He moved through the crowd, badged the young uniform guarding the perimeter, and ducked under the tape. Down at the water’s edge several cops were gathered around some sort of wooden object, but first he set out across the sloping lawn toward a clump of the city workers who dealt with the dead. Usually they’d be standing around relaxed, shooting the shit, but they seemed tense now and Jack could tell that something unusual was going on.
He felt warmer when he joined the huddle, and it wasn’t just the added protection from the wind. After a too-long medical leave, he was back in his element.
A short Dominican man with ramrod posture and a near-bald pate nodded hello: Anselmo Alvarez. The supervisor of the Crime Scene crew turned to introduce the man next to him, whose fancy wool coat and Italian leather shoes said
detective
. “This is Tommy Balfa from the Seven-six squad.”
As a member of the task force Jack’s mission was to team up with local detectives, who caught all sorts of cases and didn’t necessarily have much experience with homicides. He reached out to shake hands. The man looked to be around forty-five, with a handsome, rugged face. He wore thin, elegant leather gloves, and gripped Jack’s hand a little too hard. If this was some thirties movie, Jack thought, Balfa would have been cast as the gigolo.
Jack squared his shoulders. “What do we have?”
Instead of answering, Balfa led them down to the water’s edge, where a coffin-shaped wooden object lay on a fringe of stony beach. The box looked custom made. The lid was open, facing away.
“Is the photographer finished?” Jack asked. Nothing could be moved until a Crime Scene tech took pictures of the entire area. If there had been a murder and the perp was caught, it might be years before the case went to trial, and then this scene so vivid before his eyes would exist only as a series of photos to be pinned on a courtroom wall.
Alvarez nodded.
Jack moved around and stared down into the box. Inside, resting on a gray wool blanket, lay the body of a Caucasian boy, perhaps ten years old. In thirteen years with the task force Jack had seen a number of juvenile corpses, and many in far worse shape, but he still winced. This was something you never got inured to, especially if you had a kid of your own—or if you had a brother who had died young.
There was no obvious cause of death. The first thing Jack noticed was something written on the boy’s forehead with what looked like red Magic Marker: the letters
G.I.
The child was fully clothed, in blue jeans, sneakers, and a cheap plaid shirt buttoned to the neck—something you might buy from a discount department store. Eyes closed, skin pale and slightly blue, arms resting at his sides. Cheap bowl haircut.
Jack took out a notebook. The sight of the kid was deeply disturbing, but he needed to focus on what was in front of him, not his emotional response. His mind began working furiously, questions popping. Did
G.I.
mean some kind of Army connection, and was the kid lying on an Army blanket? Who had built the floating box, and where had it gone into the water in the first place?
First, though, he was concerned about how the tabloids would run with such a story. Most homicides offered little novelty—they were the result of skirmishes over narcotics turf, domestic disputes, petty acts of revenge. The press loved an unusual angle. (He could vividly recall the time in 1982 when he had stepped into a bodega in the middle of a midnight-to-eight and seen the infamous
Post
cover,
HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR.)
And now? They would nickname the victim “Coffin Boy” or something equally ghoulish. His race would matter, too. Black or Hispanic kids bought it all the time and barely made a paragraph on some inside page, but a white kid? Forget it—the story might well go national.
Jack called out to a uniformed sergeant. “We need to get those spectators moved all the way out of the park. And block all entrances. No press.” He wanted a few minutes to focus before things got out of hand. He turned to Alvarez. “You have a cause of death?”
The Dominican shook his head. “I don’t see any wounds or evidence of trauma or strangulation. We’ll have to take him back and do an autopsy.” He glanced down at the pager clipped to his belt. “Excuse me, gentlemen.”
Jack turned to the local detective. “Do you have any witnesses who saw how this thing got here?”
Balfa nodded toward the pier. “I’ve got a uniform holding them out there.”
“Who are they?”
The detective lowered his voice. “Coupl’a ’Rican greaseballs. I can’t believe it: They called Nine-one-one and then actually stuck around.”
Jack was not surprised by the man’s casual racism—he had been a cop too long—but he was not thrilled about it, either. He figured that somebody who spoke to him about greaseballs might well talk about kikes when he wasn’t around. He didn’t say anything, though—the nature of his job was that he probably wouldn’t be paired up with the man for long.
