“Manhattan North,” she repeated. “Best squad in the department, right?”
“Right,” he said, “and there’s only one. Brooklyn South is not Manhattan North. In fact, there aren’t many of the guys who actually want to be there.”
“Why not?”
“Did you want to be there?” he asked. “Did you ask for Brooklyn South?”
“I asked for a homicide squad,” she said. “This is the opening that came up.”
“Not your first choice, though, right?”
She hesitated, then said, “Right.”
“So nobody’s where they really want to be,” he said, “and nobody really likes anybody.”
“Does that include Jessup?”
“He’s stuck in rank, like a lot of lieutenants and captains on this job who were once on the fast track,” McQueen said.
The waitress came with their food and they suspended the conversation again.
“And what about you?” she asked, mixing her dressing into her salad.
“What about me?”
“Are you where you want to be?” she asked. “Are you stuck in rank?”
She didn’t know where she got the nerve to talk to him this way, except that she felt really comfortable with him. Maybe nobody in the squad liked anybody else, but that wasn’t true in this case. She liked Dennis McQueen, and she wanted to know more about him. And there was nothing romantic about her interest.
“First,” he said, “I’m doin’ what I want to be doin’, where I want to do it. I live in Brooklyn, and I want to keep it clean—or, as clean as we can keep it.”
She looked out at the street in front of the diner and said, “That seems to be a losing battle.”
“That may be so,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m gonna stop tryin’.”
“Okay.”
“As for my rank,” he said, “I never even wanted to be a sergeant. I was very happy as a first-grade detective. So no, I’m not stuck in rank. I don’t really have much ambition, Bailey. I’m a simple man, happy with simple things.”
“But are you a happy man?”
“Who’s happy?” he asked. “Are you? I’m divorced, my grown daughter doesn’t have much use for me.”
“What about your ex-wife?”
“We don’t talk,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I don’t have much use for her.”
He bit into his pizza burger, grabbed a napkin to keep the sauce from running down his chin.
“What about you?” he asked. “Are you happy with your life? Your assignment? Your rank?”
“Well,” she said, “the easiest way to answer that would probably be no, no, and no—but that’s not really true.”
“Which ‘no’ isn’t true?”
“I’m not happy with my life, but I’m kinda all right with it, you know? I mean, I live alone—which is fine—and I feel like I’m heading in the right direction.”
“And what direction is that?” he asked. “You wanna be the first female police commissioner?”
“It’s not on my list,” she said, “but if the job was offered to me I’d take it. As for my rank, it’s fine, right now. I know I’m going to move up. It’s just a matter of time.”
He didn’t comment on that, let her believe it, but he knew lots of men and women who thought the way she did. One misstep, though, and plans changed.
“And your assignment?” he said. “The one you didn’t ask for?”
She sat back, chewed what she had in her mouth, washed it down with some tea, and then said, “That I’m happy with.”
“You are?”
“Well, I’m happy to be partnering with you,” she said. “Ray was okay, but he was tense all the time—and now I know why. And I admit I was afraid you were going to partner me with Cataldo.”
“I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“I’ve already heard his fat girl jokes.”
“Both of them?”
“He only has the two?”
“How do you fuck a fat girl? Roll her in dough and aim for the wet spot,” McQueen quoted.
“Oh yeah, and . . . ‘gimme a hint, pee a little.”
They both laughed, not at the jokes, but at the man.
“I’m learning a lot, Dennis,” she said, “and mostly from you. So when you told me today we were partners again . . . that’s when I got happy with my assignment.”
“Well,” he said, picking up a couple of French fries, “I’m flattered.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I’m not trying to flatter you. I respect you as a detective and I think I can learn a lot from you, so there’s no flattery intended.”
He chewed his French fries, said, “Okay,” and took another huge bite out of his burger.
Later, over coffee, they discussed the case.
“Are you going to talk to the boss about getting the Wingate case back?”
“That’s not gonna happen,” he said.
“Why not?”
“The ice pick,” he said. “It throws a monkey wrench into the works.”
“But the similarities—”
“Are not enough,” he said. “Not with the different ways they were killed.”
“Smoke inhalation,” she said, “and an ice pick. What about the ice in the lungs? Well, actually Ethan—Dr. Bannerjee—called it ‘frozen condensation.’ And what about finding them both in the water?”
“Maybe,” he said, thoughtfully, “what we have are two different killers, but the same person disposing of the bodies.”
“You mean, somebody’s making a living getting rid of bodies? A serial disposer?”
He shrugged.
“Could be. It’s just a thought.”
She sat back and said, “Wow. It is a thought, isn’t it?”
“We have to get an ID on this body,” he said, “see if we can find out when he died. If he’s been in storage someplace for weeks, like Thomas Wingate, then maybe we’ll have something.”
“A real serial?” she asked, eagerly.
“Don’t be so eager to work on a serial case, Bailey,” he said. “It’s a pain in the ass, and the pressure is murder.”
