The Cutting (5 page)

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 article 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.’

McCabe took the coffee back to his desk and called Bill Bacon’s cell. It looked like it was going to be an even longer night than he’d thought. Bacon picked up. ‘Hiya, Mike.’

‘Where are you guys?’

‘In the car. You heard about our missing person? We just finished with her ex-husband. Says he’s very upset. I personally think he’s full of shit. Anyway, we’re on our way to her apartment.’

‘Back it up, Bill, and give me the two-minute drill on this.’

‘Missing woman is named Lucinda Cassidy. She’s twenty-eight years old. Works for an advertising outfit on Free Street, Beckman and Hawes.’ Bacon sounded like he was reading from his notes. ‘Young management type. She was supposed to meet her ex-husband for dinner at Tony’s at six thirty. Guy named Dave Farrington. They’ve been divorced less than a year. She’s not there when he arrives. He orders a drink and waits. By seven she still hasn’t turned up, which he says is very unlike her. He orders another drink and starts making calls. First he tries calling her numbers. There’s no answer either on her landline or her cell or at the office. So next he looks up her boss’s home number and reaches him. The boss, a John Beckman of Beckman and Hawes, says she never showed up for work this morning. He’s pissed ’cause she missed some big meeting or something. Tells Farrington he thought maybe she was sick or maybe there was a family crisis, but when she didn’t answer her phone, he didn’t know what to think. Naturally, the schmuck doesn’t think to call us.’

‘You said you thought the ex was full of shit? You think he had something to do with the disappearance?’

‘I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, anyway. I just think he’s a slick-assed jack who’s a little too full of himself. Anyway, Farrington next calls Cassidy’s sister, his ex-sister-in-law. She hasn’t heard from Lucinda in a couple of days. So now he’s really worried. He calls 911 about eight. Wants to know if there’ve been any accidents reported or if anyone brought her into any of the local hospitals. The answer is no. Dispatch routes the call to us. First thing, we go to Tony’s, talk to Farrington, who’s still there, having another drink. Then we go with him to her apartment to see if maybe she’s home and just not answering the phone. She’s not. At least, there are no lights on and she’s not answering the door either.’

‘Is that it?’ McCabe asked.

‘Not quite. Will checks her vehicle and plate numbers and sends out an ATL just in case she’s on the road somewhere. About an hour later we get a call from a unit on the West Side. Connie Davenport. Cassidy’s car’s been found. Beige ’99 Corolla. Parked on Vaughan Street by the old cemetery. Neighbor tells Davenport the Corolla’s been there all day. Turns out Lucinda’s a jogger. She runs every morning, usually on the West End. Farrington told us she was training for a 10K.’ Bill Bacon stopped talking, and there was silence on the phone.

‘What are you thinking, Billy?’

‘Mike, I’ve got a bad feeling about this one,’ he said finally. ‘I just called the evidence techs to check out the scene on Vaughan. Then I want them to flatbed the car to 109 and check it for prints, blood, fibers, the works.’

‘Busy night for the techs.’

‘Yeah. I guess for all of us. Like I said, we’re pulling up to the apartment now. Landlord’s meeting us here with a key. If she still doesn’t answer the door, he said he’d let us in.’ Another pause. ‘I’ll call you back.’

‘Is Farrington still with you?’

‘No. I got a uniform to take him down to the station to give us a set of prints. We’ll check for matches both in the apartment and in the Corolla, but I’ll bet he can prove he’s been in both places before.’

‘I’ll wait for your call,’ McCabe said and then hung up the phone.

Next, McCabe called Lieutenant Bill Fortier at home. Fortier’s wife, Millie, answered. She went to get him. In the background McCabe could hear sounds of the Sox game. ‘Yeah, Mike, what’s up?’

McCabe filled him in on what was going on at the scrap yard and what Bacon had told him about Lucinda Cassidy.

‘You think she just took off?’

‘Leaving her car sitting there on the street? Doesn’t seem likely.’

‘You think it’s the same guy?’ Fortier asked. He sounded like he was munching on something crunchy.

‘Seems like the timing’s all wrong, but who the hell knows? Our boy would have to finish with one vic and right away go pick up another. Most freaks don’t work that way.’

