Contents:
God knows, tantrums and whining were of no use at all. That meant becoming a little adult, responsible, industrious, eager to please.
Cold Room: A Corbin and Bentibi American Police Procedural (A Corbin and Bentibi Mystery) [Robert Knightly] on www.farmersmarketmusic.com *FREE* shipping on qualifying. Editorial Reviews. Review. “Clever plotting, plenty of unexpected twists, high- octane action, taut note taking and highlighting while reading Cold Room: A Corbin and Bentibi American Police Procedural (A Corbin and Bentibi Mystery Book 2).
The effort was doomed from the beginning and I gave up after a couple of years. No surprise, as I lived on it until I was old enough to go out on the streets of the Lower East Side and forge alliances strong enough to substitute for family. I rolled off the bed, walked to my sweltering office and waited impatiently for my computer to load. Then I pulled up the image of my victim and created a flier I could pass out. I included my name and rank, an untraceable cell-phone number that I routinely gave to informants, and the simple fact that Plain Jane Doe had been murdered. In the space of a few seconds, I recalled the late afternoon thunderstorm, the clouds flying up and the hail that pounded her body, and the lightning that burst all around me, listening until the noise overwhelmed every other sense.
I told myself to let Adele go, if that was what she wanted. I told myself that my first obligation was to this slain girl and I could not abandon her, come what may. No, the point was that Jane Doe had a right to justice, my personal problems be damned. Adele was a big girl. She had a good job. She could make her way in the world. For Jane, there was only me. I went online and dragged up a list of Polish churches in New York.
Eventually, I would visit them all. I knew that if there was even the slightest chance that Jane could be identified through her fingerprints, the men who disposed of her body would have cut off her hands. His thinning hair was too gray even to be called salt-and-pepper, his jowls and forehead deeply creased.
His nose was pinched at the end — it dropped almost to his upper lip when he smiled to reveal a half-inch gap between his front teeth. Academic might be a charitable way to describe his overall appearance, though goofy also came to mind as I returned his smile and shook his hand. Roach gestured to a chair, then took a seat on the opposite side of his cluttered desk. Roach got up at that point and began to pin the photographs to a cork board, one of a series of bulletin boards that ran along the wall behind his desk.
He arranged the photos in three groups, the general scene first, then the trace evidence with the tire impressions and the cut fence-link. The victim came last, prone and supine, up close and from a distance. For the next fifteen minutes, while he examined the photos, then the autopsy report, Roach spoke not a word. Lost as he was in the puzzle, I simply became irrelevant. And the puzzle was what Roach lived for — the puzzle was all he had. Profilers act as consultants, studying the evidence, offering advice, but they neither investigate, nor interrogate.
On Sunday, he went out for a morning stroll, down to the waterfront in Williamsburg. The fat man severed one link of the fence before spotting Kelly, who took off. Of course, Roach was a bit of a celebrity. If not with rank and file detectives, at least with Hyong, who also liked puzzles. But if the snub was humiliating, the new elements Hyong added to the mix captured my full attention. Roach re-examined the photos pinned to the cork board after hanging up, taking his time about it.
The rest is staged. First the pregnancy, then the cold, then the death blow. Roach smiled as he rose from his chair. My time was up. I took those thoughts with me to Missing Persons where I reviewed eighteen files, all of young white females reported missing in the last three months. Unlike the list faxed to me on the prior night, most of the case files included photographs, which allowed me to quickly determine that my victim was not among them.
Still, I took careful notes as I went along. Millard wanted his ass covered and my intention was to generate as much paper as possible, to stuff the case file until it overflowed. When I finished, I turned to the six files that lacked a photo. Five were either too young or too old to be my victim, while the sixth was of Nina Klaipeda, an eighteen-year-old Lithuanian immigrant.
Nina had been reported missing by her mother, Jolanta, five weeks before, and that made her unlikely to be my victim. Weight and height were in the ballpark as well. Did you meet with John Roach? But he was only giving me a rough impression, not an official profile. By the way, the tests came in for cyanide and carbon monoxide. Or he might live in the neighborhood, but the victim lived somewhere else.
I found myself smiling. In this matter, at least, there was no distance between us. Unless you have a better idea. If you run into a wall, he could point you in the right direction. A good detective will take help from anyone. To which I had absolutely no objection. A lifelong smoker, Leya still consumed two packs a day.
