Chapter 4: A Walk in the Woods
At the corner of Union Turnpike and Hollis Hills, there is a park. The park itself spread out over the course of several blocks between the Clearview Expressway and the Cross Island Parkway. The trees were taller than every house in the neighborhood, even the McMansions.
At the end near 73rd Avenue was a parking lot. From there, anyone could walk to a softball field across the street, or a soccer field, or a simple, paved, walking path.
The walking path went up a gentle slope for at least a hundred paces. The path turned left. If one went straight, one would drop straight down to street level, into a valley within the trees. If it had water flow, it would be called a ravine.
It was a great place for a body dump.
Our victim had been cocooned in blankets. The tight wrapping had slowed any and all insect activity. This made the body relatively bug free and intact when the animals had gotten to it. The condition of the body was typical of someone who had been left out for months. The face and eyes were gone. Something had dug into the victim’s stomach and ate out the guts. I would guess coyotes. His shoulders and upper arms, part of his hips, and his feet were still wrapped.
Despite all of this, there was still little in the way of insect activity. Which was unusual on a few levels. It was still pleasant out. What would keep the bugs away?
I looked around. Without a swarm of flies, I didn’t see any way for someone to see the body to report it.
I took my time as I worked my way down the slope. The crime scene guys had put up several posts and strung a rope along the drop.
I came down next to Alex. He had been looking at his notebook as I studied the scene.
“Who called it in?” I asked.
Alex gave a half-shrug. “Couple of kids were roughhousing up on the path. One rolled down here. He almost ended up face-first in the victim’s cavity.”
I winced. Cavity was accurate. The guts had all been cleaned out a while ago.
Crouched over the body was a middle-aged brunette. Doctor Sinead Holland was late forties, and probably older, but she was still a knockout. She only received her first silver hair near her temple within the last few months. Not white, silver—her perfectly quaffed look wouldn’t allow it to be something so artistically drab as white. Her background was Northern European, up near Norway, giving her high cheekbones and eyes that were nearly Asiatic.
She made notes on the scene as she crouched low and close to the corpse.
I tapped Sinead on the shoulder. “Anything to identify the victim?”
Sinead shook her head. She didn’t look at me, but kept her eye on her notes and on the corpse.
“Not yet,” she said. “The teeth are broken peri-mortem. Someone wanted this man unidentified. And wanted it to hurt.”
Since she was blocking my view of his hands, I said, “I presume that the fingerprints are gone.”
She nodded slightly without looking up. “The fingers are gone. Eaten. Though there are burns on the palms. It looks like acid. So they probably removed the prints before he was wrapped. Someone was very thorough. They were too thorough, actually. If they hadn’t wrapped him so tight, there would have been more insect and animal activity. We probably wouldn’t have anything left of him by now.”
“How long?” I asked.
Sinead gave the body a once over, checking her list of notes. “It’s clear that he’s been exposed for a while. At a guess? A few months. No more than six. Though I’d be surprised if it was more than a month. We had a cool August, but our July would have caused him to smell to high Heaven. I’d figure a walker would have smelled him.”
I shook my head. “Not necessarily. If it was hot enough, it may have kept people off the trail.”
Alex slapped me on the shoulder to get my attention. “Talked with some uniforms just before you got here. Some homeowners nearby complained about a smell back in July. But no one could find anything. I guess we found him.”
I looked at the body and frowned. I glanced at the particulars, contemplating what I saw.
There were no drag marks on the body or on the sheets he was wrapped in. The sheets were fairly standard. They could have been sheets from a cheap hotel or bought from Costco—and we were in Queens, the home of Costco.
“No drag marks at either the feet or the shoulders,” I murmured aloud. “He was carried and all the way off the ground.”
I tilted my head, considering the path we walked to get here. “Technically, he could have been carried by one strong man, but to dump the body where it was, the body had to have been carried nearly two hundred feet up a path, presumably in the dark, with no lights.”
Alex arched a brow. “You’re figuring two guys?”
“At least. Though ideally, I would have had two men to carry the body, one to hold a flashlight, and one more out in the car to watch for any passers-by.”
Sinead pointed her pen and traced it in the air above the length of the body. “He was placed here, too, not thrown. See how it goes along the length of the ravine? That wasn’t luck, that was deliberate. And I saw no clear path for someone to roll the body down this neatly.”
I nodded slowly, again. “Multiple perpetrators. So we know that much.”
Alex sighed, then growled in frustration. “Great. All we need is his name. If we’re lucky, that’ll take a day or two.”
There was something about the body that spoke to me. Not in a spiritual way, but in a detective way. There was something off...
Hail Mary, full of Grace, the Lord is with... one second.
I stepped around Sinead and then crouched next to her. The victim’s face was gone, as was part of the neck. One intact part of the neck, however, near the rear, showed a scratch.
I pointed to it without touching it. “Right there. Call me crazy, but is that a scratch from a necklace being pulled off?”
Sinead leaned over and past me a little. I could smell the shampoo from her hair. I was surprised she never smelled of formaldehyde.
Alex leaned down, looking at the corpse over my left shoulder. He was so close, I could tell that his cologne had a ship on the bottle. “Looks like.”
Sinead nodded. “I think you’re right.”
“Engraved medal?” Alex postulated. “Dog tags?”
I blinked. The sheets weren’t army green, but if the killer wanted to hide the victim’s identity, it made sense to use anything but army-issue sheets. What little of his shirt was exposed was a blue Izod shirt. It wasn’t any uniform shirt I’d ever seen, even Best Buy. Which meant it was personal clothing. If he did live or work in a communal field, like the military, there was one more way to quickly identify the victim.
I asked Sinead. “We good to turn him over?”
She gave a quick look, then a quicker nod. “Go for it.”
We carefully turned the body on his side. I reached for the exposed part near his neck and pulled down the sheet. His shirt collar was intact. I reached for it and pulled it down as well.
There, in permanent marker, was written “Vincent Ledford”.
“Nice call, Tommy,” Alex said. “What made you think he’d mark his clothing. Memories of summer camp?”
I shrugged. “Sort of.”
I pulled out my smart phone and tapped in the name.
Up popped the file for one Missing Person, a Vincent Ledford. He’d been missing from his post at Fort Totten Army Base for months.
His brother, however, was Steven Ledford. That made me wince.
Steven was the right-hand man of one Daniel David DiLeo. He was very much like the Green Hornet—he played “gangsta” but ran a largely legal operation. From what I gathered, he had worked his way up from street crime to an MBA. He also had a small arsenal of weapons and private security for his businesses in bad areas. He usually didn’t need to break anyone’s knees, because his “gang” had convincingly dressed the part of intimidating badass.
The fact that I stood over the remains of one of the relatives of D’s right-hand man was not a good sign—for somebody.
Though before I got to that, I looked up from my phone to Alex, “Since when was Fort Totten reactivated? I thought it belonged to the NYPD and the Parks Department?”
Alex shrugged. “It did, for a few decades. The army reactivated it and moved back in while you were away in Rome. It was practically overnight. But it was damaged after ... all that havoc up and down the coast.”
I flinched. No one was close enough to see it outside of Alex and Sinead—and they had both been there when Tiamat came out of the ocean and trashed most of the coastline.
“I guess our first stop is to talk with the next of kin.” I looked at Sinead. “Anything else while we’re here?”
“Happy hunting?”