18 Seconds Page 4

  She kept a long metal flashlight tucked under one of her arms and a portable radio clipped to her waist behind her gun. She could hear the garbled conversations between crime lab technicians under the boardwalk and cops in the public parking lot where they’d found the victim’s car. She waited, alone, shifting her feet in the cold sand until they emerged from the darkness. She watched them cross the drainpipe that jutted out from under the boardwalk, their cameras slung over their shoulders. The pipe was at least three feet off the ground, difficult enough to cross in slacks; she wondered how she was going to manage it in a skirt.

  “All through, Lieutenant,” the first of them said.

  She nodded. “What am I looking for?”

  “Looks like she made it about halfway under and tried to hide behind the pipe,” he replied, pointing toward the boardwalk. “That’s where the blood trail ends. You’ll see it easy enough. Up on top of the pipe there are drag marks; lots of handprints, most likely hers. Lots of hair, too, long hair.” He held out his hands to indicate a foot or more. “Plenty of that around.”

  “Thanks,” she said, rummaging through her pockets for a Nicorette. After a minute she popped one into her mouth and followed the pipe into the shadows.

  “Lieutenant bars, my ass.” Russell Dillon shook his bald head in disgust. “I’ve been taking that test since ’91 and no one’s going to tell me some broad can ace two back-to-back exams without some kind of help from above.”

  Doug “Mac” McGuire sighed and jotted notes in his book.

  “Good ol’ girl network. City manager is looking after her ’cause of her old man. You think I was born yesterday?” He lit a cigarette and belched.

  McGuire looked up from his notes. “She wrote better papers than us. You can’t fault her for being smart.”

  “Smart? Yeah, well, maybe you think she’s smart. Some of us ain’t that gullible.”

  “It’s not being gullible, Dillon. I know her. I work with her.”

  “No, Mac, you work for her; there’s a difference. She took your job out from under your nose and you don’t even have the balls to stand up to it.”

  “Stand up to what? She outscored me. End of story.”

  Dillon looked at him and shook his head. “What? Are you in love, too?” He shook his head and stepped back. “Jesus Christ.” He laughed. “A pair of tits walks into the building and suddenly everyone’s too stupid to wipe their own ass. Well, not me. Chief makes the promotions come out the way he wants. That’s just a fact of life. Blacks and women will always do better than us workingmen.” He put on his hat. “Tell her I said one good fucking deserves another. Maybe she’d be interested.”

  “Tell her yourself,” McGuire spat.

  “Yeah, well, maybe I will. See yah later, Sar-geant,” he sneered. It was a look that was supposed to convey that Dillon knew something to which the rest of the world wasn’t yet privy.

  O’Shaughnessy shivered in the dark. She could smell the ancient timbers covered with barnacles and seaweed. She played her light overhead, then ran it down the length of the pipe and around her feet in a circle. Water dripped from the cracks between the boards above, plinking hollowly in the cavernous chamber.

  How different, she thought, from the church she’d been sitting in an hour ago. More and more frequently, she’d be with the girls one minute and out on the street the next, often in the middle of the night. But that was part of earning her new rank, she knew. It brought the respect of the men and women who had to be out there day and night, seven days a week. That respect didn’t come easy. Besides, it wouldn’t last forever. The girls probably wouldn’t even remember it when they got older.

  Graffiti covered the big drainpipe, mostly initials and dates and profanities. A leak at the bottom of the pipe allowed a stream of water to cut a gully through the sand. A heavy black stain marked the side of the pipe next to a smudged handprint. Mac said a dog found the scene. This is where it would have been. She could see the blood smeared across the pipe. This was where the victim had tried to hide from her captor.

  O’Shaughnessy crouched where the handprints had dried on the near side of the pipe and tried to imagine what had happened. She placed her feet where the girl’s feet would have been and leaned forward with her head touching the pipe. One large smear above her looked as if the girl had rested her hand there, bleeding all the while from her wound.

  On the other side of the pipe lay crushed beer cans, bottle caps, and broken glass.

