Counterplay bkamc-18

by Robert K. Tanenbaum

  Sweatshirt cop, whose face looked like he might have once fought for a living, glared at the messenger. “Don’t you have someplace you need to be?”

  The messenger got the hint and went back across the street and retrieved his bicycle. As he pedaled off, he raised his right hand and extended the middle-fingered salute. “Fuckin’ racists!” he yelled over his shoulder.

  Sweatshirt cop was about to yell something back when the door across the way opened and two boys appeared, saw the box, and were about to pick it up. “DON’T TOUCH THE FRICKIN’ PACKAGE!” the cops all shouted at once.

  The boys stopped in their tracks, looked at each other and then, skirting around the package, jumped down the stairs, and bounded across the street to the cops. “Is it a bomb? Is it a bomb?” the Karp twins, Giancarlo and Zak, shouted with excitement.

  “Mom and I told you the public works department guys were the feds,” Giancarlo yelled in triumph at his brother.

  “Doesn’t mean the guys selling the purses on the sidewalk aren’t feds,” Zak replied hotly. “They’ve been watching us every day, too.”

  “Maybe they’re the terrorists,” Giancarlo suggested.

  “One of ’em’s got blue eyes,” Zak pointed out.

  “Lots of Muslims have blue eyes, especially if they’re from Persia. There’s a lot of Slav and Thracian-you know, Thracian like Alexander the Great-influences in the population. But they’re Muslim now.”

  The cops listened as the boys debated whether they had terrorists eyeing their apartment like they were debating the Yankees’ chances of winning the World Series. “Is it a bomb?” the twins repeated. “And did you catch the guy who left it?”

  “We don’t know what it is, so we want to play it safe for the moment,” sweatshirt cop said. “The guy who brought it was just a bicycle messenger. He doesn’t know what’s in the box.”

  “That’s what he says,” said Zak, who had always been more given to intrigue and danger than his brother. “Maybe you should have tortured him a bit and squeezed the truth out of him.”

  “Would you suggest I rip out his fingernails or break every bone in his body?” sweatshirt cop asked, smiling.

  “Both,” Zak replied but further comment was stifled by the deep-throated bark of a large dog. They all turned to see Marlene Ciampi exiting the building behind them where, the cops knew, she had an art studio on the top floor. She was accompanied by the biggest dog any of them had ever seen.

  As she approached, Marlene noticed the men, especially the presumed federal agents who’d had no contact yet with Gilgamesh, glancing nervously at the dog. “It’s okay,” she said, “he’s friendly, unless I tell him not to be.” As if to prove her right, the animal licked enthusiastically at their outstretched hands and rubbed up against their legs to beg for scratches and pats. “You want to tell me what’s going on?”

  “Oh, uh, sure, Mrs. Ciampi,” sweatshirt cop said. “We just saw a guy dropping off an unscheduled package across the street and we were checking him out.”

  Marlene turned and started walking across the street toward the package, but the officer asked her to stop. “Sorry,” he said. “I know it’s probably okay, but I’d like to call in the bomb squad just in case.”

  Marlene looked back over her shoulder at him. “That’s okay, officer, Gilgamesh, my dog, is certified in bomb detection. I’ll have him take a whiff and save your guys the trouble.” She continued across the street.

  Gilgamesh gave the box a cursory sniff, turned a bored expression to Marlene, then walked back to the curb where he barked at the twins who were still standing across the street. He was ready for a romp and wanted to know what they were waiting for.

  “Nothing to worry about,” Marlene shouted as a dark Lincoln pulled up. Her husband and Special-Agent-in-Charge Espey Jaxon got out.

  After she explained what had occurred, Jaxon knelt down by the box. “There’s no return address,” he said. “The shipping label isn’t complete either; there’s nothing under sender.”

  Business suit cop walked over and said, “The messenger company says it received the package from Denver, Colorado-no return address and the bill was paid in cash.”

  Jaxon took a pen from his coat pocket and inserted it into a flap to pick up the box. “We’ll send this back to the folks at Quantico,” he said, referring to the FBI’s crime lab in Virginia. “But let’s see if we can get a peek first at what’s inside.”

