VC03 - Mortal Grace (27 page)
“Strange in what way?”
“Rough.”
“Do you mean unpolished?”
“I mean dangerous.”
“Who told you that?”
“A witness mentioned it.”
“Father Joe is bearing Christian witness in an unchristian time. He’s a controversial figure. I’m sure you can dig up people who’ll swear he practices animal sacrifice.”
“I realize that. But all the same, isn’t it possible he invited the dead man in, and the encounter turned sour, and Father Joe defended himself?”
“You’re saying Father Joe brought an attack on himself—he deserved it?”
“I’m not talking about the attack in the park, I’m talking about what happened here in the rectory to Pablo Cespedes.”
“The accident here wouldn’t have happened if Father Joe had not been stupidly, senselessly mauled in the park.”
“There’s a problem. He didn’t report that attack. There’s no record of it.”
Her gaze met his levelly. “Whether you can find a record or not, it happened. Father Joe isn’t lying. He doesn’t lie.”
“I’m not saying he lied. But we need proof of that attack to justify the booby trap. Otherwise it’s culpable homicide.”
She sighed and shook her head. “This is so horribly unfair. Father Joe has never intentionally harmed a human being in his life, not even in self-defense.”
“Then would you object if I took hairs from the brush in the guest room?”
Her eyes narrowed on him. “What would be the point of that?”
“Pablo Cespedes claimed he spent nights at the home of a friend called Andy. We haven’t been able to find Andy. Which makes me wonder if Andy was possibly a church.”
“You think Pablo Cespedes was sleeping here?”
“I’d like to rule the possibility out.”
Her eyes never left his. “Fine. You can take the hairs. In fact, I insist. They’ll only prove Father Joe’s innocent.”
THIRTY-FIVE
H
OLDING THE NOTE BY
the corner, Cardozo laid it on the steel-topped worktable.
The murdered runaways are in the shoe box in the rector’s desk.
To the right he placed a second note. The paper had curled and aged to yellow and the ink had faded to gray, but the words were still clear:
Sally, you do that divinely—thank heaven for little girls with talent! Joe.
To the left he placed Bonnie Ruskay’s handwritten list of religious bookshops.
“I have two questions. First: Did the person who wrote that list, or the person who signed himself Joe, write the unsigned note?”
Machines murmured in the buffered quiet of the lab. Lou Stein leaned forward without commenting and pushed his glasses down to the end of his nose.
Cardozo placed five sheets of St. Andrew’s letterhead on the table and beside them another five sheets. The second group was marked with a small X at the bottom.
“Second question. Can you match the stationery of the unsigned note to either of these bundles?”
“Shouldn’t take me long to match the letterhead—or to rule out a match. I don’t do handwriting analysis myself, but I’ll send these over to Marge Bonaventura. She’s good and she’s fast.” Lou angled the tensor lamp lower. “They’re all right-handed.”
Something made a high-pitched squeaking sound.
Lou looked over. “You got a mouse in your pocket?”
Cardozo pushed the switch on his beeper. “Mind if I use your phone?”
Lou nodded toward the desk.
Cardozo called the precinct. Ellie’s voice was excited. “I just got off the phone with the National Register of Runaways. Lomax and Gilmartin aren’t listed.”
“And?”
“Neither is Vegas or Wills.”
He wondered if he’d heard her right. “
None
of them are listed?”
“Correct.”
“Ellie, why are you beeping me about this?”
“It’s amazing how far persistence will get you. I asked them to double-check, and it turned out Richie Vegas and Wally Wills were both
formerly
listed.”
“Okay. That means they were taken off the list.”
“Correct.”
“Which means they must have showed up.”
“Right here in New York.”
“And?”
“They showed up dead. Homicides.”
“Christ.”
“Wills was investigated by a Detective Mort Kandelaft out in Queens.”
Cardozo ran the name through his memory. “I don’t know him.”
“Vegas was investigated by a Detective Fred Huck here in Manhattan.”
“Talk with Kandelaft,” Cardozo said. “Talk with him now. I’ll talk with Huck.”
Cardozo replaced the receiver. When he turned, Lou was bent over the worktable, squinting through a small square magnifying glass.
“Your list was written by a woman.”
“No comment,” Cardozo said.
