by Neal Baer
“Anyone beside me smell bleach?” Nick said, detecting an odor that, as far as he knew, wasn’t found in nature.
Wilkes shook his head. “Only thing I’m sniffin’ is burnt wood.”
“No, he’s right. I smell it too,” said Aitken. “And when we get closer I’ll bet we’ll find our guy used it to clean those pots.”
Chief Dolan needed no prodding to say what they all suspected. “Only reason to clean with bleach is to remove any trace of human remains. Get rid of the DNA.”
“He did more than clean,” Aitken said, pointing to where the clearing and the tire tracks ended. “Look at the ground just past the end of the tire impressions. It’s all unnaturally matted in a perfect square.”
“He must’ve laid out a plastic tarp,” Savarese suggested.
“A big one,” Aitken said in agreement. “So that when he cut up the body he wouldn’t leave anything behind.”
Indeed, thought Nick, the spot in the woods looked completely out of place. Like it had been sterilized. A small piece of order that didn’t belong in this chaos of nature.
“I don’t know how you do that without leaving a shitload of blood,” said Wilkes.
“If I had to guess, I’d say he drained the blood somewhere else,” Aitken answered.
“So we’re thinking this whack job cuffs our victim, kills her, then brings her out here and cooks her,” mused Chief Dolan. “Why?”
“To get the meat off her bones,” said Nick from a few yards behind them, farther into the woods, leaning against a maple tree. None of them noticed that Nick had wandered off.
“Nicky, you okay?” Savarese said, heading toward Nick, who appeared to be using the tree to hold himself up.
“You know how when you put a chicken in a pot to make soup, when the soup’s done the meat just slides off the bones? That’s what our guy did here,” Nick said as Savarese reached him.
“You think whoever this sick bastard is cut this woman up, boiled her to get the meat off the bones, and made a meal out of her?” asked Savarese.
“No, he either threw the meat into the fire or disposed of it elsewhere.”
“Nicky?” Wilkes asked as he approached with Aitken and Dolan.
“Fresh Kills is only a few miles from here,” said Nick, the simmering anger in his voice apparent as he referred to the infamous, ironically named landfill on Staten Island’s west shore. “But he couldn’t get the fire to two-thousand degrees, which is what it takes to incinerate bones. . . .”
Savarese put a hand on Nick’s shoulder. He turned to face the group, his complexion pale. “Jesus, Nicky, what the hell? You look like you just saw a ghost,” said Savarese.
“I did,” Nick replied, his voice shaking. “My father’s.”
“You’re not making any sense,” Wilkes said. “What does your father have to do with this?”
“He had a case just like it,” answered Nick. “When I was ten. He told me all about it, much later. Sonuvabitch killed women and cooked them. Gave me nightmares for years.” He looked at Savarese, who removed his hand from Nick’s shoulder. “I’m okay, Tony.”
“Here’s what we’re gonna do,” the chief said to Aitken. “Call Captain Lumer,” Dolan continued, referring to Aitken’s boss, “and tell him I want as many teams as he thinks he can spare out here. Pull them in on overtime if necessary.”
He turned to Wilkes. “I think Nick’s right on the money. We’re gonna proceed on the assumption that this lunatic snatched Rosa Sanchez off the street, killed her and drained her blood somewhere else, and possibly dismembered her. We’re gonna get this scene photographed, picked up, and processed back at the lab as quick as possible, even if it takes us all night. But we’re gonna do it on the down-low. If the media gets wind of this and we’ve got reporters all over the place asking questions, the whack job who did this is gonna know we’re onto him. That’s the last thing we want.”
Wilkes spoke up. “All due respect, Chief; we bring a fleet of Crime Scene vans past those houses, we’re not gonna keep this under wraps for too long.”
Dolan had his smartphone out and was viewing a map on its screen. “Looks like the dirt road continues north and dead-ends in Amboy Avenue. Not a lot of houses up there, so we’ll bring our personnel in that way. Tony, you’ll supervise the operation,” he said to Savarese.
“You got it, Chief,” replied the detective sergeant.
“What about us?” asked Wilkes, including Nick in the package.
