The Cold Room Read online

  Like I said, I don’t like to watch autopsies, and I didn’t watch this one. Though I was physically present on that Monday at three o’clock in the afternoon, a single glance at the victim, now in an advanced state of decomposition, was enough. The rest of the time, I kept my eyes on the floor. Nevertheless, I did learn a number of facts that were to play a key part in the later stages of the investigation. First, the victim was not in her twenties, as I’d concluded after examining her at the crime scene, but in late adolescence, between sixteen and nineteen years old. Dr Kim Hyong established this fact with an X-ray of the long bones of her forearm where they met her wrist.

  I listened attentively while Hyong recorded this observation, speaking into a microphone clamped to the autopsy table, but I asked no questions. I was more interested in Hyong’s tone of voice, which remained matter-of-fact. There was no doubt in his mind, and nothing to be gained by challenging his conclusion, even if I’d had the expertise to frame a relevant question.

  Hyong wound it up with an appropriately grisly flourish. The victim’s prints could not be taken because the skin on her fingertips had grown slack, a condition known as slippage. Hyong overcame this difficulty by peeling off the skin of each finger, then inserting his right forefinger into the resulting pouch. By gently stretching this pouch with his free hand, he was able to produce a credible set of prints. ‘It’s all in the wrists,’ he explained. ‘All in the wrists.’

  The autopsy finally complete, Hyong took the crime scene photos to a metal shelf extending from the wall opposite the door, where he re-examined them under a large magnifying glass. Knowing my place in Hyong’s scheme of things, I waited patiently for him to complete this examination. A few minutes later, he called my attention to a full-length photo of the victim as I’d discovered her.

  ‘Tell me what happened here. Tell me why her skin is pink.’ Kim Hyong was short and thick, his torso running in a straight line from his armpits to his hips. His hands, by contrast, were very small, his movements precise enough to appear finicky.

  ‘I’ve seen this before, doctor, with a suicide. The man—’

  ‘Carbon monoxide, fine. What else?’

  ‘Cyanide?’

  ‘Very good. What else?’

  My first impulse was to smack him, then count the revolutions before he contacted a solid object, say the far wall. But ever the goal-oriented detective, I merely sighed before shrugging my shoulders.

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Then answer another question. This woman died from blunt force trauma resulting in severe intracranial hemorrhaging. Now, why would anyone strike her with enough force to produce this level of injury if she’d already been poisoned?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to figure that out from the time I found her.’

  Hyong glanced at me before shaking his head. ‘Exposure to cold temperatures prior to death will produce lividity anywhere from pink to cherry red. We commonly see this in alcoholics who pass out on the streets in winter, and in cold-water drownings. Of course, we’ll test for carbon monoxide and cyanide, but I’d be shocked if either test was positive.’

  Now he had my full attention. ‘Prior to death?’ I asked. ‘Is that what you said? Or after?’

  ‘Certainly prior, though perhaps both. Let me explain.’ Hyong was smiling now, exposing the yellowed teeth and coated tongue of a heavy smoker. ‘Lividity was fully set before the removal of the victim’s organs. I know this because the volume of blood in her body would have been greatly reduced if she’d been eviscerated immediately after death, producing a much fainter lividity. I can’t be certain, of course, that she was returned to a cold space in the hours between her death and the removal of her organs. But it does make sense.’

  Hyong’s response directly addressed an anomaly I’d already considered. Blunt force injuries are almost always driven by passion, by the heat of the moment, yet the preparation of the body for disposal had been carefully thought out. A gap of many hours between the two events would go a long way toward resolving the dilemma. Perhaps the killer simply cooled down enough to get his act together, or perhaps a second actor had arrived, somebody more experienced, to lend a guiding hand.

  ‘The organ removal,’ I asked, ‘do you think it was done by somebody with medical knowledge?’

  ‘No, this is the work of a hunter or somebody who works at a slaughterhouse. The victim’s sternum was cut with a heavy-bladed knife, and there are nicks, probably from the same knife, on her ribs.’

  I considered this for a moment, before asking an obvious question. ‘You said she was exposed to cold prior to her death. How much cold?’

