LITMIR.BIZ

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       10

      Krekorian does a U-turn on LaGuardia, and with his siren pushing aside the sparse traffic, runs reds across town. Just short of the river, he takes the access road under the FDR Drive into the park and turns toward the pulsing lights in the shadow of the Williamsburg Bridge. East River Park is a narrow strip of public recreational space squeezed between the highway and the river that no one at tonight’s vigil is likely to have set foot in, not because it’s a wretched place, but because the highway cuts it off from the city. During the day, families from the projects take the walkways that cross over the highway into the park, but at night, it’s a no-man’s-land. If you’re looking for a spot to dump a body, you could do a lot worse.

      Krekorian drives south past the soccer fields and the baseball diamonds, and pulls in behind the squad car parked between the tennis courts and an overgrown bathroom. Whitewashed by a couple of inches of fresh snow, the park looks as good as it ever will, but the snow can’t do much for the FDR over their shoulder or the black undercarriage of the bridge or the warehouses that form the Williamsburg skyline across the river. On the other side of the squad car, blocked in by a van from Crime Scene, is a piece of crap Impala as filthy as theirs, and standing beside it are Steve Navarro, George Loomis and Russ Dineen.

      Navarro and Loomis, who wear dark wool topcoats pulled off the same oversize discount rack, are fellow Seventh Precinct detectives who work the shift opposite O’Hara and Krekorian, and because this part of the park, the approximate latitude of Delancey Street, falls in the Seven, they got the call. The third, much smaller man, an unlit Camel bobbing precariously from the corner of his mouth, and wearing a leather jacket with a Grim Reaper patch sewn on the shoulder, is a medical legal inspector named Russ Dineen. Over the summer O’Hara and MLI Dineen worked on the suicide of a young female Indian intern. Before anyone bothered to pick up the phone, the body had been facedown in a tub for days, and thanks to Dineen, the straightforward but unforgettable phrase “Indian people soup” was added to O’Hara’s lexicon.

      Crime Scene has taped off a large rectangle around the bathroom, using the tennis court fence for one side. O’Hara wants nothing more than to duck under the yellow tape and see for herself if it’s Pena, but etiquette requires that she first exchange pleasantries with the men who got here before her.

      “Pretty horrendous,” says Loomis, an even-keeled big guy not prone to exaggeration. “How long she been here, Russ?” asks O’Hara.

      “It’s been cold,” says Dineen, and having squeezed whatever distraction he can from an unlit cigarette, finally cups his hands around it and fires it up. “Decomp is nothing like the summer, Dar. Based on color, smell, maggot activity and everything else, I’d say less than a week, but not much.”

      “That works,” says Krekorian. “Pena hasn’t been seen since early Thursday morning.”

      O’Hara takes out a copy of the picture on lampposts and doors all over the LES. “She look like this?”

      “This girl doesn’t look like anything, Dar,” says Navarro.

      “Whoever killed her had some fun first,” says Dineen. “Rape probably. Torture definitely. She’s carved up like a totem pole.”

      “Who found her?”

      Navarro nods at the backseat of the squad car, where a man in rags is having a heated conversation with himself. “The plumbing in the bathroom hasn’t worked for years, but sometimes the skells go in to get out of the weather.”

      “He goes by Pythagoras,” says Loomis. “Last known address, the planet Nebulon. We’d talk to him but didn’t want to interrupt.”

      “Fellas, I got to take a look,” says O’Hara. “Me and K. been working this all day.”

      Whatever excitement O’Hara feels at the prospect of catching her first homicide turns into something stronger and murkier as she and Krekorian stoop under the yellow tape and inch into the bathroom. The body of a naked girl, encased in a pair of clear plastic shower curtains, lies on its side under the urinals. The two techs from Crime Scene, who stare at them unpleasantly from where they are stringing lights, wear masks, but the smell—equal parts excrement, decomposition and brand-new plastic—is not as foul as O’Hara had braced for. Much worse is the way the victim’s final anguish is sealed and shrink-wrapped in bloodstained plastic. Her terribly constricted body is trapped exactly as the murderer left her, with her wrists bound behind her back and her legs bent slightly backward, tied at the ankles, her mouth sealed with tape, and her eyes wide open, as if still disbelieving what is being done to her. O’Hara feels as if she’s watching the crime itself, not the result.

      As O’Hara strains to take in the corpse in near darkness, the generator surges and the bathroom is flooded with light. Once her eyes adjust, she notices the missing tips from several toes chewed off by rats and at the other open end of the plastic tube, the missing tufts of short black hair. She now sees what Dineen meant by the totem pole. Livid circles cover the front of the victim’s body from ankles to shoulder blades. Before the lights went on, O’Hara thought they were bruises, the product of a terrible beating. Now she sees that they are gouges, some an inch deep. And although, as Navarro said, the victim has been far too brutalized to resemble a snapshot taken in better times, and in the harsh light her skin is ghostly pale, the victim’s height, weight, age and eye color all fit the description of the missing girl. O’Hara has no doubt she is looking at the body of Francesca Pena.

      Technicians work the crime scene for hours, taking countless measurements and photographs. A team from Forensics dusts the bathroom door for prints, and an hour later a second team unscrews the door from its hinges and carts the whole thing away. O’Hara, Krekorian, Loomis and Navarro spend much of the night in the Real Time Crime Van. This recent addition to the NYPD motor pool is filled with hundreds of thousands of dollars of nearly useless customized electronics and computers, but at least the coffeemaker works. At 3:15 a.m. Navarro snorts derisively at the sight of a Jeep Wagoneer pulling up to the crime scene, and the four detectives try not to laugh as their sergeant, Mike Callahan, walks toward the van in cowboy boots and a brand-new leather bomber jacket.

      “What are you two doing here?” he asks O’Hara and Krekorian, although the question would be better asked of him. “Busman’s holiday?”

      “O’Hara caught this as a missing person on Friday,” says Krekorian defensively. “We’ve been working it as a potential homicide since Sunday.”

      “I guess you saw how the papers are running with it, so you know it’s big.”

      Callahan, who made sergeant by scoring well on a test rather than distinguishing himself on the streets and augments his income by selling cop memorabilia out of his basement over the Internet, is the kind of house mouse no working detective has much use for, and O’Hara keeps her eyes moving in the hope it will make her disdain harder to read. She needn’t have worried, because her sergeant’s attention has already shifted to the black official-looking SUV that just drove up, and when Deputy Police Commissioner Mark Van de Meer steps out, the sergeant is gone without a word, ditching his detectives like four losers at a cocktail party.

      “So long, Sarge,” says Loomis under his breath. “It’s been real.”

      Just before 4:00 a.m. TV vans from five networks pull up to the scene together. They’ve obviously received the same call from downtown, because five minutes later, the police commissioner arrives to do a thirty-second remote. O’Hara knows for certain the case is top priority when a third banged-up Impala arrives and Detective Patrick Lowry extricates himself from the passenger seat. Six foot five and nearly four hundred pounds, Lowry resides ambiguously in that gray area between fat and big, playing it either way as the situation dictates, and his eyesight has deteriorated so badly in the last ten years, he can’t drive. And while both his epic size and his myopia have stoked the legend, as well as the fact that he was drafted out of Hofstra by the Philadelphia Eagles, there’s no denying his résumé. Lowry made it to Homicide by twenty-eight and made

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