by Drew Franzen
“Leland McMaster?” Dojcsak repeated.
“The child’s grandfather, Ed.”
“And you didn’t make the connection?”
Again Bauer hesitated before replying. What could he say that could possibly redeem him? Nothing he decided. “Leland doesn’t have a reputation for fidelity, Ed. I’d treated him in the past for both syphilis and gonorrhea. The man ought to be labeled a dangerous offender, his prick a deadly weapon. I supposed the virus was just his comeuppance.”
“Did you suspect he was abusing her?”
Bauer became defensive. “I didn’t suspect he had killed her. Okay, I might have. I suppose I did, but only recently. Christ, Ed, the man is seventy-six years old; the girl was a baby. I would have said something, told someone, but the girl was killed. At that point, it seemed redundant.”
Dojcsak terminated the conversation without saying goodbye.
In his office, Henry pulled himself from his heavy leather chair, prepared to cancel the rest of his day. Giving it more thought, he decided to stick out the balance of the afternoon. Not that it couldn’t get any worse, possibly it could. But on the long road to repentance, Dr Henry Bauer had far to travel, and what better time to begin his long journey toward redemption than today.
…
On the evening following the afternoon of Dojcsak and Sara’s visit to the home of Jordy Bitson, Jordy’s uncle Eugene elected to close his shop early. Eugene had been doing so more frequently since Missy’s death. Not so much from a lack of enthusiasm for his work, as an inability to hire adequate staff. Since the killing, three part timers had quit, a new hire had refused to begin and the regular ads he ran in the Sentinel-Tribune offering two dollars an hour above minimum wage had failed to encourage even a modest response.
Eugene was feeling a lot like Bob Cratchit these days, who, according to Dickens, had walked home much more slowly following the death of his crippled son, Tiny Tim.
Perhaps he should accept the offer of Andy Pardoe to find him an attractive location in the retail complex north of the river. It would be a longer walk from home for Eugene, require him, when the weather was miserable, to drive his car. Or they could put the family home for sale; relocate to one of the newer subdivisions surrounding the mall. They had some equity, though not much, and with the insurance settlement expected from the death of Missy could afford the down payment. Interest rates were low and what with the cost of maintaining an older residence, such as the one in which they now lived, monthly payments on a new home would be reasonable, equal to, possibly not much more than they were now paying out. Besides, Eugene thought, agitating the gravel beneath his shoes as he walked, the south side of the Hudson River now held too many painful memories as the place where his youngest had been born, had grown to become a teenager, and had died without having had the opportunity to become an adult.
Eugene exhaled, watching his breath turn to vapor. It was chilly, though not cold: damp, with the wind carrying off the river in gusts, rattling in the trees. The air felt like rain. The sky turned to charcoal, an advancing front obscuring the infinity of a pure black horizon. One by one the stars disappeared and with them the small comfort Eugene had taken since the death of his daughter that she was not really gone, only transformed, from one life source to another, blood cells and organic mass into a higher form of cosmic energy.
Earlier that evening, Ed Dojcsak had telephoned at the shop. He needed to speak with Eugene and Maggie; there had been developments in the case. Eugene agreed, consenting to have Dojcsak arrive at nine-thirty, only after Eugene himself had returned home. Eugene didn’t say, but suspected Dojcsak knew that he didn’t want the Sheriff speaking to his wife alone, though Eugene was nonetheless concerned that since the death of Missy, Dojcsak had.
Eugene and Maggie had yet to discuss the death of his daughter, either the circumstances or the void created by her continued absence. It wasn’t unusual, as their marriage had always been one of resignation and quiet obligation. When their eldest daughter Evelyn left home, she had done so with a handwritten note saying simply that she was leaving and would not return. No argument, no anger, no recrimination, no words. One day she was there, the next gone. It was not that Eugene didn’t appreciate her motivation. To Maggie, Evelyn was a pox. Though she could have aborted—her father certainly had the wherewithal to bring it about—Maggie chose to bear the child, as if having it were somehow a testament, Maggie’s personal mark of Cain.
