The Borzoi Killings

by Paul Batista

  Kathy was methodical and deliberate, so different from her earlier self when she was rootless and confused in her six fugitive years in Manhattan. As soon as she left the building, she scrolled on her cell phone to Bo Halsey’s number. He was the only man in the world she believed she could trust.

  After leaving the Army in 1987, Bo became a friend of her difficult father, a Vietnam veteran. Bo joined the VFW club in Sag Harbor, the youngest member of the group, because her father had asked him to do that. Years later, she and Detective Halsey, now approaching early retirement age, had worked on three cases together. Her contacts were usually with the haughty lawyers in the District Attorney’s office, who treated forensic technicians like servants. Whenever she needed to speak to a field person—a cop with “boots on the ground” as they liked to describe themselves ever since Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq—she turned to Bo Halsey. Without ever expressing it, he felt an obligation to give special treatment to Kathy Schiavoni; she had been a lost, unhappy teenager when he first knew her but had evolved into a dedicated professional. He admired her. Transforming yourself was tough. He knew that to move from lost to found, from dead to alive, to be the prodigal child returning home, was a kind of miracle.

  He recognized her number on his own cell phone when it vibrated and lit up. He was fishing in the channel of salt water that flowed under the stone bridge linking Sag Harbor to North Haven. Bo Halsey spent hundreds of isolated hours fishing there every season of the year, even in the winter on the days when the weather was mild. He had found as he grew older that he preferred the slowness of fishing for salt-water bass in this channel to deep-sea fishing or fishing from the beaches along the Atlantic coastline in Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk. And he preferred the winter months, when he was almost always the only fisherman.

  “I’m in Riverhead,” she said. “I’d like to see you. It’ll take me forty-five minutes, maybe thirty, to get there.”

  “Take your time,” he said, “I’ll be here all day.”

  Almost an hour later, Kathy parked on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor and walked to the bridge. The marinas, which in the summer were crowded with colorful boats and yachts, stretched around her, entirely empty. The American flag snapped at the top of the flagpole at the entrance to the marina: the metal fastenings on the ropes struck the hollow pole, resonating. Below the bridge Bo Halsey stood on the stony shore. He was alone. His hands were on the filament-line of his fishing rod. The water that raced through the channel was shallow, passing over rocks and sand rivulets, like rapids in swift water in the mountains.

  A somewhat overweight, ungainly woman, Kathy walked unsteadily down the slope to the shore. She held her left hand above her eyes to shield them from the bright winter sunlight that glittered over the water. Bo Halsey was gazing at the place in the icy, fast-moving water where his lead had landed.

  He said, “To what, as they say, do I owe this honor?”

  They didn’t need any small talk or pleasantries to start a conversation. They knew each other that well.

  “Something’s really pissed me off.”

  “What can bother anybody on a great day like this?” He moved his fishing pole like a wand: the sinuous line again arced above the fast-flowing water and then came down thirty yards from the shore. Bo hadn’t once looked at her. Never married, he was essentially shy with women, even with her.

  “I was testing the sheets from the Richardson bedroom for the Suarez case. I looked in the evidence box an hour ago. The sheets have gone missing.”

  He now turned toward her, smiling. “Funny how evidence can just get up and take a walk around the building.” When he met her at her parents’ house while she was still in high school, her father wanted them to feel as though they were older brother and younger sister, despite the age gap between them. Brothers tease little sisters, Halsey thought.

  “Bo, cut out the shit please. I’m totally aggravated. I told Harding that Suarez’s DNA was on the sheets, that Brad Richardson’s DNA was there. And that Joan Richardson’s vaginal stains were there as well.”

  “You should wash your mouth out with soap.” He laughed and wanted her to laugh as well. “You ladies in the lab talk pure filth.”

  “Nice going, Bo. But I need you to listen. There was another person’s DNA. From sperm, on the sheets.”

  “It’s always a good idea to wash your sheets after a murder.”

  “I asked Harding to get a search warrant for a sample of Hank Rawls’s hair.”