  She rolled the beam of her light across a splintering timber, then back to the pipe and to the top of it again, finding more bloody splatters and smudges that could have been caused by someone’s clothes. This was where he’d pulled the girl back across.

  O’Shaughnessy played the light at her feet again, reaching for a red plastic hair clip. There was rust on its hinges, so she tossed it aside. To her left, she saw broken cinder blocks and a stack of broken planks, discarded angle brackets, and hundreds of galvanized nails.

  She looked back toward the beach and the line of pale daylight coming from where she’d entered. McGuire was still there, kneeling in the light, his yellow slicker in stark contrast to the gray morning. She watched him raise a radio to his mouth and a plume of warm breath form around his head.

  Sounds were immensely exaggerated beneath the walk—dripping water, footsteps clopping overhead; she could hear her bare feet grind the wet sand.

  The mist had already made her skin and clothes slick, and the old timbers had shredded her stockings when she brushed against them. Something flashed in her light, farther under the pipe. She bent down, stretching for it, and plucked a woman’s gold wristwatch from the sand. It bore no rust. In fact, it looked new and expensive. Someone had put it there intentionally. For someone else to find?

  She turned off the flashlight and lifted her skirt to her waist. Then she put one leg over the pipe and followed with the other, tugging the skirt down over her hips when she was on the other side. Then she turned the light back on.

  The ceiling was getting lower as the sand began to rise; soon she had to stoop as she continued toward the street side of the walk.

  Radio static sounded on her belt, but she was no longer listening. She was fascinated by the graffiti overhead. LCMR High—’94 Champs, Allison loves Christy, Beejun’s suck, and Surfers Rule—but someone had put a D in front of the R to make it read DRule. Beatles, Talbert, Wishbone, EP loves FS, Fuck Gerald, and Bay Side Blows. I love Paul, Pat loves Rocky, SSM 96, BH is a cunt, Green Day Dookie, Merchant Marines, Syko Sue, Kurt Cocaine, Curly and Moe.

  Who spent so much time under here? she wondered. Druggies? Had the victim come here willingly?

  She had never really thought about what went on under the boardwalk before. It didn’t exist for her. She’d grown up in Wildwood and had gone to the beach parties. She’d even hung out with some of the girls on Strayer’s Pier, but if there had been life beneath the timbers she’d missed it somehow. It had never occurred to her all these years that there could be people gathered down here right under her feet.

  She tried to imagine them sitting in the dark, hot coals of their cigarettes floating about their heads, drinking beer and pointing their hissing cans of paint at the beams to write their epigraphs.

  O’Shaughnessy continued to the parking lot and stepped out alongside the pipe. The dull light shone on the wet asphalt. Uniformed officers were gathered around a wrecker that was lifting a dark green Explorer onto its hook.

  The jack lay next to the right front tire, which was flat. A woman’s jacket sat on the passenger seat. O’Shaughnessy knew what was in the pockets—an unwrapped condom and a tube of lipstick.

  She stood another minute, glancing between the Explorer and the dark boardwalk from where she had just exited. Then she looked toward Atlantic Avenue. If the woman had been near her car when her attacker pulled into the lot, then why hadn’t she run toward the lit street instead of going under the dark boardwalk? She took the radio from her belt and keyed the
mike.

  “Cruiser three.”

  “Go ahead, three.”

  “Have we got a return from Randall yet?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. He states negative on the hospitals; we’re still checking the twenty-four-hour reports with the state. Copy?”

  “Copy,” O’Shaughnessy said.

  An hour later she returned to police headquarters on Pacific Avenue carrying a Styrofoam cup full of coffee. She was hungry, but ever since she’d stopped smoking, she had been fighting off the weight.

  O’Shaughnessy peeked into the sergeant’s office, where McGuire had a phone cradled to his ear. She could tell by his expression that he was on hold. “Anything new?” she whispered.

  He mouthed the word “Chief” back at her and pointed toward her office. She waved her thanks and threaded her way through the detectives’ desks toward the glassed-in enclosure with a sign that read “Lieutenant.”

  Loudon was on the sofa thumbing through an old edition of The New Yorker.

