Killer Heat (14 page)

Bart Hinson asked one of the other troopers to
lead the way, with Mercer behind him, minding the cracked stone
paths that once connected the buildings.

I said to Mike, “That doesn't account for Amber Bristol. There's
nothing we know about her that has any military connection.”

"Full speed ahead, Coop. Two out of three with a West Point
nexus.

Let's work this one through."

“We learned this morning that Cadet Wade was on the women's
crew team,” Bart said. “Every time they practiced it took her right
past the island. Can't say she ever stopped here, but it would be
hard to row by without becoming curious.”

Bart stopped beneath a small archway. The cracks in the
structure overhead stretched out in all directions like an endless
succession of spider webs.

“Here's where the body was when I got called in last night,” he
said, pointing to a place just beyond the stone overhang. “Her bare
feet were right there, and the rest of her sort of that way,
lengthwise, all covered up.”

The familiar chalk outline of urban policing wouldn't have
worked in this setting. Bart pulled a Polaroid photo out of his
pocket and handed it to Mike. “Can you make it out?”

All the colors were muted. The dark material of the blanket
blurred against the brush around it. Connie Wade's skin, lighter
than Mercer's, was barely visible through the weeds.

Mike stooped to examine the ground around the site, pulling
apart tall grasses to look for traces of anything that might be
useful in the investigation. It was impossible to know whether this
part of the scene had been trampled by the killer or by the
troopers who'd been called in after the body was found.

“What's your bet? Killed somewhere else or right here?” Mercer
asked.

"I'm thinking she was alive when she got to the island. Probably
handcuffed and gagged, and forced to walk up here from the
landing.

I don't think a kid with all her smarts would volunteer to
explore this place with a complete stranger,“ Bart said. ”He'd
have to be awfully strong to have carried her from a boat."

“Facial trauma?”

The trooper took a deep breath before he answered. “I can show
you those pictures, too. The commandant from the academy couldn't
even recognize her.”

Mike stood up, looking around the rough landscape. “You got a
guess at a weapon?”

"My men carted off a few dozen of these chunks of rock to the
lab.

Her face was probably crushed by one of them."

“Were any of them around the body?”

"They're everywhere here. That's why the whole thing is
off-limits.

State officials have been worried about lawsuits if pieces fall
on trespassers' heads. I never imagined one of Bannerman's building
blocks might be used in a homicide."

Weathered and worn, the castle towers looked like oversized
chess pieces that had broken apart and shattered as they landed on
the hard, rocky surface of the island.

“Blood?”

Bart shook his head. “Nothing obvious. Nothing spattered around
that we could see. But there's so much blood on the inside of the
blanket that he may already have had the girl covered up when he
finished her off.”

“I guess it's too early to know about DNA,” I said.

“The lab tech went over the body with a Wood's lamp before they
bagged her. No external signs of seminal fluid,” he said, referring
to the ultraviolet light used to reveal the presence of semen on
skin. “The autopsy will tell us more. How about your other
cases?”

“No semen in either one,” I said.

Mike was walking away from us, shading his eyes from the
glare.

“Is there a particular place for boats to land? Can you track a
route to this spot?”

“The original dock Bannerman put in has been reinforced, just
for caretaking purposes. The rest of the island is too rocky to
risk. I'd say our man most likely came ashore there.”

Mike was off to the side of the trail. “Something's been dragged
through here.”

“I'm sorry to say we've made it tougher on ourselves-and for
you,” Bart said, following him. “Our crime scene guys brought their
equipment in this way. Probably obliterated whatever marks the
killer made getting the Wade girl from water's edge to where he
left her.” Indoor sites-the neat confines of a residential
apartment or an office building-presented far fewer challenges to
investigators. There were usually obvious perimeters to the start
of the violence and the exit of the perpetrator. Here, nature and
the elements seized control of the setting.

“Should we come with you?” I asked Mike.

Mercer had started off in the opposite direction.

Mike waved me on. “Gotta keep her close, Bart. You could give
Coop two canteens and a compass and it still might take her a week
to find her way out of Central Park.”

