Beyond the cracked sidewalk, and the telephone pole with layers of flyers in a rainbow of colors, and the patch of dry brown grass there stood a ten-foot high concrete block wall, caked with dozens of coats of paint. There was a small shrine at the foot of it, with burnt out candles and dead flowers and a few soggy teddy bears. One word of graffiti filled the wall, red letters on a gold background: Rejoice!
Hannah sighed. It's been a day and a half. A child is dead. No one has come forward to claim the body. What the hell kind of city has this turned into? She flipped open her notepad and finished the last entry: Thursday 10:45pm bartender certain the car was a Camry, large round dent on passenger door. Said the car parked, the driver's door opened, and a woman exited with a package. Package placed by the wall of Singer Sewing Machine plant on Vassar. Matches previous interview from sector car.
The victim was a baby boy. According to the coroner, he was approximately two months old. The child had been severely malnourished but there were no visible signs of trauma other than blood in the child's mouth. Its body was wrapped in a white and blue cotton blanket that had the imprint of City Hospital on one corner. Two witnesses had seen a late model white or silver car stop at the curb by the abandoned sewing machine factory in the early morning hours of Tuesday, two days ago.
The body in the blanket was placed against the wall by someone exiting the vehicle from the driver's side. Both witnesses said the body was placed carefully and not just dumped or thrown. The driver was wearing a dress, but the bartender joked that in this kind of neighborhood clothing didn't determine a person's sex. The driver then returned to the car. It made a u-turn and left quickly. No one had contacted the police to report a missing baby despite continuous coverage by both the local and national news services. It was the worst of Hannah's nightmares.
A clap of thunder gave pause to her writing and Hannah turned to look out the open window of the unmarked car. It had been raining for over a week; the summer monsoon had arrived in earnest. Most of the small monument to a child's death had been washed away, but the single word permanently affixed to the painted wall sneered at the detective. Rejoice? Hannah stared at the remains of the shrine and shook her head; the memory of her own, now long dead baby suddenly flooded her conscious mind with an all too familiar pain.
It was three years ago: He'd come home drunk, again. There was the usual argument, the slapping, the cursing, the name-calling, and he'd stormed out of the room. Hannah had run after him, fearful for their newborn; the child he'd swore to hate the day she told him that her faith would not allow her to have an abortion.
Time had screeched to halt as he, in a moment of lucidity, turned and faced her in the narrow hallway and reminded her of the teen she'd shot and killed in a carjacking gone bad. And how could she kill that child, yet still ruin his life by not getting rid of a bunch of cells that hadn't even had a name? Hannah's fury overtook her fear and she'd lunged at him, not seeing the small automatic in his hand.
He was gone now, spending the rest of his life in prison for killing their baby and a second one for the attempted murder of a police officer. Hannah had recovered, physically, but this case had brought the old pain from the depths of her emotional ocean to the surface once again and she could feel the tears sliding down her cheeks.
Hannah closed the window and wiped her face with the sleeve of her blouse. Her voice was filled with the icy currents of a professional though, as she radioed in to close out her shift.
Sleep was an illusion; rest doubly so. The bedside clock had a zero and a one on the left. Hannah couldn't make out the rest of the digits without her glasses. The little girl. She pulled open the curtains alongside her bed to let the streetlights illuminate her room. What the hell did the delivery guy say she was wearing? Dragging her bathrobe up from the floor with her left foot, Hannah threw it over her naked shoulders and found her reading glasses in one of the pockets.
A newspaper delivery guy was just finishing his route at 4am on the day of the murder and noticed a little girl running from the scene with a small pink teddy bear in one hand moments after the body had been dumped. The bear had been found on the next corner and the blood on its fur matched the victim. The girl was no where to be found.
The odd thing though was that the girl had been wearing a ski parka - in July, in New Jersey. Hannah thumbed through her notes. A yellow ski parka with fur that had a bright red cross over the left pocket. The delivery guy had seen it. The bartender, closing up for the night, had mentioned her as well, but he said nothing about the red cross. They both thought she was around eleven or twelve years old - too young for high school and too old for elementary and they both agreed with Hannah that it was just a bit odd for a twelve-year-old girl to be wandering around the city streets at that time of the morning. Neither had thought the yellow ski parka unusual, but then again, this was New Jersey.
