Deluge (CSI: NY)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Jane had a lot of work to do before Mac could get any DNA results.

  “Lunch in my office?” Jane had asked.

  “If I can get away,” he said.

  “Can I lure you with pastrami on a kaiser with mustard and a pickle? On me?”

  “Who could resist,” he had said with a smile.

  But now Mac watched Patricia Mycrant’s blood wash away on the autopsy table in front of the medical examiner. Stubborn clots clung to the steel.

  “Have you ever eaten Festivo Pollo Con Carne Dolce?” asked Sid.

  Sid had been a successful chef for years after giving up his medical practice. No one, perhaps not even Dr. Sid Hammerbeck, knew why he had returned to medicine, why he had chosen to become a medical examiner.

  “Can’t say that I have,” said Mac.

  “I’ll be happy to prepare it for you sometime,” said Sid, carefully eyeing the pale corpse as he continued to wash it down.

  “Thanks,” said Mac.

  “The trick is in the marinade,” said Sid. “Marinate it too briefly and it fails to penetrate the flesh. Marinate too long and the spices overwhelm the texture of the bird.”

  “Fascinating,” said Mac.

  Sid reached down and moved Patricia Mycrant’s left arm to expose the single wound in her armpit.

  “This wound, almost surgically placed,” he said, “dropped and nearly paralyzed her.”

  Mac looked at the medical examiner and said, “He knew what he was doing.”

  Sid nodded and continued hosing down the body.

  “Ah, what have we here,” he said, aiming the water at a clot along the left thigh.

  Remnants of blood peeled away to reveal something deep red carved into the flesh.

  “One more mystery,” said Sid.

  Mac leaned in closer.

  “Or a clue,” said Mac.

  Cut into the dead woman’s inner thigh was a distinct letter D.

  In the small basement of the Wallen School, Bill Hexton sat in front of a black-and-white screen. Danny and Lindsay stood behind him.

  Hexton looked less like a security guard than a student playing dress-up in tan slacks, a blue blazer and a loose-fitting blue and brown Wallen School tie.

  “Been here long?” asked Danny.

  “Not counting the six years I was a student at Wallen,” Hexton said, “it’s been three years. After I graduated, three years in the army, military police and then a little time in intelligence. Then right back here.”

  Hexton looked military. Super-close-cropped haircut, clean shaven, shoulders back.

  Images drifted by on the screen, corridors, gymnasium, a dining hall.

  “No bathrooms,” said Hexton. “Privacy issues. No classrooms. Academic freedom issues. You can see the images roll from one camera to the next. We’ve got sixteen cameras. We can’t afford to record all sixteen all the time so we roll from one to the other.”

  Both Lindsay and Danny knew the routine, but they listened patiently and watched the screen.

  “There,” said Hexton. “That’s the corridor outside the chem lab just before nine this morning.”

  “Slow it down,” said Danny, leaning in closer.

  Hexton turned a knob on the console. Students, gray figures, moved in both directions down the hall. Some students started to enter the chemistry lab.

  “Freeze that,” said Danny.

  Hexton pressed a button. The image stopped moving.

  “Can you identify the students going into the room?”

  “Sure. But we know who was in the class,” said Hexton.

  “Humor me,” said Danny.

  Hexton shrugged, pointed to the students about to enter the classroom and identified each of them.

  “Okay,” said Danny.

  Hexton pressed a button and the image shifted to another corridor, another classroom, moving at normal speed.

  “Can you jump forward, show the chem lab corridor and door when the class ended?” asked Danny.

  “No problem,” said Hexton. “Class would have ended at ten to ten, but Havel dismissed them halfway into the class.”

  “You know why?” asked Lindsay.

  Hexton shook his head “no” as he watched images flash by, then slowed the tape down just before the white numbers at the top of the screen said nine-twenty.

  The tape showed four students coming out of the lab. Then the image switched to the dining hall, where students were starting to trickle in.

  “Find the next tape of the chem lab corridor,” said Danny.

