Buried on Avenue B (5 page)

 

CHAPTER 9

“ANY CHANCE YOU
and I could have an adult conversation?” asks O'Hara.

“I don't see why not,” says Kelso, his face registering surprise as he sits up in his chair. “As far as I know, it's still legal.”

“Right now,” says O'Hara, “there are eleven names on the board, and ten have lines through them. The eleventh, the guy who forgot how to chew, is never going to close. He's going to be up there till the ball drops on Times Square. Every time I see his name, it makes me sick.”

“Really? I thought I was the only one who felt that way.”

“Right here,” says O'Hara, pointing at a spot in the middle of her chest. “Like acid reflux. Can I borrow your calculator?”

When O'Hara says the C-word, something changes in Kelso's expression. For a second, O'Hara can't interpret it. Then she realizes Kelso is listening to her. For the first time since O'Hara got to homicide, Kelso is actually paying attention to what she has to say, and when she bends over the little device and starts jabbing at it with a fingertip, he's riveted.

“Right now we're ten out of eleven,” says O'Hara, “a closure rate of point-nine-oh-nine-oh-nine-oh-nine. That's barely over ninety percent. For a precinct with a hundred hommies a year that would be just dandy, but for Manhattan Soft, that's not going to get it done. Brass expects better—you've spoiled them, Lieutenant—and with our caseload, you can hardly blame them. My pal Torres says Manhattan North is over eighty-eight percent, and a Colombian narco is about to plead to those execution-style slayings in Washington Heights, which would take eight homicides off the board just like that. With a little luck, they could end the year with a better closure rate than us. With ten times the caseload.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“A couple weeks ago a home health aide came to the precinct. She told me that the guy she's taking care of, who thought he was about to croak, made her pull the shades and light a candle, then confessed to a murder. Seventeen years ago, he says, he stabbed a big black guy to death and buried him in the garden on Sixth and B.”

“That overgrown tangle of weeds?”

“So I look up the perp's rap sheet. I see that twenty years ago he and his best buddy, Charles Faulk, African American, six-four, three-twenty, got nabbed for mugging somebody in Washington Square. Faulk flips, and Henderson, my perp, does three years in Attica. When does he get out of jail? In 1990—seventeen years ago—and a couple weeks later Faulk disappears. His mother files a missing person report, and he hasn't been seen since. It's a ridiculous case—the perp has Alzheimer's, thinks Schwarzenegger is president, and would never go to trial—but I got a confession, a motive, a body, and the place where it's buried. All I got to do is dig him up. Now look at this.”

O'Hara bends over the calculator again, jabs it a couple times, and spins it so the screen faces Kelso. “Point-nine-one-six,” she says. “Which rounds up to ninety-two percent. We go from barely over ninety to well over ninety percent. And one more thing, I just got off the phone with Lucas Bradley, the forensic anthropologist they hired after 9/11. He says he doesn't need a backhoe or any other heavy machinery. Just an assistant, a shovel, and five hours.”

O'Hara is spouting nonsense, but it's Kelso's favorite variety of nonsense.

“You got six hours,” he says. “But that's it, because it's on our dime. So don't come running back to me asking for even five minutes more. And one other thing.”

“What's that, Lieutenant?”

“Thanks, Darlene. For caring.”

 

CHAPTER 10

THE NEXT MORNING
at 6:00, Kelso, O'Hara, and Jandorek stand beneath the willow in the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B as Lucas Bradley makes his first incision in the downtown dirt. To thwart rubberneckers, an orange tarp went up around the tree overnight, along with a new padlock on the gate and notification that the garden will be closed for forty-eight hours so Con Edison can repair a gas leak. To give the cover a ring of truth and further impede the view, half a dozen Con Ed trucks are parked along the perimeter. The thirty-four-year-old Bradley, who has lank brown hair and the kind of open boyish face rarely seen on a native New Yorker, was hired to oversee the sifting and identifying of remains at the base of the World Trade Center towers. He made such a good impression, he was appointed the city's first full-time forensic anthropologist. O'Hara heard that he got his PhD from a department at the University of Tennessee known as the Body Farm, because of a wooded plot strewn with stiffs where students can observe them in various states of rot. To O'Hara, he looks like a kid in a sandbox, particularly when he unzips his nylon backpack and removes a Teenage Ninja lunch pail. It would drive O'Hara crazy to work with strangers looking over her shoulder, but Bradley seems to appreciate an audience. As he strips away the topmost layer of soil, he points at the hardy weeds around the base of the tree.

