The Cutting mm-1

by James Hayman

  ‘Christ, no. They give you this crap at the shelter. It’s stuff nobody else wants.’

  Lacey seemed coherent enough. McCabe glanced at Maggie, who flipped open a mini recording device.

  ‘This is Detective Margaret Savage, Portland, Maine, Police Department. The time is 9:54 P.M., September 16, 2005. The following is an interview recorded in a vacant lot off Somerset Street, Portland, Maine, between Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe, also of the Portland PD, and Mr. Dennis Lacey, residing at… Mr. Lacey, can you tell us where you live?’

  ‘Wherever I can doss down.’

  McCabe began. ‘Would you tell us what you saw tonight?’

  ‘I didn’t have nothing to do with it.’

  ‘We don’t believe you did,’ McCabe said as gently as he could. ‘We just need to know what you saw to help us find whoever did do it.’

  Lacey looked at McCabe as if trying to gauge to what degree he could be trusted. He finally shrugged and began speaking. ‘Aw, jeez, it was awful.’ McCabe could hear traces of a brogue under the man’s slur, its lilting rhythms reminding him of his own Irish grandparents. ‘Warm nights like this,’ Lacey said, ‘I sometimes sneak into the scrap yard. Just to sit. Look at the stars. Have a few drinks. Read a few poems. If I can afford it, maybe I bring something to eat.’

  ‘You read poems?’ Maggie asked. ‘What poems would those be?’

  Lacey reached into his back pocket and pulled out a dirty, well-worn paperback copy of Yeats. He handed it to Maggie. ‘I’m a sailor,’ he said, slurring his words only a little. ‘Able seaman… or I was. Not so able anymore. I spent lot of nights at sea staring at the stars, did a lot of reading.’

  ‘You read Yeats?’ she asked.

  ‘Him and a few of the other Irish poets. I like the sound of the old words,’ he said. ‘These days, I’m all alone, y’know, and words are my only company. Nobody bothers me here or tells me to shut my yap.’

  Lacey began to recite, stumbling over only a few of the words. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade…

  As the words came out, the cops all stared at Lacey. McCabe, too. Maybe McCabe most of all. When the old sailor paused, searching his memory, McCabe waited a moment and then filled in Yeats’s next line. And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow…

  ‘So you know old William Butler, do ya?’ said Lacey. ‘Unusual for a cop.’

  McCabe smiled. ‘Unusual for a sailor. Now, can you tell me when you first saw the girl?’

  ‘I didn’t see her at first. Didn’t see nothin’. Not till I got up to take a leak, which I did against that pile of scrap over there. I was just zipping up and I noticed something a little ways off. I walked closer and there she is. All cut up. It’s a terrible thing, y’know. A terrible thing.’

  ‘How long were you there before you had to take your leak?’ asked McCabe.

  ‘Not long. Twenty minutes.’ Lacey shrugged. ‘Maybe less.’

  ‘So you got here around eight thirty?’

  ‘Aw, jeez, I dunno. I don’t have no watch or nothin’. It was dark.’

  ‘Did you see anything else near the body?’

  ‘Something else? Like what?’

  ‘Like maybe a knife or a razor?’

  ‘Nah. Nothing like that.’

  ‘Or maybe some jewelry?’

  ‘What kind of jewelry?’

  ‘Any kind. Like maybe a gold earring you thought you could get a few bucks for?’

  ‘No. I didn’t see nothing. Or take nothing. I just wished I had something to cover her up with. She was lyin’ there exposed to the whole world.’

  ‘You didn’t touch her?’

  ‘No, I didn’t touch her or nothing else either.’ He pulled a pint bottle of whiskey from the sagging pocket of his pants. ‘D’ya mind if I finish what little’s left here?’ There was perhaps an inch of amber liquid in the bottle.

  McCabe silently nodded assent. He wouldn’t have minded a little himself. ‘What kinds of cars were parked nearby?’ McCabe gestured to the curb, where the techs were checking for tire tread marks and other evidence.

  ‘Didn’t see no cars. Maybe some driving by, but none that were parked.’

  ‘Any that slowed down? Any you could identify?’

  ‘Just cars going along. You couldn’t see what kind of cars they were.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr. Lacey.’ McCabe looked up and noticed a couple of reporters had arrived, including a crew from the local NBC affiliate.

