Kill Again

by Neal Baer

  “But wait a minute,” Justine interrupted, refusing to let go. “There must’ve been a bullet hole in the car, in one of the windows, no?”

  Nick smiled again as he sat down; he was thoroughly enjoying this. “You’d think so. But that’s just it. There were no bullet holes in the car and no shattered windows. Anyone wanna guess why?”

  “The windows were open?” asked Wes Phelps.

  “Not windows,” said Nick. “Window. The right rear window. It’s the only way the bullet could’ve entered.”

  Miguel Colon turned to Cory with newfound respect. “You nailed it, Holmes,” he said, turning his eyes to Nick. “So this was a one-in-a-million shot?”

  “Yep,” Nick answered. “Now what’s the manner of death?”

  “Accidental,” Miguel stated.

  “In layman’s terms, you’d be right,” Nick told him. “But in legal terms, even back then the law prohibited firing guns anywhere in the city for any reason. The guy they eventually collared had fired the shot from a boat almost a mile offshore from where the girl was hit. He was testing an old rifle he found on board that he forgot he even had, to see if it would fire.”

  “And that’s the shot that killed the girl?” asked Leslie in amazement.

  “If the right rear window of her car had been closed, she’d be a grandmother now because the shot would’ve bounced right off it.”

  “Like how kids seem to be right in the path of stray bullets even though they’re in their apartments and the shot comes from outside and manages to find them,” said Miguel.

  “Yeah,” Nick said, moving again to the board and picking up the marker. “I’ve had more of those cases than I needed. But I don’t wanna get off track. The point is, and again, I’ll use murder as my example, theory of the crime is related to the manner of death but not the same thing. It’s exactly that, a theory. The why, if you will. Why is a question, and the answer almost always begins with because.” He wrote those two words on the board. “My job as a homicide detective was to figure out the why. Because the why almost always leads you in the direction of the who.” He put the marker down. “In the case we just discussed, the answer to why the girl died is because some asshole in a boat fired his rifle in the wrong direction. And look how long it took us to get to that because. In this case, the theory of the crime changed several times because the evidence continued pointing those cops in new directions almost every day. Is everyone with me so far?”

  The students answered by continuing to type on their laptops.

  “I’ll take that as a yes,” said Nick, as one by one, the class finished their notes and looked up at him.

  None of this was lost on Claire, who fought to hide her shock over Nick’s teaching prowess. Whether he knew it or not, he was a natural.

  “Let’s try something more recent,” Nick said, still in front of the board, as he chose a red marker from the assortment of available colors. “Anyone see the news yesterday or today?”

  Claire’s heart skipped. Like the skilled interrogator Nick was, he’d lulled these students into thinking this was just a class exercise. She knew this was the segue to the matter at hand.

  “You mean, locally or, like, around the world?” asked Wes.

  “Locally,” Nick replied. “Out in Brooklyn yesterday morning.”

  “The fire where that body was found,” Leslie guessed.

  “That’s it,” answered Nick. “We’re gonna do this one in real time, see how we can use what we’ve learned.” A chorus of laptop typing and clicks indicated the students were bringing up whatever they could find on their screens. “What do we know about this so far?”

  “Doesn’t look like much,” said Justine, who read from one article: “‘Police are calling the fire that destroyed an East New York apartment building a case of arson, and may add murder to the list after the discovery of a body in the building’s burned-out basement.’”

  “Okay. What’s the manner of death so far?” Nick quizzed.

  “How can we tell from this?” Justine asked, frustrated. “All they’re saying is that none of the people who lived there were missing. . . .”

  She stopped, realizing perhaps she’d broken through her own attention barrier. “The dead person didn’t live in the building,” she realized.

  “Excellent,” Nick complimented her. “So what’s the manner of death?”

  “Still impossible to determine,” Wes Phelps said. “For one thing, if the victim didn’t live there, what was he or she doing there to begin with?”