“But if the cases are enough alike they’ll put together a task force, won’t they?”
“Possibly.”
“And since we caught both of these, we’d be included, wouldn’t we?”
“Maybe,” he said, “but we’ve got a long way to go before that happens. You done?”
“Yes.”
“Let’s go, then.”
She reached for her purse and he said, “On me.”
“Like a date?” she asked, with a smile.
“Bailey,” he said, as they stood up, “don’t be such a wise guy all the time, huh?”
“Can’t help it,” she said. “I’m starting to feel real comfortable around you.”
“God help me . . .” he said.
Chapter 33
The Ice Man sliced the veal extra thin, the way he knew Mrs. O’Brien liked it. You could almost see right through it.
“Is that okay, Mrs. O’Brien?” he asked, showing it to her.
The old lady—eighty if she was a day—smiled at him and said, “Your father would be very proud, Owen.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He wrapped the bloody veal up in brown paper, taped it and handed it to her. She paid him and told him to have a nice day.
He walked to the window and watched as she walked down the street—a street that had changed a lot since the day his father first opened the butcher shop. There were few businesses on this street that were as old as Harry’s Butcher Shop. In fact, last month a new coffee bar opened up on the corner, a sure sign that the end might be near.
Owen had taken over the butcher shop when his father died ten years ago. Tempted to close it after his mother died eight years back, he decided to fight the neighborhood change as long as he could. This was his family business, after all.
Besides, he had very special use for the big freezers in the back roo
m.
Chapter 34
Over the next few days, Dennis McQueen and Bailey Sommers were unable to identify the Sheepshead Bay body. AFIS, LEADS, NCIC, VICAP, WXY & Z and every other anagrammed identification program he could think of all came up with a big fat zero. Without the young man’s identity, it was impossible to come up with any suspects.
Sommers decided to do a computer search in an attempt to find any other bodies with similarities to the Coney Island and Sheepshead Bay bodies. Each search came up empty. She also checked with Missing Persons, but they had nothing matching the dead man’s description. If he was missing, nobody cared enough to report it.
McQueen, on the other hand, simply called Dr. Bannerjee to ask if he’d done any postmortems on bodies with similarities. Dr. G told him he doubted he’d seen anything to match those two. The presence of the iced condensation in the lungs would have stood out, he explained. Nevertheless, McQueen asked Dr. G to go back in his files to previous winters to see if he could find anything.
McQueen also spent that time talking to the other investigators who were looking into the murder of Thomas Wingate, and the arson connected to it . . .
Detective Jack Orson of the Arson Task Force said he was still looking for Vincent Dean and the man he hired to torch his building. They had checked all of the known arsonists in Brooklyn, in the five boroughs, in New York State, and then on the East Coast.
They might have flown somebody in from the Midwest, or the West, Orson said. “Guess that’ll be our next move.”
Or maybe, McQueen had thought, the person who torched the building was just a talented amateur who had no record . . .
He didn’t voice his thoughts to Detective Orson, but he did to the fire marshal.
“You could be right,” she said. “In fact, you probably are. The more I look at this the more I think it wasn’t a pro.”
“You know any amateurs who could have done this?”
“Lots of people can burn down a building, Sergeant,” she said. “All you really need is a match.”
She promised to keep him informed as her investigation proceeded.
And she told him to call her Mace . . .
Finally, he talked with the detective who had taken over his homicide case for Brooklyn North, Detective Hal Northrop.
“I got nothin’,” Northrop told him on the phone.
“I’m thinkin’ when the Arson Task Force finds their guy, they’ll find my guy, too.”
“But you’re still workin’ the case, right?” McQueen asked.
“It’s still an open case, Sarge,” Northrop said, “but you know how that is. I got two other cases I’m workin’ on at the same time.”
“Yeah, Northrop,” McQueen replied, “I know what it’s like . . .”
McQueen had also caught another case, but he and Sommers had been able to clear it within twenty-four hours, enabling him to go back over both the Coney Island and the Sheepshead Bay cases.
He had copies of both reports on his desk when Sommers came up from downstairs, where she had continued to labor on the computer.
“You know,” she complained, “if we had a computer of our own I wouldn’t have to keep going up and down those stairs.”
“Try using the elevator,” McQueen said.
“Not exactly my point.”
“I know . . .”
She leaned over his desk to see what he was looking at.
“Don’t let the lieutenant catch you looking at that Coney Island file,” she said.
“Just for reference.”
“Right.”
She perched a hip on his desk.
“You know what I think is the only thing that can jump-start this investigation?”
“Yes, I do.”
She raised her eyebrows.
“You do?”
He looked up at her.
“Another body.”
“What are you, a mind reader?”
“We’ve just been thinkin’ along the same lines, Bailey.”
“That would give us a serial,” she said.
“Still eager to work a serial case, huh?”
She shrugged.
“I want to experience everything I can on this job.”
