As Jack turned a corner three blocks from the station house, he noticed a little white Honda Civic double-parked fifty yards down. Before he got any closer, the passenger door opened and Tommy Balfa stepped out. The detective bent down and said something in through the window, then turned and hurried away. Jack wondered why the car hadn’t just dropped Balfa off in front of the station house. It pulled out into the street and a few seconds later passed Jack by. The window was sliding up, but he caught a glimpse of an attractive young redhead in the driver’s seat.
BALFA WAS ALREADY BEHIND
his desk when Jack walked into the squad room. “How ya doin’?” the detective said.
“I’m good,” Jack answered. “You out working on our case?”
“Actually,” Balfa said calmly, “I was finishing up another thing. I had to meet with a C.I.”
Jack didn’t say anything, but he was looking down at the detective’s wedding ring and thinking,
Yeah, right: some confidential informant.
“Anybody I might know?”
Balfa just smiled. “If I told you who he was, then he wouldn’t be confidential.”
Jack shrugged.
Whatever.
Balfa was certainly not the first married cop to be catching a little nookie on the side. He had more important things to worry about than this particular precinct detective. “Did you contact your Narcotics guys about the fentanyl?”
Balfa was rummaging around for something in his desk drawer; he barely looked up. “Didn’t get around to it yet.”
Jack blinked, surprised by the detective’s nonchalance. “Did you find out who’s running security over at Governors Island?”
Balfa pinched his bottom lip. “Not yet. Sorry. I had to finish up this other thing.”
Jack frowned. Back at the end of the eighties, the Seventy-sixth precinct had seen its fair share of murders, but those stats had dropped precipitously over the following ten years. Murders were rare here now—especially murders of children. Even though he had a backlog of his own cases, he had spent hours of unpaid OT trying to discover the kid’s identity. And here Balfa was, dicking around, without a care in the world…
He thought of a sign some wag had posted on a wall back at Brooklyn South Homicide:
IF OUR RESTAURANT DOES NOT MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS, PLEASE LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS.
It could have been Balfa’s motto.
J
ACK IS SWIMMING. HE
feels like a fish and he’s swimming; he’s free to glide along and everything’s blue, and friendly rays of sun slant down and Petey is swimming, too. Petey is younger but he’s a better athlete, so he can swim deeper and farther. This is Jack’s brother, whom he loves so much it causes a sweet pain in his heart. He comes up for air and he knows the place: It’s the Red Hook public pool and it’s full of kids shouting and families laughing and little babies learning how to dogpaddle. And he dives back into the blue and discovers that he can breathe underwater now and he glides forward, looking to tell Petey the good news.
Only he doesn’t see his brother, and there’s a voice coming down into the water from the loudspeakers, and he bursts up and the lifeguards are shouting “Everybody out! Everybody out!” They’re pointing at the sky, which is filling with dark thunderclouds. And everybody’s rising, spouting up, and clambering out over the sides. The pool is huge, bigger than a football field, but there’s only a few people left in it. Now no one. But Petey still hasn’t come out. Now everyone is gone
—
the families, the lifeguards, the little shouting kids
—
everyone but Jack, and he runs along the vast concrete plaza that surrounds the pool, which is quiet as the grave now under the lowering sky, and he’s peering down into the water, trying to locate his brother, who is missing.
He woke, gasping.
“You okay?” mumbled Michelle.
“I’m fine,” he answered, and she rolled back over into sleep.
Jack lay waiting for his heart rate to return to normal.
One night after he and Michelle had first grown close, he told her something he had hardly told anyone: The story of how his brother had been killed when they were both kids, how he had been powerless to save him, how the killers had never been caught. She asked if that was why he had become a cop. He had shrugged it off, said he’d never thought much about it.
He thought about it now.
What particularly bothered him was that he had not even succeeded in identifying the boy in the box, let alone figuring out who had killed him. The kid was not in any national missing children database, or in the FBI’s fingerprint database (hardly surprising, considering his age). All queries to area hospitals had come up empty so far, as had checks with schools and social services agencies throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A national search was a daunting prospect, and would require considerable resources. The problem was that nobody was making a fuss about this particular kid.
