Sunrise Highway

by Peter Blauner

  “Look, can we just start over?” She spread her hands against the top of the steering wheel. “As a matter of professional courtesy, could you just—”

  “You want ‘professional courtesy’?” said the one with the accent. “How about showing a little deference first? You ain’t in New York City anymore, sistah.”

  Boom. There it was.

  “It’s detective.” She sat up. “And when did I say I was from the city?”

  The question stopped them for a second. Two cars went by behind them, both doing eighty easily as they chased each other in and out of lanes. Neither of them even looked. They had her boxed in and they weren’t letting her go now.

  “What’s really going on here?” she said. “Is the highway even your jurisdiction?”

  “Why don’t you let us worry about that?” the one closer to her said, tapping two fingers on her windowsill. “We know where we’re supposed to be.”

  “I’m just saying, can we get real about this?” she asked, trying to banter with them. “Who did I piss off? The chief tell you to pull me over?”

  “Right now, you’re the one pissing us off with the attitude.” The one at her window looked across at his partner. “Officer, do you detect the smell of anything unusual in this vehicle?”

  Lourdes sank deep into her seat, the dashboard appearing to rise before her eyes.

  “Yes, sir,” said the one at the passenger window. “I’d say there’s a distinct odor of marijuana emanating.”

  “No, no, no.” Lourdes began shaking her head. “This isn’t happening.”

  It was just like a nightmare, this sense of total helplessness in the face of events that seemed both utterly inexplicable but completely inevitable. They were going to do her good.

  The officer at the passenger window clicked on a flashlight and aimed it, just as she knew he would, at the floor where B.B.’s feet had been resting not fifteen minutes before.

  “Got something,” he said.

  He reached down and picked up a small glassine envelope that was revealed in the flashlight beam to be filled with white powder. She realized that he must have tossed it in when she was turned around talking to the other officer. And there was not a damn thing she could do to prove it.

  “Really?” she said. “We’re really going to do this?”

  The last couple of years, when there was all this bad press about cops doing illegal stops and shooting unarmed minority civilians, she’d tried to stay out of the controversy. Kept her head down and her mouth shut at Starbucks and the nail salon whenever she overheard these heated conversations. Because if you really knew what it was like to be a cop these days, you didn’t need anybody to tell you. And if you didn’t know, there was no way to explain it.

  Now it was happening to her, though. She’d thought that having a badge, which was all she’d ever really wanted in life, would save her from being treated like ghetto scum. But she was outside city limits and they were acting like she was lower than a common criminal, like she was just a Puerto Rican skank who should have been on her knees in front of them. She felt sick and clammy, her gut throbbing like her heart had just fallen into her stomach.

  “Get out of the car please,” said the one at the passenger side window.

  “You motherfuckers,” Lourdes murmured.

  “What was that?”

  “I cannot believe you would pull this on one of your own.”

  “I got news for you,” said the one closer to her, who had now taken his gun from its holster. “You ain’t one of ours. And if you don’t stop resisting, you’re going to find out what real trouble is.”

  “I’m not resisting. I’ve complied with everything you’ve asked me to do.”

  “Again, with the mouth.” The one who’d pretended to find the bag clicked his flashlight off. “I think we need to charge her with resisting and possession with intent to sell.”

  “I want a lawyer,” Lourdes said evenly, her pulse racing as she reached for the door handle. “And I want to talk to a supervisor.”

  “Just keep your hands where I can see them and tell me where you carry your gun.” The one at the driver’s window reached to unlock her door and then opened it. “Now get out and assume the position.”

  28

  FEBRUARY

  1996

  The sky had turned gray, threatening the return of the snow, while she was inside the Price Chopper on Central Avenue in Albany.

  A hundred and six dollars for just a week’s worth of groceries. Two boys and a girl were eating Leslie out of house and home since the divorce. How she was going to afford even state colleges for them on an investigator’s $76,000 a year was beyond her. But her ex was determinedly not working and scholarships weren’t likely with their grades and athletic performance, so somehow she would find a way.

