by Blake Banner
She nodded. “Thank you. If you find her, tell her we’re not mad. We just want to know she’s OK.”
“Of course.” I paused a moment. “Mrs. Ibarri, may we have a photograph of Sonia?”
“Of course!”
She stood to go and get one.
I hesitated and added, “It’s a long shot, but there is a DNA database…” They both stared at me. “It’s for all sorts of people, not just criminals and deceased people.” Even as I said it I was aware how lame it sounded, but I pressed on. “Would you happen to have anything of Sonia’s, a lock of hair, a hairbrush…?”
Nelson nodded. He stood and went upstairs. Mary went to the fireplace and took a photograph from the mantelpiece. We both stood and she gave the picture to Dehan. I looked over her shoulder. It showed two pretty girls on a beach, laughing and waving at the camera. They were similar, but one was slightly older. Mary said, “She’s the younger one. The one on your right. She was visiting her sister in California. Her sister wants to be an actress, so she went to Los Angeles five years ago.”
I studied her face and she looked away. “What’s her name?”
“Annabel.”
“You get to see her much?”
She made a face and shook her head. Dehan took a picture of the photo on her phone and handed it back. “We’ll let you know as soon if we find out anything, Mrs. Ibarri.”
Nelson came back down the stairs on slow, heavy feet. He was holding a hairbrush. I took it and examined it. It still had thick, black hairs caught in the bristles. I glanced at them both. “Has anybody else used this brush?”
“No, only Sonia. That was her brush. We’ve kept everything, just in case.”
I pulled a plastic evidence bag from my pocket and slipped the brush into it. I looked at each of them in turn, wishing I could say something, give them some hope, but I couldn’t.
“Thank you both for your help. We’ll be in touch.”
They saw us to the door and we stepped out into the failing light of evening.
We had missed the rush-hour traffic, so it was a slightly less than two hour drive back to Haight Avenue as dusk turned to evening, and evening closed in and became night. Once we were out of town, on the open road, Dehan said suddenly, “I hear what you said to Mrs. Clemente, there are so many Hispanics in the Bronx, the fact that her daughter and Angela happened to be within half a mile of each other may look to us like a coincidence, but it’s not necessarily a coincidence.” She shrugged, spread her hands. “It’s like, how many white, Caucasian women were within half a mile of… I don’t know, Sharon Tate, when she was murdered, right? I get it…” She sighed. “But I have to tell you…”
“Dehan.”
“What?”
“I think we are looking at a serial killer.”
She sighed again, deeper. “I knew you were going to say that. That’s why you asked for the DNA.”
I nodded. “We need to look for young women found downstream. We’re going to find them.” I shook my head. “No, that’s wrong, we have almost certainly already found them. We just don’t know it yet. We’ll give Frank the samples tomorrow. We’ll get a hit.”
“Jesus…”
“It’s days like this,” I said, “I wish I’d become a geologist.”
She stared at me in silence for a while and then started to laugh. “Isn’t that what they call nominative determinism? A geologist called Stone! That would be something, wouldn’t it!”
I looked at her and laughed. “I should have been called Ewan D. Pen.”
She giggled like a child. “Or, I. B. Fuzz.”
“Or, I. M. Porker.”
She laughed out loud and we continued in that vein for a good ten minutes, getting gradually sillier, until Dehan was curling up in her seat and wiping tears from her eyes. It wasn’t that funny, but it was a release from the gloom of the day. After a bit we lapsed into silence again and the headlamps and the oncoming traffic outside the car acquired an almost hypnotic rhythm.
Suddenly she said, “What are we saying, that we have a weekend killer? Angela on Saturday the 14th, Rosario on the weekend of the 21st, and Sonia on the weekend of the 28th. That’s a rampage, but only at the weekend.”
I had been thinking the same. “It may give us a clue to his work. Maybe he worked nights during the week.”
She was frowning at me. “Isn’t that very rare in serial killers, to kill so close together?”
I shook my head. “Not really. There are no hard and fast rules about serial killers. There have been serial killers who have killed three or four times over several years, and then stopped, and there have been serial killers who have gone on sprees. You’re right that the norm, especially when they begin, is to leave pretty long gaps between one killing and another. But then, typically, the gaps will grow shorter.” I paused, thinking, and added, “We don’t know whether he had killed before, and if he had, how many times.”
She was silent again for a while. Then she said, “It may not be a serial killer, Stone. We are basing this assumption on some pretty thin evidence.”
I smiled at her. “Like the infinite number of monkeys with typewriters?”
“Huh?”
“If you get enough monkeys with typewriters, one of them is bound to write the collected works of Shakespeare. If you get enough Hispanic girls in their early twenties in a single neighborhood, three of them are bound to disappear within a week of each other.”
She sighed. “OK, you made your point.”
“If I’m right, his method of disposal was pushing them into the river. I’m not one hundred percent sure of the statistics, Dehan, but I do know that on average more than twenty bodies pop up each spring in New York rivers, as the water starts to warm. A lot of them never get identified, unless they have ID on them. He might have been killing for years.”
