Little Dead Riding Hood

by Blake Banner

  I grunted. “Can you remember his name?”

  Jack sighed, shook his head. Richard got up and went to a dresser against the far wall. He opened a drawer and pulled out a fistful of business cards. “People give us these things, we keep them as though some day we might use them, but we never do. Still, this time… Aha!” He held it out toward us to see. “Detective Leonard Davis, 43rd Precinct.”

  I nodded. “Hang on to that, would you?” I sighed. “So you told Detective Davis everything that you have told us.”

  “And more,” said Jack. “Partly because it was fresh in our memories, but also because we described the truck, which we have not done for you.”

  “I was coming to that. Can you describe the truck?”

  He smiled. “Not in much detail, I’m afraid. You may have observed that Gleason has considerably better lighting than Rosedale, and what little there is down Rosedale at that point is obscured by the trees. What we were able to see was a white or cream four by four. I can’t honestly be sure if it was a pickup or an SUV. Can you, Richard?”

  Richard was putting the business cards away, sliding the drawer closed. He shook his head. “No. I remember, as you say, Jack, it was cream or white, might have been dirty, parked in the shadow of the trees. I want to say it had a closed back, like an SUV, but I might be making that up. It could well have been a pickup, like a Ford pickup.”

  “Anything else? Did you see the driver return or drive away?”

  “No, nothing after that. I think we watched a movie and that was it.”

  I stood and Dehan stood with me. I said, “You have been very helpful indeed. You happen to know if any of your neighbors saw anything?”

  Jack stood, shaking his head. “We talked to them, but nobody else saw anything, except that girl across the way.”

  They waved to us from the door as we went down the stairs, and Jack hurried away to save his sauce. Out in the drizzle again, I stared over at the corner.

  “That right there, in that depressing light from the street lamps, in November in the rain. That was where she spent the last few minutes of her life.”

  “Assuming she was killed there and not at the river.” She looked up at me, squinting. “How did you know?”

  I shook my head and gave a bland smile. “I didn’t. It was possible, so I explored and got lucky.”

  She thumped my shoulder. “Good call. Now buy me some lunch and explain to me why it was possible.”

  SIX

  We took a short drive to the Hugh J Grant Circle. I parked on Metropolitan Avenue and we pushed through the door into the dark, warm interior of the Step In. It wasn’t long open, so it was quiet, with just a couple of guys sitting at the bar. I grabbed a table while Dehan went and ordered two beers and two burgers. She came to the table a couple of minutes later with the beers, put one in front of me and sat.

  She said: “A guy with a white or cream truck who works at one of the sites on the river between Starlight Park and Soundview. It doesn’t exactly pinpoint our guy, but it’s not the worst pool of suspects we ever had.”

  I made a noise of agreement and took a pull on my beer.

  She pointed a finger at me. “But here’s what’s really on my mind: one, why the hell did Lenny not include these witnesses in his report? And two, what made you suspect that Lenny had come across a witness he didn’t want to report?”

  I looked around the dark bar at the high-gloss brass and dark wood, trying to organize my thoughts. I said, truthfully, “I didn’t suspect it. I thought it was a possibility.”

  “Why?”

  I sighed and spread my hands.

  She rolled her eyes. “OK, Sensei! What was it that made you think it was a possibility?”

  “Several things. First, when we spoke to Remedios, she told us the guy appeared on foot. Now, as we saw later when we went to look at where she was washed up, it was a very difficult task to take the body to a place where he could dump it in the river. So one of two things happened: A, he abducted her and took her to the river, where he killed her; or B, he killed her on the spot and took the body away to dump it. Both of those scenarios require him to be driving a vehicle.”

  “Yeah… But Remedios said he arrived on foot.”

  “Actually, what she said was that suddenly he was there. If he had come down Gleason, walking, she would have seen him arrive. But if he came out of Rosedale, where Richard and Jack say they saw the truck, parked in the shadow of the trees, then it is possible she wouldn’t see him till the last minute, stepping out of the shadows.”

  She nodded. “Uh-huh…”

  “So at that point I decided…”

  “Wait, at what point? Are we still talking to Remedios at her door?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “At that point you have already decided he had a truck parked down Rosedale. You have to be kidding.”

  I frowned. “Well, it was logical, Dehan. Either he abducted her or he killed her on the spot. If he had killed her on the spot, he wouldn’t leave the body there and come back to collect it. So in both scenarios, he had to have a vehicle. The logical place was on Rosedale.”

  “OK.”

  “Then I got to thinking about the neighborhood, which Remedios had described as ‘nice’. And it struck me as odd that Lenny hadn’t found any witnesses. Put that together with the fact that the phone records were missing and I began to wonder if Lenny was trying to hide something. I didn’t suspect…”

  “It was just a possibility worth exploring.”

  “Precisely. So now we have a telephone number we can’t trace because we have no phone records—and in any case, Lenny tells us it’s a burner—and we have a truck which, had we not come to canvass the area ourselves, would also have gone undiscovered. A truck which was probably used to dispose of Celeste’s body. Two years ago, it would have been a goldmine of DNA.”

  “Why would Lenny want to hide evidence like that?”

