The Office of the Chief Medical Examiner for New York City had facilities based in all five boroughs, and the driver had been instructed to take Isabel’s body to the Queens Hospital Center Campus. The journey started out with several news outlet vehicles following like wolves chasing down a fleeing stag, but the driver hit the siren at two sets of traffic lights, and his cut-through shook off the tail. By the time the media got to the campus, the body was already inside. None of them bothered to stick around, already having enough footage for the story and needing to get it to editors ASAP.
Vargas and Chalky arrived at the hospital just as the news crews were pulling away, but unlike the press, had no trouble getting in once Vargas showed her badge and explained who she was. Minutes later they were walking silently through to the morgue to be met at the door by the Chief ME.
Vargas’ eyes slipped past him to where Issy’s body lay on the slab, still in the zipped up bag, ready for an autopsy before tagging her body for cremation or burial. The ME’s assistant and several other medical personnel were gathered in the corridors, having heard what had happened at Coney Island. By the very nature of their work, these people had a handle on their emotions better than most, but Chalky noticed that even they seemed distressed by the killing that had taken place that night.