Tick Tock (23 page)

“Just at the beach,” I said.

I was ducking a tossed empty Gatorade bottle when my boss came out of her office.

“They found her,” Miriam said. “Paulina Dulcine. Get up to the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge.”

She was actually under the 59th Street Bridge beside a York Avenue Mobil station. We bore right onto a little service road and down a ramp toward the East River. At the end of a parking lot beside an abandoned heliport, crime scene tape was wrapped around a chain-link fence.

Beyond the fence, half a dozen cops were spread out on the rock-piled shore. On the jogging path that ran under the bridge, a crowd had formed. I spotted a twelve-speed
cyclist in a full-body Speedo beside a gaggle of Jamaican nannies leaning on their Maclaren strollers. They looked bored, like they were waiting for the good part to start.

“How did the call come in?” I said to a tall, elfish-looking young uniform working the crime scene log.

“By pay phone,” the kid said.

“Amazing,” I said.

“That someone called it in?” the young cop said.

“That someone actually found a working pay phone in Manhattan.”

The jokes were long gone by the time Emily and I stumbled over to a yellow crime scene marker down by the water’s edge. It was next to a paint can. Beside the can, a burly uniform cop was squatting on the rocks, smoking a cigarette. His dazed, despondent expression couldn’t have been more disturbing.

This wasn’t going to be pretty, I thought as I finally walked up to the can.

I didn’t want to look down. I didn’t want to add another nightmare to my list. I’d seen too many already.

But it was my job.

I looked down.

I was rocked to my center. All rationality abandoned me for the moment. The mind doesn’t register such things easily.

Inside the can was Paulina’s head. Her face was turned skyward, her eyes open. She looked up at me almost pleadingly. She looked like she was buried underground or like
she’d been trying to climb through a ship’s porthole and had gotten stuck.

Some very sick son of a bitch had somehow rammed the girl’s decapitated head into the can.

Emily came over and put her hand on my shoulder.

“We need to get this guy, Emily,” I said after a silent minute.

Emily suddenly whipped out her iPhone.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

She furiously pressed and rubbed at the screen, oblivious of me.

“I knew it. This is it! Joel David Rifkin. Parts of his first victim were found in the East River! It says it right here. The woman’s head had been cut off very neatly and stuffed into an empty paint can.”

“Who was Rifkin again?” I said.

“A serial killer in the nineties from Long Island,” Emily said. “He was convicted of murdering nine prostitutes. He beat them with something heavy and then strangled them and mutilated their bodies. Some say it was closer to twenty victims. Apt is onto another New York killer.”

A shadow passed over us. I looked up. It was the Roosevelt Island tram. We both watched the red cable car as it sailed precariously though the air out over the darkening water.

“Maybe there was some odd bond between Berger and Apt,” I said, thinking out loud. “Like a cult sort of thing. Apt seems programmed. Berger had him completely brainwashed.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing,” Emily said as we started for the car. “Maybe when Apt finds out Berger’s dead, he’ll snap out of it. Come to his senses.”

“We can only hope,” I said, failing to shake Paulina’s face from my memory.

LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON found me on the back deck of my not-so-palatial Breezy Point vacation house. Boogie boards and blown-up flotation devices of every description were scattered around me while from the sun-bleached railing flew about as many beach towels as there were flags at the UN.

I was back in my element, my green zone.

Home Chaotic Beach Home.

In my atrociously ugly neon green surfing shorts, I sent my bare feet upward toward the bright blue sky as I lay back in my zero-gravity beach chair. I even had a half-full can of Tecate securely holstered in the drink holder. The only downside, I guess, were the bright red crime scene photos that stared up at me from the open murder folder in my lap.

I stared back, forcing myself to examine again the remains of Paulina Dulcine. The Medical Examiner’s
Office had said that the poor woman’s teeth had been pulled out with a pair of pliers. From Emily’s notes I knew Joel David Rifkin had committed the same savagery on his first victim in the early nineties. I tossed the file onto the picnic table beside me and let out a breath. Carl Apt was nothing if not a stickler for details.

