THE NEXT AFTERNOON, AS Jack drove along broad, tree-lined Ocean Parkway, where Orthodox Jewish parents walked their neatly dressed kids home from school, he turned on the radio. An oldies station was playing the Drifters. The horns swelled and Ben E. King swelled with them: This magic moment…The afternoon light glowed, cool air flowed in the open window, and somehow the corny sentiment seemed to point to something real. Of course, he acknowledged with a grin, that might have something to do with the calls he’d made last night to Daskivitch and his wife, and to Michelle, inviting them to his barbecue. Now he had a night to remember, and one to look forward to.
At task force headquarters, he jogged in, made a Groucho face at Mary Gaffney as he passed the front desk.
“Someone’s in a good mood today,” she said.
He grinned, tapped an imaginary cigar, and trotted upstairs. He spent several hours plodding through paperwork, then took a break to go downstairs and chat with the desk cops.
He had just come back up and was headed for the supply room and a cup of coffee when Vince Grasso, one of the other detectives on the squad, looked up from his desk.
“Jackie L.—you got a phone call a couple minutes ago.”
“From who?”
“Gary Daskivitch over at the Seven-six.”
“Is he there now?”
“Nah. He left a message, though. Said it was urgent.”
Grasso looked down, gave his big walrus mustache a tug. “Hold on a sec, my desk is such a fucking mess…I wrote it down somewhere…Here.” He held up a pink message slip. “He wants you to meet him right away at this address.”
Jack gripped the steering wheel so hard his fingernails dug into his palms. He sped along the Shore Parkway, which afforded spectacular views of the sunset over the bay and the Verrazano Bridge. He ignored the scenery. The parkway turned into the Gowanus Expressway, marching on monster stilts over Third Avenue, into Sunset Park.
The yard was full of squad cars, unmarked cruisers, and Crime Scene vehicles. An unseen dog howled as Jack climbed the exterior staircase to the third story, where faded aquamarine curtains hung in the windows.
The screen door had been sliced open and the lock was popped. Jack badged the uniform out front, entered the little vestibule, walked on into the low-ceilinged living room. The room was airless and humid—the windows were all closed. It still smelled of mothballs and mildewed rug, but over those scents pressed the sweet metallic odor of blood. A Crime Scene detective crouched by a red streak on the musty shag carpet to clip a sample, which he dropped into a plastic envelope. A photographer stood in the corner next to a big old TV, shooting down at the top of it, where a square of the surface was free of dust. “Looks like a VCR’s missing here.”
In the corner, another tech dusted a china cabinet filled with a series of presidential plates. The doors were open and the shelves inside in disarray. Jack picked up two broken halves of a plate and put them together to form Richard Nixon’s jowly face. (What a strange and terrible thing: to be admired and respected as the president of the United States, then fall so low and be reviled.)
He glanced up at the ceiling and his heart froze: the stucco held a spray of little red dots he recognized as castoff, the splatter pattern made when a perp yanked a weapon back in preparation for another blow. Or stab.
He followed a trail of bloodstains across the carpet toward the back of the apartment. Halfway across the room, a partial shoeprint marred the edge of a sticky pool of blood.
“Did you guys get this?” he asked the nearest Crime Scene tech.
“You bet. I’ll bring in a saw to take up that carpet and get it to the lab.”
Jack took a deep breath, then continued on toward the kitchen.
He stood in the entry; the first thing he noticed was a wide blood smear on the inside of the back door. He moved in past the kitchen table, to a point where he could see the bottom of the stain, which led down to the corpse of Raymond Ortslee. The barge captain knelt against the bottom of the door, as if he had toppled forward while searching for a mouse hole—or praying. He wore only boxer shorts and a T-shirt with yellow sweat stains under the armpits; he’d probably been home alone at the time of the attack. The side of his right wrist bore two deep red slashes: defensive wounds he’d sustained while raising an arm in a useless attempt to protect his body from a knife. Red streaks ran down the bottom half of the door; they marked where his grasping fingers had fallen short of the knob.
Jack flashed on a World Book picture he’d been fascinated by as a kid: it showed the ashen mold of an ancient Roman trapped in the volcanic eruption at Pompeii, his body curled in a fetal position as he raised feeble hands against the death raining down from above.
Gary Daskivitch knelt next to the body, his necktie flung over one shoulder to keep it clear of the blood. As Jack moved close, his partner glanced up, then wordlessly pulled back the T-shirt to reveal another nasty stab mouth under the man’s protruding ribs.
