HE PULLED UP ON the edge of the park, got out, and opened the trunk.
“What are you doing?” Michelle called back over the roof of the car.
He lifted out the cooler he had stashed there earlier in the day. “Just a little picnic.” Champagne, cheese, crackers, strawberries. If everything worked out right, it would turn into a celebration.
Several stretch limos were parked along the avenue, and he soon saw why. As he and Michelle headed into the park, they overtook a Chinese wedding party. The young men looked like models in their white tuxedoes and gelled black hair. The young women in their taffeta gowns were a bunch of bright flowers levitating along the asphalt path. As they all crossed the loop drive and then descended toward the Boathouse, Jack saw another wedding party posed stiffly along the edge of the little lake, and then another. Brides and grooms everywhere—it was like the punchline of a joke. Someday, he and his new wife would remember the site of their engagement and laugh.
“Do you want me to take a turn carrying that?” Michelle asked, nodding down at the cooler.
Jack shook his head. “I’m good.”
She smiled. “Yes, you are.”
It was their little joke.
The afternoon sun sparkled on the water and the sky was bright blue, with just a few puffy clouds. It was warm enough out that for once the Chinese bridesmaids didn’t have to suffer in their sleeveless gowns. Across the way, the little bridge arched across the water; beneath it, a family of ducks sailed into the lagoon.
“Why don’t we walk around?” Jack said. He wanted to get away from the other people, to find his own perfect spot. Once again, he wondered which knee he should get down on. He swallowed. All of a sudden, he was nervous again. What are you thinking? he asked himself. This woman has only known you for a few months. What makes you think she’s gonna say yes—a beautiful woman like her, a geezer like you?
Then he thought back to the end of their initial date, that first sweet, powerful kiss at the end of the night. And he thought back to the first time Michelle had spent the night. The connection had been so strong, stronger than anything he had ever felt with his first wife. And Michelle had stuck by him after the shooting; they had lived through 9/11 together…Sometimes you just knew. He was being nervous, was all, floating these doubts. She would definitely say yes.
They walked around the edge of the lagoon, breathing in the fresh winter air. The exertion was making Michelle’s cheeks rosy, and she looked so beautiful that his heart almost couldn’t take it. The path turned up toward the bridge. Remember this, Jack told himself. Fix it in your memory. If there was one thing life had taught him, it was that sadness was easy to recognize and carry around. You had to make a special effort to appreciate the fleeting moments when it was replaced by joy.
He took Michelle’s hand as they reached the bridge. Everything was right: the weather, the location, the sunlight making the Boat-house across the way look like some fantasy Italian villa. The champagne would now be perfectly chilled, and the wedding parties in their bright outfits even made a perfect backdrop for what he was about to say. It was all coming together just the way he had planned.
He set the cooler down and hitched up his right pants leg. He was about to bend his knee when his beeper went off.
CHAPTER thirteen
THE WATER WAS A military color, like the barrel of a big gun or the side of a battleship. The winter sun burned a scintillating path across it, dead ahead to the northern end of Governors Island; it was so bright that Jack had to avert his eyes.
Despite the relatively warm day, it was chilly out on the water and he turned up the collar of his coat. He noticed a charred wooden beam drifting like an alligator on the harbor currents, and he thought of the wooden box and what he had seen inside. Then he thought of a moment, decades ago, when he had stood on the deck of a huge Navy ship bound for Europe. It was nighttime, and the ocean was an endless moonlit plain, and he was having a smoke with an old lifer and shooting the shit. Idly, he asked what a man should do if he fell overboard in the middle of the ocean, if nobody saw him go. “Way the hell out here, there’s no point trying to swim,” the old sailor replied. “Just swig down some water and kiss the world good-bye.”
Jack looked up and the island was already filling the view. The trip over from the southern tip of Manhattan had taken only seven minutes. As the ferry neared its destination, he scanned the land ahead. It was completely flat and just above sea level. This end reminded him of the ritzy New England college his son had attended at a ridiculously high expense: a group of brick barracks with white cupolas and white-framed windows. Straight ahead, a big American flag snapped in the breeze above the landing slip. The rumble of engines beneath Jack’s feet changed tone as the ferry edged in. Despite the fact that he had grown up less than a mile away, this afternoon would mark the first time that he had ever visited this shore.