  “Chief.” She put down her coffee and stashed her purse under the desk, then shook off the rain parka and hooked it on a tree.

  Loudon looked up at her and recrossed his legs. “I heard on the radio you were heading back. Thought I’d make myself comfortable.”

  Her hands were filthy. Her stockings were torn. There was a streak of something black across her forehead.

  “You all right?” he asked, looking over the top of the magazine.

  She nodded, sliding into her chair and prying the lid off the Styrofoam cup. “Just chose the wrong outfit again.”

  She sneezed.

  “God bless you,” Loudon said, tossing the magazine aside.

  “Want to share?” She held up the cup.

  He shook his head. “But thanks.”

  There was a pack of photos on her desk: early copies of the crime scene from this morning. The lab chief had rushed them.

  O’Shaughnessy kicked off her shoes and began to rub her feet together under the desk. She took a sip of coffee and removed a notebook from her purse, flipping open the cover.

  “We’ve got a fresh scene,” she said. “Six to ten hours old at the most. No body.” She looked up at the chief. “I’m writing it as a kidnapping. Woman was jogging with her dog along the beach when the dog ran under the boardwalk. When he came out, his muzzle was bloody. She thought he’d cut himself, but when she checked him out, he was fine.”

  The phone rang in the outer office. The chief got up and pushed the door closed.

  “The woman called nine-one-one and we sent a patrol car.”

  She nodded at the envelope.

  He opened the seal and shook the pictures out on the desk. There were flashbulb bursts of bloody handprints on pilings, blood pools in the sand, blood smears on a drainage pipe.

  “First officers on the scene found the Explorer in public parking. Doors were unlocked, keys in the ignition.” She pointed to a picture in his hand. “Tire’s flat on the driver’s side, there’s a hole in the sidewall at least two inches from contact tread. A woman’s jacket was found on the passenger seat, no IDs, but there was a registration under the visor. Matches the tags. Car is listed to Jason Carlino, 10 Faring Way in North Beach. We sent uniforms, but no one was home. His neighbor says he goes out of town a lot on business. Drives a Lincoln for a company car, and it’s not at the house.”

  She took a sip of coffee. “Wife’s in her late thirties, name is Elizabeth. She owns Guppies, the day care on New York Avenue. There’s a daughter, Anne”—O’Shaughnessy flipped through her notes—“she’s seventeen. We left a note on the door of the house and have been calling there hourly. No sign of anyone yet. Possibly they are away for the holiday, but that doesn’t explain the Explorer.”

  The chief grunted.

  She looked down at her notes again.

  “Jason is the CEO of Echo Enterprises, a communications consulting firm. We have an office number for him, got it from the company that monitors his security system. Mac left a message on his voice mail. Hopefully he checks it often.”

  O’Shaughnessy turned a page and sipped more coffee. “Uniforms conducted a grid search of the lot and beach. Negative. Only two businesses are open late night on Atlantic this time of year. The Texaco and the 7-Eleven. We woke up both clerks and neither of them remembered anything unusual. You know what it’s like down there in May. Ghost town.”

  Sergeant McGuire was on his feet and coming toward the window. He pushed a sheet of bond paper up to the glass that read: “Your daughters are home with Tim. Cat is missing.”

  She sighed and nodded, raised a hand to thank him, then looked back at her notes.

  “Morning Public Works crew comes on at four. Mac has a guy at the dump looking through last night’s trash.”

  Loudon grunted. “What else?”

  “Under the boardwalk, over here.” She leaned forward and took the photos back, fanning through them until she found the one she was looking for. “This drainpipe runs across the parking lot and under the boardwalk. That’s where she went in. The blood trail follows it. When she gets halfway under, she crosses to the other side. Then she tries to hide under it.”

  She pointed to a dark smudge on the film. “This is where he pulled her back across.” Her finger slid to the bottom of the picture. “I found a woman’s wristwatch right here. I think she left it there on purpose.”

  Loudon’s eyes met hers over the desk.

  “It rained pretty hard last night, so the lot’s clean. Sand is too deep to get usable footprints. Maybe they’ll have better luck with whatever they find inside the car.”

