The Graving Dock Read online

  “Huh?” Balfa paused in midbite.

  “This case. You got some ideas?”

  Balfa looked down at the remains of his sandwich. He wrapped them up carefully and wiped his hands. He shrugged. “I guess we need to check Missing Persons, see if anybody’s lost a kid.”

  “What else?”

  “I dunno. If the coffin was store-bought, we could’ve checked on sales records, but that thing looked homemade.”

  Jack waited in vain for more. He was disappointed by the detective’s lack of curiosity. What was the coffin doing in the water in the first place? If it was meant to be a burial at sea, why hadn’t the thing been weighted down? Did the person who launched it want it to be found? Had it been put into the water from somewhere else on shore, or from a vessel? What could be determined from the forensic evidence, like the origins of the blanket, or the hardware used to make the box?

  “What do you make of it?” Balfa asked.

  Jack sipped his coffee and glanced out through the windshield. A couple of firemen from the engine company down the street were coming up the block with their usual cocky athlete’s gait. They looked younger than the usual guys, though, and a sadness seeped into his chest—this house had lost seven members on September 11.

  Jack turned to his new partner. “This is all speculation, obviously, but I can see several different scenarios. The simplest one is that somebody’s kid dies of natural causes. He can’t afford a regular burial, so he builds the box and launches it out. I guess some city statute would apply, but that wouldn’t make it much of an NYPD problem. On the other hand, I can’t see some bereaved parent writing on his own kid’s forehead with a Magic Marker, no matter how screwed up he was with grief…If this is a homicide, then I wonder if he knew the boy. We’ll see if the M.E. finds signs of prior physical abuse.”

  “Why do you say ‘he’?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You keep saying that the perp was a he. Maybe it was a she. Or even a they.”

  Jack nodded. “You’re right. Anything’s possible.”

  Balfa took out a cigarette and lit up. “Who knows? Maybe this is one of those devil worship things.”

  Jack stared at him, but couldn’t tell if the detective was serious or not. Back in the eighties there had been a big hubbub about Satanic Ritual Abuse, but that had turned out to be a hysterical urban myth, without a single documented case. The sad fact was that in the overwhelming majority of child murders, the perp was not a sinister stranger, but someone known to the victim. “I don’t think so,” Jack said dryly. “Let’s stick to the evidence. The box looks pretty well made, which suggests that the perp—or perps—has some familiarity with carpentry. I wonder where he built the thing, and how he would have transported it without drawing attention. Hopefully, we’ll get a tip about suspicious activity.

  “I’d guess that our guy has some kind of personal connection to the water. Lives near it, works on it…A burial at sea is not gonna occur to your average city resident. Our witnesses say that the box floated in from the north. We’ll have to talk to the Charlie Unit”—the Harbor squad—“and see what they say about tides and currents.”

  He looked over at Balfa, expecting the detective to be a little chastened by all of the points he had failed to consider, but the detective was just staring out through his side window again, as if he had something more important to think about.

  CHAPTER four

  JACK FOUND GARY DASKIVITCH in the dumpy little lounge in the Seven-six precinct house. Half a meatball sub sat on the cigarette-scarred Formica table in front of the huge detective. The other half seemed to be inside his cavernous mouth. He grinned when Jack walked in. “Hey, the cavalry returns! Are you back on the job?”

  Jack nodded, then went over and fed some change into the soda machine. He listened in vain for the accompanying clunk.

  Daskivitch stood up. “Here,” he said, elbowing Jack out of the way. He rocked the big box back as easily as if he were throwing a little English on a pinball machine. Kachunk. He tossed Jack his ginger ale. “You on that weird case that floated in this morning?”

  Jack shrugged. “Only if it’s a homicide. We’ll have to let the M.E. call it.” He liked the young detective; the crewcut bear had been teamed with him on two prior cases and Jack had done his best to indoctrinate the kid into the art of homicide investigation. Despite the fact that Daskivitch didn’t look like the brightest crayon in the box, he had been the perfect student: eager to learn, a quick study, thankful for the knowledge. Jack had started to consider himself something of a mentor to the young detective, but now he owed the bigger debt of gratitude. It was Daskivitch and his wife, after all, who had set him up on his first date with Michelle, and it was Daskivitch who had done his best to keep Jack’s spirits up during his long hospital stay.