There was nothing I could say to any of this. A sick mother cannot be challenged. Jovianna had always been close to her mother. She, too, was frightened. She opened a moment later, then led me to a cracked leather couch draped with a red and green Christmas blanket. The couch was occupied by two elderly men, brothers by the look of them. When Jolanta addressed them in what I assumed to be Lithuanian, they struggled to their feet and shuffled toward one of the bedrooms. Only after the door closed behind their backs did Jolanta turn to face me.
Her eyes met mine for a moment, then darted away, then returned. I could see the fear in those eyes, fear dancing in the amber motes flecking her brown irises, and fear in her raised and reddened lids, in the tight line of her mouth, in the flare of her nostrils. I had no reason to believe that the photo I intended to show her was of her daughter. Clearly, she thought I was coming to the Bronx only to confirm what I already knew, that her daughter was dead.
I reached into my pocket for the computer-enhanced photo I intended to show her, but Jolanta stopped me. Half hidden by an upright piano, cradle and beds were lined up against the wall opposite the windows. A young girl, maybe ten years old, sat at the piano. She was playing scales, her touch light and delicate, even in the lower registers. An older man sat on a kitchen chair beside her, nodding from time to time, while a metronome ticked away a few inches from her face. Jolanta returned a moment later with a child in tow, a boy wearing the blue, polyester pants and white shirt of a Catholic school student.
Eight or nine years old, his blond hair was cropped to within a few millimeters of his scalp. Little Miss New York. At Madison Square Garden. Almost without transition, her face brightened. I saw her look up at a crucifix on the wall to her right, watched her bless herself. Then she laughed, once, a bark of defiance, before addressing her nephew in Lithuanian.
He listened attentively until she finished, then nodded. She says that Nina is beautiful. She says that Nina is a rose and this is a cabbage. Afterward, I passed out a dozen fliers to the exiting parishioners before chatting up Father Korda, who stood by the church door. Charm was my weapon of choice in these encounters, humble petitioner my stance. Helping her was helping one of their own. I told the same story to Polish storekeepers on both sides of Manhattan Avenue.
Murdered innocent, Polish immigrant. Her family was out there somewhere, awaiting closure. Her killer was out there, too, maybe getting ready to kill someone else. Whenever possible, I tried to buy something. Breakfast at one diner, coffee and a buttered corn muffin at another.
I had fifty copies of the flier printed at a card shop. I bought a package of light bulbs at a hardware store and a tube of toothpaste at a small pharmacy. My goal was to place my flier in the front window where it would be seen by pedestrians. I was mostly successful, but the going was necessarily slow.
This was a pattern that continued through the week and into the weekend. On Thursday, Millard called me into his office to review the case. But there was nothing here and when I described my daytime activities, the effort rang hollow. Conrad had been my high school swimming coach, way back when I was a budding juvenile delinquent. Before we met, my options were limited to my druggie parents or a motley collection of street urchins on the Lower East Side.
Conrad offered a third possibility; I could, if I wished, spend my afternoons in his Murray Hill apartment. Instead, what they provided, and what I needed, was stability, a dependable world equally free of the chaos offered by my parents and the casual violence of the streets. There was a second benefit to my relationship with Conrad, a benefit still with me twenty-five years later.
Simply put, as I learned to swim competitively, water became my preferred element. With my goggles wet and every sound dampened by ear plugs, I was finally able to shut the world out, to turn my attention inward until I eventually became my own object, the insect under the glass.
Something inside you, the same something that makes your heart beat and your stomach digest, counts for you. I swam for an hour on that night, concentrating my attention on the case. As I knew that, for the time being, I needed to continue my canvas, gradually expanding the search area, and hope for the best. Now assigned to the Chief of Detectives office, Deputy-Inspector Bill Sarney had been in command of the One-Sixteen when Adele and I worked the case that put us on the outs with the job. Two-faced from the beginning, Sarney pretended to be my rabbi and my friend, all the while selling me out to Borough Command and his buddies at the Puzzle Palace.
About the PBA and its whispering campaign he could do nothing. Unidentified victims are not all that rare in New York, certainly not rare enough to attract attention from the press. Bill Sarney could get me that backing. On Monday, her mother was scheduled to undergo an endoscopy, a procedure that requires the insertion of a tube through the mouth and into the stomach. Leya Bentibi was beside herself, not least because Jovianna insisted that she make a living will.
