Neptune Avenue (14 page)

In any case, he was touched by her naïveté, dressing up for an afternoon at the beach; he sensed that she had not had a lot of fun in her young life. Funny, he had always assumed that Daniel had been burdened by a glum, severe spouse, but now he wondered who’d held back who. Either way, he reasoned that the marriage must have been troubled—otherwise, she would never have been at the beach today with him, her somber face opening into occasional heart-stopping smiles, her incredibly fine hair shining in the sun.

She was wide-eyed, like a kid—and there was plenty to gawk at. As they threaded through the crowds, they saw a man with a massive boa constrictor wrapped around his neck; another man with his entire body covered in brilliant tattoos; yet another guy, dressed in a suit made entirely of soda cans, riding along on a tall unicycle. Jack snorted: you didn’t need to go to the sideshow to see the farther ranges of human behavior. The beach was thick with sunbathers, dancing to salsa music broadcast by little boom boxes, chugging forbidden beers, or just lying like beached whales as their weekday tensions seeped down into the sand. There was a lot of flesh on display, which was not necessarily a treat for the eyes.

As he and his date strolled along, though, he found his usual cop’s cynicism melting away like hot tanning lotion. He glanced around at the incredible mix of passersby—two giggling Japanese girls, a black family sharing a couple of ice-cream cones, a couple of barrel-chested, hairy old Russian men who strutted along like former weightlifting champions—and he was warmed by a love of his native city. New York, New York, it was a hell of a town. These were his people, all of them, the ones he had sworn to protect and to serve.

At first he felt self-conscious about appearing in public with Zhenya, but when she held on to his arm he felt a rush of pride: here he was, out on a date with the most gorgeous woman on the boardwalk.

She turned to him with a very earnest expression on her face. “Zhack, can I ask from you a favor?”

“Sure,” he said, wondering what it might be.

She turned north, staring across the gaudy, whirring playground of Deno’s Wonder Wheel Amusement Park, past the giant 150-foot aquamarine-and-orange hoop of the Ferris wheel itself. “May we ride the roller coaster?”

He grinned. It had been forever since he had taken such a plunge. When he was a kid, there’d been a number of such rides here: the Thunderbolt, the Tornado, the Cyclone. Now the Cyclone was the only one left.

“I’d love to,” he said.

THEY MADE LOVE AGAIN
at her place that night, after he got off work.

They lay in the bedroom this time, which was not easy for either of them, trying to love each other with the ghosts of Daniel and Michelle keeping watch at the foot of the bed.

In the midst of it, Jack looked down in the dim light and saw tears streaking Zhenya’s lovely face. He considered stopping, asking her what was wrong, but hell—he knew what was wrong: her husband was dead. He decided that the best thing he could do was to keep his trap shut and make love to her as tenderly as possible, and that’s what he did.

Later, she fell asleep, but he lay awake, staring up into the dark. After the enjoyable afternoon, her mood had certainly shifted. She obviously had good reason, but he wondered if it wasn’t more than that—if it wasn’t also some cultural or ethnic predisposition. He thought of his father, a glum man if ever there was one, and his mother, prone to slow, sad days. It was said that the Russians were a sad people—but soulful. Jack felt it in himself sometimes, like a long, low cello chord resonating deep inside.

Lying here now, with the vast moonlit sea outside the window, he thought of a conversation he had had with Daniel Lelo, back in the hospital, after they started to become close. The month had been September, the year 2001, so of course the news had been all about the tragedy in the towers. He and Daniel had lain in their beds, watching the same channel, some local reporter interviewing families of the victims. Jack, of course, had been stunned and horrified, thinking especially of all the cops and firemen who had perished, but Daniel seemed oddly unmoved.

Later, when they turned off their TVs, Jack lay back, struggling to make sense of the event. He shook his head. “I can’t believe this happened here in New York—it’s like some kind of weird nightmare.”

Daniel remained silent.

Jack sighed. “I work with homicides every day, but the scope of this—it’s just staggering.”

Again, Daniel remained silent. Jack glanced over at him. “I don’t know, maybe this doesn’t mean as much to you, I mean, being an immigrant and all.”

