The Graving Dock Page 5

  Jack shrugged. Since the World Trade Center attack, jittery New Yorkers were picturing terrorism everywhere: in accidents, in subway delays, even traffic jams. The fact was, though, that poisoners usually wanted their crimes hidden. Poison was a rather old-fashioned MO. For centuries it had been a favored means to surreptitiously get rid of a spouse or to speed up an inheritance, but recent advances in forensic toxicology and pathology had rendered it increasingly rare.

  “Actually, it was fentanyl,” Jack said. “I’m glad it was that.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a powerful opiate-based anesthetic. That means the kid probably didn’t suffer much. With some other poisons, like strychnine or antimony, you get a violent, agonizing death, but a fentanyl overdose puts you under pretty fast.”

  Pacelli looked impressed. “You really know your stuff.”

  Jack waved away the compliment. “What can I say? You’re out here saving live people, while I’m just checking out a bunch of stiffs.”

  There were another couple of reasons why he was thankful about the case. The M.E. had reported no signs of physical or sexual abuse. And the tabloids were still so dominated by every detail of the Trade Center attack that the story of the waterborne coffin had received surprisingly little play.

  “Any idea who the victim is?”

  Jack shook his head. “I haven’t found him in any Missing Persons reports. And we’ve checked with every school in the city.” He sighed. “You wouldn’t think a kid could just disappear and nobody would give a damn. Pretty soon we’ll have to set up a hotline and put a photo in the papers, but I’m not looking forward to that; we’ll get calls from every nut job in the Tristate area.”

  “You’re working with a guy from the Seven-six on this?”

  Jack nodded. “He’s organizing a team of uniforms to canvass along the waterfront, to ask if anybody saw that box go in the water. That’s why I want your help. Obviously, we can’t cover every mile of the shoreline—we need some idea where to focus.”

  He heard a clanking and looked across the bow; the launch was nearing a buoy, a scaffolded metal tower bobbing in the water like a punch-drunk boxer. Pacelli steered to the right, following the rules of this watery road. He brought the launch around the southern end of Red Hook and into narrow Buttermilk Channel, which separated Brooklyn from a low, flat island covered with redbrick barracks. Some old Coast Guard base. It was just a quarter-mile from the Brooklyn shore, but so quiet and removed from the hubbub of New York life that nobody paid it any mind.

  Jack stared at it, thunderstruck. How could he have missed something so obvious?

  The name of the place was Governors Island. G.I.

  “What’s the matter?” Pacelli said.

  Jack filled him in.

  Pacelli shook his head. “Sorry, but I doubt that’s your answer. The island has been pretty much closed down since the Coast Guard gave up their base there in the mid-nineties. The public’s not allowed at all. There are still a few security guards and a little fire-house, to keep an eye on things, but there’s only one ferry for transportation; it goes to and from Manhattan just a couple of times a day. There’d be no reason for it to carry a kid, and definitely not a coffin. You can talk to whoever’s in charge over there these days, but it’s basically off-limits.”

  Jack frowned. It didn’t sound promising, but he made a mental note to ask Tommy Balfa to contact whoever was running the island’s security.

  Pacelli veered to the left, around a blackened chunk of wood.

  “You get a lot of stuff floating around out here?”

  Pacelli nodded. “The most common thing is wood from old piers, but we get just about everything you could imagine: plastic bags, crack vials, Styrofoam coolers, Coney Island whitefish…”

  Jack smiled at this childhood slang for floating condoms.

  As Pacelli neared the Red Hook pier where the coffin had first been spotted, he cut the engine. The boat swung like a hammock at the mercy of the water, and the cabin began to strike Jack as very small and airless.

  “You okay?”

  Jack swallowed uneasily.

  Pacelli grinned. “Waves getting to ya, huh? Here’s what you do: Just think of cold pork chops smothered in maple syrup. Or fried eggs floating in oil…”

  Jack grimaced and his old friend laughed. “Sorry. Tell you what: Why don’t we just cruise along?”

  Jack gripped a handrail and nodded.

