VC01 - Privileged Lives (8 page)

“You go for guys, Daniels?”

“The shots, Lieutenant. I’m talking about the shots.”

“Yeah, they’re Academy Award.”

Daniels folded his arms proudly across his chest. “The usual procedure with morgue lights is to use a fast shutter time, but that gives you the morgue look. I experimented, used a slow shutter, three tenths of a second, then gave the film seven minutes in a hydroxide solution. That gives the skin a glow.”

“You call this skin glowing?”

“It’s not your standard morgue shot is what I mean.”

“Daniels, are you on speed or are you doing a four-to-one today or what?”

“O.T. Time and a half and a half on a holiday.”

Leave it to a go-getter like Daniels to figure the overtime angles. “Today’s not a holiday,” Cardozo said. “Tomorrow is.”

“The weekend’s a holiday.”

Cardozo shook his head, looking at a full body shot.

“The perp has got to be one weird piece of work,” Tommy Daniels said. “Real EDP.” EDP was the police psychiatrists’ abbreviation for Emotionally Disturbed Person. “He’ll walk, right?”

“Daniels, are you a coroner, are you a shrink? I got enough resentment today without your expert opinion.”

“Today? You got resentment today? Tell me a day you don’t have resentment.”

“Very comic. Today was supposed to be my day off. I can forgive a lot, but not dragging me into this shit on my day off, and I promise you, the animal that did this is not going to walk.”

“Okay, okay, I just meant the courts—you know.”

“Screw the courts. We’re all emotionally damaged persons—you, me—that doesn’t give us special privileges to saw people up.” Cardozo tapped a photograph. “Let’s crop this one a little higher so he looks like he could be wearing an open-necked shirt. Put the face on a flyer: anyone having any information please contact et cetera et cetera. Run off a few thousand. We’ll paste them up around town.”

Daniels took back the photo. “Ten four.”

Cardozo glanced at him. Cops on TV used police radio abbreviations, why shouldn’t real cops. Life imitating art. Daniels in his liqueur-green shirt imitating
Hill Street Blues
reruns.

An association clicked in Cardozo’s head. “Say … what happened to that photography van we used on the Mendoza stakeout?”

Special Services had gutted an old Consolidated Edison repair truck. From the outside it looked like the standard Con Ed nuisance, a small white-and-blue van that took a week and a half futzing around a manhole. Inside it had cameras and radios and phone-monitoring equipment.

“The one seven borrowed it.”

“Borrow it back. I want a team at Beaux Arts Tower—your boys—round-the-clock photographic surveillance. Pictures of anybody entering or leaving the premises, any vehicles pulling up to the door or taking that alley down to the garage. A logbook with dates and hours, licenses, taxi medallion numbers.”

“Sounds like we got a budget on this one.”

“Yeah, we got a budget.”

Cardozo sat down, alone in his cubicle. He sipped a little of his coffee. He cleared a space on his desktop. He moved Tommy Daniels’s glossies around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. He couldn’t make sense of the missing leg.

Cardozo had seen corpses where the head was gone, where the tits were gone, where the dick or balls were gone. Those were the classic chop-offs.

But the leg. Why the leg?

He took a sip of coffee. He was thinking that he was getting up in his forties. Most of the cops he worked with were younger, still good at running and good at climbing fences, good at looking at stuff like these pictures and not barfing. The pressure was getting to him, One P.P. screaming for results,
The New York Times
on his ass the one time in a blue moon one of his men shot in self-defense. Fear was getting to him, too, fear of looking like a dope or a coward, fear of opening his mouth and getting in shit with the brass.

He pushed up from the desk and walked to the window.

He gazed into the black night of the shaftway. His fingers drummed on the top of the file cabinet. Had there been something about the leg the killer wanted to hide: a birthmark, a tattoo, a deformity?

Cardozo selected a photograph of the dead man’s face and took it out to the desk lieutenant. “Send this over to Missing Persons—John Doe. Have them show it around, check if he turned up missing.”

It was a long shot: the victim might not have been reported missing, he might not have been missing long enough to be reported, he might be missing from Wichita. But you had to cover the bases.

Cardozo went back to his office, lifted the phone, and dialed a number. He waited, jaw clenched, through eight rings. Finally a voice said, “Stein, Forensic.”