  Karp, Marlene, Espey, the two twelve-year-old boys, and one disappointed dog entered the building and crowded onto the elevator that took them up to the landing outside the door of the loft. Inside, Jaxon placed the box on the dining room table as they all gathered around to watch.

  Using a borrowed pair of tweezers and his pocket knife, the agent carefully opened the package without touching it to avoid messing up any fingerprints, even though it had already been handled by who knew how many people in transit. Once he had the box unsealed, he began removing the contents. First, he took out the packing material-handfuls of newspaper shredded into spaghetti-thin strips-which he placed in a plastic zip-lock bag Marlene got from the kitchen.

  A folded notecard emerged with the second handful of shreds. Using the tweezers, Jaxon opened the card, which he read aloud. “It says, ‘I hope you didn’t shoot the messenger. Your move.’ ”

  “This is soooo cool. Secret messages,” Zak said as his parents rolled their eyes at their adrenaline junkie son.

  Jaxon peered inside the box and then tipped it on end so that a small white object tumbled out.

  “A bishop,” Karp noted of the chess piece that lay on its side on the table. He didn’t need V.T. to tell him that it was a Carlos Torres; the detail was exquisite and the inset jewels had to be worth his annual salary.

  “Awesome,” Giancarlo, the chess player in the bunch, said and reached for the piece only to have his mother, who’d anticipated his avarice, smack his hand.

  “Don’t touch, buster,” she growled looking at Giancarlo but also turning her glare on Zak, who had a tendency to believe that warnings given to others didn’t necessarily include himself.

  Jaxon took out a handkerchief and touching as little of the chess piece as possible, dropped it into another zip-lock baggie. “Looks expensive. Neither of you ordered it, right?”

  Marlene shook her head. But Karp said, “It’s carved by a guy named Torres. Apparently, it is very, very expensive and each piece is hand carved.” He explained how he had come by his sudden knowledge. He bit his lip before adding, “I think we’re being told that Kane has selected another target.”

  “You think Kane sent this to you?” Jaxon asked.

  Karp nodded. “Yeah, it’s looking that way.” He told them about the two black chess pieces that had been found in his office. “First, I thought it might be a couple of my guys misplaced them. Then I asked my receptionist about it. She said they’d appeared on her desk on two different mornings and, thinking the same thing I did, put them in my office so they could be given back to their rightful owner.”

  “She working for Kane, too, maybe?” Jaxon said.

  “Nah, if she’s anything more than she appears to be-an uptight, efficient, widowed receptionist-then I’m Winston Churchill,” Karp said. “She’s going to check with the janitorial company that cleans the office. No, I think this is part of Kane’s little game-first the black bishop and Fey is killed; then week before last, the black knight, and the target is Flanagan, the dirty cop. I should say that Lucy thinks it’s not Kane sending us these pieces, but someone close enough to him to know his plans and is sending these as some sort of coded message. But I think Kane’s telling us he’s about to make his move and is challenging us to counter him.”

  “So who’s the white bishop?” Marlene asked.

  “Good question,” Karp replied. “If the type of piece has something to do with occupation and which side of the fence you sit-bishops for church people, knights for cops, white for good, black for bad-then one of the ‘good
guys’ with the church.”

  “What about Father Dugan?” Marlene said. “He and Alejandro were the ones who uncovered the ‘No Prosecution’ files and gave them to you.”

  “That’s a possibility,” Karp said. “I’ll call Bill Denton and ask him to assign some guys to Dugan. Where is he now?”

  “St. Malachy’s Church on West Forty-ninth,” Marlene said. “The Actors’ Chapel.”

  Karp picked up the telephone and placed a call to his friend Denton, the brother of the current mayor of New York and recently appointed chief of police for the NYPD. When Denton answered, Karp quickly explained what had happened and asked for the extra set of eyes on the priest. “Thanks, Bill,” he said. “Let’s talk over lunch one of these days soon.” He hung up the telephone and turned back to Jaxon. “You want to send somebody by to pick up the other pieces. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand their significance and they’ve been handled, but maybe your people can still find something of value.”

