Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  The Island.

  The name and the geography always seemed misleading to her. If you looked at a map, the land mass was separate from the rest of United States, mainly connected by bridges and highways that ran straight into New York City. But on the handful of occasions she’d gone to retirement parties out there for cops she’d worked with, it seemed like a far more representative slice of America than any of the five boroughs. Suburban sprawl and strip malls. Big flags, big cars, and big lawns everywhere you looked.

  “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.” Thugsy put a finger up. “Right now, we’ve got a body in Far Rock, so that’s NYPD territory.”

  “Amen.” Lourdes nodded. “Out of sight, out of mind. Any chance of an ID?”

  Thugsy extended his arm, playing the gracious host. “Be my guest. Maybe someone you know.”

  Lourdes slowed her step as she moved past him, the smell threatening to overpower her as the crime scene detectives turned, big men in NYPD windbreakers who resembled high school football coaches without players to yell at.

  She had noticed some of her brother officers giving her a wide berth these days, and not just because she’d gotten the bump from precinct detective to the task force faster than usual because of the dead lawyer case. Since her promotion, word had gotten around that she was being investigated by the Internal Affairs Bureau. A tip had been called in that she was using department resources for a personal matter. Her counterargument, if she ever got to make it, was that the disappearance of a detective’s younger sister was legitimate police business.

  Off a nod from Thugsy, one of the techs moved the tarp, revealing what was little more than a skeleton with patches of adipocere on it. The soft tissues had turned into what coroners called “grave wax”: a grayish-white soapy covering that retained the basic contours of the body but made immediate identification of race and sex impossible. The arms were resting alongside the torso and the hands were crossed in front of the belly. The eye sockets were empty and the remaining teeth in the skull appeared to be clenched in a permanent grimace.

  “The good news, if you want to call it that, is that the bag was taped tight around the body,” said Thugsy. “Especially around the neck area. So between that and the grave wax, it’s a little more intact than it might normally be.”

  Lourdes covered her own mouth, determined not to lose her lunch in front of a dozen other officers, most of them men who would talk about it for years afterward. She dropped into a crouch and forced herself to take a closer look.

  “It’s a woman,” she said.

  She caught the look B.B. was throwing Thugsy.

  “And don’t you be giving me the stink eye,” she warned both of them sternly.

  “What’d I say?” B.B. put his hands up.

  “You don’t have to say shit. I know what y’all are thinking.”

  Ysabel had been missing six months now. Every time a call came in about a female body, Lourdes found herself unable to stop swallowing until she confirmed it was someone else.

  “And you know it’s a woman because…?” B.B.’s voice trailed off just as he realized Thugsy was shaking his head.

  “Because she was pregnant,” Lourdes said.

  She pointed to the way the hands were clasped before the belly. There was a collection of small brittle bones between the fingers, which were not part of the adult anatomy. Almost like the victim was trying to hold onto a fragile little bird.

  “Thugsy knows it too.” Lourdes glanced over her shoulder.

  “It’s possible.” Thugsy stooped his shoulders. “But let’s not get overexcited and start talking about a second body just yet.”

  B.B. squatted beside Lourdes. “Say you’re right. Wouldn’t be the first pregnant girl, got herself killed.” He bounced on his haunches. “Happens every day somewhere. If Daddy doesn’t want another mouth to feed.”

  She resisted the urge to give him side-eye. There was a rumor that the third Mrs. Borrelli had asked for a divorce after getting a phone call from B.B.’s pregnant mistress—or, as she was known in Brooklyn, his goomah.

  “But what’s up with that?” Lourdes pointed.

  “What?” B.B. hitched up his pants, damned if he was going to mess up his Italian tailoring by getting sand in his pant cuffs.

  “Check out her throat, B.B.” Lourdes took a pen from her pocket and aimed it. “Where did all those stones come from?”

  The trachea was covered in a shell of whitish decomposed tissue. In all likelihood, the bag had gotten wrapped around the windpipe, keeping it from disintegrating. Little pebbles were lodged in the preserved tissue, clearly coming out from the inside.