  Hexton found it. The corridor was empty. The chem lab door was closed. Hexton found tapes of the corridor for the next half hour and then the image of Wayne O’Shea entering the lab.

  “O’Shea says he fainted,” said Lindsay.

  “He could be lying,” said Danny.

  “Good actor? He knew the camera might be on him,” said Lindsay. “I don’t see any blood on him.”

  “I can’t see O’Shea doing it,” said Hexton.

  “I knew a ninety-pound, eighty-two-year-old Baptist Sunday school teacher named Eloise Pringleman who’d never raised her voice to anyone,” said Danny. “One morning a large, young deliveryman with a small shipment of fax machine paper for the church used the word ‘fuck’ as a recurring adjective. Eloise asked him to stop. He didn’t. Eloise picked up a pair of very sharp scissors and created one of the bloodiest crime scenes I’ve ever seen. We’d like to take your tapes from this morning.”

  “I should check with the headmaster,” said Hexton. “Student privacy issues.”

  “No one outside of our lab is going to see them. You gonna make us get a warrant?” asked Danny.

  “Guess not,” said Hexton. “I’ll tell the headmaster. Anything else I can do?”

  “Find the students who were in Havel’s class this morning and bring them to the dining hall,” said Danny. “One at a time. And I’d like the files on all of them, as well as on O’Shea.”

  “Lining up the students, no problem. Files? I’ll need the headmaster’s okay on that.”

  “Do what you can,” said Danny.

  “I’ll take the tape,” said Lindsay.

  Hexton stretched and nodded.

  “Where’s the headmaster?” asked Danny.

  “Damage control,” said Hexton. “Students’ parents. Alumni. Havel’s widow. And reporters, not yet but soon. It’s a mess.”

  “What can you tell us about Havel?”

  “I had him for chemistry. Good teacher. Kept it interesting. Students liked him. He liked the students, seemed to be constantly amused by us. With some of the other teachers who were still around from when I was a student, it felt a little funny sort of being one of them, but Alvin made me feel comfortable, not just polite comfortable, but really comfortable from the first day. We had coffee, lunch once in a while. I’ll miss him. Not just me. The teachers, staff, everyone liked him.”

  “Not everyone,” said Danny.

  In the student dining hall, Danny sat alone at a heavy wooden table, a Wallen School coffee cup in front of him, his tape recorder out, his open kit at his side. The lights were dim. The place reminded him of something out of Harry Potter.

  The first student was sent in. Danny motioned for her to sit across from him. Danny wasn’t comfortable. He had gone to a public school where there was a cafeteria, not a dining room, and the tables had been metal and benches had been bolted to the floor. At his school, the signs of teenage rage and rebellion had been evident in the obscenities scratched on benches and tabletops. There were no signs of even minor desecration in the Wallen School dining room.

  “Annette Heights,” Danny said, motioning to the chair across from him. “Mind if I tape our conversation?”

  “No,” she said.

  Danny had turned on the machine the moment she entered the room.

  “Good. Then talk to me.”

  The girl wore a green skirt and white blouse. Her face, round, younger looking than her fifteen years, was tinged
with makeup. Her hair was wavy, black, long.

  “And say what?” she asked, sitting down across from him. She didn’t appear intimidated or nervous.

  “Mr. Havel.”

  “I hear he’s dead,” she said calmly.

  “You were in his AP chemistry class this morning.”

  “Yes.”

  “His body was found a few minutes after class let out,” said Danny. “Hard to miss a murder taking place inside the classroom.”

  “Impossible,” she said. “He was fine when the chime sounded and when I left the room. I was the first one out.”

  “Who was behind you?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Who else was in the class?”

  She shrugged.

  “Karen Reynolds the Goddess. James Tuvekian.”

  “The Goddess?”

  “Have you met her?” asked the girl.

  “Not yet.”

  “She holds the state record in the one hundred meter.”

  “Dash?”

  “Water,” she said. Annette did a mock swimming stroke and then settled back, arms folded.

  “How was Mr. Havel?”

