The Graving Dock (6 page)

Jack shrugged, doing his best to act casual. “Fine. Better than the Jets—you see the game last night?” He didn’t like talking about his shooting or recovery. Back in the hospital, he had noticed something strange. Like any wounded cop, he had received many visitors, from the mayor and the commissioner on down. His colleagues would drop by, hand off some magazines or a fruit basket, say they had to run, and run. It took him a while to figure it out: All cops wanted to believe that they were invulnerable, magically protected by the badge. Seeing a wounded coworker put the lie to that belief. Now he just wanted to put the shooting behind him, to blend back in and resume the work he loved.

He was glad to change the subject. “Tell me about the bodies.”

Pacelli moved the throttle forward to pick up speed. “We don’t find them much in winter. In the cold weather they tend to sink and stay down, and they don’t come up until the spring.”

Jack nodded. When the water warmed up, bacteria released gases in the corpses and they rose to the surface, usually around mid-April. It was known as Floater Week. There was a strange poetry to it, all those cold submerged bodies rising up: the drunken boaters, the bridge jumpers, the victims of mob hits (who often escaped their concrete shoes or chains as their bodies softened and frayed). Somebody had once called death “that bourne from which no traveler returns,” but every spring, there they came, not to be denied, all lifting toward the light like watery Pentecostals on Judgment Day.

On shore to the right, block after block of huge beige warehouses slid by, the old Brooklyn Army Terminal; it had once processed most of the troops headed off to World War II. Up ahead came the piers and brick warehouses of Red Hook, where Jack was raised. The waterfront there was dominated by a few ship-loading cranes and the huge conical metal silo of the old Revere sugar factory. (At one point the factory had been owned by an associate of Ferdinand Marcos of the Philippines, and Jack knew a local who liked to joke that the abandoned silo was filled with Imelda’s discarded shoes.)

The bow of the NYPD launch pounded up and down and threw sheets of spray as it encountered an occasional wake. During the summer, the harbor would have been crowded with speedboats, sailboats, even Jet-Skis and kayaks, but there were few vessels out in this chilly weather: mainly ferries and tugs, or tankers just arrived from the ocean, which opened out just beyond the Verrazano Bridge to the south. The ships rested on the water like majestic animals on some African plain.

“Is this the end of the season for private boats?”

Pacelli nodded. “Pretty much. By mid-January most people take their craft out of the water, because we start to get ice out here.”

Jack stared out the broad windows of the cabin. If the coffin had not been unloaded from some small boat, it had probably been launched from shore.
Where
was the question—if he knew that, he would know where to look for witnesses.

Pacelli turned away from his constant scanning of the water ahead. “Have you gotten a preliminary report from the M.E. yet?”

Jack nodded. “It seems that the kid was poisoned, by injection.”

Pacelli got a little wide-eyed. “Do you think it could be a terrorist thing? Like this goddamn anthrax that’s going around?”

Jack shrugged. Since the World Trade Center attack, jittery New Yorkers were picturing terrorism everywhere: in accidents, in subway delays, even traffic jams. The fact was, though, that poisoners usually wanted their crimes hidden. Poison was a rather old-fashioned MO. For centuries it had been a favored means to surreptitiously get rid of a spouse or to speed up an inheritance, but recent advances in forensic toxicology and pathology had rendered it increasingly rare.

“Actually, it was
fentanyl
,” Jack said. “I’m glad it was that.”

“Why?”

“It’s a powerful opiate-based anesthetic. That means the kid probably didn’t suffer much. With some other poisons, like strychnine or antimony, you get a violent, agonizing death, but a fentanyl overdose puts you under pretty fast.”

Pacelli looked impressed. “You really know your stuff.”

Jack waved away the compliment. “What can I say? You’re out here saving live people, while I’m just checking out a bunch of stiffs.”

There were another couple of reasons why he was thankful about the case. The M.E. had reported no signs of physical or sexual abuse. And the tabloids were still so dominated by every detail of the Trade Center attack that the story of the waterborne coffin had received surprisingly little play.

“Any idea who the victim is?”