  “Come on, Robles, this is Detective 101.” Thugsy loomed. “Look around. I already told you someone used rocks to weigh the bag down. Some of them probably just broke off and got stuck in the throat area.”

  “Think so?” Lourdes pressed her lips together and then relaxed them, avoiding the full duck for now.

  She took out her pad and made a note about the shape and texture of the stones in the further recesses of the plastic.

  “Here’s my problem.” She glanced up. “The stones used to weigh the bag down are pieces of cinderblock. The ones in the windpipe are relatively smooth. They’re not the same.”

  “For real?” B.B. shrugged. “All right, so it’s different stones. The bag’s been underwater. There are a few rips in it. Stones from the bottom of the inlet got swished around.”

  “Maybe.”

  Lourdes stood slowly, hands on hips, taking in the depreciation of the flesh, the loss of identifying features and the hands in front of the belly.

  “Hey, you still with us, L. Ro.?” B.B. asked.

  Six months. Maybe that was long enough. Maybe getting pregnant was the reason her sister ran away. Izzy was always talking about how everybody was so nice to girls who were expecting. And that was why she wanted one herself. Maybe this body wasn’t too tall to be her.

  “Yeah, I’m here.” The sound of the gulls broke her trance. “I’m all in.”

  “I’m thinking maybe we should reach out to Nassau County.” B.B. stood up. “I’m remembering they had a gang case right before Memorial Day where MS-13 killed a pregnant girl they thought was snitching.”

  “Yeah, I remember.” Lourdes shook her head. “But that was a one-off. I don’t think anybody wants to make a habit of that.”

  “But if they did it to silence a snitch, it would fit your theory about the stones,” Thugsy offered. “Seems like a definitive way to shut someone up.”

  Lourdes kept looking intently at the body. Still trying to reassure herself that it really wasn’t Izzy. And then finding herself trying to imagine the final moments. The position of the hands over the womb. Like she was trying to protect the unborn child. Probably not where I would have my hands, if someone was stuffing rocks in my throat.

  “Anyway,” Thugsy said, “it’s a new one on me.”

  “Me too.” B.B. nodded.

  “Makes you wonder what’s up with Daddy,” Lourdes said. “Doesn’t it?”

  “That it does,” said B.B.

  Lourdes straightened up and brushed the sand off her pant leg. The gulls nearby scattered and took flight as the other detectives shooed them away. The birds rose in a whitish mass like spirits deciding that the time had come to leave this sordid business of earthly living behind. The two little girls who’d gone back to the shore to rebuild their sand castles barely looked up.

  2

  APRIL

  1977

  Red flares lit the way into the woods. Their unflickering path combined with the low black sky and the sound of howling beyond clawing branches to make Kenny Makris think of a painting he’d seen in his seminary student days. When he’d solidified his conviction that sin and evil in this world were real, and the only question was whether to fight them with or without a priest’s collar.

  He followed the directions from a uniformed officer with a flashlight, then parked among the police cars just
outside the crime scene tape. He turned the engine off and paused to collect himself. Someone was playing that pumping, noxious dance song on the radio, “Disco Inferno.” The name came to him. Christ in the Wilderness. That was the picture in the monsignor’s office. Surrounded by beasts and tested by Satan, but with angels on his side.

  Kenny pushed open the door and stepped out into the chilly spring night, a thin and pale man of twenty-nine, stiff-legged and steady as a finger raised for an objection. With an oversized jaw and heavy-framed glasses on a head that seemed too big for his attenuated neck. His nostrils twitched, picking up the odor of human discharge. A young, mustached uniformed officer named Charlie Maslow wiped his mouth, done with vomiting. From deeper in the woods came the smell of pine trees and cigar smoke drifting from the silhouettes of detectives some twenty yards away.

  One detached himself from the group and took his time ambling over, a stocky man with modish sideburns, a wide tie, and aviator glasses.

  “You the new fish?”