“Normally, you wouldn't have this much grass or weeds near the base of a tree, but sometimes you see opportunistic growth above a grave site,” he says. “There's no better fertilizer than a juicy corpse.”

With the help of an intern, Bradley exposes an area of dirt about the size of a picnic blanket. The outer ring of dirt is darker than the area inside it, and according to Bradley that's another propitious sign. “When you dig a hole and refill it, the dirt from various levels get mixed together. Overall that makes it lighter.” The intern sets aside the loose sections of sod. Bradley opens his juvenile lunchbox and extracts a handful of plastic chopsticks. He sticks them into the dirt about sixteen inches apart around the border of the possible grave.

“I don't think I'll be going Chinois for a while,” whispers Jandorek to O'Hara.

“You don't eat it anyway,” says O'Hara. An Asian guy would kill himself before he shared his marital woes with Jandorek.

Using the trowel like a shovel, Bradley begins to dig, and dumps each small scoop into a basket covered by a fine-mesh screen. It's slow, tedious work, even more so for the gallery of detectives, like watching a man empty a bathtub with a spoon. The temperature is rising quickly, and because of the tarp, there's no breeze. Kelso in particular grows restless.

“Any chance we could goose this up a little?”

“Excavating is a destructive process,” says Bradley without turning. “You only have one chance to do it right.”

Bradley works briskly but carefully, the sweat stain on his shirt expanding at about the same rate as the hole. It's at least half an hour before he comes into contact with anything other than dirt, but when he does, the sound is so sharp, everyone but Bradley jumps. “We got a body,” says Bradley. “Naked, topless, headless. Petite.”

Bradley twists on his knees and extends his arm. Lying tits up on the trowel is a cigarette lighter in the shape of a female torso.

In the next hour, Bradley and the mesh catch one stray item after another—an old subway token like the ones O'Hara saw in Henderson's cigar box, a couple foreign coins, a marble, a folded-up $20 bill, a tiny plastic bag of weed, and then a couple larger objects: a CD, a Swiss Army knife, and a pint of whiskey. As they're found, the intern deposits them in a plastic container, and in one of the many lulls O'Hara wanders over for a closer look. They are such a motley assortment, and in an effort to make some sense of them and their possible connection, O'Hara pulls out her notebook and lists everything Bradley has unearthed so far: “1 cigarette lighter, 1 subway token, 2 coins—5 pesos, 25 yen—1 roach clip, 1 marble, $20 bill, pint of Ballantine's, 1 Swiss Army knife, 1 synthetic pearl, 1 CD, 1 small bag of weed.”

Of the objects in the Tupperware, the pint of Ballantine's gets O'Hara's attention first, not because it's good and alcoholic, but because it's unopened. Why would someone throw away a brand-new bottle? That it's unopened differentiates it from the rest of the items, which seem like random urban debris accumulated over the years. But when she scrutinizes the others more closely, she notices that the tiny plastic bag of pot is also sealed. As O'Hara pores over the collection as best she can through the plastic lid, the intern adds another New York artifact—a ticket stub from Sunshine Cinema for a movie called the
The Lives of Others
dated 6/11/07. The date surprises O'Hara. That's less than three months ago, and when she combines it with the pristine condition of the pint and some of the other items, it doesn't jibe with a seventeen-year-old homicide. Then O'Hara recalls Bradley's comment about “opportunistic growth.” There may be nothing quite like human fertilizer, but would it still be pushing up daisies after seventeen years? While the intern is nearby, O'Hara asks her to flip over the CD. O'Hara sees that it's Coldplay, something called
X&Y
, which according to the label came out in 2005, but O'Hara is distracted from her calculations about dates and timing by word from Bradley of another find.

“This is soft,” says Bradley almost to himself. Till now, everything Bradley has found has been hard and quite small.

After Bradley climbs out of the grave, O'Hara sees that the entire length and width of the hole has been taken down more than two feet. Bradley, who is drenched in sweat, takes a long pull from a bottle of water, then goes back to his lunchbox and removes a brush and a single chopstick, this time a wooden one. Back in the hole, Bradley uses both to pick and whisk away the dirt from the soft thing he has found.