Hannah reached for the phone to call Maury, her partner who was one year away from retirement when they met… five years ago. She looked over her shoulder at the clock, which now clearly read one-twenty-nine and hit the speed dial for the Detective Squad.
Maury Bloomfield, recently widowed after more than forty years of marriage, spent more time asleep in the Detective Squad than in his home in the state's western suburbs. The squad had a small bedroom with a pair of bunk beds for detectives that needed a place to crash when going home, for whatever reason, was unacceptable. Maury's reason was loneliness, one of the more common ailments of the job.
Hannah knew he'd be there and wasn't the least bit surprised when he answered on the first ring. "What's up kiddo? Solved the Lindbergh case at one-thirty in the morning?"
She offered no response to his rhetorical question, instead giving her partner the minute or two he needed to reveal a decision he'd made… a minute or two ago. Hannah heard him spit out that annoying snort before he continued, "Sure. First thing in the morning. Sweetheart, go back to sleep. I'll see you in the office at eight." The line went silent as he clicked off. She tightened the robe's cotton belt and shuffled off to the kitchen and her waiting coffee pot.
It had cost the city's first female detective and her aging partner a handful of favors, but by noon, several dozen uniformed officers and a forensics team were photographing tire imprints and questioning business owners around the corner from where the murdered child had been found for the second time in so many days. One of the businesses on the opposite corner - a bail bondsman - had a surveillance camera covering his parking lot. Hannah and Maury collected two days worth of DVDs from the owner and took them back to the squad room.
Out of the canvass, the officers produced one local owner with an outstanding bench warrant for unpaid parking tickets, a chop shop with over a dozen expensive cars in various stages of disassembly but no workers to be found (it had been closed and locked the first time they investigated), and a Chinese restaurant that had more violations than fortune cookies. Hannah gagged when a cockroach the size of a shot glass fell on her shoe while she was attempting to interview the owner.
The DVDs revealed an active corner for prostitution, information that the detectives passed along to the Vice squad, but nothing that would aid their case. Hannah was about to drive back over to the bail bondsman's office to return the recordings when the priest walked into the squad room.
The priest, Father Cozziello, was seated in one of the interview rooms across from Hannah. Maury watched from outside the room, behind a pane of one-way glass. Hannah waited silently as he took a sip of the coffee she'd offered him, giving the man a few moments to compose himself. A bit outside standard procedure, but in her mind the collar gave him the edge.
"How can I help you, Father?" she finally asked, leaning in towards him to watch his eyes.
Hannah took off her glasses and gently gripped the bridge of her nose. "Fascinating."
Reaching across the table, Father Cozziello took Hannah's hands in his as his face turned hard. He shook his head several times and Hannah could see the conflict in his eyes. The words came quickly, in a breath so hard they could have been stones thrown into the face of a sinner. "I think one of my parishioners killed one of their children and she might try to kill herself."
They recorded the priest's statement and contacted the District Attorney's office to alert them to the crime. According to Father Cozziello, one Beverly DeMarco, a church regular, had said her baby died after suffering from some un-diagnosed illness. It had kept her awake for several nights in a row so she didn't feed it. Ms. DeMarco told the priest she had wrapped the dead child in a blanket and left it by the side of the road.
A sector car was dispatched to the DeMarco residence the moment the DA called to say he'd gotten the search warrant, with Hannah and Maury close behind. The call came over the radio as they turned onto the Tenth Street Bridge. "410 to Central and Detectives 2-7. Send the coroner, there's one DOA. Female. Gunshot wound to the chest. Looks like a shotgun at close range. And send someone from family services. There's a little girl here. Looks like she could use a meal."