Some kind of rent-a-cop was waiting for him. The man sat in a golf cart parked next to a fat black cannon. He looked to be about forty, and his face was pale, as if he was descending into one of the latter stages of shock.
“Thank you for coming,” the man said, extending a hand. “My name is Michael Durkin. I’m a supervisor for the private security company that’s been looking after the island since the Coast Guard left.” He put the cart in gear and drove east along a neat lane past some brick buildings near the water’s edge. The harbor and the Manhattan skyline ruled the view to the north.
“I’m sorry about your day off,” the man said as they turned toward the interior of the island.
Jack thought of his interrupted proposal, of Michelle having to take the goddamn subway home, but he just shrugged. If he had wanted to live the way other people did, with a clear line between private life and work, he should never have become a cop. That was simply the way things were, and he wasn’t about to start complaining now.
He focused on his surroundings. He noticed that the street signs were blue, and bore Coast Guard insignia. An old fort rose up on the right, its massive stone walls topped by a grassy berm; Jack vaguely remembered something about the island’s long history of protecting the harbor from foreign invasion. Its lawns were trim, its trees noble, its barracks dignified, but it suffered faint signs of decay that would never have been allowed on any active base: chipping paint, cracked sidewalks…
“It must be pretty hard to keep things up around here,” Jack said.
The security man just nodded; his mind was clearly on other matters. He offered Jack a cigarette, then stuck the pack back in the pocket of his gray uniform shirt.
They got out of the cart on the edge of a stately quadrangle of big yellow woodframed houses, with square-columned front porches. A sign read NOLAN PARK. Durkin nodded toward the homes. “These were officers’ quarters. They were two-family homes, with basements—but you’ll see that for yourself.”
Paths of brick set in a herringbone pattern bisected the quad, which was decorated with more black cannons. Wind sighed in the old chestnut trees lining it, and some dead leaves scraped across its walkways, but the place was otherwise eerily quiet. No car horns blaring, no radios thumping, no general city noise at all. The only Other sounds came from off-island: a faint thropping of a helicopter overhead, the clang of a buoy out in the channel separating the island from Brooklyn, which was visible between the houses in the easternmost row. Jack almost flinched when the ferry suddenly blasted its horn behind him.
He spotted a couple of vans parked in front of one of the houses at the southeast end of the quad, along with an unmarked car that had an official look.
THEY WERE MET AT the door by a brisk, businesslike young man with a clipboard. He wore a bluejacket with FBI shoulder patches.
“I’ll need to see some ID,” the Feeb said.
Jack badged him, and the agent made a notation in his log.
“This way,” Durkin said.
Jack stepped with him into a quiet hallway. The front rooms on either side were barren, ne
arly stripped of furniture, but he noticed a couple signs of former habitation: a plastic-covered couch that might have been too bulky or too tacky to move, a toddler’s Big Wheel tricycle tipped over and abandoned in a corner. The place was illuminated only by whatever natural light made it past the faded curtains. It seemed colder inside the house, and faintly damp.
Another Feeb passed them brusquely in the hall. Jack waited until the man was out of earshot, then turned to Durkin.
“What’s up with the feds? Who’s got jurisdiction here?”
Durkin shrugged. “Any day now the island’s supposed to be turned over to New York, but it’s still federal property.”
Jack frowned. He didn’t like feds, didn’t like them at all. They tended to be arrogant, secretive, and contemptuous of cops. Anyone who thought that all law enforcement was on the same team had only to read the papers to see how September 11 had exposed the true rivalries and competition.
They left the hallway and entered a bare white kitchen, where they were met by a Crime Scene tech, federal issue. “I’m going to need for you to put these on,” she said, handing Jack a paper jumpsuit and a pair of booties.
