Unholy City Page 4

  As Banks waited to see what the chemicals revealed, Haggerty grabbed a flashlight and aimed the beam over the plants on either side of the stone path. Small engraved markers identified each herb by its common and botanical name. Creeping thyme (Thymus serpyllum). Wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). Tricolor sage (Salvia officinalis Tricolor). Rosemary (Rosmarinus officinalis). In the glare of his flashlight, he was struck by the unique beauty of each plant, and he continued to study them until he noticed Banks and another CSU investigator hunched over the chest.

  “It’s probably a false positive,” Banks commented as Haggerty moved closer. “There’s a lot of rust on those tools. Still, photo and bag it.”

  Banks stood and turned to Haggerty. “Don’t get your hopes up, Detective. There may be a speck of blood on a garden spade, but if so, it’s probably from someone who cut his finger while hacking weeds a year ago. We don’t have the murder weapon.”

  Haggerty pointed to the herb plants. “You’ll want to examine those,” he said. “Some of them are prickly. Whoever did this might have snagged himself on something.”

  Banks gave him a look that said, You do your job and I’ll do mine.

  CHAPTER 10

  The midnight air had turned brisk, but Codella could smell the humid fragrance of tree buds as she walked between the idle cars lining the curbs. Yellow crime scene tape fluttered against the wrought-iron church gates like ribbon tied on a giant gift box. A crime scene, she thought guiltily, was a gift.

  She signed in with the recording officer, and he stepped aside to let her through, but a flash of light on the ground in the distance caught her attention. She squinted farther up the dark street. “I’ll be right back,” she told the officer. Then she followed the light past the parked squad cars and CSU van. A vibrating cell phone was lying face up on the sidewalk near the curb.

  She stooped to pick it up, and then she stopped herself. What was it doing here? She peered through the tinted passenger window of a silver Honda minivan parked at the curb. She could just discern the dark mass of something or someone within. She rapped on the minivan roof, but there was no movement inside the vehicle. She pulled her jacket sleeve over her fingers and gingerly lifted the door latch. The car was unlocked, and as she swung the heavy door open, the van’s dome light came on.

  A woman lay on her left side across the passenger seat. Her straight grayish-brown hair was swept back from her face. Her cheek rested on the empty cup holders molded into the center console, and her open eyes seemed fixed on the dashboard. Codella pressed two fingers against the side of her fleshy neck but felt no pulse. She hadn’t expected to find one. It was obvious from the bluish cast of the woman’s lips and the unnatural position of her head that no heartbeat pumped blood through her body.

  Codella stepped back from the door and shouted to the recording officer. “Get Detective Haggerty out here.”

  Haggerty arrived a minute later, his hands in the pockets of his blazer. “Claire?” He watched her turn away from the minivan.

  “Hey.” She smiled.

  “Hey.” A frown of confusion wrinkled his forehead. “What are you doing here?”

  “You called for Homicide. I’m on call. You must have known they’d send me.”

  “Of course. I mean, what are you doing out here?” He gestured to the street and the cars.

  “Oh.” She sighed with relief—he had expected her.

  Then she signaled him to the passenger side of the van. “Look in there. Be careful not to touch anything.”

  He bent close to the open door and peered in. “Son of a bitch.” He pressed his lips together in disgust. “I should have had someone walk this block already. We searched the church, of course, but we just started the canvass—shit! You’re here one minute and you find a body I missed.”

  The words were an undeserved indictment. Just as she had feared, he was letting slip his insecurity—and maybe some of his dormant anger—about their “unequal status.” Was he already regretting having made the call he knew would bring her here? Was he afraid to work with her again—afraid she would detect a weakness in his judgment or a lack of thoroughness that would render him less desirable to her? Wasn’t it just as possible that working together again would reveal qualities in her that he found unappealing—her intensity, her aggressiveness? If he surrendered to his feelings of inadequacy right now, she knew, they were doomed in more ways than one. And having gone through so much to get where they were now, she didn’t want either of them to fuck it up.