“It's some kind of fabric,” he says, and a couple minutes later, “It's the bill.”

He backs away to give the lieutenant and two detectives an unobstructed view. O'Hara can see that he's referring to the bill of a cap, the leading edge of it, which is pointing straight at the sky. In the next ten minutes the entire navy blue lid is revealed, then the crown, with the “NY” of the New York Yankees. The style of the hat is quite current; it's certainly not a seventeen-year-old cap. Apparently Kelso has noticed that too, because she can feel his glare on the back of her neck. But neither has long to concentrate on the other. Less than a minute later, Bradley sits back on his heels and announces, “We've got remains.”

 

CHAPTER 11

THE YANKEES CAP
rests on a yellow-brown skull. Where there were eyes are two square holes, and centered beneath them, where the nose had been, is a triangle. Between the upper and lower jaws, small teeth are visible. It's been a while since O'Hara scrutinized the human skull, and is surprised by the rounded smoothness of the shapes, which are far more elegant without the lumpy draping of skin and tissue. O'Hara feels as if even without eyes, the skull is staring at her, and despite the ghoulishness of the scene, something in the cast of the jaw suggests a smile. Kelso, however, is far from smiling. His agitation is so palpable that O'Hara resists the urge to turn and face him.

“It's not a black man, is it, Bradley?” says Kelso.

“No.”

“You can tell by the opening for the nose, can't you?”

“If it was an African American, the aperture would be bigger.”

“And it's not a large man, either,” says Kelso.

“No,” says Bradley, “it doesn't appear to be.”

Working steadily from the cap down, Bradley uncovers a striped button-down dress shirt. If there were any possibility that these are the remains of what had once been a six-four, 320-pound man, it's gone by the time Bradley uncovers his jeans. From the narrow shoulders and waist, it's clear that the clothing covers the remains of a child, a small, slight one. When Bradley reaches the knees of the pants, Kelso can't contain himself. “It's not the motherfucker,” he mutters. “It's not the motherfucker. It's not the goddamn fucking motherfucker.”

O'Hara has sold him a bill of goods. Not one thing she promised has come to pass. Instead of a black male, it's a white child. Instead of a victim named Charlie Faulk to whose murder another man has already confessed, O'Hara has dropped a pile of unidentified bones on his desk. And instead of a name going up on the board with a line already drawn through the middle of it and a closure rate of 0.916, O'Hara has added a John Doe, and nothing else. He watches morosely as Bradley reaches the bottom of the pants legs and whisks the dirt from a tiny pair of Converse high-tops.

 

CHAPTER 12

THE MEDICAL EXAMINER'S
office is in a building on First and Thirtieth as ugly as the Ukrainian National Home. The decomp morgue is located in the most ventilated corner of the basement. Bradley wheels in the body, still enclosed in the orange bag in which it was transported from the garden, and parks it next to an archaic X-ray machine. It's 1:00 a.m., and Bradley moves in the deliberate manner of someone who has been awake too long. With the discovery of a recently buried white child instead of a long-deceased black junkie, all bets are off, and the six-hour time limit waived. Bradley and his assistant were still sifting, measuring, and photographing long into the night, and although Kelso and Jandorek headed back to the precinct, O'Hara stayed in the garden until the work was done, then followed the body up First Avenue to the ME's office. Bradley loads a twenty-four-by-eighteen-inch cartridge and slides the tray under one end of the bag. Then he aligns the nose of the X-ray machine and takes the first shot. “When I got here,” says Bradley, “there was talk of finally getting a state-of-the-art machine. As you might guess, that conversation didn't go anywhere.”

Bradley works his way down the length of the body bag, the previous image developing while the next is being taken. When he's done, the four overlapping shots, laid out on the counter, yield a composite view of the full skeleton. For the next couple hours, Bradley separates clothing and remains. He unbuttons the dress shirt and finds a black T-shirt, “The Germs” written across it in red letters. From the armholes of both shirts, Bradley pulls out the delicate bones of the fingers, hands, and arms. From the bottom and top he slides the spine, ribs, chest, and shoulders. Then he performs the same drill with the lower half, removing the bones of the feet, legs, and pelvis from the victim's sneakers and the legs and waist of his jeans, a process made slightly simpler by the fact that the victim is not wearing underwear. When he's done, the clothes are lying on one high-bordered metal tray, the bones on another beside it. To make sure the bones are all accounted for, Bradley reassembles them like a jigsaw in proper anatomical order. “An adult has fewer bones than a child,” says Bradley, “because over time, bones fuse, particularly in the hands.” When he's finished, the skeleton lies naked on the table, as it lay clothed in the grave.