“We’re flying back to headquarters,” said Dolan to Nick. “And once we’re there you’re gonna tell us what your father was talking about.”
CHAPTER 7
An hour and a silent, uncomfortable helicopter trip back to headquarters later, Nick, Wilkes, and Dolan sat at the well-kept, walnut-stained conference table in the ornate, oak-paneled conference room adjacent to Dolan’s private office. The room was a tribute to its predecessor, the old conference room in the previous, historic headquarters building at 240 Centre Street. It was just the three of them. What had happened in those Staten Island woods and what was about to be discussed was for the ears of these men only. Nick took a silent but deep breath and began.
“Back in seventy-seven my father was working a sector car in the Six-nine,” he said, referring to the police precinct covering the Canarsie section of Brooklyn. “He’d just started an eight-to-four tour and Central sends him on a nonemergency run to a two-family over on East Eightieth Street. When he gets there, the homeowner shows him a mound of dirt in his grass where someone had dug a hole during the night and then filled it back in.”
Nick stopped, as if waiting for a response. Neither Dolan nor Wilkes had one, their faces signaling the only thing they wanted was more information.
“So,” continued Nick, “Dad takes a look and tells the guy it seems like whoever did it buried something there, and asks if it’s okay to dig it up again. The guy says sure, go ahead, but he doesn’t have a shovel. So Dad calls the sergeant to bring a couple over from the precinct. Once Dad and his partner start digging, they get only about a foot down when they hit something hard. They clear away the dirt and see the top of a burlap sack. Dad reaches in and next thing he knows, he’s got a human skull in his hands with a bullet hole in it. So while he goes out to the street and loses his breakfast, his partner and the sergeant call for help. Forensics and the medical examiner show up and get the bag outta the ground. When they look inside it’s full of human bones.”
Nick’s eyes landed on Wilkes and Dolan, and it was clear he had their attention. Wilkes’s face, though, was twisted into something quizzical, as if trying to squeeze from the sponge that was his brain a memory that didn’t exist. “Why don’t I remember this?” he asked. “I was on the job then.”
“Because it happened on August first,” Nick replied. “The day after David Berkowitz shot his last two victims over in Bath Beach. My father even said it to me later, that the bag of bones never made the papers ’cause all anyone gave a shit about back then was Son of Sam.”
“Jesus,” Dolan said, a pained expression crossing his face that Nick hadn’t seen before on this man.
“You okay, Chief?” Nick asked.
“Just keep going,” Dolan replied.
“Okay,” said Nick, “so the ME checks out the bones and tells my father that by the size of the pelvic girdle, he could say the victim was a woman. Then, the next night, the exact same thing happens two blocks away. A bag of some poor woman’s bones turns up buried on some other poor schmuck’s front lawn. I’ll never forget it. Dad came home and drank himself nearly into a coma. He started calling the perp ‘the Butcherman.’ Dad couldn’t understand what kind of monster would kill someone, dismember them, and then boil them to get the meat off their bones. . . .”
“Wait a minute,” Wilkes interjected. “The ME knew the bones were boiled?”
“Yeah, both victims. I don’t remember how the ME knew,” Nick replied. “We’ll have to pull the files if we can find them. Thing is,
” Nick concluded, “every cop in town was looking for Berkowitz, so the bones cases got put on the back burner. The victims were never identified and no one ever collared the perp. And far as my father knew, it never happened again.”
Chief Dolan’s expression hadn’t changed, and now he sat wearily back in his seat. As if he’d put two and two together and it added up to six.
“He was right,” said the chief in a heavy voice. “It didn’t happen again. But it happened before.”
Nick and Wilkes locked eyes, both covering their shock in respect to their boss. “Uh, Chief,” said Wilkes, “you mind telling us what you’re talking about and when it happened?”
“About a month before what Lawler just told you,” the chief said, straightening himself up. “I was a rookie in the One-Twelve in Forest Hills, and some dog dug up a bunch of bones in Flushing Meadows Park. They kept me on overtime to stand guard in the rain at the crime scene. I don’t even know if the detectives looked into it. We were the only precinct in the city where Berkowitz struck twice. Nobody cared about anything else.”