  She gripped his arm and yanked him into the street, away from the ears of a uniformed officer making his way toward the car. She pointed a finger in front of his face. “Look at me. Remember who I am.”

  He glanced at her briefly and then down at the pavement.

  “I said look at me, Brian.” She waited until his blue eyes locked onto hers. “I would have missed that body too if I’d been in your shoes. You had a scene to contain. You were alone. You had a church full of possible suspects. The only reason I found her is that her phone is on the sidewalk over there”—she pointed—“and it lighted up while I was signing in.”

  He gazed to where she was pointing.

  “I’m not your enemy,” she continued, “but if you don’t want to work with me, say it right now, and I’ll get someone else over here.” She waited.

  “No. I’m sorry. It’s just—”

  “It’s all in your mind,” she told him. “Whatever you’re thinking, it’s yours—not mine. I don’t doubt you. You’re the only partner I ever wanted to work with, remember?”

  He still seemed unconvinced, and the intimacy they’d shared just an hour ago had apparently vanished as well.

  “We’ve got two dead bodies here.” She squeezed his arm tightly. “We’ve got a chance to work together again. Don’t spoil it. Reset your head. Right now.”

  He finally nodded. “Okay.”

  They turned simultaneously as the footsteps of the uniformed officer approached. “Everything all right, detectives?”

  “Call for more backup,” ordered Haggerty. “We’ve got a second crime scene here.” He turned back to her. “I’ll go alert the CSU guys that their job is only beginning.”

  Codella nodded. “Chances are this death is related to the other one. Does anyone in that church have their shit together enough to try to ID her for us?”

  “Yeah. I know who can do it.”

  “Good. Bring him out here.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Roger Sturgis watched Detective Haggerty walk toward him. “Can you please come with me?”

  The question wasn’t really a request, Roger understood, and he pushed out his chair to stand. His eyes scanned the faces of the other vestry members seated at the Community Room tables. Peter was still clicking his pen, and he kept licking his lips as if he were parched. Vivian was reading her pocket Bible, and Rose had her elbows on the table and her head propped in her hands.

  As he passed Susan’s table, he caught her narrowed eyes and quickly looked away. He squeezed the ring of keys in his pocket as he followed the detective across the corridor, through the south doors, and down the parish house steps. He had the uncanny feeling that he’d just been taken prisoner, and he flashed to the February morning in 1991 when the armored vehicle he and his men were in broke down in the desert and Iraqi soldiers surrounded them. In the endless five minutes before help arrived, he’d imagined his roadside execution and whispered the SERE mantra: survival, evasion, resistance, escape. He found himself thinking those words now.

  On the sidewalk beyond the gate, the detective turned left. Five or six brownstones ahead, bright lights turned darkness into daylight. “What’s going on?” Sturgis asked.

  Detective Haggerty pointed to a minivan parked in the bath of white light. “There’s a body in that car, Mr. Sturgis, and we think it might be someone from the church. We’d like you to have a look.”

  Roger felt the tension in his shoulders relax slightly. He loosened his grip on the k
eys in his pocket. “Another body? Another murder, you mean?”

  And now all his apprehension dissolved. He wasn’t under arrest. The police were not going to interrogate him. They merely needed his help. They had sized him up as the parishioner with the strongest constitution. And that was certainly true. Roger couldn’t imagine any of the women vestry members handling the task—except Susan, of course—and he didn’t even want to think about how Peter Linton would react to seeing the body. “Whatever I can do to help,” he told Haggerty.

  As they continued toward the vehicle, Roger wondered if any dead body could shock him. Near the end of Desert Storm, he’d seen the charred remains of an Iraqi soldier who had tried to escape his scorched convoy truck along the Highway of Death. The man’s burned fingers still gripped the side of the truck, and his blackened face, with sizzled flesh peeling back from bone, wore a grimace of agony. What could shock Roger more than that?