  ‘Hey, McCabe. Remember me? Josie Tenant, News Center 6. We heard the Dubois girl was found murdered here. Can you give us a statement?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’ McCabe turned away.

  ‘C’mon, McCabe. Is it Dubois in there or isn’t it?’

  Media relations weren’t McCabe’s strong suit. He turned to face her. ‘Look, Josie, this is an active crime scene. I’m not entirely sure how you got here so fast, but it would really be helpful if you kept your folks on the other side of Somerset. We’re still trying to collect evidence.’ Tenant and her cameraman reluctantly retreated to their van. The other reporters followed.

  McCabe turned to Comisky, the cop who’d found Lacey. ‘Kevin, would you take Mr. Lacey down to 109? If Detective Sturgis is around, see if he’d be kind enough to take the rest of Mr. Lacey’s statement. Otherwise, I’ll do it when I get back.’ To Lacey he added, ‘Make sure you let us know where we can find you. Here’s a card with my number on it. We may have to talk to you again. Do you understand?’

  ‘Aye, aye, Captain.’ He threw McCabe a shaky salute and staggered toward Comisky’s car. ‘Canadian whiskey’s not so bad, y’know,’ he said, looking sadly at his now empty bottle. ‘It’s not Irish, but it’s not bad.’ The homeless man climbed unsteadily into the back of the car.

  Before Comisky could follow, McCabe said softly, ‘Make sure you check his pockets for a gold earring or anything else he might have picked up here.’

  The patrol officer nodded, slid behind the wheel, turned the key, and opened all four windows before starting off.

  Bill Jacobi and Terri Mirabito were completing their tasks. There didn’t seem to be much more McCabe could do. He approached one of the other uniformed patrol officers. ‘Keep the reporters out until the body’s picked up and the area’s clear — and don’t listen to any of their bullshit.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Sergeant. I’ve heard it all before.’

  McCabe and Maggie Savage got into Maggie’s Crown Vic for the short ride back to the office. ‘Do you want to join Sturgis interviewing Lacey?’ McCabe asked.

  ‘No. There’s no way he’s the killer. I’m sure Carl can get whatever else there is to get. I just hope he doesn’t start doing his bullying Carl shit. Lacey’s got enough problems already.’

  ‘Well, Maggie, that’s very thoughtful of you. Maybe, instead of interviewing Lacey, we should just get him a bottle of Jameson’s and ask him to read us some more Yeats.’

  Maggie didn’t laugh. ‘You know, McCabe, I love you dearly, but sometimes you’re really an asshole,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I called Katie’s mother and stepfather when I saw the news van pull up. I didn’t want them hearing about their daughter’s death from News Center 6. So I told them, as gently as I could, that I thought we’d found her and that we needed to talk to them again.’

  ‘How’d they take it?’

  ‘About what you’d expect. The mother broke down sobbing. Couldn’t talk. Just wanted to know if I was sure it was Katie. I told her I was, and she put the stepfather on the phone. He was quieter. They agreed to come downtown and talk to me when I told him how important starting fast could be on cases like this. We’ll see if maybe they can remember anything new.’

  ‘Okay. Just drop me off. I want to take another look at the missing persons file on Katie. Then I’m going to hit the computer. See if anybody’s reported anythin
g similar.’

  Maggie pulled into the curb in front of 109 Middle Street, the PPD’s small headquarters building on the edge of the Old Port.

  ‘You’ve got the world-famous memory. Anything ring a bell?’

  McCabe didn’t answer. He just sat staring out the windshield. A few raindrops were splattering against the glass. Why the hell would anybody neatly and precisely cut a girl’s heart out of her body? Sexual nutcase? Some kind of anatomical collector filling his trophy case?

  ‘McCabe?’

  He looked at her and nodded, almost imperceptibly. ‘I do remember something,’ he said.

  ‘D’ya want to share it?’ she asked.

  ‘Let me check it out first. I also want to set up appointments with a couple of the cardiac surgeons up at Cumberland Med. Find out what it takes to cut out somebody’s heart.’

  ‘Think this could be the start of a serial string?’ Maggie asked as McCabe exited the car.

  McCabe turned back and leaned in the open window. ‘I don’t know. It’s sure got the earmarks.’

