Shadow Dancers (39 page)

“BELIEVE ME. TURF IS AN ENTIRELY DIFFERENT
ball game from dirt. An old claiming nag who couldn’t even zero on the main track can be gangbusters on turf. I’ve seen it happen. A horse who dies in sprints on the main track may be a knockout distance runner on grass. Take Dauntless …”

Mooney was holding forth at the bar to a handful of anointed cronies. Shortly after noon, it had started to snow in earnest. Blizzard snows had been predicted throughout the night and early into the next morning. Companies had sent their personnel home early and accordingly there’d been a barrage of dinner cancellations at the Balloon that evening. Business was way off.

Most of the waiters were sitting around in the back, drinking 7-Up. Arms folded, they leaned against the walls near their stations, gazing hopefully at the entrance for prospective clients. Though it was bad news for Fritzi, it was just the sort of thing Mooney relished. He had the place to himself, or nearly to himself. Those that were there were the old crowd, the regulars, there because, like him, they loved it.

“If you’re lookin’ to pick winners on the turf,” Mooney went on expansively, warming to his subject, “look for a horse with a track record on turf and ignore their dirt form. I mean, forget it entirely. …”

Nodding and murmurs of approval followed this pronouncement, as if a sage had spoken.

“Hey, Mooney, wanna take a call over here?” Patsy called from across the bar.

“No!” Mooney shouted back and resumed his talk. “Hey, Mooney!” Patsy shouted again, this time waving the receiver in the air above him.

“Who is it, for cryin’ out loud?”

“Pickering.”

“I’m not here.”

“He hears me talkin’ to you, for Chrissake.”

Mooney muttered something, drained his drink, and lumbered across the bar to where the phone awaited him. “This better be good, Rollo,” he snarled into the receiver.

“Trust me. You’ll like it.”

“If I don’t, you’re in a lot of trouble.”

“Looks like we got another Dancer job.”

Mooney paused, peering into the speaker. His mind had not yet disengaged from the esthetics of turf running. “Frank? You there?”

“Of course I’m here,” he fumed at the question. “Who says we got another Dancer job?”

“The Hundred and Twelfth, up in the North Bronx. They called a half-hour ago to say they’re pretty sure they got one.”

“How would they know?”

“They know. They read the papers. It’s got all the earmarks. Married lady. ‘Bout forty-four years old. Semi-detached residence. Split-level. Right off the Thruway on the east side approach to the Throgs Neck Bridge. It’s a mess. Wanna go see?”

Mooney looked outside. “There’s six inches of snow and another eight coming.”

“Nine days,” Pickering snapped, alluding to the swiftly approaching coronation of Sylvestri. “Nine days is all you got left, Frank.”

Mooney could feel the heat rising from beneath his collar. “Hang on. I’m calling for a car.”

“Don’t bother. I’ve already got one. Be out front. I’ll be by for you in twenty minutes.”

HOMICIDE IN BRONX SUGGESTS

RENEWED DANCER ACTIVITY

AFTER LULL OF THREE MONTHS

Mrs. Ada Billeto of 1340 Bell Street appears to be the nineteenth victim of the so-called Shadow Dancer. Known for a series of particularly grisly homicides commencing twenty months ago with the brutal slaying of a woman in her home in the Richmond Hills section of Queens …

According to police, this latest outrage occurred late yesterday when the Shadow Dancer gained access to Mrs. Billeto’s bedroom on the ground floor of her semidetached tract house in the Throgs Neck district of the Bronx.

The body was discovered by Mr. Billeto when he returned from work. Police described the scene as “grim,” adding that details of the slaying had all the special earmarks of the Shadow Dancer, including ritual mutilation and macabre crayon drawings of mostly sexual content scrawled on the walls.

Forensic units of the medical examiner’s office have been combing the site all day in an effort to …

The jangle of the phone on Mooney’s desk brought his bleary eyes up from the newsprint he’d been poring over.

“Detectives. Manhattan South. Mooney speaking.”

“Did you read it?” Mulvaney snapped. It was not quite eight
A.M.
and already he was skirting dangerously close to apoplexy.

“I’m reading it now.”

“What d’ya think?”

“It’s him, all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“Ninety percent.”

