Deadly Rich (81 page)

The crime scene squad had dug around the container, disturbing the earth as little as possible, and raised it from its three-foot hole. Cardozo stood for a long time gazing into it. His finger touched the edge of his brown, beginning-to-gray mustache: it was an instinctive impulse to cover his mouth, just as instinctively suppressed.

The skull was recognizably a skull. The rest was harder to distinguish. Time and worms had done their work. There were bones, there was earth, and there was something else that was not quite one or the other.

Lou Stein from the lab was crouched down beside the box with a measuring tape. “This container was built for shipping.”

“Shipping what?”

Lou stood. He brushed dead leaves and twigs from his slacks. He removed his near-vision glasses and slid them into his shirt pocket. His naked eyes radiated blue energy from under a cap of blond-fringed baldness. “Perishables.”

Cardozo reflected. A strong man could have carried the container, but not easily or inconspicuously—so assume for the moment it had to be brought here by vehicle. How would a vehicle get to this spot?

Cardozo surveyed the woods.

Ten strides north brought him to the bushes at the edge of the garden. He ruled out that approach on two counts: a vehicle driving through the garden would have been stopped—and it couldn’t have gotten through without crushing the shrubbery. At the moment, the bushes formed an unbroken wall.

Oak and pine grew to the east of the gravesite, too closely spaced to allow any vehicle but a bicycle to pass.

Which cut out half the compass.

Cardozo walked unhurriedly to the south, almost meandering. The ground dipped steeply to a depression that had filled in with undergrowth and brown leaves. He noticed something white poking through the dead vegetation. He pushed the leaves aside with the edge of his foot.

Newspapers, plastic cups, cartons, and bottles had formed a decade’s worth of landfill.

He took a dead branch and poked it down. The stick slid through compacted slime. He found a ravine three feet across and three feet at its deepest, running in a ten-foot arc—possibly the bed of an old stream—just wide and deep enough that a vehicle’s wheels would have gotten trapped in it.

Which ruled out every direction but west.

The trees were fewer, much wider spaced. There were mostly bushes and brush. Ten feet along, Cardozo saw that this had once been a section of dirt road. He shifted leaves and overgrowth and saw a number of tracks that could have been animal or human, a few that might even have been tire prints. He doubted that any could predate the most recent rain.

The dirt road curved past oak and pine and petered out a yard or so from a one-lane service road surfaced in asphalt. A shallow gutter edged the asphalt—but it was nothing tires couldn’t get across.

Cardozo began building a scenario in his mind, a rough sketch of what might have happened. Whoever left the body brought it by car or truck, pulled off the service road into the bushes. Certain types of vehicle would not be noticed here. Not if they seemed to be park maintenance. As for a man or woman walking or even digging here any time of day or night—who would bother to challenge or even notice? Especially if that person was wearing a park service uniform—or if they looked homeless or dangerous. This was New York, after all: no one noticed anything anymore—certainly not in the park.

“Hey, Vince—look at this.” Lou Stein was examining a shoulder-high branch of a dogwood tree. It was the only dogwood among the oaks and pines, probably a distant relation of the dogwoods planted in a horseshoe marking the boundary of the garden.

The sharpened points of several twigs projected downward from the branch. They had all been torn in the same direction and in the same way—a narrow rip on the upper side had stripped off two inches or more of bark. Young bark had grown back, pale compared with the old.

“Were they cut?”

Lou shook his head. “This wasn’t done with a blade. They were snapped off in winter when they were brittle. Something went past and caught them.” He took out his tape and measured the height of the snapped twigs. He jotted figures in a notebook. “Could have been a vehicle of some sort.”

“Last winter?”

Lou studied bud scars along the twigs. “Winter before.”

Cardozo’s gaze traveled past the dogwood to the overgrown dirt road that branched off the service road. A lot of leaves had fallen since the winter before last. “Any tire tracks in that dirt?”

“A few tracks—hard to date.” Lou began snapping flash photos of the twigs. “We’ll see.”

Cardozo tried to visualize this spot in winter. Leafless. In the gaps between trees, he could see out to the garden and the Vanderbilt Gate. Intermittently, he could see beyond to the high rises across Fifth Avenue.