As if I weren’t depressed enough, one of my Major Case Task Force buddies had just texted me the latest rumor that Chief McGinnis wanted a personal who-what-when-where-how-and-why session with me and Emily about the murder of Paulina Dulcine. Another carpet call. Sounded fun, not to mention productive. I couldn’t wait.

I’d just finished my beer and was having a staring contest with a shady-looking seagull perched on my rusty rain gutter when my phone rang.

I smiled as I looked at the number. It was from me, apparently. Someone inside the house behind me was playing a joke at my expense.

“Detective Bennett, NYPD. Who is this? Who’s wasting my time?” I barked in my best tough cop voice.

“Yes, uh, hello, Detective,” said Eddie in a low, badly disguised voice. “I’d like to report a crime.”

I’d specifically told them I had to work and to leave Daddy alone, but the natives were getting restless. And who could blame them? I hadn’t been around much for the past week.

I was about to hang up, when I spotted something on the picnic table beside me, and I suddenly had a better idea.

“Well, you’ve called the right place, sir,” I said as I quietly stood, lifting the Super Soaker water gun from the table before I trotted down the deck steps. “Name the felony, please.”

“Well, it’s a kidnapping,” Eddie said as I quickly came around the side of the house.

I stopped at the hose bib and loaded the gun with water before I hopped over the railing onto the front porch.

“Kidnapping? Well,” I said as I peeked through the screen door at the backs of Eddie and a cracking-up Trent at the phone in the kitchen. “That’s a serious crime. What’s the victim’s name?”

“Pants,” Eddie said, not missing a beat. “John Pants.”

Trent guffawed as he punched Eddie’s leg. I had to stifle my own laugh as well. Eddie was a funny kid. Maeve and I always said we should have made Eddie’s middle name Murphy. They definitely seemed to be in much higher spirits since that Flaherty kid had been put back on his leash.

“Mr. Pants. I see,” I said as I silently opened the front screen door. “Now, what relation is he to you?”

“Well, he’s my father, actually,” Eddie said. “We haven’t seen him in a few days. It’s really not like him. Well, actually it kind of is. We seriously think he might be a workaholic.”

“You’re in luck, sir. I think I know the location of Mr. Pants,” I whispered as I took aim from the kitchen doorway.

“Where’s that?” Eddie said.

At the last second, Trent, who had been bent over,
laughing, stood up straight, his head tilted slightly like a deer at a cracked twig.

“RIGHT BEHIND YOU!” I yelled as loudly as I could.

Eddie dropped the phone as Trent screamed. Before they could breathe again, I let them have it.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Am I getting you jokers wet?” I said, dousing them with the Super Soaker’s twin barrels.

Trent got the worst of it, by far. He looked like I’d poured a bucket of water over his head by the time he squirmed away, screaming.

“What in the name of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph?” Mary Catherine said as she came running from upstairs.

“They started it this time, I swear,” I said as I hid the water gun behind my back.

AFTER I SWAMPED OUT THE KITCHEN, I decided to put death on hold and give Mary a break, so I took the kids down to the beach.

There must have been a storm coming or one out at sea, because the water was particularly choppy. Some of the blue-gray Atlantic waves were as high as five feet. Tall enough for some pale surfers to be out there among the shore fishermen’s lines.

There were at least a dozen cops and firemen and phone guys hanging ten Queens-style. New York City was the last place most people would think of as a place to surf, but you could pull it off, once you figured out how to fit the board on the A train.

I sat on the shore, watching the little guys goof in the shallows, shoveling for sand crabs with their heels the way I’d shown them. I remembered being a kid doing the same thing with all my cousins.

One time, I remembered, a couch—a bright ’70s-orange couch—washed up with a breaker, like a floor model from an underwater Ethan Allen. I also remembered pausing to watch the Concorde head out of Kennedy for Europe. You didn’t watch it so much as stand in awe of it, trying not to wet yourself once you caught the high, terrifying, bone-rumbling scream of its supersonic engine.