Jack went clammy. He forced himself to draw several deep breaths, then took out a handkerchief and wiped off the sweat beading his forehead.
Daskivitch looked up. “You all right?”
“How did you know he was here?” Jack said grimly. There was no routine reason why a Seven-six detective would be immediately informed of a murder in the Seven-two.
“The Crime Scene guys found my card on the body. It was in his fucking shoe.”
Jack turned away from the body. The techs had left their sooty print dust on the door, the rusting stove, the cabinets…
Daskivitch tugged nervously at his tie. “That Berrios murder was no amateur job. These people figured out how to track this guy down.”
“Speaking of which—”
“I know. We need to check with whoever’s in charge of the canal to see if they got any strange calls. I think it’s the DOT.”
A big droopy-eyed black man in a sharp double-breasted suit came through the door. Ed Colby, from the Seventy-second Precinct. Jack had met the detective before, when they were both working Robbery.
“Nice of you to drop in,” the detective said. His left eye twitched, an involuntary tic. The other cops at the Seven-two had taken to calling him Detective Winks.
“This your case?” Jack asked.
“Yes, it is. You rookies screwing up my crime scene?”
“We’ll get out of your way.”
Colby hitched up his pants. “Way I see it, the vic’s in bed, the perp comes in through the front door there, starts searching around. Vic wakes up, comes out, confronts the perp in the living room.” Colby pointed to the front of the house; his eye twitched. “Perp assaults him there—that’s probably where he gets the defense wounds, vic goes for the back door and the fire escape, doesn’t make it. The drawers in the bedroom are open; some stuff looks like it’s missing in there.” He pointed to the living room. “I think we got a B and E gone bad.”
“Robbery, huh?” Jack rubbed the back of his neck and exchanged a look with Daskivitch.
“Yeah. We found his pants upstairs. The pockets are turned out, wallet’s gone…what? What do you guys know?”
“Let’s get some air,” Daskivitch told the detective. “I’ll fill you in.”
Jack stayed in the kitchen, staring down at the barge captain’s abused body. A wave of nausea swept over him. He leaned against a counter and pressed a hand to his stomach. He squeezed his eyes shut, willing the queasiness to disappear.
Be professional, he told himself. Look at the whole picture. Find the evidence. He took another look at Ortslee curled up by the door and then—he couldn’t help it—he knelt down and lifted the little man up.
Daskivitch walked through the door. “Did I leave my—?” He stopped in shock. “Jesus Christ—what are you doing!”
Jack looked down at the frail body in his arms. “I don’t know,” he said weakly.
Daskivitch turned to see if anyone was behind him. “Jack, you gotta put him down.”
Groggy, he complied.
“Fuck,” Daskivitch muttered. He wet some paper towels and wiped the blood off Jack’s hands. “Come on,” he said, and tugged Jack’s arm to lead him out the back door onto the fire escape.
Jack sank down in the corner. The iron rails pressed into his back. He breathed deep of the night air, trying to free his nostrils of the scent of blood. Above the door, some sort of strange flying beetle was zittering around a bare light bulb. Down below, across a shadowy asphalt lot, a couple of cops leaned against a squad car, shooting the shit and laughing.
Daskivitch paced back and forth, rubbing his chin. “Jesus, guy, what the hell were you thinking?”
Jack didn’t answer.
Daskivitch crouched down. “What is it with this one, Jack? Why is this case different for you?”
Jack considered the question as if he were staring at a foreign object. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t know, or you won’t say?”
Jack sat silent for a moment, then raised his head. “We killed the barge guy, Gary. I killed him.”
“What!”
“I laughed at him. I ordered him to stay put.”
Daskivitch turned to look down into the lot. “Maybe…maybe Colby was right. Maybe this was just a bad B and E. A fluke, you know? A coincidence.”
Jack snorted. “How many burglars go around carrying knives?”
“Maybe he found it in the kitchen.”
“Come on, Gary. It was the same goddamn perp.”
Daskivitch sighed and scratched the back of his head. “Maybe we screwed up. But it’s like my first partner on patrol taught me. You learn from it, then let it go. Right?”
Above the door, the beetle kept smacking its head against the light. Jack smiled bitterly. “Let it go. Sure.”
“You gonna be okay?”
Jack shrugged.
His partner stood up. “All right. “You better not go back in there. Why don’t you head down this back way? I’ll go inside and tell Colby you got an emergency call.”