FOUR
PRESSURE MAKES DIAMONDS
Now that the engagement was official, Donovan felt free to enjoy it. Unfortunately, he was scheduled for back-to-back doubles the following two days, and he barely saw Joann, who was herself busy with the Dinkins Shelter case. After working almost thirty-three hours in those two days, he finally made it to Black King, the Irish pub around the corner from Polaris, for drinks with the other bartenders.
“Shots,” Guzman announced. He was a tall, thin Mexican with a big square head and thick black hair. He passed around shot glasses full of something brown. “Maybe we can drink some sense into you.”
Corey, the youngish manager Donovan liked best of his bosses, snorted. “Have you seen his fiancée?” He raised his glass. “Salud, Donovan. If she has a sister…”
“Only child,” Donovan said. “Sorry.”
Four shots (so far) of Jack Daniel’s had been a good start, and when Guzman had pulled out a blunt of White Widow, Donovan lit it up with no hesitation. He enjoyed getting high, especially after working crazy shifts. Joann rarely partook anymore—as a member of the NY Bar, drug testing was always a possibility for her—and since Donovan really didn’t like to get high alone, an opportunity like this was an engagement gift from above.
Jools, the petite blonde who had come by Polaris for her check and decided to join them, cocked her head. “Are you getting married tonight?”
Donovan took a second to process the question. “Tonight? No.”
“Then how come a priest just came in?” She giggled and pointed. “And he’s coming over here.”
Donovan turned in his seat. “Father Carroll? Father Carroll! We’re drinking a toast to the engagement. Want a shot?”
The priest declined with a polite smile. “No, thank you. Do you have a moment, Donovan?”
Jools and Guzman both made faces. “Donovan’s in trouble!” she giggled.
“Feel free to employ capital punishment, Father,” Guzman said. “This young man has strayed from the path of righteousness, and must be corrected.”
“I’ll bear it in mind,” the priest said dryly.
Donovan got up and followed him outside. “What’s up?”
“A situation has arisen.” Father Carroll looked him over. “Are you capable of functioning?”
“Hey, I just worked four shifts in a row and I’m celebrating my engagement. I’m allowed to partake.”
“I’m not judging, I’m asking you to assess whether you’re able to participate in something very important and probably quite disturbing.” He gestured at the cab that waited curbside. “Are you able?”
The four shots attacked his stomach lining. “What are you talking about? What happened?” Fear wrenched him. “Is it Joann?”
The priest blinked. “Oh. Good heavens, no. No, Francis has asked for you.”
“Sergeant Fullam?”
“Are you able?”
“Being high doesn’t mean I’m a giggling moron. I’m just not as…focused.” Donovan took a couple of deep breaths. The weed’s THC made his skin buzz. “Sorry. Give me a few seconds.” He ran to the twenty-four hour deli down the block and bought himself a pack of cupcakes and a bottle of water. “Sweet things kill my high,” he explained, climbing into the back seat of the cab. “It’s why I try not to eat when I smoke. And drinking gives me dry-mouth.”
Father Carroll watched him with a tolerant expression. “If you say so.”
The cab headed south on Lexington. “What happened?” Donovan asked. “Where are we going?”
“Brooklyn. Red Hook. Francis believes he’s located the Capricorn victim.”
“He has?”
“Hanging in a burned out building, missing its knees.”
“Capricorn the Goat is death by hanging? How do you think that works?”
“I’ve no idea. He would like us to see the site, to perhaps find something traditional police eyes might not see or understand.”
Donovan took a bite of cupcake. The cab made the left turn from Lexington onto 42nd Street, heading east towards the FDR. “He asked for me?”
“He was impressed with what you did at the morgue, and how you figured things out.”
“Wow. Better not screw this up.” Donovan chewed and shrugged. “Sorry. I’m not being flip. I guess I’m a little…surprised. I mean, we did those field trips for parapsychology class to ‘haunted’ sites, but this is beyond that. Way beyond.”
“It is. Can you handle it?”
“Hell yes.” He grinned. “This is usually Joann’s thing, going to crime scenes and working with cops. I always thought it might be kind of cool, but—”
“‘Cool’?” Father Carroll raised an eyebrow. He paused. “It reads differently than it lives, I’ll grant you that.”