“Well, we’d need more than just the freshwater ice to get the department to form a serial killer task force,” he told her. “We’re also short on one other thing.”
“What’s that?”
“Time,” he said. “It’s February. It’s not gonna stay winter forever. If preserving the bodies and then dumping them in freezing cold water has any significance, what’s gonna happen when the temperature starts going up?”
She shrugged helplessly. He pushed his chair back from his desk and regarded her.
“How about this? He wants us to find the bodies, that’s why he’s dumping them in or near the cold water. But maybe he doesn’t realize that he’s preserving the evidence in their lungs by doing so.”
“Okay, say you’re right,” she said. “If he’s keeping the bodies on ice someplace, the weather isn’t going to affect that. He’s got to have a man-sized freezer someplace.”
“And who has access to freezers that size?” he asked.
“Lots of people,” she said. “There are lots of business that require freezers.”
“Okay then,” he said, “that’s your next job.”
“What is?”
“Prepare a list of the types of businesses that need freezers,” he said. “Large, industrial-type freezers, not the kind people keep in their basement to hold extra meat.”
“And why not that kind?”
“They’ll be harder to track,” he said. “Let’s start with industrial types that would be ordered by businesses.”
“That could be a long list.”
“Then you better get started.”
Chapter 35
The more McQueen thought about it, the more convinced he became that the killer of the two young men was the same. And for him the stronger link was not how the bodies were disposed of, or the frozen condition of the lungs. For him it was the scratch at the small of the back of both men.
“That’s the most unusual aspect of this case,” he told Sommers. “Your buddy Ethan is gonna have to come up with something from those scratches.”
“He’s not my buddy,” she said. “He’s just a rarity in law enforcement—a gentleman.”
“A rarity, huh?”
“If you’re a woman in law enforcement, yes.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Would you like me to go and see Eth—Dr. Bannerjee and see what he has?”
McQueen grinned at her across his desk and said, “No, I think we should go together.”
“I don’t need protection, you know,” she said.
“It wasn’t you I was thinking about protecting . . .”
It was several days after the discovery of the second body and, somehow, the M.E. had been busted while McQueen and his squad were not.
“Sergeant McQueen,” Bannerjee said, when McQueen and Sommers appeared in his doorway, “and your lovely partner, Detective Sommers. Please, come in.”
“Thanks, Doc,” McQueen said. He allowed Sommers to precede him into the doctor’s office. He’d show her there were some other gentlemen out there, as well.
“I’m surprised you responded so quickly to my message,” Bannerjee said.
“What message was that?”
I called your office just a little while ago,” the M.E. said. “I thought you were in response to that.”
“I never got your message,” McQueen said. “I just thought we’d stop in and see where you were on Detective Sommers’s case.”
“The Sheepshead Bay victim,” Bannerjee said. “Actually, that’s why I called you, about that and about last month’s case, from Coney Island.”
“Did you get something on those scratches?”
“I did, indeed,” Bannerjee said, “and knowing your preference for getting straight to the point, I’ll tell
you that the blood found in the wounds did not belong to either of the victims. In fact, it was not even human blood.”
Bannerjee paused and McQueen said, “Doc. . .”
“Yes, yes, all right,” Bannerjee said. “You will not even allow me to build the suspense. Very well, it was bovine blood.”
“Bovine?”
Bannerjee sighed and said, “Cows.”
Sommers slapped McQueen on the arm and said, “Beef.”
“Exactly.”
“In both cases?”
“Yes.”
“Slabs of beef,” Sommers said, “hanging from hooks.”
“Excuse me?” the doctor asked.
“Doc, could the scratches have been made by metal hooks?” McQueen asked.
“Hooks?”
“The kinds slabs of beef hang from, Doctor,” Sommers said.
“Ah, I see what you’re getting at,” Bannerjee said. “Both bodies were preserved in freezers, apparently, and so now you think they were . . . hung from hooks?”
“That’s what we’re thinking,” McQueen said.
“Well,” Bannerjee said, “it’s not exactly my area of expertise, but I imagine the scratches could have been made by metal hooks, but . . .”
“But what?”
“Wouldn’t that mean they would have had to be hung up by the back of their belts?”
“Exactly,” Sommers said.
“That would have to be done by someone with very little regard for . . . for personal dignity.”
“I think murder would be an indication of that, Doctor,” Sommers said.
“The blood could have been transferred to their bodies by the point of the hooks, couldn’t it?” McQueen asked, still following the train of thought.
“Definitely,” Bannerjee said, “especially the way this blood was imbedded into the scratches.”
“You still have one of the victims here, don’t you, Doc?” McQueen asked.
“Yes, your unknown man from Sheepshead Bay. Why?”
“I’m gonna ask the lab to send someone over to look at that scratch,” McQueen said.
“Looking for what?” Bannerjee asked.
“Something you wouldn’t be lookin’ for,” McQueen said. “Traces of metal.”
Cold Blooded (Dennis McQueen 02) Page 13