  ‘Thirty-five to forty degrees would be my guess, the internal temperature of a common refrigerator. But I want you to take a look at her dentition.’ He pulled down the woman’s jaw, then stretched her lips away from her teeth. ‘Please, look,’ he said.

  Though I didn’t understand why he couldn’t just describe whatever he’d discovered, I walked over to the table and stared down at my victim’s molars, two of which bore gold crowns. But that wasn’t what struck me as odd. It appeared that she had no cavities.

  ‘Notice those fillings?’ Hyong asked.

  ‘Do you mean the crowns?’

  Hyong’s face was round and slightly dished in the center. When he compressed his lips, his disapproval apparent, his mouth all but vanished. ‘Look closer,’ he demanded.

  I did as I was told, noticing that my victim’s many fillings were white instead of the silver I was used to seeing. ‘It’s quite likely your victim was born and raised behind the Iron Curtain. In the East, they use composite fillings, the white you see in her mouth; in the West, metal or silver. Notice the gold crowns, common in Europe, while here we cap teeth with porcelain.’

  My first thought was of the neighborhood just to the north of Williamsburg, to Greenpoint and the many thousands of Poles who’d emigrated there following the break-up of the Soviet Union. From even the furthest reaches of Greenpoint, it was only a few miles to where my victim’s body was discovered. Now I had a place to begin.

  ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me about time of death,’ Hyong declared when I turned away from the body and took up a position near the door.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any point.’ In fact, every physical indicator of time of death is altered by cold: rigor mortis, livor mortis and insect activity are greatly retarded, while the loss of body heat is accelerated.

  ‘There’s a case reported by the DiMaios, father and son,’ Hyong announced, ‘in which the body of a young boy who’d drowned in a cold lake was still in full rigor when it was recovered seventeen days later.’

  I looked back at my victim. Hyong had left her with her mouth agape, her lips folded back in what could have been mistaken for a smile. ‘How long will she be here?’ I asked. ‘If I can’t find someone to claim her body?’

  ‘A couple of months.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘And then the city will pick up the cost of her burial.’

  ‘On Hart’s Island?’

  Hyong snorted. ‘What were you expecting, detective? A mausoleum?’

  I moved toward the door without responding. What questions could be answered had been answered and there was other work to be done. With no tools, I’d been unable to collect the cut link in the fence on South Fifth Street. I’d take care of that now, on my way to work, as I’d prepare myself for the briefing Lieutenant Drew Millard would undoubtedly demand.

  ‘That’s it?’ Hyong asked.

  I turned to face him, suddenly remembering my conversation with Adele. ‘One more thing. Will you test her blood to find out if she was pregnant?’

  ‘What makes you ask that question?’ Hyong was standing at the sink, washing his hands.

  ‘It’s possible that her organs were removed because her killer was after a developing fetus. The idea was to prevent a comparison with the father’s DNA.’

  ‘Now that is brilliant. Perhaps there’s hope f
or you yet. The blood test in question is for a hormone called human chorionic gonadotrophin. We run it routinely.’

  I got a call from Adele on my way to the Nine-Two. She’d used her connections at the DA’s office to reach the NYPD’s profiler, John Roach, who would grant me an interview on the following morning, should I so desire. I had no more faith in profilers than in Gypsy fortune tellers, but I wasn’t about to rain on Adele’s parade. There was something in her voice, some hint of regret that I didn’t care to acknowledge.

  ‘I think that’d be a very good idea, Adele, because the puzzle has suddenly gotten more complex. According to Hyong, the red lividity was most likely caused by prolonged exposure to cold before she was killed.’

  ‘How much cold?’

  ‘Refrigerator cold.’ I hesitated, but Adele remained silent. ‘I can’t imagine forcing someone into a home refrigerator while they were still able to fight back. The unit has to be commercial. Maybe a restaurant.’

  Adele sighed into the phone. ‘She’s placed in a refrigerator long enough to alter her blood chemistry, then bludgeoned. It doesn’t make sense. If you wanted to kill her, why not leave her where she was?’