Adele could not simply desert her mother. So there was nothing to consider. But then, as my stroke became ragged, an image of Adele rose, unbidden, to hang before my eyes. Adele was sitting in the lobby of North Shore Hospital, her face a mask of bandages, her ski jacket matted with dried blood. Adele had been sitting with her back straight and her head up when I entered the hospital, enduring the frank stares of all who passed her by.
I fell in love with her at that moment, with her pride, her defiance. A few days later, when she came to me, when I felt her breasts against my chest and tasted her lips, I knew there was no going back. Twenty minutes later, after a quick shower, I tried to call Conrad on his cell phone. If I could talk to anyone, it was Conrad, who knew me better than I knew myself. But Conrad was somewhere off the coast of Alaska, on a cruise with his girlfriend, Myra Gardner.
I started to leave a message, then abruptly hung up. There was no point. Upwards of one hundred thousand Russians and Ukrainians, most of them immigrants, are packed into Brighton Beach, enough to spill over into the communities of Gravesend and Sheepshead Bay. On the little shops along the streets and avenues, the signs are most commonly written in Cyrillic, and more business is conducted in Russian than English.
There are grocery stores in Brighton Beach, no larger than bodegas, which carry ten brands of pickled herring and a dozen of caviar.
The weather remained hot throughout and I was grateful for the deep shadow cast by the el on Brighton Beach Avenue as I made my rounds. My pitch to these Russian shopkeepers differed only slightly from my approach to the Poles of Greenpoint. I told the Russians that I was sure my victim came from Russia or the Ukraine, a white lie that netted me zilch, though I managed to post fliers in a number of businesses.
Adele called me that evening, a few minutes before I entered the Nine-Two. No surgery was foreseen, now or in the future.
All concerned were relieved. I was waiting for Adele to say that she was coming home.
Instead, she turned the conversation to the case. He says you should call in the morning and let him know where to meet you. It took me a moment to remember that Capra was an agent with the Immigration amp; Naturalization Service. I have to take a look at the fact that every day I go out to a job I hate.
This carefully prepared speech presented a line of reasoning familiar to Harry Corbin. About my age, Capra was short and wide-shouldered, with a thickened nose red enough to hang on a Christmas tree. That nose reddened still further when he chugged a double bourbon within minutes of his arrival. Adele had cautioned me about Dominick Capra, and for good reason.
Capra was obsessed with the criminality of the new immigrants and the threat they posed to the nation. He spewed bigotry with every breath. But then Capra surprised me with something relevant and my focus shifted abruptly. They live in ordinary communities, most commonly among individuals they knew in their home countries. This is especially true for your ex-commies.
I keep in touch with Missing Persons on a daily basis. Then he raised his glass. Some are lured into it with false promises and some are purchased from their parents. Either way, these girls become virtual slaves. Capra tilted his head back and brought his glass to his mouth, draining the last few drops of Jim Beam. Four or five years ago, a nineteen-year-old girl, a Philippine national, broke her ankle jumping from the second-floor window of a townhouse.
According to the girl, Consuela Madamba, she was recruited in her home village by a woman representing an American employment agency. For a substantial price, to be paid from her wages, Consuela would be smuggled into the United States and guaranteed employment as a domestic. Capra leaned over the table. These days, illegals have to keep going until the debt is completely satisfied.
Call it sharecropping for the new millennium. I thought about this for a moment, before asking the obvious question. Second, her family in the Philippines co-signed for the debt. Third, the reason she got her ass kicked was because she tried to escape. Capra leaned back as the waiter set a fresh drink on the table before him. He looked at his whiskey for a minute, then caught a single drop running down the side of the glass on the tip of a finger. He brought the finger to his mouth and sucked appreciatively.
On the other hand, shit happens now and again, after which you have to clean up the mess. We figure she was around eighteen when she was killed. I was still cooling down, when Capra glanced at his watch. In my opinion, the best way to reach large numbers of immigrants is through their newspapers. Advertising is what works. I know this because we used local papers to pull off a number of stings.
