Victims (5 page)

For which, of course, she had to be respected. Obviously, this did not make her popular with the guys at the 112th. What they knew they didn’t like; what they
didn’t
know bothered the hell out of them.

There was a light finger-tapping at his door, and Miranda Torres came in and took a seat next to her partner. She had that alert, wary look, her head held just slightly to one side, as though she was listening for more than just what was being said. She was a beautiful girl and she made the captain uncomfortable. He wondered if Dunphy had had any thoughts about her: fantasies, daydreams. He doubted Dunphy would make any moves; he was too smart for that. Probably.

“Good report,” he said to Torres. She waited politely. “Okay,” O’Connor said, “what the hell are we dealing with here? No signs of robbery or attempted robbery. No signs of sexual assault or attempted; guy stalks her and attacks her right out in the middle of the street, under the lights. No attempt at concealment. The guy is yelling his head off at her, like they’re arguing.” He flipped through the report, then narrowed his eyes, adjusted the distance until he could see the typing clearly. “The guy was yelling at her in Spanish?”

“We’re working on a translation, Captain,” Miranda said. “No one we spoke to understood Spanish, but it seems, phonetically at least, that he was calling her names: cheat, liar, thief. And a few...sexual references.”

Her delicacy was natural, as if she sensed O’Connor’s discomfort at her presence in his squad. There was a ladylike quality, a fine line that she had drawn around herself, an unspoken demand that she be accepted and respected on her own terms.

O’Connor nodded. “So. Maybe we’re dealing with a lovers’ quarrel. Who the hell knows. The girl thought her mother was in Florida, but she’s coming to her apartment anyway instead of going home from the hospital where she works. Claimed she had a sick headache, so she left work two hours early. She’s got a key to her mother’s apartment in her hand. Which seems to indicate she believed she was heading to an empty apartment.”

O’Connor gazed over the top of his sliding-down eyeglasses and waited for comments.

Miranda sat, pen poised over a notebook.

Dunphy said, “That might indicate that she had an arranged meeting with the guy. A couple of hours of bliss, maybe, then home to hubby. Who the hell would know the difference. A possibility.”

“But why wouldn’t the guy wait until they were in the apartment if he was planning to attack her? Why in hell was he so out in the open about it?”

Neither partner answered. They waited as their captain continued thinking out loud.

“The consensus, so far, seems to be that this has nothing to do with the other murders. That this was a one-on-one thing, whatever else the hell it was. That makes sense, right?”

“The circumstances of this killing are in no way—not one single way—similar to the other killings,” Dunphy said.

“There is nothing to indicate a similarity,” Torres said. It registered with O’Connor that her answer was tentative and open-ended.

The other three killings in Queens County seemed to be random sex murders. Within the last nine months, there had been three late-night attacks by an unidentified rapist-murderer who had followed women from deserted subways or bus stops, dragged them into alleys or bushes, raped and murdered them. He had been named in the headlines “The Beast of Queens.”

The first victim had been found in Elmhurst at the end of January. She had been a sixty-three-year-old practical nurse. The second attack in April had been in Long Island City; a twenty-one-year-old factory worker on her way home. The third victim, an eighteen-year-old on her way home from night classes at Queens College, had been brutalized and killed two blocks from her home in Queens Village in June. There were definite similarities in all three attacks. Each victim had died from a puncture wound in the jugular. Very messy. There were certain other reasons to believe that the crimes had been committed by the same person.

“I talked with Jaffee, over at Homicide, a while ago,” O’Connor said. “He’s anxious to keep this one separate and apart. Hell, all we need is a fourth unsolved serial killing on the streets of beautiful safe Queens County. He’s letting out a low, casual word through the PR people that this is very possibly a lovers’-quarrel kind of thing. Of course, if we find the guy within the next twenty-four hours and he confesses to all four murders, we’d be the first to announce we got the Beast himself. At any rate, we’re separating this killing out for logical reasons. It doesn’t connect with the other murders.”

O’Connor took off his smudged, scratched glasses, blinked rapidly, then focused on Miranda Torres. She was an outline, sitting absolutely motionless, her face tilted, waiting. He put the glasses back on and flipped through the report.