  He shut the door. “What’s the story with this Balfa guy?”

  Daskivitch set his sandwich down again and wiped his hands on a fistful of paper towels. He frowned. “I don’t know. He hasn’t been here long—I guess the verdict is still out. He keeps to himself. Not much of a team player, I guess you could say.” He shrugged, evidently deciding not to badmouth a colleague. “He’s all right, I guess.”

  Jack nodded thoughtfully. Not much of a recommendation. “How long has he been on the job?” A lot of cops started early and got out as soon as their twenty was up. Sometimes they lost interest as they neared that pension.

  Daskivitch swallowed the last of his sub. “I think he’s got about ten years.”

  Jack frowned: So much for that theory. Ah well…maybe his new partner was simply not a very good detective. In the old days, cops got promoted on the basis of their achievements, but the department had changed and now people could move up based on all sorts of political bullshit.

  “You want any help?” Daskivitch asked eagerly.

  “I don’t know.” Jack watched the big detective’s face fall, like a kid disappointed in his Christmas presents. “I’d be glad to work with you again, Gary, but you might wanna think before you get involved in this one.”

  Daskivitch sank back in his chair. “Why?”

  Jack leaned back against a wall. “Well, for one thing, the press might get all over this. Then we’ll have every kind of pressure to get results.”

  Daskivitch shrugged. “I don’t mind a tough job.”

  Jack nodded. “I know you don’t. But if you get tangled in a press case, it can really jam up your career. I don’t care much, myself—I’ve got my twenty, and I’ve got my rank.” (Out of some six thousand detectives in the NYPD, Jack was one of only a couple of hundred who had reached the top rank of First Grade.) “You’ve got your whole career ahead of you.”

  Daskivitch brightened. “Yeah, but if I helped break a case like that, it would do me a world of good.”

  Jack shook his head. “It’s not just the career thing. These jobs can do a real number on you. Up here.” He tapped his temple.

  Daskivitch waited, sensing that a tale was on the way. For cops, it was all about the stories. The Department offered all sorts of technical courses, but the real training happened like this: one cop talking to another, reliving a case.

  Jack rubbed a hand over his face. “You ever hear about Baby Annie?”

  Daskivitch shook his head.

  Jack sighed. “Back when I was a rookie on patrol in Bay Ridge, one morning we got an anonymous call. A couple of the guys went to check it out: In a vacant lot, they found a cardboard TV box. Inside it was a little girl, D.C.D.S.” Deceased, Confirmed Dead at Scene. “She was tied up. She was malnourished, and she’d been seriously abused.” He fell silent for a moment, remembering; he could picture the girl as clearly as the day he’d seen her. “We worked double shifts for weeks. Nobody worried about overtime.”

  There were all sorts of less-than-noble reasons why detectives wanted to close cases. There was pressure to keep the stats up. There was the salary increase that a promotion could provide. There was an intell
ectual pleasure in solving puzzles, and the satisfaction of proving that you were smarter than the bad guys. But a case like Baby Annie’s reduced the job to its starkest Biblical form: You just wanted to catch and punish the sick bastard who could do such a thing. You wanted to avenge the child.

  “We had no ID,” Jack continued. “No evidence, nothing…We got a thousand tips, but none of them led anywhere.”

  Daskivitch’s boyish face had taken on a rare somber look. “Why was she called Baby Annie? Did you find out who she was?”

  Jack shook his head. “We couldn’t stand calling her Baby Doe; we thought she deserved some kind of a name. We kept that case open for years, hoping somebody would give us a real tip; you know, try to plea down some other case, make a deathbed confession…”

  On TV, detectives solved every case by the end of the hour, but in real life, Jack knew, about a third of New York City’s homicides went uncleared. And those were just the known murders—there were plenty of crimes that never got solved because the police never even found out about them.

