“Don’t know yet. So you remember Brookings?” I ask. “Were you on the case?” Jessie is now head of the computer division at the precinct, but she used to be on the street. That’s where she would still rather be, but she has been a victim of her technology expertise. In the new world, being in charge of cyber-stuff pretty much makes her the lead detective in the unit, but she doesn’t see it that way.
“Yes. It was all hands on deck; the pressure was on. You don’t remember it?”
“No; it happened in my dark period. But Nate has been updating me, between insults.”
“If this is the same perp,” she says, “we’re in for a wild ride.” Then, “Probably will be a wild ride either way.”
The first thing I do when i get in this morning is call up the file on Brookings.
Nate is not here yet; Jessie and I always drive in together really early. She likes to get a lot of work in before the phone starts ringing, and I like to inhale a lot of coffee and donuts before the real work starts. It’s a different approach, but both of our methods seem to work.
Obviously, there is no compelling need to familiarize myself with Brookings yet; the ballistics aren’t in. But there’s also no harm in it either. I’d like to know more about it, especially what my actions were.
This is not the first time I’ve gone back and checked out a cold case to see what steps I took. It’s a weird feeling when I do it, like reading a novel about my own life without knowing what comes next. But it can be good or bad; I cringe at the prospect of seeing that I did something wrong, and I’m very relieved on the occasions that I’m pleased by my performance. I’m rather self-critical, so I do a lot more cringing than smiling.
In the Brookings case, I’m also hoping to see something with fresh eyes. It’s an open case, though growing cold, so it would be nice to find the killer regardless of whether he has struck again.
Since Nate and I are homicide detectives, finding killers is actually part of our job description.
We’ve been having pretty good success lately, having cleared three cases in the last three weeks. They haven’t been head scratchers; the likely suspects all but screamed their guilt at us. One of them was still at the scene, the murder weapon in his hands. That’s usually a pretty good clue.
But the point is we’ve arrested all three, and put neat cases in the hands of the prosecutors.
It’s a great feeling, one I will never get tired of.
The only recent open case that Nate and I are working on is a domestic murder; a woman by the name of Nina Muller was brutally murdered while she slept alone in her rented Passaic apartment.
We were called in on this one because there was more than one county involved. Mrs. Muller and her husband, Frank, lived in Englewood, and their life there did not go smoothly, primarily because Frank is a violent, abusive scumbag.
The Englewood police were called in on numerous occasions by Mrs. Muller because Frank was abusing her. She finally summoned the guts to move out, and she took the Passaic apartment on a temporary basis, the first step in starting a new life. Frank threatened her, and she went to court and received a restraining order against him. She told the judge that she feared for her life.
There is little question that the restraining order did not restrain Frank at all, and that he’s the one who broke into her apartment and stabbed her to death. There is no evidentiary doubt of that; she fought back and had his skin under her fingernails. Frank took off and hasn’t been seen since.
We’ve put out the word, and he will be found; the only question is when. I’m hoping to be the one to find him, and I’m hoping he will resist arrest.
I open the Brookings file and begin reading. There is a lot of biographical stuff on Brookings, and he is mostly as Nate had described him. He was rich, no doubt about that, and he was also philanthropic. A wing at Hackensack University Medical Center is named after him; an unpleasant irony is that’s where he was declared dead after being shot.
Brookings was forty-nine and left a wife and two adult children behind. There is very little in the files about the kids; they live out of state.
The phone rings and it is Captain Bradley on the other line. “Get your ass in here,” he says. Captain Bradley is not much of a chit-chatter; I like that about him.
As I’m walking out of the office, Nate is walking in. “Where are you going?”
“Bradley. He told me to get my ass into his office.”
“What about me?”
“He didn’t mention anything about your ass. He might consider it too large; he doesn’t have that big an office. If we were meeting in the conference room, that would be a different story.”
Nate doesn’t seem deterred by that and follows me toward Bradley’s office. There’s no doubt Bradley wants both of us; when it comes to investigations, Nate and I have long been joined at the hip, if not the ass.
When we enter Bradley’s office, the first thing he says is, “Close the door.” But as he says it, he is walking over and closing it himself. Once he does, he gets right to the point. “I just got off the phone with Captain Stanton from Paterson PD. The ballistics report is on the way to us, but he was giving us a heads-up. It’s a match to Brookings.”
“Shit,” Nate says.
Bradley turns to me. “I understand you don’t remember Brookings?”
“I’m reading up on it.”
“Good; read fast. Because we are full-out on this one.”
“Do we go public with the match?” I ask.
“Opinions, please.” It is Bradley’s style to seek input before making a key decision, a technique I respect. He doesn’t always agree, which is fine.
Nate shakes his head. “I say we sit on it, at least for a while. We’d just scare people; there will be plenty of time for that later.”
“I don’t agree,” I say. “It’s going to come out anyway, and then we’ll look bad for concealing it. But more importantly, the public has a right to know, and they might even help. We are going to have to find a connection between Brookings and Randowsky, and maybe someone will come forward with it.”