“Witnesses?”

“Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything.”

“Naturally,” Mulvaney muttered bitterly. “What did it look like to you?”

“The typical stuff.”

“A mess.”

“A little worse than the usual, I’d say.”

“Worse?”

“This poor lady looked like she backed into a buzz saw. Blood and hair all over the walls.”

Mulvaney made a sound of disgust. “Spare me the details. So we’ve got him back again, eh?”

“Looks that way. But who knows? Could be the other guy. The pretender to the throne.”

“You think this might be the copycat guy?”

Mooney wanted to say, “We’d know possibly, if we’d kept a tail on Koops,” but what he settled for was, “We’ll know more after we’ve had the M.E.‘s report. Offhand, though, I’d say no. This one’s in the classic mode. The hand of the master is everywhere present.”

Mooney proceeded to enumerate for the chief of detectives the diagnostic characteristics they’d come to associate with the work of the Dancer. At the conclusion of their talk they agreed that the similarities in the most recent slaying far outweighed whatever small deviations In style they’d noted from the Dancer’s typical M.O. It was more than enough for them to discount the possibility that they might be dealing with the counterfeit rather than the authentic. “I still have eight days,” Mooney said at the end of their talk. Mulvaney didn’t reply. He simply hung up.

After that, the phone started to ring in earnest. Mostly, it was newspapers and television news shows asking for interviews. The mayor’s public relations flak absorbed a full half-hour of his time, pleading for any positive development the mayor could report to a nervous city at his press conference that afternoon. Several neighborhood associations called, demanding additional police patrols, and a handful of the usual anonymous callers denounced Mooney viciously in language unfit for print. On these he slammed the phone down with a whoop of malevolent joy.

The next call, however, was a significant one. It was Paul Konig at the medical examiner’s office, asking him to come down immediately.

“… And the tooth marks around the breasts and inner thighs match perfectly.”

“What about the blood type?”

“The serology reports are incomplete. But, so far, from the semen samples we managed to get, it looks like an AB pos. Also, this specimen had normal sperm,” the young woman in the blood-spattered surgical smock added pointedly. She watched the information register on Mooney’s face.

They were gathered in the large autopsy suite in the basement of 334 First Avenue, the medical examiner’s office: Mooney and Pickering, Konig and Dr. Joan Winger. Barely nine
A.M.
, the place was already a hive of activity. Thirteen steel trestle tables stood in a line, each bearing a flayed, naked cadaver, the accumulated carnage of the night before. Each body lay open on the table, each with a long Y-shaped incision commencing at the tip of the scapulae, plunging through the breastbone, and terminating at the pubic symphysis.

There was a low, remorseless din as police surgeons, medical students, and dieners milled about the tables, sectioning organs, plumbing the entrails and orifices of the remains in the quest for clues to the mystery of death, sewing up the cadavers when they’d finished, then carting them off.

Mooney stared down at the gutted, battered remains of what only twenty-four hours before had been a happy, healthy forty-four-year-old wife and mother of three. She now lay on a steel table, viscera exposed, the sparse, pale furze of pubic hair beneath the abdomen looking strangely childlike. People barged back and forth past her, impersonal and businesslike — the awful indignity of bureaucratized death.

“Sure messed her up pretty good.” Pickering stared down at the remains, wonder and fear mingling on his face. The eyes were half open, the irides glinting out from beneath. A portion of the tongue had slipped out through the gap, settling at the corner of the mouth.

Konig was talking now, pointing out a number of similarities between the injuries present here and those found on other Dancer victims. Mooney made a show of attentiveness, trying hard not to see the electric band saw at the next table, slicing through the skull of a young black man of princely dimensions.

“It adds up,” Mooney nodded, anxious to be gone from there. “The M.O., the method of entry, the type and location of the house …” His eye had fastened on something several minutes before while Konig was in the midst of a lengthy disquisition on the nature of the injuries. “What are those marks on her face, anyway?” Konig’s eyes twinkled. “I thought you’d never ask. Perhaps Dr. Winger would care to explain. She’s come up with something rather interesting.”

They all turned to her in a single motion.

“Boot marks,” she replied curtly. “Someone stepped all over her face.”