The view was obstructed now, but in winter months it would be clear. From a vehicle in the trees you’d be able to see the buildings. And from the buildings, depending on the time of day and the light, you might be able to see a vehicle in the trees.

Another of Lou’s flashbulbs went off.

An unexpected glimmer of color from the underbrush flagged Cardozo’s attention. He stopped. He looked back slowly along the bushes but he couldn’t find it.

The faint indentations of his footprints were still visible in the leaves. He retraced his last three steps, placing his feet exactly where they had walked before.

He came forward again and this time he saw it.

Five feet from the dogwood, no more than six inches above the ground, a red-tinged object dangled in the shade, suspended from the branch of a bush. It was the slight swaying motion combined with the curious color that enabled him to see it now.

He stepped closer. At first he thought that strands of spiderweb might have wound together. He hunkered down and moved a leafy branch aside.

It was a piece of thin red string.

He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and stuck the tip of it into the loop. He drew in a careful breath and slowly eased the string free of the branch.

He saw now that it had twisted into a figure eight. A bunch of dead twigs had caught in the lower loop. Or rather, the string had been looped around the twigs three times.

He counted twigs.

There were twelve, almost straight, almost the same ten-inch length, held almost parallel by the twisted string.

“Hey, Lou—would you come over here a minute?”

Lou grunted and rose, brushing a dead leaf from his trouser cuff.

Cardozo pointed to the bundle of twigs. “What would you say these are?”

“Twigs have been clipped.” Lou made a thoughtful face. “Looks like the remnant of a mixed bouquet.” He tipped his glasses at an angle. “I’d take a wild guess and say lilacs, lilies, some kind of rose.”

“That seem odd to you?” Cardozo said. “A grave there, a bouquet here?”

“When you put it that way, doesn’t seem so odd.” Lou slid the remnant into a plastic evidence bag. “Bird could’ve moved it. Doesn’t seem odd at all.”

T
HE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE
occupied the northeastern corner of Thirtieth Street and First Avenue. Structurally and architecturally, it was the southernmost building of the University Hospital complex. Administratively, it was a separate entity.

The redheaded woman at the subbasement one reception desk was filling out a receipt for a cop who’d dropped off a hit-and-run. Cardozo flashed his shield and signed the log.

As he hurried down the stairway to subbasement two, the temperature seemed to drop three degrees with each step. His breath vapor glowed in the overhead fluorescent light. He pushed through a heavy steel door with a green rubber jamb. A smell of formaldehyde and eight flavors of human decay floated up like ambient tear gas.

All the tables in the cutting room were taken. Green sheets covered two of the cadavers. A woman doctor was working on a third, a white female. Cardozo still had trouble accepting this as woman’s work.

As he watched, she reached plastic-gloved hands into an open chest cavity and lifted out an enormous, glistening gray liver. She loaded it onto a scale suspended from the ceiling and slid a poise along the fine adjustment beam. The faint
boom-boom
of music leaked from her headphones.

At the fourth table, Dan Hippolito was closing the rib cage of a young black male. He saw Cardozo and lifted his Plexiglas face shield. “Hi, Vince. You’re just in time.” He wiped his hands with a downward sweep over his rubber apron and finished the job on his surgical smock. “She’s over here.”

He led Cardozo to the wall of stainless steel body lockers. Their footsteps clicked across wet cement. Dan fitted a key into the latch of 317 and swung the door open. Darkness seemed to
whoosh
out. He bent down and gave the body tray a nudge. It rolled out on silent ball bearings.

“It’s a young female.” Dan lifted the green nylon sheet that covered the body. “She was sawed.”

Cardozo gazed. Slow leaden shock pulled him down. She looked as though she had been buried by Cro-Magnons and unearthed fifteen thousand years later. Her bones lay black and encrusted on the thin rubber mattress, separated into groups that corresponded roughly to limbs and trunk. Each group had been placed in its approximately correct anatomical relation to the others, as though a paleontologist had arranged them for easy reassembly.

Her skull rested on a thin pillow, the kind airlines give you on overnight flights. Her eye sockets, staring up with black, dignified stillness, seemed to pulse. The facial skin that remained had darkened unevenly, giving her the look of a shrunken head that hadn’t shrunk at all. Hair still clung to the scalp, twisting around her noseless face in two long braided clumps.

