Saints Of New York (34 page)

Richard
McKee was the fourteenth interview. He was in his late thirties, well-dressed,
his hair immaculate, his shoes shined. He had on the kind of frameless,
non-reflective spectacles worn by those who wished to appear as though they
weren't wearing spectacles at all, but every once in a while he turned his head
and the light reflected violet and pale blue off the surfaces and obscured his
eyes.

It
was nearly two in the afternoon. They had questioned a little more than half of
the employees, and - as yet - there had been nothing significant, nothing that
raised the hairs on the nape of Parrish's neck. They all seemed willing to
assist, understanding of the need to maintain confidentiality, genuinely
concerned that there might be a link between their own office and the deaths of
at least five young girls, all of whom were in some way already unfortunate,
disadvantaged, even lost.

'Seems
such a sad state of affairs when someone who's already a victim is victimized
again,' was the comment made by one Harold Kinnear, a fifty-three-year-old
veteran of the business. 'Been dealing with adoptees and runaways and state
wards and abandoned kids for nearly thirty years,' he went on. it wasn't easy
in the Eighties, and it's even harder now. Seems the more civilized and
sophisticated we become the less able we are to look after our own children.'

Parrish
felt that Kinnear's last comment could apply to him, perhaps one of the world's
very worst parents.

Parrish
found McKee immediately concerned and co-operative. Yes, he had heard about the
murder of Jennifer Baumann. Lester Young had told him. Lester had been the case
officer for the girl they were interviewing about the possible sexual abuse.

'I
can't remember the girl's name' McKee said. 'The one that had been abused.
Lester was her case officer, I know that much. I remember the one that was
murdered though. I remember when he told me about it. He went out there with
the police to see the Baumann girl, and then he found out someone had killed
her. It really shook him up.'

Radick
looked at Parrish. Parrish felt like his heart had dropped into the base of his
gut. Lester Young's name had come up for the second time . . .

'But
Lester doesn't work here anymore. He went over to the Probation Service.' McKee
sighed audibly. 'I try and remember all the cases, but it's difficult. So many
names and faces and files, and we're advised not to make any of it personal.'
He looked away for a moment, and then he smiled with effort and looked back at
Parrish. 'You try and make it impersonal, businesslike you know, but sometimes
you just can't help it.'

McKee
had also heard of Karen Pulaski, though he hadn't been aware of her murder.

'Of
course, anything I knew is now very old,' he said. 'And what I did know, well I
don't see that it would be relevant now.'

'And
the others?' Parrish asked him. 'Melissa Schaeffer, Nicole Benedict, Alice
Forrester, Rebecca Lange, Kelly Duncan?'

McKee
shook his head, and again the light played off the front of his glasses and
obscured his eyes. 'No,' he said, but there was a heartbeat of hesitation in
his voice.

'You're
sure, Mr McKee?' Radick said, leaning forward, and Parrish sensed that Radick
had picked up on the hesitation also.

'Like
I said, it's hard to remember every face and every name,' McKee said. 'I deal
with hundreds of cases every year, some of them closely, some of them in a
supervisory capacity, some of them simply because I'm on the referrals
checklist. I even do reviews for case officers in training. I look over their
files before they are submitted for examination. It's a lot of people in any
given year, and these girls . . . well, they go back two years . . .'

'I
just want you to take a moment and think, Mr McKee,' Parrish said, and he
repeated the girls' names - each one slowly, carefully, all the while watching
for the slightest shift in McKee
's
expression.

'No,'
McKee said, his tone definite, his expression unchanging throughout. 'I really
can't say that any of those other names ring a bell with me. Of course, if
anything comes to mind later I'll let you know.'

'That
would be very much appreciated,' Parrish said, and he took out his card and
slid it across the table.

There
was silence between Parrish and Radick after McKee had left the room.

Radick
broke it. 'I didn't get anything from him,' he said. 'Okay, so he may or may
not have had some skin mags way back when. What the fuck, eh? Most people would
think it abnormal if a guy didn't have a few skin mags at some point.'

'Well,
I figure that's sufficient grounds for arrest,' Parrish said, and he smiled
sardonically. 'Fact of the matter is that he wouldn't have appeared a great
deal different from anyone else we've spoken to, but we had those few words
from Mr Lavelle and all of a sudden we're biased.'

'I
didn't get anything from any of them so far. They all seem like decent,
concerned people, trying to do a really, really hard job in a really fucked-up
system.'

Parrish
leaned forward. 'I agree, but we've spoken to - what? - fourteen of them.
Another twelve to go today, and then there's the other twenty-odd on Monday.'

'I
need a break,' Radick said. 'Seriously.'

Parrish
looked at his watch. 'We need to get done,' he said. 'I want to get through
these today, and then we can run checks on them tonight and tomorrow. Then we
start afresh on Monday with the rest.'

