Cold Day in Hell

by Richard Hawke

I stopped in my tracks. Literally. “There’s been another murder?”

  “Somebody out there is a very busy boy,” he said dryly. “Not to mention a very angry one. This doesn’t look good, Fritz.”

  “Who says it’s related to Robin Burrell?”

  “First officer on the scene got a little too excited just now. Called in a thirty-c then started blabbing, ‘Same as last night, same as last night.’”

  Thirty-c is police code for homicide by cutting. I switched directions and angled toward Sixth Avenue. “You said the Boathouse?”

  “That’s what I’m hearing.”

  “And you got this when?”

  “It’s fresh, buddy. Not two minutes ago. You hurry, you’ll beat the mobs.”

  I pocketed the phone and took off running.

  THEY WERE STILL STRETCHING the tape when I arrived. A crime-scene photographer was leaning against a police van, fiddling with his camera. The snow was coming down a bit harder, and he was shading the camera from getting wet. The body was just off the trail leading up from the small parking area of the Boathouse Café into what’s called the Ramble. If you want to take a curvy path through the woods of Central Park, or if you want to go see rats the size of small dogs, or if having sex with a fellow anonymous adventurer of the same sex is your bag, then the Ramble is your place. The person who had happened upon the body and phoned it in was a pasty-faced blond man with a walrus mustache, a faded Greek fisherman’s cap and leather chaps. I don’t know, maybe he was looking at the rats.

  Joseph Gallo was conferring with one of his officers. His long camel coat hung on him beautifully. Of course. He and his fellow officers were standing next to a large boulder, the trail twisting out of sight behind it. Atop the boulder, a pair of crows were pecking angrily at the snow. I waited next to a small tree until Gallo looked up and saw me. He said something to the uniformed cop then stepped over to me.

  “Let me guess. You were just cutting through the park on your way to the ice rink.”

  “Those aren’t the kind of guesses you can build a career on.”

  “You seem to be my brand-new shadow, Malone. What gives?”

  “Charlie Burke plucked the thirty-c out of the air. He says it smells like Robin’s killer.”

  “Yeah, I was just giving Officer Loudmouth over there a talk about that. I told him next time why don’t you just call the media directly.” He shot his cuffs to tap a finger against his watch. “I give them five minutes tops.”

  “You could seal off the park.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of the precious First Amendment? What do you take me for, a stinking Commie?”

  “Sorry, Joe. Must’ve confused you with someone else.”

  Gallo grunted a laugh. “Believe me, after today I’m going to wish I was someone else. Goddamn back-to-backs not more than eighteen hours apart. This is most definitely not the way we’re supposed to start the New Year.”

  “And we’re talking the same killer?” I asked. “You’ve already determined that?”

  “We haven’t determined a thing. I only beat you by five minutes. I haven’t even introduced myself to the corpse.”

  The lieutenant brushed at the snowflakes settling on his shoulder. “If you want to make yourself invisible, feel free. You’ve got to keep out of the perimeter. I like a clean crime scene.”

  I pointed at the boulder. “How about that rock?”

  “If you feel like mountaineering.”

  Another cop was using a tree next to the boulder as one of his corners for the crime-scene tape. I ducked under the tape and scrambled up to the top of the boulder. With the leaves gone, I had a nice view of Central Park Lake below me, the row of overturned rowboats running along the south shore, the cast-iron Bow Bridge arching over the lake. The intensity of the snow was already increasing, and in just a matter of minutes, the overturned rowboats had already started fading to white. The lake itself was partially covered with a thin film of ice in a shape reminding me of a piece from a jigsaw puzzle. Directly below was the large flat rock where people like to go sunning in warm weather. It was abandoned now, of course, except for a trio of uninterested mallards.

  The body was lying about twenty feet from the base of the boulder. I couldn’t see much at first, as a pair of forensics experts and someone in a long black coat were squatting on either side of it. I could see pants legs and a pair of men’s brown dress shoes. Through the legs of the forensics cops, I could make out a large area of bloodstained snow and leaves. As Gallo approached the scene, he looked up to where I was standing. “How’s the view?”