  The streets were emptier now. As McCabe walked toward the building, he could feel that the air had become noticeably cooler, the first hint of the coming autumn and the dark winter that lay beyond.

  3

  Friday. 10:30 P.M.

  Two foam cups partially filled with cold coffee greeted McCabe at his desk. He checked his messages. There were two from his boss, Lieutenant Bill Fortier. In the first, Fortier delivered fair warning that Chief Tom Shockley was going to take a personal interest in this case. In the second, he asked McCabe to set up a detectives’ meeting for the morning to organize the investigation. Finally, there was one from the great man himself, Portland Police Chief Thomas H. Shockley. ‘Hey, Mike. It’s Tom Shockley. We need to talk about Dubois ASAP. I’m giving a speech at a fund-raiser tonight. I can fend off the press until tomorrow, but then I need a complete update. Meantime, don’t talk to the media. I’ll handle that. Give me a call at home tomorrow A.M. You’ve got the number.’

  McCabe knew Shockley liked making any and all public statements on major cases himself. He thought he was better at it than anyone else in the department, and that was probably true. Shockley was a political animal, and McCabe knew that could be useful even in a small city like Portland. Still, it amazed him how much the chief loved looking at himself on the tube.

  As usual, McCabe’s desk was a chaos of paper, none of it critical and all of it irrelevant to the Dubois case. He swept it, in a batch, into the left-hand drawer of his desk. The important stuff, files from a couple of ongoing cases, was already locked safely in the right-hand drawer on top of a pair of Casey’s ski mittens. The background on the Dubois case wasn’t among it.

  He pulled the missing persons file on Katie Dubois and brought it back to his desk. He’d read it once, but he wanted to go over it more carefully now that he knew for sure her death was a homicide. As he sat, he glanced at Casey’s mischievous face, age seven, beaming up at him from within the confines of a metal picture frame. The simple fact that Casey was now just a couple of years younger than the girl dumped in the scrap yard somehow made this case more personal. Not more important. Just more personal.

  McCabe opened the file. Right up front were three digital photos of Katie Dubois, alive. The first was a family shot from her last birthday. He checked Date Of Birth on her personal info data form. The birthday was two months earlier, July 14. In the picture Katie looked even prettier than he’d thought. She was sitting in front of a big white cake with two candles on it in the shape of a one and a six. Sweet sixteen. Her lips formed an exaggerated pucker, mugging for the camera, ready to blow out the candles. He wondered what she’d wished for. Whatever it was, it wasn’t what she got.

  The second picture was the one they posted around town and gave to the media. A formal close-up, it had a Sears Portrait Studio look about it. The third one showed Katie, wearing a Portland High School soccer uniform, standing on the field with her mother. Probably just after a game. Other players and fans could be seen in the background. Both mother and daughter were smiling a little stiffly as if someone had asked them to say ‘cheese.’ Katie’s mother, Joanne Ceglia, looked younger than McCabe expected, probably under forty. Reddish blond hair. Freckles. He checked the file for her maiden name. O’Leary. He thought as much. A McCabe will always recognize an O’Leary. She had the same shaped face and mouth as Katie. There was a similarity in the eyes as well, but the energetic, fresh-faced prettiness of the daughter was gone from the mother.

  He put the photos back and skimmed the file summary of the missing persons report. He’d read it before, and there wasn’t much that stood out. Katie was Joanne Ceglia’s only child. Katie’s father, Louis Dubois, was a commercial fisherman who’d drowned ten years back when the trawler he was working on capsized in an ice storm off the Georges Bank. All hands were lost, Dubois’s body never recovered. Two years later, in 1997, Joanne married Frank Ceglia. Ceglia made a good living as a union pipe-fitter, probably forty dollars an hour or more. The only thing to notice about him was the AutoTrack report Tom Tasco had recorded showing Ceglia had done a little time for petty drug dealing when he was a kid, followed by a couple of years on probation. He’d been clean ever since.

  McCabe skimmed Tasco and Fraser’s interview summaries and case reports. They’d done a thorough job. They conducted scores of interviews. They grilled her boyfriend, Ronnie Sobel. They gamely followed up on every tipster’s call, and there’d been dozens. Despite these efforts, the department hadn’t come close to finding Katie or preventing her death.