The worst part was that dead bodies kept coming in to the Kings County morgue; if it filled up, and the child was still unidentified and unclaimed, his small body would end up buried out on Hart Island, in an anonymous grave in Potter’s Field. Jack was determined not to let that happen.
THE MORNING WAS NIPPY
and his breath clouded up as he climbed out of his car on Mermaid Avenue. The ocean and the Coney Island boardwalk were just two blocks to the south, and usually the whole area smelled of salt water and fried grease, but those odors were muted in these winter months.
In the Brooklyn South Homicide office, things were business-as-usual: The bright fluorescent-lit space was filled with desks piled with paperwork, and the other four detectives of Jack’s team were hunkering down behind the piles, like drivers settling in for a demolition derby. Amid the usual wanted posters, union notices, and department paperwork, two computer-printed banners ran across the back wall.
He who is not pursued escapes. Socrates.
And,
If a man is burdened with the blood of another, let him. be a fugitive unto death. Let no one help him. Proverbs 28:17.
Jack signed in to the command log. “Please tell me there’s some coffee left,” he muttered as he headed for the makeshift little kitchen in the back storeroom.
He didn’t get that far. Sergeant Tanney stuck his curly head out of his office. “Leightner, I’ve got a fresh one for you.”
Jack winced. “Can’t you give me a couple more days on the Red Hook thing?”
Tanney shook his head. “This one’s gonna be big, and I need you on it.”
Jack sighed, but didn’t argue. As new jobs came in, the detectives caught them in turn. They could go “off the chart” for four days to focus exclusively on a fresh job, but unless the case was high priority, after that they went back into the rotation. He had worked the job involving the boy in the box as hard and as thoroughly as he could, and would continue to do so in every free minute, but this new case would have to take precedence. (He just hoped that Tommy Balfa would show a little initiative.)
Five minutes later he and Hermelinda Vargas, another detective from his team, were speeding north toward the Seventy-eighth precinct.
MIGHTY STATUES OF REARING
horses flanked the entrance to Prospect Park’s southernmost corner. The inner roadway that circled the park was closed to cars between the morning and evening rush hours, but Jack steered around the metal barrier.
Like Coney Island—and the harbor—the park provided the residents of Brooklyn with some respite from the miles of asphalt, concrete, and brick that covered the rest of the borough. The park had been designed by the same guy who created Central Park, and had similarly elegant features, but this place was not overrun with tourists; as befitted Brooklyn, it was a lot more low-key.
Jack steered the unmarked Chevy along the park drive. To his left, bordering a small lake, honey-colored cattails swayed in the bright morning sun. Geese waddled along the shore, while out on the water hundreds of white seagulls rested, all facing the same direction, into the wind. In warm weather the park provided a refreshing blast of green, but now everything was brown and gray: the ground bare, the trees stripped to their stark branches.
Somewhere in this wooded landscape, two bodies lay sprawled on the rotting leaves. More than a decade ago, that fact would have set Jack’s heart thumping. He had hardly been a rookie back then, with years of experience on patrol and as a precinct detective, but Homicide was a whole new challenge. Now he was just going to another day at work.
His colleague, who had come along to provide a little extra support for what was sure to turn into a press case (a white jogger killed in a public park), was similarly calm. Hermelinda Vargas—whom everyone called Linda—was a short, self-assertive woman. After work, when the team went out for a beer, men would hone in on her because of her soccer-ball-sized breasts. When they caught a blast of her withering sarcasm, they would usually retreat. Hermelinda was fiercely in love with her husband, a scrawny little electrician. She liked to say that she had become a cop because it was her destiny: Her first name meant “shield of power.”
Now she sipped a cup of coffee and checked out the passing scenery. Though the park drive was closed to cars, that didn’t mean that it saw no traffic. First the detectives passed a blond jogger in a trim sweatsuit, her tight ponytail tossing in a circle above her head. A hundred yards on they zipped by an inexperienced Rollerblader lurching forward, arms thrust out, and then a pack of bicyclists in sleek pro gear, their goggles and aerodynamic helmets making them look like a swarm of space aliens. These signs of activity were good for the case: Though the shootings had happened in the park’s interior woodlands, the perp would have had to cross the loop to get there, and maybe some of these weekday athletes had seen him do it.
