by Blake Banner
I laughed. “You asking or telling?”
“Both. I’m asking but I know I’m right. What was it? What did he say?”
“You remember I said something was curious, and you thought I meant the decay of the semen?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I didn’t. What struck me as curious was the fact that he had crushed her windpipe with his thumbs. But she was lying face down.”
She made a face and nodded. “So he was trying to move her.”
“Right. The report you read made no mention of that. So I want to know if the papers or the TV did. Because if they didn’t…”
She was nodding. “He did. He said the killer tried to move the body into the river, then ran when the Harbor Patrol came by.”
“Yup. So we need to pull up the reporting from the time. Because if he was there, either he saw who did it, or…”
I looked at her and she said, “Or he did it.”
TWO
We found a space to park outside the Golden Mango Supermarket on Havermeyer Avenue and walked the short distance to Zerega, which runs along beside the creek. There is a stretch between the quarry and the Fedex Depot, about a hundred and forty yards or so, where the road borders the riverbank, separated only by an ugly fence made of steel tubing and wire mesh, about eight feet high. It serves little purpose, other than to make a place that should have been beautiful even uglier than it had already become: it was both easy to scale and easy to cut through.
Dehan touched my arm and pointed. “There’s a gate over there. It’s open.”
I followed her over and examined the gate. There were scratches that suggested it had once been secured by a chain and a padlock, but both were long gone. Dehan pushed the gate further open and we squeezed through into a miniature jungle of tall grasses, weeds, ferns, bushes, maples, and oak trees. I stood a moment, absorbing the scene. Dehan pushed farther in, following what might have been once a beaten path, taking big, arching steps over weeds and nettles with her long legs. She had the file with her.
I called out, “I think the body was down there.” She turned to look at me and I pointed to the right. “There should be an inlet down there, with a rocky beach, and a grassy lip, like a small mound.”
She nodded and started picking her way to the right a bit. I followed and we came out onto a sloping bank of mixed rocks, sand and moss that descended steeply for about eight or nine feet to a small knoll, roughly oval, about twelve or fifteen feet long and six or seven feet across at its widest point. It was surrounded on three sides by tall grass and shrubs, but on the far side it sloped gradually down to a rocky inlet in the river. Dehan pulled out the pictures of the crime scene. “That’s it, there,” she said, and we scrambled down to the knoll.
She stood a moment examining the pictures again while I peered over her shoulder. She pointed ahead, to the edge of the grassy lip. “Her body was over there, face down, with her right arm pinned underneath her and her left arm kind of flung out toward the river.” She shook her head. “I can’t make out any drag marks…”
I turned and looked back, in the opposite direction. “He probably rolled her. That’s why her arm is pinned. If you drag a body you have to do it from the feet, otherwise they are almost impossible to move. If Wayne was telling the truth he would have been over there, in those bushes.”
I pointed up at a patch of undergrowth about thirty feet away. Dehan turned, looked where I was pointing and nodded. She said, “So right now I am asking myself, if… if Wayne has knowledge of the crime scene and the position of the body, that was not made available to the media, what’s to stop us from promoting him to prime suspect?”
I shrugged with my eyebrows. “I was wondering the same thing.”
She echoed my eyebrow-shrug with her shoulders. “The only thing I can think of is that, if he was the killer, he would have to be really stupid, seriously stupid, to draw attention to the fact that he was here at the time of the murder. And he struck me as a lot of things, but stupid wasn’t one of them.”
I scratched my chin, still staring at the area where Wayne had said he’d been lying, getting stoned and looking at the night sky. He would have had a perfect view of the events. I sighed. “Agreed. He’s not stupid, at least not in the sense of having a low IQ.”
I clambered up to the spot, lay down and looked up at the sky. I called down to her, “What did Ibanez make of it?”
Dehan was quiet for a bit, leafing through the file. “She didn’t really come to any firm conclusions, but she speculated that the most likely explanation was that Angela, if that was her name, was a prostitute and was killed by her pimp or a client.”
