VC03 - Mortal Grace (2 page)

She listened to the cheering, whistling ovation that wanted to go on and on. “You hear that sound, and you realize there’s nothing else in life that matters.”

Well,
almost
nothing else. She could feel a familiar craving in her nerves, a need for that certain boost that only a toke on the wow-pipe could give her. “How long do we have till the next set?”

Pierrot consulted his watch. “Ten, fifteen minutes.”

“Be right back.” Johanna kissed him and hopped down from the stage. It had been set up ten feet from the woods of Central Park. Peering into the trees, she could see all the way through to Fifth Avenue, past silhouettes of fellow dancers relieving themselves in the bushes.

Not there
, she decided:
privacy is required.
She had only half a nickel rock left in her sock, and she was in no mood to share.
After all, a dancer needs all the energy she can muster.

She made her way through the crowd. The Vanderbilt Garden had been closed for three years due to a city budget shortfall—but now, thanks to a grant from the Port Authority Foundation, it was being reopened with a gala ceremony. Everyone was here: socialites, celebrities, Rockettes, Guardian Angels, hand-picked street kids from Harlem and the South Bronx, print people, radio people, TV people, clergy, laity, the whole world. And more were pouring through the wrought-iron gates that once had guarded the Vanderbilt mansion.

Music boomed: marching bands; rock bands with vocalists yowling into hand-held mikes. What roaring! What thumping!

Johanna’s heart soared.

Minicams scanned, still cameras flashed, faces and hairdos and flowers bloomed. There was Bianca Jagger!

Johanna smiled.

And there was Tina Vanderbilt, the unofficial doyenne of New York society!

Johanna waved.

And
there
was Sheena Flynn, the blond news anchor, shouting orders at her TV crew.

Johanna blew airkisses. “Hello!” she sang out. “Hello!”

At the south edge of the garden, she peeled off from the crowd, lifted aside a lilac branch, and sneaked behind the rhododendron bushes. Bracing herself against an elm, she bent down and retrieved her smoking paraphernalia from her leotard.

Step one:
Center the precious rock in the pipe bowl.
Step two:
Hold the flame of the Bic against it till the crystal pulses.
Step three:
Place pipe in mouth, pull the hot gases into your lungs, and count to ten.

She sat on the ground and shut her eyes halfway. Filtered through the trees and through her eyelids, the garden became a blue and pink and bright yellow shimmer. The leafy shadows seemed to wear a smile. The roar of the celebration seemed a light-year away.

A squirrel sped past, ripping the mood like a gunshot.

Johanna dropped her pipe.

She gave a dismayed yelp. Her eyes scanned tangled vines and underbrush, searching. She got on her hands and knees and pawed through dead leaves.

Her hand struck something solid, smooth, man-made. She pushed back the leaves and uncovered the lid of some kind of hamper.

She frowned. She felt a prickling of curiosity.

She lifted the lid.

“Who found it?” Lieutenant Vince Cardozo, NYPD, asked.

“I found it.” A young woman stepped forward from the group of witnesses. She was dressed in blue-and-white striped tights and matching ballet skirt. Her cheeks and the tip of her nose bore circular splotches of clown’s blue. The makeup had run.

Cardozo could see that the shock had poleaxed her and she was still reeling, unable to control her crying or her shaking or her breathing or anything else that was happening to her body.

“And your name is?”

“Johanna Lowndes.” Her voice quavered like a child trying very hard not to bawl.

“How did you happen to be in those woods?”

“I was one of the dancers. Columbine.” She nodded toward the small wooden stage that had been set up twenty feet away, but her eyes stayed on him. “I needed to…you know…”

“I’m not sure I do know.”

Shock had brought her down to her naked reflexes, and he realized that those pale staring eyes were paying him a compliment. Flirting. Playing the save-me card. No longer a permissible card for a politically aware woman, but still permissible for a teenage girl.

Cardozo knew he was no pinup—he was well into his forties, and though he was tall and had kept himself in shape, he’d always tended to stockiness. But his hair and mustache had started showing flecks of gray and he’d noticed that younger women had started looking at him just the way this girl was looking now.

“I needed to take a pee,” she said.

