Entombed (10 page)

He was quoting from
its opening. "'Police sources are puzzling out whether the skeleton
found in the basement of an NYU building is just a sad postscript to
another age, or actually Edgar Allan Poe's crypt.' What the hell is
this, Alex?"

"You want to give me a
chance to look at it before-"

"Pat McKinney just
called me. Says you know all about it. Says you gave this story to
Diamond."

McKinney was deputy
chief of the trial division, a wretchedly petty supervisor who seemed
to take great pleasure in undermining my work. The week before
Christmas his wife had thrown him out, embarrassed by his long-term
affair with a coworker, and McKinney was flailing out in all directions
as though making other people miserable would ease his own suffering.

"I do know all about
it and I should have come in to tell you. I know how Diamond got the
tip but it wasn't from me. I'm sorry- I was just so busy in the grand
jury yesterday and I never imagined this would be of any press
interest. Certainly not before the police figured out who she was and
how she died."

Falling on one's sword
often helped with Battaglia, but sometimes you had to do it repeatedly
before he'd back off.

"What's the deal on
these bones? Tell me everything."

I gave him the scant
information I knew and he asked another dozen questions for which I had
no answers.

The rest of my day was
planned to be relaxing. I dressed for my Saturday morning ballet class,
and covered my tights with warm-up pants and fleece-lined boots to trek
through Central Park to the dance studio. I stayed for two hours of
lessons, stretching and bending before taking my place at the barre for
the exercise routine that helped relieve the week's tension.

Then I hiked back
across town to the salon where Elsa and Nana would pamper me,
highlighting my blonde hair and cutting it for a midwinter lift.

On the way home I
stopped at Grace's Marketplace for some takeout, a lemon chicken breast
and steamed broccoli that I could nuke at dinnertime. Mercer would pick
me up at midnight and we would remain on our patrol until 4
A.M.
, so I decided to
nap in the early
evening and eat dinner before going out on our profiling expedition.

When the doorman
called up to tell me Mercer was waiting, I pulled on a black ski jacket
over my jeans and went down to the car.

Mercer opened the rear
door to let me in a beat-up old Chevy Malibu with chipped paint that
had once been a deep navy blue. "Whose wheels?"

"My next door
neighbor's kid. Won't stand out quite as much as a department car or
medallion cab. Alex, this is Greg Karras."

I reached over the
seat back and we shook hands. "Good to meet you. Thanks for flying in.
How do we do this?"

"You've got your hands
full with this guy. I've studied the old reports and Mercer confirms
this is about the time of night he starts to strike, right?"

"Nothing earlier."

"I'd like to visit
each of the locations to get a sense of what his approach has been,
what the egress opportunities are."

Mercer and I had
graphed out the crimes for Karras. We decided to start at the northern
end of the map and drove to the quiet street where one of the earliest
attacks had occurred. Mercer stopped the car in the middle of the block
and pointed to a stoop thirty feet farther on. "Left-hand side, the
steps with the wrought-iron handrail."

Karras got out of the
car and walked from our position midblock to the corner of the avenue.
A couple sauntered down the street with their arms around each other's
waist, stopping to kiss under a street-light, the guy looking back over
his shoulder at Karras. There were no trees anywhere near the victim's
building and no place for an assailant to hide in waiting.

"Look at this,
Mercer," I said, pointing at someone approaching the rear of our parked
car. "She's likely to be in my office on Monday if she isn't careful."

The heavyset young
woman was unsteady on her feet. She looked as though she was
intoxicated, talking to herself and fishing in her purse for her keys.
She stood between two buildings with her back to me, trying to decide
which one was her destination.

"I almost want to get
out and help her," Mercer said, "but she'd probably start screaming
bloody murder."

She pulled herself up
the six steps by leaning on the handrail and then fumbled for the right
key on the ring to open the door. She would have been an easy target
for any thug.