  Pacelli restarted the engine and turned north again. They motored through the channel and out into the open harbor, just a short distance from the thicket of skyscrapers rising from the southern tip of Manhattan. The absence of the Twin Towers was like a slap in the face. Beyond the remaining skyscrapers, over on the west side of the island, teams of volunteers were hard at work, sifting through twisted mountains of wreckage and rubble, by an unimaginable degree the biggest crime scene the city had ever known.

  Pacelli saw where Jack was looking, and shook his head. “Man, I sure hope they catch that Bin Laden bastard. I’d like to personally string him up by the balls.” He turned the boat to the right, into the broad opening of the East River.

  “Tell me how the water works,” Jack said. He knew plenty about homicide and the intricate workings of the city streets, but this was unknown territory. His job was hardly a solo venture, like it was in the movies—to a large extent, a detective was only as good as the network of helpers he or she had built up over time: confidential informants, friends at the DMV and phone company, old colleagues with specialized knowledge…

  Pacelli squared his shoulders, eager to show off his expertise. “First of all, if the box was dumped into the harbor, it would probably have landed out on the south shore of Long Island.”

  “How do you know?”

  “The DEP did a study a few years back. They dropped thousands of little plastic bottles all over the harbor and the rivers, and then tracked where they ended up.”

  “Well, we have a couple of witnesses who said it was moving from the north.”

  “Okay, it would’ve probably come down the East River here.”

  “How do these currents work?”

  “First of all, you know that this isn’t really a river, right?”

  Jack made a face, as if he had suddenly been called on back in grade school. “What do you mean?”

  “Technically, it’s a tidal strait that connects the harbor with the Long Island Sound. If it was a river, your problem would be simple, ’cause it would only flow one way, and it would be easy to determine the speed and movement of the box. But this is a very complicated body of water. The tides are semidiurnal, which means the damned thing changes direction four times a day…not to mention the slack tides in between, when it just sits there. Then you’ve got your currents, which sometimes run in the opposite direction from the surface water. Throw in the air currents, which also influence the way something’s gonna move, and it’s a goddamned circus.”

  The light outside the windows dimmed; Jack looked out and saw that the launch was slipping into a realm of shadow beneath the grand old stone towers of the Brooklyn Bridge. Beyond rose the blue metal span of the Manhattan Bridge, and the ugly industrial lattices of the Williamsburg Bridge beyond that.

  “How long is the river, or strait, or whatever?”

  “Sixteen miles,” Pacelli answered. “Times two, when you count both shorelines.”

  Jack winced. “That’s a lot of ground to cover.”

  Pacelli smiled. “Yeah, but I’ve got good news. Look upriver.”

  Jack squinted ahead. “I can’t see very far. There’s a crook in it.”

  Pacelli nodded. “That’s the good news.” He pulled out a chart. “See, the river bends like a sock here. The heel’s right up ahead there on the Brooklyn side, and it’s got a little bay dipping off of it. That’s the old Navy Yard Basin.” Pacelli pointed to a small cut in the shore just above it. “That’s the Wallabout Channel.” He moved his finger along the upper portion of the river
. “When stuff enters the river from up here, it tends to wash back onto the shoreline nearby, or else float down into the Wallabout, which acts like a catch basin.”

  Jack considered the chart. “So our box probably entered the water somewhere below that channel. That’ll narrow our search a lot.”

  Pacelli nodded again. “And you can narrow it down a lot more, because you’ve got the Navy Yard here, a big power plant right on the shore here…There’s not much publicly accessible shoreline.”

  Jack’s beeper went off. “Hold on,” he told his colleague, and used his cell phone to contact the task force office.

  A minute later he hung up, shaking his head, puzzled.

  “The M.E. just called my boss: They got some new test results. The kid was definitely poisoned, but now it turns out that he would have died soon anyway. He had very advanced leukemia.”

