Tiger Rag (22 page)

She brought no formal business background to her sessions with MBAs and no prior connection to crime detection to her dealings with the police. Her business clientele grew rapidly after one of her first clients, the CEO of a fiber optics company, credited her in an interview with giving him the tools—his “psychic tool kit,” he called it—to outmaneuver two larger companies and land a contract laying cable in Brazil. Despite the praise, and the lucrative pay, she felt this aspect of her work was antiseptic
.

With the police, the pay, when she accepted it, was meager, and the work was anything but antiseptic. It was not work she had sought. The city’s chief of detectives, frustrated by an unsolved crime that was inflaming the public, heard about Joan from the deputy mayor’s wife, who was a client. The chief had enlisted conventional psychics on previous cases, with mixed results, but never one who came so highly recommended. So he called Joan and then drove up to her apartment on Riverside Drive
.

On its surface, the crime was not complicated. Four months earlier, the ten-year-old daughter of a Queens firefighter had disappeared on her way to school in Rego Park. The firefighter was a widower and she was his only child. Her smiling
face—blond, brown-eyed, with a gap in her front teeth—had beamed from newspapers, televisions, and posters plastered around the city. No witnesses came forward, and no trace of her was found. There was also no ransom demand, always a bad sign. The manhunt occupied hundreds of policemen in four states. A squad of city detectives worked overtime without pay. Dozens of sex offenders were hauled in for questioning. The fire department posted a $25,000 reward. A Mafia capo in Flushing let it be known that his soldiers would pass along any information they picked up. For two months, not a single lead surfaced. The papers stopped covering the case. All but two detectives were pulled from it. Then one afternoon a patrolman investigating a car theft at an outdoor parking lot found a size 4 sneaker caked with blood wedged into a gap in a brick wall. He pulled the sneaker out, and there was still a foot inside it. The missing girl had been wearing sneakers. And the parking lot was just ten blocks from her house. The cops were certain now that she was dead—but where was the rest of her? The newspapers jumped back on the story. Again there was a massive search, for a body this time, but after two more months, they found nothing
.

After relating the facts, the chief asked Joan for assistance
.

She possessed certain abilities she was uncomfortable tapping for an assignment like this. She was aware there could be serious repercussions for her personally. She would need to channel at least two people, picking up traces of their thoughts, memories, emotions: the girl and her killer. And that wasn’t a place she wanted to go. It would mean focusing on the girl’s home and possessions, and the one object they knew the killer had handled, her severed foot, and the place where they had almost certainly been together, the parking lot. If she was successful
,
it would be because she managed to enter a nightmare and remain there long enough to decipher its contents
.

She agreed to help. Her only condition was that the chief promise to keep her name out of the papers, no matter how things turned out. She visited the parking lot, behind an old supermarket. The asphalt was cracked, and it was littered with trash. There were ten rows of parking spaces, nine spaces to a row. On that particular morning, there were only fourteen cars parked there. Joan examined the gap in the wall and studied photos of the sneaker when it was discovered there
.

Then she went to the girl’s house. She met the father, John Kelly, a broken man on indefinite leave from his job. He was sitting alone in his dining room. On the table, a plate, napkin, and cutlery were set at the girl’s place, for the dinner she had never come home to. Her name was Frances. Joan went upstairs to her bedroom alone. She could hardly bear to touch the T-shirts and underwear in the dresser and the dresses in the closet, to pick up the doll propped on the bed and uncap the tiny bottle of Two Hearts perfume that smelled like roses. After placing several strands from a hairbrush into an envelope, Joan sat down on the bed and wept
.

When she returned to the dining room, John Kelly was drinking a can of beer. A beefy man with a crew cut, he had lost fifty pounds. He hadn’t shaved that week. Without looking up, he pushed two photo albums over to Joan. She studied every shot of Frances: Christmas under the tree, age four; riding a bicycle in the park, age six; first day at school; first communion; curled up on a couch with a gray terrier. There was no dog in the house now. The photos were arranged in reverse chronology, so Joan ended on a photograph taken in winter light, of a smiling young woman with fair hair and the same
eyes her daughter would have, cradling a swaddled newborn in front of Queens Hospital
.

