VC03 - Mortal Grace (6 page)

The cardinal looked at the autopsy photos and read the report and slowly shook his head. “Poor lost child. Is it a boy—or a girl?”

“Female. They found the body in a meat container in the Vanderbilt Garden in Central Park.”

An unbounded sadness descended on the cardinal. “Then she’s another one of our man’s?”

“I’m sorry to say she is definitely one of our man’s.”

“Of course. You wouldn’t have brought her to me if she weren’t.” Still, the cardinal couldn’t help hoping this one would somehow be different. “Is there communion wafer in the mouth again?”

“Fortunately, the medical examiners are still calling it unsalted matzo.”

“I’d hoped this was all behind us.” The cardinal sank down onto a velvet-cushioned chair. “This poor child makes the third. It just goes on…and on.” The phone on the desk rang. The cardinal lifted the receiver. “I asked you not to disturb me.”

“I’m sorry, Eminence, but will you take a call from your grandnephew?”

“Who? Oh, yes. Certainly.” He covered the mouthpiece. “This will only take a moment.”

The D.A. shrugged.

Cardinal Fitzwilliam listened to a voice excitedly telling him that he had just become a great granduncle. “Nora’s fine—twelve hours in labor, but she’s fine.”

“A girl or a boy?” The cardinal found himself thinking of that picnic basket in the Vanderbilt Garden. Lately, he noticed, he’d been unable to keep his thoughts in the categories he assigned them to. They overflowed, like water.

“A boy. We’re calling him Barry Ignatius—with your permission, of course.”

“I’m honored.”

“We hope you’ll do the baptism.”

“And a wise move, because if you dared ask anyone else I’d have you excommunicated.”

“Same old Uncle Barry.”

The cardinal hung up the phone. He went to the curtained window and stared out at the false Gothic spires of St. Patrick’s. They seemed lacy and stunted compared to the sculpted steel towers that soared far above, shadowing them.

“Strange. In Central Park, another young person is senselessly dead. In New York Hospital, another life is brought into the world.”

“It happens every day. Barry, you can’t take things personally.”

“I’m seventy-three. There comes a time when you have to take life personally. There comes a time when you have to wonder.” He could feel a dark wind of energy rebounding from the high steel slabs, from the traffic-clogged avenues. A chill went through him. “Are the Hindus right—is destruction inextricably interwoven with creation in the fabric of existence? Are we watching the work of the four hands of Siva?”

“You’re picking the damnedest time to turn Hindu.”

“We have to find this man. He has to be stopped before he kills any more…” The cardinal released the curtain. It fell back, whispering. “And before someone puts it together.” He felt unspeakably tired. He was overcome by a yearning to hear music—Mozart, opera. Something that didn’t matter.

“We’ll find him. We’ll stop him. And no one’s going to put anything together. Count on it.”

The cardinal had doubts. Nothing seemed certain anymore—not even the Lord’s mercy. “When we find the killer—if we ever find him—what if he’s a Catholic?”

“We live in the real world, Barry. If he’s a New Yorker, there’s practically a fifty percent chance of that.”

“What if he’s a priest? What if he’s a
Catholic
priest?”

“If he were, chances are we’d have a lead by now. You direct a highly efficient organization, Barry. I wish mine were half as well run. You monitor suspect priests. You know which priests have had breakdowns, which priests have drinking problems, which priests have sex problems. You never allow problem priests to be alone or unsupervised. You require them to make regular confessions and you require them to go to self-help groups or psychiatrists or both. You see their records; I see their records.”

“And it’s on my conscience.” The cardinal let out a long, sighing breath. “Once upon a time confession was inviolable. Now it’s been redefined. Like everything else.”

“The courts did that, Barry—not you. There’s no confessional privilege in a capital case. Not anymore.”

The district attorney flashed his come-on-now-we’re-both-men-of-the-world smile. The cardinal had to wonder just how confident Bill Kodahl really was beneath the throwaway ease of that smile.

“If the killer isn’t a priest,” the cardinal said, “then who is he? What is he?”

“Whoever he is, the Church will be protected.”

“How?”

“As it’s always been protected.”

“I’m not unaware or ungrateful—just concerned.”

“You have to keep your perspective on this. Right now, we’re dealing with one killing—this girl. As far as the media are concerned, the other two are already forgotten. There’s no linkage.”