Whatever developments in the case there were, they would not be pleasant. The Bitson and McMaster families each carried the weight of their unforgiving circumstances like an unbearable burden: Eugene the stigma of his relationship with Maggie, the reputation of his brother; Maggie the estrangement from her parents, her first born, and now this. For both Maggie and Eugene the future had, in effect, caught up with the past, proving Nietzsche’s theory that destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law of our today.
…
Christopher Burke viewed the photos with a mixture of envy and disgust, mesmerized by their sheer vulgarity.
After helping Sara to catalogue the evidence collected from the home of Jordy Bitson, Christopher spent the evening drinking in town at the Fox ‘n Fiddle, stepping out occasionally to his vehicle to smoke from his stash of weed. The laptop was password protected. Rather than play Whac-a-mole trying to gain access, Dojcsak instructed them to box it and ship it to the State Police in Albany.
According to its exterior signage, the Fox ‘n Fiddle was an Authentic English pub; only to a North American could the ubiquitous aroma of stale tobacco, sour beer and mediocre pub fare evoke such sentiment of the genuine article. But the Fox ‘n Fiddle was packed, even more so these days in sympathy with the joint coalition of American, British and French jet fighters bombing the be-Jesus out of the Middle East, as if the patrons were witnessing an installment of Monday Night Football.
Burke was as much a patriot as the next man but wondered at the characterization of the skirmish as a war: a war requires the participation of two opposing forces, he decided, and from what he gleaned on CNN this appeared to be more a mugging than a legitimate conflict.
By eleven-thirty that evening, Burke was—as they say overseas—substantially in his cups, losing at darts and having consumed four pints, or thereabouts, of a dark, stout Guinness Cream Ale. Burke was comfortable with the virtually all male company this night, relieved from the obligation to maintain his appearance for the benefit of a female audience. He hadn’t showered or shaved since early morning and his curly hair stood on end, encouraged by the nicotine stained fingers he obsessively pulled through it every two minutes or three.
At home, Sheila was retaining water. Henry Bauer had threatened hospitalization unless she stayed off her feet. “You’re no use to me,” Sheila complained to her husband. “I’ll call my mom,” which was fine with Burke since he was fond of the old bag anyway. At times, he preferred her company to that of her offspring. Though he preferred his women young, Irene Marinos was an attractive fifty-something matron still capable of causing a slight commotion in the region between her son-in-laws legs.
After leaving the Fox ‘n Fiddle, Burke made his way south across the bridge and over the river toward the station house. He’d left his cruiser in the lot, knowing better than to drive while drunk. On this evening, he had intended to drink, though perhaps not so much. Tomorrow would be busy, tracking down Jordy Bitson and whatever other evidence they would discover linking the little scumbag to the crime.
At the station, he planned to soak his body under a cold shower, consume half a dozen aspirin washed down by a gallon jug of ice water, and sleep, hoping for the best in the morning, expecting the worst.
This was the plan as Burke crossed the river. How had his life come to this, he lamented? He considered himself a reasonably intelligent and better than average looking college grad who had, until blowing h
is knee out in his sophomore year, harbored an unspoken ambition to play point guard in the NBA. At six-foot-four, Burke was just tall enough, blessed with an uncanny ability to consistently hit better than eighty per cent from the floor. Scouts considered him a lock to go second, maybe first round in the draft.
His knee and ambition for a career in professional sports shattered, after graduation Burke planned to take a year off. A year in which he planned to sow his wild oats, which he assumed would amount to the equivalent annual average output of the combined European Union. (This was substantial, according to the international agricultural trade statistics he had studied in his senior year at Cornell.) That was the plan. Instead, Burke accepted the position as Dojcsak’s deputy. He had never seriously intended to become a cop. Two years later, he married Sheila Marinos. He had never intended to marry either.