  “Close the question and the answer will leap out at you.”

  “What would make Lenny conceal… OK…”

  “Reynolds makes a big thing of the fact that he and Lenny were friends and grew up on the same street and they are members of the same Catholic church. Lenny plays it down, but he went out of his way to stress to me how much he hated giving the old man the news of Celeste’s death: his oldest daughter diagnosed as schizophrenic, his wife died in childbirth, then the very child whose birth killed his wife was murdered and he, Lenny, had to tell him…”

  A waitress arrived with our burgers and told us to enjoy them. I picked up one of the fries and put it in my mouth and asked Dehan, “Have you seen a white pickup recently?”

  She frowned with the burger halfway to her mouth, dripping ketchup. “Yeah…”

  “With tools in the back.”

  She nodded. “Yeah…” Her face cleared and she put down the burger. “Holy… Samuel.”

  “Samuel. When he got back from all his shopping.”

  Dehan’s gaze became abstracted. “Celeste has reached that age. She has a crazy sister, a crazy dad and a crazy brother. Plus God alone knows what dark feelings of guilt about having killed her mother. She hits puberty and her hormones turn her life into a living nightmare.” She flopped back in her chair and looked at me, still holding her burger. “So she becomes that nightmare and starts making her dad and Samuel’s lives nightmares, too. It is a lot more than either of those two simple souls can cope with and the home environment soon becomes totally toxic. After two or three years of this, she and they are all fit to explode. Dad seeks refuge in his religion and his belief in family. Hell, it was probably the original cause for his angina and his high blood pressure. And Samuel is left with the whole burden of the family’s deepening tragedy.”

  I smiled. “You should write those rrue crime stories, Dehan. I’m right there, living it.”

  I bit into my burger and wiped my mouth and fingers with a paper handkerchief.

  She looked at me resentfully. “Shut up.
The situation becomes intolerable when she starts sleeping around. She is, to coin a phrase, adding sin to insult. On that weekend, she comes in having spent practically two whole days and nights out. They confront her, she refuses to talk to them and storms up to her room. But then, not content with having spent Friday and Saturday night in sin, she now tells them she plans to spend Sunday night in sin, too. She walks out. Samuel cannot take it. He calls her and tells her he is coming after her in the truck. She certainly doesn’t want Samuel turning up at Chad’s house and humiliating her, so she decides to confront him at the playground and tell him to leave her alone. Chad turns up in his white pickup, parks on Rosedale and the rest is history.

  “Except that a week later, her body is washed up on the banks of Soundview Park. Lenny is called to the scene and recognizes Celeste. He talks to Sean and Samuel, learns about the fight, checks the phone records and talks to Richard and Jack, and puts the pieces together. This is going to be the final blow for Sean. The one member of his family he has left, whom he depends on entirely, is going to prison for the rest of his life for murdering his daughter. It will kill him. So, to protect his friend, he suppresses the evidence and lets the case go cold.”

  “Admirable,” I said through a mouth full of burger. “So how do we go about proving any of this?”

  She stared at me a moment, then took a big bite out of her burger and we both sat chewing and staring at each other.

  “Fob a shtart…” she said, maneuvering the words around her food, “we need to find out where Samuel works. We also need to filter out all the businesses along the river that are impossible dumping sites for one reason or another: there is no river bank at that spot, there is no access to the river, that kind of thing. Then we start cross referencing people connected with Celeste with people connected with that list of businesses, see if anything pings.”

  “Good. We also find out how long Samuel has had that truck. If he only bought it last week, we have a problem.”

  “Find out what Chad drives.”

  I watched her lick ketchup from her fingers and nodded. “Yeah, there is something else, too.”

  “Whamph?”

  “Celeste’s phone records.”

  “You said there was nothing we could do about that.”

  “I’m wondering. Lenny said he’d look at home. I’m kind of betting he won’t find them. If he doesn’t, what else can we do?”

  She pointed at me like a gun, then wagged her finger up and down. “I was going to say. We should be checking her email. Where the hell is her computer? Eighteen-year-old kid with no computer?”

  “E-mail. Exactly. Any longer messages will be on Facebook or her email. I’ll talk to Reynolds today and see what happened to her computer.”

  She was watching me, squinting and chewing her lip. “What do you plan to do about Lenny? His motives may not have been personal gain, but still, you can’t let a murderer walk free just because it will upset his dad. Lenny has to be brought to account.”

  “I know. I agree. But I don’t want to spook him just yet. If he’s been concealing evidence and we spook him, we might lose any chance of ever recovering any of it.”

  We finished our beer and made our way back to Fteley Avenue. As we were walking into the detectives’ room Lenny approached on rapid, short legs.

  “Hey, Stone! How you doing, pal? Listen, you were right, I had the phone records at my house. I must have took the file home to study i—due diligence, right?” He laughed a nicotine laugh and slapped my arm. “And the damn page slipped out or whatever. I left it on your desk. How’s it going? Doing any better than I did?”

  Dehan was watching him with narrowed eyes and her hands in her back pockets. It made her look like a hawk about to pounce.

  I shrugged. “It’s a bit of a brick wall. I can see why it went cold.”

