The Execution (9 page)

CHAPTER 16

F
isk badged his way inside the perimeter, parking in a sand-strewn beach parking lot that was a portrait of the desolation of the end of summer. Mostly empty and silent under an overcast sky. He stood out of his vehicle, and a burst of wind brought gritty particles of sand to his face, as well as a hint of ocean spit. Nothing dies so alone as a summer beach in September.

He crossed the boardwalk into the dunes. Dress shoes walking in sand. He followed a path through the sea grass, at first trying to be careful, taking shallow steps. Then the first spoonful of sand beneath his heel and it was over. Only pride kept him from rolling up his pant cuffs and walking out there barefoot. Another pair of shoes ruined.

“I’m looking for Kiser?” Fisk said at least three times. A Crime Scene Unit photographer finally heading back to his car pointed Fisk down the shore. He saw a dozen or so uniformed cops standing around a temporary fence of white plastic sheeting whipping in the wind and started toward it.

Nothing out on the horizon, no barges, tankers, or pleasure boats. The sky was gray but visibility was good. Fisk shivered and stuck his hands in his pockets, and it was the first climate-related chill he had felt since at least June.

“Kiser?” said Fisk, finally reaching the crime scene.

A slight man in his forties looked up from his notepad. He wore khakis and a pink button-down shirt with a heavy, wrinkled, unzipped all-weather jacket. He had a fringe of dark hair, just enough to clip his yarmulke.

“Fisk?” he said, offering his hand.

Fisk shook. He could not see over the top of the plastic sheeting yet. Most of the cops standing around it were holding the wooden stakes into the sand, keeping the temporary fence from lifting off and tumbling back to the parking lot.

Kiser said, “I know you?” Then, seemingly in reference to Fisk’s name: “I thought so.”

He stood looking at Fisk a moment, placing him as the guy who got Jenssen. The pause was not one of admiration or respect, but more along the lines of
Why is this guy riding the UN Week desk?

Fisk, referring to the fence, said, “How bad is it?”

“It’s grim. Worse than grim.”

Fisk figured it was violent. That was why the plastic sheeting. The
Post
loved making a front-page meal out of murder scenes. Fisk looked up at the dunes. Any one of them could have hidden some punk with a four-hundred-millimeter lens.

“Killed here or dumped?”

“Dumped,” said Kiser, with a nod of certainty. “We tried scouting the sand for tire tracks, footprints, but this thing happened overnight.”

Fisk stepped over to the fence. He was unprepared for what he saw.

“Jesus.”

Kiser said, “A baker’s dozen. There were seagulls picking at them. Dog walker found them.”

The bodies had been decapitated. Thirteen of them, all shoulders, trunks, and limbs. Amazing how incomplete and inhuman a body looks when the head is gone.

Fisk looked back toward the dunes again. “Dumped.”

Kiser said, “No cameras on the beach parking lot. You got Kennedy airplanes masking your noise. We’re going to have to get plenty lucky to find anybody with eyes on this thing.”

Fisk looked back at the bodies. An identification nightmare. Only fingerprints and tattoos. Not so bad if they were felons, but Fisk could already see that they’d be lucky to get ten names out of thirteen.

Kiser said, “Ever work a mass murder before?”

Fisk shook his head.

Kiser said, “This precinct, you know, tends to be more your floaters, your hobos OD-ing under the boardwalk, night swimming accidents, late-night domestics. Things of that nature.”

Fisk was still thinking crime scene contamination. “You should string off the most direct path from here back to the dunes.”

Kiser followed Fisk’s eye line.

“Schlepping bodies is hard work, especially through sand. They parked somewhere up there. As they string, have your guys sift for trash. Things get lost on beaches in the dark. Check the parking lot up there, too. Pay special attention to the edges, because of the wind. You never know.”

Kiser nodded. He went off and spoke to another officer, leaving Fisk to look at the dead bodies again.