He followed the detective out. The new pier was much fancier than the old one, but it was already showing subtle signs of decay. The trash cans were just rusting metal drums, but someone had taken the precaution of chaining them to the light poles. Out above the harbor, the sun was locked behind a white haze, making it hard to distinguish where the sky ended and the water began. To the northwest loomed the Manhattan skyline, with its gaping new absence. Even though Jack had had months to get used to the fact, it still seemed impossible that the towers were missing. He turned away.
The cove was bounded by a modern brick bunker on the right and an old warehouse on the left. Graffiti covered the sides of the latter building:
Red Hook Rules
and
S.A.D.
He wondered if the latter was some kid’s initials, or just a general commentary on what had become of the neighborhood.
After interviewing the two wind-chilled young Hispanic men—who had stayed because one of them had a brother on the job and he wanted to do his civic duty—Jack and his new partner talked to some of the onlookers, but none of them had been present when the coffin washed ashore.
THE TWO DETECTIVES WENT
for lunch at the edge of Red Hook, near the Gowanus Expressway. The highway had severely damaged the Hook, separating it from the rest of Brooklyn. Belmontes Sandwich Shop was one of the few remnants of the old neighborhood—it had been around for eighty years and had survived thanks to four generations of Belmontes. The front window held a collection of American flags and faded plastic flowers. The paneled walls inside sported signed photos of celebrities, including Frank Sinatra. (Jack had seen such photos so many places around New York that he wondered how OF Blue Eyes had found any time to sing—it seemed that he had spent most of his days eating pizza and getting cheap haircuts.)
He had little appetite this afternoon, but Tommy Balfa stepped up to the counter, manned by crusty men in white T-shirts and little paper hats, and ordered the house special: an Italian hero featuring roast beef, fried eggplant, and fresh mozzarella.
Jack ordered another cup of coffee. One of the countermen, a burly man with a Tasmanian Devil tattoo on his arm, looked up and his eyes widened. “Hey,” he said, “didn’t you used to be Jackie Leightner?”
“I still am.”
“I’m Richie Pepitone,” the man said. “I used to play ball with Petey.”
Jack nodded politely but his face tightened. His younger brother had been killed when they were just teenagers. The counterman looked like he was eager to chew the fat about old times, but Jack moved away toward the register. The old times had not been such good times, so why dwell on them?
There were no chairs in Belmontes, so the detectives sat out front in Balfa’s immaculate blue Grand Marquis. He turned the engine on and Jack was grateful for the heat pouring out of the dashboard vents.
Balfa cleared his throat. “So you know the neighborhood, huh?”
Jack shrugged. “I grew up here.” It seemed to him that the other detective’s look grew slightly cagey, but he might have imagined it.
Balfa popped a can of Coke and set it on the dash. He unwrapped his sandwich and ate hungrily.
“You been with the Seven-six long?” Jack said, making conversation.
Balfa shook his head. “I just got here a few months ago.”
“Where were you before that?”
“Narcotics. East New York.”
Narcotics had always seemed like a shitty detail to Jack. It was pointless, like shoveling sand from one end of a beach to the other. No matter how many skels you arrested, it didn’t do anything to solve the problem. People on the bottom end of the totem pole wanted a little shot of pleasure in their crappy lives. Ultimately, you would need to do something about why they were unhappy in the first place—and how could the police address that? They were mostly there to keep the poor from bugging the taxpayers: off the street, out of sight. At least in Homicide the moral issues were simpler.
Killing people: bad.
“Did you like it?” he asked.
Balfa’s eyes gleamed. “I loved it.”
Jack scratched the side of his mouth. Some cops got into a cowboy lifestyle in Narcotics, thrived on the danger. Some got themselves in trouble. “Why’d you leave?”
Balfa snorted. “My wife couldn’t take it. Said she was gonna pack up and split if I didn’t get into something safer.”
Jack let the subject drop. He could smell the fried eggplant as Balfa chewed his sandwich. Every couple of minutes the detective checked the rearview and side mirrors; Jack wondered if this was a habit from his days with Narcotics. The man seemed preoccupied, and Jack wondered if he was thinking about their case. “What do you make of it?” he asked. It was time to size up his new partner’s abilities.