He could see the poor kid was embarrassed. Mentioning peepee was a kiddie taboo, and right now she didn’t know what age she was.

“And there’s no bathroom, so I went into the bushes.”

Cardozo’s eye measured the distance from the stage to the bushes where the body had been found. She would have had to force her way to the far side of the garden through a crowd of three hundred to reach those lilacs. On the other hand, bushes grew equally dense directly behind the stage and afforded at least as much privacy.

“Did you choose those bushes for any particular reason?”

Confusion flickered in her face. “I’m sorry?”

“Is there any reason you didn’t use the bushes in back of the stage?”

She stared at him openmouthed, not answering.

“Perhaps I can help,” a voice behind Cardozo said.

He turned. A brown-haired man in a neat gray business suit stood smiling at him. The smile was not social, but political: I-want-your-vote-but-I-don’t-have-time-for-your-shit. “I’m David Lowndes—Johanna’s father. I’m the attorney for the sponsors of today’s event.”

“And?”

“I find it horrific that this sort of thing should happen in a civilized community.”

Like the daughter’s voice, the father’s conveyed a sense of privilege even when it was complaining. Unlike his daughter, the man had a good working mastery of the nuances of intimidation.

Cardozo flicked the message out through his eyes:
Buddy, you’re wasting your nuances on this cop.

The smile evaporated from Lowndes’s smooth, evenly tanned face. “If you wish to interrogate my daughter, I’ll be glad to act as counsel for her.”

“I’m not booking your daughter.”

“I’m grateful.”

If that’s a thank you, you’re welcome.
But it wasn’t. Sarcasm had a thousand accents in New York, and Cardozo recognized 999 of them.

He retraced the journey Ms. Lowndes claimed to have taken. He wedged his way as gently as possible through the swarm of guests. Some of them posed. Some chatted. Most waited sullenly in line to give their names and addresses to the police.

He moved aside lilac branches and stepped into the deep shade of the woods. The air hung humid and motionless. The trees seemed to push the sound of traffic far into the distance.

The crime scene squad had dug around the container, disturbing the earth as little as possible, and raised it from its three-foot hole. Cardozo stood for a long time gazing into it. His finger touched the edge of his brown, beginning-to-gray mustache: it was an instinctive impulse to cover his mouth, just as instinctively suppressed.

The skull was recognizably a skull. The rest was harder to distinguish. Time and worms had done their work. There were bones, there was earth, and there was something else that was not quite one or the other.

Lou Stein from the lab was crouched down beside the box with a measuring tape. “This container was built for shipping.”

“Shipping what?”

Lou stood. He brushed dead leaves and twigs from his slacks. He removed his near-vision glasses and slid them into his shirt pocket. His naked eyes radiated blue energy from under a cap of blond-fringed baldness. “Perishables.”

Cardozo reflected. A strong man could have carried the container, but not easily or inconspicuously—so assume for the moment it had to be brought here by vehicle. How would a vehicle get to this spot?

Cardozo surveyed the woods.

Ten strides north brought him to the bushes at the edge of the garden. He ruled out that approach on two counts: a vehicle driving through the garden would have been stopped—and it couldn’t have gotten through without crushing the shrubbery. At the moment, the bushes formed an unbroken wall.

Oak and pine grew to the east of the gravesite, too closely spaced to allow any vehicle but a bicycle to pass.

Which cut out half the compass.

Cardozo walked unhurriedly to the south, almost meandering. The ground dipped steeply to a depression that had filled in with undergrowth and brown leaves. He noticed something white poking through the dead vegetation. He pushed the leaves aside with the edge of his foot.

Newspapers, plastic cups, cartons, and bottles had formed a decade’s worth of landfill.

He took a dead branch and poked it down. The stick slid through compacted slime. He found a ravine three feet across and three feet at its deepest, running in a ten-foot arc—possibly the bed of an old stream—just wide and deep enough that a vehicle’s wheels would have gotten trapped in it.

Which ruled out every direction but west.

The trees were fewer, much wider spaced. There were mostly bushes and brush. Ten feet along, Cardozo saw that this had once been a section of dirt road. He shifted leaves and overgrowth and saw a number of tracks that could have been animal or human, a few that might even have been tire prints. He doubted that any could predate the most recent rain.