  ‘That’s what I’m supposed to find out, being as I’m the detective assigned to the case. I’ll let you know when I succeed.’

  Adele laughed, then sighed. ‘I’ve got a train to catch.’

  ‘And I’m on my way to work. Let’s both have a good time.’

  ‘Yes, Corbin, let’s do that.’

  The 92nd Precinct is located on Meserole Street, near Union Avenue, in a two story building erected in 1904, a year after the completion of the Williamsburg Bridge, the second bridge to span the East River. The upper story of the building is of red brick, the lower of limestone blocks. Though not massive by New York standards, the blocks are large enough to impress, especially around the double-doors at the Nine-Two’s main entrance where they tilt gradually up to form a true arch. There are other nice touches as well. The fanlight window over the entrance way is dark with age, its rippled panes now more reflective than transparent. Directly above, a weathered terracotta medallion bears the shield of the NYPD, while a pair of wrought-iron stanchions flanking the doors are capped with Kelly-green globes.

  I’d stood outside the Nine-Two for a good fifteen minutes on the day I first reported for duty. That was on a mid-April afternoon, with a spring breeze riffling my hair. By then, I pretty much knew my fate. One of the cops I’d taken down nine months before, Dante Russo, had been a trustee in the Policemen’s Benevolent Association, the union that represents every uniformed officer below the rank of sergeant. For some reason, the fact that Dante was a psychopath who deserved his fate had escaped his PBA buddies. The idea, now, was to punish the messenger by repeating the same lie wherever he went: Harry Corbin is an Internal Affairs Bureau snitch.

  Within a couple of days, spread by the PBA delegates in the precinct, the accusation would be common knowledge in the Nine-Two, and even those cops wise enough to distrust the grapevine would shun me. Knowing, as they did, that guilt by association was another weapon in the PBA’s arsenal.

  But if I was reluctant to take up residence at the Nine-Two, I was comforted by the building itself. The limestone, grayed by urban soot, and the brick, faded from blood red to rosy pink, had endured for a century, uniting the generations even as Williamsburg’s ethnic deck was reshuffled every couple of decades. To me, as I crossed the street and walked through its doors, it appeared ready to endure indefinitely into the future.

  Not so the interior. Maybe limestone and brick can withstand long years of neglect, but interiors have to be aggressively maintained. That the Nine-Two’s had not was obvious at a glance. A waist-high rail separating the public from the precinct’s inner sanctum was without a finish, the raw wood now entirely exposed. Two paths had been worn into the oak floor, one leading from the door to the duty officer’s desk, the other to a gate set in the rail. Cracked in a dozen places, the institutional-green paint on the walls and ceiling was overlaid with a greasy, nicotine-yellow film. Worst of all, the interior space on both the Nine-Two’s floors had been divided and subdivided many times in order to house other units like Traffic and the School Crossing Guards.

  By the time I showed up that spring, the Nine-Two was housing a large contingent of traffic officers, a street narcotics team, Brooklyn North’s Vice unit and two shifts of squad detectives. All were expected to share the second floor, which had been divided into a haphazard assortment of cubbyholes and small offices. My own space, into which a pair of battered metal desks had somehow been squeezed, was about the size of a prison cell.

  It was almost seven o’clock when I finally walked into the Nine-Two on the day after the murder. The precinct was quiet, as it usually is on a Monday evening. Sergeant Jackson Bell, the duty officer, was speaking with a pair of uniformed officers, both female. He stopped in mid-sentence when I appeared in the doorway, his glance flicking from the two cops to me. The women then turned to check me out and a very staged silence followed, a silence that could only have been more comical if they’d raised strings of garlic to ward off a hungry vampire.

  I looked from the two uniforms, whose names I didn’t know, to Sergeant Jackson Bell, holding their eyes for just an instant longer than necessary before continuing on my way.

  Every precinct has its secrets, and every precinct guards those secrets, however grand or humble they may be. From this point of view, Sergeant Bell’s attitude wasn’t entirely unreasonable. If I was an IAB snitch, there was always the chance, perhaps even the likelihood, that I’d been assigned to scrutinize some individual, or group of individuals, in the Nine-Two. Perhaps even Sergeant Bell himself.