  “Himself,” she said. “No. Come to think of it, he wasn’t. Or maybe that’s just me exercising my imagination because he’s dead.”

  “How was he?” asked Danny.

  “How wasn’t he,” she said. “No bounce. He was a bouncer. Not today. And he let us out early.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  Danny nodded.

  “What did you think of Mr. Havel?”

  “Alvin was much beloved,” she said flatly, looking across the dining hall at the rain running down the windows.

  “You didn’t like him?”

  She turned her eyes from the window and focused on Danny. “You’re cute.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “You didn’t like Mr. Havel?”

  “He was all right.”

  “Would you like to give me your hand?” he said with a smile.

  She smiled back and held out one hand. He took it.

  “Both of them,” he said.

  She held out her other hand. Danny removed a sheet of plastic from his kit and a spray can. He sprayed her palms and placed them on the plastic sheet. Then he took out his portable ALS and shield and examined her palms.

  The process seemed to amuse her.

  “See anything?” she asked.

  “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  “I want to know now,” she demanded, no longer sounding amused.

  “I guess I’m not so cute anymore,” he said bagging the plastic sheet.

  “None of this is legal,” Annette said, folding her arms. “I’m only fifteen. You didn’t ask me if I wanted a lawyer.”

  “You aren’t a suspect. You’re a possible witness,” said Danny. “Maybe next time we talk you’ll want your parents or a lawyer.”

  “Now I’m a suspect?” she snapped, standing.

  “A person of interest,” he said.

  “Do you know who my father is?” she asked.

  “No,” he said calmly. “Tell me.”

  “Robert Heights,” she said.

  “And…?”

  “You don’t know who my father is?” she said, looking around the room for an unseen someone who could share with her this incredible moment in which she had encountered the one person in the civilized world who didn’t know who Robert Heights was.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” said Danny.

  “This is unbelievable,” she said. “My father is one of the ten greatest concert pianists who ever lived.”

  “That a fact?” said Danny.

  “This is…”

  “Want to tell me who killed Mr. Havel?”

  “I don’t know,” she shouted.

  “Have a nice day,” said Danny. “Stay dry.”

  Annette Heights, cute and petite and used to getting what she wanted when she flashed her father’s name, stalked out of the dining room.

  Lindsay almost collided with her as she left.

  “You didn’t make a great impression on the little lady,” she said, sitting across from Danny in the seat Annette had vacated.

  “The Messer charm failed me,” he said. “Girl’s father is Robert Heights.”

  “Really?”

  “Absolutely,” said Danny. “I saw him in Carnegie Hall last year. I’ve got two of his CDs if you ever want to come by and listen. Schumann, Beethoven. As good as it gets.”

  “I’ll borrow them,” she said.

  “They don’t leave my apartment. Too precious,” he said with a grin.

  “The girl?”

  “No blood on her hands,” he said.

  “But?”

  “She’s still a person of interest.”

  Stella scratched a bloody three-inch wound on her right ankle as she balanced her way toward the spot where Sheldon Hawkes had disappeared. She ignored the scratch, even though in some recess of her mind she knew she might have lost the ankle bracelet given to her by a friend, a friend she had thought might become more of a friend but hadn’t. She had given him up. Maybe it was time to give up the bracelet too.

  She was aware of Devlin moving past her.

  She was aware of the pain in her ankle.

  She was aware of the rain beating against her yellow disposable poncho with CSI FORENSIC LAB printed in black on the back.

  A few yards from the spot where she had last seen Hawkes, Devlin’s voice exploded, “Stop.”

  Stella stopped. She could hear fragments of plaster and wood tumbling into the hole she could now make out ahead of her.

  “Careful,” said Devlin, coming around the hole and touching her arm.

  Below them was a pit about the size of a giant truck tire. The hole was dark.

  “Hawkes,” Stella called.

  A light flashed on about ten feet down.

  “Here,” Hawkes said, his voice a damp echo.

  “We’ll get you out,” said Devlin. “Hang in there.”