  Turning again toward the water, Bo Halsey steadily reeled in the line. He cast again. The tip of the rod, propelled by the deft motions of his left hand, swept back and forth, a blur except for the edges of the arc where each sweeping motion seemed to stop momentarily as though in a freeze frame before becoming a blur again.

  “And you want hairs from the head and crotch of a once-upon-a-time Presidential candidate? Right?”

  Kathy Schiavoni knew that every conversation with Bo Halsey was a process of excavating through his cynical demeanor, bred by four years in the Army, and more than twenty years as a cop in New York City, to a level where he was somewhat softer, somewhat more open, and thoughtful. It was difficult to get there. She said, “I think Suarez is entitled to know who put the extra semen stain on Joan Richardson’s bed. The jury’s entitled to hear that.”

  A crystalline breeze blew inland from the wide harbor, chilling both of them and rattling the branches of the desiccated nearby reeds and brush. “Hey, baby, I think it’s up to the dark princess and her frog prince Lupo to decide who gets hit with the pleasure of a search warrant. Five cops crashing into your house with a search warrant for your crotch hair is a pretty big deal.”

  “Bo, listen to me, there was obviously another man in the house sometime just before or during the day Richardson was killed. Suarez’s lawyer has a right to know that and to know who it was.”

  “Rematti has no reason to have any idea that you’re testing the bed sheets, Kathy. Forget it. It is all, as they say, irrelevant and immaterial. That was not the room where Richardson lost his head. What happens in people’s bedrooms stays in the bedroom.”

  “Isn’t that where the money was stolen?”

  “Do you think people were having sex with Mrs. Richardson between the time her husband and the dogs had their heads taken off and when the money was lifted? Come on.”

  “Come on, Bo, this is important to me. You’re the senior guy in the office. You might not even need a search warrant. Just contact Rawls and see if he’ll come in voluntarily to give it to you.”

  Bo genuinely liked Kathy Schiavoni. He had once even thought about asking her out to dinner, but his innate, crippling shyness about women prevented him. “When I was in the Army, Kathy, a spade from Detroit was taking a shortcut in front of the company headquarters. It was a dirt yard. But it had signs on it saying ‘Keep Off the Grass.’ There was no grass, it was as bald as my head. A lieutenant from some fucking place like Louisiana, a classic redneck, Gomer Pyle-type of guy, walks by and yells, ‘Soldier, you’re walking on my grass. Say sorry to my grass,’ The black guy looks at the dirt, then says to the lieutenant, ‘Never gonna happen, sir,’ and walks away.” Bo paused. “Never gonna happen, Kathy. I’m a year away from retiring early. I could give a rat’s ass about some guy’s pubic hair, Juan Suarez, Margaret Harding, Richie Lupo, Brad Richardson, Raquel whatever the fuck her name is.”

  He saw that Kathy was angry and struggling with what to say. “I’ll handle this myself, then, Bo.”

  Staring at her, remembering her as a teenager, Bo said, “Be careful, Kathy. I want you to be safe.”

  Just as Kathy Schiavoni turned to walk up the slope, the silvery line of Bo Halsey’s fishing rod rose, snake-like, iridescent in the bright air.

  21.

  Richie Lupo’s office was sprawling. Located in a drab two-story municipal building constructed almost entirely of brown cinderblocks in the outskirts of Riverhead, it overlooked a high school football field with dee
p ruts in the brown grass. In contrast to the drabness of the other offices in the building, the office of the District Attorney of Suffolk County had wood-paneled walls, bookcases, a credenza filled with law books, and Richie’s many trophies and memorabilia on every available surface except his desk, which was completely clear.

  Raquel Rematti, who always tried to meet the head of every prosecuting office she dealt with, recognized from the first handshake that Richie didn’t like her. He did little to conceal the contempt he wanted to convey for a lawyer who had a storied career. In Richie’s domain in Suffolk County he barely tolerated outsiders who came in to represent clients, and Raquel Rematti was a special outsider. Raquel, for her part, wasn’t going to let the hostility bother her. This visit was not about her; she had a reason to be there.

