VC03 - Mortal Grace (3 page)

The redheaded woman at the subbasement one reception desk was filling out a receipt for a cop who’d dropped off a hit-and-run. Cardozo flashed his shield and signed the log.

As he hurried down the stairway to subbasement two, the temperature seemed to drop three degrees with each step. His breath vapor glowed in the overhead fluorescent light. He pushed through a heavy steel door with a green rubber jamb. A smell of formaldehyde and eight flavors of human decay floated up like ambient tear gas.

All the tables in the cutting room were taken. Green sheets covered two of the cadavers. A woman doctor was working on a third, a white female. Cardozo still had trouble accepting this as woman’s work.

As he watched, she reached plastic-gloved hands into an open chest cavity and lifted out an enormous, glistening gray liver. She loaded it onto a scale suspended from the ceiling and slid a poise along the fine adjustment beam. The faint
boom-boom
of music leaked from her headphones.

At the fourth table, Dan Hippolito was closing the rib cage of a young black male. He saw Cardozo and lifted his Plexiglas face shield. “Hi, Vince. You’re just in time.” He wiped his hands with a downward sweep over his rubber apron and finished the job on his surgical smock. “She’s over here.”

He led Cardozo to the wall of stainless steel body lockers. Their footsteps clicked across wet cement. Dan fitted a key into the latch of 317 and swung the door open. Darkness seemed to
whoosh
out. He bent down and gave the body tray a nudge. It rolled out on silent ball bearings.

“It’s a young female.” Dan lifted the green nylon sheet that covered the body. “She was sawed.”

Cardozo gazed. Slow leaden shock pulled him down. She looked as though she had been buried by Cro-Magnons and unearthed fifteen thousand years later. Her bones lay black and encrusted on the thin rubber mattress, separated into groups that corresponded roughly to limbs and trunk. Each group had been placed in its approximately correct anatomical relation to the others, as though a paleontologist had arranged them for easy reassembly.

Her skull rested on a thin pillow, the kind airlines give you on overnight flights. Her eye sockets, staring up with black, dignified stillness, seemed to pulse. The facial skin that remained had darkened unevenly, giving her the look of a shrunken head that hadn’t shrunk at all. Hair still clung to the scalp, twisting around her noseless face in two long braided clumps.

“Probably a high-power rotary meat saw.”

“Professional butchering job?”

“A professional wouldn’t saw into the joints.” The heavy latex forefinger of Dan’s glove pointed to the splintered gaps. “This was done by a guy with a fair amount of time and no knowledge of the anatomy of the larger mammalian vertebrates.”

“How much time?”

“Took him a good hour to do this.” Dan Hippolito’s hairline had receded halfway up his skull, lending his dark eyes a grim prominence. “A professional could have done it in fifteen minutes.”

“How did she die?” Cardozo prayed to God she had died before any of this butchery had started.

“She wasn’t exactly preserved for posterity in that Styrofoam box. Most of the soft tissue is gone. What we’ve got here is mostly bones and teeth and they don’t tell us how she died.”

“So what do we know?”

“We know she didn’t die of a fracture. We can see she was out in the park twelve, fifteen months. She’s got the femurs and the pelvis of a woman fifteen, sixteen years old, give or take a year on either end. Skull indicates she’s Caucasian, possibly northern European ancestry. She has no cavities, no dental work at all—so she could have grown up in a state that has fluoridated water—or she could have been a conscientious kid who brushed her teeth and flossed after every meal. Don’t know how many decent meals she had—these bones are borderline calcium-deficient, unusual in a person her age. But she did eat shortly before death. She’s got bread mold on her teeth. The bread mold is weird—there are no yeast cells, dead or alive.”

“What does that tell us?”

“She could have been eating matzo.”

“And so were two million other girls her age. You’re not giving me much, Dan.”

“Stick around, there’s more. Look here at her third rib…it’s been broken—twice—and healed twice. Not as well the second time, though.”

“What would have caused that?”

“Bare fist could have done it—or a frying pan, steam iron—anything heavy and compact.”

“So someone hit her.”

“Hit her hard when she was eight or nine and harder when she was eleven or twelve.”

“I don’t remember Sally getting—”

Dan Hippolito finished the sentence for him. “Getting a rib broken?”