“But sooner or later someone in the police department is bound to make a connection.”

The D.A. shook his head—respectfully. “The bodies showed up in different precincts—each case has gone to a different detective.” His voice was precise and calm. “The detectives don’t even know one another, let alone one another’s caseloads. Hell, they’re so overworked, half of them don’t even know their
own
caseloads. In a city this size, with the homicide rate we’re running, it’s not exactly probable a single unaided detective is going to see the similarities—let alone have the time to dig them out.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“I’d bet my home on it. The assistant deputy police commissioner in charge of media and information is working closely with my office on this.”

A shadow moved across the cardinal’s thoughts. “I know cops, Bill. I have two in my own family. Maybe I know them a little better than you.”

“Cops are employees. They take orders.”

The cardinal felt too restless to stand still. He walked again to the window. “I still can’t help worrying.”

“Don’t. My right-hand man will have a talk with the detective who’s handling the case.”

The cardinal turned. “When?”

The D.A. angled his wrist to glance at a lozenge of gold. “In about ten minutes.”

SEVEN

I
F ASSISTANT DISTRICT ATTORNEY
Harvey Thoms minded the straight-backed steel chair with no cushion, he didn’t show it. “If you release too much to the press,” he was saying, “this could be a tough case to prosecute.”

“We generally give the media the victim’s identity,” Cardozo said. “Failing that, a description. Plus time and place of the crime.”

“You hold back the M.O.?”

Cardozo considered his visitor. Harvey Thoms was happily working a plastic toothpick through his upper left molars. He had the beefy build and the florid complexion of an ex-heavyweight who had spent twenty years drinking martinis. That last question of his suggested he been drinking them on his afternoon coffee break as well.

Of course you hold back the M.O. Rookie cops know that. Rookie D.A.s ought to know it.

“We hold back the details,” Cardozo said. “The idea is, give a general picture so anyone with information will recognize enough to come forward.”

“We may want to modify that procedure this time.”

“We’ll have to. We can barely describe the victim, let alone identify her. We don’t know exactly how she was killed, we have no idea where she was killed, and we’re not going to be able to fix the time of death closer than a month.”

“The easiest thing would be if you don’t discuss the case with the media.”

“Easy for the D.A., maybe. We’re going to need some lucky breaks. Witnesses aren’t going to come to us if they don’t even realize they’re witnesses. We have to let the public know the girl’s dead.”

“Let the office of the commissioner for press relations handle it.”

“They usually do handle it—in their half-assed way.”

“What I’m saying is, nothing travels between you and the media. It all goes through press relations.”

“I’m not sure that’s a great idea.”

“It’ll simplify your job not having to deal with reporters.”

“I’m not sure of that either.”

A moist, spring-loaded smile bent Harvey Thoms’s mouth. “That’s how the D.A. wants to handle it.”

You could have said that ten minutes ago
, Cardozo thought. “If that’s what the D.A. wants, naturally that’s what he’s going to get. Within reason.”

“Within reason is all we’re asking.”

“So long as you’re not putting a gag order on the investigation.”

“Hell no.” Harvey Thoms rose from his chair and gave Cardozo a playful college-jock punch in the bicep. “Just be sure you don’t talk to anyone.”

Cardozo ignored the pain in his arm and walked Thoms out through the squad room. At the moment it was mobbed. Voices screamed, telephones rang, faxes beeped, printers clattered.

“Busy,” Thoms observed.

“Always.”

“Good meeting you. We’ll be seeing one another again.”

Cardozo didn’t doubt it, and right now he didn’t want to think about it either. “Thanks for coming by.”

Thoms gave an oddly petite wave.

Cardozo turned and bumped into a large, bearded, shambling man who was holding out a sheet of drawing paper.

“What’s this?” Cardozo studied the portrait. The girl’s eyes had a goofy, glazed stare that was somewhere between moronic and dead. The skin had an unreal, un-human stiffness. It was the kind of face that would never sweat or smile or cry or scream.

“It’s a computer-assisted probable reconstruction of the dead girl’s face.” Nico Forbes, an artist who specialized in magic realist cityscapes, eked out his earnings by doing portrait work for the police.

“Maybe you should try it without the computer assistance.”