Their earnest progress around the park made Jack think of the extra few pounds at his own waist. He lived only a mile or two away—maybe he could take up a little jogging during his time off. It would be good to get out into nature a little, watch the seasons change. He resolved to stop by a sporting goods store and pick up some appropriate running clothes.
His partner swiveled as they passed a jogger in a Spandex outfit. “Jesus, did you see that guy’s tights? Come on, people: Leave a little to the imagination.” Vargas didn’t say much, but when she did, she prided herself on talking like one of the guys.
Jack decided to buy some old-fashioned baggy sweatpants.
They were getting close now, as they swooped past some of the park’s genteel landmarks: an Adirondack-style gazebo on the lake, a turn-of-the-century covered pavilion…Soon they came upon the Boathouse, an elegant white building with huge arched windows and a red-tiled roof. It faced onto a serene little lagoon, an offshoot of the lake, separated from it by a graceful stone bridge. A Chinese bride in yards of white taffeta sat by the shore as a photographer snapped pictures. Jack wondered how the woman kept from shivering in her sleeveless dress, but evidently it was worth the discomfort. Chinese wedding parties loved this spot: With the bridge in the background, the sparkling water, the willow trees, it made an ideal calendar-style image for the wedding album.
Jack stared at the lagoon. Ever since the fiasco at the inn upstate he had been agonizing about a spot for his next proposal. Why not here? He could suggest a little stroll with Michelle, lead her up onto the bridge…Thank God the inn had finally found the ring, miraculously unmangled, inside the garbage disposal (or so they claimed).
“I think this is the turnoff,” Vargas said.
Jack veered onto the Center Drive, which led into the heart of the park. As they left the loop road behind, the cheery tone changed. The woods became quiet, nearly devoid of people, and various lonely paths led off into the underbrush. A subtle air of menace crept in, as if they were entering a fairy-tale forest.
A hundred yards ahead, a group of NYPD vehicles was clustered like a bunch of big flashing beetles. Jack parked far away, so he wouldn’t risk getting blocked in. The sound of his closing door seemed to echo in the woods. Ahead he heard an occasional crackle of radios, but the area was otherwise still, the quiet broken only by the scuffing of his shoes on the asphalt, an unseen dog barking in the distance, a squirrel skittering through the dead leaves. He breathed deep: The air held a mulchy, piney smell.
Beyond the vehicles, to the right, some yellow Crime Scene tape stretched across the turnoff for a secluded path. Jack and Vargas badged the uniform standing guard, and got the familiar nod of respect.
Ladies and gentlemen, the cavalry has arrived.
THERE WAS A PHOTOGRAPHER
at work here, too, but his subject was the dark opposite of the happy view near the Boathouse.
The crime scene was about two hundred yards up the path, which twisted and turned so that it lost all sightlines with the road and then descended into a quiet hollow between two ridges. A wire fence ran along the left side, and a steep hillside rose along the other: It made a perfect spot for a mugging, because the victim had nowhere to run. People tended to misjudge the center of the park; Jack had often seen odd loners wandering its interior paths. Even the nature didn’t look so bucolic here: Jack noticed a tree—hit by lightning?—that had crashed down and split its neighbor in half, and another one with an ugly tumor glommed around its trunk.
A group of detectives, uniforms, and pathologists from the M.E.’s office stood, hands in coat pockets, outside a perimeter marked with more yellow tape. They were waiting for the Crime Scene team, in their paper jumpsuits, to finish photographing and collecting evidence. In the middle of the scene, two bodies were splayed out along the path. The nearest one was Caucasian, probably in his forties, wearing a high-tech silver-and-blue running outfit. The second, lying on his back with his head pointed up the path, was a squat African-American teenager engulfed in a bulbous down jacket.
“Aw shit,” Vargas said dryly. “Someone done killed the Michelin Tire Man.”