Bradley nods. “Okay. I’m inclined to agree with Doug, but I’ll think more about it. And I want to talk to the commissioner. What I really want to do is hold a press conference to announce an arrest, so get working on making that happen.”
There is one highly unusual aspect to the case which jumps out at us.
Why would the killer wait eighteen months between shootings?
“Maybe he was in jail,” Nate says. “Or hurt. Or out of the country.”
Of those choices, jail seems the most likely, and it’s something we will follow up on immediately. But a lot of people go in and out of jails every day, and there is no guarantee that our guy was incarcerated anywhere around here. That means the suspect pool would be a very large one.
Of course, we are looking for a guy who went away soon after Brookings, and got out relatively recently, so that narrows it down a bit more. But there will still be a lot of people who fit within that time frame.
The possibilities that Nate mentioned make sense if this is truly a random series of murders. If it comes from nothing but the excitement of killing, then eighteen months would be a superhuman time to wait. It would mean that the thrill-killer is demonstrating a deliberateness beyond anything I’ve ever encountered. The only way that would seem possible would be if the killer were literally unable to act, for reasons like incarceration or injury.
Of course, there is always the possibility that the killer actually has struck in the interim, possibly in a different jurisdiction using a different tactic and weapon. For example, had he strangled a jogger in a park in Newark, we’d have had no reason to tie it to Brookings.
There is also the definite chance that it’s not random at all, that Randowsky and Brookings were connected, and that the motive for their murders isn’t yet apparent. That motive, whatever it may be, might contain within it an explanation for the unusually long time betwee
n the killings.
Obviously we’ve only started to scratch the surface on Randowsky, so it’s way too soon to make any judgments. But Jessie and her staff are already in the process of doing a deep dive to learn everything about him that we can online. Interviews with friends, family, and business associates will give us a much more detailed and accurate picture, but the online search is a big help to start us off.
Randowsky was a lawyer and partner in a Ridgewood firm that practices mostly family law. He was forty-five years old, and divorced with no children. There is also some indication that he was well off financially, and gave time and money to charitable efforts.
There is no obvious connection to Brookings other than their common wealth and willingness to help others. But there are many ways a rich businessman and a lawyer could be linked, and we will track down all the possibilities.
But for now all we know is that someone obviously smart and painstaking, and a deadly marksman to boot, is lying in wait and shooting people for a reason still to be explained.
So all I can do is go back to reading. A lot of the legwork on Brookings has obviously already been done, some of it by me. Even though it never led to anything positive, at the very least it’s valuable as a guide to prevent us having to go down the same unproductive roads again.
Nate joins me in going through the files; it’s been a while and he’s not as up on it as he’ll need to be. I’m glad he’s doing so, because I can ask him questions about some of the information, since he might be familiar with some of the nuances that are not written down.
After about ten minutes, he says, “You know, we could do this just as well in the cafeteria.”
I nod. “I’m sure we could. But all the files are here, on the third floor. The cafeteria is downstairs, on the first floor. It’s a two-floor difference.”
“I know where the cafeteria is, wiseass. We can take the files with us. Reading makes me hungry.”
“Everything makes you hungry. Eating makes you hungry.”
“Beating the shit out of you is going to leave me famished.” He stands up, grabbing some files as he does. “I’ll be reading in the cafeteria.”
With Nate gone and me not having to listen to his stomach making noises, I can actually concentrate better. Once I’m finished with the Brookings bio material, I can get into the substance of the investigation.
It is immediately obvious that the department went into a full-court press on this. Nate and I actually split up and interviewed potential witnesses and suspects separately, a sure sign that we wanted to maximize manpower and speed things up.
Also, since we were in charge, one of us often had to stay back at our desk going through the reports the other cops were filing. That’s going to happen again as the current case heats up. Neither of us will be happy about it, but it is unavoidable.
A total of four hundred and forty-one interview reports were submitted, from all the members of the department. Either my signature or Nate’s is on every one of them; as leaders of the investigation it was important that we see everything, and the signatures show that we did.
I’ve been through things like this so many times that it shouldn’t be stunning to me that I remember none of it, but it still seems hard to believe.
And it is very, very frustrating.
I call Jessie and ask her to have her people run down everyone mentioned in these files to determine if any of them were out of commission for the last eighteen months. It’s a long shot, but necessary. She’s already working on possible connections between Brookings and Randowsky, but says she’ll have the team get to it as soon as they can.
I grab some files and head to the cafeteria to join Nate. Being frustrated makes me hungry.
Nate and I head back to Eastside Park.
We’ve been to the crime scene already, but it was in the middle of the chaos after the discovery of the body. At the time we didn’t even know if we’d be on the case; it wasn’t yet tied in to Brookings. This will give us more of a chance to get a feel for what happened and how.
