Saints Of New York (12 page)
Read Saints Of New York Online
Authors: R.J. Ellory
'We
have a good two dozen,' she told Parrish. 'These are people that knew Rebecca
by name, shared classes, some of the friends she hung out with. We appreciate
the need for this, but the truth of the matter is that they are all pretty
shaken up by what's happened. The principal said a few words to the whole
school yesterday, and we've had a priest in from St. Barnaby's to talk to the
ones that needed . . . well, the ones that took it hardest.'
'I
really appreciate your help,' Parrish said, and he smiled as sincerely as he
could. His head hurt from the night before. He'd chewed a couple of aspirin on
the way over, and the bitter aftertaste hung there in the back of his mouth.
He could have used
a
cup of coffee
but he knew that getting one would be more trouble than it was worth.
First
up was a frail and timid girl with thick-lensed spectacles. She spent five
minutes trying not to look scared, and seemed extraordinarily relieved to get
out of the room. Next was a dark- haired teenager who said he'd dated Rebecca.
'Well,
kind of dated,' he added, smiling awkwardly. He
had
braces
top and bottom, his hand hovering in front of his mouth in an effort to hide
them when he spoke. 'We were just friends really. But this was like six, twelve
months ago, and we never really went anyplace, you know? We just hung out. We
were into the same kind of tunes, that's all.'
Third
was a girl not dissimilar in height and build to Rebecca, but her hair was
darker, longer, tied back behind her head in a ponytail. She cried from start
to finish, in her hand a balled-up fist of Kleenex, a metal stud in her tongue
that seemed to make speech a chore.
After
an hour Parrish was fading. Ten gone, thirteen or fourteen to go.
It
was a young man called Greg Kaufman that changed things.
Like
that other girl that my sister knew.
'I'm
sorry?' Parrish said.
'The
other girl. The other one who died last year. It reminded me of that. I mean,
Rebecca I didn't know very well really. We took a couple of classes together and
she seemed real nice, but when I heard about it I thought of the girl that died
last Christmas, you know? I think she was strangled as well.'
'What
girl?'
'I
don't remember her name - Clara, Carla, Carly - something like that. My sister
would know. My sister and her were real good friends.'
'And
your sister is here at this school?'
'No,
she's at Waterbury up near the Grand Street subway station.'
'And
your sister's name?'
'Hannah,
Hannah Kaufman.'
Parrish
made a note of it.
One
other girl provided something of interest. Brenda Grant said she and Rebecca
had spoken about Danny, Rebecca's brother.
'Becca
told me he knew he was in trouble about something or other.' She looked up at
Parrish nervously. 'You know - um - I guess you know he was into drugs, right?'
She asked the question hesitantly, as if this was somehow her fault.
'Yes,
Brenda, I knew Danny quite well.'
'Well,
I don't know if this trouble he was in was anything to do with the drugs, but
Becca told me that she was really worried about him, that he might have gotten
himself into some difficulties.' 'Did she say what kind of difficulties? Or who
he might have been in trouble with?'
'No,
sir, she didn't say anything specific, just that she thought he was into
something deep, and she was worried about him.'
'Did
you know that Rebecca used to run away from home to spend time with Danny?'
Brenda
glanced at Ruth Doyle.
'It's
okay, Brenda,' Doyle said. 'Detective Parrish is here to find out as much as he
can about what might have happened to Becca. He's not going to get mad or
anything like that, and you're certainly not in any trouble.'
'Yes,
she told me that she would go there at weekends sometimes. Not every weekend.'
'And
did she say what they used to do together?'
Brenda
frowned.
'Like
they would hang out, maybe go see movies, or go see a band? Something like
that?'
'I
don't know what they used to do. She just used to tell me that she'd been to
see her brother at the weekend or whatever, and I would ask how he was, and she
would say he was good, or he was doing better, and sometimes she would say he
was doing worse.'
'And
do you know if Rebecca ever took drugs?'
'No
way, never in a million years. She wasn't like that at all. She was really
serious about that kind of thing.'
'Okay,
Brenda, this is really appreciated.'
'Is
that all?' Brenda asked, and started to rise from her chair.
'One
other little thing,' Parrish said. 'Did she ever use nail varnish?'
'Huh?'
'Nail
varnish. To color her nails, you know?'
'No,
I don't think she did. She didn't use a lot of make-up or anything like that.
She had really nice skin . . .' Brenda hesitated. She seemed confused for a
moment. 'She had really nice skin,'
she
repeated, and
then it seemed to Frank Parrish that she was ready to cry. It seemed that
perhaps she had put it all on hold, and finally - in that moment, having to
remember so much about
her
friend - she had
at last confronted the simple fact that her friend was dead. She knew then that
Becca wasn't ever coming back because someone had choked her to death.