“So his MO would be to pick up out of town girls, visitors, tourists…”
I nodded. “These three girls fit that pattern. They were also all three Hispanic, all three nice, middle class Catholic girls, well brought up…”
“Yeah, they tend to fixate on a particular type of victim…”
“So, where would he pick them up? All three were in the neighborhood of Zerega…”
She interrupted me, “Don’t forget, Sonia hooked up with this guy, was going to spend the weekend with him. That tells us something, right?”
“He’s attractive.”
“Right. He’s attractive. He has some kind of magnetic attraction to a particular type of girl.”
I nodded. “I got from Mary that maybe their two girls were a bit more wild than they liked to admit. Annabel went off to Hollywood, Sonia begged her aunt not to tell her parents she was hooking up with this guy…”
Dehan continued, “And Rosario was naïve, spontaneous and independent. So we are looking at a guy who is attractive to a particular kind of girl: a girl from a nice, middle class Catholic background who can, under the right conditions, be a bit reckless and daring…”
I took a deep breath, puffed my cheeks and blew out. “And that’s how he traps them. They walk away from him, they are safe. They go with him, he kills them.”
“He could still be operating, Stone.”
I grunted. After a moment, I said, “We need to go back to Wayne.”
She was quiet for a bit. “You see Wayne in that role?”
I shrugged. “The problem with serial killers is they can be anybody. Yeah,” I nodded, “I can see Wayne in that role, for sure I can. But I can also see Larry at the deli, Mo at our next desk, Alvin at the corner store.”
“Mo is not magnetic or attractive.”
“So Alvin is?”
“Well, you know, in a kind of nervous, spotty way.”
“That’s the last time you go to the corner store alone.”
“OK, joking aside, Stone. Do you think Wayne is the guy?”
I scratched my head. “Do you?”
She thought about it and finally shook her head
. “No.”
“Why?”
“Because this killer has been killing for at least two years, possibly much longer…”
I finished for her, “And the only reason we even know he exists is because of Wayne. Why would he be stupid enough to draw attention to himself?”
“Exactly.”
“OK, but one thing we can be pretty sure of, Dehan, is that Wayne knows who it is. So we need to talk to him.”
“Are we going to offer him a deal?”
“I’m not sure yet. He was very insistent that he did not belong in there, you remember? He’s crazy to get out.”
“Yeah.”
“So let’s see if we can tease something out of him with small offerings. Maybe we can draw him out with a visit to the crime scene, a coffee, small tastes of the outside.” I glanced at her. “He likes to talk. He likes an audience.”
“But if it comes to it, if he insists on a deal…”
I was quiet, looking at the long, dark road ahead. Finally I said, “Unfortunately that is up to the inspector and the DA. Let’s see how it plays out.”
And we drove on through the dark, toward home.
FIVE
“Her name is Anderson? Pam Anderson? Seriously?”
She asked this next morning, tying her hair behind her head in a knot to stop the breeze whipping it across her face. I glanced at her and saw myself duplicated, reflected in her sunglasses, looking back at myself out of a warped, bronze world as we sped toward the Bruckner expressway.
“You are too young to know what that means,” I said.
“Are you kidding? I was raised on repeats from the ’80s. Pam Anderson. You think she has the…you know…?” I glanced at her again. She was leering and nodding. “… You know…”
I shook my head. “You are a disturbing woman, Dehan.”
“Pam Anderson… And she is coming to us?”
“On her way to work, yes.”
“Will she come running, do you think? You know, down the street, boing, boing, boing…”
She started to laugh. I sighed and shook my head.
As it turned out there was little that was remarkable about Pam Anderson. She arrived at the 43rd punctually at nine and we took her up to interview room number one. She declined coffee and sat across the table from us, looking vaguely worried.
“Pam, Detective Dehan and I run a cold cases unit and, as part of a wider investigation, we are having another look at the disappearance of Rosario Clemente. We understand she was a close friend of yours and she had been staying with you just before she disappeared.”
Her skin was pale, but her pink cheeks now turned a little pasty. “Yes, she attended a couple of interviews for jobs, one in Manhattan, the other was in Brooklyn. Our house was a convenient place to stay. Plus…” She sighed and looked down at the table. “We got on well and it was great to catch up.”
Dehan was watching her carefully, chewing her lip. She asked, “So what day did Rosario arrive, Pam?”
“She arrived on the Wednesday, in the morning. Her interviews were on Thursday and Friday…” She trailed off.
“Did she meet anyone during that time? Did she go out, see anyone…?”
Her eyes, very blue against her pale skin, darted from Dehan to me and back again. She shook her head. “No…”
I sighed. “What is it you are not telling us, Pam?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
I smiled at her the way you’d expect a kindly uncle to smile right before he smacks you around the back of your head. “Here’s the thing with cops, Pam: over a career as long as mine, you get literally thousands of people lying to you and trying to conceal the truth. You learn to recognize the signs pretty quickly, and here’s the bit that is important for you: when you realize somebody is lying to you, that person immediately gets promoted to your suspects list.” I leaned forward and put my elbows on the table. “Is that a place where you want to be?”
Her cheeks were glowing bright pink. “I don’t know what you want me to say. She didn’t…” She faltered.