I winced, sat up, leaned my elbows on my knees and stared down at her. “Did she offer any reason for that remarkable hypothesis?”
She kept reading and eventually said, “Well, if you can call it a reason, she says there doesn’t seem to be any other explanation for why she would be at a place like this at that time on a Saturday night. She quotes some statistics: that a Hispanic girl murdered and raped in the Bronx in a lonely place of these characteristics is most likely to be a prostitute…”
She stopped reading and stared at me. She looked mad. I agreed. I felt mad too. “So basically she had no evidence and assumed because she was an Hispanic girl out late on a Saturday in the Bronx she was a whore.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
I sighed and stood up. “This is not Hunts Point. It’s one of the safest areas in the Bronx. Not just the Bronx, in New York. Whatever her statistics may say, the chances of finding a prostitute working this district are practically nonexistent.”
“Plus, look at the way she was dressed. What was her line, Miss Demure? A flutter of the eyelashes is extra?”
I laughed. “Mmm…sounds appealing.”
“Funny.”
I joined her on the knoll. “Did they check NamUs?”
“There is no mention of that.”
“Let’s go talk to Detective Ibanez. I think this is a case of the same old same old, Dehan. A woman nobody cares about killed by a guy nobody cares about. You go through the motions, you don’t get an immediate hit off the databases, so you file it under Don’t Give a Damn and let it go cold.” We started climbing back up the bank. I spoke over my shoulder as we climbed. “And let’s look at women who were reported missing around that time. It will be tedious, but I reckon if we can get some idea of who she was, we’ll get some idea why she died, and who killed her.”
* * *
You could tell Detective Veronica Ibanez liked to think of herself as bad ass. She didn’t wait for us to find her, she came looking for us. She was small, all her movements were quick and she chewed gum like she was in a hurry to get it chewed. She shouted to me as we walked into the detectives room. “Yo! Stone! You want to talk to me?”
She said it as she walked across the room with her chin stuck in the air.
I smiled and frowned at the same time. “How’d you know?”
She arrived at our desks as I was pulling off my jacket. She had her hands in her jeans pockets and was chewing furiously. “Inspector told me you was looking at the Westchester whore…” She grinned and made a small noise that wanted to be a laugh but never made it. “I figured you’d wanna talk to me, get my view.”
“Yeah. Grab a chair.”
“I prefer to stand. I get restless sitting down. Whacha wanna know?”
Dehan sighed, dropped into her chair and opened her laptop.
I rested my ass against the desk. “What made you think she was a prostitute?”
She shrugged. “What else? She wasn’t doin’ voluntary work out there at that time of the night, was she?”
“That was it?”
“What else?” she said again. It was obviously her go-to analysis. “If it walks like a duck and it quacks like a duck, it’s a duck!”
I shrugged and gave a small laugh. “But she didn’t look like a duck. Her clothes were sober, demure even. She looked
the picture of respectable middle class.”
She made a pfff! sound. “You ever worked vice? I tell you Stone, you should take a sabbatical and work vice for a year. It’ll open your eyes. You get whores of every color, shape, size and persuasion! Ask Mo…” Mo was laughing like an egg custard. “Hey, Mo, you’re writing a thesis on the whole gamut of whoredom, ain’t ya? You know ’em all, huh? You dirty bastard!” There was a moment of generalized hilarity. She turned back to me. “Believe me, pal. Clothes don’t mean nothin’!”
I was about to ask her how, then, she knew what a duck looked like, but I could see the discussion turning circular so I left it and moved on.
“I saw in the file you ran her prints and her DNA, but there’s no mention of NamUs. Did you check on women reported missing…?”