Burke altered his course away from the station, continuing along Main Street past the river and deeper into town. The air was cool, a bitter north wind that increased in velocity and sucked up moisture as it passed over the water. It hit Burke’s face like a refreshing, damp slap, keeping him awake. At this hour, the street was quiet, empty of either pedestrians or cars.
“Opportunity and preference,” he remembered a first year psych professor once saying about Freud’s attitude toward sex. “The only abnormal sexual behavior is no sexual behavior at all.”
The comment did not sit well with the female members of his class, less for what the professor said, Burke suspected, than for how he said it.
So why did he feel as if he needed to have a bath? (In the words of Sara Pridmore.) Earlier, with Dojcsak and Sara standing with him, he had viewed the photographs confiscated from Jordy’s bedroom. Excusing himself to the restroom, he discovered he was semi-erect. He passed it off as having waited too long to pee. Still, the images kept popping up in his head like targets in a carnival midway shooting gallery. It was natural to react in this way, Burke rationalized. The photos were provocative, meant to stimulate and to arouse. It was not a reflection on the sorry state of his sexuality that they had.
As if on autopilot, Burke made for the home of Renate St. Jacob’s. It was late, it was a school night, Renate would likely be asleep and Burke would have to be mindful not to wake her parent’s, but he would not be deterred, intent on proving—if only to himself—that Christopher Burke was not a pedophile.
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
SARA TIMED her arrival at the Medical Examiner’s office in Albany so as to avoid the congestion of early morning rush hour traffic by leaving Church Falls by car two hours before the sun was due to rise. An hour with Abby Friedman—from eight to nine—would leave her ample time to travel south on I Eighty Seven, from there to the Palisades Interstate Parkway and over the George Washington Bridge into Manhattan, arriving for lunch by one.
With the assistance of the New York Department of Labor, Sara had learned Evelyn Bitson was employed at Tonic, a jazz club located in the City’s lower east side. She had confirmed by telephone that the estranged daughter of Eugene and Maggie would be working a shift that Friday, tending bar on what was expected to be a routine, if not lackluster, end of the week afternoon.
“Nights are busy, afternoons slow,” said the manager, “so she should have time to talk before the rush. Sorry about her sister,” he had said, as if hearing of Missy’s death for the first time.
At the Medical Center, Sara parked her vehicle underground, in an empty space away from other cars, careful to keep it from harms way; other drivers who opened doors thoughtlessly with no regard to the quality of the automobile parked in the space next to them. Dojcsak had asked if the prospect of a long drive to New York bothered her. On the contrary, she had replied, I look forward to it.
He’d asked for her to attend the Medical Examiner’s office personally to collect the results from the DNA examination on specimens collected from the crime scene and Jordy’s bedroom, and if possible, though doubtful, the contents of Jordy’s hard drive.
In a case of this importance, Dojcsak was not prepared to compromise the chain of evidence. As to her visit with Evelyn, Dojcsak was unwilling to chance embarrassing revelations at the hands of a surprise witness called during a subsequent trial.
“She might not seem relevant, but possibly she is,” he had told Sara in a telephone conversation the evening before.
Sara arrived shortly before eight that day, as planned. The Medical Examiner was a natural beauty, but today—to Sara—she appeared to have slept through her alarm, missed her bus, to have accidentally spilled coffee on her blouse and been late for her first appointment. Had she asked, Abby would have confessed this much and more to Sara Pridmore.
“Please, sit,” she told Sara, extending her hand in welcome. There was only one available armchair opposite Friedman. Sara was required to remove file folders to gain clear access.
“Coffee?” Friedman offered.
Sara refused the offer. “I was up early. Had my fill on the road. Thank God for rest stops.”
“Yes,” agreed Friedman with a sheepish smile. “The facilities are at least clean, more than I can say for the service stations along the way. You won’t mind if I do, will you?”
Sara’s eyes strayed to Friedman’s soiled blouse. Friedman said, “Spilled my first cup.” She smiled at Sara with Chiclet perfect white teeth, reminding Sara of Chris Burke. Friedman ordered coffee through an intercom from an assistant. Within moments, she had a steaming Bugs Bunny mug firmly in her grasp.