  As she pushed the shopping cart over the cracked and icy parking lot asphalt, the rattle of its cage and the crunch of salt under her boots reminded her that she needed to somehow trudge on and hold things together. There were no savings to fall back on and little chance of advancement at the Department of Investigation, unless she could prove that the time and expense of the Long Island investigation had been worthwhile. She just needed to keep moving forward somehow. Especially since she had a constant sense of eyes on her back. She’d even felt them in the supermarket as she perused the frozen foods aisle.

  * * *

  Joey, still trying to get the hang of PowerPoint, clicked the switch and the image of a clown with a rictus grin filled the screen.

  “John Wayne Gacy,” he said. “A bozo. Literally.”

  The members of the class tittered. Fresh-faced recruits. Mostly local kids, with associate degrees and a couple of years’ working experience in other jobs. Mostly white, mostly male, mostly unlikely to be superstars in the department. But he liked to keep teaching, to get a feel for them early on, to see who could be trusted and who had to be watched.

  “Democratic Party operative, member of the Jaycees, KFC franchise manager, owner of his own construction company, married father of two, with a sideline entertaining hospitalized children as Pogo the Clown.” He clicked to the photo of Gacy’s baggy-eyed and unshaven 1978 mug shot. “And also the murderer of thirty-three young men, most of them buried in the crawl space of his home.”

  The tittering died away. Somehow these twenty-four people wanted to be police officers but had never heard of one of the most famous serial killers in the country.

  “How did he get away with it?” Joey moved in front of the screen. “Was he a mad genius, like the kind we see on movies and TV shows?”

  The class gave each other knowing looks, though none of them had a clue where he was going with this.

  “Well, he wasn’t a complete idiot.” Joey, in short sleeves to show off his biceps, opened his arms. “He finished high school. Managed a couple of more or less successful businesses. And was able to avoid detection for several years. But a genius? Gimme a break.”

  He clicked to Gacy’s clean-shaven 1968 mug shot. “The dude had been arrested and convicted ten years before for sexually assaulting a fifteen-year-old boy. And then paying another kid to mace the vic and beat him up to keep him from testifying. The neighbors saw him coming and going in his car at odd hours. And at least two other boys told the police Gacy had handcuffed them and raped them without it leading to an arrest.”

  The cadets were starting to mutter among themselves.

  “So it’s not like this was a criminal mastermind,” Joey said, clicking to a picture of David Berkowitz. “Son of Sam, in the city, 1977. Thought a dog was talking to him.” He clicked to a photo of Jeffrey Dahmer. “The Milwaukee Monster. Borderline personality disorder with psychotic tendencies. Liked to drug his victims, rape them, and cut their heads off. And occasionally fry up their body parts for dinner.”

  A couple of the cadets made faces and covered their mouths. Had these people been living in caves that they hadn’t heard of this?

  “Dri
lled a hole into one kid’s skull while he was still alive and injected hydrochloric acid into it,” he said. “The cops found the boy sitting naked on a street corner. And what’d they do? They walked him back into the house where Dahmer had another corpse rotting and then left so Dahmer could finish the kid off. Brilliant. Right?”

  He noticed that they had stopped shifting around and murmuring to each other.

  “He was finally arrested two months later for basically starting to do the same thing again when the cops found a shirtless guy wearing a handcuff outside his place,” Joey said. “So what does this tell us?”

  * * *

  She popped the hatchback of her Honda Civic and started to load her bags. Something passed in the right side mirror. Too slow for a bird, too fast for a car just getting out of its space. She turned and found herself staring at another harried mother, this one younger than her, but more bony-faced and dead-eyed in that upstate way she was still getting used to. Two sleeping twins in a creaky double-stroller. Leslie tried to give her a sympathetic smile, but the woman just bared more of her upper teeth. As if to say, Why isn’t anyone helping us?