  “It’s a man,” I said.

  Gallo tapped the side of his head. “We could use a natural like you on the force. What else can you see from up there?”

  “Nothing. Your men have the better seats.”

  The figure in the long black coat turned and looked up at me. “Some detective.” She rose and gave her lower back a solid stretch. Like the two forensics cops, she was wearing a wool NYPD cap, her short hair tucked in so that none of it would become part of Gallo’s crime scene. Her smirk arrived as if on wings.

  “Hello, Detective Lamb,” I said.

  She squinted up at me. “Fritz Malone. Long time no see.” Maybe not the strongest Long Island accent I’ve ever heard, but strong enough to defend itself.

  “I guess we’ve just been haunting different corners of the city.”

  “Yeah, well. No shortage of corners.”

  Megan Lamb was a junior detective in Joe Gallo’s homicide squad out of the Twentieth. I’d known her for several years. We first met when she invited me to a diner in the Village one afternoon to chew me out for what she considered my interference with an investigation she was involved in. I was guilty as charged, and we’d had a spirited fight over it. Generally speaking, I found her somewhat guarded, but it’s not uncommon for women cops to keep their armor at the ready just as a matter of course. Still, I liked her. She had a passion for her job. She’d wade in plenty deep in the interest of the victim. The previous winter Megan had landed herself in the headlines by fatally shooting a serial killer and rapist in the line of duty. The Swede. Both Megan’s partner and her closest friend had been slaughtered by the Swede minutes before Megan’s arrival on the scene. Though she’d been hailed in the press as a hero and eventually been given the all clear by the department’s investigatory panel (standard procedure when a police officer fatally dislodges their weapon), a degree of murkiness had lingered around the circumstances of the shooting, and only a few weeks after her return to active duty, Megan had put in for extended leave. Some weeks after, rumors reached me that Megan was having a rough time of things and that she wasn’t exactly conducting herself in the healthiest of fashions, and I’d made a point to cross my path with hers one night, trying to pass it off as a coincidence. She’d sniffed me out and told me exactly what she thought of my “charity mission.” Nobody likes a hovering angel. I know I don’t. She’d remained off my radar screen until this past May. She was back on active duty, and her next fifteen minutes of fame came for being the cop who had slapped the cuffs on Marshall Fox when he was taken into custody for the murders of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman.

  Now Megan went into a pocket of her coat and pulled out a stick of gum, unwrapped it, and popped it into her mouth. She’s a fairly small-framed woman; the long coat threatened to swallow her. After methodically folding the wrapper and sticking it back in her pocket, she squinted up at me again. “Don’t go falling on my crime scene, Malone, okay? It’s deteriorating fast enough as it is. You just make like a statue and stay put up there.”

  “You’re the boss.”

  Megan indicated Gallo. “He’s the boss. I’m just the working stiff.”

  I could see more of the victim now. A tie. An overcoat. The head was twisted to its left and partially submerged in a clump of red snow and dead leaves. Even from up on the boulder, I could tell the location of the source of the blood.

  Megan turned to Gallo. “Fr
esh as a daisy.”

  Gallo grunted. “Dead daisy.”

  One of the forensics specialists spoke up. “She’s right. This guy isn’t an hour cold.”

  From my perch, I was able to see one of the local television news vans pulling into the Boathouse Café parking area.

  “Your favorite vultures have arrived,” I announced to Gallo.

  Gallo turned to the cop whose radio call Charlie Burke had picked up and directed him to go head off the press. “Read my lips, Carr. No comment. Think you can handle that?”

  Megan Lamb had pulled a small notebook from her coat pocket, and she scribbled down a note. “We need to get a tarp up here, Joe. This guy’s going to be a snowman in another five minutes.” The wind had kicked up and the snow was driving sideways. Megan brushed some of it from her sleeves and stepped gingerly around to where one of the forensics teams was carefully removing a clump of leaves and old snow from the victim’s face. She looked like a kid in that large coat. She bent down to take a look. “Jesus Christ.”

  All I could see from my vantage point was the look on Megan’s face when she straightened again. She looked as if she’d taken a brisk slap.