“You don’t need to comment. It’s obvious from the depth of the verticals. A woman in a hurry.” Lou moved the lamp to the right. “Your unsigned note was written by a man.”
Cardozo took a small plastic evidence bag from his pocket. “One more favor.”
Lou stretched out a hand. “Ask and it shall be given.” He held the bag under the light. “Male Caucasian late teens.”
“I need to know if that hair matches hair from the head of Pablo Cespedes.”
Lou smiled. “And know you shall.”
“Wanted to ask you about a homicide you handled three years ago,” Cardozo said. “A runaway teenager.”
“Glad to help.” Detective Fred Huck thrust out a hand. He was a tall, friendly-looking man with a shock of graying blond hair. He gestured Cardozo into his office.
The small space showed signs of city revenue cutbacks—pea-soup-green paint curling off faintly grimy walls, shirt cardboard and duct tape replacing a broken pane in the window. Snowbanks of paper smothered the desk.
“The kid’s name was Richie Vegas.” Cardozo took a chair and handed Huck the boy’s photo. “You found him over in Tompkins Square Park.”
Fred Huck studied the picture. He had a cool look of blankness and then he snapped a finger. “Two weeks before Christmas. Sawed up in pieces in a basket.”
Cardozo allowed his face to register no reaction.
“The worst of it was, a little girl found him. Ten years old, and she had to see a thing like that.”
“Did you ever close the case?”
“I think so, but let me get the file.”
Fred Huck came back six minutes later carrying a slim manila folder fastened with two rubber bands.
“Sorry to take so long. The files around here are a mess. Half are on the data base and the other half are lost.” He sat at the desk and snapped the bands loose. “All the teenage males killing for the price of a pair of sneakers, it’s not surprising one of them gets the tables turned.”
Huck began turning pages.
“The body was found December tenth. Approximate date of death, first week in November. Identified from dental X rays the following February eighteenth. Returned to parents, February twenty-first.”
“I don’t remember reading about it,” Cardozo said. “Was there anything in the newspapers?”
“The story made one of the local TV news shows. The D.A. wanted us to hold something back from the media, so we didn’t publicize that the body had been chopped up. All we released was the basket.”
“A large reinforced container?”
Huck nodded. “Trade name Styrobasket. Made in Kalamazoo.”
“Do you have the crime-scene inventory there?”
“Sure do.”
“Was a bouquet found near the gravesite?”
Huck gave Cardozo a bewildered look. “Bouquet?”
“Dead flowers—a dozen or so—fastened with a piece of thin red string.”
Huck scanned the inventory. “Matter of fact, there was a scraggly bunch of dead flowers. No mention what kind of string.”
“Did you by any chance keep them?”
Huck shook his head. “There’s no property marker listed here. I guess we didn’t.”
“When did you finally close the case?”
“Struck it lucky May of last year. The killer confessed. Family man. A futures analyst from Salomon Brothers. A real Jekyll and Hyde by the name of Martin Barth.”
“The pieces of Wally Wills’s body were found March third, two years ago, in a Styrobasket on the old World’s Fair grounds.” Ellie sat in the straight-backed chair, summarizing in a quiet, unemotional voice from Detective Mort Kandelaft’s file. “Traces of a matzolike substance were adhering to the roof of his mouth. Approximate date of death, the middle of the preceding January. No bouquets were found at the grave.”
Cardozo rocked back in his swivel chair. “Which doesn’t mean a bouquet couldn’t have been left there.”
Ellie nodded, conceding the point. “In order to hold information back from the public, the matzolike substance wasn’t released to the media. Neither was the Styrofoam basket.”
“They held back the basket in this case. They held back the dismemberment in the Vegas case.” Cardozo steepled his fingers together. “Who decided that—Kandelaft or the D.A.’s office?”
“Kandelaft was following orders from the D.A.’s office. The case was closed that spring—May twelfth. The murderer confessed: he said he took Wills to a meatpacking plant and sodomized him and killed him.”
Silence closed in and then a blast of PTP radio static pulsed through the squad room.
“And who was this murderer?”
Ellie handed Cardozo the file. “A Wall Street futures analyst by the name of Martin Barth.”