Daniel just shrugged.

Jack started to get a little pissed off. “Doesn’t it bother you, what happened?”

Daniel shrugged again. “You know what is difference between people from my country and your country? In your country, people are surprised by bad news. In my country, we never expect life to be good.”

Jack had frowned. “A lot of people died here, Daniel. That sounds kind of cold.”

Daniel frowned back. “
Cold
? I tell you something cold. I come from a town in Ukraine. Was eight thousand of us there. After the Nazis come through, was seventeen people left. There was
hundreds
of villages where such things happen.” He shifted his bulk in his bed. “You know how many Russians was killed in the war? Twenty-seven
million
. You know how many Russians Stalin was killing, all by himself? With famines, purges, executions—maybe twenty million more.”

Jack found his temper rising. “So what are you saying? This isn’t important, because less people were involved?”

Finally, sorrow touched Daniel’s face, and he raised his hands in a gesture of conciliation. “Please, my friend, I don’t mean no offense. The numbers only mean so much. Every death feels like end of the world to somebody.”

IN THE MIDDLE OF
the night Jack rolled over and put his arm around the dead man’s wife, and soon they were making love again. This time, the urgency was not so great, but it was replaced by a deep tenderness and affection. For the first time, it occurred to him that this might be more than just a glorious, temporary fling.

“S
HIT,” JACK MUTTERED. HE
pushed himself up off his knees, wiped moist soil from his hands, and rubbed his tired eyes. The last thing he wanted was to be at the back of this Crown Heights community garden at nine thirty in the morning, squinting in the bright summer sun, looking at another empty, dry condom. He walked out to the middle of the garden. About twenty little individual plots, spread out across a narrow vacant lot between two brick buildings. Some serious gardeners, evidently; the place was bright with summer vegetables. Cherry tomatoes peeped out of tangled vines; little pumpkins and squash lay bulbous on the ground; tall, radiant sunflowers rose above the last plot in the back. Not tall enough to obscure the sight of a young woman hanging from a branch of a low fruit tree, above a shaded little picnic area. She looked to be about nineteen, and her hair was dread-locked. She wore a little diamond in the side of her right nostril, and fashionable clothes: a cute, formfitting blouse and a type of silky pants that Jack’s ex-girlfriend had once referred to as “parachute pants.” Probably not a hooker, this one; a student, maybe, or a counter girl in one of the fashionable little boutiques that were springing up around Fort Greene and Prospect Heights …

His stomach felt sour. If he hadn’t spent his two days off worrying about Daniel Lelo and making love to the man’s widow, if he had just worked a little harder on the first Crown Heights case, maybe he wouldn’t have to be here today. Maybe this girl would still be alive. He roused himself; he couldn’t let these thoughts interfere with his concentration. There was a killer to be caught.

The usual crew of techs bustled around the vic or made trips back and forth from their vans parked out on the street, careful to keep to the slate stepping-stones that marked the central path. The first officer on the scene, a young patrol cop, had been summoned by the traumatized first gardener of the day, an elderly West Indian woman who had run quaking from the site and found him on a corner just a block away. The uniform had done a good job of securing the scene. That, combined with the dry weather overnight, boded well for the investigation.

As Jack had learned back in his Academy days, in the 1920s a forensic scientist named Edmond Locard had come up with the motto that had governed crime scene investigation ever since:
Every contact leaves a trace.
That meant that the perp would almost inevitably leave some sort of physical matter at the scene of his crime, whether it be DNA, clothing fibers, or his own stray hairs. (Under natural circumstances, three or four hairs fell from the average human head every hour.) He might also leave dust from his workplace: yeast for a baker or brewer, ink droplets or paper fibers from a printer’s clothes, bright multicolored dust from an auto paint shop.

The flip side of the motto was that the perp would also probably take something
away
from the scene, whether it be blood from his victim, soil in his shoe treads, or tiny slivers of broken glass. In this instance, there was a chance that he might have taken away something of a more botanical nature: seeds from a tree, burrs from a berry plant, pollen from a flower. Such traces tended to fall off clothing shortly thereafter, but some might have lodged in a seam or pocket—and they might prove crucial later in tying him to the crime scene.