Before I could finish the question she gave a big shout of laughter. “Are you kidding me? Do you know how many files on missing women there are? One hundred thousand, my friend! One hundred thousand!” She did a weird thing with her neck, moving her head from side to side. “If you think I’m gonna bust my ovaries goin’ through a hundred thousand files looking for a babe who is probably an illegal anyway, so she ain’t gonna be in those files, you are plumb crazy. No way. You wanna do that, be my guest. I got more important things to do!”
I heard Dehan’s voice from behind me. “More important than identifying a murdered girl?”
Before she could answer, I said, “What steps did you take to identify her, Veronica?”
“You know what we did. It’s in the report. We ran her through CODIS and IAFIS, and we spent a day canvassing the area. Nobody knew her, nobody had seen her.”
I heard Dehan snort. “A whole day, huh? You sure earned your pay that week, Ibanez.”
I glanced around at her and smiled. She was staring at her laptop. Ibanez looked at me. “You know what, Stone? I don’t need this.”
I nodded. “I know, you have important stuff to do.”
“Take a hike. You got any questions, look in the report.”
She went striding at speed back across the room, with her chin in the air. I turned back to Dehan. “What are you doing?”
“I’m checking the reports from the time to see if there is any mention of the position of the body.”
“And?”
“So far I’ve read three reports. None of them says anything about the position of the victim.” She sat back in her chair and linked her fingers behind her head. “Seems to me that, if the media had been told that it looked as though the body was going to be dumped into the water, they would have reported it.” She shrugged. “You know, bodies floating down the river, that kind of stuff. Sort of thing the press like.”
“I’m inclined to agree. But keep looking. I’m going to look for women reported missing May and June of 2016. Veronica is probably right. It probably runs into thousands. But first, let’s go and report to El Jefe.”
We climbed the stairs to the inspector’s office, tapped and were told to come in. He was standing at the window, spraying something onto his potted plants. He smiled benignly at us and gestured toward his chairs. “Sit, sit. I am just tending to my plants. All life is sacred, don’t you think?”
Dehan said nothing so I spoke for both of us. “Can’t argue with that, sir.”
“No,” he said, lowering himself into his chair with a sigh. “And if you did, you’d be wrong. So, how did you get on at Rikers? Has he got information of value? Or is he bluffing?”
Dehan answered. “It may be both, sir. He has something, but it may not be as valuable as he is trying to make out.”
He frowned. “I see…”
I said, “He claims he was at the scene.”
“In what capacity?”
“Well, that’s just the thing, sir. He says he was enjoying a joint, lying on the grass looking at the stars, when he saw the killer arrive with the victim. He claims she was bound and gagged. He described the way her wrists were bound and, more important than that, he said that after the victim was killed, the killer tried to drag her to the river. That is a fact that, as far as we know, was never reported to the media.”
He nodded. “Aha, so if he knows that, either he was there as a witness…”
“Or he did it.”
“Indeed. So what are your next steps?”
I drew breath but Dehan spoke first. “We spoke to Detective Ibanez. She couldn’t add anything to what was in the report. So we thought we would check how the murder was reported at the time and see if there is any reference to the body’s being moved. If there isn’t, then A, Wayne becomes our prime suspect and B, the chances are good he has more information to give us. Also, we start trawling reports of missing women around May and June 2016.”
He frowned. “That wasn’t done in the original investigation?”
I shook my head once. “Nope.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I see. May I suggest you also approach the PDs and sheriff’s departments of New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, et cetera…”
I nodded. “All our immediate neighbors. Yes, we’ll do that. How we proceed thereafter, sir, depends very much on what we find regarding how the media reported the case.”
He leaned back in his chair. “That makes perfect sense, detectives. Well done. I won’t hold you up any longer. Good work.”
As we left he was reaching for the internal phone. As I closed the door we heard him saying, “Ah, Detective Ibanez, could you come up and see me for a moment…”
We passed her on her way up. She and I made a point of ignoring each other, but Dehan said, “Going to see the Inspector, Ibanez? Say hi from me.”
She didn’t answer.