“Probably a high-power rotary meat saw.”

“Professional butchering job?”

“A professional wouldn’t saw into the joints.” The heavy latex forefinger of Dan’s glove pointed to the splintered gaps. “This was done by a guy with a fair amount of time and no knowledge of the anatomy of the larger mammalian vertebrates.”

“How much time?”

“Took him a good hour to do this.” Dan Hippolito’s hairline had receded halfway up his skull, lending his dark eyes a grim prominence. “A professional could have done it in fifteen minutes.”

“How did she die?” Cardozo prayed to God she had died before any of this butchery had started.

“She wasn’t exactly preserved for posterity in that Styrofoam box. Most of the soft tissue is gone. What we’ve got here is mostly bones and teeth and they don’t tell us how she died.”

“So what do we know?”

“We know she didn’t die of a fracture. We can see she was out in the park twelve, fifteen months. She’s got the femurs and the pelvis of a woman fifteen, sixteen years old, give or take a year on either end. Skull indicates she’s Caucasian, possibly northern European ancestry. She has no cavities, no dental work at all—so she could have grown up in a state that has fluoridated water—or she could have been a conscientious kid who brushed her teeth and flossed after every meal. Don’t know how many decent meals she had—these bones are borderline calcium-deficient, unusual in a person her age. But she did eat shortly before death. She’s got bread mold on her teeth. The bread mold is weird—there are no yeast cells, dead or alive.”

“What does that tell us?”

“She could have been eating matzo.”

“And so were two million other girls her age. You’re not giving me much, Dan.”

“Stick around, there’s more. Look here at her third rib…it’s been broken—twice—and healed twice. Not as well the second time, though.”

“What would have caused that?”

“Bare fist could have done it—or a frying pan, steam iron—anything heavy and compact.”

“So someone hit her.”

“Hit her hard when she was eight or nine and harder when she was eleven or twelve.”

“I don’t remember Sally getting—”

Dan Hippolito finished the sentence for him. “Getting a rib broken?”

“Not twice.” Cardozo frowned, trying to remember. “Once I might have forgotten, but not twice.”

“From what you’ve told me about Sally Manfredo, I doubt this is her. I’ll have to check, but I very much doubt it.”

Cardozo didn’t know whether he felt relief or pain. His niece had vanished six years ago, and every time an unidentified female teenager turned up dead he had that instant of black dread: this time it’s Sally. “Would you check, Dan? Just to keep my mind at ease? I’d appreciate it.”

Dan picked up a bone from the lower leg and for one surrealistic moment Cardozo thought Dan was going to ask him to touch it, feel it, get to know it.

“Now, this is her left ankle and
this
”—Dan’s finger ran along an uneven inch-long fissure—“is a bad fracture…happened no more than eight weeks before death. Hasn’t healed…she should have stayed off it, but obviously she didn’t. She probably got it set by a doctor, then she started putting weight on it, which is how it developed this seventeen-degree twist that you see here. Safe bet she was taking painkillers.”

“This girl led a rough life.”

“That’s understating the case.” Dan pointed to an area above the break. “There’s a fair amount of skin tissue still adhering to the tibia—and these things here are leather particles.”

Cardozo squinted. There was a layer of dark matter stuck to the bone, and he couldn’t see which particles Dan was talking about. “Leather?”

Dan’s dark eyes met Cardozo’s. He nodded. “Commercially treated and tanned and dyed black. Hard to see without a microscope.”

“What’s leather doing on her shin?”

“It could be someone secured her bare feet with a belt.”

Cardozo frowned. “How soon before death?”

“Put it this way: between that belt and death, no shower intervened.” Now Dan pointed to the rib cage. “Exactly the same thing goes for these patches on the sternum, the clavicle, the seventh rib—her skin’s been preserved.”

Cardozo could see the patches, gray against the intermittent ivory of the bone, but he would never have recognized them as skin. “Preserved how?”

“With wax.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Somebody most likely lit a candle and dripped it on her. Probably while her feet were tied with that belt. Most people wouldn’t hold still for hot candle wax.” Dan’s hand made an arcing gesture toward the arm bones. “If any of the tissue around the radius or ulna had survived, we might have found that her forearms had been secured too.”