  Leslie went back to putting bags in the car, wishing she hadn’t parked in this remote part of the lot, just to be near the exit onto the service road. Everything seemed a little harder than it needed to be since her transfer up north. Long Island hadn’t exactly been warm and friendly. Especially when she started digging into the relationships between the police and the politicians out there. But the winters weren’t as bleak and brutal with six-foot snowdrifts, plows that never made it to the unpaved road where she’d finally found a house she could afford to live in with three adolescents, and frequent power outages from fallen wires.

  Since her aborted lunch with Kenneth Makris, the investigation had hit more roadblocks. Tommy Danziger had stopped returning her phone calls, all of her budget requests had been steadfastly ignored, and Beth, the widow of Randy Carter, had given her the finger as she pulled out of her driveway and spotted Leslie parked across the street from the Smithtown house. Wearing sunglasses after sundown, like she had a black eye. Joey Tolliver strikes again. As if he’d been tipped off by his old friend, the DA.

  Leslie finished putting the bags in the car and slammed the hatch. Then she came around on the driver’s side to get in the front seat. She saw him clearly in the left side mirror now. The brown hooded sweatshirt with shades and hands in the front pouch.

  * * *

  Joey killed the projector and turned on the classroom lights. The newbies rubbed their eyes and looked around, like they were each coming out of some collective nightmare.

  “It tells us that these people did the same thing over and over in a ritualistic fashion.” He leaned against the lectern. “Like they did not adapt and adjust after their close calls with law enforcement. Because they were in the grip of some obsessive behavior that they could neither control nor explain. And what does that tell us?”

  Again, blank scared looks all around. A mixed blessing. Because they were larva and somehow he’d have to supervise them on the job. On the other hand, he knew he had nothing to fear from them. Not a Sherlock or even a Kojak among them.

  “It means the police were not doing their jobs,” he said. “They had no system to absorb information and learn from it.” He slammed a fist on the lectern, to wake them up a little. “Adapt or die, people. That’s what it’s all about in this life. Those who don’t learn from the past are destined to repeat it. Until they get caught or until they realize they missed the opportunity to prevent a murder.”

  Finally, one of them shyly raised a hand. Dudley Do-Right in the first row. With goggly eyes, floppy hair, and an oversized cleft chin.

  “Yes?”

  “Um, is it possible sometimes all these people don’t get caught because someone’s helping cover their tracks?” he asked.

  “Son, what’s your name?”

  “Gillispie, sir. Paul Gillispie.”

  Joey made a note of the name on the side of his lecture notes. “Well, Paul Gillispie,” he said. “I hesitate to say anything is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard because I’ve heard so many dumb things in my career. But you’re in the big time now.”

  The class cracked up and Gillispie sank down in his seat, embarrassed. Joey underlined the name. Determined to remember it and make sure the kid never got an assignment anywhere near him.

  * * *

  Leslie turned just as he pulled out the gun. He fired twice before she could reach for the Glock in her shoulder bag. The first round glanced off her collarbone. The second struck her in the middle of the forehead.

  She fell against the car and landed on her back on the asphalt, flakes falling fast and melting on her unblinking eyes.

  29

  SEPTEMBER

  2017

  They took her gun. Then they took her prints. Then they took shoelaces so she wouldn’t hang herself, and put her in a protective custody cell in Central Islip.

  At least she’d been able to get a call out to Mitchell to tell him what was going on before she lost reception again. Presumably he had called her squad and they had reached out to One Police Plaza to let the upper echelon know about this crap being pulled on an NYPD officer pursuing a legitimate investigation in another jurisdiction.

  But right now, none of that made any difference. The reality was that it was almost two o’clock in the morning, it would be seven hours until she got to see a lawyer before arraignment court, and she was stuck by herself in a twelve-by-fifteen cell with Styrofoam white walls, a gray cement floor, and a black camera eye in a corner of the ceiling.

  She’d been flaked and screwed and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it. And she still couldn’t quite believe the reason. Yes, she’d been narrowing her focus down onto a cop who preyed on prostitutes and other vulnerable women. But the question still nagged: If Tolliver was involved, how could he have gotten away with it for so long? Other people would have had to know.