Of course, the forensic evidence might be a little more unusual. At the moment, the Crime Scene techs were keeping a particular lookout for stray animal hairs.

Jack watched a fat bumblebee wander above a bush of bright red flowers like a drunk stumbling home from a bar. The garden had its practical side—it provided some good food for its patient keepers—but there were a lot of flowers too, which people had taken the trouble to cultivate just for the pleasure of looking at them. He thought of his mother, who always kept flowerboxes in the window of their dark little Red Hook apartment when he was growing up. Her husband was a drunk and her life was hard, but she always had some small bright spot in her life, courtesy of a few treasured blooms—

“I got you some coffee,” Kyle Driscoll said.

Startled, Jack looked up to find his partner from the Seven-one coming up the center path. He reached out gratefully for the cup, even though iced coffee would have been better on such a hot, humid morning.

The young detective frowned. “What’ve we got?”

Jack nodded toward the crime scene. “I found another unrolled, dry condom back there, under that wooden bench. And the victim’s got double ligatures on her neck—one of them made by what looks to have been an electrical cord.”

Kyle grimaced. “You think it’s the same guy?”

Jack shrugged. “Crime Scene is looking for any kind of forensic match. I’m gonna ask for a DNA sample from both condoms. They looked pretty empty, but who knows? Maybe he left a little pre-somethin’-somethin’ in there.”

He glanced at the body, then turned back to his colleague. “You know what bothers me? With that first killing, I was thinking maybe it was a real spur-of-the-moment thing. Like, the guy just got enraged and lost it and did the strangulation with whatever he found lying around.”

“And here?”

Jack rubbed his chin. “What are the odds that another electrical cord happened to be lying around in the back of a garden?”

Kyle’s eyes narrowed. “You think it was premeditated?”

“Who knows, maybe the first killing
was
just random. But what if he discovered that he liked it.”

Kyle made a sour face. “Man, I hope we’re not looking at some kind of serial thing.”

“It’s too early to say, but I doubt it. Serial murder is a pretty rare, specific syndrome. Those guys get this terrible tension that builds up inside them, psychologically, and then they feel some relief when they kill. It takes a while for the pressure to build up again. Here we’ve got two murders in just a few days. If you ask me, I think this is some macho creep who’s experiencing some of that erectile dysfunction they’re always yammering about on TV, and he’s got major anger management issues. Bad combo.”

He picked up a pebble and shook it in his cupped palms. He didn’t want to get the young detective all jazzed about the serial killing theory, but if this
was
the beginning of such a run, they usually started somewhere close to the killer’s home. The comfort zone … Maintaining control over his victims would be very important to the guy, and—at least at the beginning—he’d want to operate someplace where he knew the terrain.

He turned toward the front of the garden. “I’m thinking about how he got the girl to come in here … unless she was killed somewhere else. But that seems like a real risk, transporting her body.”

Kyle glanced at the back of the garden. “Did, ah, did Crime Scene happen to find any beaver fur?”

“They’re still looking.”

“Did they say anything about evidence of a struggle?”

“Nope.”

“How about the M.E.’s crew? Any indications of sexual assault?”

“There’s no sign that she was forced.” Jack stared thoughtfully at the garden entrance. “It looks like he was smart enough to get her to walk in here voluntarily. On the other hand, he was dumb enough to stage this fake suicide crap again. Maybe he’s not the brightest crayon in the box.”

Kyle looked back at the victim, hunched his shoulders, and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s too dumb to pull off something like this again.”

“Detective Leightner?”

One of the Crime Scene techs was coming down the path from the back of the garden, holding up a little waxed paper envelope. “We found something,” he said. “Some hairs. Probably animal.”

“What kind?” Kyle asked.

The tech shrugged. ‘We’ll have to look at these back in the lab.”

After the tech walked out to his truck, Jack turned to find his partner staring at him.

“We need to talk to some Hasids,” Kyle said.

Jack sighed again. “Maybe so. But let’s get the lab results first.”