Jack shook his head. “I haven’t found him in any Missing Persons reports. And we’ve checked with every school in the city.” He sighed. “You wouldn’t think a kid could just disappear and nobody would give a damn. Pretty soon we’ll have to set up a hotline and put a photo in the papers, but I’m not looking forward to that; we’ll get calls from every nut job in the Tristate area.”

“You’re working with a guy from the Seven-six on this?”

Jack nodded. “He’s organizing a team of uniforms to canvass along the waterfront, to ask if anybody saw that box go in the water. That’s why I want your help. Obviously, we can’t cover every mile of the shoreline—we need some idea where to focus.”

He heard a clanking and looked across the bow; the launch was nearing a buoy, a scaffolded metal tower bobbing in the water like a punch-drunk boxer. Pacelli steered to the right, following the rules of this watery road. He brought the launch around the southern end of Red Hook and into narrow Buttermilk Channel, which separated Brooklyn from a low, flat island covered with redbrick barracks. Some old Coast Guard base. It was just a quarter-mile from the Brooklyn shore, but so quiet and removed from the hubbub of New York life that nobody paid it any mind.

Jack stared at it, thunderstruck. How could he have missed something so obvious?

The name of the place was Governors Island.
G.I.

“What’s the matter?” Pacelli said.

Jack filled him in.

Pacelli shook his head. “Sorry, but I doubt that’s your answer. The island has been pretty much closed down since the Coast Guard gave up their base there in the mid-nineties. The public’s not allowed at all. There are still a few security guards and a little fire-house, to keep an eye on things, but there’s only one ferry for transportation; it goes to and from Manhattan just a couple of times a day. There’d be no reason for it to carry a kid, and definitely not a coffin. You can talk to whoever’s in charge over there these days, but it’s basically off-limits.”

Jack frowned. It didn’t sound promising, but he made a mental note to ask Tommy Balfa to contact whoever was running the island’s security.

Pacelli veered to the left, around a blackened chunk of wood.

“You get a lot of stuff floating around out here?”

Pacelli nodded. “The most common thing is wood from old piers, but we get just about everything you could imagine: plastic bags, crack vials, Styrofoam coolers, Coney Island whitefish…”

Jack smiled at this childhood slang for floating condoms.

As Pacelli neared the Red Hook pier where the coffin had first been spotted, he cut the engine. The boat swung like a hammock at the mercy of the water, and the cabin began to strike Jack as very small and airless.

“You okay?”

Jack swallowed uneasily.

Pacelli grinned. “Waves getting to ya, huh? Here’s what you do: Just think of cold pork chops smothered in maple syrup. Or fried eggs floating in oil…”

Jack grimaced and his old friend laughed. “Sorry. Tell you what: Why don’t we just cruise along?”

Jack gripped a handrail and nodded.

Pacelli restarted the engine and turned north again. They motored through the channel and out into the open harbor, just a short distance from the thicket of skyscrapers rising from the southern tip of Manhattan. The absence of the Twin Towers was like a slap in the face. Beyond the remaining skyscrapers, over on the west side of the island, teams of volunteers were hard at work, sifting through twisted mountains of wreckage and rubble, by an unimaginable degree the biggest crime scene the city had ever known.

Pacelli saw where Jack was looking, and shook his head. “Man, I sure hope they catch that Bin Laden bastard. I’d like to personally string him up by the balls.” He turned the boat to the right, into the broad opening of the East River.

“Tell me how the water works,” Jack said. He knew plenty about homicide and the intricate workings of the city streets, but this was unknown territory. His job was hardly a solo venture, like it was in the movies—to a large extent, a detective was only as good as the network of helpers he or she had built up over time: confidential informants, friends at the DMV and phone company, old colleagues with specialized knowledge…

Pacelli squared his shoulders, eager to show off his expertise. “First of all, if the box was dumped into the harbor, it would probably have landed out on the south shore of Long Island.”

“How do you know?”

“The DEP did a study a few years back. They dropped thousands of little plastic bottles all over the harbor and the rivers, and then tracked where they ended up.”

“Well, we have a couple of witnesses who said it was moving from the north.”

“Okay, it would’ve probably come down the East River here.”

