Monday, October 18, 2004
I got up early to make Bambi and me a breakfast of French toast and sausage and still made it to the station by seven thirty. Hennison was already there. He looked disheveled with several days of stubble on his face and his suit rumpled as if it had been slept in, which it probably had. His attitude toward me had cooled. I knew he wasn’t happy that I hadn’t taken him up on his offer of more overtime after the funeral. He barely acknowledged my presence as he tossed a paper onto my desk. As I looked it over he told me it was a list of tenants at the Upper West Side apartment building that he wanted me to interview.
“What about the knife?” I asked.
He gave me a cold stare. “What about it?”
“I’d have to think with the FBI involved, we should have a list by now of Internet purchases for that make and model.”
“How’s that your business?”
“Because I’d like to conduct the interviews,” I said.
He kept his cold stare going while he considered some smartass crack back at me, but I guess he decided it would be better to just get the work off his desk and have one less thing to worry about. He nodded to me. “Yeah, we’ve got a list,” he said. “You want it, you can have it, but I still want those tenants interviewed.”
“How about a list of owners licensing .40 caliber pistols?”
“I’ve got that covered,” Hennison said. From the way he looked at me I could pretty much tell that he had spent the day Sunday and a good part of the night calling those gun owners and getting them to agree to provide ballistic samples. I could also tell he was resenting me for him being made lead for these murders. There was no question he was feeling the pressure. The papers still hadn’t connected the two murders—we kept enough out of our news briefings so they wouldn’t be able to connect them—but Hennison had to know he only had a few days before the brass felt compelled to connect the dots for them or, worse, before some enterprising reporter did it himself. Once that happened and the city realized we had a serial killer out there, the heat was going to be scorching.
I collected the list of knife purchases from Hennison and took it back to my desk. Unless our killer was the dumbest fuck alive on the planet, there was little chance that he’d allow a knife to be tracked back to him or, for that matter, that he’d have any registered .40 caliber in his possession. While you’re not expecting a Mensa candidate, these types of killers usually possess an animal caginess that makes this routine tracking of leads mostly pointless. Unless you get lucky with forensics, more often than not these types of cases break because a witness or informant drops in your lap. Still, until you find either hard evidence or a witness more reliable than, say, Zachary Lynch, all you’re left with is tracking down leads and hoping you catch a break.
I felt more clearheaded than I had over the past few days, but I also had that same uneasiness that I had woken up with the other night. I couldn’t shake this feeling that something was more wrong than simply Mariano Rivera blowing a playoff game for the Yankees. As I was scanning the list of knife purchasers the FBI had come up with, I received a call from a detective out in Queens who I grew up with in Flat-bush. It had been a few years since we spoke, and we spent some time catching up. He had been an usher at my wedding, and at one time dated Cheryl’s sister, and he gave his condolences when he heard about my divorce.
“My brother, Andy, is going through it now,” he said. “The whole custody business is killing him.”
“Shit, I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah, I know. Listen, Stan, that woman shot with a .40 caliber in Tribeca. You’re the lead for that right?”
“Not anymore.”
He hesitated. “Should I be talking to you or someone else?”
“I don’t know. What’s up?”
“Some dogs were found shot up. I talked with the patrolman who investigated the area, and he told me heavy firepower was used. Made me think it might be a .40 caliber.”
“Who’s the officer?”
“Juan Fullijo.”
I thanked him for the call and then spent the next twenty minutes on the phone before I was able to reach Fullijo. I asked him about the dogs.
“There were three of them,” he said. “We found them under the Steinway Street overpass in Astoria.”
“What was done to them?”
“They were shot, you know, several times each. Big holes blown out of them. From the way they looked, maybe they were there for several days, maybe a week. Hollow-points might’ve been used.”
I felt my heart skip a beat. “.40 caliber?”
“We didn’t do ballistic testing,” he said, sounding confused. “These were dogs, right? Why the interest?”
“We’ve had a couple shootings here in Manhattan where a .40 caliber was used. Were these dogs shot point-blank in the back of the skull?”
“One of them was, yeah. Blew the little guy’s face right off.”
I couldn’t help smiling bitterly at that. Same goddamn sonofabitch. Maybe this time we’d find a witness—at least one who saw more than hallucinations.
“We’re going to need autopsies on these dogs,” I said. “And we need the area marked off as a crime scene.”
“I think the carcasses are being disposed of,” Fullijo said, distracted. “I’m sorry, detective, but shit, these were dogs. It’s not procedure to do autopsies.”
“You did fine, officer,” I said, and I got off the phone with him so I could track down the carcasses before they were lost. I got lucky. They were minutes away from being cremated when I found them and arranged for them to be sent to Manhattan for examination. I then filled Hennison in. He maintained a good poker face throughout, only a glint of light in his eyes betraying his excitement.
“You don’t know yet if a .40 caliber was used,” he said.
“Not yet.”
“You send forensics there?” he asked.
“I figured I’d let you do it.”
His poker face finally cracked and he shook his head grimacing. “The fucking psycho had to shoot dogs,” he said.
He made a call to send forensics to the scene. After that, the two of us headed over to Queens together.