One of the uniforms looked startled by this gallows humor, but Anselmo Alvarez smiled as he ducked out under the tape. The Crime Scene supervisor lifted one of Vargas’s gloved hands to his lips. “Hermelinda,” he said, pronouncing the name flawlessly. “We have to stop meeting like this.”
Jack shook hands with a rail-thin detective in a camel-colored coat: Richie Halpern, one of the Seven-eight’s senior detectives. The man’s rough pink skin and shock of white hair reminded him of a lab rat.
“Your case?”
Halpern nodded.
“Any IDs yet?”
“They found an empty wallet next to the white guy. He’s a doctor over at Methodist; lives near Seventh Avenue.”
“And the other one?”
“Unknown.”
Alvarez signaled to the pathologists, who moved inside the perimeter for a preliminary examination of the bodies. They would check for rigor mortis and use rectal thermometers to help determine the time of death, take samples from the red pools under each body, bag the extremities of the victims to preserve trace evidence.
While the detectives waited their turn, they shot the shit, traded news about colleagues, inquired about each other’s families…Jack stood to the side, contemplating the bodies. Even from yards away, he could see a couple of the bullet holes. They were not very dramatic, but years of experience had taught him that gunshot wounds were often quite modest.
He knew all about bullets. He had seen them pried out of floors, out of walls, out of armchairs, toys, briefcases, books, TVs, even a Thanksgiving turkey. He knew their sizes, velocities, trajectories, how they rebounded off brick or metal. Over and over he had seen what they could do to human flesh. It was only recently, though, that he had literally absorbed the knowledge. Underneath his shirt now, between his solar plexus and his right nipple, was a scar the size of a dime. (A quarter, if he was feeling dramatic.) The burning metal had passed through his lung and a fragment had lodged in one of his vertebrae. That piece was still inside him, too difficult to remove—a doctor had shown him the ghostly white spot on his X-ray.
The greatest damage was not physical. When his son, Ben, was small the boy had gone through a brief obsession with cuts and scrapes and Band-Aids. At the heart of it was the kid’s uneasy discovery that his body was vulnerable. The effect of a bullet was a thousand times greater: It was an invasion and a violation. It was an obscenity. It changed everything. Before Jack’s shooting, he had been unaware of his belief in an invisible membrane that protected him from the world. He only realized it after a bullet shredded that thin parchment.
He glanced at his fellow detectives, chatting blithely. To them, corpses were remote objects, unrelated to their own bodies. They didn’t know how easy it could be to cross the line.
Alvarez finally gave the go-ahead. “Keep to the asphalt,” he cautioned; he didn’t want any extra shoeprints on the mulch beside the path.
The Caucasian was curled in a fetal position. When Alvarez gently pushed him onto his back, the body moved easily—the low temperatures might have inhibited rigor mortis, or perhaps it hadn’t had time to set in yet. The man looked older than Jack had first guessed, a handsome guy who kept himself in shape. Alvarez moved the hands aside; the doctor had been clutching at a bullet wound in his chest, and there was another one at the top of his right thigh. Jack noted a pair of headphones around the neck; he pulled out a ballpoint pen and used it to draw the cord away from the body. It was not attached to any device.
The other body, the one in the down jacket, lay stretched out. He wore a stocking do-rag, half pulled down over his face. In his bare left hand he clutched a semiautomatic pistol, a Mac-9; it smelled of cordite. Jack noted a hole in the chest of the down jacket: a glimpse of white feathers soaked with red. Under the brown nylon of the kid’s do-rag, Jack noticed the glint of a little silver cuff on the right ear. Peering into the kid’s slackly open mouth, he noted a gold cap on one of the front teeth. Kids were sometimes smart enough to bring throw-away clothes when they did a crime, but they tended to hang on to their jewelry.
Ah, vanitas
…He made a mental memo to run these identifiers through a computer database when he returned to the task force office.
He knelt down between the bodies, steadying himself with his fingertips pressed against the cold asphalt. The sweet, metallic odor of blood rose up to him and he shivered, blinked. Saw a basement room in Red Hook, a bullet-ravaged man lying on a concrete floor a few feet away, gasping out his last few breaths…
Hermelinda Vargas turned to one of the pathologists. “How many wounds do we have?”