“Huh?” Balfa paused in midbite.
“This case. You got some ideas?”
Balfa looked down at the remains of his sandwich. He wrapped them up carefully and wiped his hands. He shrugged. “I guess we need to check Missing Persons, see if anybody’s lost a kid.”
“What else?”
“I dunno. If the coffin was store-bought, we could’ve checked on sales records, but that thing looked homemade.”
Jack waited in vain for more. He was disappointed by the detective’s lack of curiosity. What was the coffin doing in the water in the first place? If it was meant to be a burial at sea, why hadn’t the thing been weighted down? Did the person who launched it
want
it to be found? Had it been put into the water from somewhere else on shore, or from a vessel? What could be determined from the forensic evidence, like the origins of the blanket, or the hardware used to make the box?
“What do
you
make of it?” Balfa asked.
Jack sipped his coffee and glanced out through the windshield. A couple of firemen from the engine company down the street were coming up the block with their usual cocky athlete’s gait. They looked younger than the usual guys, though, and a sadness seeped into his chest—this house had lost seven members on September 11.
Jack turned to his new partner. “This is all speculation, obviously, but I can see several different scenarios. The simplest one is that somebody’s kid dies of natural causes. He can’t afford a regular burial, so he builds the box and launches it out. I guess some city statute would apply, but that wouldn’t make it much of an NYPD problem. On the other hand, I can’t see some bereaved parent writing on his own kid’s forehead with a Magic Marker, no matter how screwed up he was with grief…If this is a homicide, then I wonder if he knew the boy. We’ll see if the M.E. finds signs of prior physical abuse.”
“Why do you say ‘he’?”
“What do you mean?”
“You keep saying that the perp was a
he
. Maybe it was a
she
. Or even a
they
.”
Jack nodded. “You’re right. Anything’s possible.”
Balfa took out a cigarette and lit up. “Who knows? Maybe this is one of those devil worship things.”
Jack stared at him, but couldn’t tell if the detective was serious or not. Back in the eighties there had been a big hubbub about Satanic Ritual Abuse, but that had turned out to be a hysterical urban myth, without a single documented case. The sad fact was that in the overwhelming majority of child murders, the perp was not a sinister stranger, but someone known to the victim. “I don’t think so,” Jack said dryly. “Let’s stick to the evidence. The box looks pretty well made, which suggests that the perp—or perps—has some familiarity with carpentry. I wonder where he built the thing, and how he would have transported it without drawing attention. Hopefully, we’ll get a tip about suspicious activity.
“I’d guess that our guy has some kind of personal connection to the water. Lives near it, works on it…A burial at sea is not gonna occur to your average city resident. Our witnesses say that the box floated in from the north. We’ll have to talk to the Charlie Unit”—the Harbor squad—“and see what they say about tides and currents.”
He looked over at Balfa, expecting the detective to be a little chastened by all of the points he had failed to consider, but the detective was just staring out through his side window again, as if he had something more important to think about.
J
ACK FOUND GARY DASKIVITCH
in the dumpy little lounge in the Seven-six precinct house. Half a meatball sub sat on the cigarette-scarred Formica table in front of the huge detective. The other half seemed to be inside his cavernous mouth. He grinned when Jack walked in. “Hey, the cavalry returns! Are you back on the job?”
Jack nodded, then went over and fed some change into the soda machine. He listened in vain for the accompanying clunk.
Daskivitch stood up. “Here,” he said, elbowing Jack out of the way. He rocked the big box back as easily as if he were throwing a little English on a pinball machine.
Kachunk.
He tossed Jack his ginger ale. “You on that weird case that floated in this morning?”
Jack shrugged. “Only if it’s a homicide. We’ll have to let the M.E. call it.” He liked the young detective; the crewcut bear had been teamed with him on two prior cases and Jack had done his best to indoctrinate the kid into the art of homicide investigation. Despite the fact that Daskivitch didn’t look like the brightest crayon in the box, he had been the perfect student: eager to learn, a quick study, thankful for the knowledge. Jack had started to consider himself something of a mentor to the young detective, but now he owed the bigger debt of gratitude. It was Daskivitch and his wife, after all, who had set him up on his first date with Michelle, and it was Daskivitch who had done his best to keep Jack’s spirits up during his long hospital stay.