“Was that victim ever identified?” asked Nick.
“I don’t think so, and as a rookie I knew better than to ask,” Dolan answered. The comment sounded ironic, given his position now. “I don’t remember if I ever knew about the bones in Brooklyn.”
“Well, someone’s gonna remember them,” Wilkes warned.
The chief’s ringing cell phone interrupted.
“Hold that thought—it’s Savarese,” said Dolan, answering. “Tony, I’m with Wilkes and Lawler and you’re on speaker. What’s going on out there?”
“Nothing good,” came Savarese’s voice through the crappy speaker. “Aitken says there isn’t a trace of a dead body on any of these pots or around the campsite,” he said.
“How can he know that so fast?” Wilkes growled.
“Because the cadaverine gas from the corpse would have attracted a shitload of flies and animals and there’s no tracks or anything else to indicate they’ve been here. We’re gonna keep looking, but if whoever left all this stuff really did cook some woman, he did a helluva job cleaning up.”
“Let us know if anything changes,” said Dolan, ending the call and looking down at the table.
“Okay, guys, what now?” he asked. “If a body’s cooked in the forest and no one can find a trace of it, is the person really dead?” It was a rhetorical question. They all believed Rosa Sanchez was, in fact, a murder victim.
“Only way to know for sure is to find those bones,” Nick said.
“And how are we gonna do that?” Wilkes asked.
“Assuming it’s the same guy from thirty-five years ago,” Nick postulated, “we should look where he left the other ones.”
Dolan eyed him like he’d lost his mind. “If it is the same guy,” he said, “you can’t think he’d be that stupid.”
But Nick was undeterred. “He was stupid enough to leave Rosa’s cell phone on,” Nick replied. “Meaning he wasn’t stupid at all. He wanted us to find his campsite. That’s why I think he wants us to find the bones too. I think it’s worth a try.”
They drove across Brooklyn to the Canarsie neighborhood where the last two bags of bones had been found.
Chief Dolan stayed in his car on the phone while Wilkes and Nick walked four blocks up East Eightieth Street looking for freshly dug-up ground. But it was apparent no bodies had been buried in the neighborhood. They saw a radio car from the 69th Precinct parked at the curb on the next block, the cops inside appearing to be writing up paperwork.
“This is nuts,” Wilkes said to Nick, gesturing him to turn around before the cops spotted them. “Anyone sees the chief of detectives out here, they’re gonna know something’s up,” he growled as they hurried back to their own car.
“Let’s go to the next stop,” Nick suggested.
“Screw that,” said Wilkes as he removed his suit jacket, not caring about exposing the nine-millimeter Glock holstered on his belt. The heat was clearly getting to him. “I’m gonna recommend to the chief we send a radio car out to that spot in Flushing Meadows Park and see if anyone dug up the ground. We don’t have to tell the cops why.”
A short whoop from the siren on Chief Dolan’s department-issued Chevy Tahoe cut him off. Wilkes and Nick ran the remaining block back to where the Tahoe was parked.
“What’s up, Chief?” Wilkes panted as he climbed behind the wheel, breathless.
Dolan was busy shouting into the radio mic. “No, Central, have patrol seal off the street and wait for our arrival. No one goes into or out of that block before I get there.”
“Ten-four,” came the dispatcher’s voice.
“Where we going?” asked Nick, barely in his seat before Wilkes threw the Tahoe in gear and stomped on the gas.
“South Bronx,” the chief shouted over the din of the siren. “Coupla sanitation guys dumped a garbage can from a street corner and a bag full of bones fell into their truck.”
CHAPTER 8
There was no easy way to get from Canarsie to Yankee Stadium. Wilkes chose surface streets to avoid the Belt Parkway’s perennial construction backups. He maneuvered the Tahoe up Pennsylvania Avenue through Brownsville and East New York, still two of the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of the city. They were also the city’s most neglected, pothole-ridden streets. Between the bumps, the blare of the siren, and the decrepit buildings passing by his tunnel vision, Nick found himself with a raging headache and almost got carsick.
