He held out his hand for the twenty.
"I'll buy dinner. Put it towards that."
"No can do, Miss Lonelyhearts. Valerie leaves for California tomorrow. Family ski trip for her parents' fortieth anniversary. Going to her place for a home-cooked meal. You know what that is, home cooking?"
"I have a vague childhood recollection." I had grown up in a close-knit family. My grandmother, who emigrated from Finland as an adolescent, lived with us for many years. Both she and my mother were superb cooks who prepared complicated meals every day of the week and made it seem effortless. We'd spend less than an hour at the dinner table when my father returned home from his surgical rounds, and then the women had to deal with the mounds of plates and pots that had been used in the process. Somehow I never inherited the love for standing over a hot stove that had run through my maternal line.
"Andy's making great progress," Mike said. "Scotty and I got up here at five. He's already running with it."
"With what?" I asked, glancing around the shelves that were lined with fragments of bone and assorted animal skeletons- snakes, an armadillo, and an elegantly horned antelope head among them.
"Basic 'scrip. Enough for Scotty to start looking at old police records and calling other agencies. Explain it to her."
Andy kept rubbing the surface of the leg bones with his toothbrush. "We've got a woman-and I'd say a young one, in her early twenties."
"How can you tell that?"
"Get used to it, Andy. Coop's gonna keep interrupting. All she knows how to do is cross-examine."
"First thing is getting the bones clean, laying her out in a proper anatomical position. That was easy here. Usually when we find them so many years later, the skeletal pieces are scattered around the scene, or they've been moved by animals. This one had nowhere to go in that brick coffin."
"But age, how can you tell that?"
"Bones stop growing basically by the time we're twenty-five years old. Up until then they keep changing and fusing together. After that, you begin to see deterioration, which helps us make estimates. They sort of break down, with everything from signs of arthritis to osteoporosis."
"And here?"
"She's in her early twenties, most probably. It's the pelvis again, and the ribs. She's got good height. How tall are you, Alex?"
"Five-ten."
"I'd say she was somewhere between five-six and five-eight."
"I was this big by the time I was sixteen. Could she have been a teenager?"
Andy's attention shifted to the skull, and he pointed the tooth-brush at the woman's mouth. "The teeth are interesting. Can you see?"
I stepped closer to the table.
"Some pretty expensive dental work went into this girl. Quality dentistry, including a pricey porcelain crown in one of the back molars."
I could see the neat and well-crafted denture in the lower part of the jaw.
"Now look up here," Andy said. "These teeth evidence some pretty severe rotting."
"That's an odd combination, isn't it?"
"What it suggests is a kid from a family of means, parents who would pay for first-class dental work throughout her youth and at some stage of young adulthood. The multiple sites of decay are consistent with some other kind of dysfunction going on in her life. Most often it's a slip into addiction or alcoholism. Her mouth exhibits classic signs of someone who has stopped taking care of herself, someone who didn't get medical or dental attention because the substance abuse would be discovered once she was in the hands of a health care professional."
It was astounding to me how this empty shell of a being was revealing herself to Andy Dorfman. "Can you tell anything else about her?"
"Give me the calipers, Mike," he said, reaching across the table. "We try to figure out race from the facial characteristics, using tools like this. The distinctions are pretty subtle for the most part- the set of the cheekbones, how far apart the eyes are, the shape and width of the nose. You need the skull to do it, so we're fortunate she was intact-without that, I couldn't even make an educated guess."
"And here?"
"Caucasian. I'm sure of it. I've put my calculations into FORDISC-"
"What's that?" I asked.
"University of Tennessee keeps a database of cranial measurements, a few thousand of them going back a century. Forensic Discriminant Functions, it's called. Sometimes the facial mask is more obtuse than this one. No question in my mind about this one."
"So we got a white female in her early twenties," Mike said. "Possibly a drug addict or alcoholic. If the ring is hers, her initials are A.T."