  He sighed. “After a while we took up a collection at the precinct and we bought that little girl a headstone and gave her a proper burial…We didn’t know when she was born, or when she died, exactly, so we put the only date on the headstone that we knew for sure: the day we found her. The lead detective retired years ago, but he’s still working on the case, hoping something will turn up…He’s never gotten over it.”

  He straightened up. “Anyhow, think about it before you get involved.” He realized that he was trying to protect the young detective from the hard realities of life in the same way that he had tried to protect his own son.

  Both gestures were probably equally futile.

  A CHILD IN A BOX. In other quarters the situation would have called for mourning, or for prayer. In this meeting, though, the focus was Departmental politics, even if nobody wanted to spell it out.

  They sat in the small, cramped office of Balfa’s boss, Detective Sergeant Larry Riordan. The thin, mournful-looking man presided behind his desk, rubbing his jaw with a characteristic pained expression. Above him rested one of the chief reasons for his pain: a big board marked with a box for each case. The victim’s name was written in black if the case was open, and then changed to red if the detectives managed to close it. A squad supervisor’s job was to provide the bean counters down at One Police Plaza with as many red boxes as possible, and he was reminded of that fact with stressful frequency. Even so, Riordan was a veteran of street work who did his best to protect his team from the vagaries of the paper cops, which was more than Jack could say for his own boss, who had dropped by for this confab. Sergeant Stephen Tanney was only thirty-seven, with a full head of curly red hair and an immaculate mustache. The man was relatively new to the homicide task force; so far he seemed most interested in pleasing the higher-ups.

  Riordan opened with a question for Jack. “What do you make of this?”

  Jack sat forward and rested his forearms on his knees. “I think we should press hard now, so we’ll have a good jump on things by the time the M.E. finishes the autopsy. I’d be glad to stay on tonight and see what I can find out.”

  “Hold on,” Tanney said. He always reminded Jack of a tame actor doing his best to play a tough guy. “Let’s not start talking overtime before we even know what this is.” If the M.E. ruled out unnatural causes, the local precinct would still have the case, but the homicide task force would be off the hook.

  It’s a dead child, Jack wanted to say. Stop worrying about your goddamn budget and do the right thing. He held his tongue, though. He had had conflicts with his boss before, and was reminded of a sign in his local hardware store: PRESS BUTTON TO REGISTER A COMPLAINT. The button was mounted on top of a mousetrap. “We did our best to secure the scene,” he said, “but I think I spotted a guy from the Daily News.” He watched as the little career-impact calculator in Tanney’s brain clicked away. Press interest meant public interest, which meant Department interest, which meant that jobs might be on the line.

  Tanney frowned. “All right. Why don’t we send some uniforms out, do a waterfront canvass? I’ll see if we can get some manpower from the next shift, and of course we’ll run the kid through Missing Persons…” He turned to his fellow sergeant. “Can you spare some people?”

  Riordan nodded. He turned to his own detective, who ultimately owned the case. “What do you think, Tom?”

  Balfa just shrugged. “Sure. Let’s find out who the little bugger was.”

  AFTER HIS DAY TOUR was over—and after his boss went home for the day—Jack dropped into One Police Plaza in Manhattan and volunteered several hours of his own time, checking computer databases to see if he could discover the boy’s identity. He had his work cut out for him: At any given time, nationally, there were at least a thousand unidentified dead children.

  CHAPTER five

  AT HOME, JACK STOPPED in the hallway to listen for signs of activity from his landlord upstairs. The man was eighty-six, a recent widower, and he had suffered a stroke during the past summer.

  Jack heard a door open, and a moment later a pleasant young Jamaican woman came downstairs buttoning up her winter coat. Mr. Gardner’s home-care nurse.

  “How’s he doing?” Jack asked.

  The woman smiled. “Feisty as ever. He says he wants to take me to Atlantic City.”

  Jack grinned. “You can’t keep a good man down.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows. “How about you?”

  “I’m not ready for any marathons, but I’m getting stronger every day.”

  She nodded. “Good, good.” She pulled on a hand-knitted purple hat. “You take care of each other now. And stay out of trouble.”