  “Right?”

  “But, listen, you said ‘page’?”

  “Yuh.” He nodded vigorously. “The phone records.”

  “Just one page?”

  “Sure. How many pages you want?” He laughed again.

  “Well, at least six months’ worth, Lenny. How many days did you get?”

  “One. What the hell! I was only interested in who called her that night!”

  Dehan stepped over, her face screwed up like she’d just bitten a lemon. “You asked the phone company for the records on one day? What were they doing, charging by the hour?”

  “Hey, take it easy, Wonder Woman! And can the attitude! What? You accusing me of not doing my job?”

  People had started to turn and look. I said, “Nobody’s accusing you of anything, Lenny. Relax. I was just hoping to go back over her calls leading up to that weekend. It’s no problem. Thanks.”

  He scowled at Dehan and then at me. “Yeah,” he said. “Now I know why you’re both so damned popular! Accusing fellow officers ain’t cool. Don’t expect too much cooperation from me from now on. Screw you!”

  Everyone who’d been watching turned away and got busy. Dehan gave me an eloquent look and we made our way to our desks. There was a slim manila folder on my laptop. I opened it and pulled out a single sheet of printed paper. I studied it a moment and saw the names of the people she had called, or who had called her, written in the margins. One number was listed simply as ‘burner’.

  I glanced at the top of the page and then tossed it over to Dehan. “It’s a copy of a printed email document. Look at the top left corner. Those marks numbers he’s tried to blank out. This is page two of one hundred and eighty. He got the whole six months up to the day she died.”

  She picked up the sheet, stared hard at it and then stared at me. “How stupid is he? How stupid does he think we are?”

  “They are good questions, and ‘not very’ has to be the answer to both of them.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s not stupidity, it’s panic.”

  She raised an eyebrow, but I ignored her.

  I thought for a while. “Let’s not focus too narrow just yet, Dehan. Let’s continue with the plan we had, but perhaps we need to spread our net a little wider.”

  She sat forward and started typing. Absently, she said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  I stood and went to look over Dehan’s shoulder as she worked. I smiled. “You think you haven’t,” I said. “But you have.”

  “Yeah?” She looked up at me and grinned.

  I winked at her. “Tell me if you get a hit, or what you find anyway. I’m going out to the car to talk to my pal at the DMV. And, Dehan?”

  “What?”

  “If you find something, try not to look triumphant.”

  She nodded. “I hear you, Sensei.”

  Out in my Jag, I slammed the door and sat thinking for a while. Finally, I called Mike, an acquaintance at the DMV who often helped me out. After greeting each other and reminding each other we had promised to grab a beer some time, he asked, “What can I do for you, John?”

  “Oh, it’s just a couple of small things, Mike. They are a matter of public record, but you can find them in a matter of minutes and it would take me forever.”

  He laughed. “You could always use the computer!”

  “If I did that, it would take me not hours, but days.”

  “OK, shoot.”

  “I need to know what vehicles are registered to Samuel Reynolds.” I gave him the address and hesitated.

  He said, “That’ll take five minutes. Anything else?” I was silent so long he eventually said, “John? You there?”

  “Yeah, Mike, find out also what vehicles are registered to Leonard Davis, would you? Just email me the results to my personal email.” I gave him Lenny’s address, thanked him, promised we would get together soon and hung up. Then I sat there five minutes, drumming my fingers on the wheel and thinking. Eventually I climbed out of the car and saw Dehan coming out of the station house door. She hunched her shoulders against the cold and the drizzle and loped across the road on long, slim legs.
She looked up into my face. My phone pinged. I opened the email and read it.

  I said, “Samuel Reynolds has owned his white Toyota pickup for the last six years.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” she said, as though I hadn’t spoken.

  I said, “I think I might, though.”

  “After two years, the number is still assigned to a burner, Stone. It hasn’t been used since that night, when it was used to call Celeste. But I nailed the location where the call was made from.”

  I smiled. “See? This is why I married you.” She didn’t laugh. Neither did I. I said, “It was made from here, at the station house, wasn’t it?”

  She didn’t say anything, she just nodded. “How did you know?”

  “Because Samuel called her from the landline at the house. So why would he call again, minutes later, from a burner? Also…” I showed her the email on my phone. “Lenny Davis has owned a cream Cherokee Jeep for the last four years.”

  SEVEN

  She looked away and ran her fingers through her wet hair.

  “Stone, this is starting to look like a lot more than concealing evidence to protect a friend.”

  “I know, but we shouldn’t jump to conclusions yet. Lenny is a jerk, but he’s also a good cop. One thing is protecting Sean from an escalating family tragedy, but Lenny as a killer? I find that hard to believe.”

  “The evidence is staring us in the face, Stone. Two blocks from where we’re standing, he turns left onto Rosedale and two minutes later, he parks at the playground.” A cold breeze moved down Fteley Avenue and she fingered a strand of damp hair from her eyes.

  I didn’t answer straight away, then I sighed. “It’s circumstantial. He owns a white truck, so does Samuel, so do thousands of other New Yorkers. The call was made from the station house, but that doesn’t mean that he made it.”

  “If not him, who?”