“That’s what I figured,” Mooney said.

“Just like Bailey, Torrelson, and some of the others,” Pickering added. “We found the same markings stamped on the faces there, too.”

All eyes switched back to the young woman. This time she appeared flustered by the sudden attention.

“Would you step down this way, please.” She pointed with her head to the right, then led them to another dissection table about five places down. A group of medical students, working under the supervision of an Oriental pathologist, stood away from the table as Konig and his party approached.

As they parted from around the table, Mooney had a sudden view of what they’d been working on. It was the body of a young man, roughly in his mid-twenties. The limbs and appendages all showed the sickish purple of lividity. Moving in closer with the others, he could see the broken, shattered ends of bones where they had burst through the outer skin at nearly every point of the body. Like the other cadavers in the room, this body had been flayed open. The organs showing from within swam in pools of blood.

“What the hell happened here?” Mooney asked. “Construction worker. He took a nasty fall on Sixty-first Street,” Konig explained, with mirthless glee. “From the seventieth story of a building site. They now say he was probably pushed.”

“Broke every bone in his body,” Dr. Winger added. “Ruptured most of the organs. He literally exploded on impact. From inside out.”

Pickering gaped down at the Remains, that expression of wonder and awe making him look foolish. “I heard about this one the other day. Came over the wire at headquarters.”

Konig grinned. “One of the workers on the site saw it happen. Some guy just came out on the beam where this kid was working and kicked the poor bastard over.”

“They get the guy?” Mooney asked, mildly curious. “Any identification?”

“Nope. Number one, the guy who did it was wearing a welder’s mask, and number two, he got away before anyone up there could grab him.”

Mooney grew thoughtful for a moment, then shrugged. “Okay. Very interesting. What does all this have to do with me? This is Midtown North s problem.”

“Maybe,” Konig said, his eyes dancing merrily in his head. “Maybe not.”

“Look at his right hand, lieutenant,” Dr. Winger said. She pointed to the back of the dead man’s hand with her pencil.

Glancing down, Mooney at first saw nothing. Then suddenly he saw the abrasions and the strange purple grid patterns he’d observed moments before on the twisted death mask of Mrs. Ada Billeto. His eyes rose to meet those of the young woman pathologist, who was smiling. “Boot marks?”

Mooney and Pickering exchanged looks. Both appeared to be bewildered. Mooney held both hands up defensively, as though he were trying to hold back an onrushing locomotive. “Now, wait a minute. You’re not suggesting …”

“Why not?” Konig smiled irritatingly.

“This is different,” Mooney protested. “I mean, the M.O. is completely different.”

“The boots, Mooney. The boots,” Konig pressed him. “What about them? Millions of guys in this city working on construction sites …”

“Even guys not working on construction sites,” Pickering chimed in.

“… wear boots like that,” Mooney sputtered on. By that time he was red in the face. “You re not seriously telling me that this masked nut who kicked this poor bastard off a beam on Sixty-first Street is —”

“The Shadow Dancer.” Konig’s grin never faltered. “Before you have a stroke, would you step upstairs a moment. We’ve got something to show you.”

Moments later, they were in the cool shadowy silence of Dr. Winger’s office, gathered round a viewing screen. Three slides were already up on the screen. She flicked a switch and the blue-white glow of fluorescent illumination suffused the room. The three slides projected before them had been magnified many times. On first glance they gave the appearance of an eerie lunar landscape: bumps and crevasses, deep fissures and jagged excrescences. All of it was laid out in what was clearly a circular pattern.

“Do you know what these three slides represent?” the young woman asked.

“Let me guess.” Mooney dripped sarcasm. “They’re photo enlargements of the sole prints taken off of Torrelson, the Bailey kid, and our latest entry to the charmed circle, Mrs. Billeto.”

Konig applauded. “Very good, lieutenant.”

“Would you please take note,” Dr. Winger continued, “of the areas I’ve circled in red crayon on all these enlargements.”

Mooney, still smoldering, leaned forward and studied the circled markings.

“You observe anything unusual, lieutenant, about the nature of these markings?” Konig taunted.

“Certainly,” Mooney rose to the challenge. “The markings on all three of these enlargements are in precisely the same location on the boot sole.”