"Anything that tells you how she died?"
Andy ran his eyes up and down the length of the silent specimen on the table. "Nope. I thought for sure once we turned her over today I'd find a fracture on the back of her skull. I really wanted to."
"Why?"
He looked up at me. "Because the alternative is pretty frightening."
"Nothing worse that I can think of," I said, recalling the undersides of the broken fingernails, caked with a layer of cement.
"It's one thing to find that she died-say of an overdose-or was killed, even, and then bricked up inside this wall. But if she was alive, and gagged, and then watched herself being entombed-well, can you think of a more miserable death?"
"Twenty-five years ago, huh?" Mike said. "I just hope the guy who did this to her is still breathing so I can be there when Scotty slaps the cuffs on."
"Are you still looking for something else?" I asked.
"The pathologists reviewed it with me-both the X-rays and the bones. They agree there's no other gross cause of trauma. There won't be any kind of death certificate for months down the road, Alex. Whatever fancy medical term they come up with, we're talking buried alive here."
"Why months?" Mike asked.
"I'm going over the works once more to clean her up. I've got to check more thoroughly for any individualizing characteristics to compare to old records."
"Like what?"
"Pathologies, like fractures that had healed. I think we've got a hairline fracture of the tibia here. We've x-rayed it and I'll document it with detail and measurements."
"Will you attempt any kind of facial reconstruction?"
"Sure, Alex, and that slows down the process, too." First the computer would attempt several forms, based on the shape of the skull and Andy's measurements. Then a forensic sculptor would come in to add texture, to try to humanize the portrait. "You'll be lucky to have that by April or May. It's a skill very few artists have. The ball's in Mike's court."
"The NYPD's computer system only has missing persons' reports online back through 1995. Everything earlier has to be a hand-search," Mike said. "From there, Scotty's got to notify every jurisdiction in the Northeast. No saying where this chick got here from."
"And the feds, of course." New York was a mecca to hundreds of thousands of young men and women, coming to the big city from every corner of the country-to find jobs or go to school, if their heads were on right-or to get caught up in the alternative street life of drugs, alcohol, prostitution, and crime if they were unstable or unwise.
"So you go home and get some beauty rest, Coop. Andy's given us a jump-start on the basics. By the time we go public with the story, we'll have a pretty fair idea of who we're looking for."
I walked along the green-tiled hallway to the elevator that carried me upstairs to the lobby and out the front door onto First Avenue, where I hailed a cab to go home.
Despite the low temperature, the sidewalks in the Fifties and Sixties were full of pedestrians, making their way to and from the bistros and bars. Friday-night burgers and shooters were staples of the end of the long workweek for many young people looking to socialize before heading to the bridges and tunnels.
How many of the women hoping to hook up with guys tonight knew that a dangerous rapist had this very neighborhood in his scope? I thought, as the cab cruised under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge overpass. How many o
f them would walk out alone after four or five drinks-intoxicated and oblivious to their vulnerability- and make their way down the side streets in the early hours of the morning?
I unlocked my door at eight-thirty and dropped my files and pocketbook in the entryway. Next to my bed, the answering machine flashed that there were three messages, and I played them back as I undressed.
"Alex? You there? It's Lesley. How about a movie and late supper? Give a shout." Girlfriends were stepping in to try to fill the void left by my breakup with Jake.
That one was followed by a call from Nina Baum, my college roommate and best friend, who lives in Los Angeles. "No feeling sorry for yourself this weekend. If you get lonely, I'm around all weekend. You did the right thing." Nina had been the most out-spoken about how wrong Jake was for me and tried to keep my spirits up after the split.
"It's Mercer, Alexandra. We're on for tomorrow night. Greg Karras is coming in from the coast. Let me know if you're riding with us." The geographic profiler was ready to start the hunt for John Doe, and I was game to go.