  CHAPTER eight

  JACK SAT IN HIS car, thankful to be back on solid ground. He squinted down at Tommy Balfa’s card as he punched the detective’s number into his cell phone. He had to admit that the device often made his job easier, but he rarely used it when he was off duty. For one thing, the tiny keys made his not-particularly-large hands feel like clumsy sausages. For another, he hated the way the phones had ruined the distinction between private and public space, and the way they conveyed such a ridiculous sense of self-importance, as though every little action was worthy of being broadcast. I’m waiting for the bus. I’m getting on the bus. I’m on the bus. They made him cranky.

  Balfa answered, but the connection crackled.

  “Can you meet me at your squad room?” Jack asked.

  “I’m out on a job, but I can be there in fifteen.”

  “I’ll wait for you,” Jack said. He was already in the neighborhood; he figured he’d kill the time by buying a muffin or something to settle his stomach.

  He walked over to a pastry shop on Court Street and bought a sfogliatelle, a seashell-shaped Italian pastry, and then strolled down a quiet side street, enjoying the faint taste of orange rind mixed in with the filling’s ricotta cheese.

  He considered the latest findings in the case. Yes, the boy in the box had been a homicide, but now it seemed like maybe a mercy killing. He shrugged: That was better than finding out the kid had been abused, but he was still eager to catch whoever had administered the drug. If it had been some loving parent who had done it to put their child out of agony, that was one thing, but the business with the homemade coffin and the writing on the kid’s forehead definitely indicated a perp with a few screws loose. It wasn’t his job to determine that mental status—he would find the killer, and let the shrinks sort it out.

  The next step would be to fax the kid’s photo to hospitals in the Tristate area, see if he had been treated there. (If he wasn’t local, though, the search might get tough: There were seventy-five hundred hospitals nationwide.)

  As Jack turned a corner three blocks from the station house, he noticed a little white Honda Civic double-parked fifty yards down. Before he got any closer, the passenger door opened and Tommy Balfa stepped out. The detective bent down and said something in through the window, then turned and hurried away. Jack wondered why the car hadn’t just dropped Balfa off in front of the station house. It pulled out into the street and a few seconds later passed Jack by. The window was sliding up, but he caught a glimpse of an attractive young redhead in the driver’s seat.

  BALFA WAS ALREADY BEHIND his desk when Jack walked into the squad room. “How ya doin’?” the detective said.

  “I’m good,” Jack answered. “You out working on our case?”

  “Actually,” Balfa said calmly, “I was finishing up another thing. I had to meet with a C.I.”

  Jack didn’t say anything, but he was looking down at the detective’s wedding ring and thinking, Yeah, right: some confidential informant.

  “Anybody I might know?”

  Balfa just smiled. “If I told you who he was, then he wouldn’t be confidential.”

  Jack shrugged. Whatever. Balfa was certainly not the first married cop to be catching a little nookie on the side. He had more important things to worry about than this particular precinct detective. “Did you contact your Narcotics guys about the fentanyl?”

  Balfa was rummaging around for something in his desk drawer; he barely looked up. “Didn’t get around to it yet.”

  Jack blinked, surprised by the detective’s nonchalance. “Did you find out who’s running security over at Governors Island?”

  Balfa pinched his bottom lip. “Not yet. Sorry. I had to finish up this other thing.”

  Jack frowned. Back at the end of the eighties, the Seventy-sixth precinct had seen its fair share of murders, but those stats had dropped precipitously over the following ten years. Murders were rare here now—especially murders of children. Even though he had a backlog of his own cases, he had spent hours of unpaid OT trying to discover the kid’s identity. And here Balfa was, dicking around, without a care in the world…

  He thought of a sign some wag had posted on a wall back at Brooklyn South Homicide: IF OUR RESTAURANT DOES NOT MEET YOUR EXPECTATIONS, PLEASE LOWER YOUR EXPECTATIONS.

  It could have been Balfa’s motto.