  “You’re on the right track,” Nick said. “Take that to the next step. If you were me and you were on this case, what possibilities would you consider?”

  “Well, that the victim either somehow wandered into the basement or was killed earlier and dumped there,” Wes offered.

  “That’s a good start. Anyone else?”

  “Wouldn’t we have to know how badly the victim was burned?” Cory asked.

  “Yes. And for the sake of argument, let’s assume the body was burned to a crisp. No usable DNA to have even a hope of an ID, unless the medical examiner can find some viable cells in the skeleton.”

  “I might start by checking out whether there’d been any similar arsons in the area or even the city,” Kara said.

  “Yes, and that’s a basic step we would take immediately in the investigation,” he said, writing similar arsons on the board. “In fact, the arson investigators, both NYPD and the fire department, would be on the scene. They’d know instantly if a crime like this rang any bells. No pun intended. But remember, we’re talking about the why. Why would this victim wander into this basement, if that’s what happened?”

  “I don’t think that’s how it went down,” Miguel stated.

  Nick put down the marker. “Tell me why,” he said.

  “Because there’s no way somebody just happens to wander into a building’s basement the same night some match lights the place up,” Miguel said, using cop slang for arsonist.

  “Just like there’s no way some poor girl gets shot in the head while driving sixty miles an hour on the Belt Parkway because some asshole’s in a boat. . . .”

  Nick stopped, seeing Miguel get the point and shake his head “no,” presumably at himself. “That was pretty dense of me, yo,” he admitted.

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” advised Nick. “Here’s the deal, folks. This work ain’t what you see on TV. Sometimes we find the perp in a day. Sometimes it takes forty years. And sometimes, as has happened, though fortunately not to yours truly, we collar the wrong person with the right evidence. And then we have to eat our own shit, pardon my expression, years later when we learn we screwed the pooch and put away an innocent person. You know when that’s most likely to happen?”

  It wasn’t a rhetorical question. He looked at the students intently for an answer but none of them wanted to venture a guess.

  “It’s most likely to happen when you get too focused on the who instead of the why. As in why would this person I like for this murder want to kill my victim? Or, the flip side: why is it possible even with the evidence, the person you suspect may not have done the crime?”

  “That’s reasonable doubt,” said Wes Phelps, the prosecutor wannabe.

  “Yes it is,” Nick said. “And reasonable doubt should begin with you as a cop, not with a jury, because by then it could be too late. But in a case like this one, you can never know the why without knowing who the victim is. So let’s say the remains go to the medical examiner, who finds some viable cells for DNA, but can’t come up with a full sequence. What’s the next step?”

  “I’d run it through the system anyway,” said Leslie.

  “Why?” asked Nick. “You’d get nothing back.”

  “Unless I ran it with a lower percentage match,” she returned. “Maybe I’d get lucky and pick up a family member whose DNA is in the database, like a brother or mother, and that person could lead me to the victim. Like how they caught that Grim Sleeper dude in LA.�
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  “Excellent idea,” Nick said, writing CHECK FAMILIAL DNA on the board. “But what if we did that and still couldn’t ID the victim?”

  “Wait a minute,” Cory said, staring at the board. “If we have DNA, we must know the sex of the victim, right?”

  “Yes,” Nick said, trying to move things along, “and let’s assume it’s a male. How does that help us?”

  “Not much,” Kara answered, “unless there’s someone in the neighborhood who mysteriously vanished overnight.”

  Claire was bursting at the seams, wanting to join the conversation but holding her tongue. Nick could see this, which only added to his frustration.

  “Okay,” he said, about to go out on a limb from which he hoped not to be hung later. “We can’t ID the victim, so let’s assume the body was dumped by the same person who then started the fire.”

  “Wow,” said Cory. “Some freakazoid who’d burn down a building full of innocent people just to cover up a murder?”

  “It’s happened before,” Nick assured him. “The Jamaican drug gangs in South Ozone Park back in the eighties would kill anything that breathed to protect their businesses or send a message that they were not to be screwed with.”

