Red Hook (35 page)

“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.

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Gabriel Cohen’s debut novel,
Red Hook
, was nominated for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel. He wrote three more mystery novels featuring Brooklyn South Homicide Task Force detective Jack Leightner:
The Graving Dock
,
Neptune Avenue
, and
The Ninth Step
. He is also the author of
Boombox
, a novel, and
Storms Can’t Hurt the Sky: A Buddhist Path Through Divorce
. He teaches in the writing program at Pratt Institute and loves living in Brooklyn, whose spirited, incredibly diverse neighborhoods provide him with a limitless source of vivid material. His website is
www.gabrielcohenbooks.com
.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2001 by Gabriel Cohen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-6715-6

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

345 Hudson Street

New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com