“Not twice.” Cardozo frowned, trying to remember. “Once I might have forgotten, but not twice.”

“From what you’ve told me about Sally Manfredo, I doubt this is her. I’ll have to check, but I very much doubt it.”

Cardozo didn’t know whether he felt relief or pain. His niece had vanished six years ago, and every time an unidentified female teenager turned up dead he had that instant of black dread: this time it’s Sally. “Would you check, Dan? Just to keep my mind at ease? I’d appreciate it.”

Dan picked up a bone from the lower leg and for one surrealistic moment Cardozo thought Dan was going to ask him to touch it, feel it, get to know it.

“Now, this is her left ankle and
this
”—Dan’s finger ran along an uneven inch-long fissure—“is a bad fracture…happened no more than eight weeks before death. Hasn’t healed…she should have stayed off it, but obviously she didn’t. She probably got it set by a doctor, then she started putting weight on it, which is how it developed this seventeen-degree twist that you see here. Safe bet she was taking painkillers.”

“This girl led a rough life.”

“That’s understating the case.” Dan pointed to an area above the break. “There’s a fair amount of skin tissue still adhering to the tibia—and these things here are leather particles.”

Cardozo squinted. There was a layer of dark matter stuck to the bone, and he couldn’t see which particles Dan was talking about. “Leather?”

Dan’s dark eyes met Cardozo’s. He nodded. “Commercially treated and tanned and dyed black. Hard to see without a microscope.”

“What’s leather doing on her shin?”

“It could be someone secured her bare feet with a belt.”

Cardozo frowned. “How soon before death?”

“Put it this way: between that belt and death, no shower intervened.” Now Dan pointed to the rib cage. “Exactly the same thing goes for these patches on the sternum, the clavicle, the seventh rib—her skin’s been preserved.”

Cardozo could see the patches, gray against the intermittent ivory of the bone, but he would never have recognized them as skin. “Preserved how?”

“With wax.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Somebody most likely lit a candle and dripped it on her. Probably while her feet were tied with that belt. Most people wouldn’t hold still for hot candle wax.” Dan’s hand made an arcing gesture toward the arm bones. “If any of the tissue around the radius or ulna had survived, we might have found that her forearms had been secured too.”

Dan walked around to the front of the body tray.

“I’ve cleaned her hair a little—wanted you to see the way this is woven in.” The gloved hand lifted one of the girl’s braids. Something foreign glinted through dully, something that wasn’t dirt or dead cells or decayed vegetation.

Cardozo could make out a series of tiny metal links. “Looks like a jewelry chain.” Or a dime-store key chain that had been pressed into service as jewelry.

Dan nodded. “She didn’t do it herself—someone helped her.” He reached into the pocket of his rubber apron. “I found one other piece of jewelry on her person.” He placed something in the palm of his outstretched glove. It was a tiny, very tarnished metal ring.

Cardozo frowned. “That’s too small even for a pinkie.”

“It’s not a finger ring. It was in her left nipple—preserved in wax. The nipple was pierced four, five years prior to death. The other nipple didn’t get the wax treatment, so we don’t know if she had a pair of rings. I didn’t find any other ring with the bones. The lab may have found something in the hamper.”

Cardozo shook his head. “Not yet.”

“The maggots left a little marrow in the right femur—possibly I can liquefy some blood cells. Don’t get your hopes up, but sometimes even a few cells can tell us what infections she was carrying, what drugs were in her system.”

Cardozo was still for a moment. He was aware of a desolating flow of sadness inside his chest. It was an old sadness—he had been handling it for six years, he would handle it now. He wasn’t going to let sadness keep him from doing his job.

“What’s your feeling, Dan? What’s her story?”

“I hate to extrapolate from the condition this body is in.” Dan’s gloves smoothed down his surgical smock, leaving ashen tracks. “But I get a feeling she was a teen hooker—with a heavy s/m sideline.”

FOUR

A
S CARDOZO CAME UP
the precinct steps, he saw that one of the two green globes flanking the doorway had been shattered again. He shook his head. If it hadn’t been the station house, the five-story brick building would have been run off Sixty-third Street for pulling down the neighborhood. Broken panes had been patched with duct tape. Half the iron bars over the windows had rusted, and the nineteenth-century facade was caked with grime that dated from the era when Teddy Roosevelt had been police commissioner. Since World War II, city hall had been promising to rebuild. It had never happened.