Parrish
left St. Francis of Assisi School at a quarter to four. He should have called
Radick, had him drive over and pick him up, but instead he walked to the subway
station and took a ride to Grand Street. He found the Waterbury School without
difficulty, presented himself, his ID, asked to see the principal.
Principal
Bergen, another capable, forthright, uncomplicated type, granted Parrish an
audience without hesitation. She was an attractive woman, wore a wedding band.
'I
am working on a murder investigation,' Parrish told her. 'A student from the
St. Francis School was found strangled. I spoke to a friend of hers and she
mentioned that you might have had—'
'Karen
Pulaski,' Bergen said. 'That's who you're talking about.'
'What
was the deal with that?'
'Last
Christmas, couple of days after, the twenty-eighth I think, she was found
strangled. She had only recently joined the school. Had been here - I don't
know - six months, nine perhaps. It was a terrible, terrible thing.'
'And
the case was never solved?'
'Not
that I'm aware of, Detective. I haven't heard anything for a several months
now. I can only assume that if it was solved the police would've had the
courtesy to inform me.'
'Never
guaranteed, Mrs Bergen,' Parrish replied. 'I can find out for you and let you
know.'
'Don't
trouble yourself, Detective. Perhaps it's better to go on assuming that it was
resolved swiftly and expediently, but the relevant detectives have been so busy
with other incidents that they just forgot to let me know.'
Parrish
didn't reply. He knew the case was open. He just felt it.
'And
the investigating officers on the case?' he asked.
Bergen
shook her head. 'I don't remember now. They came up from the nearest precinct,
over near Gardner and Metropolitan I think.'
'I'll
find out,' Parrish said.
'You
think your girl and ours were murdered by the same person?' Bergen asked.
Parrish
shrugged. 'I shouldn't think so, Mrs Bergen, but I have to follow up everything
I can, you see? Sometimes it's little more than a formality, other times it
goes somewhere.'
Bergen
rose and walked Parrish to the door.
'Appreciate
your time,' he told her.
'You're
welcome, Detective. Good luck.'
Parrish
called Radick from a payphone.
'Go
on home, Jimmy,' he said. 'I'm still over in Williamsburg. I'll get the subway
back. You take off, have a good evening, and I'll do the Active Invest report
when I get back.'
'How
d'you get on over there?'
'Not
a great deal of anything. Couple of things to check up on, but nothing positive
as yet.'
'Thanks
for doing the report, Frank.'
'Sure.
No problem. See you tomorrow.'
Parrish
walked three blocks and found a diner. He was starving hungry, freezing cold.
The
special was some kind of mystery meat stew. A lot of carrots, little substance.
He ate it anyway. After that he took the subway from Grand to Jefferson, walked
up Flushing Avenue to Stewart, took a left and walked the six blocks to
Scholes. Here he turned right and found the Williamsburg 91st Precinct on
Gardner and Metropolitan.
They
were helpful enough. The desk sergeant found him
a
uniform,
the uniform showed him where Actives were stored, and by seven Parrish was
seated in the station house canteen with the Karen Pulaski file open in front
of him.
Everything
seemed to be present. Records of date, time
of
dispatch,
dispatch number; number of the city ambulance unit that responded; name, unit
and number of the first officer at the scene; the incident tracking number, the
name of the attending Homicide detective - Richard Franco - the ME's report.
The crime scene pictures were there, and the QA sheets from the initial
canvass; lists of evidence-bag numbers for her shoes, her clothes, her
belongings; the crime lab report, and reference numbers for the skin, hair and
blood samples for later DNA comparisons.
Karen
had been sixteen when she died. From her crime scene pictures she seemed not
unlike Rebecca - fresh-faced, youthful, blonde. There were similar abrasions,
bruising and ligature marks around her neck and throat, but Karen had not been
strangled manually. A quarter-inch rope, Parrish guessed, perhaps even a cable.
There
were indications of recent sexual intercourse, even semen deposits, but the DNA
report and coding analysis from January of 2008 indicated that the sample had
not matched anyone on file within the New York database. Karen appeared to have
been an only child. Her parents - Elizabeth and David Pulaski - lived about
eight or nine blocks south on Troutman Street. Both employed, the father a
management accountant, the mother a receptionist for a local orthodontist.
Karen had gone to see friends on the 26th, the day after Christmas. By all
accounts she had boarded a bus on Irving Avenue opposite Bushwick Park, and
vanished into nowhere. Two days later, approximately four in the afternoon of
December 28th, her body had been found in a dumpster behind a hotel on Humboldt
Street. Detective Franco had been thorough. He had traced the bus driver, and
then a couple of other passengers had come forward as a result of a newsflash
on the 29th, but then it went quiet.