The stop-and-go traffic didn’t help; Brooklyn drivers rarely pulled over for a cop or fire truck on an emergency run to begin with. Add in air-conditioning and music at full blast with the windows closed, and most drivers wouldn’t even hear the siren until it was right on top of them. If even then.
When they hit the Jackie Robinson Parkway, the pavement and the ride smoothed out and the traffic dissipated. Wilkes gunned the Tahoe onto the Grand Central Parkway, hitting eighty on the speedometer as they flew past Flushing Meadows Park, Citi Field, and LaGuardia Airport. They came to a dead stop on the RFK Bridge because of an accident, and Wilkes’s cursing the hapless livery cab driver who’d changed lanes into a Toyota Camry didn’t help Nick’s headache. Neither did the fear that the crime scene to which they headed would be contaminated by the time they got there.
Nearly an hour had passed before they hit the Deegan Expressway in the city’s northernmost borough. Only when he saw Yankee Stadium come into view did the throbbing in Nick’s head begin to subside. Wilkes sped the chief’s Tahoe down Walton Avenue, past the Bronx courthouse, and brought it to a stop in front of several radio cars parked at odd angles in front of 157th Street, closing it off to traffic.
As he sprung from the Tahoe with Wilkes and Dolan, Nick’s earlier fears subsided as well. It was what wasn’t there that soothed him: no medical examiner’s van, no Crime Scene Unit vehicle. Chief Dolan’s orders were being carried out to the letter. Only the garbage truck sat there, its two spooked sanitation workers standing with four uniformed police officers who made sure nobody crossed past their patrol cars.
Other than the fact that the street was closed off, no bystanders seemed to care. When anyone asked what was going on, the officers said what Dolan had instructed them: “Checking out a water main. No danger.”
Nick pulled out the chain holding his detective’s shield and hung it around his neck. It was the first time in almost a year he’d been to a crime scene, and though this was serious business, he suppressed a grin. He was back on the streets, back in the game. He followed Chief Dolan and Wilkes as they strode to the rear of the garbage truck and looked inside the hopper.
In front of them, atop a mound of garbage, was a large burlap sack. Human bones protruded from a tear on the side. It stank but Nick barely noticed. He’d smelled many a decomposing body in his time, and to him rotting garbage was a walk in the park.
Chief Dolan kept a poker face as he turned to the patrol cops, all young, all humbled, and perhaps even scared fac
ing a commander of Dolan’s rank.
“Who was first on the scene?” the chief asked.
Two of the uniforms raised their hands, and Dolan motioned them over. “Did you see what was in that truck?” he asked.
“Yessir,” answered one of the cops, whose name plate read Singh.
“Did anyone else? Besides the two sanitation guys?”
“No, Chief,” replied the other cop, Hammond. “Orders were not to let anyone near here. Even the sergeant didn’t see it.”
“Did you fill out sixty-ones?” asked the chief, referring to the standard police report form number.
“We were told to wait for you,” said Officer Singh.
Dolan nodded, satisfied the cops had indeed done what he’d wanted. “Here’s the deal,” he began. “The sanitation guys told you what they thought they saw. You responded to the job on the radio and when you got here you took a look yourselves. You weren’t sure what you were looking at, so you’re impounding the vehicle. And by my order, the Detective Bureau will take over from here. We understand each other?”
“You got it, Chief,” said Officer Hammond. Dolan pulled a notepad from his pocket. “I’m writing down your names and shield numbers,” he said as he wrote. “Do like I say, keep this quiet, and I’ll personally make sure you’re taken care of.”
Both officers knew what that meant: as long as they followed the chief’s orders, he’d put them on his list for assignment to a detective squad. “Now,” Dolan said, finishing, “we need this truck towed to the pound and the two sanitation guys brought downtown to my office. Tell your sergeant I asked you to do that yourselves, and if he has any questions he can talk to me directly.”
“Sergeant’s a she, sir, but we’ll tell her,” said Officer Singh, and the two of them gestured the shocked sanitation workers to follow as they headed off to their radio car to carry out the orders. When they were out of earshot, Dolan turned back to Wilkes. “We’ll have Crime Scene come over in their unmarked van and get the garbage can,” the chief said. “They can meet us at the pound along with the ME to empty the truck.”
