At thirty-six years of age, Dr. Carrie Elizabeth Andrea Norton, BA, MA, PhD, was convinced that she would have been far better off if she’d kept her summer job flipping burgers at her local Mickey D’s twenty years ago and never gone to university at all. By now she would probably own her own franchise, drive a hot car and be married with a couple of kids, or at the very least have a boyfriend. It wasn’t as if anyone really needed an anthropologically based native herbology of North America. Did anyone really care if the Kalispel Indians of Montana, sometimes called the Bitter Root, used the herb of the same name as a laxative? Just to make herself really depressed, she’d once checked the computer files in the Columbia University library to see how many times her doctoral thesis had been consulted in the past seven years. The answer was the one she’d expected: never.
As a child she’d preferred to read books by Mary Renault and Rosemary Sutcliff rather than Nancy Drew mysteries or Little House on the Prairie. As a teenager she’d dreamed of finding another Tutankhamen or Rosetta stone rather than being a movie star or a model. Her parents, one a teacher in a prep school, the other the principal of a nearby high school, had stressed education and paid for her tuition along with her braces, and the die was cast: she was doomed to a life of academic poverty and overqualification and a social life where a guy still didn’t go out with a girl who was smarter than him, even if she was relatively good-looking, had a nice body and was perfectly willing to sleep with him on the first date if she really liked him.
Instead she’d become an itinerant “shovel bum” or “dirt digro”—a contract field archaeologist who wound up going to all sorts of exotic locations around the world to dig holes, type up somebody else’s notes, be sexually harassed by an endless series of beardie-weirdies who thought all graduate students with breasts were fair game and get nowhere with her career. There just weren’t that many top jobs in the archaeology profession, and much to her disgust she discovered that it really wasn’t what you knew but who you knew, and that was being polite about it.
In the end, as the years rolled by and her passport filled up with stamps and scrawls from just about anywhere you could name and others you couldn’t pronounce, she was surprised, like people are who do one thing very well for a very long time, that she’d become something of an expert. Instead of being a run-of-the-mill field-worker, of which there were an endless supply, some even willing to pay for the privilege, she was now considered to be a “China Hand,” someone who generally had more field experience than the academics often hired to oversee a project by the consulting firm, and someone who was often the real intelligence behind a dig and able to bring it home on time and on budget.
Contract archaeology—research, surveying and excavation contracted by government agencies or private companies to protect or identify sites in danger of destruction due to development—was big business, and the ability to do things quickly and economically at a dig site was a valuable commodity. The only problem was that the work was intermittent and rarely had much in the way of benefits, and the pay was smiliar to that of a supermarket bag boy. On the other hand, you didn’t have to buy an expensive work wardrobe: construction boots, jeans and a flannel shirt were the de rigueur uniform for a shovel bum. In winter long johns, a cable knit and something padded from Galaxy Army and Navy on Sixth Avenue at Thirtieth filled out the ensemble.
All of this wandered through her thought processes between the time she got up and the time she stepped into the shower in her tiny fifth-floor apartment on Second Street and Avenue A in the East Village’s Alphabet City. Some people, usually landlords, referred to the area as “trendy,” but to Carrie it was still the slum she’d used as a base of operations for the better part of ten years now.
After the shower she went across her hallway office to her closet bedroom and dressed for a summer day, which meant a T-shirt instead of a flannel one. Today’s shirt was a classic SHOVEL BABES DO IT IN THE DIRT design. She did up the laces of her dependable old Wesco Jobmasters, completely ignored the dishes in the mini-sink in her mini-kitchen and went out the door.
She rode the creaky, coffin-sized elevator down to the street, then went across to Nicky’s and picked up a six-inch bánh mì, the Vietnamese version of a submarine sandwich. She thought about the fried egg breakfast version but knew it would drip, so she went for the basic: pâté ham, roasted ground pork, pickled carrots, cucumber, cilantro, jalapeño, easy on the mayo, all on a mini, crusty baguette. She got an iced Vietnamese coffee to go with it, then walked over to Second Avenue and two blocks down to Houston Street, alternately munching at her sandwich and sucking up her iced coffee through a straw.