  McCabe put the reports back in their jacket. He tapped the computer to life and Googled the name ‘Elyse Andersen,’ getting 437 hits. He found the one he was looking for on page two. An article in the Orlando Sentinel, dated April 2, 2002. McCabe remembered reading it on a flight from Orlando back to LaGuardia.

  He’d taken Casey down to Disney World for spring break. The idea had been to cheer her up after he and her mother, Sandy — the beautiful Cassandra, Casey’s namesake — had divorced. McCabe hadn’t thought about Sandy in a long time. The familiar refrain, ‘selfish bitch,’ came instantly to mind. He supposed Sandy’s new life, married to an investment banker, commuting between a fancy house in the Hamptons and a nine-room co-op on West End Avenue, suited her better than being the wife of a cop ever had. Still, McCabe wondered how comfortable she was having walked out not just on a failed marriage but also on her only child. She told McCabe the banker didn’t want to be burdened with kids. At least not somebody else’s kids. He’d forced Sandy to choose between having money and having a daughter. McCabe wasn’t surprised she’d chosen money. That’s just the way Sandy was. There was nothing anybody could do to change it. He wasn’t bothered for himself, but he’d never forgiven Sandy for what she’d done to Casey.

  The news story sprang back to life in McCabe’s mind as he read. A construction crew working for the D. J. Puozzoli Construction Company of Orlando yesterday unearthed the decomposed remains of a nude woman, later identified as 26-year-old Elyse Andersen of Winter Park. Ms. Andersen, a sales representative with Mulvaney Real Estate in Orlando, was reported missing three weeks ago by her husband, Martin Andersen, also of Winter Park. An unnamed source at the Orange County Medical Examiner’s office told the Sentinel that the cause of death had been the ‘surgical’ removal of Ms. Andersen’s heart.

  McCabe closed out the page. He remembered the rest of the article pretty much verbatim. Orlando police were following several leads. There was no mention of additional wounds, but the article did include the name of the lead detective on the case, Sergeant Aaron Cahill. McCabe looked through the rest of the hits on the Google search and found one follow-up article. Apparently Sergeant Cahill’s leads led nowhere and the case went cold. McCabe decided to wait until after the autopsy, when he would know more about the manner and cause of Katie Dubois’s death, before contacting Sergeant Cahill of the Orlando PD.

  He printed out the art
icle and slipped it into a brand-new murder book. Then he picked up the coffee cups and walked them to the small kitchen at the back of the bullpen. He poured the dregs down the sink. One of McCabe’s detectives, Jack Batchelder, stood nearby making a fresh pot.

  ‘Hiya, Mike. Bad night, huh? At least that’s what I heard.’ Batchelder was a balding, overweight man of fifty. In McCabe’s view, Jack was pretty much a burned-out case, putting in time, padding his pension with a few more years, before calling it quits.

  ‘I guess you heard right, Jack. Anything else going on?’ McCabe asked.

  ‘The usual Friday night mayhem. A couple of domestics. A kid got beaten up in a brawl down by the ferry terminal. Oh yeah, there’s another missing persons report. Woman named Cassidy. Works for an ad agency here in town, Beckman and Hawes. Her ex-husband called it in about eight o’clock.’

  McCabe looked up. That was about the same time he and Kyra were arriving at Arno and Lacey was sneaking into the scrap yard. ‘Who took the call?’

  ‘Bill and Will. They should be talking with the ex now.’ Detectives Bill Bacon and Will Messing had been universally known by their rhyming first names since McCabe teamed them up a year earlier.

  Carl Sturgis joined them by the sink. ‘Hey, McCabe,’ he said in that shrill terrierlike bark of his, ‘that homeless guy they brought in? He didn’t have shit to say. He was just sneaking into the scrap yard for a couple of snorts. Found the body. Started running around screaming till he found Comisky. End of story. Except he was pissed I didn’t offer him a drink. Big joker. Says you promised him some booze. I told him it was up to you to keep your own promises. I mean, you didn’t really do that, did you?’

  ‘Don’t believe everything you hear,’ McCabe said, pouring himself a fresh coffee, ‘but thanks for asking.’ He tossed a dollar into the can next to the coffeepot. ‘Where is he now?’

  ‘I got a uniform to drop him off down by the shelter. I told him to let us know where we could find him. Fat chance.’