  Jaxon nodded. “We might even be able to piece the newspaper Kane used to pack the box and find out where it’s from. But what if this chess piece doesn’t represent Dugan? What if it’s just white for good and black for bad, in which case, the white bishop could be someone else?”

  “You know, I may have seen someone suspicious watching the loft the past couple of days,” Marlene said. “I just happened to be looking down across Grand and noticed a couple of guys, looked Mediterranean or Middle Eastern. I hate to stereotype, but they were paying a lot of attention to what’s going on here.”

  “The guys selling the purses!” Zak crowed and punched his brother on the arm. “I told you.”

  “You thought they were federal agents,” Giancarlo replied, punching back.

  “I never said that,” Zak contended. “I said they’re watching the loft. I didn’t say if they were feds or terrorists.”

  “So you saw them, too,” their mother interjected. “They were certainly more interested in watching the loft than selling purses, especially after the boys got home from school. I was about to go visit them when that poor bicycle guy delivered the package and got jumped.”

  “Well, if you see them again, sic the cops on them,” Jaxon said.

  “Oh, I’ll sic more than that.” Marlene smiled and scratched Gilgamesh behind his ears.

  14

  The next afternoon Karp was still mulling over the chess pieces-the two from his office had been picked up at eight sharp-when Mrs. Milquetost buzzed him. “Mr. Karp, Mr. Guma is here with another…gentleman. Shall I tell them you’re too busy to see them now?” she asked hopefully.

  “That’s okay, Mrs. Milquetost, he’ll probably just outwait me; he doesn’t have much else to do,” he replied. “Send him in.”

  A moment later, Ray Guma walked in the door. “Hey, thanks for all the support with Eva Braun out there.”

  “You deserve it,” Karp said, then spotted the man behind Guma and grinned as he stood up. “Well, hello, Jack. I heard Ray had been talking to your group but didn’t know you were in town.”

  “Top secret…worried about the paparazzi, you know,” Jack Swanburg replied with a chuckle. “A handsome face like this drives the girls wild, and if they knew I was here, I’d never get any work done.”

  Karp laughed. While Swanburg was one of the preeminent forensic pathologists in the country, he was no Tom Cruise in the looks department. In fact, he looked a lot more like Santa Claus on holiday with his white beard, twinkling blue eyes, and a pronounced round belly that-Karp suspected-probably shook like the proverbial bowl full of jelly. The gut was covered with a bright yellow aloha shirt and red suspenders holding up a pair of baggy cargo shorts that exposed hairy white legs that obviously rarely saw the sun. The pipe that hung perpetually from his mouth, even when he wasn’t smoking, completed the jolly old elf picture, and Karp half expected him to break out in a “ho ho ho.”

  Swanburg had appeared as an expert witness more than a thousand times to testify about the cause of death in homicide cases. It should have been enough morbidity for any one man. However, he also had what he called a “hobby” as the president of 221B Baker Street, Inc., a loose affiliation of scientists who volunteered to help police solve difficult homicide cases by combining their expertise into what their literature described as a “many-headed Sherlock Holmes.”

  In fact, the name of the group-221B Baker Street-was a reference to their fictional hero, the master of deduction and the herald of the real-life collaboration of science and police work. Holmes was said to live at 221B Baker Street in London. Many of the group’s members were forensic scientists, whose work-such as forensic anthropology or blood-splatter analysis-was regularly used by police agencies. But most of the others made a living in other scientific endeavors, such as geology and entomology, not normally associated with crimes but applicable in the right situations.

  Karp had first heard of the group from Marlene, who’d met one of the members, Charlotte Gates, a forensic anthropologist from the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Gates had been called in to exhume the clandestine graves of Indian boys murdered by the demonic priest Hans Lichner; she’d been the first to discover the rosary beads.

  Karp had met Swanburg when he needed a forensics expert to testify in the Coney Island Four case. The old man had essentially dismantled the rapists’ version of events.