I returned all three calls-gave Mercer a yes, chatted with Nina about my week, and left Lesley a message telling her I had gotten home too late to accept her offer. I soaked in the bathtub with a stack of magazines beside me, wrapped myself in a warm robe, and settled into the den with a Dewar's, an English muffin, and a Faulkner novel that Jake had left behind.
When I awakened at 7A.M. I was relieved that I had slept through the night without a call from anyone at Special Victims. My Silk Stocking nemesis had taken another night off.
I opened the door to pick up the newspapers. The Times had the latest on Middle East peace talks and presidential gaffes. The tabloids were beneath it and I bent to retrieve them. There on the front page of the Post was a photograph of the doomed building on Third Street with a cartoonlike skeleton dangling below a three-inch banner headline:POE'S CRYPT?
10
"Did you see the damn article on the cover of that rag this morning?" Paul Battaglia shouted into the phone about five minutes later.
"Yes, boss. I haven't had a chance to read it yet-"
He was quoting from its opening. "'Police sources are puzzling out whether the skeleton found in the basement of an NYU building is just a sad postscript to another age, or actually Edgar Allan Poe's crypt.' What the hell is this, Alex?"
"You want to give me a chance to look at it before-"
"Pat McKinney just called me. Says you know all about it. Says you gave this story to Diamond."
McKinney was deputy chief of the trial division, a wretchedly petty supervisor who seemed to take great pleasure in undermining my work. The week before Christmas his wife had thrown him out, embarrassed by his long-term affair with a coworker, and McKinney was flailing out in all directions as though making other people miserable would ease his own suffering.
"I do know all about it and I should have come in to tell you. I know how Diamond got the tip but it wasn't from me. I'm sorry- I was just so busy in the grand jury yesterday and I never imagined this would be of any press interest. Certainly not before the police figured out who she was and how she died."
Falling on one's sword often helped with Battaglia, but sometimes you had to do it repeatedly before he'd back off.
"What's the deal on these bones? Tell me everything."
I gave him the scant information I knew and he asked another dozen questions for which I had no answers.
The rest of my day was planned to be relaxing. I dressed for my Saturday morning ballet class, and covered my tights with warm-up pants and fleece-lined boots to trek through Central Park to the dance studio. I stayed for two hours of lessons, stretching and bending before taking my place at the barre for the exercise routine that helped relieve the week's tension.
Then I hiked back across town to the salon where Elsa and Nana would pamper me, highlighting my blonde hair and cutting it for a midwinter lift.
On the way home I stopped at Grace's Marketplace for some takeout, a lemon chicken breast and steamed broccoli that I could nuke at dinnertime. Mercer would pick me up at midnight and we would remain on our patrol until 4A.M., so I decided to nap in the early evening and eat dinner before going out on our profiling expedition.
When the doorman called up to tell me Mercer was waiting, I pulled on a black ski jacket over my jeans and went down to the car.
Mercer opened the rear door to let me in a beat-up old Chevy Malibu with chipped paint that had once been a deep navy blue. "Whose wheels?"
"My next door neighbor's kid. Won't stand out quite as much as a department car or medallion cab. Alex, this is Greg Karras."
I reached over the seat back and we shook hands. "Good to meet you. Thanks for flying in. How do we do this?"
"You've got your hands full with this guy. I've studied the old reports and Mercer confirms this is about the time of night he starts to strike, right?"
"Nothing earlier."
"I'd like to visit each of the locations to get a sense of what his approach has been, what the egress opportunities are."
Mercer and I had graphed out the crimes for Karras. We decided to start at the northern end of the map and drove to the quiet street where one of the earliest attacks had occurred. Mercer stopped the car in the middle of the block and pointed to a stoop thirty feet farther on. "Left-hand side, the steps with the wrought-iron handrail."
Karras got out of the car and walked from our position midblock to the corner of the avenue. A couple sauntered down the street with their arms around each other's waist, stopping to kiss under a street-light, the guy looking back over his shoulder at Karras. There were no trees anywhere near the victim's building and no place for an assailant to hide in waiting.