“Guess I’m about to find out.” Donovan took the second cupcake from the package. “As long as I can help without being part of the actual system. I mean, I see the crap Joann is taking for this whole Dinkins thing and it kills me. I don’t know that I have the political savvy to handle it as well as she does.”
“I’m sorry, what is the ‘Dinkins thing’?”
“Last February there was a riot at a homeless shelter in Brooklyn. A few guards and some of the residents were killed. You might have seen things in the paper?”
“I remember it, of course. She’s involved?”
“She was the ADA riding when the call came in. After they picked up the pieces, she was responsible for building the case against whoever instigated it, because she’s the DA’s Golden Girl and it’s a high-profile case. Problem is, the one guy really responsible for everything—she’s calling him Charming Man—seems to have gotten away. She’s been holding off going after the smaller fish until she can find out who he is, but every day the press is climbing all over them to do something.”
“Pressure often comes from those who can neither control nor understand reality.”
“My father says pressure creates diamonds.” Donovan let down the window on his side. Fresh air battered his face. “He used to tell me that when I played Little League.”
“Perhaps, but pressure tends to destroy more than it creates.”
“It hasn’t destroyed Joann yet.”
“I’ll pray for her nonetheless, although we may be able to do more than that for her tonight. The burned-out building where we’re meeting Francis, where the body was found, is the David N. Dinkins Memorial Shelter.”
“Really?” Donovan looked strangely at him. “Odd coincidence.”
The cab turned down Verona Street. Donovan saw the ruins of the shelter in the middle of the block, cordoned off by a hastily erected chain-link fence. The shelter was a large building that resembled a high school gymnasium, with a smaller building for the intake/processing offices in front of it. Both buildings seemed lifeless, but a light illuminated a scorched window frame on the top floor of the larger one.
Here we go.
Although the nearest streetlight was half a block away, he could make out the sergeant leaning against a nondescript Crown Victoria. He straightened as the cab pulled up. “Maurice.” He extended a hand. “Thanks for coming by. You too, Mister Graham.”
“Call me Donovan.”
The sergeant’s nostrils twitched, and his face grew stony. “You functional?”
A red flush crept up Donovan’s neck. “Ah, I was celebrating—”
“I didn’t ask you why. I’m asking if, in spite of your state, you’ll be any use to me?”
His abruptness was startling. Donovan nodded. “Yes.”
Fullam gave him another few seconds of examination before turning to Father Carroll. “I’ve been looking at mutilated bodies ever since Mister Graham made his observations at the morgue. I’m tired of it. This one seems to fit best for Capricorn. Let’s take a look and see what you can come up with.”
He gave Donovan another stony glance and started towards the shelter. Donovan motioned for Father Carroll to go first. Well, at least I wasn’t banished.
Inside, the sergeant led them up a stairwell pocked by mildew spots, graffiti and peels of paint. “Whoever did this was smart enough to put him upstairs, top floor. Less likely to be found right away. Also, a lot of garbage is spread around, pretty much polluting any chance Crime Scene had to get anything. We bagged and tagged a lot of it, but whoever these people are, they don’t leave much to chance.”
“‘These people’?” Father Carroll asked.
“There are at least two: the giant who took the thighs off Father Roehling’s body—that was the name of the archery victim, by the way, Father Arthur Roehling—and Mister X, who did the actual killing.” They rounded a landing that stank of urine. “One good thing that came out of that fiasco at the morgue was we were able to compare the cuts made on Mister Denschler with those the giant did on Father Roehling. Even allowing for the hurried circumstance, Doctor Pommeru showed me the cuts were made by different people. The giant took Father Roehling’s thighs, Mister X took Denschler’s genitals as well as…” He gestured ahead of them.
The large loft he brought them to might once have been a storeroom. All that remained now was garbage, strewn about to an average depth of four inches. The despair ran deeper. A couple of filthy, stained mattresses occupied one corner. Band and gang graffiti fought for space on the walls; scorch marks obscured some of both. Shadows loomed over and above everything, preventing Donovan from seeing anything clearly enough to decipher.