“How do these currents work?”

“First of all, you know that this isn’t really a river, right?”

Jack made a face, as if he had suddenly been called on back in grade school. “What do you mean?”

“Technically, it’s a tidal strait that connects the harbor with the Long Island Sound. If it was a river, your problem would be simple, ’cause it would only flow one way, and it would be easy to determine the speed and movement of the box. But this is a very complicated body of water. The tides are semidiurnal, which means the damned thing changes direction four times a day…not to mention the slack tides in between, when it just sits there. Then you’ve got your currents, which sometimes run in the opposite direction from the surface water. Throw in the air currents, which also influence the way something’s gonna move, and it’s a goddamned circus.”

The light outside the windows dimmed; Jack looked out and saw that the launch was slipping into a realm of shadow beneath the grand old stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Beyond rose the blue metal span of the Manhattan Bridge, and the ugly industrial lattices of the Williamsburg Bridge beyond that.

“How long is the river, or strait, or whatever?”

“Sixteen miles,” Pacelli answered. “Times two, when you count both shorelines.”

Jack winced. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

Pacelli smiled. “Yeah, but I’ve got good news. Look upriver.”

Jack squinted ahead. “I can’t see very far. There’s a crook in it.”

Pacelli nodded. “That’s the good news.” He pulled out a chart. “See, the river bends like a sock here. The heel’s right up ahead there on the Brooklyn side, and it’s got a little bay dipping off of it. That’s the old Navy Yard Basin.” Pacelli pointed to a small cut in the shore just above it. “That’s the Wallabout Channel.” He moved his finger along the upper portion of the river. “When stuff enters the river from up here, it tends to wash back onto the shoreline nearby, or else float down into the Wallabout, which acts like a catch basin.”

Jack considered the chart. “So our box probably entered the water somewhere below that channel. That’ll narrow our search a lot.”

Pacelli nodded again. “And you can narrow it down a lot more, because you’ve got the Navy Yard here, a big power plant right on the shore here…There’s not much publicly accessible shoreline.”

Jack’s beeper went off. “Hold on,” he told his colleague, and used his cell phone to contact the task force office.

A minute later he hung up, shaking his head, puzzled.

“The M.E. just called my boss: They got some new test results. The kid was definitely poisoned, but now it turns out that he would have died soon anyway. He had very advanced leukemia.”

J
ACK SAT IN HIS
car, thankful to be back on solid ground. He squinted down at Tommy Balfa’s card as he punched the detective’s number into his cell phone. He had to admit that the device often made his job easier, but he rarely used it when he was off duty. For one thing, the tiny keys made his not-particularly-large hands feel like clumsy sausages. For another, he hated the way the phones had ruined the distinction between private and public space, and the way they conveyed such a ridiculous sense of self-importance, as though every little action was worthy of being broadcast.
I’m waiting for the bus. I’m getting on the bus. I’m on the bus.
They made him cranky.

Balfa answered, but the connection crackled.

“Can you meet me at your squad room?” Jack asked.

“I’m out on a job, but I can be there in fifteen.”

“I’ll wait for you,” Jack said. He was already in the neighborhood; he figured he’d kill the time by buying a muffin or something to settle his stomach.

He walked over to a pastry shop on Court Street and bought a
sfogliatelle
, a seashell-shaped Italian pastry, and then strolled down a quiet side street, enjoying the faint taste of orange rind mixed in with the filling’s ricotta cheese.

He considered the latest findings in the case. Yes, the boy in the box had been a homicide, but now it seemed like maybe a mercy killing. He shrugged: That was better than finding out the kid had been abused, but he was still eager to catch whoever had administered the drug. If it had been some loving parent who had done it to put their child out of agony, that was one thing, but the business with the homemade coffin and the writing on the kid’s forehead definitely indicated a perp with a few screws loose. It wasn’t his job to determine that mental status—he would find the killer, and let the shrinks sort it out.

The next step would be to fax the kid’s photo to hospitals in the Tristate area, see if he had been treated there. (If he wasn’t local, though, the search might get tough: There were seventy-five hundred hospitals nationwide.)