Not so much these days.
There were half a dozen marked NYPD cars, some with lights flashing, cluttering the street. As Bourque approached the stairwell entrance he recognized the patrolman standing there.
“Hey,” Bourque said.
“They’re expecting you,” the officer said, and lifted the tape.
Bourque still had to duck, and the tape brushed across his short, bristly, prematurely gray hair. He was a round-shouldered six foot three. When circumstances demanded he stand up straight, he pushed six-five. He started up the stairs. Halfway, he paused for several seconds, a slight wave of anxiety washing over him. It was still hanging in there, this sense of unease before he reached the scene of a homicide. It hadn’t always been this way. He reached into his pocket, feeling for something familiar, something reassuring, and upon finding it, he carried on the rest of the way to the top.
When he reached the High Line walkway, he looked left, to the north. The path veered slightly to the west, where the High Line crossed West Twenty-Ninth Street. A gently curved bench hugged the walkway on the left side, with a narrow band of greenery between the back and the edge.
This was where everyone — police, the coroner, High Line officials — were clustered.
Bourque walked on with a steady pace, his head extending slightly ahead of his body, as though tracking a scent. There was no need to run. The subject would still be dead when he got there. Bourque had turned forty only three months earlier, but his creased and weathered face would have allowed him to pass as someone five or ten years older. A woman had once told him he reminded her of those trees that grow out of the rocks up in Newfoundland. The relentless winds from the ocean caused them to lean permanently to one side, the branches all going in one direction. Bourque, the woman said, looked like someone who’d been worn down by the wind.
As he got closer, another detective, Lois Delgado, saw him and approached. Seeing her, his anxiety receded some. They were more than partners. They were friends, and if there was anyone Bourque trusted more than Delgado, he couldn’t think who it might be.
And yet, he didn’t tell her everything.
She had an oval face, the way she let a curl of her short dark hair fall across her upper left cheek where she had a port-wine stain about the size of a quarter. Bourque understood why she tried to disguise it, but he found it one of her most beautiful features. She pulled her hair back on the right side, usually tucking it behind her ear, giving her face a kind of lopsided quality. She was a year older than Bourque, but unlike him she could have passed for someone younger.
“Well?” he said.
“Dead male,” she said. “No ID on the body. If I had to guess, late forties, early fifties. Early-morning jogger noticed something behind the corner of the bench that turned out to be a foot.”
Bourque looked around. The High Line wound among countless apartment buildings. “Somebody must have seen something,” he said.
“Yeah, well, that part of the bench is up against a nearly windowless wall on the left, and an open area on the right, and then there’s the rink just up there, so...”
Delgado shrugged, then continued. “Had to have happened in the middle of the night when there was no one going by. Tons of pedestrian traffic up here through the day. Thousands of people walk along here.”
“High Line closes at what, ten or eleven?”
“Yeah,” Delgado said. “They roll down the gates at all the access points then. Opens up again at seven in the morning. Wasn’t long after that that the body was discovered. You couldn’t do this to someone during the open hours.”
Bourque gave her a look. “Do what?”
“Easier if you just come and see for yourself,” she said.
Bourque took a breath.
I’m fine.
As they approached the bench, he saw the dirty white rubber sole of the shoe the jogger had spotted.
“We think he got dragged into the tall grasses and that was where it happened,” Delgado said, pointing to all the vegetation at the edges of the walkway that made it such a popular place for people to stroll. “I guess, just before they close the High Line and security does its walkthrough, someone could hide in the grass and not be seen.”
A couple of other officers made some room for the two detectives, who stepped off the main part of the path and into the greenery at the left edge. Bourque knelt down close to the body.
“Jesus,” he said.
“Yeah,” said Delgado.
“Did a real number on the face.”
“Hamburger,” Delgado said.
“Yeah,” Bourque said, feeling a tightening in his chest.
“Check the fingers. At least, what’s left of them.”
Bourque looked. “Fuck me.”
The fingertips on both hands were missing.
“All cut off,” Bourque said. “What would you need for that? Small pruning shears? The kind you use in the garden? Who walks around with one of those, unless it’s one of the people who maintains this area.”
“Don’t think he used pruners,” Delgado said. She parted some grass to reveal a rusted ribbon of steel, one of the original tracks when the High Line was used to bring rail cars into the heart of the city. “See the blood?”
Bourque slowly nodded. “He holds the guy’s fingers over the rail, using it like a cutting board. Could have done it with a regular pocket knife, although he’d have had to press hard to get through bone.”
“Our guy would have to have been dead by then, Jer,” Delgado said.
“Would make it a tad easier,” Bourque said. He paused to take a breath. “You cut the ends off ten fingers, you’re going to get some objections if your guy is alive.”
They looked back from the bloody rail to the body.
“Why?” Delgado asked.
“Hmm?”
“I’ve seen a finger get cut off as a way of getting someone’s attention, of making them talk, of punishing them, but why cut ’em all off after he’s dead?”
“Identi—”
“Of course,” Delgado said. “So we can’t take fingerprints. And the smashed-in face keeps us from knowing who he is.”
“Maybe the killer’s never heard of DNA,” Bourque said, pausing to take another breath.
“You okay?” Lois asked. “You comin’ down with something?”
He shook his head.
Delgado said, “DNA takes time. Maybe whoever did this wants to slow us down. Or maybe our guy here isn’t in the database.”
“Could be.”
“Why not just cut off the hands? Why all the fingers? Why ten cuts instead of two?”
Bourque thought about that. “If he just had a simple knife, cutting through fingers was easier than sawing through wrists.”
Delgado nodded. “Yeah.”
Bourque raised his head over the top of the bench and looked down the walkway. “You walk off with ten fingertips, maybe you leave a blood trail.”
“It rained around five this morning,” Delgado said.
He sighed, looked at the body again. He took out his phone and started taking pictures. His gaze wandered farther down the body. The man’s tan khakis had inched up one leg far enough to reveal his socks.
“Check it out,” Bourque said, his voice barely above a whisper.