  CHAPTER nine

  JACK IS SWIMMING. HE feels like a fish and he’s swimming; he’s free to glide along and everything’s blue, and friendly rays of sun slant down and Petey is swimming, too. Petey is younger but he’s a better athlete, so he can swim deeper and farther. This is Jack’s brother, whom he loves so much it causes a sweet pain in his heart. He comes up for air and he knows the place: It’s the Red Hook public pool and it’s full of kids shouting and families laughing and little babies learning how to dogpaddle. And he dives back into the blue and discovers that he can breathe underwater now and he glides forward, looking to tell Petey the good news.

  Only he doesn’t see his brother, and there’s a voice coming down into the water from the loudspeakers, and he bursts up and the lifeguards are shouting “Everybody out! Everybody out!” They’re pointing at the sky, which is filling with dark thunderclouds. And everybody’s rising, spouting up, and clambering out over the sides. The pool is huge, bigger than a football field, but there’s only a few people left in it. Now no one. But Petey still hasn’t come out. Now everyone is gone—the families, the lifeguards, the little shouting kids—everyone but Jack, and he runs along the vast concrete plaza that surrounds the pool, which is quiet as the grave now under the lowering sky, and he’s peering down into the water, trying to locate his brother, who is missing.

  He woke, gasping.

  “You okay?” mumbled Michelle.

  “I’m fine,” he answered, and she rolled back over into sleep.

  Jack lay waiting for his heart rate to return to normal.

  One night after he and Michelle had first grown close, he told her something he had hardly told anyone: The story of how his brother had been killed when they were both kids, how he had been powerless to save him, how the killers had never been caught. She asked if that was why he had become a cop. He had shrugged it off, said he’d never thought much about it.

  He thought about it now.

  What particularly bothered him was that he had not even succeeded in identifying the boy in the box, let alone figuring out who had killed him. The kid was not in any national missing children database, or in the FBI’s fingerprint database (hardly surprising, considering his age). All queries to area hospitals had come up empty so far, as had checks with schools and social services agencies throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut. A national search was a daunting prospect, and would require considerable resources. The problem was that nobody was making a fuss about this particular kid.

  The worst part was that dead bodies kept coming in to the Kings County morgue; if it filled up, and the child was still unidentified and unclaimed, his small body would end up buried out on Hart Island, in an anonymous grave in Potter’s Field. Jack was determined not to let that happen.

/>   THE MORNING WAS NIPPY and his breath clouded up as he climbed out of his car on Mermaid Avenue. The ocean and the Coney Island boardwalk were just two blocks to the south, and usually the whole area smelled of salt water and fried grease, but those odors were muted in these winter months.

  In the Brooklyn South Homicide office, things were business-as-usual: The bright fluorescent-lit space was filled with desks piled with paperwork, and the other four detectives of Jack’s team were hunkering down behind the piles, like drivers settling in for a demolition derby. Amid the usual wanted posters, union notices, and department paperwork, two computer-printed banners ran across the back wall. He who is not pursued escapes. Socrates. And, If a man is burdened with the blood of another, let him. be a fugitive unto death. Let no one help him. Proverbs 28:17.

  Jack signed in to the command log. “Please tell me there’s some coffee left,” he muttered as he headed for the makeshift little kitchen in the back storeroom.

  He didn’t get that far. Sergeant Tanney stuck his curly head out of his office. “Leightner, I’ve got a fresh one for you.”

  Jack winced. “Can’t you give me a couple more days on the Red Hook thing?”

  Tanney shook his head. “This one’s gonna be big, and I need you on it.”

  Jack sighed, but didn’t argue. As new jobs came in, the detectives caught them in turn. They could go “off the chart” for four days to focus exclusively on a fresh job, but unless the case was high priority, after that they went back into the rotation. He had worked the job involving the boy in the box as hard and as thoroughly as he could, and would continue to do so in every free minute, but this new case would have to take precedence. (He just hoped that Tommy Balfa would show a little initiative.)

  Five minutes later he and Hermelinda Vargas, another detective from his team, were speeding north toward the Seventy-eighth precinct.

  MIGHTY STATUES OF REARING horses flanked the entrance to Prospect Park’s southernmost corner. The inner roadway that circled the park was closed to cars between the morning and evening rush hours, but Jack steered around the metal barrier.