‘Yeah, doesn’t one killing usually satisfy the lust for a while?’

‘It’s supposed to,’ said McCabe, ‘but all these sadistic whack jobs have their own little quirks. Anyway, nobody’s killed Cassidy yet. At least as far as we know. Let’s not hurry her along.’

‘You think I should come in? Get everybody together tonight?’

‘I’d rather have our people on the street tonight than sitting in a conference room. They know what they’re doing, and I can coordinate by cell. If the same guy’s responsible, we ought to get a jump on it. Besides, there’s not much to report yet, and, like I said, Cassidy may still be alive.’

‘Alright – but we better make quick progress, or the wrath of Shockley will come down on all our heads.’

As he hung up the phone, McCabe looked up to see Maggie leaning against his desk. Nearly six feet tall, she was a lean, slightly gawky-looking woman with bright, searching eyes. McCabe always thought she looked more like a college professor than a cop. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘Parents think the boyfriend’s to blame,’ she said. ‘According to Tasco’s report, he and Katie were seen arguing just before she walked off and disappeared.’

‘He’s got a solid alibi. Isn’t that right?’

‘True. There were five other kids in the group. They all say he stayed with them for at least two hours after Katie left, which would have made it about midnight. After that, he says he went home to bed. His mother says he got home around twelve thirty. She was still up.’

‘What did her parents say about him?’

‘They don’t much like him. They see him as being pretty much an operator. Stepfather says Katie came in drunk a couple of times after dates with Sobel, and she was out all night more than once.’

‘Having sex?’

‘The mother thinks so. Says Katie had a prescription for birth control pills, and she told her always to carry condoms. “Don’t depend on the guy to carry condoms.” That seems to have been the sum total of her motherly advice.’

‘It’s pretty good advice.’

‘Yeah, but it shouldn’t end there,’ said Maggie. ‘Not for a sixteen-year-old.’

‘C’mon, Mag, you know as well as I do Sobel as the murderer just doesn’t figure. You don’t acquire the skills to neatly remove a human heart cutting up frogs in biology class. Plus, if he did kidnap her, where does he keep her for a week before he kills her? Under his bed at home?’

‘Yeah. I know.’

‘Where are the parents now?’

‘On their way home. I paid for a cab.’ Maggie paused, waiting for McCabe to react. He didn’t.

‘I’m putting in for it,’ she said. ‘I expect to be reimbursed.’

‘Did I say anything? Fortier’s the Scrooge around here. Not me.’

‘Don’t pull that Mr. Innocence stuff with me, McCabe. Fortier’s afraid of you. He’ll do whatever you tell him to do.’

‘What makes you think he’s afraid of me?’

‘You’re smarter than he is and he knows it. Plus that memory thing of yours. Always calling up little-known facts out of thin air. That really makes him nervous. He always thinks you’re going to show him up in public. Or, even worse, around Shockley.’

‘How much was the cab?’ asked McCabe.

‘I gave them ten bucks. I don’t expect the Ceglias will send back any change.’

‘Ten bucks!’ McCabe exclaimed in mock alarm, but before Maggie could react he added, ‘Sure, put in for it. By the way, another shoe just dropped.’

‘What sort of shoe?’

‘We’ve got a brand-new missing person.’

‘Oh, Jesus. Already?’

McCabe filled Maggie in on Lucinda Cassidy’s disappearance.

‘Are we assuming it’s the same guy?’ Maggie pulled her own desk chair across to McCabe’s desk and sat down. She produced a big bag of Rold Gold pretzels, poured a mound of them on the desk, put her feet up, and started munching.

‘Definite possibility. Whoever arranged Katie’s body so artfully out there in the scrap yard was showing off. He’s preening. Wants us to notice him. I’d love to minimize the media feeding frenzy and deny him that pleasure.’

‘I don’t think that’ll be possible. We’ve got the gruesome murder of a teenage girl. Add in Cassidy’s disappearance and they’ll be all over it.’

‘Shockley will be thrilled.’ McCabe’s phone rang. He checked his watch. It was after midnight. Bill Bacon was on the other end. ‘What did you find?’ He silently signaled Maggie to pick up on the other line.