  Haggerty lifted the crime scene tape, and Roger ducked under it. Just inside the tape stood a woman. She was seven or eight inches shorter than Haggerty, and her cobalt-blue eyes demanded appreciation. Her black hair gleamed under the crime scene floodlights. A gold shield hung off her belt. Roger wasn’t usually attracted to white women, but he found himself unexpectedly captivated by this one. And she reciprocated his look of interest, he thought.

  “I’m Detective Codella,” she said. “We need you to look inside the front seat and tell us if you know this woman.”

  He nodded, his eyes dipping. The detective’s breasts were the same size as his wife Kendra’s.

  “Don’t touch anything,” she instructed him. “Just look.”

  He felt her eyes follow him to the minivan. He stuck his head through the open passenger door, and a uniformed officer aimed a strong flashlight beam over his shoulder and onto the figure within. Roger stared at the face for several seconds. She was such a large-boned woman, he reflected, and he’d always found her haircut unflattering. She was one of those St. Paul’s women—there were so many of them—who didn’t feel the need to conceal their age or compensate for physical imperfections. They let their hair go gray. They eschewed makeup. They came to church wearing casual, outdated clothing. Their shoes were flat and practical.

  He stared at her floral blouse. The pattern was strangely delicate for such a large woman. How odd it was, he thought, to see her like this just an hour after watching her ferociously scribble vestry meeting minutes. She’d probably rushed out of the meeting thinking about her next snack—not her imminent death. Just as Philip had likely left the Blue Lounge intending to celebrate his night’s victory with an extra dry martini. People who’d never been ill or at war always assumed they’d live on and on.

  “Well?” Codella broke his train of thought. “Do you know her?”

  He pulled his head back from the minivan’s open door. “I’m afraid I do. It’s Emily Flounders. She’s the vestry secretary and runs the Sunday school program.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Codella stared at Roger Sturgis as a uniformed officer escorted him back to the church. Then she gazed up the block at one of the canvassing cops climbing the front steps of a brownstone. She looked across the street where another officer stood in the glow of a porch light speaking with a man in a bathrobe. A death in the night always woke the living. Most of these Upper West Siders, roused from their sound sleeps, would not have seen or heard anything, but there was always that outside chance an insomniac had looked through a window at just the right moment to see what had happened to Philip Graves or Emily Flounders.

  Codella scanned the dark brownstone windows facing the church. Would those canvassers encounter the killer without realizing it? Was the perpetrator peering out from one of those windows right now, watching her and Haggerty, smiling at the scene his actions had brought to life?

  Every crime scene was similar in some ways and yet so different in others. Many told a simple, straightforward story that required no inferences or interpretation. Others were like ancient texts that you had to decipher one symbol at a time before you could make meaning. This one did not feel straightforward, and that pleased Codella in a way she would never admit to others, of course. At the beginning of a complicated case, she always felt a secret guilt at the core of her exhilaration.

  She felt Haggerty’s eyes on her now. “What are you thinking?” he asked.

  “I’m thinking it’s going to be a long night, and I better call McGowan before we get started so he doesn’t feel left out.” She pulled her phone from her pocket and pictured McGowan in a coma-like sleep after one too many shots. Lately the whites of his eyes were road maps in the mornings.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Call Muñoz. We’re going to need him.” Maybe, she thought, she could manage to run this case without involving McGowan’s boys, who would only make her life difficult. “And then we start interviewing those people in the church.” She gripped his arm and looked him in the eyes. “Until we determine otherwise, we’ve got to assume one of them is our killer.”

  He nodded. Then he leaned in and kissed her lips. “I know that’s the last one I’ll get for a while.”

  CHAPTER 13

  Detective Eduardo Muñoz rolled onto his side. He watched Michael get up from the mattress, pull on his briefs, and run his fingers through his tousled black hair. Michael’s usually pale skin was flushed. “Wait here,” he said.