“Lou, it’s Vince. Got anything yet on the Beaux Arts killing?”

“Didn’t Tony tell you?”

“Would I be calling if Tony was here?”

“He’s gotta be there, he left an hour ago.”

Cardozo came back into the squad room. “Was Tony Bandolero here asking for me?”

Sweeney angled his chin toward a half-open door across the room. “In there.”

There was an unused space off the squad room. One of the detectives had found a Sony Trinitron in the garbage on the street and brought it in, and detectives on a break sat around watching TV. People in two two threw out good garbage.

Cardozo crossed the room. He could hear gunshots and screeching tires. Cop show. He wondered how detectives, grown men, could watch that stuff.

He peered into the flickering darkness. “Tony, you there?”

One of three forms heaved itself up from a chair. “Shiut. Policewoman was about to nail the arsonist.”

Tony Bandolero came into the light, a heavyset man in his late twenties with limp black hair and a low, wrinkled forehead.

“How can you watch that stuff?” Cardozo asked.

“You want me to be improving myself, Vince, reading some great books?
Divina Commedia,
that’s how I should be spending my coffee break?
Fangul.”

Cardozo closed the cubicle door. “What have you got?”

“Eight partial prints.”

Cardozo took the sheet and frowned. “You can get a positive ID from this?”

“If you can come up with a suspect, why not?”

“Crap. We’re going to get a match, and it’ll be one of the building workers, someone who had nothing to do with it.”

“You don’t know that, Vince.”

“I know it. What else?”

“We removed human blood from the rotary saw.”

“Is it his?”

“It may not be enough to type, Vince. We’re going to try. But all we can definitely say at this point in time is the victim is type O and the blood on the saw is human.”

“That’s all?”

“Not quite. The leather mask is standard s.m. gear—what they call a bondage mask down at the Pink Pussy Cat.”

“Any prints on it?”

“Leather is very tough to print.”

“So where are we?”

“You’re going to like this, Vince.”

Tony Bandolero handed him a magazine. Cardozo leafed through.

“What the hell’s this, gay porn?”

“It’s a leather goods catalogue, Vince, from a Greenwich Village sex shop called the Pleasure Trove. It is
the
place for leather and bondage goods.”

“This is part of the NYPD reference library?”

“Will you hear me out, Vince? The mask is handmade, and it’s in the catalogue, item number 706.”

6

T
HE M.E.’S OFFICE WAS
located at Thirtieth Street and First Avenue in one of a complex of cinderblock buildings near Bellevue. A dark-haired girl was in charge of the lower-level reception desk, talking to a cop who wanted a receipt for a drop-off.

Cardozo gave her his name and asked to see the medical examiner.

The girl smiled at him prettily and consulted a clipboard hanging at the side of her desk. “He’s expecting you. Do you know the way?”

Cardozo nodded. He couldn’t help thinking she was awfully young to be working in a morgue.

He took the stairway to the subbasement with its depressingly familiar banks of overhead fluorescent lights and walls of latched stainless-steel body lockers. Drains dotted the cement floor at six-foot intervals.

This level was full of scurrying figures in white lab coats. Many of them, Cardozo knew, were medical students on the prowl for pregnant Jane Does. The city let them take the dead fetuses.

As he pushed through a door with heavy green rubber lips his nose was assaulted by a sudden stench of formaldehyde and human decay.

He saw at a glance that four of the tables in the cutting room were occupied. Three of the bodies, two white males and a black female, had had their rib cages split open, exposing the lungs and viscera. The fourth was covered. Beside each table stood a scale for weighing organs.

“Hey, Vince.” Dan Hippolito crossed the room. He was wearing a surgical smock and a rubber apron. He had pushed a curved Plexiglas face shield up over his receding hairline. “We just finished draining him and he’s ready. Right over here.”

Hippolito led Cardozo to the necropsy table where John Doe lay beneath a white sheet, his one leg jutting out with the foot at a slant. Hippolito gave the sheet a nudge and let it spill to the floor.

“The incisions on the chest are superficial, don’t mean anything. The skin coloring and neck contusions indicate asphyxia. Like I said before, looks like he was strangled. We’ll know for sure when we get to the lungs. The leg was cut off an hour, two hours after his heart stopped beating. The shear marks on the femoral bone were made by a rotary blade.”