  “But we’re talking about seventy people living there,” Cory pressed. “To me that adds up to a righteous psycho.”

  “If there could ever be such a thing,” Justine whined, again intimating Cory was a moron.

  “Okay,” Nick prompted. “I’d probably think the same.” He wrote righteous psycho on the board as Cory, empowered by his newfound bravado, took a swig of coffee. “If we’re talking psycho, where would you turn next?”

  “Honestly?” asked Wes Phelps. “I’d bring in the FBI.”

  “You wouldn’t wanna close the case yourself?”

  “Sure I would,” Wes explained. “But the FBI has people who specialize in this stuff, the profiling. And if you’ve already exhausted your local resources—say, there’s nothing in your databases with anything like this—then you take the next step, don’t you?”

  Nick turned to the board, shaking his head yes, and wrote FBI/ FEDS. “This might not be our first choice, as the relationship between the NYPD and the FBI isn’t the best,” he said as he finished writing. “But your classmate is correct. Not pooling resources is what prevented us from possibly stopping the September eleventh attacks. If you have the information and you’re at a dead end, you share it. It’s a lot like life itself, folks. Whatever you put out there comes back to you, many times in ways you never expect.”

  He noticed Professor McClure giving him the high sign that it was time to wrap things up.

  “Detective Lawler will be back next week with Doctor Waters,” he said to the class. Then, to Nick and Claire, he asked, “Is there anything you’d like our friends here to do in preparation?”

  “Yes,” said Claire, now standing. “Cory, you asked who would risk more than seventy lives to cover up the murder of one person. I’d like you all to go with that scenario and write down what kind of person would do that, like a profile of sorts. As if you were the behavioral science folks at Quantico. Let your minds wander and jot down all your thoughts. Remember, there are no stupid or wrong ideas.”

  “Let’s give it up for Detective Lawler,” McClure said, and the class broke into enthusiastic and sincere, if abbreviated applause. “Thanks for waking us up, Nick.”

  As the students stood up loading laptops into backpacks, Claire glanced out the window. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear.

  McClure walked up to her and Nick. “You’re a natural up there,” McClure said to Nick, “and they’re always looking for adjuncts with your experience. Ever thought about teaching part time?”

  Claire turned to Nick, anxious to hear his answer. Maybe this was a path he could take when his eyesight got worse. And I wouldn’t mind working with him, she thought.

  “I’ve done some classes at the academy in homicide investigation,” Nick said, “but I’m not handing in my papers just yet. When I’m ready to take the plunge, though, you’re my first call.”

  “Thanks for the great class,” McClure said, shaking Nick’s hand. He picked up his soft leather briefcase. “See you here next week. Same bat time, same bat channel,” he quipped as he went through the door, leaving Claire and Nick alone.

  “You did a great job,” Claire said. But you’d never know it from the look on Nick’s face. “What’s wrong?”

  “It was a waste of our time,” he said.

  “We got them going,” she argued.

  “Other than a half-assed part-time job offer, we got nothing. And we don’t have time to wait for next week.”

  Claire wasn’t so sure. “Maybe that kid Wes is right. We should go to the FBI.”

  Nick wheeled on her. “‘We’ already did.”

  “Is that right?” Claire said, a hint of anger in her tone.

  “It’s one of the first things we’d do in cases like this.”

  She looked away from him so he wouldn’t see the anger on her face. He knew what fueled it.

  “No, I don’t tell you everything,” he confirmed for her. “But Wilkes called a friend of his over at the New York field office and had him check. There’s not a lot the behavioral science gang at Quantico hasn’t seen in the way of serial killers. The one guy they collared for something similar is doing life in Leavenworth. And just for the record, I don’t have to tell you everything and you’re just gonna have to accept that.”

  Claire turned back, acceptance on her face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “When I get like this it’s not directed at you. I’m just thinking about Rosa.”

  Her words softened Nick. “Don’t worry about it.”