The area is still roped off, and there are three Paterson cops guarding the perimeter. The media trucks are gone and there is no commotion, but the event will certainly live on in the memory of those who were here. It will be at least a couple of days before anyone can play tennis here again, and probably a lot longer before many people would have the guts.
I’m sure the cops have been told to let us in, and they do so after following the proper procedure of making us show our badges. Obviously the body has been removed, but we head to where it was found.
Based on the witness interview that the Paterson cops conducted with Randowsky’s tennis partner, they had just finished playing on court three. The way the courts are set up, the exit for the caged-in courts is at the side of court one, so Randowsky and his partner would have walked past courts one and two, no doubt well behind the baselines so as not to have interfered with play.
Of course, it’s possible the other two courts were not being used, but we don’t know that yet. We’ll find that out when we conduct our own interview with Randowsky’s partner, or read the interviews the Paterson cops conducted.
Once he exited the playing area, Randowsky walked about ten feet, probably toward where his car was parked. At that point he was also walking toward the woods in the distance, and that is when he was shot. He was facing his executioner, but did not know that. In fact, he probably never realized it; he was dead before he hit the ground.
“Shooter picked the perfect time,” Nate says.
I nod. “Right, and not by accident. He had to be lying in wait. Randowsky was heading toward him, so it was a direct shot. The fact that he was walking wasn’t a problem, because he was walking head on into the bullet.”
“You could have made that shot,” Nate says. I ignore the insult; we both know that I could be woken up out of a dead sleep and outshoot Nate. “He could have shot him earlier, while he was playing,” Nate continues. “There’s a lot of down time in tennis when you’re not moving … between points.”
“But then he’d have been shooting through this chain link fence. No sense doing that if he knew which way Randowsky would be coming once they were done. And he certainly knew, because this is the only way out, and the shooter probably knew where he was parked. It’s not like the shooter was waiting on a busy street; he had all the time in the world, without any real concern about being seen.”
Nate nods. “And he probably didn’t pick up the weapon until it was almost time, so if somehow he was seen earlier, he could have just aborted.”
We walk toward the woods where the shooter must have been hidden. I mentally count the paces I take, although it’s really not necessary. The tech people have identified where the shot likely came from, and they measured the distance as one hundred and twenty yards. An easy shot for anyone with experience with the M4 rifle, the weapon that was used.
The shooting site is taped off, and it’s not necessary for us to enter the small area. It’s only about six feet by five feet, and it’s set about five feet into the woods. The shooter chose perfectly; he was concealed while he waited for Randowsky to finish, but had a good enough sight line to make the shot.
There are indentations in the grass where the shooter set up; I doubt they reveal his shoe type or weight. I make a note to find out if anybody is already trying to figure that out; knowing Pete Stanton, I am sure the Paterson cops are working on it. But if not, we will, though it’s likely that nothing will come of it.
“Okay,” Nate says. “He fired the shot. Now what?”
It’s a question I had already started thinking about. “The woods go back about forty yards, all the way out to Derrom Avenue. He could have parked there, but there would be signs of him walking in that direction, to and from the car. Some footprints, maybe some broken shrubs; the report from the Paterson cops says they didn’t find any. Still, it’s possible.”
“Seems risky to have left his car there.”
/> I nod. “Especially since there could easily have been people on that street; it’s a neighborhood. He’d be walking out of the woods, which is not an everyday occurrence; he would know that someone might take notice of it.”
“And he’d be carrying a rifle, though probably in some kind of case.”
I think about it for a while. We’re dealing with a shrewd and careful guy; walking out of the woods into possible witnesses just doesn’t make sense. “I think he walked this way,” I say, pointing toward the courts.
“Takes a shot and then walks out of the woods and toward the scene where everyone can see him?”
“Think about it. A shot is fired; a loud noise, and probably no one knows what it was. But Randowsky goes down, people are screaming, and there is blood everywhere. Nobody has any idea where the shooter is; if they’re clearheaded at all, they’re seeking cover.”
“So he walks out and acts like one of the scared people,” Nate says.
“And if he’s smart, which he obviously is, he’s wearing tennis clothes and the rifle is in a racquet case. The M4 folds up; it would fit in easily. Then he gets in the car and drives away, probably that way, since he’d figure the police are going to enter through the main entrance. But he’d be gone long before they got here anyway.”
“We are dealing with one cold-blooded son of a bitch,” Nate says. “A cold-blooded son of a bitch who can shoot.”
I nod. “Those are the worst kind.”
We head back to the station. I spend the time thinking about motive. Until now I’ve thought there were two possibilities. One, that Randowsky and Brookings have some still to be discovered connection—also tied in to the killer—and that explains why they were the two targets. The other was that these are just random shootings by a determined but deranged individual.
Now I see a third possibility that combines the first two: Brookings and Randowsky could, in fact, have been chosen randomly—meaning that the killer had no particular grudge against them, or reason to kill them. But the point is they were chosen; that much is certain.
Black and Blue Page 2