Karras got back into
the car and asked us to go to the next location. He was quiet as he
made notes on a PalmPilot. Mercer circled down to York Avenue and back
to Seventy-eighth Street. Scene after scene, we watched the profiler
walk each block and check the intersecting cross streets. He measured
distances between street-lamps by walking between them, counting the
steps as he put one booted foot in front of the next, and made
notations of fire hydrants and the occasional tree.

After the round of
visits, we went to an all-night coffee shop on Second Avenue. I was
ready to put toothpicks in my eyelids to hold them open.

"What ideas did the
task force work on last time?" Karras asked.

"Our first thoughts
were businesses in the area. The fact that nothing started until after
midnight made us think the guy worked here, got off a duty shift at
midnight or one
A.M.
Victims told us he
was clean and that he smelled good. We were thinking restaurants or
bodegas. Someone who washed up when he left work," Mercer said.

"How about hospitals?"

"We've got two big
ones in this zone-New York Hospital and Lenox Hill. Same thing-it's a
natural fit with shift turnovers. We subpoenaed the files of every male
who worked there, from brain surgeons to male nurses to orderlies. Took
months to get them all. By the time we'd gone through most of them, he
had vanished."

"And we swabbed plenty
of the employees, too," I said. "They've been entered in the data bank
against the profile."

"I studied all the
police reports Mercer sent me while I was on the plane. Can you give me
more details-personal details-about your victims?"

"Everything you want
to know," I said.

"Alex and the lawyers
do the most thorough interviews you can imagine. There's nothing we
can't tell you about these women."

I operated on the
theory that I needed to know as much about the victim as the defendant
knew, and more than the best defense investigator could find out if he
applied every resource he had. We also tried to reconstruct every
second of the victim's interaction with the offender, things that might
help us connect to a suspect and give us probable cause to swab his
saliva for DNA comparison.

"Can you bring the
task force members together for a brainstorming?" Karras asked.

"Of course. Alex and
Sarah Brenner, her deputy, have handled all the victims themselves.
I'll round up the team of detectives. For when?"

"I'll let you know
when I'm ready."

"Sure. What do you do
now?"

"All this data on
street locations that I've been mapping, this tracks the spatial
characteristics of the pattern. There's a prototype computer system
called Rigel. Once I dump in every crime scene- every hospital, store,
school, possible physical boundaries-"

"There are no physical
boundaries."

"You can't have
linkage blindness, Alex. There may be more clues that I can pick up on
than you're even aware of. This case is going to create a very colorful
map."

"We've already got a
map." I was tired and impatient, growing fearful that this was as
useless as the psychological crap.

"I'll give you a
jeopardy surface, the rapist's center of operation. You haven't had
that yet. The perp's most likely base or anchor point."

I rolled my eyes at
Mercer. "A jeopardy surface, that's what it's called? Don't tell Mike
Chapman, okay?"

"Yeah, I try to
pinpoint that-his home or his job. It gets superimposed on the scene
locations, which are the virtual fingerprints of the perp. The more
crime sites there are, the better the predictive power of this system."

So Karras's goal was
the exact opposite of ours-he'd be happy with even more crimes to fill
his colorful grid. I was looking at one of his old samples. A bright
red dot for the jeopardy center, orange shading for the offender's
preferred area of operation, changing to yellow and then green, blue,
and purple for the outer limits of his quarry.

"You basically provide
us with where he selects his victims," Karras said. "He's got a clear
comfort zone, and we know that some of the women are low risk-from his
perspective-because he thinks they're alone and in some cases
intoxicated. His signatures are obvious-the weapon, the kind of binds,
not much profanity, minimal verbalization, the way he subdues his prey.
The computer uses his movement patterns and his previous hunting
habits."

"To do what?"

"Statistics tell us
that right-handed criminals in a hurry to flee generally make their
escape to the left. But they discard their weapons to the right. You
haven't charted that fact yourselves, have you? See what happens if you
take him left out of every one of these buildings. Where does it lead
him? That's what I'm supposed to figure out."