Durkin grimaced. “I’ll wait for you here.”
Jack couldn’t blame the man for not wanting to revisit the crime scene. He was used to looking at dead bodies, but for civilians the sight cut through all the bullshit they put up to avoid thinking about how fragile life really was; it bypassed the mind and went straight to some deep animal place of vulnerability and fear.
Attired in the jumpsuit, he descended into the basement, one big low-ceilinged room, wood-paneled, with a pool table and a wet bar. It was windowless; several battery-powered floodlights lit the place for a swarm of technicians. The place smelled bad.
“Are you Leightner?”
Jack turned to find a heavyset, bespectacled black man approaching, reaching out a meaty hand. Another blue-windbreakered Feeb.
“I’m Ray Hillhouse,” the man said. “Thanks for coming.”
The guy seemed surprisingly open and low-key; he reminded Jack of a cheery TV weatherman.
“I came across one of the memos you sent out about your Red Hook case,” Hillhouse continued. “You’ll see immediately why I thought of you.”
The FBI man led Jack across the musty blue wall-to-wall carpet, around the pool table, over to the wet bar. Next to it lay the body.
Like every homicide crime scene, this was a storm of activity with a terrible quiet eye at its core. All of the crackling walkie-talkies and gruff banter, the photography and fingerprinting, the note-taking and speculation—it all faded into the background when Jack looked down at the victim, who had dropped into a somber realm beyond all action and noise.
He was a male Caucasian, a bulky older man, clothed in the same gray uniform as Michael Durkin, only the victim’s pants and shirt were stained with blood. He lay on his side, forlorn, like a slaughtered animal. A possible murder weapon lay just a couple of feet from his crew-cut head: the heavy end of a pool cue, also stained with blood.
Jack glanced beyond the body to a half-open closet door. A number of opened cans and boxes were jumbled inside, and seemed to be the source of a rancid smell. Another olfactory note competed for attention: unwashed body.
Hillhouse hitched up his pants. “Seems like our perp spent some time down here. And he wasn’t too big on hygiene—though he didn’t really have much choice. The island’s water system is off; they can’t keep it running all the time just for a few firemen and maintenance people.”
Jack noticed what seemed to be a makeshift bed behind the wet bar: a pile of heavy gray blankets. He thought of the lining of the floating box that had brought the dead boy to Red Hook. He had mentioned it in his memo—was this what had flagged the attention of the FBI agent? He slowly moved around the body and then knelt down. No, here was the giveaway, brazen as a neon sign: the letters G.I. were inscribed in red across the fallen security guard’s forehead.
THE ESSENCE OF THE job was to go back in time, to project yourself through that still eye of the storm, and to come out into another whirl of activity, the one that had put the body there in the first place. In this case, it looked pretty simple to reconstruct.
“Yesterday,” said Agent Hillhouse, “the security firm that runs things here got a call from your colleague Balfa asking them if they had noticed any unusual activity. This guard—his name is Barry Reynolds—made the rounds, driving all over, rattling doorknobs. The last anybody heard from him, he called in on his walkie to say that he hadn’t found anything out of the ordinary. That was around four-thirty yesterday afternoon. And then he went off the radar. He wasn’t found until this morning.”
Jack frowned. “Why did it take so long?”
“First of all, he didn’t specify his location in that last call. Second, there are only a handful of people here overnight these days, and so there was only a tiny search party.”
Jack shrugged. “Okay, but this place isn’t very big.”
“It looks small from the water, but there are more than a hundred and seventy acres. And there was housing for four thousand people here before the Coast Guard left. There were a lot of places to look.”
“How’d they find him?”
“They just walked around, calling him on his walkie. It’s so quiet here that Durkin actually heard the sound of it coming up out of the basement.” Hillhouse stepped aside to let a couple of techs pass, then turned back to Jack. “Hey, speaking of your guy Balfa, is he coming out?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s his day off, too, and he’s out in New Jersey or someplace.” Catching some more nookie, no doubt. Jack frowned as he thought of their recent phone conversation. Most detectives would have been thrilled to hear of such a potential break in a case, but Balfa had just seemed preoccupied with his own business, as usual. He’d actually had the gall to say, “I’m sure you can handle things.”