It was very effective. I had a sudden vision of shackled deportees being led, in a long line, toward a waiting airplane. Headed for home sweet home. Those foreign gangsters I mentioned? Capra turned to go, but I held him with a gesture. The employment agency that placed Consuela Madamba with the Saudi family. Did you run them down? It took about a week, by which time they and their workers were long gone.
I went from my lunch with Capra to a news store on Second Avenue. I showed the owner my badge and asked a few questions about Polish-language newspapers. Though I showed my badge and explained the situation in enough detail to draw pity from a psychopath, Lucjan Bilawski refused to discount his advertising rates. On the bottom, I left the number of my cell phone.
Bilawski smiled when he took my check. He shook my hand vigorously. Just give me a ring. They worked for tips, these men, gathering in small knots outside the many restaurants, their battered bikes chained to meters and no-parking signs.
Everybody knew they were in the country illegally. The Mayor knew it. The City Council knew it. The New York Times knew it. Dominick Capra knew it. Just as all knew there was a less visible army of illegals out there, sewing dresses, cleaning floors, mowing lawns, busing tables in restaurants all over the city.
The job, at the direction of a succession of mayors and commissioners, has disavowed the whole business. Illegal immigration, as the job understands it, is a federal, not a local, crime. It takes something more — a murder victim, for instance, eviscerated and dumped on a street in Brooklyn — to motivate the NYPD.
He passed it back to me after a quick glance. The man wore a gold warm-up suit with black stripes on the pants and sleeves, and he was very large. Sirrico, Conda Douglas, Sharon K. Dark blue tiles, shot with irregular veins of silver, covered the floor. The Devil Knows You're Dead.
Or at least one low-ranking detective. She was in charge of the decision-making process. The issue was more pressing for Jane. My ad in Gazeta Warszawa was not just another turn of the cards. The newspaper, which claimed a proven circulation of forty thousand, was written entirely in Polish. That meant every reader had to be a Pole. Hyong had told me that white fillings were rare in the West. But what about South America? And while I was sure the man who carried Jane to the Brooklyn waterfront was familiar with the area, I also knew, as Adele suggested, that he might work in the neighborhood and live somewhere else.
And then there was the possibility that Jane had only been in the country for a few weeks, or even a few days. After all, any line of investigation can be second-guessed. By then, I had the patter down. And that was the end of that. But even if the caller had gotten the date right, I was prepared to add a series of questions about height and weight, country of origin, hair and eye color. Checking false leads was an activity I was determined, for obvious reasons, to minimize. I continued to field calls through Friday, through torrential rains on Saturday, and into Sunday morning without getting a hit.
Although a few of the calls began by asking whether there was a reward — and concluded shortly afterward — most were from desperate parents. Their collective heartbreak poured through the phone lines, as real to me as the air I breathed. They might have been sitting beside me. And I knew what they wanted, these mothers and fathers. They wanted to be made whole, to be restored. I could not restore them, but I doled out the only solace I had to offer. I informed them, after a few questions, that the murdered girl I searched for was not their daughter.
They could go on hoping. The Mets were ahead, six-zip, having pulverized C. Sabathia, while the feared Yankee batters had been limited to a single infield hit. I muted the TV, then pushed myself to a sitting position and took the phone from the end table. The girl whose photograph appeared in the newspaper today was here, at Blessed Virgin. I spoke to her briefly. At this point, I was supposed to ask when the conversation had taken place, to screen the call, but several things caught my attention.
An authoritative tone, first of all, that conveyed near certainty, and the title, Sister. Father Stan had examined the photo carefully before looking up. His eyes, as I recalled them, were large and strikingly blue, dominating a hawkish nose and strong cheekbones. Honest citizens have a hard time lying to a cop. That was on a Saturday when she came here with the other girls, to confess. I told myself to chill out, to wipe that smile off my ugly face. Would you describe the circumstances? Though I had no real plan, I decided to stay inside the church while they confessed, hoping for an opportunity to speak to them alone.
That chance presented itself at the very end when their minder left to use the bathroom. This was my first approach and I spoke to the girls as a group. Not that I see how it matters. The community of Maspeth, in Queens, is heavily industrialized, like virtually every other New York community bordering the waters that surround Manhattan. In this case, the water is Newtown Creek, a polluted canal that feeds into the East River.