“Just the three you see, I think.” It was often possible to miss a hole, given the rough conditions out of doors; the autopsy would tell for sure.
Jack pulled himself out of his momentary mental lapse—thankfully the others didn’t seem to have noticed. He stood up and checked out the blood spatter on the asphalt and the leaves. The way it had broken up into small drops indicated the force of the gunshots; they were elongated, with tails that pointed away from the source. What was surprising was that both sets pointed in the same direction, up the trail.
Jack pointed to the headphone cord. “Did you find a Walkman or anything?”
The pathologist shook his head.
Jack turned to Alvarez. “We’ve got more casings than wounds, huh?”
The Crime Scene man nodded at the five little plastic stands his team had set up next to ejected cartridge casings. “Yeah. And it looks like they all came from a Nine.” All five had been found on the left side of the path, from the kid with the gun’s perspective, which was odd, because semiautomatic casings normally ejected six to eight feet
to the right
behind the shooter.
Jack and his detective colleagues spent another ten minutes quizzing the pathologists and the Crime Scene crew. Then he turned to the local detective, to show deference to the owner of the case. “What do you think?”
Halpern glanced up and down the path. “This is looking pretty screwy. At first you think, okay, this is a mugging gone bad. But there’s only one gun here, so how did the kid get hit? In theory, I guess he could have killed the other guy and then turned the gun on himself, but there’s no burn marks or stippling on the wounds.” That indicated that the gunshots had come from a distance of more than eighteen inches.
Linda Vargas scratched her nose. “I don’t mean to get all
politically correct
here, gentlemen, but let’s not jump to conclusions about who’s the perp.”
Halpern frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Look, just because we’ve got a black kid wearing a do-rag, let’s not assume he was the one who brought the gun to the party. Who knows? Maybe this doc was some kind of
Death Wish
urban vigilante type, out looking for trouble…”
Halpern was clearly making an effort not to look skeptical. “How would that work? The kid’s the one with the gun.”
Vargas nodded. “Okay, but let’s say the doc shot the kid, and then the kid managed to get the gun away from him, and fired back before he went down for the count.” She turned to Jack.
He shrugged. “It’s possible. But look at this outfit.” He pointed at the doctor’s skintight running gear. “There’s nowhere to conceal a piece. I doubt he would just roam around carrying it in the open.”
Vargas nodded thoughtfully “You’ve got a point there.”
Jack frowned. “The missing Walkman is what bothers me. I mean, maybe somebody came along after the shooting and snatched it up, but who’d want to get involved in something this bad?” He called out to Anselmo Alvarez. “Can we get an on-site residue analysis on these guys? Just the hands…”
Alvarez nodded and had his men go back to their truck and pull the necessary equipment. When a gun was fired, primer residues usually landed on the shooter’s skin and clothing. Normally, tests would be conducted in a lab, but new technology had made it possible to check for them at the scene.
Jack took another look around the bodies. “The spatter doesn’t feel right. I think there was another shooter.”
A few minutes later Alvarez came over, shaking his head. “Well, well, well: It looks like
neither
of our friends here fired a gun today.”
All three detectives reacted the same way: They turned to scan the empty woods. The real shooter was out there, somewhere else.
Jack turned back to the scene. “Here’s the way I see it. I don’t want to discount the possibility that our doctor could have started things, but let’s begin with a likelier scenario. Our jogger comes up the path and there’s two perps waiting for him, maybe up on that ridge. One of them, Mr. Michelin here, runs out in front. The shooter takes up a position behind the vie to box him in. They ask for his wallet and his Walkman. Maybe he tries to be brave, thinks he’s gonna pull some macho stunt. That’s when everything goes haywire.” He turned to his task force colleague. “Remind you of anything?”
Linda Vargas laughed.
“W
AIT, BACK UP A
minute,” said Jack’s son, Ben, at dinner that evening. “What did the splatter thing tell you?”
The young man had barely touched his dinner, a meal Michelle had gone to a fair amount of trouble to make, but she didn’t mind. Ben looked more animated than she had ever seen him. He was a tall, gangly kid, and he was usually quiet and withdrawn. (Or maybe he was just shy about the remnants of acne that still spotted his narrow face.) Even though he lived in Brooklyn, it was rare that he came by Jack’s apartment.