"Look at this, Mercer," I said, pointing at someone approaching the rear of our parked car. "She's likely to be in my office on Monday if she isn't careful."
The heavyset young woman was unsteady on her feet. She looked as though she was intoxicated, talking to herself and fishing in her purse for her keys. She stood between two buildings with her back to me, trying to decide which one was her destination.
"I almost want to get out and help her," Mercer said, "but she'd probably start screaming bloody murder."
She pulled herself up the six steps by leaning on the handrail and then fumbled for the right key on the ring to open the door. She would have been an easy target for any thug.
Karras got back into the car and asked us to go to the next location. He was quiet as he made notes on a PalmPilot. Mercer circled down to York Avenue and back to Seventy-eighth Street. Scene after scene, we watched the profiler walk each block and check the intersecting cross streets. He measured distances between street-lamps by walking between them, counting the steps as he put one booted foot in front of the next, and made notations of fire hydrants and the occasional tree.
After the round of visits, we went to an all-night coffee shop on Second Avenue. I was ready to put toothpicks in my eyelids to hold them open.
"What ideas did the task force work on last time?" Karras asked.
"Our first thoughts were businesses in the area. The fact that nothing started until after midnight made us think the guy worked here, got off a duty shift at midnight or oneA.M. Victims told us he was clean and that he smelled good. We were thinking restaurants or bodegas. Someone who washed up when he left work," Mercer said.
"How about hospitals?"
"We've got two big ones in this zone-New York Hospital and Lenox Hill. Same thing-it's a natural fit with shift turnovers. We subpoenaed the files of every male who worked there, from brain surgeons to male nurses to orderlies. Took months to get them all. By the time we'd gone through most of them, he had vanished."
"And we swabbed plenty of the employees, too," I said. "They've been entered in the data bank against the profile."
"I studied all the police reports Mercer sent me while I was on the plane. Can you give me more details-personal details-about your victims?"
> "Everything you want to know," I said.
"Alex and the lawyers do the most thorough interviews you can imagine. There's nothing we can't tell you about these women."
I operated on the theory that I needed to know as much about the victim as the defendant knew, and more than the best defense investigator could find out if he applied every resource he had. We also tried to reconstruct every second of the victim's interaction with the offender, things that might help us connect to a suspect and give us probable cause to swab his saliva for DNA comparison.
"Can you bring the task force members together for a brainstorming?" Karras asked.
"Of course. Alex and Sarah Brenner, her deputy, have handled all the victims themselves. I'll round up the team of detectives. For when?"
"I'll let you know when I'm ready."
"Sure. What do you do now?"
"All this data on street locations that I've been mapping, this tracks the spatial characteristics of the pattern. There's a prototype computer system called Rigel. Once I dump in every crime scene- every hospital, store, school, possible physical boundaries-"
"There are no physical boundaries."
"You can't have linkage blindness, Alex. There may be more clues that I can pick up on than you're even aware of. This case is going to create a very colorful map."
"We've already got a map." I was tired and impatient, growing fearful that this was as useless as the psychological crap.
"I'll give you a jeopardy surface, the rapist's center of operation. You haven't had that yet. The perp's most likely base or anchor point."
I rolled my eyes at Mercer. "A jeopardy surface, that's what it's called? Don't tell Mike Chapman, okay?"
"Yeah, I try to pinpoint that-his home or his job. It gets superimposed on the scene locations, which are the virtual fingerprints of the perp. The more crime sites there are, the better the predictive power of this system."
So Karras's goal was the exact opposite of ours-he'd be happy with even more crimes to fill his colorful grid. I was looking at one of his old samples. A bright red dot for the jeopardy center, orange shading for the offender's preferred area of operation, changing to yellow and then green, blue, and purple for the outer limits of his quarry.
Entombed Page 7