  That afternoon they sat at the kitchen table in Nick’s apartment, his laptop open as he typed furiously. “You’re right, that class wasn’t a waste of time,” he said. “Seeing those students on their computers got me thinking.”

  “Are you going to clue me in at some point?” Claire asked him.

  “Sure. I realized we didn’t go far enough with the FBI and that there was a wider ‘net’ to be cast. The Internet,” he said. “Just because this guy did it before and disappeared doesn’t mean he was doing time here or even just evaded capture and lived happily ever after somewhere in Kansas like BTK.”

  “BTK was caught,” Claire reminded him, referring to the infamous serial killer in Wichita who’d evaded arrest for years until finally being captured in 2005.

  “He also took long breaks between murders,” Nick observed. “One of them was almost eight years.”

  Claire came around the table and looked over his shoulder at the screen as he typed human bones boiled into Google’s search engine and hit Enter. The results came up and Claire read them aloud. “I don’t believe this. Instruction manuals for boiling human bones? The Church of Euthanasia? History of cannibalism?”

  “Easy,” exclaimed Nick. “We’re only on the first page.”

  “Click to the next page,” she said.

  “Jesus,” Nick muttered. “Give me a break.” But he did it.

  Claire’s eye caught a line about halfway down the next page. She pointed and read. “Right there. ‘Bones discovered on the beach were believed to be those of Martha Palmer. . . .’ Click on that one.”

  “I am,” Nick said, doing it.

  Up on screen appeared a newspaper article from an English-language newspaper published in Costa Rica called the Tico Times, with a photo of a beautiful, middle-aged woman.

  “It’s from 2009,” Nick observed. “Says here that the bones were found too far up on the beach to have washed ashore and were laid out as if someone put them there to dry in the sun.”

  “Does it say anything about boiling?”

  “I’m getting there,” Nick retorted. “Here we go. ‘Police officials say the yellowish color to the bones indicate they may have been boiled prior to being placed on the beach.’”

  Claire was getting discouraged. “One mu
rder from ’09 in another country does not a pattern make,” she lamented.

  “It’s worth a call to the Costa Rican police,” Nick replied.

  “We may not need that,” Claire said, her eyes a few lines further into the article than Nick’s.

  “What are you reading?” he asked.

  “About why Martha Palmer’s murder was such a big deal. Her husband, Victor Palmer, once was the owner of the resort.”

  Nick wasn’t biting. “If my wife was found butchered on my property, I might sell it too,” he observed. “Doesn’t mean anything.”

  “But definitely worth making that call after all,” urged Claire.

  “We can do it from the office,” Nick said, closing the laptop. “Instead of running up my phone bill.”

  “Let me hit the restroom first,” Claire said.

  She left the kitchen and walked down the hallway, past framed photos of Nick with his arms around Jill and Katie, several years younger. All were smiling broadly, standing in front of a cabin in what looked like the Adirondacks. She wondered if Jenny, Nick’s wife who’d committed suicide in this very apartment two years earlier, had snapped the photo.

  After completing her business in the small, rarely used powder room, Claire washed her hands in the sink and noticed the wallpaper, a faded sky blue studded with small silver stars. She realized that lately she’d been analyzing the apartment, looking for clues not only about Nick’s preferences, but also to learn more about his mother, who’d lived here for forty years before recently passing away. Nick and the girls had lived with her for the two years after Jenny died, until her own sudden death.

  Claire also noticed, when she turned off the faucet, that the toilet was still running. Her physicist father had taught her to be handy around the house. She knew how to unclog a drain, caulk a bathtub, and fix a running toilet.

  When she lifted the porcelain lid off the tank, it was heavier than it should have been. One look underneath revealed why: a package, wrapped in dark plastic, was duct-taped to the underside. From its triangular shape she knew it held a gun.

  Her anger rose to the surface. Nick had sworn to Wilkes he’d turned in all his guns. To be caught with this one would mean the end of his job for sure.