  Kenny recognized Detective William Rattigan, a.k.a. Billy the Kid, a.k.a. the Prince of Pain. He had seen the detective in the courthouse hallways and heard about him at the DA’s office, usually referred to in quiet, wary tones. The Original Ninety-Four Percent Man—that was alleged to be his success rate in solving homicides. Though, given what Kenny knew so far, it seemed unlikely that any detective on eastern Long Island would have handled a hundred murders in the course of his career. This wasn’t the city, with its street anarchy and fiscal crisis. Where the sidewalks were filthy and criminals were as free and rampant as the rats in the garbage-strewn gutters. This was the Island. Where decent people went to escape the chaos and the darker classes.

  Up close, the detective was younger than Kenny had realized, maybe only in his mid-thirties. In contrast to the light-brown hair grown fashionably down to his collar, his face had a prematurely gnarled mahogany look. And even though it was a quarter to midnight, his lenses were tinted as if he’d worked in the darkness of the criminal world for so long that the distinction between day and night had lost its meaning.

  “Counselor.” The detective gripped and squeezed Kenny’s hand. “I’m going to take a wild guess and say this is your first murder scene.”

  Kenny concentrated his strength into his right hand to keep Rattigan from twisting it. The natives’ test. One of those crude little rituals to see if you belonged here. Even though the county had absorbed thousands of city refugees who’d lost jobs in the recent budget shortfall, if you weren’t originally from the Island, you were automatically suspect. And after close to a year at the DA’s office, Kenny, a son of Greek Catholics from Astoria and a graduate of Brooklyn Law School, was all too aware that he had yet to prove himself.

  “Yes.” He took back his hand and wrung it out. “That’s why I wanted to come and see for myself.”

  “Have a stogie.” The detective pulled a thin, inexpensive cigar from an inside jacket pocket.

  “Not really cause for celebration, is it?” Kenny forced a smile.

  “Don’t be an asshole. It’s to cover the stink. I don’t need anybody else throwing up near my crime scene after Maslow.”

  “Oh.”

  “Brace yourself, Bridget.” Rattigan jammed the cigar into Kenny’s breast pocket. “Even for us old-timers, this is a nasty one.”

  Kenny followed the detective under the crisscross of yellow tape wrapped around the trees and out toward a trail through the woods, trying to ignore a growing tightness in his chest.

  “How was the body found?”

  Rattigan ignored him, taking out a small flashlight and swinging its beam haphazardly to catch bits and pieces of what the night had hidden: obscenities spray-painted on tree trunks, crushed beer cans amid fallen leaves, a black bra dangling from a spindly branch. More baggy-eyed cops trudged past them, heading out of the woods. Brighter lights were shining beyond the trees as Kenny, trying to get oriented, realized they were not far from the Shiloh High School football field.

  “Girl named Kim Bergdahl, also known as Bird Dog, was due home by eight-thirty tonight,” Rattigan said, a disembodied voice at least twelve paces up ahead. “By ten o’clock, the mom was freaking out, calling the local police department and organizing the neighbors into a search team. The little brother eventually coughed up a tip about Kim meeting someone behind the football field bleachers. Then the mom found the body near some bushes. That’s her you still hear screaming.”

  Kenny realized his teeth were already clenched in anticipation. He’d thought it was just normal nocturnal disturbances.

  “You’ve let the mother stick around the crime scene?” he asked with an involuntary shiver. “Is that standard procedure?”

  “We keep sending her home and she keeps coming back,” Rattigan said. “What else you want me to do, arrest her?”

  Now that he knew what the noise was, each scream increased the pressure on either side of Kenny’s head. As if a pair of hands were taking hold and turning him, making sure that he’d view things from a certain angle.

  Rattigan’s flashlight went off, leaving Kenny lost in the dark with only the football field lights far up ahead as an identifiable horizon. There was a stirring in the bushes to his right and a crackling of what he first thought were twigs and then realized was the cigar wrapper rubbing against his chest as he moved. The unseasonable sound of crickets filled the air, seeming to follow him.

  “Detective?” he called out, his voice high and tremulous. “Where did you go?”

  Rattigan’s light clicked back on and arced over into his face, blinding him for several seconds. “Counselor, get your cherry-red ass over here,” the detective hollered back.

