Close Pursuit

by Carsten Stroud

  But a latent print will nail a suspect, once the man has been taken into custody, and a latent print found on the victim is as conclusive as an eyewitness. It’s one more item that a DA can use to convince a jury.

  The brutality of the attack, and particularly the mutilations, had prompted Stokovich to contact the New York office of the FBI, to get some advice from the Behavioral Science Unit. The BSU team had been interviewing serial killers for several years, gathering data in an attempt to develop a profile of the typical mass killer. The unit had been involved in the Atlanta child murders, as well as the Ted Bundy sexual homicide investigations. It had also been useful in providing the British police with some projections about the likely domestic patterns and personality problems of the Yorkshire Ripper. That and a hundred other smaller incidents had allowed the unit to offer a forensic resource to any police force with an interest.

  The Muro case was an isolated incident, not part of a series of similar attacks, so there was no way in which Stokovich could have persuaded the Department to make an official request for their help. But he did know one of the FBI field men, and he got access to some advice through the old-boy network.

  In the meantime, Kolchinski, Fratelli, and several plainclothesmen from Patrol had conducted a major canvass of the apartment block and the streets and alleys surrounding it. They paid special attention to the apartments across the back alley from the Muro apartment, where people had a clear line of sight into the room where she had been killed.

  Patrol officers had conducted the initial interviews, merely asking whether or not anyone in the area had seen or heard anything during the hours surrounding the attack. If the officers got a positive response, which was rare, then they would flag that sheet for the attention of the Detective Division. Out of 343 canvass contacts, the officers had found only seven people who had, or seemed as if they might have, relevant information.

  A full afternoon and evening shift had been devoted to the Muro case. Physical evidence had been taken by the Crime Scene men, and other blood, semen, hair, and tissue samples had been gathered during the autopsy. The canvass had generated some possible witnesses, and Stokovich had some data concerning the mutilations. At 2345 hours, about sixteen hours after the First Officer had arrived at the scene, Stokovich pulled his Task Force back to the squad room for a conference, to see what they had, what they needed, and what it all meant.

  During the conference, while the tired men slouched in chairs or leaned against the walls, and the coffee machine popped and hissed, Stokovich took each team through their actions, making notes in a steno pad.

  He knew that serology and the rest of the forensic work was going to take a few days to come together. What the team was looking for at this stage was some anomaly, what the textbooks call “the stressor” in the recent life of Adeline Muro. They were hoping for some unusual occurrence—a fight with a boyfriend, the loss of a job, a new acquaintance, something ordered from a store—anything at all that could suggest the first contact with her killer. Experience had taught them that very few cases of sexual assault took place between absolute strangers. It was a depressing truth that the most likely suspects in any sex killing were members of the immediate family and close associates. The nearest and the dearest. So the first hour of the conference was devoted to analyzing what had been discovered about the last week of Adeline Muro’s life and the people who had been in contact with her during that time. Somewhere in that record there might be a clue to her death.

  They got the first clue when Kolchinski and Wolf Maksins reported that Adeline Muro’s husband was serving a sentence for drug trafficking up at Rikers. He was a known associate of several drug runners in Alphabet City.

  Fratelli had discovered that Adeline Muro had been making regular purchases of medicinal antiseptics from the Comprehensive Health Services.

  Kennedy observed that Marcuse had not found any signs of disease in the victim’s body.

  Stokovich noted that the Crime Scene Unit had detected at least five varieties of fingerprints in the primary crime zone: some plastic, some visible, and a couple of latents. Kearny had suggested, off the record, that it looked like two of these sets of prints were from a small child and a young woman. The other three types were typical of adult male prints.

  Maksins came back from the phone with the name of Adeline Muro’s husband, a Rubio Joaquin Muro, DOB 05/21/48, with a history of drug and weapons offenses. He was a Cuban who had come across during the great exodus in 1980, when Castro had cleared his prisons and insane asylums and set them all afloat for America from Mariel Harbor.

