Escape (26 page)

So he occupied his time feeding Gilgamesh and then took the dog out for another walk around the block. They got back as the sun was setting, so he placed his call.

"Shalom," Moishe Sobelman answered.

"Shalom," Karp replied. "This is Butch Karp. I just wanted to thank you again for today."

"We both enjoyed it. And I hope it won't be so long before our next meeting."

"Actually, that was another reason I called," Karp said. "I spent a little time when I got home researching Sobibor." There was silence on the other end as the baker waited for him to go on. "I think this is a story that my bar mitzvah class should hear and, if it's not too much trouble, I was going to ask if you'd be willing to discuss it with them."

"It is not a pleasant story, Butch. I cannot tell it without expressing the horror of that time. Their parents will complain that I've given their children nightmares."

"I'll make sure their parents are present," Karp replied. "And if they should have trouble sleeping, it's better than ignorance, especially after what happened in July."

"Then let me know the time, and I will be there."

Karp had barely hung up when the telephone rang. The Caller ID indicated it was from Marlene's cell phone. "Hi babe."

"Well, hey good-looking," answered a male voice.

"Oh, uh, hey Jack," Karp laughed. "What have you done with my wife?"

"That's for me to know and you to never find out," Swanburg replied.

"Uh-oh, now I'm sure she's been ruined for any other man," Karp said. "But the kids still need her so if you could send her home when you're through with her, we'd all appreciate it."

"No problem. 'Old love 'em and leave 'em Swanburg' can't be tied down to any one woman, no matter how good looking. And besides, my wife would cut my heart out with a spoon if she found out."

"Ouch. Now that we've settled that, was there a reason you stole my wife's phone and called me?"

"Oh, yeah, that. We thought you might like to know that we found the Volvo station wagon. Marlene's down at the river while they haul it out. She asked me to give you a call."

"That's great news!" Karp exclaimed. "How'd you do it?"

"As the Great Detective would say, it was elementary."

Earlier that morning, Marlene had gazed appreciatively at the forests of elm, beech, spruce, and oak trees that lined both sides of the Taconic State Parkway. "Beautiful, isn't it?"

"'Tis indeed," remarked Swanburg, who sat in the passenger seat next to her.

Her other passenger, the forensic anthropologist Charlotte Gates, who was riding in the club cab of her truck, didn't answer.

They'd taken Cross Bronx Expressway out of Manhattan and merged onto Interstate 95 heading north. Their destination was a small hamlet on the Hudson River called Staatsburg, based on what some people might have called an educated guess, and others pure deductive logic. It didn't matter so long as they located the Campbell family's station wagon and its tragic crew of three small bodies.

Gates had fallen silent by the time they hit the Major Deegan Expressway and stayed quiet when they turned onto the parkway. Marlene thought she might have been sleeping, but when she looked in the mirror she saw that Gates was staring out the window.
It has to be tough on her,
Marlene thought.
She's the one who has the most contact with the dead.

In front of her, Fulton drove the DAO Lincoln with Kenny Katz and Detective Marj Cobing on board. Behind her was an NYPD van marked "NYPD Dive Team," towing a rubber-pontoon Zodiac. Inside the van were four members of the dive team and geologist James Reedy, who was explaining how they were going to go about locating a small car in a big, muddy river.

After the meeting with the 221b Baker Street Irregulars, the next step had been for Detective Cobing to speak to Jessica Campbell's parents at their loft in SoHo. Although gracious enough on the telephone when the detective called to arrange an interview, Liza Gupperstein had been hostile when Cobing arrived.

"Why should we talk to you?" she said after inviting Cobing into her living room. "Our daughter is sick and needs help. But that Nazi Karp wants to put her in prison. Can't he see that she's already suffered enough?"

"I avoided saying what I was thinking—that those three children had suffered worse," Cobing told the search team that morning. "Instead, I told her, 'Look, I know you're hurting. And I understand where you're coming from. I have a child myself, and I'd do anything to protect her. But I don't make the decisions on whether to prosecute someone or not. I just try to gather all the facts I can, and then give them to the district attorney, who makes the decision on how to handle the case.'"

"That still doesn't give us a reason to talk to you," Liza had told her. "Then she started crying," Cobing recalled. "So I said, 'Look, I don't need you to talk about Jessica. What I'm trying to do now is find your grandchildren. We know they're dead; it's time to bring their bodies home and put them to rest.'"

"A stranger could have taken them," Liza had blurted out. "One of Charlie's political enemies ... or one of these right-wing nuts who doesn't like Jessica's politics. He could be holding them for ransom, or ..."

"I didn't know how to respond," Cobing said. "She just wasn't dealing with reality. But her husband touched her arm, real gentle like, and told her, 'Please, Liza, enough. We have to face this.' Then his voice cracked and he said, 'The babies are gone. And the cold, hard truth is that our daughter, their mother, took their lives.'"