  Kenny stumbled toward the beam, roots on the ground threatening to trip him. The air was getting close and insects grazed off the back of his neck and crawled around the rims of his ears as he drew near.

  “You ready?” Rattigan asked, with a hint of a gruff taunt.

  The crimson tips of cigars and cigarettes revealed the presence of other detectives in a semicircle, smoke wafting over the deep-set crags and crevices of their faces. It made him think of a gathering of tribal elders in the dark, about to begin some kind of initiation.

  “Yes.” Kenny straightened the knot of his tie. “I’m ready.”

  “Meet Kim Bergdahl, age fifteen.” Rattigan aimed the flashlight. “Take a good look, because she ain’t getting any older.”

  The beam took its time so that all the details could register. Yellow hair with a bloody gash on the back of the head. Lowered blue jeans and a faux-Indian bead belt outside its loops. Pale white buttocks. An errant sneaker above the head. Familiar elements put together in an unfamiliar way.

  “Come here.” Rattigan called out, shining the light directly into Kenny’s eyes again. “There’s something else you need to see.”

  Kenny forced himself not to blink or shield his eyes this time, knowing that the others were watching and judging. He stepped carefully over the body and joined Rattigan beside a tree. The detective changed the angle of the flashlight so that Kenny could now plainly see the girl, who looked much younger than fifteen. Her blue eyes were half-opened and her head was thrown back, as if she’d been mid-howl when she died. She was grotesquely swollen around the mouth and jowls.

  “Too soon to say cause of death.” Rattigan cleared his throat. “We’ll check to see if there was a full-on sex assault. But look what they did to this poor fuckin’ child.”

  Kenny knelt as if he was back before the altar at St. Augustine’s. “What is it?”

  “Look.” Rattigan directed him with the beam. “No, look close. They jammed a fucking tree down her throat.”

  “What do you mean?”

  The flashlight beam focused on Kim’s mouth, which Kenny could now see was filled with twigs and leaves. On closer inspection, he could see the leaves were attached to stems, which were in turn attached to a branch extending from deep in the girl’s throat, as if a plant was growing stra
ight up from the pit of her stomach.

  “Jesus.” Kenny almost fell backward.

  “Okay, easy.” Rattigan put a hand on his shoulder, steadying him. “I warned you not to get sick on me. Don’t make me send you back to your car.”

  “How could they do this to her?” Kenny touched the ground with his benumbed fingertips, trying to keep his bearings. “I mean, how did they even manage to keep her mouth open long enough…”

  “Right now we want to keep this part out of the press. So we have something that only the real killer would know about.”

  “Right, of course…” Kenny found he could not keep looking.

  “So what do you say, counselor?”

  “What do I say about what?” Kenny looked through the beam, trying to see where the detective had moved.

  “What do you think we should do about this kind of thing?”

  Kenny slowly stood, feeling slightly like a different man from the one who’d started up this path and then crouched a few seconds before. He looked around at the semicircle of more broken-in men with their weathered faces and glowing embers.

  “I think we should do whatever we have to, to whoever we need to do it to, to make sure someone pays for this.”

  He tried to meet each gaze around him, daring all of them to laugh at his Boy Scoutish oath.

  “So whatever it takes.” Rattigan moved to where Kenny could see him, just a foot or two away. “Am I right?”

  “Absolutely. Whatever it takes.”

  “Because you’re either with us or against us.”

  “A hundred percent.” Kenny nodded.

  Rattigan offered Kenny his right hand again.

  “Glad to have you on our side.” He clicked the light off so that they shook hands in darkness. “Now take out that fuckin’ cigar and smoke it already. You’re in the club.”

  3

  AUGUST

  2017

  As soon as she entered the Queens medical examiner’s office, Lourdes could feel the blood gurgling in her veins. On shelves before her were brains in jars and a glassed-in wardrobe with the bloodstained clothes people had been wearing when they died. From the next room came the sound of a saw grinding through bone, rising above the electronic syncopation of Southeast Asian dance music.