He could see the seagull bites. A few of them circled overhead now, beach vultures raised on Doritos, half-eaten hot dogs, and trash. They had picked at the edges of the neck wounds, which were otherwise surprisingly flat and neat. Fisk wondered what kind of tool had been used.

Kiser came back. “Thanks for the help. Thought Intel didn’t work crime scenes.”

“We don’t. Almost never, anyway.” Intel was about collating information, working sources, going undercover, but rarely working a scene. “But I was a cop before I was an Intel cop.”

Kiser was nodding, debating whether or not to say what was on his mind. “I gotta get this outta the way. I saw the
Dateline
on you—”

Fisk tried to stop him. “It wasn’t on me.”

“On your thing, with the tower, and your girlfriend—”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it and I didn’t watch it,” said Fisk, turning back toward the bodies. He would rather have dealt with corpses than talk about a television “documentary” that apparently made a soap opera out of his and Gersten’s love life. All he knew about it was that they had broadcast video of him walking into his mandated therapy meeting, shot from the backseat of a car across the street. Until then, Fisk had never known what it was like to be one of the people he followed for a living.

Kiser realized he had spit in Fisk’s coffee here. “Do you want to get inside?”

The plastic sheeting, he meant. Fisk shook his head. He could see plenty from where he was.

Each corpse was naked, male. No wallets to go through, no cell phones to check for messages or unanswered calls, no IDs or credit cards. He noticed that a few were missing one or both hands as well as their heads; others retained their hands, even a few wedding and pinky rings. One of the more heavily tattooed bodies had burn marks around his thighs and genitals. Two others showed bruising inconsistent with lividity or decomposition. They had been, if not tortured, sadistically beaten before they were beheaded.

Kiser said, “Colombians, maybe? Going by the skin, which is a little dark. Spanish in the tattoos. Salvadorans?”

Fisk turned his head sideways to try to read one of the tattoos. Across one pair of shoulders, partially obscured by dried black blood, over the rendering of a scarlet red pistol was the word
SINALOA
.

“Mexicans,” said Fisk. “At least that one is.”

Kiser tried to read what Fisk was seeing. “Cartel stuff?”

“That’s the idea.”

“In Rockaway?” Kiser hooked his fingers into his belt loops. “We don’t see too many Mexicans here in the One-oh-one. Puerto Ricans, sure. Over off Mott, some Colombians. Salvadorans, as I said. But not like MS-13-type guys,” he said, name-checking a prominent El Salvadoran drug gang. “We get workers. Quiet people. Housekeepers, maintenance workers. Gardeners.”

The wind shifted for a moment and Fisk and Kiser got a noseful. “Doubtful they were killed here.”

Kiser said, “So maybe somebody mistook all this sand for a landfill. I think if you dump bodies on a beach, you’re trying to say something.”

“Agreed,” said Fisk.

“If you have the space and the tools to decapitate thirteen grown men and get rid of heads, you can certainly get rid of the rest of the body.”

Fisk nodded. “This is cartel-level violence.” He looked at Kiser. “This is why your captain had you call me.”

Kiser nodded. “The T-word.”

Fisk winced. “Maybe. They used to call it crime. Now if it hits a certain number on the meter it becomes terrorism. In this case, narcoterrorism.”

“You’re not interested?”

“You mean Intel?” said Fisk. “Not my call. Depends on what you get. Processing these hunks of meat is going to be a bitch.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I would reach out to OCB. The Organized Crime guys have a good grip on gang stuff, at least stateside in NYC. Maybe you’ll get one guy on ink alone, and that ID might beget another, and so on. Word to the wise. Be meticulous. You caught a big fish here, everyone’s going to want to get in on it. Every police inspector in all of Queens is going to want to come down here for a look himself, but don’t let them. No stomping around your crime scene. This is your realm now. If any i’s don’t get dotted, it’s all on you.”

The wind came back on them again. Kiser spun away hard.