  Robinson presented a Manhattan Human Resources case card in the name of Hermenegildo Muro, DOB 09/06/58, and a CATCH sheet on the man, listing his a.k.a.’s as Zaka, Loco, and Mokie. The card had been found in the spare room.

  A Mokie Muro was listed on Rubio Joaquin Muro’s sheet, but improperly, as an a.k.a. The different dates of birth suggested a simple error in filing.

  The M.E.’s preliminary report, phoned in to Kennedy in the afternoon, had hinted at two types of semen in the victim’s anal and vaginal canals. And it had been the feeling of the odontologist that there were two distinct bite patterns on the body.

  And the material under the nails of the victim was definitely human skin and blood, type AB, which matched the blood type found in one of the semen samples.

  Kolchinski had been on the phone to the clerk at the Health Services clinic, and she confirmed that Adeline Muro had been concerned about hepatitis and how infectious it was for children. The paramedic had suggested certain antiseptic procedures and cautioned her against sharing drug paraphernalia. The Muro woman had become angry, insisting she was not a drug user and never would be.

  Kolchinski had asked the clerk if there had been any other person named Muro diagnosed as having hepatitis by the clinic. After the need had been explained to her, the woman had pulled the name of Hermenegildo Muro from the files. Hermenegildo was also being treated for the pre-ARC phase of AIDS, which he had contracted during a homosexual liaison with an unidentified Hispanic male. The clerk could not ascertain the name of this third party, nor did she have any idea who could.

  The paramedic had concluded by stating that she had inferred from the Muro woman’s manner that there was some degree of tension in the house, arising from the hepatitis and ARC diagnosis of Hermenegildo, and her concerns for the health of her child.

  Kennedy quoted from a Crime Scene note, indicating that while there were definite signs of tool-work and force applied to the security bars and window moldings of the fire-escape exit, there was a thick layer of undisturbed dust and mud on the middle flight of iron stairs, which made Kennedy believe that no one had climbed up or down that fire escape in the last few days. The drought, which had been in effect all summer, had left most of Alphabet City coated in dust, and a recent rain had only served to turn the top layer of dust into a thin, delicate shell of mud. Anybody using the fire-escape stairs would certainly have broken that shell.

  Robinson contributed the statements of one of the canvass sources, who had said that Adeline Muro had recently broken off “relaciones amorosas” with a man named Fuentes, a delivery driver for a midtown service. Fuentes was nowhere around, and Robinson had put out a call for him.

  Robinson also quoted from an interview report wherein a next-door neighbor had recalled a “very bad fight” that had taken place between Adeline Muro and “that boy Mokie.” The neighbor was uncertain as to the exact date of the fight, stating only that she “had heard through the walls a most angry word” and that the boy Mokie had moved out of the apartment the following morning.

  Another witness had reported that a “blue car, an old junker” had arrived on the same morning, and that a “fat man” had helped Mokie to take a few possessions away in the back of that car. The witness could give no better description of the car or the vehicle, nor could she remember the license number.

  An addict who had been sleeping in the stairwell rec
alled that a very angry man had come out of Apartment 7C a few days before. The addict thought that the woman had called that man Miguel or Michael, or something similar.

  Robinson closed by saying that some legwork had developed a first name for the ex-boyfriend, an employee of a bicycle delivery service whose name was Miguel Fuentes.

  The conference broke up after Stokovich summarized things, assigning Robinson to check out Miguel Fuentes and detailing Ben Kolchinski to put a fire under the forensic serologist to get the decision on those blood, semen, and tissue samples as soon as possible. In the meantime, Kennedy and Fratelli could go out on the street and talk to whatever finks and addicts they could put their hands on. And he’d put the word through to Street Narcotics and to the Anti-Crime Units to put some generalized heat on the various numbers dealers and drug traffickers in Alphabet City until somebody came forward with something helpful.