  “Thanks for letting me see you, Mr. Lupo. And Margaret, it’s good to see you again, outside of the courtroom.”

  Glancing first at Margaret Harding and then at Raquel, Lupo said, “Ms. Rematti, what can we do for you?”

  “You can help me save a man’s life.”

  Riche Lupo glanced again at Margaret Harding, as though looking for guidance in how to deal with this woman. “Help me understand,” he said to Raquel. “You’ve lost me already.”

  “I went to visit my client last Friday.”

  “Which client is that?”

  “I only have one client out here at the moment, Mr. Lupo. That’s Mr. Suarez.”

  “What do you want to tell me about Mr. Suarez?”

  “When I saw him last Friday his face was bruised and he had a stab wound in his back.”

  “He’s gotten proper medical care, hasn’t he?”

  Raquel wasn’t surprised that Riche Lupo already knew about the attack. She said, “His medical care is not my major concern. He’s young and strong. He’ll survive the bruises and wounds. But obviously his life is in jeopardy.”

  “How so? Did he tell you that?”

  “Not at all. Mr. Suarez is a stoic. He said very little, but it’s clear, isn’t it, that he didn’t slip and fall in the shower.”

  “You know, Ms. Rematti, I got an incident report from the prison.” He touched a piece of paper on his desk and glanced at it as though checking a sentence. Richie Lupo said, “He seems to have attacked another prisoner, unprovoked, and that prisoner was severely injured.”

  With an unexpected edge of anger in her voice, she said, “It didn’t happen that way. People with stab wounds in their backs generally aren’t the attackers.”

  “Is that right? I should believe one Juan Suarez, if that’s his name, and not three prison guards who filed the incident report? Now why in God’s name should I do that?”

  “What you should do, Mr. Lupo, is take whatever steps you need to take to protect my client’s life.”

  “Take steps? I don’t know what happens in other parts of the country, Ms. Rematti, but in this part of the world the DA’s office has absolutely no control over prison security. That’s all up to the prison. I’m sure you know that. Pigs will fly before the prison listens to me.”

  “Look, I want to avoid taking this to the judge. You know as well as I do that all you have to do is pick up the phone and the prison will do much more to protect him. The judge doesn’t want a dead defendant on her hands.”

  “Go to the judge, Ms. Rematti, be my guest, and she’ll give you exactly the same answer I’m giving you—the prisons make their own rules and do what they feel they need to do to create a secure environment. Secure, that is, for the guards, the other inmates and, last on the scale of priorities, your client.”

  “I don’t think she has that narrow a view of the scope of her powers.”

  “You know what, Ms. Rematti? I think I know the judge far better than you do. She and I went to law school together at Hofstra. I can’t stop you from asking her to get what you think your client deserves. In fact, your client should have thanked his lucky stars that he was able to get around the prison for work and exercise and meals. They’ve been pretty lenient toward him. If I had anything to say about it, he’d be in lockdown twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Which is where he is now, and he may stay there for good. That should protect him.”

  “Somebody tried to kill him, sir. I see jails that are more humane in Alabama.”

  Richie Lupo was staring at Margaret Harding as though looking for her to express admiration for him, for his bravery in challenging the legendary Raquel Rematti. “I don’t know anything, Ms. Rematti, about jails in Alabama. This isn’t Alabama. It’s Suffolk County.”

  The words that formed in Raquel’s mind were distinct—You’re an asshole, Richie Lupo—but years of self-discipline suppressed the words. Finally she said, “Mr. Lupo, I can have the New York Times and CNN here in ten seconds to hear about the attempt to kill my client and the fact that the guards, after turning their backs on the assault, then filed a false report. They intervened only after Mr. Suarez got the upper hand.”

  Richie Lupo was now angry. He leaned toward her. “Bring them out, Ms. Rematti. You know what? I don’t give a flying fuck what they say. As I said, this is Suffolk County. I like it fine here. I’m not going anywhere, and I don’t want to go anywhere. Anderson Cooper can piss all over me. I win elections, he doesn’t.”