“All right,” Hillhouse said, pushing his glasses higher up on his nose. “So our man Reynolds is walking around Nolan Park. Maybe he finds a door unlocked, or he hears something suspicious. He comes into the house, pokes around, decides to check the basement. He comes down, shining his light”—the FBI man nodded toward a flashlight lying on the floor a couple of yards away.
Jack picked up the story. “Someone’s waiting for him in the darkness, but they don’t meet right away, or else he probably would’ve ended up near the bottom of the stairs. He comes across the room, and the perp is hiding. Maybe he’s down behind the bar here, or in the closet. Reynolds makes it all the way across the room, and he discovers the perp. He challenges him. The perp grabs the pool cue, or maybe he was already holding it, waiting…”
The FBI man frowned. “His choice of a weapon is odd.”
“Why?”
Hillhouse walked over behind the bar. “Look at this.”
Jack came around and saw what he was pointing to: a small bottle of gun oil, a bore brush, and a couple of cleaning patches. He bent down: The scent of oil was strong, and the cleaning patches were damp.
Jack’s eyebrows went up. He thought for a moment. “If he used a gun, the sound might’ve given him away. And once somebody knew he was here, he’d be screwed. Where you gonna run to? Speaking of which, I assume you guys have searched the place pretty well?”
Hillhouse nodded. “Of course. We brought over a dog team this morning. The freshest trail led over the side of the esplanade behind the house, right to the water.”
“He kept a boat there?”
“Doubtful. It would have been spotted in daylight. We’re thinking an inflatable raft, like a Zodiac. Maybe he took it out of the water, stashed it under the porch…”
Jack nodded. He liked the way the FBI man focused on the possibilities, the way he obviously cared about his work. Why couldn’t this man be his partner, instead of a lump like Tommy Balfa?
“There’s something else you should see.” Hillhouse led Jack around the other side of the pool table. Several more
blankets had been shoved underneath. “We pulled this stuff out,” the agent said, pointing at a number of items spread on the carpet: a couple of comic books, a little portable video game player, some empty candy wrappers, a pile of child-sized clothes. Jack crouched to examine the evidence. Maybe this was where the boy in the box had spent his final hours. The candy and the entertainment indicated that the perp had showed at least some concern for the child’s mental and emotional state. The boy had not been bound…was it possible he had come here willingly—that he might even have seen this as an exciting last adventure?
“Look over there,” Hillhouse said, pointing at the floor nearby. Jack saw a toiletries kit. Next to it rested a half dozen bottles of prescription medicines and painkillers—and a hypodermic needle and a tiny unmarked bottle of some liquid. The fentanyl that had sent the boy into his final sleep?
He checked out the far corner of the room, an improvised workspace. A couple of screwdrivers, a putty knife, some emptied tubes of sealant. No hammer, no saw. Anselmo Alvarez had observed that the floating coffin had been put together without any nails, and now Jack understood why. The sound of hammering or sawing would have been too risky. Which meant that the perp had pre-cut the wood, then carried it over and screwed it together on the island. Which meant that he had committed the homicide with full premeditation—this was no accidental overdose.
After a minute, Jack stood up and glanced around the room again. It was a treasure trove of potential clues: fingerprints, blood, hair and fiber samples, traceable purchased products, maybe dirt or pollen carried to the island on the perp’s or child’s clothing…Thank God he finally had something to work with.
Moving slowly, he made one final circuit.
“What are you looking for?” the FBI man asked.
Jack scratched his cheek. “I think it’s safe to say that our perp left in a hurry. He abandoned food and clothes; he didn’t get rid of the kid’s stuff, didn’t make much of an effort to cover his tracks. It would be nice to think that he’s just some nut who committed one mercy killing and one defensive attack when he got trapped. It would be nice to think that this will be the end of it.”
The Graving Dock Page 8