  Nothing worth noting had come out of the finks—either the tame ones or the casual informers that Kennedy and Fratelli had on their strings. The NYPD maintained a system of registering their informants, and each detective was required to report any consistently reliable source to the Intelligence Division for approval as a confidential informant. A source was considered to be a potential informant if he had given reliable information about a crime or a pending crime more than once, and if he had asked for money, court consideration, or had a prior criminal history. Once he was approved by the Intelligence Bureau, the confidential informant was given an ID number, made up of the precinct he had been developed in, his file number, the squad that had developed him as a source, and the Criminal Bureau number. This ID number was used to code a complete case file on the informant, and any member of the Department who could show a reasonable need for that informant could apply, through his C.O., to the Intelligence Division for access to that informant. It sounded like a great system. It was a disaster.

  The reasons why it was less than efficient were complex, but the bottom line was that no one who makes money by turning in his very lethal buddies is likely to jump for joy when he hears that the Police Department, of whom he is not overly fond, has written his name down somewhere in a computer and that any cop in the city can dig it out and go see him any time of the day or night. Notoriety such as that can make you suddenly dead. Since most informants know, deep in their hearts, that even the cops who run them don’t like them very much, they tend to dry up when they realize that the NYPD has put them on a list.

  And detectives don’t like to have to share the sources they develop, especially since some of these sources know as many damaging things about the detective as the detective knows about the fink. If a strange cop can ride into the neighborhood and get permission to rattle another cop’s private finks, many times without the presence of the man who ran that fink, then nobody is safe from the prying eyes of the Internal Affairs Department. Registration of informants was seen by many detectives as just another way for the slicks at Internal to throw their weight around. The basic rule in the detective brotherhood was that a man’s fink was his private property, and you had to ask him unofficially if he would do you the honor of allowing you to relay a few questions, through him, off the record, to his own fink. The result was that most of the confidential informants filed with the Intelligence Division of the NYPD were either well-blown old hacks, or minor shits thrown to the computer because they were of little real value to the detective who had developed them.

  Over the weekend the serologist called Kolchinski at home with the news that there had been two secretors involved in the Muro case, and that one of the secretors had type AB blood, which corresponded to the skin samples taken from under Adeline Muro’s nails.

  And Maksins’ fink, a small-time break-and-enter man whom Maksins had turned into a pretty good source in exchange for a few dollars a crack and a word in Sorvino’s ear over a Criminal Facilitation beef, reached Wolfie with the news that Hermenegildo “Mokie” Muro had been sharing a needle with a shooter on Avenue D and that shooter had told Wolfie’s snitch that Mokie was “seriously pissed” with his cousin’s “cunt wife” for throwing his ass out in the street and that he was going to do something about it.

  Other than that activity, the men of the Task Force spent the weekend cutting their lawns, playing with whatever children they were fortunate enough to have visitation rights to, or simply lying around their apartments tossing rubber mice at their cats, if they had one. That’s what sensible cops do on their days off, and they don’t give up their days off easily.

  On Monday afternoon, while Kennedy was watching Charlie Marcuse remove the internal mechanisms of Porfirio Magdalena Ruiz, Miguel Fuentes was giving Frank Robinson a very convincing alibi for his whereabouts on the night Adeline Muro was killed. He had been in an 84th Precinct holding cell for trying to kick a dollar out of a computerized blackjack game in a bar on Flatbush Avenue. It checked out, and Miguel Fuentes was crossed off the list.

  The brownies turned out to have cited a battered 1967 Ford Fairlane for sidewalk parking outside the Muro apartment on Thursday, September 12, the morning after (all the best witnesses had stated) Adeline Muro had the big fight with Mokie Muro. The computer gave a registration for the Ford Fairlane, owned by one Salvador Olvera, showing an address on Myrtle Avenue. Salvador Olvera came up on the CATCH system as a small-time drug trafficker with the usual range of penny-ante charges, one anomalous bust for public lewdness and another odd beef—consensual sodomy. Stokovich was surprised to see the charge. The Supreme Court had declared that charge unconstitutional, although it was still technically on the books. The act must have been so outrageous that the arresting officer had laid the charge anyway.