Jack finished chewing a bite of chicken. She was surprised by his robust appetite, after such a gruesome day. “It’s
spatter
,” he said. “That’s the way blood sprays out from a gunshot or other wound.”
Michelle considered asking if they could finish this particular conversation after dinner, but she refrained. Not only because Ben seemed to be getting along with his father, but because it was one of the few times she had ever heard Jack talk so openly about his work.
He reached out and moved the salt and pepper shakers in front of him. “It’s a simple matter of geometry. If two people face each other and they shoot, the spatter’s gonna go in opposite directions.” He made a couple of little explosive gestures with his fingers to demonstrate. “The weird thing here, though, was that it faced the same way for both. Let’s say one guy shoots the other guy first…” He marshaled the shakers like toy soldiers. “Now, somehow, the second guy would have to move all the way around the first guy before
he
got popped.” He shrugged. “Not impossible, mind you, but not very likely.”
He looked up at his son. “You ever hear of Occam’s Razor?”
Ben shook his head.
“Occam was some old guy, a monk or something. He said that if you’ve got two or more theories, the simplest one that accounts for all the evidence is usually your best bet. To put it another way, if you hear hoofbeats, think
horses
, not
zebras
.” He straightened up. “Of course, you’ve still gotta stay open to all possibilities, ’cause believe me, we see the wackiest sh—, er,
stuff
.”
Michelle smiled at this self-censorship, as if Jack’s son was still eight years old.
“Anyhow,” he continued, “I’m thinking there was another shooter.”
Ben frowned. “But why would he shoot both of them: the jogger
and
the mugger?”
Jack grinned. “That’s where the wacky part comes in. The situation reminded me of this case we had over in the Seven-five last year. Two punks tried to jack an Escalade. One stood on the driver’s side, and the other on the passenger’s. The driver tried to get away, so one of the homies reached up and shot at him through the window. Two problems, though: He couldn’t see very well ’cause the window was so high, and he pulled off the shot gangster-style.” Jack pantomimed holding a gun sideways, then shook his head. “It’s the curse of the movies. We get all these thugs imitating the crap they see in some dumb flick.”
“Why was the sideways thing a problem?” Michelle asked. She wasn’t much impressed by all the talk of guns and violence—not nearly as impressed as Ben seemed to be—but she was happy to help the conversation along.
Jack snorted. “These kids think it looks good, but try aiming a gun when you hold it like that. And with a semiautomatic with a light trigger pull, there’s even less control.”
Ben was wide-eyed. “What happened?”
Michelle pressed her fingertips to her mouth, interested now, despite herself. “Don’t tell me: The shot went out the other window and killed the partner?”
Jack nodded. “Another criminal genius bites the dust.” He grinned. “It’s what we call a public service homicide.”
Ben leaned forward. “So you think something like that happened in the park?”
Jack shrugged. “It’s a theory.” He set down his napkin and stood up. “I’ll go get the coffee and dessert.”
Ben looked surprised. Perhaps his father had not been so domestic in the old family home, Michelle thought.
Jack stopped halfway across the room and turned back to his son. “Don’t go talking about this case with your friends. They’ll tell someone else, and then someone else will hear about it, and the next thing you know, it’ll show up in the
Daily News
. And that would be bad news for your old man,
capisce
?”
Ben nodded solemnly; he seemed impressed by the trust his father was placing in him.
As soon as Jack was out of earshot, the kid turned to Michelle. “Wow! I think that’s the most he’s told me about his work since…
ever
. Usually I ask him how it’s going and he never wants to talk about it.” He shook his head, then smiled. “You must be having a good effect on him.”
Michelle smiled modestly, but she was pleased. Pleased most of all that this rare family dinner was going so well. She liked Jack’s son. Their first meeting had taken place under the most awful circumstances: the night Jack had been shot. There was the usual emergency room craziness, plus panicked cops milling everywhere, and then the commissioner and his entourage showing up. Michelle had just met Ben and was trying to explain why she was there even though she had only known his father for a couple weeks when Jack’s ex-wife showed up, with some kind of boyfriend in tow, and things got even more awkward.