  She got up from the bench and put her back against the wall, thinking of doing some of her yoga exercises just to relieve the stress, made worse by the microwave-like hum of the lights. But she couldn’t bear the thought of the guards cracking up as they watched her on the closed-circuit TV monitor outside. Fat female cop doing downward dog in the pens. Comedy gold. Within hours, it would be on every laptop in every police station in the county. And then it would go viral and nationwide, worse than the YouTube clip of her and Erik Heinz in the city.

  On the other hand, maybe they weren’t covering for a serial killer. It could have been simple resentment. Nobody likes an outsider coming in to tell you how to get your house in order. Pointing out where you messed up and let a dozen women get killed. And perhaps finding out about a bunch of other corruption in the process. Magdalena had said there were politicians and businesspeople at the party where this J tried to strangle her. That would be enough reason to try to shut down an outside investigation.

  There was a sharp buzzing sound, a series of metallic clicks, and then a doughy female guard led in a new prisoner. A hulking figure was deposited in Lourdes’s cell and as the guard exited quickly, opening an outer door, Lourdes could hear other women in the main holding pens. It sounded like there’d just been a major prostitution-and-drug sweep. The ladies were clearly high off their asses, shout-singing and cursing raucously and laughing like it was someone’s retirement party and no one needed to worry about going to work tomorrow.

  Then the outer door closed, the locks clicked, and Lourdes found herself alone with her new cellmate.

  The microwave hum was louder now, bringing with it a renewed sense of menace. For a second, it appeared that a large and belligerent man had been left with her. Brawny and crewcut, with the sleeves torn from a lumberjack shirt to show off beefy tatted-up arms. A pair of baggy denim shorts ended just above two clam-like kneecaps and hairy shins backed by bulging calf muscles. The feet were encased in black Doc Marten workboots without laces, which loo
ked like they might have had steel toes. The head was lowered in the position of a bull about to charge.

  The words “I’m a friend to the LGBT community!” came urgently to Lourdes’s mind. Followed quickly by “I have an aunt who’s gay and butch!”

  But any idea that this might be an encounter about gender identity or tolerance dissipated as the cellmate dropped into a drastic deep squat in the corner, massively callused hands clenched into fists in front of her face, a lunatic cackle escaping behind them. She began to bounce lightly on her sizable haunches, like she was riding a man sexually, and began to sing to herself.

  “Ma hump. Ma hump. Mahumpmahumpmahump…”

  Lourdes looked up at the ceiling camera and slowly shook her head. You bastards.

  “Whatchoo gonna do with all that junk, all that junk inside your trunk…”

  The woman lowered her fists, revealing a rough longshoreman’s mug and an unnervingly steady glare.

  “What you looking at?”

  “Nothing.” Lourdes patted at her side absently, wishing she at least had her Taser on her.

  “Dumb bitch.” The callused hands rested on the knees. “You say something to me?”

  “No, I didn’t say nothing.”

  It was a shock to hear her fourteen-year-old ghetto girl voice come out of her thirty-five-year-old mouth. This was like one of those conversations she’d learned to dread in the stairwells of the Walt Whitman Projects in Fort Greene. A few stray words while you were passing someone on your way to do something more important and then next thing you knew a kick in the ass sent you flying down a flight of steps where you landed facedown on the landing with a bunch of two-hundred-pound girls stomping the living shit out of you.

  “Hey, you hear what I said?” The cellmate stood and shook out her arms, which had matching dragons tattooed on them. “I called you a ‘dumb bitch.’”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  The large woman swaggered up to her, fists hanging at her sides, mouth twitching like she was thinking of all the things she wished she’d said to everyone who had pissed her off. She stopped within six inches of Lourdes, deliberately disrespecting her personal space, forcing Lourdes to flatten herself even more against the wall. Even without the Doc Martens, she would have been a solid six feet tall. At close range, though, her lips were pink and feminine and her nostrils were small and surprisingly delicate as they sniffed.