When I turned to watch the swimming “bad teens,” as Chrissy and I called the older kids, I saw that Seamus was out with them. At one point, the septuagenarian actually stood on a boogie board. For about a millisecond. He somersaulted once and almost again in the air as a wave swatted his skinny butt into Davy Jones’s locker. The lifeguard went batty, blowing his whistle. A moment later, Seamus broke the surface with his hands in the air like a victorious prizefighter.

I couldn’t stop laughing. You can’t hurt a fool.

I signaled Seamus ashore to do the babysitting in order to show him how it was done. Which was odd, since I had absolutely no idea. I goofed on the boogie board for a while until the ocean stole it.

Instead of fretting, I decided to surf the way God intended with my just awesome bod NYC freestyle. That is, until an evil wave tried to make off with my Hawaiian jams. I managed to retrieve them with a last-ditch hook of my right foot.

“Mr. Pants, indeed,” I mumbled, tightly retying the string.

“Trouble?” someone said.

When I looked up, my jaw dropped almost as hard as my pants just had.

Mary Catherine had decided to join us, after all. In a bikini. A new red bikini, I noticed. I knew all of Mary’s swimwear, and the article she was almost not wearing was definitely new. As a detective, I was trained to pay attention to details.

I tried to be nonchalant, as if my nanny showing up dressed like a Maxim pinup girl was about as exciting as waiting for the crosstown bus.

“Trouble?” she repeated as she brushed past me, all blond and tan and thin scallops of red.

She disappeared into a wave a moment later. Heading back for Ireland, with my luck. She very well might have been a mermaid returning to sea.

“Just breathing,” I finally said.

A COUPLE OF HOURS of saltwater frolic later, I was back at the grindstone in my outdoor office. I was still barefoot, of course, and my hair was still wet, but I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt now and had replaced my beer with a massive mug of French vanilla coffee.

Even with the caffeine kick, it took me a while to ramp up. I had to work to get some indelible images out of my head first. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw water sluicing off Mary’s back, her beautiful face laughing as she lay on the towel beside me, her eyes closed, her tan cheek powdered with sand.

Magical visions every one, the hardest of all to shake.

To linger on such things was fraught with danger, I knew. A massive land mine of buried feelings had built up since my wife had died, and thinking about Mary Catherine in this manner was like taking a jog right through the
middle of it. I did it, anyway. Of course I did. Every cop is at least a little bit suicidal.

Hard as it was, eventually I had to get down to brass tacks. I rubbed my eyes for a few minutes, putting back on the armor, and guzzled some coffee. Then I flipped the murder folder open and re-entered the land of the dead.

I read over everything meticulously. What I was most interested in was the connection between Berger and Apt. What had drawn them to each other? Was it a cult thing, like Emily had suggested? Could just two people qualify as a cult?

Mary Catherine came out after a while and refilled my mug. She’d gotten changed as well, unfortunately.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I said, smiling. “I appreciate you keeping the savages at bay. Speaking of which, why is it so quiet?”

“The older guys went to a fireworks show, and Seamus took the peewees to miniature golf. They’ll bring back pizza.”

“We’re alone? Heck, what are we waiting for?” I said, starting to stand. “I’ll get the beers, and you take a seat.”

She put her hand on my chest.

“Not so fast, slacker. I got the kids out of here so you could have some peace and quiet. You need to work. You need to catch whoever it is you’re chasing, and take off the rest of this dwindling vacation for real. At this point, I want to catch him just so you can have a break. It feels like I’m at work just looking at you.”

“Why are you so nice to me?” I said.

Mary Catherine’s smile lit up the back porch.

“You know, that’s funny. I keep asking myself the same question,” she said.

I reluctantly went back to my wretched reading. As I pored over the case files, I was again struck with regret over not being able to keep Berger’s death out of the press. If Apt really was brainwashed, we could have used it to somehow lure him in.

But had we lost it after all? I suddenly wondered. What if we set up some sort of memorial service? Maybe something in Central Park, across the street from his building. A chance for all his friends and family, if he had any, to pay their respects.

I heard the phone in the kitchen a few minutes later. I didn’t want to know who it was. The commissioner, probably. Someone in a position of authority, without a doubt, ready to dole out more responsibility or more punishment. I wanted neither.

It turned out I was wrong. It was actually worse.