  Devlin had a large flashlight in his hand. He turned it on, knelt, and cast the beam downward. More of what had once been the floor of Doohan’s slipped down into the hole.

  Devlin’s beam found Hawkes about a dozen feet below. The fireman cast the light along the inside of the hole and then back to Hawkes. Then he stood up and said softly to Stella, “He’s in a basement. Sides of this thing are loose. Could implode if we touch them and—”

  “Bury Hawkes,” said Stella.

  “It gets worse,” he said. “There’s a support beam down there. You can take a look. It’s on its side holding up a section of ceiling. It could go if we touch it.”

  By this time two more firemen had joined them at the hole.

  “It’ll be okay,” said Devlin. “What do I call him?”

  “Doctor Hawkes,” said Stella.

  “Doctor?”

  “He’s an MD,” she said.

  “Check,” said Devlin, motioning the other two firemen back. He leaned over near the hole and said, “Doctor Hawkes, we’ll rig something up. Don’t try to climb up and don’t touch that wooden beam to your left.”

  “Right,” said Hawkes. “How long will this take?”

  “Not sure,” said Devlin. “We can’t move too quickly. Anything we can do for you?”

  “Stop the rain,” Hawkes said. “I’m up to my ankles in water and it’s rising.”

  “How fast?” asked Devlin.

  “Not sure. I’m not worried about myself.”

  “What do you mean?” Stella called.

  “I’m not alone,” yelled Hawkes. “There’s a man trapped down here, with one of his legs pinned down by that beam.”

  “Alive?” asked Stella.

  “Alive.”

  “Is he on his stomach or back?”

  “His back.”

  “The water?” asked Stella.

  “To his armpits,” said Hawkes.

  Something shifted in t
he debris. Across from Stella and Devlin a small avalanche of rubble rumbled down the hole. It drummed against the concrete basement floor.

  “Hawkes, you all right?” Stella yelled.

  “I am. He isn’t.”

  “You have your kit?”

  “I don’t…yes. There it is.”

  Behind Stella, Devlin was giving orders to the other two firemen.

  “Can he talk?” asked Stella.

  Muffled sounds from below. A crack of thunder from the east.

  The two firemen hurried away, moving toward their truck parked on Catherine.

  “He can talk,” said Hawkes.

  Hawkes shined his flashlight on the face of the trapped man. He was white, probably in his late forties, lean, salt-and-pepper hair, military cut. He was wearing a leather jacket, now torn at the sleeve, and a drenched green turtleneck shirt.

  “You all right?” Hawkes asked the man.

  “Couldn’t be better,” said the man with a pained grin and a slight accent Hawkes couldn’t quite place. “Legs pinned down, water rising, world about to come down on my head. Who could ask for more?”

  “I’m a doctor,” said Hawkes, gently touching the man’s ribs and arms, and then his pinioned ankle. “Anything feel broken?”

  “Ankle, maybe.”

  “You’ve got a few lacerations and bruises, nothing serious. Did you hit your head?”

  “No, I always talk this way,” the man said. “Name is Connor Custus. Easy to remember. Hard to forget.”

  He held out his right hand. Hawkes took it. The two end fingers were missing. Hawkes could feel the rough calluses on the man’s palm.

  “Scottish?” asked Hawkes.

  “Australian,” said Custus. “I guess I really know the meaning of being down under now.”

  “We’ll get out. FDNY is working on it.” Hawkes reached for his kit and opened it.

  “How’s a doctor happen to be at the scene of an explosion?”

  “Crime Scene Investigation,” said Hawkes, carefully touching the man’s trapped right ankle, which was almost covered by water.

  Custus winced and bit his lower lip.

  Hawkes tried the other ankle. No reaction.

  “Right one broken?” asked Custus.

  “Yes,” said Hawkes.

  “Can you set it?”

  “I’d rather get you out of here first.”

  “The precarious state of this dungeon might make timely escape unlikely,” said Custus. “Edmond Dantès had more to work with than we have and he had the use of both legs and no rising water.”