Nico shrugged agreeably. He put very little ego into his police work. Maybe that was the trouble.

“Come over here.” Cardozo took Nico to the bulletin board. He pointed to the photographs of two recently murdered teenage prostitutes. “Neither of these is the actual kid, but they were both unhappy enough to run away from home, and they were alive when these pictures were taken—not dead like that drawing of yours. People have trouble recognizing a dead face. They remember their friends alive.” Cardozo picked the more somber-eyed of the two. “Couldn’t you give her more of an expression in her face? Like this one has?”

Nico stood nodding. “Yeah, yeah, there’s a feel there.”

“See what you can do. ASAP.”

Cardozo returned to his cubicle.

“There are only twenty-two.” Ellie Siegel had laid out two rows of negatives on his desk and, beneath each negative, the matching print.

“Is that good or bad?”

“Lou says there should be twenty-four.”

Cardozo picked up Lou Stein’s report and skimmed the dot-matrix lettering. “The prints are taken from a roll of Kodak A-20—and A-20 has twenty-four exposures. So two negatives and two prints are missing.”

“Like I just said.”

“He also says the tire prints at the gravesite have the wrong wheel spacing to be park vans.”

“The parks department phoned.” Ellie threw him a dark glance, outlined in perfectly understated mascara. “They don’t have any vans with smiling suns painted on the side. Only maple leaves.”

Cardozo laid down the report. “So what about these missing negatives?”

Beneath an avocado blouse, Ellie’s shoulders shrugged. “Maybe they didn’t turn out.”

“Doesn’t the company usually return the bad negatives anyway?”

“Maybe this time they didn’t. Or maybe Father Joe threw them out.”

Cardozo’s eye meandered among the prints. Four photos showed Harlequin and Columbine doing the lindy on their little stage. Two showed the lady reverend from St. Andrew’s standing with two grinning tow-headed kids.

Father Joe had concentrated a dozen or so exposures on the A-list contingent, the rich and the recognizable, dressed and jeweled as if they were camouflaged for a weekend in the rain forest.

It interested him to see what Father Joe had not bothered to photograph: except for one shot of an overweight Curtis Sliwa chatting with Tina Vanderbilt, there were no Guardian Angels. There were no ghetto kids at all, no faces darker than a four-weekend Hamptons tan. Odder still, there were no photos of the Styrobasket being dragged out onto the lawn.

“I don’t get it,” Cardozo said. “Father Joe turned around when the girl screamed, but he didn’t photograph the bush.”

“Unless those were the missing photos.”

“Then the question is, why are they missing?”

Ellie shrugged again. It didn’t seem to bother her. “Were there drag acts in that show?” She picked up a starkly lit shot of a tall, caramel-skinned woman wearing a blond wig and spandex exercise tights and a ratty violet boa.

Cardozo studied the photo. The woman’s makeup had a coarse, putty-knifed look. The eyelashes were centipedes that had crawled through a vat of coal tar dye. The posture had a whacked-out wackadoo theatricality—ass jammed back, tits thrust forward, hands up and out and right-angled to wrists, mouth a huge glossy red O like the bull’s-eye on an archery target.

But there the staginess stopped. Her shadow fell across a brick wall tattooed with garish graffiti and torn posters. A dark, narrow stain trickled from the wall down across the sidewalk. You could almost smell the urine.

“It may be drag, but it’s not part of the garden show. The light’s wrong. This was taken at night. And it’s not an act. That’s no stage set.”

Ellie separated the lady in the boa from the other photos. “He photographed her three times.”

A second view, from the rear, showed her smiling peekaboo over the shoulder, forefinger cocked in an unmistakable get-your-ass-hither. A third showed her blowing kisses to the wind like soap bubbles at a children’s birthday party. In this one she wore a rose over her left ear.

“Funny rose,” Ellie said.

“Why funny?”

“Yellow and pink variegated—I’ve never seen one. Could be an imitation. You know, I get the feeling this lady is definitely a theatrical act. Only her theater happens to be the street.”

Cardozo called Greg Monteleone in from the squad room. “Greg, you worked vice. Give us the benefit of your expertise.”

Today Greg was wearing a Hawaiian shirt colored like a punch in the eye. The two top buttons were undone, the third button was missing, and two gold chains glistened in a graying nest of chest hair.