“Dan, I don’t get it. Why take a dead leg?”

“That’s your field. I’ll tell you what happened, you figure out why. The left testicle, on the other hand, was cut off before death.”

Cardozo couldn’t believe he had missed it. “He lost a ball?”

Hippolito lifted the scrotum sac. Now Cardozo could see it. One testicle.

“How long before death?”

“Figure at least a year—it’s completely healed.”

“Did a doctor do it?”

“Either a doctor did it or a doctor stitched it.”

“Why would you take a ball off?”

“A lot of reasons. Like cancer maybe.”

“A guy this young?”

“The environment’s not healthy, Vince. You see pathologies developing early in a great many mammals. The reproductive organs are especially vulnerable.”

Hippolito pulled on a pair of heavy latex gloves. He removed the suction catheters from the dead man’s wrists. He angled the overhead light and began speaking into a microphone suspended over the table.

“The body is that of a young male Caucasian, twenty to twenty-two years of age, height approximately six feet, body weight prior to drainage one hundred forty-nine pounds, light weight due to absence of right leg, which has been severed at the midpoint of the femur. Left testicle missing. Superficial cutaneous cuts.”

He opened the dead man’s mouth and peered in.

“One filling, upper left second molar.”

Hippolito moved to the foot of the table, took hold of the ankle, and rotated it slowly.

“How is your little girl?” he said. “Still a real charmer?”

It made Cardozo uneasy to discuss his daughter in a room full of dead bodies. It seemed like inviting bad luck. “Fine, thanks. Terri’s just fine.”

Hippolito walked to the other end of the table and lifted the head, testing the resistance of the neck muscles. He reached up to the microphone. “Rigor mortis is pronounced, indicating death occurred at least thirty-two hours before examination.” He lifted each eyelid in turn and gazed down into the unseeing eyeballs. “She must be beginning school now, your little girl?”

“Sixth grade.”

“A prodigy.” Hippolito studied the throat closely, then spoke into the mike.

“Contusions on front of neck, probably thumb imprints. A rash is visible around the neck.” He angled the light further down the body. “And around the waist and the ankle.”

“What kind of rash?” Cardozo interrupted.

Hippolito raised a hand to turn the mike aside. “Maybe an allergy, but the localization is unusual for that. Most likely some kind of abrasion.”

“Think he was tied?”

“I’ll have to peel the skin and see it under a microscope. Looks like a reaction to some kind of particles or granules. I don’t think rope would do it, but we’ll see.”

Hippolito unhurriedly studied the dead arms and wrists.

“What’s that?” Cardozo said suddenly.

The left hand was balled into a fist.

Hippolito frowned, pulled at each finger in turn. “I’ll be damned, Vince. He’s holding on to something.”

The M.E. took a pair of surgical pliers, adjusted the grip around the dead man’s index finger, and gave a quick twist. The finger flapped loose with the crack of a breadstick. With three more cracks Dan was able to bend the hand open.

Cardozo could see something small and white, the size of a fat caterpillar, wedged into the pulpy gray valley of the heel of the palm.

Hippolito probed the object free with a pair of tweezers.

“A cigarette butt.” Hippolito frowned. “Filter tip. Check the brand.” He handed it to Cardozo.

There was a ring of red around the filter.

“Lipstick,” Cardozo observed.

The M.E. pointed to a plastic evidence bag. Cardozo dropped the butt into it.

Hippolito was examining the hand, shaking his head.

“The cigarette was extinguished on his palm. I’ll tell you something, Vince. This happened while he was still alive. And here’s what’s weird.”

Hippolito pointed his scalpel to a quarter-inch circle of ash and caked blood.

“He closed his hand around the burning cigarette. Normally that wouldn’t happen, the reflex would be to eject it or somehow evade it.”

“Could the killer have forced his hand closed?”

“See how the tendons are tensed? That shows he clenched his own hand. It’s not a normal reflex to pain.”

Hippolito gazed at the body.

“What strikes me is, there’s a remarkable absence of defensive wounds. Not that the peace sign on the chest is life-threatening, but still you’d think that the victim would have tried to defend himself in some way.”