Bradley will return to the skeleton later, but now directs his attention to the clothes. Hovering over them, he takes them in as a group. Then, although the evidence department will perform the same task in greater detail, he moves from one garment to the next, examining it inside and out; assessing its condition; looking for signs of blood, hair, or remains; and checking the contents of the pockets. In a back pocket of the jeans he finds a sodden clump of paper so stuck together that he decides to leave it where it is for evidence to tease apart, and caught in the laces of the sneakers he finds several strands of light blond, nearly white hair. “A towhead,” says Bradley, showing a strand to O'Hara before sealing the hair in a separate plastic bag.

Finally he gathers each article of clothing, holds it about a foot over the table, turns it over, opens it up, and gingerly shakes it to see if anything has been caught in the fabric. When he shakes out the black tee, the early morning silence is punctured by a metallic ping, as startling as when his trowel hit the lighter. A quick search and Bradley holds a small copper bullet between his latex-covered thumb and forefinger.

“Twenty-two-caliber,” he says, “the kind my grandfather and I used to shoot beer cans and bottles, as well as various critters who made the mistake of treating themselves to his vegetables. Twenty-twos aren't much good for killing anything much bigger than a rabbit, and this is a lot smaller than the urban ammo that gets pulled out of bodies here. You got to be pretty unlucky to be killed by a twenty-two, but I guess we've already established that this kid wasn't lucky.”

Having found the bullet, Bradley takes a second, more focused look at the two shirts. He searches for holes and blood, but he finds neither. Then he walks to the counter where the X-rays are lined up. And after scanning the ghostly images for several minutes, points out a dark spot in the left shoulder blade or scapula. “Until the last of the flesh decomposed, the bullet was lodged in here. Eventually, it fell out into the shirt.”

Bradley slips the bullet casing into a plastic bag and sets it aside for ballistics. On the counter is the Tupperware container holding the various items dug up with the victim, which will soon be delivered to the evidence lab or, in the case of the pot, to narcotics. As Bradley packs and labels the clothes, slipping each into a separate bag, O'Hara looks them over again and continues the effort she began in the garden to make sense of them. Several items are currency, or a form of it—the $20 bill, the pesos and yen, the old subway token, maybe even the marble and the fake pearl. The knife, the roach clip, and the titty lighter are, loosely speaking, tools, and the booze, weed, and CD are entertainment, the makings of a party. Maybe the movie stub falls into that multimedia group as well, or maybe it's a bit of trash that just happened to end up in the vicinity. The tiny bag of weed bears the initials “GMS” in small, discreet script, like a monogram on the inside of a pricey wallet.

The clothes packed and labeled, Bradley sits down for the first time that O'Hara can recall in a nearly twenty-four-hour day and reviews his notes and sketches from the site. “We'll know more in a day or two,” he says, “after the dental X-rays and the DNA sample come back, but here are some broad strokes. The date of the movie ticket was 6/11/07, which means that the body could not have been buried in the garden before that. That's a little over two months ago, and the level of decomposition is well beyond what you would expect from a body that had been buried for that amount of time. That suggests that the body spent a significant interval exposed aboveground before it was buried. But the most glaring thing,” says Bradley after a pause, “is the manner in which the corpse has been handled. I'm sure you noticed this as well, but this is not the case of a body being dumped in a hastily dug hole. On the contrary, the body was carefully and respectfully laid out. The body was placed flat on its back, arms at his side, and the grave was meticulously dug. The length and width are consistent to within a quarter-inch. Then there's the condition of the shirts. Since there are no bullet holes or blood, and only slight evidence of remains, these can't be the clothes the victim was wearing when he died. That means that the body was prepared and dressed for burial, and considering that at that time there would still have been decomposing flesh on the bones, that would have been a horrendous job. The stench alone would make you retch. The point I'm trying to make is that this boy—and based on his clothes, I'm assuming for now that it's a male, approximately ten years old—was given a decent burial, or at least an attempt at one. A considerable effort was made to send him off with a sense of ceremony.”