She finished her breakfast, then rode the uptown F train to Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue. She came up out of the subway on West Third, watched a group of kids shooting hoops in the public court for a minute or two, then walked back down Sixth Avenue past the drugstore, the sex shop, the Taco Bell and the abandoned Wendy’s, finally turning left onto Minetta Lane. Mamoun’s was only a block away on MacDougal Street, and the makdoos—the $3.50 stuffed eggplants with garlic and walnuts marinated in olive oil—were without a doubt the best thing about the job she was working on: a parking lot excavation and preliminary site analysis for an eighteen-story, ten-million-a-pop condo building being developed by the Lincoln Corporation on the corner of Minetta Lane and Minetta Street, once the center of the neighborhood known as Little Africa during the Civil War period.
The Lincoln Corporation had purchased the old tenement property years before and put it into typical New York City development turnaround by tearing down the building, paving over the remains and turning it into a parking lot. Property prices had risen to a point where somewhere deep within the Lincoln Corporation’s pulsing, heartless infrastructure a little bell had tinkled and the plans for the Avalon Tower on Minetta Lane, a LinCorp Lifestyle Development Project came to life.
But to get the official go-ahead required a pass from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission, and that’s where Cornwell-Maibaum Urban Archaeology Consultants (“We Won’t Let Your Project Become a Thing of the Past”) and Dr. Carrie Elizabeth Andrea Norton, BA, MA, PhD, came into the picture. William Augustus Cornwell and David Maibaum, two new-age archaeologists with more degrees in business and computing than in archaeology, sat in their Tribeca loft offices making all the money while as project manager Carrie did all the work under the supposed “direction” of the senior archaeologist on the project, Vaughn Erickson, a dull-witted twenty-seven-year-old boob with a minty-fresh doctorate from a nothing university in Ohio or Iowa or Arkansas or someplace like that and no field experience whatsoever, who just happened to be David Maibaum’s son-in-law. He also had bad breath, Maibaum’s equally dull-witted, flat-chested, spotty-faced daughter for a wife and no sense of humor whatsoever.
All part of the ongoing life of an American shovel bum. Maybe someday she’d write a book about it. If she ever got the time, which was unlikely. For Carrie there were two states of existence: working and looking for work. It didn’t leave much time for anything else, including vacations. The last one of those had been four years ago, half of the time spent trout fishing on the Willoughby River in Vermont with her dad, the other half spent looking for antique spinning wheels with her mom, and all the time fielding questions from both of them about why she wasn’t married and making them grandparents.
She went through the doorway in the plywood utility fence surrounding the site and headed for the grimy, graffiti-covered ten-by-twenty-foot trailer they used as a field office. She was surprised to see everyone clustered at the far end of the site around the last test trench they’d started on the day before. Nobody was working. They were just standing around, jawing and looking into the trench. There was no sign of Vaughn Erikson.
She went up the three plank steps and into the office. Erickson was at the phone behind his paper-covered desk. As Carrie stepped into the office, he covered the mouthpiece of the phone and stared at her. His eyes were wide and he looked nervous.
“We’ve got trouble,” he said.
“What kind of trouble?” Carrie asked.
“We found a body.”
“Oh, crap,” said Carrie with a sigh. “That’s all I need.”
Detective Max Slattery of the NYPD Cold Case Squad looked like Winston Churchill in a butchcut toupee. He had the kind of face that belonged on a bald head, but his snow-white hair was a perfect bristled flattop exactly half an inch long over a vast expanse of glowing pink scalp. His hangdog jowls were clean shaven and the thought of growing a mustache had never occurred to him. Everything about him was square: face, shoulders, barrel chest and short, powerful legs. Years ago someone had taken a Spuds Mackenzie Budweiser poster and taped Slattery’s picture over the dog’s face. The caption read: AREN’T YOU GLAD HE’S ON OUR SIDE? A lot of people thought he’d been the inspiration for the Andy Sipowicz character on NYPD Blue, and the average reaction on meeting him for the first time was that he was nothing but a dumb Mick cop. He wasn’t. He was an extremely smart Mick cop who’d solved more homicides than anyone else in the history of the New York Police Department.