  “Get that blood typed,” Loudon said. “Maybe it isn’t human.” As he spoke, he flipped through the photos—some with bright white spots where flashbulbs reflected off the white-paint graffiti. “I’ve seen some pretty weird hoaxes around here.”

  O’Shaughnessy nodded. “I thought of that, too. Meyers got samples to Mercy Hospital first thing. It’s A-positive and definitely human.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” Loudon whispered, as though it was foolish to hope for good news.

  “I checked the emergency rooms at both hospitals; there are no Jane Doe admissions in the last twenty-four hours.”

  “Can we get into the Carlino house?”

  “McGuire has a call in to Hamilton. He’s working on an affidavit with Judge Merrell.”

  “Good job, Kelly. Let me know if anything changes.”

  “The press,” she said quickly. “What do you want me to give them?”

  “Nothing. Not until you’ve talked to the family. We need to know who’s not accounted for before we start crying wolf.”

  She nodded. “But if we do reach the family and either of the Carlino women is missing, I want a photo of them on the eleven o’clock news.”

  “Do what you think is right. You need anything from me?”

  She shook her head.

  He made a steeple of his fingers and touched his lips. “You heard about Elmwood?”

  She nodded. “I sent McGuire when we finished. I’ll stop by myself as soon as I get out of here.”

  “Don’t bother.” Loudon shook his head. “I went over myself. Body’s in the morgue, building’s in lockdown, nothing you can do until tomorrow.”

  O’Shaughnessy raised her eyebrows, wondering why the chief would respond to a slip-and-fall death in a nursing home.

  “Any scene to speak of?”

  He shook his head. “Nothing inconsistent with an accident, although I don’t like people falling down stairwells in the dark. Always looks too neat. Even old people in nursing homes.”

  “Maybe he cheated at hearts.”

  “Or he was hitting on some great-grandma and her main squeeze found out.” Loudon smiled.

  “McGuire could have managed until I got there.” The question loomed.

  “I knew him,” Loudon said at last. “Name was Andrew Markey. He was a captain on the PD when I came on.”

  “No shit.”

  “D
idn’t end up well for him.” He shook his head. “Got involved with organized crime in Atlantic City and earned himself a few years in Poughkeepsie.”

  “So the fall down the stairs really does bother you?”

  He shook his head. “Nah. All that’s ancient history now. Slip-and-fall is all it was. I guess I was just curious.”

  “You want me to do anything special?”

  He shook his head. “Autopsy should tell you enough. You’re going to have plenty on your plate with this boardwalk thing, so get yourself into some dry clothes and find that cat. Let Mac take it for now. Mac can handle it just fine.”

  O’Shaughnessy finished the dishes by eight, put scraps of cold lamb in Chester’s bowl, and changed into workout clothes after she tucked the girls in for the night. Tim had stayed with them until she got home. In retrospect, he had tried to start a conversation, but she’d been unreceptive. Maybe it was all that had happened today or maybe she just didn’t want to make things easy for him.

  She didn’t play the 911 tape until she was on the exercise bike in her bedroom, eating a celery stick and trying to manipulate the cassette player with her free hand.

  “The time is 5…54 and 20 seconds,” a voice announced. There was silence followed by static, then a loud clicking noise before the voice of a female dispatcher: “Wildwood Central. Go ahead with your emergency.”

  “My name is Cathy Rush,” a woman said. Her accent was very heavy Southern. “I’m, uh, visiting a relative in town, and I, uh, I was jogging and my dog went under the boardwalk and came out with blood all over his face. I checked him out real good, and the, uh, blood cleaned up, but something is under there. I, um, yelled out, but nobody answered. It’s pretty dark under there and I didn’t want to go under alone—”

  The dispatcher broke in calmly. “You say this is under the boardwalk?”

  “Uh-huh, near the big pier with all the rides on it.”

  “Is that at Rio Grande?”

  “I’m not sure of…the street name, there’s a…there’s a shop here on the corner, I’m just visiting for the weekend, T-Tops, the store’s called T-Tops, the carnival rides are just across from me.”