John Kelly studied Joan. His eyes were not friendly or unfriendly. Something had struck him, and Joan picked up on it at once: he had never had a black woman in his house
.

Your wife was beautiful, Mr. Kelly. And Frances was very special. Thank you for showing me these.

He nodded
.

I’m so sorry.

He looked away
. No pity,
he mumbled
.

I want to help.

So many times he’d been disappointed, but he believed she meant it
.

I do mean it,
she said softly
.

He looked back at her, surprised
.

We will find her,
she said
. I promise you.

Her voice was soothing, but he had also seen how hard her eyes were when she came downstairs
.

Through the bay window, at the curb, two gold-shield detectives were sitting in an unmarked sedan. They had been specially chosen by the chief to accompany Joan everywhere, gain her access wherever she wanted, do whatever she asked of them
.

They drove her downtown to Police Plaza and took her to the pathology lab. A technician gave her latex gloves. He brought the bloody sneaker to an examining table. It was torn and black. Once it had been pink, with red laces. She held it in her palm. It seemed weightless. The technician took a clear box from a refrigerator. The severed foot was at its center, in dry ice. It, too, was black. And the elements had done their work:
it looked even smaller than Joan expected, shriveled, two toes gone, the heel eaten away
.

It was sawed off by hand,
the technician said
, just above the talus. Most likely a hacksaw.

Joan had seen her share of ugliness, among the living and the dead, but this was the worst. She went numb, her mouth so dry she couldn’t swallow
.

Can you leave me alone for a minute?
she said to the detectives, and they took the technician with them
.

She placed her fingertips on the clear box and moved around the table, studying the foot from every angle
.

She returned to Queens with the detectives. They drove to the parking lot, this time with the patrolman who had found the sneaker. Joan stood at the wall alone, her back against the rough brick. Then she crisscrossed the lot, covering different ground each time. The third time she stopped in the fourth parking space in the second row. She stepped in and out of it. A cool shiver ran up her legs. She planted her feet and closed her eyes for what felt like an hour
.

One of the detectives came over
.

They were parked here,
Joan said
.

What did you see?

She shook her head. She felt light-headed. Her stomach was tied in knots. What she had seen was Frances’s face flash by, then a blaze of blue light. Frances did not appear as she had in any of those photographs. She looked terrified
.

It was a blue van,
Joan said
.

For the next three days the detectives did their work, cataloging every blue van in Queens, attempting in vain to find a match on the list of vehicles registered to sex offenders. They
established which vans could have been in the vicinity of the parking lot the day Frances disappeared, then systematically winnowed that list down. Joan couldn’t eat or sleep. She kept the strands of Frances’s hair in a glass jar on her dressing table beside a photograph of the girl. It was the most recent photograph her father had, taken for the school yearbook two weeks before her disappearance. Sixty children had lined up and posed singly, one after the other, before a white screen. Frances was smiling, but looked not quite ready for the photographer to snap
.

Joan took the F train to Queens and walked around for hours, on random streets. She returned home and ate some rice. It was all she could tolerate. That night, around nine, the detectives called. Gus and Frank. They had something. She got dressed and made a pot of coffee
.

Frank Ramos lived in Brooklyn. He was married, with two kids. Gus Albanese was divorced. He lived in the Bronx, in the Italian neighborhood near Tremont Avenue. He was taken with Joan’s looks, voice, the easy manner beneath which you sensed her intensity. He sat down in her living room, with its leather sofa and Moroccan carpets, and stirred his coffee
.

We’ve narrowed it to three vans,
Frank said
. None registered to prior offenders. We have addresses. Before we obtain warrants or do forensics, we want you to check out the vans. Are you up for it?