Karen's
friends, her boyfriend, her parents, even the girls she knew from a local mall,
seemed to have shed no light on what might have happened. She had far better
than average grades at school, seemed happy at home, was pretty and popular. If
she had run away she hadn't made it far. Time of death, though rarely accurate,
said she drew her last breath between eight and midnight, night of the 27th.
The dumpster where her body had been left was the secondary, and no primary had
been found. Six, twelve, even twenty-four-hour TOD spreads weren't uncommon.
Unless liver temp, was taken on site the DC would've had to have gone by rigor.
Rigor is evident in the smaller facial muscles and the ends of the fingers
within a couple of hours, but rigor sets in, dissipates, and then returns over
a more substantial time frame, and thus accurate determination of the victim's
time of death from rigor has to be done twice over a span of some hours. And an
external crime scene is far more difficult.
Even
with an internal, crime scene evidence starts to deteriorate as soon as it
becomes a crime scene. A homicide detective who appreciated this fact would
deal with the body last. The body was going nowhere, no-one would touch it,
whereas fibers, hairs, footprints, anything transient, would vanish fast.
Inside, you didn't have to deal with inclement weather, the wind and rain
wiping away all traces of who'd been there. With a property you could ascertain
ownership: was there forced entry, and if no forced entry then the possibility
that the perp was perhaps known to the vic? You might have an apartment block
where people were aware of the comings and goings of their neighbors, curiosity
occasioned by an unfamiliar face. The physical evidence left by a killer was
far easier to isolate in an enclosed room than in a snow-covered tenement
alleyway littered with broken bottles, spent needles and garbage. What was
absent was often as important as what was there. And the more police that were
present, the more difficult it became to control the scene; even experienced
people made mistakes, and sometimes the DC - the individual whose job it was to
authorize the movement of the body - often came in and made his initial
examination before the detective had finished.
The
Holy Trinity - physical evidence, eyewitnesses and confessions. Without the
first two it was rare to obtain the third.
In
the cases of both Rebecca Lange and Karen Pulaski, there was little physical
evidence, no eyewitnesses, and thus no-one
to
interrogate.
The
similarities between the two cases were the approximate age and appearance of
the girls, and the fact that they had been strangled. But Rebecca had been
choked by hand, whereas Karen had been strangled with a rope.
Parrish
closed the file and returned it to the office from
where
he'd taken it.
He
left the 91st a little after eight, walked back to Jefferson,
took
the subway to Lorimer Street. Here he
changed lines and
headed
south
to Brooklyn - Broadway, Flushing, Myrtle-Willoughby, Bedford-Nostrand,
south-west to Clinton-Washington, and
then
a
handful of minutes walk along Lafayette until he reached Clermont.
He
stopped at the liquor store on the corner of DeKalb and bought a bottle. He was
hungry again, wondered if there were any frozen pizzas left in the apartment.
He took a gamble and skipped the Seven-Eleven. He could always come back if
there was nothing at home. Come to that, he could always have another couple
of glasses and forget about eating altogether . . .
He
waited for the elevator, aware that one of his neighbors waited too. He did not
acknowledge her until the elevator door opened, and then he realized it was the
woman from the floor beneath. Mrs Langham, he believed. Her daughter was with
her, couldn't have been more than six or seven years old. Parrish held the
elevator door, allowed them entry first, and he smiled at Mrs Langham. The
woman did not smile back. She either knew he was police and disapproved, or she
didn't know and disapproved anyway. The bottle in his hand perhaps didn't
contribute to the atmosphere. She more than likely knew he lived alone, and in
this building - perhaps not a great deal different from many other buildings
across the city - people didn't feel comfortable with a police officer as a
neighbor. Until they got burgled, or someone tried to mug them on the
stairwell. Then you became the most important person in the world.
Parrish
was aware of the little girl staring.
He
looked down and smiled at her.
The
little girl beamed back at him - such enthusiasm, such lack of preconceptions.
Parrish
opened his mouth to speak, but was cut short by the mother, invoking maternal
authority in a forced whisper.
'Grace
. . . stop staring. It's rude.'
Parrish
watched the little girl's smile vanish, and then the elevator stopped, the
doors opened, and Grace Langham and her disapproving mother stepped out.
The
little girl turned as the doors came to, and she raised her hand in farewell.
Parrish
waved back, and they were gone.
Frank
Parrish was in his kitchen by eight-forty-five. He was a third of a bottle down
by nine-thirty, and he made do with a can of tuna that he found at the back of
the cupboard.