Cardozo stepped inside, where peeling industrial-green paint maintained the level of shabbiness. The female lieutenant on duty at the complaint desk was trying to calm down a hyperkinetic blue-haired lady.

“Razors!” The lady waved two purseless blue leather straps. “The kids had razors!
White
kids! We pay your salary and you let that happen to us!”

Cardozo tossed the lieutenant a sympathetic nod and took a deep breath. He had a two-story climb. He dodged a pizza delivery boy barreling downhill and bypassed two shouting lawyers on their way up.

A century of tramping feet had worn a dip into the marble stairway. Weekly moppings had preserved only a narrow central channel of the original gray-brown grain.

On the second floor, a white skinhead was cursing as three sergeants shoved him into the holding cage where a black man sat reading an old issue of
U.S. News & World Report.
Two steps down from the third-floor landing, a woman was sitting trying to quiet a screaming child.

Cardozo said, “Excuse me.” He wondered how she could sit there. The sides of the steps were caked with built-up gunk that had the color of unprocessed petroleum.

“Anyone belong to that madonna and child out there?” he shouted as he came into the detective unit squad room. Phones were ringing. Voices were hollering. A fax was beeping and a PTP radio was sending out soft rock music with bursts of static.

“She’s mine,” Sergeant Henahan called out. “She witnessed a shooting.”

Cardozo had to turn sideways to squeeze between crammed-together metal desks and wood tables. “You’re deposing the baby too?”

Henahan was filling out a form, hunting for the keys on an old typewriter. “She couldn’t get a sitter.”

Cardozo shrugged. “What’s one decibel more or less.”

He crossed to his office, a small one-windowed cubicle off the main room. He shut the door. It didn’t keep any of the racket out, but he felt better knowing he had tried.

Departmental paper had a way of piling up on his desk. He could swear it was an inch higher than when he’d gone out. He sat down and cleared enough space to open the case folder on the girl in the basket.

CASE UP61 #11214 OF THE 22ND PRECINCT, DETECTIVE VINCENT R. CARDOZO, SHIELD #1864, ASSIGNED.

He turned pages. The facts were still alarmingly few:
JANE DOE, CAUCASIAN, HOMICIDE BY MEANS UNKNOWN.

In 80 percent of homicide cases, the important breaks came within the first forty-eight hours, or they didn’t come at all. Ms. Basket Case didn’t look like she was going to get her break.

In the space where a passport-sized photograph of the dead girl’s face would ordinarily have been stapled, a photo of the skull had been stapled instead. It looked like an artifact from a museum of primitive art.

The spaces for time and place of homicide were still blank. Description of crime scene, still blank. Victim’s name and employment, notifications made, all empty.

The spaces for names and addresses of persons interviewed were beginning to fill up. So far, detectives had questioned over thirty guests from the opening ceremony and twelve doormen from the apartment buildings overlooking the garden. Cardozo skimmed their reports.

None of the guests had had anything useful to say. None of the doormen could recall seeing any kind of truck or van inside the garden during the last sixteen months—except for park department vehicles.

Cardozo sighed. The sound of the air conditioner washed over him.

He slipped a cassette into the VCR and pressed the
play
button. Unedited TV footage of the garden ceremonies came up on the screen. This wasn’t the first time he had viewed it and he knew it was far from the last.

Actors from
Sesame Street
, dressed up in their animal costumes, cavorted on a specially built stage. Celebrities and socialites mixed with a mob of Guardian Angels trying for a comeback and carefully selected, non-threatening ghetto kids.

The camera wandered past brown and tan and yellow faces till it picked up another cluster of whites. Cardozo recognized the faces from newspapers and TV—Samantha and Houghton Schuyler, premier Manhattan party givers and partygoers, chatting with Tina Vanderbilt—the aged First Lady of New York society. The gaunt-looking man holding Mrs. Vanderbilt’s left elbow wore an obvious yellow wig.

There was a knock. Cardozo didn’t turn. “Come in.”

“I just got off the phone with the National Register of Runaways.” A woman stepped into the cubicle.