They were twenty feet ahead of me and I traipsed off to catch
up.

To the left, my peripheral vision picked up something moving
quickly out of my way in the brush. I froze in my tracks.

“Hurry up,” Mike said.

I couldn't move.

“What is it?” Mike asked, as Bart Hinson came back to escort me.
“Probably a black rat snake,” he said, offering his arm. “They eat
blonds?”

"Bullfrogs, mostly. That's why they like it here. They're
diurnal.

Great daylight hunters, and very fast."

“And extremely long,” I said, still frightened by the appearance
of the satiny black reptile slithering away.

“Poisonous?” Mike asked.

“No. But you'll see lots of them around. They'll come out to
bask on the rocks if the sun gets stronger.”

Mike turned away and I grasped Bart's arm as I forced myself to
keep moving. Birds circled overhead-harmless, I was sure, but now I
imagined they were vultures. Everything on the island looked
ominous.

From the river, I could hear the noise of motorboats and jet
skis. It was the only sign that we were anywhere near
civilization. For more than an hour, the caretaker and several of
the troopers stayed close to Mike, who was going over every foot
of the trail from the old wooden dock back toward the castle. From
time to time, he would bend to point out debris-pieces of candy
wrapper impaled on the tip of a branch or an empty soda can that
was wedged between rocks. He insisted that every item be picked
up, tagged, vouchered, and sent to the lab. Odds were that none of
this related to Wade's killer, but that was a chance Mike Chapman
never took.

The clouds thickened, the humidity rose, and the mosquitoes
proved themselves pros at getting underneath my clothing. When
Mike was convinced that the painstaking work was being done to his
standards by the troopers, he led us in search of Mercer.

I stood beside Mike in the doorway of the main entrance. The
roof had long ago caved in, so although daylight revealed the
baronial hall, the collapsed boulders and beams made it impossible
to walk very far inside.

From the distance, I heard a sharp yell-and then Mercer calling
Mike's name.

“Over there,” Bart said, as we went back. “They're in the powder
house.”

Beyond the six-story castle and the arsenal was one of the
smaller structures. It appeared as though fire had ravaged it
years earlier, and as we ran to the entrance, I could see what was
left of the rear wall, blackened and charred at its fringes.

One of the young troopers had slipped through a piece of
flooring.

With a panicked expression on his face, he was struggling to
keep a grip on Mercer's powerful arm and stop himself from
plunging into whatever basement was below.

Mike and Bart rushed to the edge of the broken planks and helped
lift the officer back up onto solid footing.

“You okay?” Mike asked.

“I'll be fine, but it's all rotted out,” the trooper said.

Bart stooped to examine the wood. “This place was gutted ages
ago. A whole load of ammo blew up inside. But I'm thinking these
boards don't match the rest of the old planks in here.”

“Give us some light,” Mike said to the caretaker, who had run in
at the sound of the commotion.

Mercer leaned over and peered in. “Well, well. I think we've
found ourselves a little bunker here.”

He held on to the surrounding planks and dangled one of his feet
into the open space.

“Where the hell are you going?” Mike shouted.

“Some kind of makeshift steps,” Mercer said, counting them off
for us as he moved slowly down. “One, two, three, four of them.
Now I'm standing on dirt. I'm in.”

Mike handed the flashlight to him and Mercer ducked down to
examine the space. Seconds later, his head reappeared.

“All the comforts of home,” Mercer said. "If you like living in
a black hole.

Mike handed me a pair of latex gloves and I stifled my intense
claustrophobic fears to lower myself into the dungeonlike space

Don't touch anything, Coop. Bart's getting a team in here to
tear it apart. Just look around and tell me if you get any
brainstorms. I couldn't stand up all the way. Hunched over, I
shined the light around the four-foot-square room. A ladder had
been cobbled together from large tree branches, while smaller
limbs-strung with strips of canvas-were hung as shelves, above an
old army cot resting on rusted springs

Looks like he's moved out,“ I said. ”No clothes, no fresh food.
Not even water."

“There's no potable drinking water on the island,” Bart said.
“You'd need to bring that along to live here.”