“See if you can’t get it in your mouth, rather than on your top,” the assistant said good-naturedly before leaving them alone.
Abby Friedman sipped from her mug. To Pridmore, she looked to be about thirty years of age. Sara suspected she was as much as ten years more, knowing she had to have obtained a medical degree and some measure of on the job experience to earn her position here. Friedman spoke with a faint accent. Brought with her when she migrated to America from overseas? Sara didn’t ask.
“Do you have children?” Friedman asked now. Sara said she did not. “Well, not all it’s cracked up to be. You love them dearly, but sometimes they drive you mad. And don’t even get me started on teenagers, especially girls. Sometimes, I think I’m talking to myself,” Friedman said, thinking of an argument she’d had with her daughter that morning. “How is the investigation progressing?”
“An eyewitness would be helpful.”
Friedman sipped coffee, careful to maintain a firm grasp on her cup. Sara studied the room, the haphazard scatter of manila file folders across the doctor’s credenza and desk, the slide cultures piled high, one on top of each other on the loose fitting shelves along the wall, the cardboard cartons stacked a dozen high in two corners of the office as if they were competing for either attention or for space. Chain of evidence, Sara mused, from this haphazard collection of disconnected links?
“Only Christmas gifts come in neatly wrapped packages, Officer,” Friedman said as if reading Sara’s mind. The Medical Examiner retrieved an envelope from the chaos that was her desktop, removed a computer print out and passed it to Pridmore.
Sara examined it for a moment before confessing, “What am I looking at?”
Friedman said, “DNA, a comparative analysis from a bloodstain retrieved from the crime scene and cross-referenced against a semen sample we lifted from the bed-sheet and the blood-stained tee shirt you supplied. We compared these three samples against a semen deposit extracted from the victim.”
“And?” Sara asked, pulse quickening.
“You may have a challenge.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Well,” said Friedman. “The blood collected in the alley belongs to the person whose blood is on the tee shirt you supplied. The DNA is also an exact match to the person who smeared his seed on the bed sheet you supplied.”
“Go on.”
“As well as semen on the bed sheet, we discovered a trace of vaginal fluid and pubic hair; both belong to
the victim. There is a marked, though not exact, similarity between the DNA strand of both the female and the male donors. Not brother and sister or father and daughter, but blood relative. Cousins, probably first.”
Sara exhaled, audibly. “Jordy Bitson, her cousin. He’s the killer. I knew it. It makes sense, doesn’t it? He had sex with her in his bedroom that afternoon. Afterward, he buys food at McDonalds, romantic little shit that he is, which they eat—where?—we don’t know, yet. He walks Missy home, they argue, possibly about the fact he’s raping her, possibly about the fact she wants out of his perverted little games. They fight, he scrapes himself, dumps her in the trash bin to conceal her body. Not premeditated, but good enough for a charge of second degree.”
“A killer, an accomplice, a material witness? That, Officer Pridmore,” said Abby Friedman in a trademark evasion of responsibility, “is for the police to decide.” Then, lifting a well-manicured finger in the air in a calculated gesture of Ah-ha, she said, “This is, however, where, for you, the theory breaks down.”
“Oh?” Sara said, now hedging her enthusiasm.
“Let’s look only at the physical evidence for a moment,” Friedman said. “We suspect the victim was having sex with her cousin, Jordy, you say; the pictures you speak of are a powerful indictment. Also, from the physical evidence, we know they likely did it on top of those bed sheets. But the bed sheets don’t prove conclusively that they had sex the day the girl died.”
“Aren’t we being retentive, Doctor? You’re forgetting; I’ve seen the photographs. Believe me, the two were doing more than just heavy petting.”
“I don’t dispute she had intercourse on the day she was killed, Officer—I’m betting an hour, maybe two at the most, before death—but what I can say, unequivocally, is the victim did not have sexual relations with the person whose blood was found in the alley, or with the person who stained the bed sheet, who we know to be her cousin Jordy.”