“I’m going to go find a nice clean spot in the weeds for a good puke.”

“Do it,” said Fisk. “You’ll feel better.”

CHAPTER 17

F
isk returned to Intel, still unsettled by what he had seen. The sight of thirteen beheaded humans, dumped on a beach in Rockaway looking like they had washed ashore from Mexico, had rattled his cage. This was cartel-level violence here in New York City.

It did not take much checking to confirm his assumption that the pervasive and extreme violence of the Mexican drug gangs had not migrated north of the border. If anything, drug-related violence in the United States was trending downward. The overall murder rate in Mexico was more than five times as high as the United States. Fifteen percent of all drug-related murders in Mexico involved torture, including roughly five hundred beheadings in the past year. Fisk found exactly one case of a drug dispute resulting in a beheading in the United States, and that was in 2010.

So why here? And why now? There hadn’t been any uptick in turf wars or drug prices that he was aware of. As a strange anomaly, he was intrigued but as the point man for United Nations Week, he was too preoccupied to do anything about it.

FISK COULD NOT IMAGINE
a more complicated tangle of law enforcement agencies and conflicting jurisdictions than he was seeing here during United Nations Week.

The United States Secret Service is the designated agency for protecting the president, vice president, and their families, of course. It is also charged with protecting visiting heads of state. This week provided an unusual challenge, obviously. The Secret Service has a uniformed division of roughly thirteen hundred officers—they resemble military cops in their blue uniforms and baseball caps—many of whom had been summoned from Washington, D.C., for the week. Fisk was in contact with their New York agency, but it was more of a courtesy situation involving information sharing and daily briefings.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service played a smaller role. Their primary job is to provide bodyguard-level protection for U.S. diplomats overseas, as well as police-level work inside U.S. embassies and consulates. They also protect State Department people and facilities in the United States, as well as visiting political dignitaries unqualified or not warranting full Secret Service protection. DSS special agents tend to be ex-military, and DSS does not have a uniformed division. They provided the protection detail to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The United Nations Headquarters property itself in Turtle Bay, occupying six city blocks on the site of former slaughterhouses overlooking the East River, is policed and protected by the UN’s own police force. (The UN also has its own fire department and postal service.) The sovereignty of the United Nations is such that New York Police Department personnel may not enter the property without being invited.

The FBI had more of a presence than usual in the Big Apple that week. They were responsible for domestic counterintelligence, and United Nations Week represented a premium opportunity for foreign nationals to enter the country as part of a nation’s diplomatic contingent or security detail. It was also the opportunity for some spy gamesmanship, which was probably why the FBI had allowed itself to be made outside the Chinese embassy earlier that day.

Of course, there was the New York Police Department, Fisk’s own employer and the largest police force in the country, with more than thirty-four thousand sworn officers. The department represented the outer ring of general security, doing crowd control, bomb sniffing, metal detectors, and pat-downs, as well as the all-important traffic details. But the NYPD had little or no authority inside the inner security ring, including embassy properties, which are considered foreign soil.

Finally, there were the visiting dignitaries’ own security teams, who were subject to the laws of New York State but carried concealed weapons and generally enjoyed certain courtesies that occupied a gray zone between local and international laws.

Fisk himself and the Intel Division in general had little or no actual authority in any of these individual security matters. His brief was to oversee general security within New York City and to safeguard against any outstanding terrorist threat to the proceedings as a whole. This was what Intel did on a day-to-day basis throughout the five boroughs, except that United Nations Week provided a potentially tempting buffet of hard targets over the course of six days in September. With every other law enforcement agency and guest nation focused on their own areas of concern, Intel’s self-appointed assignment was to take in the view from the air and zero in on potential threats.

