“SHIT,” JACK MUTTERED. HE pushed himself up off his knees, wiped moist soil from his hands, and rubbed his tired eyes. The last thing he wanted was to be at the back of this Crown Heights community garden at nine thirty in the morning, squinting in the bright summer sun, looking at another empty, dry condom. He walked out to the middle of the garden. About twenty little individual plots, spread out across a narrow vacant lot between two brick buildings. Some serious gardeners, evidently; the place was bright with summer vegetables. Cherry tomatoes peeped out of tangled vines; little pumpkins and squash lay bulbous on the ground; tall, radiant sunflowers rose above the last plot in the back. Not tall enough to obscure the sight of a young woman hanging from a branch of a low fruit tree, above a shaded little picnic area. She looked to be about nineteen, and her hair was dread-locked. She wore a little diamond in the side of her right nostril, and fashionable clothes: a cute, formfitting blouse and a type of silky pants that Jack’s ex-girlfriend had once referred to as “parachute pants.” Probably not a hooker, this one; a student, maybe, or a counter girl in one of the fashionable little boutiques that were springing up around Fort Greene and Prospect Heights …
His stomach felt sour. If he hadn’t spent his two days off worrying about Daniel Lelo and making love to the man’s widow, if he had just worked a little harder on the first Crown Heights case, maybe he wouldn’t have to be here today. Maybe this girl would still be alive. He roused himself; he couldn’t let these thoughts interfere with his concentration. There was a killer to be caught.
The usual crew of techs bustled around the vic or made trips back and forth from their vans parked out on the street, careful to keep to the slate stepping-stones that marked the central path. The first officer on the scene, a young patrol cop, had been summoned by the traumatized first gardener of the day, an elderly West Indian woman who had run quaking from the site and found him on a corner just a block away. The uniform had done a good job of securing the scene. That, combined with the dry weather overnight, boded well for the investigation.
As Jack had learned back in his Academy days, in the 1920s a forensic scientist named Edmond Locard had come up with the motto that had governed crime scene investigation ever since: Every contact leaves a trace. That meant that the perp would almost inevitably leave some sort of physical matter at the scene of his crime, whether it be DNA, clothing fibers, or his own stray hairs. (Under natural circumstances, three or four hairs fell from the average human head every hour.) He might also leave dust from his workplace: yeast for a baker or brewer, ink droplets or paper fibers from a printer’s clothes, bright multicolored dust from an auto paint shop.
The flip side of the motto was that the perp would also probably take something away from the scene, whether it be blood from his victim, soil in his shoe treads, or tiny slivers of broken glass. In this instance, there was a chance that he might have taken away something of a more botanical nature: seeds from a tree, burrs from a berry plant, pollen from a flower. Such traces tended to fall off clothing shortly thereafter, but some might have lodged in a seam or pocket—and they might prove crucial later in tying him to the crime scene.
Of course, the forensic evidence might be a little more unusual. At the moment, the Crime Scene techs were keeping a particular lookout for stray animal hairs.
Jack watched a fat bumblebee wander above a bush of bright red flowers like a drunk stumbling home from a bar. The garden had its practical side—it provided some good food for its patient keepers—but there were a lot of flowers too, which people had taken the trouble to cultivate just for the pleasure of looking at them. He thought of his mother, who always kept flowerboxes in the window of their dark little Red Hook apartment when he was growing up. Her husband was a drunk and her life was hard, but she always had some small bright spot in her life, courtesy of a few treasured blooms—
“I got you some coffee,” Kyle Driscoll said.
Startled, Jack looked up to find his partner from the Seven-one coming up the center path. He reached out gratefully for the cup, even though iced coffee would have been better on such a hot, humid morning.
The young detective frowned. “What’ve we got?”
Jack nodded toward the crime scene. “I found another unrolled, dry condom back there, under that wooden bench. And the victim’s got double ligatures on her neck—one of them made by what looks to have been an electrical cord.”
Kyle grimaced. “You think it’s the same guy?”
Jack shrugged. “Crime Scene is looking for any kind of forensic match. I’m gonna ask for a DNA sample from both condoms. They looked pretty empty, but who knows? Maybe he left a little pre-somethin’-somethin’ in there.”
He glanced at the body, then turned back to his colleague. “You know what bothers me? With that first killing, I was thinking maybe it was a real spur-of-the-moment thing. Like, the guy just got enraged and lost it and did the strangulation with whatever he found lying around.”