The dirt road curved past oak and pine and petered out a yard or so from a one-lane service road surfaced in asphalt. A shallow gutter edged the asphalt—but it was nothing tires couldn’t get across.

Cardozo began building a scenario in his mind, a rough sketch of what might have happened. Whoever left the body brought it by car or truck, pulled off the service road into the bushes. Certain types of vehicle would not be noticed here. Not if they seemed to be park maintenance. As for a man or woman walking or even digging here any time of day or night—who would bother to challenge or even notice? Especially if that person was wearing a park service uniform—or if they looked homeless or dangerous. This was New York, after all: no one noticed anything anymore—certainly not in the park.

“Hey, Vince—look at this.” Lou Stein was examining a shoulder-high branch of a dogwood tree. It was the only dogwood among the oaks and pines, probably a distant relation of the dogwoods planted in a horseshoe marking the boundary of the garden.

The sharpened points of several twigs projected downward from the branch. They had all been torn in the same direction and in the same way—a narrow rip on the upper side had stripped off two inches or more of bark. Young bark had grown back, pale compared with the old.

“Were they cut?”

Lou shook his head. “This wasn’t done with a blade. They were snapped off in winter when they were brittle. Something went past and caught them.” He took out his tape and measured the height of the snapped twigs. He jotted figures in a notebook. “Could have been a vehicle of some sort.”

“Last winter?”

Lou studied bud scars along the twigs. “Winter before.”

Cardozo’s gaze traveled past the dogwood to the overgrown dirt road that branched off the service road. A lot of leaves had fallen since the winter before last. “Any tire tracks in that dirt?”

“A few tracks—hard to date.” Lou began snapping flash photos of the twigs. “We’ll see.”

Cardozo tried to visualize this spot in winter. Leafless. In the gaps between trees, he could see out to the garden and the Vanderbilt Gate. Intermittently, he could see beyond to the high rises across Fifth Avenue.

The view was obstructed now, but in winter months it would be clear. From a vehicle in the trees you’d be able to see the buildings. And from the buildings, depending on the time of day and the light, you might be able to see a vehicle in the trees.

Another of Lou’s flashbulbs went off.

An unexpected glimmer of color from the underbrush flagged Cardozo’s attention. He stopped. He looked back slowly along the bushes but he couldn’t find it.

The faint indentations of his footprints were still visible in the leaves. He retraced his last three steps, placing his feet exactly where they had walked before.

He came forward again and this time he saw it.

Five feet from the dogwood, no more than six inches above the ground, a red-tinged object dangled in the shade, suspended from the branch of a bush. It was the slight swaying motion combined with the curious color that enabled him to see it now.

He stepped closer. At first he thought that strands of spiderweb might have wound together. He hunkered down and moved a leafy branch aside.

It was a piece of thin red string.

He took a ballpoint pen from his pocket and stuck the tip of it into the loop. He drew in a careful breath and slowly eased the string free of the branch.

He saw now that it had twisted into a figure eight. A bunch of dead twigs had caught in the lower loop. Or rather, the string had been looped around the twigs three times.

He counted twigs.

There were twelve, almost straight, almost the same ten-inch length, held almost parallel by the twisted string.

“Hey, Lou—would you come over here a minute?”

Lou grunted and rose, brushing a dead leaf from his trouser cuff.

Cardozo pointed to the bundle of twigs. “What would you say these are?”

“Twigs have been clipped.” Lou made a thoughtful face. “Looks like the remnant of a mixed bouquet.” He tipped his glasses at an angle. “I’d take a wild guess and say lilacs, lilies, some kind of rose.”

“That seem odd to you?” Cardozo said. “A grave there, a bouquet here?”

“When you put it that way, doesn’t seem so odd.” Lou slid the remnant into a plastic evidence bag. “Bird could’ve moved it. Doesn’t seem odd at all.”

THREE

T
HE MEDICAL EXAMINER’S OFFICE
occupied the northeastern corner of Thirtieth Street and First Avenue. Structurally and architecturally, it was the southernmost building of the University Hospital complex. Administratively, it was a separate entity.