  Gallo asked, “What’ve you got?”

  Megan indicated me. “Okay if he hears?”

  “Yeah, sure. What is it?”

  She puckered her lips. It looked almost like she was giving a smooch to the falling snow. Her breath frosted around her face as she exhaled. “It’s the lawyer, that’s what it is. The loudmouth.”

  Gallo stepped closer to the body and bent over for a look. “Son of a bitch. That’s exactly who it is.”

  I edged closer to the edge of the boulder, careful not to tumble off the slippery edge as I got a better look at the uncharacteristically silent, cold body of Zachary Riddick.

  10

  EXCEPT FOR THE CABBIE who drove Zachary Riddick to Central Park, the lawyer had last been seen alive at 12:20 on the day he was murdered. This was at the news conference, where Riddick had bellyached for a mistrial to be declared and for the immediate release of Marshall Fox from custody. He had been pure Riddick, decrying “the abysmal miscarriage of justice” and working up the sort of lather that Joan of Arc could have only dreamed of from one of her defenders. He also managed to slip in the phrase “my good friend Marshall Fox” or “my personal friend Marshall Fox” fourteen times, according to Jimmy Puck’s column in the Post. And as Joseph Gallo predicted, Riddick had produced a tape player and played the phone threat that had been recorded on Rosemary Fox’s answering machine.

  I’m coming, you whore. Can you taste the blood yet?

  The police did what they could to track Riddick’s whereabouts in the several hours between the end of the news conference and the discovery of his body in Central Park. Rosemary Fox reported speaking with him briefly on the phone some minutes after the conclusion of the news conference. Riddick had told her he would come by her apartment later in the afternoon to discuss where things stood. He did not disclose his plans for the intervening hours. One would presume lunch. But the contents of Riddick’s stomach, once his body was turned over to the medical examiner for the up-close-and-personal, showed nothing since the twin stack he had shoveled down at his local diner-where he was a regular-at approximately 7:45 that morning. One of the local stations went ahead and dug up the waitress who had served him, a moon-faced Ukrainian who informed the viewing audience, “He luks fine when he leaves here. You think, He vull be back tomorrow like always. Who can know he vull be kilt like that? I hud no idea.”

  The police had questioned everyone they could round up in Central Park in the immediate minutes after arriving on the scene. They showed photographs of Riddick. A few people said that they might have seen him, but the information provided no real insights into the murder. Riddick had entered the park from the southeast corner, dropped off by a taxi. The cabbie was tracked down. He had picked Riddick up at Church Street, a few blocks from the courthouse. On the ride uptown, the two shared an animated conversation on the subject of Marshall Fox’s guilt or innocence (the cabbie saw the new murder the same way Riddick did, proof that the real killer of Cynthia Blair and Nikki Rossman was still out there); however, Riddick failed to reveal what his purpose was for heading into the park. The cabbie reported a good tip. He last saw his fare heading into the park via the walkway that runs by the zoo at approximately a quarter to one.

  Speculation centered on the possibility that Riddick was on his way to meet someone for lunch at the Boathouse Café-he’d been known to eat there on more than one occasion-but no one surfaced claiming to have been stood up by the lawyer for a lunch date.

  Essentially, Zachary Riddick took a cab to the park, briskly walked the quarter mile to the area of the Boathouse and saw his life end amid blood and snow and dead leaves on a nub of a hill overlooking Central Park Lake.

  The police weren’t saying much. I’d had to poke and prod just to pick up what little I knew.

  IT WAS DIFFICULT to go anywhere in Manhattan the next several days without getting caught up in a conversation about Marshall Fox and this new set of murders. In point of fact, it was difficult to get anywhere in Manhattan in general, unless you were going by subway. Eight additional inches of snow had fallen on the city in the space of twenty-four hours, slowing street traffic to a skidding crawl and leaving the curbs lined with large cloudlike mounds. After the snow stopped, the temperature had tumbled to record lows, locking the city in an arctic freeze. An elderly woman in Fort Apache froze to death in her unheated apartment. A visitor from Columbus, Ohio, lost a leg to a skidding taxi. In Sunset Park, two sisters aged six and nine died when snow leaching from the roof into their bedroom ceiling melted and dripped onto their space heater, igniting a fire that gutted the entire second floor of the house. The mayor put out a call for all nonessential businesses to remain closed. Stores were shuttered. School classes were canceled. Trash collection was suspended. In general terms, as much as a city of nine million restless inhabitants can ever truly grind to a halt, that’s what happened.