“Well, we don’t have to search too hard for witnesses,” he said. “How many people we got in the field, Jim?”

Dunphy closed his eyes for a moment. This was his case—his and Miranda’s—and they were working with Homicide. It was his first homicide in many years. When he was transferred from downtown Brooklyn to Forest Hills, his job had changed drastically. He had to get back into gear.

“We got eight squad members—nine, what’s-his-name is back from vacation; he’s fielding the phones. And Homicide has a crew. And we’ve got about six uniforms doing interviews.”

“This guy had a regular audience,” O’Connor said. Dunphy shook his head in disgust. Torres did not react in any way. “Their statements are pretty consistent, too. Just slight differences depending on the perspective. Jeez,
this
one takes the all-time cake, doesn’t it?
The mother.”

They let it sit there for a moment. There was genuine hostility coming from Dunphy. He still wasn’t sure how the hell Torres had gotten to the mother before anyone else had. Along with Mike Stein. What the hell was that connection, anyway?

There wasn’t too much to say about a mother whose daughter was being murdered right outside her window. She hadn’t denied knowledge of the fact: just of the identity of the victim.

And no one had called 911. No one had done anything at all. They had just watched.

O’Connor flipped through the report, ran his finger quickly, then held it under the words he had been seeking.

“What’s this about ‘I thought it was the Spanish girl’?” he asked Torres, as though she would understand and have an explanation.

“According to several other witnesses, besides the mother, there was an assumption that the victim was a young Hispanic woman who lives on the top floor of the corner building.”

“So then we have a possible mistaken identity,” O’Connor said. That was a starting point. “You checking her out?”

Dunphy answered. “I’ve got a meet with the manager of the building. In about an hour. Torres and I—Miranda and I are splitting up interviews. Doubling back. You know, clarity with the light of day.”

“Yeah, well, here’s a little fog on your clarity.” O’Connor searched through the collection of papers on his desk, then pulled out a telephone message slip. He glanced at it, then leaned forward. “Detective Torres, do you know Mike Stein?”

“I’ve read his work. I didn’t know who he was last night. He acted like brass, and so I...” She stopped, shrugged.

“Acted like brass. Yeah, he’s got some brass, all right,” O’Connor said. “You don’t know him, then?”

Dunphy turned toward his partner. There was an accusation in the captain’s question. He had worked with Torres long enough to catch the stiffening of her spine, the movement along her jaw as she clenched her teeth.

“Is there some question you want to ask me, Captain? Some specific question?”

There was a sharp tense silence in the room as the men exchanged glances. There was a mixture of anger, tempered by respect. This girl didn’t pull her punches, and she either didn’t have the slightest trace of common sense or felt so protected that she didn’t bother with games.

“I just asked you a specific question, Detective Torres.”

Dunphy was an interested observer. Despite twenty years of friendship, he never crossed the official lines of O’Connor’s authority. It was one of the unwritten rules: the boss was, after all, the boss.

It wasn’t really that Torres was challenging the captain, although it seemed that way. It was more a let’s cut the crap and ask me what you want to ask me. Which took guts, no matter who was in her corner.

“I never met Mr. Stein before last night, Captain. When I went with him to Mrs. Hynes’s apartment, I had assumed he was a superior officer. He didn’t actually say that, but he... acted in a certain way. I did not know he was a journalist until later on. When my partner told me who he was.”

“Uh-huh.” O’Connor leaned back in his chair, glaring at her. “Then you wouldn’t know why Mr. Mike Stein put in a request—through certain channels that make a request more than a request—that you be assigned to him? That you be his ‘liaison officer’ during this phase of this investigation.”

Her surprise was genuine. Dunphy, who liked the kid, was glad.