  And consensual sodomy seemed to fit the pattern. The Health Services paramedic had reported that Mokie Muro was having a homosexual relationship with an unidentified male. The color of Salvador Olvera’s Ford Fairlane was listed as blue. Salvador had the a.k.a. of Tinto, along with a couple of other Hispanic nicknames, including Reina which was Spanish for “queen.”

  The gestation period for the ARC stage of AIDS was considered to be something like three years, so this Olvera guy, homosexual or no, could not have been the source of Mokie’s disease. For that matter, there were enough addicts with AIDS in Alphabet City to give half of Manhattan a good shot at AIDS through their needles, so the ARC thing didn’t really count for much.

  The FINEST net had sent around the intriguing notation that a male prostitute named Jesus Rodriguez had been found in possession of a cameo with an inscription reading “para mi corazón Adelina.” It resembled one of the articles a neighbor had described as Adeline Muro’s personal and most treasured belongings. But Jesus Rodriguez had been released on his own recognizance, through a mixup in Communications, and nobody in Midtown North seemed to know where the kid was now.

  And finally, Stokovich’s FBI buddy had gotten back to him with the reading from his buddy in the Behavioral Sciences Unit at Quantico. The fact that Serology had found two types of secretors in the victim’s body did not fit the usual pattern of sexual assault that they had formulated. It was rare that the kind of man who vented his rage at women by mutilating them in a sexual manner could actually perform sexually with a woman. They were usually impotent, and did not have normal sexual lives at all. So the removal of portions of the body did not seem to fit with the obvious traces of two sexually functioning males. He had added, however, that this was only a reading from a distance. If a second murder developed, Stokovich was to be sure to contact Quantico directly.

  Thanks, Bruno had said, but the sarcasm was lost.

  When Wolfgar Maksins made contact with the addict who had shared a needle with Mokie Muro, the man who had heard him talk about his cousin’s “cunt wife,” the addict was too sick to talk. He needed a hit before he could remember anything. So Wolfie bounced him around in a stairwell until he felt better. When things settled down a little, Maksins acquired the additional information that Mokie had talked about his friend who w
as a striker—a recruit—for a motorcycle gang in the Bronx. Mokie had said, through a fog of cheap crank and a couple of Quaaludes, that he was going to go up there and be a striker too. That was all the addict could manage to get out before he got the dry heaves, and Maksins left him there, working out his problems.

  When they got together again for the Tuesday morning general conference at 0845, most of the Task Force was convinced that the killers of Adeline Muro were Mokie Muro and an “unidentified third party” who was probably this man Salvador Olvera, a.k.a. Tinto. Citywides had been issued on the teletype for both men, and the plainclothes units from Midtown were keeping a special watch for Jesus Rodriguez, who seemed like the best lead so far. Units of the Biker Squad in the Bronx had been contacted about a possible sighting of Mokie Muro, but the Bronx had troubles of its own, and it was probably going to take a personal push from some of the Task Force guys to locate either of the two suspects. Kennedy had his hands full with the Porfirio Ruiz killing. Maksins had a sadistic sex killing in Greenwich Village. Fratelli and Robinson were chasing some demented Armenian bunko artists who had graduated to homicide after a knifing on Van Dam. Kolchinski was up to his bald head in a Hell’s Angels investigation. Natural velocity was pushing the Muro case into the background until the Ruiz case led Kennedy into a brick wall because of the Strike Force operation against some major drug dealers. Stokovich had already decided to hand Kennedy the 23rd Street jumper, which he thought was a grounder, and then turn him loose on the Muro case. Eddie Kennedy didn’t know it, but Stokovich looked on Kennedy as his “silver bullet,” his absolute best man when it came down to bringing in a running man. It was the thing Kennedy did best. His case work was textbook perfect, but out on the chase he had something extra, a sense for where a man will go when he’s running for his life.