Radick
couldn't disagree, and so he didn't argue. This kind of work did not wait. Word
would be out among those who had not yet been interviewed, and if their man was
one of them, and in his answers there was something incriminating, then they
could not afford to give him any leeway. Let him go home, now apprised of the
investigation, and he could remove evidence. The likelihood that this would
happen was slim, but often the thinnest thread was attached to the strongest
lead.

Radick
and Parrish pressed on - different faces, same questions, over and over with
the girls' names. It was as Parrish had suspected. To all intents and purposes
these people were good- hearted, somewhat jaded, a little exhausted with the
frustrations attendant to any profession where a desire to help was the
motivation, but on the surface they appeared to be nothing more nor less than
what they said they were. By the time they were finished he could remember only
Harold Kinnear and Richard McKee, Kinnear because of the telling comments he
had made, McKee simply because of what Lavelle had said about the skin mags.

Lavelle
was last. It was past six. The office was now empty and both Parrish and Radick
were mentally battered.

'I
don't know what else to say,' Lavelle began. 'I've been out there talking to
them. Some of them remember the girls, others don't. I don't think I dealt with
any of the cases directly, couldn
't
say
I've ever spoken to them, but a couple of the files have crossed my desk from a
referral perspective, you know? The thing is . . . well, you never expect
something like this to happen, and there
's
no way of predicting who might get into trouble, so
you can
't
help
but deal with all of them in exactly the same way. Truthfully, certainly for
the majority of us, there's no one case that's any
more important
than any other.'

'And
from your discussions this afternoon, both with those
that
we had interviewed and those that were
awaiting interview, is there anything that was said by anyone that appeared
odd or
unusual? Anything on your radar, so to
speak.'

Lavelle shook
his head slowly, as if answering the
question
before
he'd even considered it. 'I don't think so.
No-one seemed
stressed or overly anxious. There's a
couple of people
who've had
homicide
cases before. A ten-year-old who was beaten
to death by
her stepfather, a young boy who was
killed by his
mother, but it
was
years ago. Nothing to do with the current
investigation. I
think the general view is that
the world is so fucked
up that, well,
something
like this is bound to happen at some
point. It's the
career, you know? It's obvious in your case, but
there's
a lot of
professions
that deal with the less fortunate
members of
society,
and they're going to touch the edges of
this kind
of thing every
once
in a while, aren't they? They're bound to I
suppose, one way
or the other.'

'Okay,'
Parrish said, tired now of hearing
the same thing
a
hundred different ways. 'We just need
your full
name, date of
birth,
Social Security number, address, work
history
prior
to your
employment
here, and then we're done.'

Lavelle gave
them what they wanted to know, just as all the interviewees had. Not one of
them had objected. No-one had even inquired as to whether or not a lawyer or
someone from Family Welfare's own legal department needed to be present.
Helpful, co-operative, concerned, interested, eager to divulge anything that
might help. It was all too easy to forget that the decent people were the
majority. Perhaps there was a bad seed here, and perhaps they would find him on
Monday.

Parrish and
Radick thanked Lavelle. They shook hands, left him behind to turn out the
lights and lock up the building.

'We have to find
Young,' Radick said. 'Lester Young is going to be my priority right now.'

It was as they
reached the car that Parrish was paged. It was Pagliaro. Parrish called him
back immediately.

'I'm at the City
Morgue,' Pagliaro said. 'I think we've got your runaway.'

What
little remained of the victim from the trashcan was spread out on a steel
operating table. Remnants of clothing and personal possessions sat on an
adjacent trolley, and it was from these that Pagliaro extracted the purse - in
it the cell phone, gum wrappers, eye drops, condom - and showed it to Parrish
and Radick. It was Radick who held up the plastic baggie, within which was the
student ID card.

The
forensic pathologist, a genial, red-faced man in his mid- forties, introduced
himself.

'Andrew
Kubrick,' he said, and then added with a grin, 'No relation to Stanley.'

'So
who do we have?' Parrish asked, looking at the ID card. 'Is this Melissa
Schaeffer?'

'I
don't know yet,' Kubrick said, 'but what I
can
tell you is that skull morphology and
femoral bone dimensions give us a Caucasian female, approximately five-three
in height, somewhere around one hundred to one hundred and ten pounds.'

Kubrick
picked up the skull, already detached from the spinal column. 'There's a
connective tissue joint between the frontal and parietal bones of the skull. As
we get older that joint closes up. How far that suture is closed can give us
approximate age. This young lady? I'd say somewhere between sixteen and
nineteen.'

'Any
indication of COD?' Radick asked.

'Strangulation,'
Kubrick said, tone matter-of-fact.

'How
can you tell?'

'Know
what the hyoid bone is?'

'In
the throat?'

Kubrick
pointed to a spot on his own neck. 'Horseshoe-shaped bone, only one that isn't
articulated to any other bone in
the
human
body. Sits between the chin and the thyroid cartilage.
It's
a delicate little bone, and it's
fractured in about thirty percent of all strangulations. This young lady was
strangled, no question. There's no other broken bones, no indication of any
damage to the skull.'