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“You first on the scene?” Driscoll asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“First homicide?”

The officer nodded. “I feel like I’m caught in a nightmare staged at a slaughterhouse.”

Inside the boathouse, the scent of fresh blood was dizzying. Its acidity assaulted Driscoll’s sinuses. He approached Larry Pearsol, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, who was hunched over what was left of the victim. Jasper Eliot, Pearsol’s assistant, was busy photographing the remains.

“What do we have, Larry?” asked Driscoll

“Our guy is vicious. She’s gutted like a fish. I can’t find a bone in her, and the head, hands, and feet are missing.”

The eviscerated remains lay sprawled on the rotting wooden floor. The boneless flesh vaguely resembled something human. Its breasts said female.

The sight of the corpse disgusted Driscoll. This crime was particularly heinous, its perpetrator barbaric. What would drive someone to commit such an atrocity? And why take the head, hands, and feet? What was that all about?

As he stared down at the mutilated remains, he was reminded of his mother’s mangled corpse after the New York City Fire Department cut her dismembered body out of the entangling steel of a Long Island Railroad passenger train. His mother had ended her life in the summer of 1969 by hurling herself in front of the oncoming train. Driscoll had been eight years old. He had accompanied his mother to the station that day. She had made him wait at the bottom of the stairs, telling him she had to meet the 10:39 from Penn Station. As the train had screeched into the station above, a river of what he believed to be fruit punch cascaded down, splattering the asphalt and the windshields of passing motorists. A woman had jumped out from behind the wheel of her car, screaming, “My God, that’s blood!”

The memory of his mother’s suicide haunted him every day of his life.

“Lieutenant? Are you all right?”

It was the voice of Sergeant Margaret Aligante, a member of Driscoll’s elite team. She had just arrived on the scene.

“I’m fine.”

“For a minute there, I thought you had seen a ghost.”

“Whad’ya make of it, Larry?” Driscoll asked, ignoring her remark.

“Brutal. Capital B. And I’d say this is the drop site, not the murder site. No blood splatter. Forensic’s been all over the body and all over the site, but they’ve yet to come up with a single strand of trace evidence.”

“This rain doesn’t help,” said Margaret.

“Looks like the boys may have missed something,” said Driscoll as he leaned in over the butchered corpse. His eyes had detected a tiny fragment of material protruding from the mutilated labia. His gloved hand provided protection and discretion as he pulled the object from the fleshy wound.

MCCABE, DEIRDRE

ID NUMBER: 31623916

EXPIRATION DATE: 2/04/08

CLASS D CORRECTIVE LENSES

ORGAN DONOR

The New York State driver’s license showed the face of a youthful redhead smiling for the camera.

“Here lies Deirdre McCabe,” said Driscoll. “And some sick bastard went to a lot of trouble to introduce us.”

Chapter 5

There is a sanctuary in this hustling city, a peninsula in the New York archipelago spanning the Atlantic Ocean and the greater Jamaica Bay. It is a community of freckle-faced children and burly blue-collar workers. They call it Toliver’s Point. This strip of land, a home to gulls awaiting its summertime awakening, lies trapped between sea and sky, situated just beyond the footing of the Marine Parkway Bridge on the outskirts of New York City.

A wooden dock juts one hundred yards out into the bay. On its tip stood Driscoll. The Lieutenant was drawn to this particular spot. Drawn to its silence, to its natural coastal beauty. Behind him sat the tranquillity and calm of Toliver’s Point. But before him, on the other side of the two-mile-wide body of water, prowled a killer.

Putting that reality aside, his thoughts drifted to earlier times. It was Colette who had discovered Toliver’s Point when, as a landscape painter at New York’s Art Students League, she had fulfilled her assignment to locate the most scenic spot in the city. She had found the location irresistible, and vowed to establish a home there as soon as she had raised $25,000 for the down payment. After five years as a pattern artist at Bertillon Textiles in Manhattan, she had saved enough money to put a deposit on her first piece of oceanfront real estate, a summer bungalow in Toliver’s Point.

The first night Sergeant John Driscoll was invited to the peninsula, he thought he had been transported to some distant island where she was Calypso to a young and inexperienced Ulysses. After he and Colette married, the bungalow was renovated and winterized and became for them a year-round home.

One afternoon in May, as Colette was driving Nicole to her weekly flute lesson, a Hess gasoline tanker side-swiped their Plymouth Voyager. The bleak images still haunted Driscoll’s consciousness. Colette’s twisted minivan, its shattered windshield, his daughter’s lifeless form, the overturned eighteen-wheeler, his wife’s mangled hand boasting the wedding band, the wail of the ambulance, the hellish dash to the hospital…his grieving.

After the accident that robbed him of fourteen-year-old Nicole and threw his wife into a permanent state of unconsciousness, his world changed. Driscoll the happily married man and loving father became Driscoll the caretaker and grieving dad. The bungalow that was their paradise became an intensive care unit. In the middle of what was once her artist’s loft, Colette lay in a positioning bed surrounded by a Nellcor N395 pulse oximeter, an Invicare suction machine, a Pulmonetic LTV 950 home-care ventilator, a Kangaroo model 324 enteral feeding pump, and an EDR super-high-resolution electrocardiograph. Her inert body was wired to amber screens. Her circulation, respiration, and cardiac tremors were being vigilantly monitored by a multitude of sensors. Constantly attended by a registered nurse, Colette waited, listless, comatose.

It had been no small feat to care for his wife at home. He had been forced to flex his authority and call in favors from friends in high places to convince the hospital’s administrative staff to condone such an unorthodox arrangement. But that’s where he wanted his Colette. The in-house treatment had been costly beyond his wildest imagination. He had to delve deeply into his pension to offset what was not covered by Blue Cross. But, to him, the expense was worth it.

The Lieutenant left the dock and turned toward home. Sullivan’s Tavern, which lay at the beach end of the pier, beckoned. It had become a regular haunt for Driscoll, where bartenders Jim and Christopher helped him wrestle with his demons of despair.

But not tonight.

In the pocket of his Burberry topcoat he carried a jar of natural emollient, skin cream brought from Trinidad by his friend, Detective Cedric Thomlinson. Made from natural fruit oils, it was widely used by Caribbean women to moisturize and nourish the skin, and Driscoll wanted the nurse to apply it to his wife’s inert body.

The jar was deforming the pocket of his topcoat. Before he had known Colette, Driscoll wore polyester suits purchased at NBO on Washington’s Birthday, the great holiday of sales. He saluted patriotism with frugality. But Colette had introduced him to fine English tailoring. She believed it was more advantageous to own one exquisite suit, well made and designed, sewn to withstand the wear and tear of a harried life, than to boast five mediocre ones that were dull, uninspiring, and shoddily made. Her logic was irrefutable. Overnight, she had donated his wardrobe to the Salvation Army and bought him three luxurious suits at Barney’s annual sale, five Dior shirts at clearance, two Ferragamo ties with a gift certificate at Bloomingdale’s, two pairs of Kenneth Cole shoes at a One-Day-Only Two-For-One extravaganza, and her favorite men’s cologne, Halston 14.

Driscoll had become hooked on fine English cloth-expensive wools and beautiful silks. His wardrobe became his only indulgence. After a purchase of a jacket by Bill Blass or a pair of slacks by Ralph Lauren, he could sense Colette’s approval. He still dressed for her, not for the unanimous distinction of being New York City’s best-dressed detective, nor for the moniker “Dapper John” his well-cut suits had earned him.