  What was he up to now? Muñoz wondered. Michael had a seemingly infinite store of hyperactive energy that wasn’t sapped even by sex. He could spend hours glued to his computer, and when he wasn’t immersed in his work, he was redesigning the apartment. Did all software engineers rearrange their physical surroundings the same way they manipulated their virtual environments? In the past three months, Michael had spent almost every night with Muñoz, and in that time, he’d completely transformed Muñoz’s one-bedroom apartment. The glass vase in the vestibule was now filled with fresh flowers. The bathroom had a new rug. The linen closet had been reorganized so that sheets and towels no longer spilled out whenever Muñoz opened the door. The couch and chairs had been subtly moved. Michael had fixed the loose hinges on the kitchen cupboards, repositioned the contents of the cabinets, and filled the refrigerator with food. He had, Muñoz realized with nothing but pleasure, quietly and confidently altered not only Muñoz’s physical world but also the entire emotional landscape of his life.

  Now Muñoz heard the refrigerator door open and close. He listened to the rattle of dishes and recognized the sound of the silverware drawer opening. It occurred to him that if this obviously brilliant man—who had pursued him with calculation and persistence—were suddenly to disappear from his life, he wouldn’t enjoy his solitude the way he once had.

  He slid his palm toward the side of the mattress Michael had occupied. One year ago, he would never have allowed someone to share his bed. Back then he was undercover in more ways than one—as a narcotics officer and as a gay man. He didn’t have relationships. He hooked up, and never at his place. But now he had his gold shield, and thanks to Marty Blackstone, the most obnoxious detective at the one-seven-one, the whole precinct knew he was gay. A few detectives still used the nickname Blackstone had christened him with six months ago—Rainbow Dick. Hiding was no longer an option, and as difficult as that was at times, he was glad to finally be himself.

  Michael returned to the bedroom with two ceramic bowls and handed one to Muñoz. Inside each bowl were scoops of coffee ice cream floating in hot fudge. Michael crawled back into bed, and they sat side by side against the headboard. The hot fudge was warm, and the ice cream was smooth and rich. The moment seemed perfect to Muñoz. “Why don’t you just move in with me?” he heard himself say.

  Michael’s spoon stopped on the way to his mouth. “Is that a sugar rush talking?”

  Muñoz laughed. “You fed me ice cream on our first date, remember?”

  “That wasn’t exactly a date, but yes, I remember.”

  “Did you f
eed everyone ice cream?”

  “No one else stayed long enough. But you wanted more. You just didn’t know it.”

  “Oh, but you did?”

  Michael laughed. “I didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out. You didn’t stop talking. It was so obvious you were there for more than a fuck. And I suppose I fell for you right then. Fell in love with you, I mean.”

  Muñoz stared at him.

  “Uh-oh. I scared the big bad detective.”

  Muñoz set his bowl on the table by his bed. “What makes you think I’m scared?” He took the bowl out of Michael’s fingers and set it next to his. Then he reached his hand around the back of Michael’s head and gently pulled the smaller man toward him. “I love you too,” he said, and the words felt natural and right. He leaned closer still, and they shared the taste of hot fudge and coffee until the ring of Muñoz’s cell phone intruded. He looked at the number on the screen. “Dammit. I have to take this.”

  CHAPTER 14

  Rose followed Detective Haggerty out of the Community Room and down the wide corridor. Detective Codella and a police officer were huddled with Mother Anna in front of the Blue Lounge. As Rose passed them, she thought she heard the woman detective speak Emily Flounders’s name, and she distinctly heard the police officer utter the words “next of kin.” Haggerty touched Rose’s arm and urged her quickly around the corner, past the parish kitchen, and down an alcove into Mother Anna’s small office.

  “What’s happening?” she demanded as he shut the door behind them.

  “Have a seat, Mrs. Bartruff.” He stepped behind the rector’s desk.

  “Is Emily all right?”

  He frowned.

  “I heard them mention her name. Did something happen to her?”