  The house was in Midwood, at the center of the immense concrete and asphalt plain that was Brooklyn. It was a quiet neighborhood, populated largely by Hasidic Jews. They were unexciting neighbors, but that suited Jack fine: He got all the excitement he could want at work.

  After the nurse left, he slowly mounted the stairs to say hello. The hallway was musty, and the stairs were carpeted in Astroturf. Mr. Gardner was a great fixer-upper, but he worked with found materials.

  Jack paused on the landing to catch his breath. He thought of his second week in the hospital, when he had begun his physical therapy. The bullet had passed through his lung and a fragment had lodged in one of his vertebrae—its heat had shocked his spinal cord, causing temporary paralysis from his chest down. As that started wearing off, he had spent a morning just trying to raise his foot enough to step up onto a little fake curb.

  The TV was on so loud inside Mr. G’s apartment that the old man couldn’t hear Jack’s knock. He was always watching: ball games, game shows, old war movies in the middle of the night…

  Jack went in and found him in his usual spot, sitting in an old duct-taped recliner in front of his ancient TV The room smelled of mothballs, mildewed carpet, and the old man’s faintly sour skin. Mr. Gardner looked up through blocky old eyeglasses as thick as the bottoms of Coke bottles. His gaunt face broke open in a gap-toothed smile—it drooped on the right, on account of the stroke, but not much. Jack had always thought of him as “the old man,” and himself as very vigorous in comparison, but his convalescence had done a lot to balance out that difference, and he felt closer to his landlord than ever.

  “Jackie! How ya doon?”

  Jack shrugged off the question. He glanced at the TV A game show.

  The thought of him sitting in front of the TV all day depressed Jack. The last time he had visited, they watched a talk show in which a squat woman with huge tits had gotten into a threesome with two mooks with mullet haircuts, and they all argued about which one had fathered her baby. Why was it that if you wanted to watch TV in the daytime, the networks assumed you were a moron?

  Mr. G clicked again.

  Jack gestured at a pair of newscasters smugly jawing in front of a picture of a man in a turban. “They catch him yet?”

  Mr. G frowned
. “Bin Laden? No. I don’t know what they’re waitin’ for.”

  “You mind if I turn this off for a second?”

  Mr. G shook his head, a bit nervously. These days in late 2001, everybody in the City had turned into a news junkie, afraid of another terrorist attack. It was only in the past couple of weeks that the acrid smell of smoke from Ground Zero had finally stopped drifting across the river. It had been a hell of a few months, for Mr. Gardner as well as for Jack. The old man had lived in the house for ages, anchored by his familiar routines, and he was shaken by any kind of change. That was why Jack himself was anxious now.

  “I wanted to ask you something.”

  Mr. G peered up at him.

  He scratched at an imaginary spot on his pants leg. “You know Michelle, that woman I’ve been seeing these past few months?”

  Mr. G nodded slowly. The old man was a great landlord and a friend, but he was wary as an old peasant, determined that nobody was going to put anything over on him.

  Jack cleared his throat. “I was wondering how you’d feel if she moved in with me.”

  Mr. G scowled. “Whadda ya mean, shack up with ya?” The man never went to church, but carried strong remnants of his Catholic upbringing.

  Jack smiled. “Not exactly. Can you keep a secret?”

  Mr. G nodded uncertainly.

  “I’m gonna ask if she’ll make an honest man out of me. I got the ring and everything.” Jack winced, remembering; he’d had the ring, anyhow.

  Mr. G stared for a moment longer, and then grinned as widely as his impaired facial muscles would allow. “Good for you, kid!” He fumbled for the lever at the side of his chair, and managed to tilt it back a bit. “That goddamned nurse doesn’t let me take my real medicine.” He reached down under the footrest and pulled out a dusty bottle of Seagrams 7. “Go in the kitchen and grab us a couple of glasses.”

  DOWNSTAIRS, LATER, JACK SANK into a hot bath. For most of his life he had been a brisk-shower kind of a guy, but after he got out of the hospital Michelle had pampered him a bit, and turned him on to the luxury of a good soak. It went well with his general appreciation of cleanliness, and with the job—Lord knows there were plenty of days when he wanted to scrub some unpleasantness off his skin, or out of his head.