Ben Gupperstein had turned back to the detective. "Ask your questions," he'd said. "We will say nothing that might help the DA send our daughter to prison, but we want our grandchildren—their bodies— returned to us. They deserve a decent burial in a place where the people who loved them can mourn properly."

Cobing wiped at her eyes. "I tell you, that was as tough an interview as I've ever done, emotionally speaking. I kept looking at my notebook, but I was on the verge of tears myself. Finally, I asked him if there was any place in particular where the family had gone when Jessica was a child—someplace she would have been happy and would feel comfortable. Near a large body of water."

Benjamin Gupperstein mentioned a beach house they'd once owned on Long Island when their kids were young. But Liza interrupted him. "She loved our little summer cottage on the Hudson River near Staatsburg, just north of Hyde Park," she had said.

"That's right," Benjamin had agreed. "It's about a hundred miles north of here. We'd canoe and picnic in the summers. And sometimes we'd even head up in the winter to go sledding on a big hill in Mills Memorial State Park."

"Jessica never wanted to come back to the city," Liza added. "She would have stayed there, and that's really why she attended Vassar College in Poughkeepsie for her bachelor's degree."

After her interview, Cobing called Swanburg, and they'd agreed that Staatsburg was their best shot. It was in range; the railroad ran right through town; and the killer was familiar with the territory and felt comfortable there.

Marlene had followed Fulton when he turned off the Taconic State Parkway onto New York Highway 9-G and from there to North Cross Road into Staatsburg. The trip had taken a little more than two hours.

The convoy met up with Sgt. Larry Washington of the Duchess County Sheriff's Office at Mills Mansion State Park. The search team and police officers congregated around Washington's car, where he had a large map laid out on the hood.

As arranged, Washington, a large black man with salt-and-pepper hair and a belly that hung over his belt, brought detailed U.S. Geological Survey maps that showed the Hudson River and east shoreline. He pointed out the park where they were meeting and then to a road. "This is Highway 9, better known around here as the Albany Post Road, which was originally constructed a couple hundred years ago to connect New York City to Albany in order to deliver the mail, or 'post.' As you can see, it goes right through town and pretty much parallels the river." He pointed to another line on the map that ran along the bank. "That's the Hudson River Railroad, serves Amtrak and commuter trains."

Washington turned to Reedy, who'd been introduced as the Irregular who would do the searching with the dive team. "If I understood the two detectives correctly, you're interested in places where your suspect could have run her car into the river in the middle of the day and then hopped the train back to the city." He cocked his head and waited for someone to tell him differently.

When no one did, he shrugged. "I think that rules out the park itself. Although it's pretty damn big and there's access to the river, including boat ramps and such, it's a busy place, and chances of someone noticing a car go into the river would have been pretty high. But as you can see from the map, there are any number of small roads—some of them paved, others just a couple of ruts through the underbrush—leading to the river. The foliage is dense along the Hudson, and some of the boat ramps are secluded and hidden, unless you're actually out on the water looking toward shore. There are a few places somebody could roll a car into the river without being seen and still easily walk back to Staatsburg to catch the train."

When the police sergeant was finished, Reedy positioned himself in front of the map with a ruler and pencil and began to make grids along the shoreline, starting with an access point north of town that seemed about as far as Jessica Campbell would have been willing to walk. "The trick will be determining how far from a ramp a car would move downriver," he said. "Last March, the river was a few feet higher than it is right now—flowing a lot faster with spring runoff and flooding. There's a good chance that a car could have been carried a ways downstream from the entry point."

The searchers got back in their cars and drove north on the Albany Post Road and then turned toward the river on a small offshoot called South Mill Road. They'd chosen for their new command post one of the access roads leading to a boat ramp about halfway between the northernmost point of the grid and the town.

As the Baker Street and dive teams began to unload and check their equipment, the Duchess County sergeant and his deputy cordoned off the area to prevent the public from wandering in. "Marj and I are going back to town," Fulton said as he and Cobing stood watching with Marlene and Kenny Katz. "We'll start at the train station and see if anybody recalls seeing Jessica Campbell up here last March. We've checked her credit card purchases. There's nothing for a train or bus ticket, but she could have paid in cash."

"Which would be interesting from the trial standpoint," Kenny said, pulling out a small pad to write himself a note. "Indicates someone who is making a conscious decision to avoid detection, wouldn't you say, Marlene?"

"Seems a logical conclusion," she agreed. "I guess God told her to visit an ATM first."

Surrounded by a rapt audience, Swanburg explained how the Baker Street Irregulars approached locating clandestine graves: "by combining science, the powers of observation, and, admittedly, a bit of luck and intuition."