“Well, then I will explain it to you.
Specifically.
Apparently, this case has interested Mike Stein. He plans to do some articles about it. About the witnesses who watched this girl die and didn’t do a damn thing to help her. For some reason or other he felt that
you
would be a good liaison for him.” O’Connor reached his hand to the telephone, tapped it, then said, “Stein has selected out this case for himself. There will be very low press coverage. No one else gets anything. He has permission—
absolute permission
—to see every report in every phase of the investigation. Including Homicide’s findings, the technical findings, whatever. He also wants you to accompany him—or maybe the other way around, he wants to accompany you—on some of your interviews with the witnesses.”

O’Connor studied her for several seconds, then asked, “What’s your reaction to this, Detective Torres?”

“If that’s what my assignment is, then that’s what my assignment is.”

“Uh-huh,” O’Connor said. “I guess I don’t have to tell you to be careful. To be very careful. Mike Stein is an unknown quantity. One day he’s for us, the next day he’s on our case. Be aware of that and act accordingly.”

Damn, O’Connor thought; she resents being told. But was smart enough not to say so.

“Yes, sir, Captain. I shall be very cautious with this Mr. Stein.”

For the first time, he caught what Dunphy had told him: when she was very uptight, when she was exerting a tough control, her speech patterns changed. Sounded almost as though she were speaking in translation.

He handed her a slip of paper with the information she needed: where to meet Mike Stein. She had a free hour and she said she would use the time to organize her material and to set aside copies of reports for Stein.

O’Connor glanced quickly at her as she left the room: great figure, if a little thin. He shook his head and said to Dunphy, “You got yourself a hard case for a partner, pal.”

“She’ll be okay with Stein. What the hell is he up to, anyway?”

O’Connor shrugged. “Whatever he wants, we know who
his
friend is.”

Nearly fifteen years ago, Mike Stein had accompanied the Police Department’s Chief of Operations, Arthur Cordovan, to Vietnam. Cordovan’s only son had been sent home in a body bag: accident victim; run over by an Army truck. The son, an intelligence officer, had written his father a series of letters describing a huge illicit market operating with the knowledge, approval and participation of some high-ranking Army personnel. He had gotten in over his head. He had nowhere to take his information. He had turned down lucrative offers; he had fielded various threats by trying to take his information higher. He had been run over by an Army truck. Accidentally.

Cordovan had contacted Mike Stein.

The two men spent weeks investigating, and their findings were described in Mike’s Pulitzer Prize-winning series of articles about corruption, graft and murder. He named the names that Cordovan’s son had uncovered. Together, the two men were responsible for congressional hearings, for a massive shake-up with the Army hierarchy, for several courts-martial and convictions. The murderer of Cordovan’s son, however, could not be located. There was reason to assume he too ended up an “accident victim.”

Stein, despite the fact that he was known to write the truth, however he saw it, despite the fact that several of his recent articles had ripped Police Department personnel and procedures, had carte blanche through Cordovan’s office.

He had in the past written in defense of police officers when the action they had taken on the scene was characterized as brutality and racially motivated. He was known to drive a straight line, to write what he found to be fact and to let things take their course from there.

Jim Dunphy sensed the easing of tension, the relaxing of his old friend. It was safe to make a joke that he wouldn’t have made five minutes ago.

“So tell me something, Bill,” he said. “What if Torres didn’t want to ‘work liaison’ with Stein? What if she went to
her
‘friend’—whoever the hell he is—and said, ‘Hey, do something, I don’t want to work with this journalist’? You think her friend would be able to cancel out Chief Cordovan?”

Captain O’Connor blinked through his smeary glasses. There were times in a police department, just as in the real world, when it was wiser to just stand mute and leave things alone.

But it did bother him. How the hell did Miranda Torres, from the South Bronx, acquire a rabbi so heavy that no one seemed able to get a line on him?

W
HEN SHE WAS A
little girl, her mother used to tell her, “Miranda, speak softly, nice and quiet. When you talk to the sisters in the school, when you talk to the grocery man, when you talk to that nice library lady who lets you take home all those books. It shows respect, Miranda, and they will see you are a good girl.”

Her mother thought that all the people she came into contact with were in the position of dispensing or withholding gifts: knowledge, food, information, opportunity. Nothing came about directly because of what Miranda herself had accomplished but because of how people in positions of power viewed her accomplishments.