FISK REALIZED HE WAS
long overdue for lunch and did something he routinely promised himself he would never do: he ate a chicken salad sandwich out of the break room vending machine. He ate it standing up, looking at the CNN coverage of the “Rockaway Massacre.” He ate it quickly, lest anyone snap his picture and caption it
SMART PEOPLE MAKING DUMB FOOD CHOICES
.

He saw himself on television, a brief glimpse of him talking to Detective Kiser near the plastic sheeting rippling on the beach, part of a looping video package. As Fisk had suspected, the camera shot was from hundreds of yards away, the zoom shaky. It was followed by footage of officers stringing off the path back to the parking lot, and then a glimpse of Kiser near the dunes, bent over at the waist, hands on hips, getting sick. Fisk laid his hand on his own stomach, suffering from instant eater’s remorse.

Nicole Heming came around the corner. “There you are,” she said. “People here to see you. From the Mexican president’s protection detail.” She looked at the triangular plastic sandwich carton in his hand. “You’re the one who eats those things?”

“Thank you, Nicole,” said Fisk, tossing it into the trash and walking out to the waiting area instead of returning to his desk. Intel headquarters wasn’t built to host visitors or guests; out through the pass-card door was a bench, a fake ficus tree, and a black rubber mat for snow boots during the messy winter months.

The woman wore a black jacket over a white blouse and gray pants. She had the sleek, raven-black hair common to many Mexicans, but her complexion was so unusually pale that she could have passed for black Irish. The contrast was striking. Fisk might have looked at her a moment too long.

One man with her wore a thin tweed suit but had a military bearing. He was a hard-faced man of sixty or more with a thin silver mustache. He introduced himself as General de Aguilar, Jefatura del Estada Mayor Presidencial. He was the chief of the Presidential Guard, the EMP, a unit of the Mexican army. Fisk remembered his profile from one of many briefings. He was a two-star general who had been handpicked by the recently elected Mexican president to head his security detail.

The man with him looked like a soldier, big shouldered with an athletic bearing. He wore a dark suit with a pin of the Mexican state shield on his lapel, along with the symbol of the Estado Mayor Presidencial, a maroon square featuring five gold stars over the initials EMP. The suit was double-vented, suitable for carrying various types of concealed weapons. Despite the formal attire, a pair of wraparound Oakleys sat atop his head. He was introduced to Fisk as Virgilio, no first name, no rank.

“Cecilia Garza,” said the woman, offering her hand. Fisk’s first impression was that she wore an icy, supercilious expression, like that of a Latin American aristocrat.

Aguilar said, “Comandante Garza is with the Policía Federal, our federal police force. She is assigned to President Vargas’s security for this trip.”

“Garza,” said Fisk. He had heard of her. “Mexican intelligence, aren’t you?”

“Civilian intelligence,” she corrected him. “I am attached to the
federales
.”

Fisk believed he was looking at his Mexican counterpart. “I know you by your reputation.”

“And I you,” she said, with no hint of a smile.

“Detective,” said Aguilar, “we are here to ask a favor.”

Garza said, “There was a mass murder reported earlier. We would like any information the New York Police Department has, and to offer our assistance.”

Fisk nodded. He had assumed that their showing up today was no coincidence. “I don’t know what to tell you. Thirteen men beheaded, dumped on a beach in Rockaway. I can give you the name of the detective leading the investigation in that precinct. His name is Kiser.”

“Can you take us to him?”

“Can I take you . . . ?” Fisk looked out the window at the auto junkyard across the street. The windows were one-way. The sun was getting low in the western sky. “No, I cannot. I can give you an address to put in your GPS, however.”

Garza said, “This Kiser will brief us?”

“Well, I didn’t say that. That’s his call. Though not really. His captain, more like it.”

“How far?” asked Aguilar.

“This time of day, Rockaway is a hike.”

“A hike,” said Garza, puzzling through the idiom. “A long walk. We do not have time. The president—our president—lands in three hours. Can all information be sent to us electronically?”