Three days later an automobile pulled up and parked beside the concrete wall. The driver opened the door, but did not get out of the car. Although her face was in shadow, it was easy to tell she was sad. There was something about how she turned away from the sun and rested the weight of her hands on the steering wheel, something about her silent composure, that caused Hannah to sigh. The young girl watched the driver lean out of the car and stretch her hand out towards one of the burned out candles. This woman, like the others that come and parked, was photographed by the team in the surveillance van across the street from Hannah's car. Her license plate was run through the national database and everything it contained was copied to the on-going file in the death of baby DeMarco. Someone had killed two people in her city and Detective Hannah Bockert was going to bring that someone down. Kasey DeMarco, the sole survivor of her small family, had been taken still wearing her yellow ski parka covered in her mother's blood, to a shelter where they learned that apparently, her father was also deceased. Beyond saying the word "dead" when asked about her father, Kasey hadn't spoken another. Hannah had been picking up the young girl at the shelter in the late afternoon to visit the shrine to her murdered brother while the shelter's psychiatrist spent the mornings trying to open her mind. Together, Hannah and Kasey had been watching the steady stream of mourners. It was the shrink's conclusion that Kasey had seen either her mother's murder or her mother killing her baby brother and she had surrounded herself with an ironclad shell. He said it could take years to break her out of it and that she would probably remain silent until that day. By taking her back to the shrine, Hannah hoped she could crack that shell of silence much sooner. The late Beverly DeMarco had spent much of her adult life in rehab. The coroner said that if the shotgun blast hadn't killed her, AIDS would have within a few months. He confirmed that both the dead baby and Kasey were the woman's children. A search of the dead woman's residence yielded little to offer a solution as to who or why she had been killed nor was the murder weapon found. Hannah wasn't completely sold on the idea that Beverly had killed her baby and thus the case was left open with two possible victims and a missing murderer. Maury, however, wanted to close the baby's murder case, arguing that the woman's confession to a priest of the baby's murder was enough to put that one to bed. They were driving back to the shelter on Pell Street, late in the afternoon, with Kasey in the backseat when the call of a shooting at a bodega three blocks east came over the radio. Hannah made a hard left, knocking over a trashcan as the car came around the corner, the engine screaming as it accelerated. Two marked cars were already jutting out from the curb in front of the bodega. With their lights bouncing off nearby windows it was brighter than a rock concert and all the neighbors had come out to sing along. Hannah parked between the cruisers, shouted at Kasey to stay in the car, and the two detectives ran into the store; the raucous sound of the cavalry coming up the avenue behind them. One male, white, well over six feet tall was in handcuffs and had bullet wound to his left shoulder that at first glance, Hannah described as a "through and through". A second male lay still and bleeding in front of a freezer case of soda cans. Maury was on the radio calling for paramedics, as he didn't think the man on the ground was dead. The third participant in this drama was a young woman, Hannah figured her to be in her very early twenties. She had most of her face blown away from the shotgun lying on the floor near the tall white man. She was quite dead.
Hannah holstered her 9mm Glock and nodded toward the nearest officer. "Jerry, what the hell is going on here?" The pile of warrants for the arrest of Sergio Ortega covered most of the criminal offenses in the book. The worst of the lot however, was his trafficking in human body parts, very small human body parts. Sergio Ortega paid women for their newborns so that he could harvest their tiny organs and sell them on the black market to desperate families with sick babies. Hannah had heard the stories but thought they were nothing but rumors. The dead woman on the floor in front of the bread display made her a believer. Ortega had been in hiding since his escape from an upstate holding cell. Cops in five neighboring states had been searching for the baby dealer for several months and there had been rumors that he had fled the country. News of his capture would spread fast. Hannah picked up on the urgency to get this man out of the bodega and into a police car before all hell broke loose. By now, the street outside the bodega was filled with a mix of glowing police cars, two news trucks that had been monitoring the police frequency, and a growing gaggle of residents, vying for a position to get in front of a TV camera. Last on the scene was Captain Morris, the watch commander who proceeded to bring order to chaos on the crowded street.