The joke among cops who work near the canal is that a body dumped into the water at sundown will dissolve before morning. Newtown Creek was an industrial dump site for a hundred years before the first environmental laws were written. Somehow, the near-miraculous rehabilitation of the Hudson and East Rivers has passed it by. I drove across Newtown Creek that Sunday afternoon, on Metropolitan Avenue, from Brooklyn into Queens, continuing on through the industrial heart of Maspeth and into a primarily residential neighborhood near Fresh Pond Road.
The homes were modest here. Semi-detached and two-family for the most part, they bore flat roofs and were sided in a textured vinyl that made only the faintest stab at a wood-like appearance. But their yards were neatly kept, the tiny lawns mowed, the shrubs carefully trimmed. In one, the path to the front door was framed by a trellis overgrown with pink roses. In another, a woman bent over an enormous hydrangea, cutting the purple blossoms and transferring them to a laundry basket at her feet. Blessed Virgin Roman Catholic Church was as modest and well tended as its neighbors.
The stone tower on its northern face rose only a few feet higher than the surrounding homes, and the statue of the Virgin in its churchyard, though crude enough to pass for lawn furniture, was freshly painted. There were people gathered outside the church when I walked down the block. The Roman Catholic Church in New York is committed to satisfying the demands of believers from nations as diverse as Rumania and Botswana. I scanned the crowd as I passed the face of the church, looking for a group of young women escorted by a single man, but found only the expected gathering of families.
The large room I finally entered was given over to a motley collection of couches and upholstered chairs. The effect was homey, nevertheless, with the chairs and couches arranged in small groupings that afforded a bit of privacy. Sister Kassia was sitting on one of the couches, speaking to a woman who sat next to her. Her nose was pointed, her mouth pinched and turned down at both ends, her chin sharp enough to punch holes in sheet metal.
Two deep grooves rolled up and out from the bridge of her nose to echo the sharp hook of her pale eyebrows. They appraised me without apology. Finally, the nun turned to half whisper a few words to the woman on the other side of the couch before crossing the room. Late in middle age and a good thirty pounds above her best weight, she nevertheless moved with grace, coming at me with her shoulders squared, offering her hand for a firm shake.
I nodded my head. That brought her up short and she paused to reassess the big cop who towered above her. I met her gaze without flinching, the message I wanted to send quite simple. When Sister Kassia picked up the phone to call me, the entrance to the maze had closed behind her. There was no going back. She smiled then, a thin and grudging smile to be sure, but a smile nonetheless. Our position here is very delicate. But does the priest who performs the mass go outside to greet his parishioners as they leave the church?
I discovered Father Manicki in a small room at the end of a narrow hallway. He was standing before a closet that held a variety of robes and brightly colored vestments. There were two children in the room with him. I would have made them for altar boys in an earlier era, but these two were of mixed gender, the girl a foot taller than her companion.
Father Manicki turned to me when I knocked on the open door. He raised a hand to slow me down, then instructed the children to wait outside. When they were safely gone, he closed the door behind them. At first glance, Father Stan might have passed for a bare-knuckle prize fighter, but there was something else in his blue eyes, a sense of regret that I knew I could exploit should the need arise. I want a confirmation or a denial. The room was very spare, a plain chest of drawers, several ladder-back wooden chairs, a small table.
Except for a large crucifix above the door, the walls were undecorated. Father Manicki turned his eyes to the crucifix at that moment, to a stylized Christ whose arms and legs were too long for his emaciated torso, who wore, in lieu of a crown of thorns, an actual crown, as if already risen. But the other girls are still at risk. You may think that you can ride to the rescue, perhaps arrest the men who watch over them. Most likely, the young women in question had contracted a debt which they were now obliged to work off.
Bait and switch, a marketing strategy as old as marketing itself. Sister Kassia told me the girls might be working for any employer willing to hire illegals. They might be waiting on tables in Manhattan, or sewing garments in Elmhurst, or dusting furniture in Bayside. We were standing at the window, looking out over the churchyard. The congregation was already inside Blessed Virgin, the mass about to start, but the girls and their escort had yet to appear. I use it because these kinds of debts are commonly bought and sold, because tomorrow morning they could wake up to find a new master in charge of their lives.