  When Guma presented the Stavros case to the bureau chiefs and questions were raised about the need to find the victim’s body, Karp recalled that 221B Baker Street’s specialty was locating hidden graves of murder victims. When the meeting was over, he’d suggested that Guma give them a call.

  Like most law professionals, Guma was leery of amateur sleuths who wanted to play detective. They’ll give you the shirts off their backs, he’d explained his hesitation. But they’ll tear them to pieces in the process. It was clear he was putting the 221B group in the same category as psychics and tarot card readers who regularly call the police to help “solve” crimes. But with nothing left to lose and a major obstacle to overcome to win at trial, Guma called Swanburg. He’d been impressed by the man’s questions and was soon thereafter on his way to Colorado, the group’s home base.

  There, the tables were turned. He was asked to present his evidence, as well as his theory on where the body might be located. This time, he was the one peppered with questions by the two dozen 221B members in the auditorium at a local sheriff’s office.

  I’ll be honest, Guma told Karp when he returned, I wasn’t expecting that much…but they really put me through the wringer. If nothing else, I learned that I wasn’t half as prepared in this case as I thought I was.

  They’d asked him if the moon was absent or full on the night Teresa Stavros disappeared. It might indicate, they said, how much light the killer would have had to work with in the backyard if he hadn’t wanted to turn on the lights. They asked if he knew the composition of the soil, which could affect how deep the killer might have been able to dig. Could Stavros have moved the body from the premises without being seen?

  “I basically had to say, ‘I don’t know,’ to a lot of the questions,” Guma said now recalling the inquisition for Karp.

  “But he also said, ‘I’ll find out,’ ” Swanburg added, “which is what we wanted to hear. We don’t take all the cases presented to us. We simply can’t with our limited resources and time. So if the cops or, in this case, the DAO, aren’t willing to do their homework, we shake their hands, wish them well, and politely decline.”

  Swanburg walked over to Karp’s desk and opened a large manila envelope he was carrying and withdrew two large black-and-white photographs, which he placed on the desk. “One of the questions we asked Ray was the availability of aerial photographs of the Stavros home from before the ‘disappearance’ and after,” he explained. “These photographs are more available than people think-if you know where to look. Places like surveyors’ offices, zoning commissions, the United States Geological Survey, even declassified military
photographs-which have the highest resolution, those guys can read a license plate from a satellite. Take a moment and look at the photographs I handed you and tell me what you see. The former Stavros house and yard is the one surrounded by the circle I’ve drawn to make it easy.”

  Karp stood up and, resting his knuckles on the desk, leaned over to get a bird’s-eye view of the side-by-side photographs. He felt like a kid being put on the spot in a geography bee. However, when he compared the circled areas on the photographs, he quickly noticed a difference between the two. “The backyard…the one photograph there seems to have more bushes and less of this white space; the other, there’s more white space, with something on it, and fewer bushes.”

  “Very good!” Swanburg exclaimed like a proud parent overseeing a homework assignment. “Photograph number one, as you correctly noted, has more vegetation, and was taken by a photographer in a Piper Cub in 1989, two years before Mrs. Stavros disappeared. The photographer was creating a coffee-table book called A Bird’s-Eye View of Manhattan Neighborhoods. Photograph number two, which was taken in conjunction with the experimental mapping of Manhattan with a new satellite, was taken in 1991, three months after she disappeared. By the way, the white space is a patio, probably cement, and that’s a hot tub on it.”

  “That’s pretty cool, but what’s it prove?” asked Karp. “Emil got tired of the garden and wanted a hot tub for his mistress…or was she a wife by then?”

  “Still a girlfriend,” Guma said. “There was still money in the account, so he hadn’t divorced Teresa yet.” He used the eraser end of a pencil to point to a corner of the house above the former rosegarden-turned-patio. “Zachary said that he remembered the sound of digging that night. And his bedroom was here, above the former rose garden.”

  Karp looked at his friend. The old Guma energy was radiating from him, he was gearing up for the fight with relish. Karp looked down at the photograph again. “I’d say if your instincts tell you a judge will grant a search warrant based on this photograph, then go for it.”