There were several cans of food and fruit stacked under the cot,
and packages of MREs, the meals ready-to-eat used by our military.
A large shovel lay beneath the rungs of the ladder, and next to the
spade was the translucent skin of one of the island snakes.

Weapons of every variety were ranged on the floor and propped
against the walls. Ropes of varying lengths and widths were stuck
into the dirt walls with large nails. Hunting knives and revolvers,
hand grenades and bayonets from another era, fierce-looking metal
objects large enough to trap a bear-Bannerman's arsenal had
inspired some modern-day madman to collect his own assortment of
deadly toys.

“You see anything to suggest Connie Wade was down there?” Mike
asked from above.

If the same man had killed all three victims, the impersonality
of the crime scenes was the most solid link we had. He had left no
signature at any of them, dumping women in remote locales without
depositing a hint of his genetic profile-despite the obvious sexual
overtones to the attacks.

“No.”

“Put yourself in her place.”

“I wouldn't have lasted an hour,” I said, my gloved hand on the
ladder, ready to pull myself out. It was dark and dank, and the
daddy longlegs that was scampering across the narrow cot seemed as
anxious for me to leave his home as I was.

“Everything goes,” Mike said to Bart as I climbed out. “Don't
let anybody touch the handle of the shovel. Maybe we'll get his DNA
on that or on the trigger of one of the guns.”

Bart nodded in agreement.

“Who's got the handcuffs?” I asked.

“They're already in Albany, at the state lab.”

Mike was writing Bart's phone number in his pad. “If this killer
was as organized as I think, he was wearing gloves. There won't be
anything on the cuffs.”

“I'm talking about swabbing the inside of the cuffs,” I
said.

Mike raised an eyebrow at me.

“In addition to Connie Wade's DNA, you might find Amber
Bristol's. Link your cases to each other through the victims, even
if you can't find any trace of the perp yet.”

“Every now and then you are useful, Coop.”

Mercer extended his hand and pulled me out of the hole. “You've
got to think that maybe our man never got Wade this far,” Mercer
said. 142 LINDA FAIRSTEIN “Maybe he was on his way to this spot
with her when something interrupted him. ”Could be,“ Bart said.
”Hard as we try to keep people away from the island, it's
impossible to stop them."

“We'll need a news alert covering the killer's window of
opportunity, see whether anyone can come up with a description, if
that's the case,” Mike said. “Maybe someone else passed our man on
his way to the dock or on the other side of the shore, where he
parked.”

“What else will you need from us?” Bart asked.

“Everything you've got, for starters.”

Mercer looked at Mike. “RTCC?”

The most innovative new development was the NYPD's Real Time
Crime Center, a state-of-the-art computer system designed to
accelerate the analysis of data, interact instantaneously with
field personnel, and connect the dots between law enforcement
agencies all over the country. Discrete bits of information
supplied from commands in any jurisdiction were fed into a “brain”
that coordinated them to enable patterns to emerge from seemingly
unrelated facts.

“You bet. This guy's a poster child for Real Time Crime. I'll
call the lieutenant on our way back. The chief of detectives will
have us up and running by sundown,” Mike said. “We'll enter every
bit of detail you and your men have got into this think tank.”

Bart led us back through the maze of brush to get to the
clearing where Joe Galiano was waiting to return us to the city. It
must have been the layer of haze and the storm clouds forming off
to the west that had mercifully kept the serpents from sunbathing
on the boulders.

We climbed into our seats and buckled up. Galiano had the rotors
whirling within minutes, warning us that we would be flying through
some rough weather.

Mike was as uncomfortable in this fast-moving glass-enclosed
bubble as I had been underground. We lifted off over the river,
climbing above the West Point campus on our bumpy ride back to
Manhattan.

I thought he would kiss the ground when Galiano lowered us onto
the landing pad at the heliport.

A uniformed cop was waiting for us at the security gate.
“Detective Chapman? You're to go directly to One PP,” he said.
Police Plaza, the department headquarters, was farther downtown,
three blocks south of the criminal courthouse. "Commissioner Scully
wants to see the three of you immediately.