“After the riot, the city was supposed to knock these buildings down. The citizens of Red Hook are still waiting. Meanwhile, squatters get in here sometimes, leave their mark. That’s where the victim, Stuart Brandeis, was found.”
Fullam indicated around a brick corner, to a cul-de-sac that must have been a janitor’s walk-in closet. Donovan looked around the corner and faltered as, for an instant, he saw exactly what he knew couldn’t be there: a partially dismembered, purple-faced corpse.
Psychic flashes? I didn’t think the weed was that strong…
“Are you all right?” Father Carroll asked.
“Yeah.” He saw Fullam shake his head in disgust. “Tripped on something.”
In reality, a smashed sink was in one corner of the closet, while a square drain occupied the center of a filthy ceramic square near the outside wall. A pipe extended above the top of the walls, about eight feet off the ground, with a clear spot on its rusty surface. Donovan got a slight shiver as he realized the spot had been polished by the rope during Brandeis’ struggles. A large metal hook jutted from one wall, incongruous in its newness.
“After incapacitating Brandeis by duct-taping his arms to his sides, the killer strung him up using a chain and a noose he made from a sleeve of a sweater we found.”
“A sweater?” Father Carroll was gazing about the room. “Not a rope?”
Fullam shook his head. “The chain had links big enough to loop over that hook, so the killer could adjust the height from which Brandeis hung. Maybe it was a game to see how long he could keep the man alive. After he got tired of it, he took out a chain saw and cut through Brandeis’ legs just above the knee. He took them over there,” he waved, “and cut the lower part off, keeping only the knees. Odd thing—before he did that, he put tourniquets on each of Brandeis’ legs. Hung, but not bled out.”
Donovan peered closer into the janitor’s closet. A burst of red had sprayed against the wall, and a rust-colored stain scabbed over the drain in the floor. A couple of dark blobs dotted the floor nearby. Tiny bumps mixed in with the red mess on the wall, and he felt nauseated as he wondered whether it was skin or fragments of bone the chain saw had thrown.
“The killer apparently took his time doing this, because cigarette ashes were all over the floor.” The sergeant indicated at some gray smears. “Unfortunately, he’s seen CSI: New York, and knew enough not to leave the butts—with his DNA—behind.”
“Why here?” Donovan asked. Fullam glanced at him with cop eyes. “I mean, it’s obviously out of the way, but there must be tons of places that are out of the way to do something like this. Is there a connection between here and Mister Brandeis?”
“Brandeis was a teacher. He lived not too far away, over in Cobble Hill.”
“Proximity,” Father Carroll asked, “or something more?”
“Good question. Can you see anything around that might answer it?”
The priest put a hand on one of the lights. “May I?” He adjusted the light stand, turning the illumination around the walls. Now they could see the graffiti more clearly, but there was so much, drawn over and around itself, that it quickly became evident to all of them it was only mindless scribble.
“Nothing appears ritualistic.” Father Carroll began to walk around the room, inspecting the markings. “However, a question: it seems they’ve taken the body parts they needed at the time of each murder, correct? Then why didn’t they take Father Roehling’s thighs when they killed him?”
“I talked to the detectives on the Roehling case. Mister X was interrupted in the middle of the murder. He escaped without mutilating the body.”
Something scurried out of a pile of fast food garbage, making Father Carroll start. He adjusted his glasses. “There’s a witness? Did he provide any information?”
“So far, she hasn’t. Mabel Muglia is the caretaker at the rectory where Father Roehling was murdered. She’s been in shock since she interrupted the attack.”
“Perhaps I could speak to her.”
“Yeah, I thought about that. Probably not a bad idea; you’re a little more sympathetic than a lot of cops.” Fullam took a deep breath in through his nose and turned to Donovan. “Not you. I don’t want you talking to her. I appreciate what you’ve done so far, Mister Graham, but Maurice is an official police consultant. You’re not. I’m not going to put myself or this investigation at risk by involving a pothead. No offense.”
Donovan felt an irrational urge to light up the blunt Guzman had given him. That would be childish. “Just because I get high doesn’t mean I can’t help you. In philosophical hermeneutics, achieving an altered state of consciousness is a positive thing.”