"Oh," I said
grudgingly, toying with my scrambled eggs and lukewarm decaf.

"Did you know that
when lost or confused, men go downhill but women go up?"

He was losing me now.
"It's a perfectly flat neighborhood, Greg. This isn't San Francisco."

"The guy who first
developed this program ten years ago? He did it with a serial rapist in
Vancouver. Came up with exactly the same kind of map I'm going to
create. Charted seventy-nine crime scenes and the computer spit out a
red dot on the exact spot in which his perp lived. Nailed him the next
day."

I wasn't focused on
the good news. "Seventy-nine cases before he got a solution? Couldn't
have been many places left in Vancouver to look for the guy by that
time. I'll be too old to celebrate if I live through that many more
attacks."

"Wait that long and
neither one of us will have a job," Mercer said.

Mercer's cell phone
vibrated and he picked it up off the Formica tabletop. "Wallace here.
Hey, loo, what's up?"

It was 4:17
A.M.
and I was fading. The lieutenant was
undoubtedly worried about how much overtime he would have to authorize
for Mercer on this untested caper.

He stood up and walked
to the front of the shop to finish the conversation, scribbling
something on a napkin the waitress handed him at the counter. He
flipped the phone closed, motioned to us to come as he paid the tab.

"Can you take a cab
back to your hotel, Greg? Alex and I have business."

Mercer moved away from
the register and pushed open the front door. The blast of cold air
revived me as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

"East Eighty-third
Street, between First and York. Brownstone with a locked front door.
Female white, panty hose, knifepoint assault."

Karras had his
PalmPilot in his hand, entering the address. "Boy, once they get good
at something, these perverts don't change their style."

"This one's different,
Alex," Mercer said, ignoring the profiler. "This time the girl is dead."

11

Mike Chapman was
whistling a Sam Cooke tune, meant to get under my skin, as he opened
the door to let us into the vestibule of the small building. "'Another
Saturday night and I ain't got nobody…'

"Don't you have better
things to do with your time, Coop?" he asked, handing us the rubber
gloves and mesh booties we needed to enter the crime scene, which was
still being worked by Hal Sherman and his crew.

"Where to?" Mercer
asked.

"C'mon up to three.
It's a floor-through," Mike said, telling us that the deceased had
lived in an apartment that occupied the entire third floor of the
building.

I trailed behind them,
up the staircase where the clean yellow paint on the walls and banister
had now been coated with black fingerprint dust.

"Is she here?" Mercer
asked.

"We just got her out
fifteen minutes ago. I didn't want to deal with the neighbors and a
body bag first thing on Sunday morning."

The third-floor
landing was full of Sherman's baggage-metal trunks that held every
piece of equipment necessary to process a crime scene. I stepped over
them and into the entryway of the victim's apartment.

Hal was on his knees,
taking a series of photographs of smudges-probably blood-on the area
rug that covered the hallway. I squeezed his shoulder and stayed behind
him until he finished shooting and greeted us.

"You got a time of
death?" Mercer asked. A death investigator from the medical examiner's
office responded to every homicide in the city. The body wasn't removed
from the scene until that had happened.

"He thinks she'd been
dead only a couple of hours," Mike said. "A friend of the deceased let
himself in downstairs at two. They were supposed to meet earlier but
she didn't show up. Claims he had a duplicate key, for emergencies.
That's when we got the call. The ME was here within an hour."

"The friend-you
holding on to him?"

"Yep. He's cooling his
heels at the precinct, writing out a statement. Trust me, he's not the
man."

"Is there a story?"

Mike led us from the
entry through the living room, kitchen, bathroom, and into the bedroom,
a series of long narrow cubicles that gave the feel of walking through
the cars of a railroad train.

I clasped my hand to
my mouth to stifle the involuntary noise that gurgled up when I saw the
blood that covered the beige linen bedspread. It made the stains
outside Annika Jelt's apartment look as if they could have been stemmed
by a couple of Band-Aids.