  The corridor I followed to Lieutenant Drew Millard’s office took a series of doglegs past the cubbyholes occupied by my co-workers on the four-to-midnight tour. Only one was occupied, by a detective named Robert Bandelone who waved me into the room.

  ‘I heard you caught a homicide yesterday.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I replied, ‘around noon.’ I’d worked with Bandelone for a short time when his partner was out with the flu. Already promoted to Detective Second Grade, I knew him to be obsessed with obtaining First Grade status. If he thought the case was a grounder, he wouldn’t hesitate to invite himself in as my partner. On the other hand, if he decided that he was looking at one of those mysteries cops dread, mysteries involving many hours of labor with little chance of a pay-off down the road, he’d keep his distance.

  ‘You come across anybody who might be good for it?’

  ‘No such luck, Bobby. What I got is a seventy-three-year-old witness, I don’t think he can see his hand in front of his face, and an unidentified white female with no organs and a hole in her head.’ I smiled. ‘Would you believe time of death could be anywhere from a few days to a few months ago?’

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Bandelone had a habit of patting his bald scalp, very gingerly, with the fingers of his right hand, a gesture I found hopeful. He did it now, while I watched.

  ‘She was dressed like a hooker, so who knows? Maybe I’ll get lucky when I ask around.’

  ‘You have a photo?’

  ‘Wait a second.’ I opened my briefcase, removed the Polaroid I’d taken of my victim’s face at the scene on the prior afternoon and laid it on Bandelone’s desk. He stared down at the milky eyes and bloated cheeks for a moment before handing it back. Behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses that he pushed up onto the bridge of his nose, his dark eyes appeared almost fragile.

  ‘You think anybody’s gonna recognize that?’

  ‘What could I say, Bobby? Eventually I’m gonna see what a sketch artist can do with it, but for right now it’s all I have.’

  SIX

  There were times when I felt sorry for my commanding officer. Born into a cop family that traced its roots to an ancestor who’d joined the New York Metropolitans shortly after the Civil War, Drew Millard seemed to pass most of his time playing catch-up. Ranger Millar
d was the ancestor’s name. He’d risen from obscurity, in the course of a career that spanned three decades, to the rank of Inspector, roughly equal to today’s Chief. That was just before Teddy Roosevelt forced Ranger to surrender his badge in the wake of a corruption scandal.

  Notoriously brutal, Ranger had worn shoes even a hard man would have difficulty filling. Meanwhile, his direct descendant was soft in body, mind and spirit. Drew’s gut was flabby, his blue eyes pale, his soft ass shapeless. Wheedling was the tactic he normally used to motivate his detectives, often beginning his sentences with a nearly fawning, ‘C’mon, guy’.

  Millard was sitting behind his desk when I walked into his office, dealing with his share of the paperwork generated by the train derailment on the prior morning. He seemed unusually cheerful, if a bit harassed, as he motioned me to a chair. ‘Let’s hear it,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened this afternoon.’

  Millard wanted to know why I’d attended the autopsy, which I was not obliged to do. I presented him with the mysteries, the pink lividity, the head wound, the evisceration, the possibility that Plain Jane Doe was exposed to cold before and after her death.

  ‘The way the ME put it,’ I concluded, as I had with Bandelone, ‘time of death might be anywhere between a few days and a couple of months ago.’

  ‘So you’re saying the case isn’t going anywhere until she’s identified?’

  ‘The ME recovered a decent set of the victim’s prints. They’ll go over to Missing Persons tomorrow morning. Missing Persons also promised to fax me a list of all females reported missing in the last month. I should have it within the hour.’ I shrugged and smiled, my intention to play the role of amiable, semi-competent investigator for all it was worth. No sense, after all, in raising expectations. ‘I don’t know, boss. I got a bad feeling here.’

  ‘C’mon, guy, don’t be so pessimistic.’ Millard spread his arms and smiled encouragingly. ‘What about the witness?’