Fullam’s face and voice were flat. “In a police investigation, it’s not.”
***
He gave them a ride back to Father Carroll’s building in the Crown Victoria. Donovan sat in the back seat, quiet the whole way. The sergeant’s attitude stung, but he didn’t want to antagonize the situation further.
“I’ll messenger you over a copy of the case file and the witness’ address,” Fullam said as they got out. “Tomorrow morning I’ll call and let her know you’re coming.”
“Have a good night, Francis.”
“You too.” Fullam gave Donovan one last look-over. “Mister Graham.”
Donovan watched the Crown Victoria drove away. “‘In a police investigation, it’s not.’” He turned to Father Carroll. “I can help.”
“If that’s what you believe,” the priest regarded him with a combination of empathy and professorial challenge, “how will you prove it?”
“I don’t know—yet. But I’ll figure something out.” He raised his arm as a cab drove down East 4th Street. “He said I couldn’t talk to the witness, but he didn’t say I couldn’t see the place where the Sagittarius murder was committed.” The cab pulled up, and he opened the door. “I might find something there.”
“After over a week? Something the police haven’t already discovered?”
“They don’t see things the way we do. Will you help me?”
Father Carroll examined him. Donovan recognized his “weighing of options” face. “Is that really what you want to do?”
“Haven’t I proven it yet?”
“As a student, without question. But Donovan—this isn’t the classroom.”
“I understand that. And I understand I’m not an ‘official’ police consultant. This is something I never considered doing, but I like it. I want to do it. I can do it.”
“All right, then.” Father Carroll sighed, but he was smiling. “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
***
The Reverend Arthur Roehling had been an associate Episcopal priest attached to the Church of the Transfiguration, on East 29th Street. At 10:15 the next morning Donovan, slightly hung over, leaned against the wrought-iron fence bordering the church garden, next to the lych gate. The lych gate was modeled after those in English churchyards, a place where coffins would be held while a brief service was performed before entering the church. It was decorated with images of scallop shells in homage to the Santiago de Compostela pilgrims. He thought about Paolo Coehlo’s book and again resolved to take that walk himself someday.
Father Carroll arrived shortly after he got there, and they were greeted by an elderly Hispanic woman who brought Father Carroll up to see Mabel Muglia. While they talked, Donovan went to the room where Father Roehling had been murdered. As soon as he opened the door, a headache began to throb in a band from temple to temple. He’d studied cases of psychometry—getting impressions off scenes or objects—but immediately dismissed the possibility in himself.
Psychic sensitivity? Try shots of Jack coming back to haunt you.
It was a small room furnished simply with dresser, bed, night table and desk. Everything bore signs of wear but was clean. Whatever damage had been done during the murder had been repaired, and Donovan guessed no one had entered the room since. He glanced around, making a slow, 360 degree turn to take everything in. Freshly plastered spots scarred one wall. He leaned on the dresser to examine them but saw nothing unusual. His hand brushed something and he glanced down. A fine layer of waxy red droplets sprinkled the dresser top.
Red wax?
He stared for a moment, then took a step back and looked at the scene. An image from the previous night appeared before him, startling him with a revelation. He left the room and went downstairs. The housekeeper was at the kitchen table with a cup of tea, gazing at nothing. Donovan sensed in her a desire for closure to this horrific incident, and he was surprised at how much he wanted to provide it.
“Could you please ask Father Carroll to give me a call when he finishes with Miss Muglia?” he asked. “I have to go.”
Hope lit her face. “Did you learn anything?”
But he was already out the door, jogging back to his motorcycle.
***
The ruins of the Dinkins Shelter looked worse in the daylight. The gate in the chain-link fence, which Fullam had locked, was now open and swinging. Donovan took off his helmet and ran inside. Racing past the crime scene tape, he took the steps two at a time to the top floor.
Red wax.
He leapt up the final three stairs and stopped dead.
Two men in dark blue windbreakers stood near the janitor’s closet, packing up the crime scene spotlights from last night. They looked at him.
“Who the hell are you?”