Cardozo’s fist slammed down on the desk top. The framed picture of Terri as a six-year-old jumped. “Barth confessed to killing Wills. He confessed to killing Vegas. He confessed to killing Ms. Basket Case. All young Caucasian runaways, all of them lured to a meat-packing plant and sawed up and left in a public park in a Styrofoam picnic basket. These are so obviously the same M.O. that a ten-year-old would see it. I can’t believe nobody put them together. Why wasn’t there at least some kind of press reaction?”
“Details were held back.” Ellie shrugged. “It’s standard operating procedure. In this case it meant the media didn’t have enough to put the murders together. Wish I could explain it—but I don’t understand how things work nowadays. Chiefly because they don’t work.”
Cardozo ripped through the files. “Clothes folded up with bodies—gray acrylic fiber sticking to clothes—incense residue sticking to clothes… None of this was given to the media.”
“Vince, you can’t know that.”
“Did you read it in the papers? Did you hear it on TV? Because I sure as hell didn’t. Candle wax on torso—leather fragments on wrists—leather fragments on shins—cocaine residue on injection mark—traces of azido-, azido-something-or-other in Vegas’s and Wills’s livers—ˮ
“Azidofluoramine.”
“Thank you. Why didn’t the D.A.’s office see it? Why were three identical killings farmed out to three different detectives?”
“Okay, somebody screwed up. It happens.”
“The only way this could have happened is because somebody screwed up on purpose.”
Ellie’s legs were crossed and she was languidly rotating one ankle. Body language for:
Watch yourself, Lieutenant. You’re on the verge of losing it.
“This city is the murder capital of the world. Details get overlooked.”
“These are not details.” Cardozo felt anger like a dentist’s drill going through his intestine. “And they’re not going to get overlooked any longer.”
Vince Cardozo and Pierre Strauss sat facing one another on upholstered chairs the color of driftwood. Cardozo had not come all this way to talk to Martin Barth’s lawyer, but there Strauss sat, righteous and implacable, like a wall.
“When did you meet Wally Wills?” It was the seventh time Cardozo had asked a variant of the question.
“I forbid my client to answer.”
The window in the VIP visitors’ room at Dannemora faced west. Behind Strauss, Martin Barth stared at the setting sun touching down in the mountains.
“When did you meet Richie Vegas?”
“I forbid my client to answer.”
“When did you meet Wally Wills?”
“I forbid my client to answer.”
“How did you get them to go with you? Did you invite them for a drink, for a meal? Offer them money, drugs, what?”
“I forbid my client to answer.”
“They were only kids, Marty. Hardly older than your own boys. Why did you kill them?”
“I forbid my client to answer.”
Martin Barth began pacing. He wore loose-fitting prison blues, but Cardozo could see that a year and a half in Dannemora had put weight on his bones. Barth stopped at the table beside his attorney’s chair. He picked up a pack of Marlboro Lights and tapped one loose.
“Marty, that’s your third pack.” Strauss gave him a light. “Cigarettes are going to kill you.”
“Was it fun, Marty?”
Strauss sighed. “I forbid my client to answer.”
Behind horn-rimmed glasses, Martin Barth’s eyes kept flicking to the door. Outside, the guard’s blue shoulder was leaning against the glass panel.
If I could only get this guy alone
, Cardozo wished. “What do you do for fun now, Marty? Would you like me to send you a few cartons of Marlboro Lights?”
“My client does not need cigarettes. And he does not need you exceeding your authority.”
“I’m within my authority.”
“Bullshit. What’s your authorization for this inquiry? These cases are closed. What the hell are you investigating?”
“That’s my business.”
Hair stood up on Strauss’s head like wisps of meringue on a pie that needed more baking. “You’re making it my business too.”
“Martin Barth made statements to me and two other New York City homicide detectives. I have a right to clarify those statements.”
“You have no right to ask about Vegas and Wills. My client has never been charged with those offenses.”
“Come off it, he confessed.”
“My client is under no obligation to incriminate himself.”
“For chrissake. It was his admissions that closed the goddamned cases.”
“Then anything my client has to say on the subject is already contained in the district attorney’s files. And this interview is concluded.” Pierre Strauss yanked Martin Barth around by the arm. “Come on, Marty. We’re outta here.”
THIRTY-SIX
“S
INCE SEVEN-THIRTY LAST NIGHT
I’ve had eight phone calls from Pierre Strauss.” Harvey Thoms’s face was flushed and damp. Edginess rippled out of him. “Has he gone around the bend or what?”