Rolling his 300-pound bulk into the bodega was enough to force most of the unneeded personnel out the door. He shook hands with Maury, gave Hannah the usual look of disdain, and surveyed the scene. Until now, the criminal had not said a word, had not let the sneer drop from his lips. At the sight of the massive police captain peering into his eyes, Sergio Ortega began to quiver. His eyes lurched away from the captain's gaze and Hannah could see him visibly grow smaller. Captain Morris took a step closer to him, reaching for something in his right pocket. Hannah was about to grab the captain's arm when he suddenly pulled a Milky Way bar from his pocket. He pushed Ortega down onto a juice crate behind the man and spit in his face. With his commentary complete, the captain turned and walked out the door, dropping the Milky Way wrapper on his way. In all the confusion, Kasey had let herself out of the unlocked detective's car and was casually strolling up and down the sidewalk. It was late and she was hungry so she walked into the bodega in search of food. Hannah saw her come through the open door and was about to say something, grab her and put her back in the car, but Kasey froze in her tracks, her eyes locked on Sergio Ortega. "Dead!" she screamed at him. "Dead! Dead! Dead!" she repeated the word over and over, pointing at Ortega but seemingly unable to move any other part of her body. Hannah rushed over to the girl and tried to wrap her arms around her, but Kasey slithered out of her grasp and ran toward the killer screaming the single epithet over and over. Maury stepped between the girl and Ortega, reaching down to grab her but Kasey was too quick for the old detective. As she passed him, Kasey pulled his .38 revolver from the holster on his belt, aimed the gun at Ortega, and pulled the trigger. The shot was wide, blasting into a box of Twinkies behind the man's head, but in an instant everyone in the bodega with a gun had it drawn and was taking cover. Ortega rolled behind the pastry display and tried to get up but Kasey fired again, this time hitting the criminal in his left knee. She was still saying "dead" but the word was now a whisper as she followed him around to the other side of the aisle. Hannah, crouched low at the other end of the aisle called to Ortega, telling him to get out of the way and at Kasey, in a vain attempt to get her to lower the weapon.
"Kasey, stop! Put the gun down!" Hannah shouted at the young girl. Kasey was now less than ten feet away from Ortega. She took aim at his head and clenched her teeth. What she failed to see though was the wounded husband on the floor who had rolled over and was now aiming a gun at Sergio Ortega as well. Hannah spotted the man and yelled to him, "Don't!" But it was too late. The sound was so loud that Hannah was unsure who had fired. Maury, as it turns out, fired first, a split second before she did, both of their bullets hitting targets. Hannah's shot blew the gun out of Kasey's hand. It ripped open a large gash in her palm but the young girl was otherwise uninjured. As she fell to floor, howling louder than a pack of wild wolves, the gun rolled under an end cap. Maury's shot just missed the husband but not the freezer case behind him. The glass shattered, pouring tiny crystals all over the man and dousing him with soda from the one can Maury's shot had killed. Hannah did her best not to laugh but the moment was too priceless to let pass. In the confusion, Ortega reached down and found Maury's gun. He brought it up with both manacled hands and took aim at the young girl. "I should have killed you the other night when I silenced your mother." He laughed. "Piece of shit. Worthless piece of shit. Both of you." Ortega spit on the floor and peered at the child. He never heard the shot that ended his life. Nor the second one that Hannah fired, not sure if she'd hit him with the first bullet. Ortega fell backward, Maury's gun clattering to floor. There was nothing but silence in the bodega for several long moments as the living stared at the dead and let an unspoken prayer slip from their lips. Kasey walked over to the lifeless body of the man who had destroyed her family and kicked his thigh. She turned to Hannah and smiled, saying only word, "Dead."
Hours later, once the paperwork was complete and Kasey had been safely returned to the shelter, Hannah sat at her desk, eating a pastrami sandwich and watching the news. She groaned as the camera zoomed in on her just in time to catch the detective pick her nose. "Did you see that?" she asked Maury, "My fifteen seconds of fame and I've got the boogers. Oh, Jeez."
Hannah finished her sandwich and pulled her purse out from the bottom drawer of her desk. "You going home or sleeping here?" |
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