“Again, that’s not my call. Not my decision. You’d have to go through Rockaway for that. Or straight over my head. I assume someone could arrange a briefing for you. Is there a connection to your president’s visit?”

“What condition were the bodies in?” she asked, blowing right past his question. “Were they all beheaded?”

“They were all beheaded, some missing hands—”

“Were they all Mexican?”

“I don’t know that. It’s still early days yet.” He recalled the Sinaloa tattoo, but kept that to himself for the moment. Garza’s obvious and intense interest intrigued him, but he had other things to do. “Now, I don’t mean to be rude, but I’ve got a meeting with the head of the UN’s security service in about forty-five minutes.”

“Do you have any identification on them yet?” Garza continued, as though not having heard Fisk’s answer. “What about tattoos?”

Fisk looked to the other two men. Clearly Garza had insisted on this visit. They appeared to be supportive of her questioning, but just along for the ride. Fisk attributed any anxiety on their parts to the impending arrival of their boss. “Look. It’s an ongoing investigation, and it’s not my place to get into it. Sorry. You know how it is.”

Garza looked away . . . and when she looked back at Fisk, it was as though a different Cecilia Garza had taken her place. This one was softer in expression, more solicitous. It was chiefly her eyes. “We would like very much to help. I believe we could be of service.”

She was smart. She was wily. She was impressive. Fisk said, “How does this relate to President Vargas’s visit?”

Garza offered a generous shrug. “I don’t know that it does. I consider this more a point of national pride.”

“Shame is more like it,” said Fisk. “I get it now. It’s an embarrassment on the first day of the UN General Assembly. But I’m sorry, I can’t help you. If this involves a threat to the Mexican president, then I can at least point you in the right direction or offer additional assistance.”

Garza’s gray eyes turned cold again. “I assure you, Detective, we need no assistance.”

Fisk smiled and nodded, including the two men in his remarks. “Then I’m not sure what we’re all here talking about.”

Garza turned to Aguilar and spoke in Spanish. “This is the man who stopped the presidential assassination at the Freedom Tower. Somehow, he has been relegated to desk duty here. I don’t know what he did to receive such punishment.”

“It’s not punishment,” said Fisk, in English. His father had been posted to Panama for four years when he was young, and he understood Spanish with the fluency of a native. He could even discern between accents: Panamanian, Castilian, Colombian.

Garza looked a little surprised, but only for a moment. Fisk could see her recalibrating her assessment of him, promising herself not to underestimate him again. For his part, he was a bit stung by her remark. But more than anything he was curious as to her objective here.

He said, “Either this has something to do with your president’s arrival, or you are here as a point of national pride. Either way, you refused to admit the problem, or that there is a problem. Which is par for the course, I suppose.”

“Par for the . . . ?”

“It’s routine. For a country known for its law enforcement . . . shall we say, moral vulnerability.”

“Ah,” said Garza, nodding as though accepting a challenge. “Corruption. Malfeasance. That is what you think of all
federales
.”

“I’m saying admitting the problem is the first step toward curing it.”

Garza said, “That sounds like good advice for our noisy neighbor to the north, with their voracious appetite for illegal narcotics.”

Fisk nodded once, pulling back emotionally from the exchange. “You came here asking for help, or offering to help? Either way, you won’t identify the problem you need help with. This cartel-type violence, the point of it is to do something to get people’s attention. You can’t look away from thirteen beheaded bodies, you can’t bury that at the bottom of the news hour. It’s to announce their presence and intimidate their enemies. If you’re expecting trouble for your president, I would like to know. Otherwise?” Fisk shrugged. “I’m afraid this is United Nations Week. Not Mexican beheadings week.”

Garza looked at him with quiet contempt.

And Fisk wasn’t quite sure how or why it happened, but he knew that he had, here, this afternoon, made an enemy for life.

“Thank you so much for your careful attention to this matter,” she said.

Fisk shrugged again. “Good day, Comandante. Gentlemen.”