"We've done our homework," he said. "One of the first assignments was calling the New York district of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for the maintenance of navigation channels on U.S. rivers. The Corps keeps the Hudson channel clear to a minimum of 32 feet—not necessarily in all parts or along the banks, but the main shipping channel. It's also deeper, much deeper in parts, so hopefully our car didn't get too far out into the current before it sank. Here's Jim. He can tell you more about how they're going to search for what we cannot see."

Swanburg waved to the geologist, who wore a floppy, wide-brimmed fly-fisherman's hat and an aloha shirt. "Hey Jim, got a moment to explain your gadgets?"

"Sure, the dive team's still got to get the Zodiac off the trailer and into the water," Reedy said. "We first considered using a type of sonar equipment typically used to map the bottom of large bodies of water—the ocean, big lakes. It's useful when looking for certain geological formations that might indicate mineral deposits and potential drilling sites, or searching for lost equipment, and even sunken vessels and aircraft. Essentially it takes 'photographs' of what's below, sort of like satellite imagery, only these images are created by bouncing sound waves off of objects. That data is fed into a computer that translates it into an image that mirrors the geography—like rock formations or crevices. Sometimes it's clear enough to detect the silhouette of manmade objects, like a car. Some of that depends on what objects are next to it and what angle it may have come to rest at on the bottom."

However, he'd decided against sonar. "The river's not deep enough," he explained. "Just like with aerial photography or satellite imagery, you have to be a good distance above the object to understand what you are looking at. Too close and it's all just a blur."

Instead, he'd decided on using a magnetometer. "As you'll remember from our excursion in Idaho when we were searching for a buried car in a gravel pit, the Earth is a big magnet that generates magnetic fields running north and south. Also, objects made of ferrous materials—like iron and steel—have their own magnetic fields. Now the Earth's magnetic field has a certain measurable intensity, but place an object made of iron or steel—such as a Volvo station wagon—and it will ramp up the intensity at that particular spot. The magnetometer detects these changes. As we pass a magnetometer over a certain area, it takes readings and feeds them back into our computer. The result looks like a topographic map, only these lines denote magnetic intensity rather than elevation. Large variations in this topography are what we call 'anomalies,' and that's what we're looking for here."

"How would you know that you're looking at a car, rather than, say, a steel drum?"

"Good question, Sergeant Washington. That's where knowing what we're looking for, and if possible, the amount of ferrous materials used to create it, becomes important. A 1,500-pound car made of steel is going to give off a much more intense reading than a 50-pound steel drum."

"Where's the magnetometer?" Katz asked, looking over at the Baker Street equipment. Nothing looked particularly sexy. Just some machines with graph paper and dials and knobs.

"That gadget sitting in the inner tube over there," Reedy said, pointing. "And we're going to be towing it behind us so that it doesn't get thrown off by being close to the boat's motor."

"Because it's noisy?"

"Well, that's part of it, but really it's because the engine is made of steel and has a magnetic field," Reedy explained. "In fact, that's part of the reason we're using a Zodiac, which is predominantly made out of rubber and has no electromagnetic field."

Swanburg explained that he'd contacted the Volvo manufacturer, and after being "passed from one confused engineer to another" he'd been put in touch with someone who could actually give him the weight of the steel in the car, as well as the percentage of iron in that steel. "It really helps us calibrate the instrument," he said. "In fact, the Volvo guy was a big help all around."

"You know how Volvo is always boasting in their ads about how safety conscious they are?" Reedy said. "Well, those guys have actually performed tests on how long their cars float if they go into the water. They've even done them with the windows up and with the windows down, which obviously makes the car sink faster. Along with the flowcharts we got from the Corps of Engineers, the 'float times' give us an idea of how far down from each access point we should be concentrating. At least to start."

When the dive team had the boat in the water, Reedy and Gates got in along with the police officer who would be manning the helm. Reedy would be monitoring the magnetometer, while Gates used Global Positioning System equipment to record the exact location of any anomalies he saw. "I'd like to go," Swanburg said, "but these old knees can't take sitting in a cramped boat all day."

"What about them?" Katz asked. He pointed to the dive team, who, after getting their scuba equipment, ropes, and other items out of the van and launching the boat, were settling into lawn chairs.

"They'll only go in if there's something worth checking out," Swanburg said. "The river looks calm. But you'd be surprised how powerful that current is. The Hudson is greatly affected by the Atlantic Ocean's tides, which can push brackish water as far north as Poughkeepsie, and when the tide goes the other way, it's like a vacuum cleaner sucking the water down. It can be dangerous, plus you never know what's moving down the current beneath the surface, like submerged logs, and there isn't much visibility. It's risky business, even for guys who know what they're doing."