VC03 - Mortal Grace (4 page)

Now he turned.

Detective Ellie Siegel’s dark eyes gazed at him out of a fine-boned, honey-skinned face. “They estimate they have over twenty-one hundred possible matches.”

“They always say twenty-one hundred possible matches. Keeps them in business.” Cardozo stopped the tape. “Who’s that guy with the nonhair product on his head?”

Ellie leaned toward the hiccupping image. Today she was wearing a violet dress that hugged every carefully exercised curve in her body. “According to the columns, his name is Whitney Carls and he’s Mrs. Vee’s walker.”

Cardozo sat tapping a pencil on the arm of his wooden swivel chair. There was little to absorb sound in the dimly lit space: no curtains, no carpet. In places, the linoleum had worn down to the wood flooring. The furnishings were City of New York standard issue: a battered steel desk; a seriously abused steel filing cabinet; a straight-backed steel chair that visitors rarely opted to sit in.

“Can we narrow our description of the dead girl?”

Ellie pushed a waving strand of light brown hair away from her eyes. “Not yet we can’t.”

“How about the X rays?”

For the last forty-eight hours four detectives had been combing emergency room records for fractured ankles, female, fourteen to seventeen years of age, occurring one to two years ago.

Ellie shook her head. “Nothing so far.”

Cardozo looked up at the sound of knocking on the open door. Detective Greg Monteleone was holding a notepad in one hand and a toasted bagel in the other. At six-foot-one, two hundred five pounds, he was definitely an overeater. He mumbled something.

“Swallow your food,” Cardozo said. “Please.”

Greg swallowed. “Styrobasket of Kalamazoo.”

“What about them?”

“They made the meat container. It’s the institutional size—the largest. The sales department says they sell over eight hundred thousand a year. There’s no serial number, so individual Styrobaskets are untraceable.”

“How many dealers handle them in the metropolitan area?”

“Over three hundred. They’re faxing us the names.”

“Mazel tov,” Ellie muttered. “How long was it in the park?”

Cardozo dug through the papers on his desk and found the lab report. “At least fifteen months. Which is in the same ballpark as the broken dogwood branches. The only tire marks in the immediate area were made by a four-wheel-drive vehicle—but they can’t be dated because leaves don’t fall in discrete layers. Lou found a narrow indentation in the earth four feet from the grave—it could have been made by some kind of loading and unloading ramp….” He thumbed through sheets of computer printout. “Which suggests we’re dealing with a van.”

“Hallelujah,” Greg said. “There are only about three hundred thousand of those in Manhattan.”

Cardozo flipped a page. “A pair of Levi’s and a T-shirt were in the basket with her.”

Ellie grimaced. “That’s not adequate clothing, not for the time of year she died.”

Greg sighed. “Try to get a kid to dress right.”

“Greg.” Ellie glared at him. “Shut up.”

“The lab has found bits of acrylic gray shag carpet sticking to the blue jeans.” Cardozo skipped over the chemical analysis. “It’s an inexpensive variety—Monsanto—designed for office buildings and hotels.”

“And motels.” Greg licked cream cheese from his fingers.

“There’s a powdery residue in the fabric—incense. All-purpose, bottom-of-the-line variety. The big users are churches.”

“I take it back,” Greg said. “She was a good girl after all. But do good girls have pierced nipples?”

Ellie glanced up. “She had a ring in her nipple?”

Cardozo nodded. “A tin ring. With a thin gold plate that’s practically worn through. It’s a cheap item. They make a lot of them in Taiwan.”

“We seem to be hearing the word
cheap
a lot,” Greg said.

“It’s all generic—the clothes, the carpeting, the incense, the nipple ring.” Cardozo dropped the report onto the desk. “Even the girl. Generic unidentified young female.” He sighed. “And somewhere there’s a generic mother worrying about her—going crazy because she doesn’t know whether her kid is dead or alive. She can’t figure out whether to close the book or keep hoping. Hope can be a poison.”

He pressed the
start
button on the VCR. On the screen, figures broke again into plastic joie de vivre. Heads tipped back merrily. Hands gestured grandly. Drinking glasses danced.

He reached a hand to boost the sound. Chatter and laughter from another dimension rose above the growl of Fifth Avenue traffic, and above it all two miked voices were singing
We are the children of life, we deserve laughter, we deserve joy.