“And here?”
Jack rubbed his chin. “What are the odds that another electrical cord happened to be lying around in the back of a garden?”
Kyle’s eyes narrowed. “You think it was premeditated?”
“Who knows, maybe the first killing was just random. But what if he discovered that he liked it.”
Kyle made a sour face. “Man, I hope we’re not looking at some kind of serial thing.”
“It’s too early to say, but I doubt it. Serial murder is a pretty rare, specific syndrome. Those guys get this terrible tension that builds up inside them, psychologically, and then they feel some relief when they kill. It takes a while for the pressure to build up again. Here we’ve got two murders in just a few days. If you ask me, I think this is some macho creep who’s experiencing some of that erectile dysfunction they’re always yammering about on TV, and he’s got major anger management issues. Bad combo.”
He picked up a pebble and shook it in his cupped palms. He didn’t want to get the young detective all jazzed about the serial killing theory, but if this was the beginning of such a run, they usually started somewhere close to the killer’s home. The comfort zone … Maintaining control over his victims would be very important to the guy, and—at least at the beginning—he’d want to operate someplace where he knew the terrain.
He turned toward the front of the garden. “I’m thinking about how he got the girl to come in here … unless she was killed somewhere else. But that seems like a real risk, transporting her body.”
Kyle glanced at the back of the garden. “Did, ah, did Crime Scene happen to find any beaver fur?”
“They’re still looking.”
“Did they say anything about evidence of a struggle?”
“Nope.”
“How about the M.E.’s crew? Any indications of sexual assault?”
“There’s no sign that she was forced.” Jack stared thoughtfully at the garden entrance. “It looks like he was smart enough to get her to walk in here voluntarily. On the other hand, he was dumb enough to stage this fake suicide crap again. Maybe he’s not the brightest crayon in the box.”
Kyle looked back at the victim, hunched his shoulders, and stuck his hands in his pockets. “Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean he’s too dumb to pull off something like this again.”
“Detective Leightner?”
One of the Crime Scene techs was coming down the path from the back of the garden, holding up a little waxed paper envelope. “We found something,” he said. “Some hairs. Probably animal.”
“What kind?” Kyle asked.
The tech shrugged. ‘We’ll have to look at these back in the lab.”
After the tech walked out to his truck, Jack turned to find his partner staring at him.
“We need to talk to some Hasids,” Kyle said.
Jack sighed again. “Maybe so. But let’s get the lab results first.”
PLACED SMACK-DAB ON THE center of a wall in the Homicide squad room was a bold little sign that read GOYAKOD. It was an acronym and stood for Get Off Your Ass And Knock On Doors, a reminder that the bulk of cases—as Jack had told his young partner on the case—were closed not with TV-style forensic magic, but old-fashioned shoe leather. And so it was that Jack and Kyle Driscoll and a bunch of uniforms spent the rest of their day canvassing the neighborhood around the little community garden.
After the young victim had been taken down from the tree but before the M.E.’s boys had done their carryout, Jack took some Polaroids of the girl, taking care to close her eyes so that she wouldn’t look so grim. And then they’d left the garden and fanned out, climbing stoops and ringing doorbells, asking if anyone had seen two or more people enter the dark garden the night before, if anyone knew the girl in the photos.
Kyle was professional but a bit frosty toward his partner from Homicide. Jack bore it in silence. What was he going to do, stir up a whole community on uncertain evidence?
They had hardly been welcomed into the neighborhood, yet it didn’t take long for them to get an I.D. Another stylishly dressed young woman, walking down a street two blocks away, recognized the victim as a fellow student in her jewelry design class over at Pratt Institute in Fort Greene. Shantel Williams. And then they talked to Shantel’s grandmother, with whom she had lived, and who was frantic because Shantel had never come home the night before, and then they tracked down a couple of girlfriends who had spent the early part of the previous evening hanging out with her in a couple of trendy new neighborhood watering holes. As Jack discovered after some tactful prodding, it turned out that Shantel had a drinking problem that could make her become rather unpleasant to be around, so her friends had left her in a bar around midnight. And so it was that Jack and Kyle spent the last couple hours of their tour visiting bars, asking if anyone had seen someone chatting up the girl or maybe escorting her away.
But there the trail went cold, and then the tour ended, and Jack passed his info on to the evening Homicide squad, and he got in his car, glad to be headed back to Brighton Beach and Zhenya Lelo’s waiting arms.