“You were going to say she didn’t go out, but she did, didn’t she?”
“No…!” Again she faltered. “Not exactly. We went out, together.”
Dehan shrugged. “Why is that a big deal?”
“It’s not. You’re making it into a big deal.”
Dehan shook her head. “Come on, Pam. You deliberately concealed the fact. That means you didn’t want us to know about it.”
“What is it exactly,” I said, “about going out with Rosario that you didn’t want us to know?”
She buried her face in her hands and sighed loudly. Then she ran her fingers through her fine hair and flopped back in her chair. “Nothing,” she said obstinately. “Rosario’s mom, Alicia, is really cool. She is not a typical mom. She gave Rosario a lot of freedom…”
“But?”
“But it was freedom to work! Or improve herself. They got on real well, Rosario loved her and admired her, but there was always like this huge guilt trip. Even watching TV was like this big thing, you know? And when she came to see me I was like, come on! Relax! You will not go to hell just because you watch a bit of TV!”
Dehan nodded. “Or go out for a drink.”
“Right! So we went out and had a few drinks. It wasn’t like we got hammered and the cops had to take us home. We had a couple of glasses of wine and walked home.”
I scratched my chin. “When was that?”
She looked at me with steady eyes.
I waited. “Pam? When was that?”
“Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.”
I smiled. “Every night.”
“I figured she needed it. She was so uptight. And it was great to see her chill and relax. We had a laugh.”
“You said you walked home. Where did you go?”
“Teddy’s. It’s like a ten, fifteen minute walk from my house.”
“On Zerega Avenue.”
She nodded. Dehan was making notes. Now she looked up. “I need you to think really carefully about this before you answer, Pam. Did anything happen on any of those nights, anything out of the ordinary, however trivial it may have seemed at the time.”
She looked around, as though seeking memories located in the various corners of the room. Finally she shook her head and said, “I honestly can’t think of anything.”
I gave a single nod. “But if you could, what would it be?”
Dehan looked at me like I was crazy, but the question didn’t seem to faze Pam at all. She said, “Only that there was a guy who tried to hit on her. But that wasn’t anything out of the ordinary. Guys were always trying to hit on her. She was beautiful. We ignored him and he went away.”
I said, “That was Thursday, right?”
Now she looked a little surprised. “Yeah, Thursday.”
“Tell me about Saturday morning. You went with Rosario to the bus station.”
She looked over to her right, at Dehan’s hands resting on her notepad. She shook her head. “There’s nothing to tell. I drove her to the bus station. We had a coffee. She got on the bus and I came home.”
I leaned back in my chair and scratched my head. “So, wherever Rosario disappeared, it had to be between the bus station and Deadham.”
She shrugged. “I guess so.”
“What did the guy look like?”
She frowned. “What guy?”
“The guy who hit on her at Teddy’s on Thursday night.”
She looked up into the corner of the room behind me, like there was a picture of him pinned to the wall up there. She bit her lip and her eyes drifted down to the table top, and wound up looking at Dehan’s hands again. “He was just a guy. I hardly noticed him. It was like two years ago.”
Dehan was frowning hard at her.
I arched my eyebrows. “It wasn’t like two years ago. It was exactly two years ago, and Pam, I have to tell you, I think you’re lying. I think you remember very clearly what he looked like.�
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Her cheeks colored again. “I’m not lying. He was just a guy.”
“Black or white?”
“White.”
“Latino?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
I shrugged and spread my hands. “So not an olive complexion, fair hair, blue eyes…”
“I don’t know… no, not olive, white. I don’t know what color hair. Dark. I didn’t notice his eyes.”
“Fat.”
“No, normal.”
I smiled. “Four foot three.”
She gave a nervous laugh. “No, normal, maybe six feet. We were drinking. I was trying to ignore him.”
“Armani suit?”
She sighed. “No, um…probably jeans, a pale shirt?” She hesitated. “Uh, maybe he worked there. I’m really not sure. It was two years ago and I was trying to ignore him.”
I smiled in a way you could describe as knowing. “But Rosario wasn’t trying to ignore him, was she?”
“Rosario was just real polite. She kept answering his questions and then asking him to leave us alone. You can’t do that. If you talk to them, they stay.”
Dehan said, “So she got into conversation with him.”
“Not exactly, but in the end I had to say to her, you know, like, either ignore him or I’m leaving. Then he stopped and left us alone.”
I nodded my understanding. “Sure, that makes sense. Was that why you didn’t go with her on Friday?”
Her eyes went wide and her mouth sagged. “What?”
“Friday night, she went alone to Teddy’s. Did she ask you not to go or did you just decide you didn’t want to be the spare wheel?”
“How did you know that?”
“Would you just answer the question, please, Pam?”
She puffed out her cheeks and blew out, staring down at the table. Then she held up her hands. “OK, you got me. Rosario wanted to do the whole Friday night thing, party, have a few tequilas. That’s not my scene. I like to go out with friends, have a few drinks, a laugh, and go home. Rosario is either one extreme or the other. Work, work, work, like a good Catholic girl, or, if you give her an inch, she goes crazy. So I told her I wasn’t going and frankly I think she was relieved.”