We worked through lunch, Dehan read every article she could find on the case, and contacted the major TV news networks for any footage they had where the murder was reported. Meanwhile, I sent out a request to the neighboring PDs and sheriff’s departments for missing persons reports on Hispanic females in their early to mid twenties, reported missing in late May or June, 2016.
After that it was a matter of trawling, painstakingly, through the NamUs database. Ibanez had not exaggerated. There were approximately one hundred thousand cases of missing women over the age of twenty-one, and an extra two thousand three hundred people reported missing every day. My search criteria were pretty narrow, but even so there were thousands of files to work through.
By eight o’clock that evening I was beat. I rubbed my eyes, crunched my vertebrae and looked at Dehan, who was leaning back with a pencil in her mouth, reading from the screen of her laptop.
I shrugged and shook my head. “I haven’t found her. I need food and a bottle of wine.”
She nodded for a while, still reading. Then she yawned and stretched, reached forward and switched off the computer. “Me too.” She rubbed her face with her hands and stared at me. “It was not reported, Stone. However Wayne Harris came by that information, it was not through the press.” We stared at each other for a long moment, then she summed it up. “Either he has spoken to somebody who was there and told him what happened, or…” She shrugged and I nodded.
“He was there.”
THREE
By the time we got home it was almost nine o’clock. Dehan put a couple of pizzas in the oven while I pulled a cork from a bottle of wine, then fixed a couple of martinis, extra dry, while the wine breathed. As I placed her drink on the bar, Dehan said, “So, Sensei, how do you want to play it?”
I thought about it. “First drink, then dinner, then bed.”
“Where’s your red nose, Mr. Clown?”
I carried my drink to the sofa, kicked off my shoes, stretched out and spoke to the ceiling. “I say we don’t rush our fences. Wayne ain’t going anywhere anytime soon.” Dehan came over, nudged my feet aside with her ass and sat on the arm of the sofa. I looked at her. “He’s playing it like he has a strong hand. Maybe he has, but we can bluff. I don’t want to give him a deal if I can avoid it.”
She nodded. �
�So, before we go back to him we try to find out who she is. Then take it from there.”
I nodded. “I think that makes sense.”
There was a ping from my phone. She retrieved it from my jacket pocket and handed it to me.
I thumbed the screen. “Emails,” I said. “Whaddaya know. Philadelphia PD and Boston PD.” I pulled myself into a sitting position and read: “Reported missing June first, 2016, Sonia Ibarri of Buttonwood Avenue, Maple Shade Township in Philly. Twenty-two at the time of her disappearance.”
Her eyebrows rose up. “Sounds promising, if that’s the right word.”
“Hmm… We’ll find out tomorrow.” I went to the next email. “Boston PD. Rosario Clemente, twenty-three at the time of her disappearance. Reported missing Sunday twenty-second of May, 2016. One week after our victim was killed. Also a good candidate. Neither of them is called Angela.”
Dehan shrugged. “It could have been her grandmother’s cross. Could be a family heirloom. They both sound like they could be our girl.”
“We’ll go see them tomorrow, have a look at some pictures, and hope we don’t have to show them any of Angela.”
She nodded gravely, then gently punched my knee. “C’mon, big guy. Pizza’s ready.”
* * *
Next morning Dehan phoned ahead to Alicia Clemente, Rosario’s mother, and the Ibarris while I made breakfast, and by nine we were on the road to Boston. It was a three hour drive, but we didn’t talk much. We were in a somber mood. One hour in, Dehan, looking out at the woodlands and fields around New Haven, said, “It’s hard to know what to hope for. You hope for a positive ID to be able to lay her soul to rest, and give some closure to the family. But you hope for a negative too, so you can give them some hope.” She turned to look at me, with her aviators hiding her eyes. “We want truth and we want hope. It’s a tough break when the truth robs you of hope.”
There was no answer to that, so we drove on in silence.