The first van belonged to a laundry on Ditmars Boulevard. It was parked outside a two-family house in Jamaica. The driver was a Chinese kid, working for his uncle. He was petrified when the detectives asked him to step outside. Joan circled the van, laying her hands on it. She looked at the kid and shook her head
.

The second van was driven by the owner of a hardware store. He was sixty-four years old, Polish, living in an apartment in Corona. The van was parked in the building’s garage. Joan circled it and touched it. They knocked at the man’s door, and he was bewildered at the sight of the grim detectives and the tall black woman. He was five four, maybe 120 pounds. His left arm was so arthritic he could barely lift it. His wife was in a wheelchair in front of the TV
.

Their third stop was on a street of rowhouses in St. Albans, near Montefiore Cemetery. The houses were all on the right side of the street, facing a strip of woods. A blue Chevy van was parked in front of Number 40. The house was dark. A window on the second floor lit up when Gus pressed the doorbell. Then a second window. A heavyset middle-aged woman opened the door but kept the chain fastened until she saw Gus’s badge up close. She had gray hair and doughy skin. A second woman, even older and grayer, ambled up behind her. They were retired nurses, sisters
.

What is it?
the second sister said
.

They said they mostly used the van to travel to arts and crafts fairs. They were certain they hadn’t been out driving that day
.

How can you be so sure?
Gus said
.

The housepainters were here for two weeks in April,
the first sister said
, and we never left them in the house alone.

What’s this about?
the second sister said
.

Does anyone else ever drive your van?
Frank asked
.

The sisters looked at each other
.

Only my brother,
the first sister replied
. He borrows it sometimes.

Where does he live?

Linden Boulevard. But he wouldn’t go to Rego Park.

How do you know that?
Gus said
.

What would he want there?
the second sister replied
.

Gus glanced over his shoulder at Joan, who was backing away from the van, edging toward the woods across the street. Her spine was stiff and her expression was frozen
.

Gus squeezed Frank’s arm and said
, I’ll go with Joan.

He had his flashlight out as he caught up to her in the woods
. They have a brother who uses the van,
he said
.

Joan nodded
. He has red hands, a flushed face, thick lips. Asthma, maybe, that makes him wheeze.

It was true, he had all of those things. And a temper that had gotten him fired from his last job, custodian at a technical school, where he had stolen the many tools discovered in his cluttered one-room apartment—and one tool that wasn’t found
.

Thirty minutes later, the forensics squad and four cops arrived in two vans. Two other detectives were dispatched to 467 Linden Boulevard, awaiting the go-ahead to make an arrest. At one
A.M
., beneath portable floodlights, two of the cops began digging in a drainage ditch across the woods to which Joan had directed them. The scent of Two Hearts perfume filled her head as she threaded the trees. But Frances’s screams, which had rung in her ears when she approached the van, stopped abruptly
.

The drainage ditch, dug months before, was still waiting to be lined with cement. Raymond Mullen had concluded correctly that additional digging would never be noticed before the cement was poured and the grave sealed. It didn’t have to be a large grave for a girl Frances’s size. Standing with Gus and Frank, Joan watched the wet dirt pile up beside the ditch. Then
the diggers stopped abruptly and signaled the forensics chief, who stepped into the ditch and squatted with his small rakes and brushes. After fifteen minutes, there she was, four feet under, the hacksaw on her chest. Her remains looked intact at first. Then they saw that her other foot had been severed, too
. Christ,
Frank muttered
.

After Gus and Frank drove her home, Joan curled up on the sofa in her raincoat. She didn’t want to go to bed. Didn’t want to dream. She only wanted to blot out what she had seen. And to detach from whatever it was internally that had enabled her to find Frances
.

She attended the funeral with Gus and Frank. John Kelly embraced her outside the church. The fire commissioner was there, and Kelly’s squad, and the chief of detectives. They all watched the hearse and the cortege drive away
.