A girl’s voice screamed.

The image on the screen whited out for just an instant, and then the camera panned crazily toward a bank of lilac and rhododendron. Two young men in clown suits were struggling to tug a mud-covered basket out from the bushes onto the lawn. Socialites and ghettoites clustered to gawk.

Cardozo pushed
reverse.

The image froze, then sped backward. The clowns pushed the muddy mess back into the bushes. The camera panned away. The screen went blank.

“What’s that flash?” He pushed
forward.
The girl screamed. The screen blanked out for just a half instant. The camera panned. He ran it again. Scream. Blank. Pan.

“Are you sure it’s not a flaw?” Ellie said.

“The sound carries over,” Greg said, “so the tape’s not flawed.”

“It’s something in the image,” Cardozo said. “Something out there in the garden is flashing.”

Ellie was thoughtful. “Maybe it’s a reflection from a windshield. Go back. Let’s see what’s happening in the traffic.”

Cardozo rolled the tape back and this time ran it forward in soundless slow motion.

The traffic on Fifth Avenue was intermittently visible through shrubs and trees. Slow-moving windshields and roofs peeked above the park wall—cars and trucks, limos and taxis and buses, even the odd van or two.

“The sky’s too overcast for any sun to reflect,” Greg said.

“Then it’s a flash camera,” Cardozo said. “It’s shooting straight into the minicam.”

“Or past it.” Ellie’s teeth came down on her lower lip. “Who’s got the ground plan of the crime scene?”

“You do,” Greg said.

“No. Vince does.” Ellie lifted a pile of paper debris from the desk. She tugged loose a neatly drawn map labeled
Vanderbilt Garden, 11 May, 2:40
P.M.

Cardozo watched her, feeling a slight irritation, though he knew he had no right to. “How come you know your way around my mess better than I do?”

“I was married for seven years.” Ellie laid a pencil on the map. She placed the eraser tip on the spot marked
stage.

“So was I. What does being married have to do with it?”

“Everything. You’re not as messy as he was.” She held the eraser in place and rotated the pencil till it passed through the point marked
MINICAM
. “Ahem.” She smiled as though to say,
Don’t I do this well?
The pencil tip was pointing directly at the bush marked
BODY FOUND
. “That flash could have been someone photographing the bush.”

“Why would they photograph the bush?”

“Shutterbug on lookout for photo-op hears scream.”

Cardozo frowned. “At the very first scream—before anyone has identified what’s going on, or where—the photographer knows exactly where to aim his camera?”

“Maybe they were shooting something else that just happened to be in that direction at that moment. Or maybe they had inside knowledge that there was a body behind that bush. There could be a dozen reasons.”

“Inside knowledge like they put the body there themselves?”

“Inside knowledge like we don’t know yet.”

Cardozo was dubious. “Why would they photograph the discovery if they were involved?”

“All I’m saying is, we’ve got a whole range of maybes and let’s not rule any out without at least looking at them.”

“Okay, let’s look.” Cardozo ran the tape back to the scream, then forward again. Just before the flash, he froze the frame.

“The resolution on this VCR is rotten,” Ellie said. “Can you keep the picture from vibrating?”

“This is as steady as it gets.”

Her eye scanned the screen. “Our photographer has to be someone looking toward the minicam instead of toward the stage.”

Greg’s finger tapped a cluster of wide-eyed faces that had turned around to stare out of the screen. “One of these five.”

A jolt went through Cardozo. Two of the men were wearing priest’s collars, and Cardozo recognized one of them.

FIVE

I
T WAS EXACTLY AS
Cardozo remembered.

Despite an endowment rumored to be the second largest in New York City, St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church gave the impression of Yankee sturdiness rather than Manhattan grandeur. In size and design it resembled the proudly undecorated, tall-spired church in a New England town square—except for two details: instead of white clapboard siding, the architects had used gray granite; and there was no graveyard.

The rectory, by contrast, was a turreted, gabled redbrick curiosity. It must have been the only building on the Upper East Side to boast white marble gingerbread—certainly the only such structure on the tree-lined stretch of East Sixty-ninth between Madison and Park.

And this particular marble gingerbread, Cardozo realized, with its pierced lighter-than-air filigree, looked like something out of the
Arabian Nights
, carved by genies.