He was also getting old, with twenty-eight years on the force, having worked everything from Warrants and Central Robbery to Missing Persons and Manhattan North Homicide. He’d now been with the Cold Case Squad since it was formed in 1996—more than a decade. In two more years he’d reach mandatory retirement, and he knew the boredom would probably kill him. He’d been a cop for almost thirty years and with very few exceptions he’d enjoyed every minute of it. He’d chewed up a few marriages and countless other relationships, lost partners to violence, disease and promotion, and never been on the pad for more than a cup of coffee.
The offices of the NYPD Cold Case Squad are located in a squalid little building in Brooklyn. It looks like every other police squad office only more so. Everything is out-of-date, from the telephones to the computers. Everything is either green or brown or beige. Everything is worn out, one way or another. There are filing cases lined up against the walls, battered lockers and rows of battered desks. There is a police administrative assistant—PAA—named Doris Dubukian, who is a bottle blonde, as old as Max Slattery, and who has a memory that is unbeatable when it comes to the mundane. Ask her the names of the first five batters struck out by Sandy Koufax in the first game in the 1963 World Series and she’ll answer immediately: Tony Kubek, Bobby Richardson, Tom Tresh, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, just like that. Behind Doris and Max’s back there were whispered rumors of a long-standing affair between the two of them. Rumors that were utterly unfounded.
At ten thirty in the morning Max was at his desk, working his way steadily through a pile of DD5s, his reading glasses barely hanging on to the end of his Bob Hope nose. Out in reception he heard Doris’s phone buzz. A few seconds later his light started to blink. He picked up. The voice belonged to Max’s boss, Charlie Groman, an inspector who was in his office one floor up.
“What do you know about Minetta Street?” Groman said.
Max sat back in his chair and closed his eyes. He thought for a moment. The rest of the squad called the look on his face “doing a doris.” Finally he spoke. “Stephen Crane wrote an essay about it. A crook named No Toe Charley lived there. It used to be a high-crime spot, worse than Five Points. Before that it was a black ghetto. Al Pacino lived on Minetta Lane in 1973 in Serpico and he spied on his girlfriend there in 1993 in Carlito’s Way. The Minetta Tavern on the corner was used in another mob movie called The Legend of Jimmy Blue Eyes. The Minetta Tavern was also the place where Reader’s Digest was founded. In the basement.”
“You’ve got a sick mind, Max—you know that, don’t you?”
“Sick minds solve crimes,” answered Max. “What’s new on Minetta Street that would interest us?”
“An archaeological site. They found a body.”
“Isn’t that what they’re supposed to find?”
“This one took a bullet to the back of the skull, had his throat ripped out as well, his lips sewn together with binder twine and apparently is wearing a uniform. Civil War. A naval uniform by the looks of it.”
“Which side?”
“Ours.”
“Which presumably means the uniform is not Confederate.”
“Correct. Which is odd.”
“Why would that be?”
“Because the corpse is black.”
“I see.”
“No, you don’t. The property belongs to the Lincoln Corporation. You’re going to have to tread very softly here.”
“Why do we have to tread at all?”
“You know the rules. Article seven, item six of the New York Landmark Preservation Act says that in the event of unanticipated human remains being discovered, the NYPD and the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner shall be informed.”
“So, consider yourself informed.”
“Quit being a pain in the ass, Max.”
“Okay.”
“Get yourself down there. Your contact is a woman named Dr. Carrie Norton. She’ll give you the dirt, so to speak.”
“Don’t try to be funny, Charlie. It doesn’t suit you.”
“Go.” Groman hung up.
“On my way,” said Slattery to the dial tone.