  Raquel too was angry. She was almost startled by Richie Lupo’s rant. In her career she’d had many tense and acrimonious encounters with prosecutors—after all, this business was not for the faint at heart—but there was something outside the pale, off-the-reservation, about Richie Lupo, who resembled Mitt Romney but spoke like Rush Limbaugh. Was he, she wondered, putting on an act for the very attractive Margaret Harding? Was he crazy? “I get the complete picture now, Mr. Lupo.” She stood up. “I’m going back to planet earth.”

  As Raquel left the room, she heard Richie Lupo and Margaret Harding laugh. It was loud and derisive laughter.

  22.

  The videotape was grainy. Bo Halsey had spent hundreds of hours in his career staring at blurred photographs and then, with the advent of surveillance cameras everywhere, the faint images of people on tape. After five repetitions of the three-minute tape, he recognized the men depicted on it. They were Cerullo and Cohen. They were hastily moving cash from the Richardsons’ stately bedroom to the bathroom. While there was no surveillance tape of the bathroom, Cerullo and Cohen weren’t carrying it out of the house then. Bo Halsey knew they were hiding it.

  “When did you see this tape?” Halsey asked Ang Tien, the youthful Asian technician who, two days earlier, had asked for an appointment with him.

  “Last week.”

  “Why were you looking at tape from the bedroom? He was killed in his office on the first floor.”

  “Someone from the security company must have been like curious. She would have known the locations in the house where the security systems were. It’s a subtle system, kind of beyond the state of the art technologically, you know. Like very advanced. It doesn’t rely on cameras. It relies on sensors that aren’t like visible to anyone looking for them. So she probably thought it would be like interesting to review footage from a house where, you know, a murder happened.”

  “And she knew to look in the bedroom?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Why would anyone in his right mind have a surveillance camera in his bedroom?”

  Ang Tien was young, geeky. Halsey knew that Ang spent hundreds, possibly thousands of hours every month gazing into computers. He had no friends or girlfriends; his computer life was the only life he wanted to lead. Bo Halsey was once impatient with the young generations of police officers who worked for him and who used like and you know in every sentence. But, despite that annoying tic, many of them were smart and hard-working. Ang Tien, the grandson of a Vietnamese soldier who had fled Saigon in a helicopter in 1975 as the North Vietnamese army rolled to victory, was very smart: he had helped Bo in other cases, and his information and results were always reliable.

  “Have you shown th
is to anybody else?”

  “No. You’re in charge of the investigation. I thought, you know, I should go directly to you.”

  “Do you recognize the men in the tape?”

  “No.”

  “Do you see what they’re doing?”

  Ang Tien was struck by the question because it was so unnecessary. He wondered for a moment whether Bo Halsey was taunting him. It was obvious what the men were carrying.

  At last Ang said, “They’re like carrying cash.”

  “Is there any other footage of them later that night?”

  “No, just as there’s no footage of them before this scene. The sensors in Richardson’s office were turned off like about five minutes before he was killed. But not in the bedroom, like whoever turned it off in the office didn’t, you know, do it in the bedroom. The surveillance system is in zones, and the service can be turned off with a password in a keypad, but there were like different keypads in that house.”

  Halsey had Ang replay the scene. At the start of the sequence, Cohen and Cerullo were repeatedly glancing toward the ceilings, searching for telltale camera eyes. Bo Halsey was disturbed by the scene, but not surprised. Years earlier, when he was a narcotics detective in Manhattan, Cerullo and Cohen had risen quickly through the ranks and become detectives. Neither of them worked for or directly with Halsey, but the word on the job was that they were rogues, executing search warrants for drugs and cash in targeted apartments and entering on the inventories only half the cash and drugs. They kept the rest. Halsey was already working for the Suffolk County Police when first Cerullo and then, a year later, Cohen joined the department. They came from politically connected families in Suffolk County. They now reported directly to Bo Halsey, and the three of them were the ranking homicide detectives in the county. They annoyed him, he thought they were jerks, and he no longer tried to conceal his contempt for them.