  Two nights after Zachary Riddick’s murder, Margo and I attended a talk on Wicca given at the American Museum of Natural History. The museum is only several blocks from Margo’s place, but getting there was half the fun. Margo went down on her lovely can as we approached Columbus Avenue but then got the last laugh a minute later as my lunge for a lamppost failed to keep my feet beneath me and I slid to the ground like a cartoon drunk.

  Margo had done a recent piece for The Village Voice on the woman giving the talk, so she was curious to hear the presentation. The woman was a Wiccan herself, though in civilian life, she ran a small advertising agency out of her apartment in Chelsea. You know what they say, scratch an ad exec, find a Wiccan. It turned out to be a good talk, much more engaging than I had expected, but even so, the buzz in the auditorium during the reception afterward barely included the word “Wicca.” The murders of Riddick and Robin Burrell had taken place a mere quarter mile from the museum, and their grip on the crowd was palpable. Even the Wiccan, when Margo introduced us and told her what I did for a living, shrugged off my compliment on her presentation and asked my opinion on Marshall Fox in light of these recent killings. The woman was in her sixties, overweight in a hippie-gone-willingly-to-seed way. She was wearing wire-rimmed glasses and a gold breastplate necklace that shot off reflected light every time she moved. A thick graying braid nearly as stout as one of her arms snaked down her broad back.

  “Innocent until proven guilty,” I said colorlessly.

  “But your opinion. I’ll share mine. Mr. Fox is serving as a touchstone, if you will.”

  “Touchstone.”

  “I see these as ritual killings. Maybe not so much sacrifices. But more a ritualized and symbolic cleansing. Purifying.”

  “You’ll excuse me, but I fail to see what is purifying about slitting innocent people’s throats.”

  The Wiccan brought her fingers together as if in prayer. Her tiny smile was astonishingly
smug. “Innocence is in the eye…or, should I say, the heart of the beholder. From the sphere the killer or killers are operating on, these subjects were clearly anything but innocent. In fact, they were probably considered a poison, or represented a poison, and so it was necessary to remove them from the world.”

  I glanced at Margo again to see how she was taking this. She had slipped on her inscrutable mask. “So where does Marshall Fox fit into all this?”

  “He’s the touchstone. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say the godhead.”

  “I’m sure he’d be flattered to hear that.”

  “Mr. Fox held a position of great significance for millions of people. Don’t forget your Simon and Garfunkel: ‘And the people bowed and prayed to the neon god they made.’ The television is our society’s alternative altar. A person such as Mr. Fox takes on the symbolic role of the deity.”

  I said, “And religion makes some people go cuckoo.”

  She nodded. “There is a history of excess and frenzy, yes.”

  Excess and frenzy. I liked that. You could slap that headline on the morning paper each day of the year, and you’d never be wrong. I asked, “So you don’t think that Fox murdered those two women last year?”

  The Wiccan pushed her glasses back up on her nose. “I don’t. I believe each killing was performed by a unique participant.”

  Margo’s mask dropped. “You mean a different person for each killing? That’s four separate murderers.”

  “That is correct.”

  “My God. That’s crazy.”

  “From the perspective of our sphere, absolutely. But you recall Charles Manson and the so-called Manson family? This was a group of people completely at peace with their actions. Ritualized killings. Purgings. Cleansings. Symbolic. Iconic. However you wish to term it.”

  I blurted, “What was so iconic about Robin Burrell? Or any of them?”

  “I could hardly say with any certainty. All were intimates of Mr. Fox. We know that much. Perhaps the killer or killers perceived that the victims had betrayed Mr. Fox or were a source of danger to him. Or that they were in some way corrupting him.”