If the workers defaulted, the relatives would have to pay. But Sister Kassia had been all over this topic. Once the women were settled into real jobs that paid real wages, they would send money home to those relatives. The point was to avoid involuntary servitude. The nun concluded with a direct appeal to my conscience. Now you have it in your power to affect those lives directly. The women came first, five of them in their Sunday best, the oldest in her mid-twenties, the youngest in her late teens.
They wore simple cotton dresses, knee-length and brightly colored, and flat-heeled shoes with tiny white socks that barely covered their ankles. Make-up was held to a minimum, a hint of blush in the cheeks, a pale gloss across the lips, a touch of color in the brows. Snap judgements, especially of strangers, are a hazard for cops.
There was nothing hard in their expressions, no element of cold calculation. They were not whores. Pleased with this conclusion, I focused on the man who walked behind the women, the shepherd tending his flock. I watched him turn onto the path leading up to the church, then pass within twenty feet of where I stood. He seemed as ordinary, at first glance, as the women who preceded him. His face was noticeably thin, his cheeks hollow, his mouth squeezed between a strong nose and a cleft chin. Though he appeared no older than thirty-five, the top of his head was bald except for a dark fuzz at the very front which might have been better shaved.
As he passed me, I watched his eyes criss-cross the landscape in little jumps.
They never stopped moving and only the fact that I was standing well away from the window prevented my being discovered. In Turkish and Farsi, aslan means lion. I know because I became curious the first time I heard the name and ran a search on the Internet. I stifled a burst of nearly infantile glee, then changed the subject. I gave the van plenty of room, passing by the corner of Eagle Street and Franklin Avenue in time to watch it disappear through a roll-up door into the interior of a warehouse.
The warehouse was two stories high and no more than twenty feet wide. As decrepit as its attached neighbors to the east and west, the entire face of the building, including the steel door in front, was covered with graffiti.
I called in the plates, first. They came back registered to an outfit called Domestic Solutions. That done, I checked the well-worn tires. Now I had something to compare it with. Finally, I looked inside the vehicle, just in case there was a kilo of cocaine lying in plain view. Instead, I discovered a pair of car seats in the back, one clearly meant for an infant. Children, of course, would add another layer of control, especially pre-schoolers who could be kept out of sight.
As I passed by Eagle Street for a second time, a light went on behind the curtains in the two small windows on the second floor. This was a violation of the building code I could turn to my advantage. Industrial structures cannot be used for residential purposes, not without going through a complicated conversion process that requires a thorough renovation, inside and out. That the home of Domestic Solutions and its workers had not undergone that process was obvious at a glance. That meant Jane was killed somewhere else and the only somewhere else she could have been killed was at work.
I kept at it for another twenty minutes, certain of only one thing: Monday, January 16, Writing Loves Company. Some writers need music, others need silence; I need company. Last week I spent four days in a remote part of south Jersey with a fellow writer, Elena Santangelo. We had no TV, no Internet, no distractions, whatsoever. Even the birds were quiet, or had vanished to warmer climes. Elena adopted the front room.
I took over the middle room. The kitchen was the common room where we met for meals, and we were allowed to talk. Somehow the presence of another writer working in close proximity spurs me on like nothing else. All I know is — it works for me. Of course, there were other incentives.
Fear and guilt played a part. South Jersey in winter is even quieter than in summer. A decorated officer, loving wife, devoted mother, and loyal friend, Lindsay's unwavering integrity has never failed her. But now she is confronting a killer who is determined to undermine it all. Star FBI detective Amos Decker and his colleague Alex Jamison must solve four increasingly bizarre murders in a dying rust belt town--and the closer they come to the truth, the deadlier it gets in this rapid-fire 1 New York Times bestseller.
Something sinister is going on in Baronville. The rust belt town has seen four bizarre murders in the space of two weeks. Cryptic clues left at the scenes--obscure bible verses, odd symbols--have the police stumped. It's a bleak place: Decker has only been there a few hours when he stumbles on a horrific double murder scene. Then the next killing hits sickeningly close to home. And with the lives of people he cares about suddenly hanging in the balance, Decker begins to realize that the recent string of deaths may be only one small piece of a much larger scheme--with consequences that will reach far beyond Baronville.
Decker, with his singular talents, may be the only one who can crack this bizarre case. Only this time--when one mistake could cost him everything--Decker finds that his previously infallible memory may not be so trustworthy after all