He pushed the rectory doorbell. After a moment a young woman with alert green eyes and wavy blond hair opened the door. She was wearing a gray blouse and faded jeans and he didn’t recall seeing her the last time he’d been here.

“Vince Cardozo. I have an appointment with Father Montgomery.”

She smiled. “I’m Reverend Bonnie Ruskay.” She led the way to the waiting room. It was still furnished in the almost opulent Victorian manner that Cardozo remembered—carved chairs, potted palms, beaded lamp shades, table shawls.

“Would you care to take a seat? Father Joe will be with you in just a moment.”

Two women were already waiting. Well dressed and striking in a carefully understated way, they were both engrossed in magazines.

Cardozo settled himself in an armchair. He picked up a copy of
Architectural Digest
that was lying on the table. Opening it, he found himself staring at a four-color photo of the very room he was sitting in.

T
HE HOUSE OF GOD THAT JOE BUILT
, a line of bold type announced with fanfare.

Father Joe Montgomery channels the hurly-burly of a thriving Upper East Side parish into good works that really work. Socially impeccable, socially sought-after, and socially responsible, New York’s “vicar of the blue bloods” epitomizes the new mix for the 1990s. Is he the paradigm that can hold our fragmented and fragmenting city together into the next millennium? Miranda Lembeck interviews Father Joe of Manhattan’s St. A’s.

Cardozo leafed through the article. Photos showed a brawny, vigorous, gray-haired Father Montgomery cavorting in shirtsleeves and clerical collar with instantly recognizable female celebrities—tasting oysters with Nancy Reagan…directing Sonya Barnett in last season’s educational TV award-winning
“Saludos, Electra!”…
joining Liza and Lena in a down-and-dirty “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”…joking with Chairperson of the Vestry Tina Vanderbilt.

Cardozo felt mild surprise at the realization that Sonya Barnett—his mother’s all-time favorite singing, dancing, emoting actress—was still alive. In the pantheon of American values, Barnett occupied a niche as high and almost as old as the Statue of Liberty and Coca-Cola. Though he hadn’t seen one of her movies in years, he liked to think of her as one of her roles—a naughty old ethnic WASP with a Dixie accent.

“Father Joe will see you now.”

Cardozo caught resentful glances from the two waiting women and realized he had been jumped to the head of the line. The young woman led him down a corridor to a study lit by the soft glow of a Tiffany-shaded table lamp. The carved marble fireplace and bookshelves beveled in brass continued the Victorian motif of the waiting room.

Father Montgomery came across the oriental rug, hand extended. He looked to be in his mid to late sixties, but he must have worked out daily with weights, because he had the incongruously hefty build of an ex-linebacker. “So good to see you, Lieutenant.”

Do you remember me?
Cardozo wondered.
It was only six years ago. In this very room.

Father Montgomery gestured toward an armchair.

Cardozo sat. He was aware of the lady reverend softly closing the door as she left.

Father Montgomery settled himself behind the desk. He struck a match and held up a pipe. “Do you mind?”

“Not at all.”

“When it comes to smoking in public, I am pro-life rather than pro-choice. But in the privacy of my place of work, I find it relaxes me.” Father Montgomery lit the pipe. “And how can I help the New York City police?” There was a grace note of irony in the intonation.

“Could you identify the people in this photograph?” Cardozo leaned forward to place a small color glossy on the desk top. It was an enlargement taken from a single frame of the videocassette: a sea of heads at the opening day ceremonies of the Vanderbilt Garden and five faces—four men and a woman—turned the opposite direction from everyone else.

Father Montgomery studied the picture. “Well, there’s yours truly, obviously.” His lips pursed disapprovingly. “I loathe the way I photograph. The woman is my neighbor and very good friend, Sonya Barnett—looking her usual ageless self.”

Cardozo’s eye moved from Ms. Barnett to her neighbor, a man with a beard that looked as though it could have been a prop in one of Father Montgomery’s amateur theatricals. “And the other men?”

“The hirsute fellow is Iman Zafr Mohadi of the West Side Mosque. The chubby-faced rogue is Rabbi Jack Green of the Village Temple. And the other priest is Father Chuck Romero of St. Veronica’s, over in Queens.”