Cynthia wasn’t fooled. She was a freak, the mother of the replacement baby, the idiot who had moved back into the same trailer park after a tornado tossed her first mobile home. They wanted to put her on parade so the paper’s readers would feel safe and secure. Their babies would never be stolen, their babies would never be killed, because Cynthia Barnes had taken the fall for all of them.
Tuesday, April 7
2.
The grease smell hanging in the air behind the New York Fried Chicken on Route 40 was at least six hours old, but it still juiced Nancy Porter’s appetite as she walked back and forth between the restaurant’s rear door and the Dumpster, studying blood spatters. She had started a new diet yesterday and she was already having severe cravings, especially for anything deep-fried. To her way of thinking, there was nothing on earth-no vegetable, no meat, no piece of bread-that could not be improved by being dipped in a basket of hot oil.
Here on the part of Route 40 near where the state park began, the scent of frying oil bumped right into the generic green smells of an April morning. Cut grass, an undercurrent of lilacs, something else wild and sweet. Combined, the fried and the floral odors managed to trump the other smell on the breeze, the decadent, protein-laden fast food debris, mixed with the ferrous hangover of a young man’s death.
“What is New York Fried Chicken, anyway?” she asked her partner, Kevin Infante. “I mean, I’ve heard of southern fried chicken and Kentucky Fried Chicken and even Maryland fried chicken, but what’s New York Fried Chicken?”
“It’s a way of saying it’s better,” the Bronx-born Infante said with a lopsided grin. His chauvinism was a running gag with them, whether the topic was food or baseball, a way of bridging the ten-year gap in their ages while defusing any boy-girl stuff. Not that he was her type, under any circumstances. Infante had glossy black hair and wet-looking brown eyes, and if Nancy ’s Polish grandfather were alive, nothing in the world could have stopped him from leaning in, pretending to run a finger across the top of Infante’s head, and announcing: “Quart low.” Josef Potrcurzski may have learned to live alongside Italians and Greeks in Highlandtown most of his adult life, but he had never learned to like it much.
“I don’t know,” Nancy said, playing along. “I like the Chicago style with the thick crust that they serve over on Pennsylvania Avenue. You know, the place we go to eat on our court days.”
“That’s not pizza,” Infante said. “That’s, like, a quiche with pepperoni. New York pizza is the best, and New York hot dogs, and New York deli and New York bagels and New York taxi drivers and New York baseball-”
The last was undeniably true, so all Nancy could say was “Oh, fuck you.”
“If the sergeant knew how much you cursed when he wasn’t around, he’d be so disappointed in his sweet little Nancy.”
“Double-fuck you.”
“Is that like Doublestuf Oreos?”
Nancy felt her color rising. That was the drawback to working with a partner, even for just a few months: they learned your weaknesses awfully fast, down to the brand names. Kevin Infante knew some things about Nancy that her husband didn’t know, and Andy had been part of her life off and on since high school.
Then again, she was learning Infante’s weaknesses, too: J &B, Merit Lights, the Mets, real redheads.
“Stop talking about food, okay?”
“You started it.”
“I know. God, I hate stabbings. Give me a shooting every time.”
Infante gave her a funny look, but didn’t say anything. Nancy knew it would never occur to him to have a preference about methods. To Infante, in Homicide for five years now, there were only two types of cases, gimmes and what he called career-enders, although they never did. Not his, anyway.
And this one was clearly a gimme. The scene screamed stupidity-an absence of coolness, the telltale signs of a plan gone awry, and so much trace evidence that they could clone the whole gang of them, not that anyone but a mad scientist would want to replicate this group.
Infante crouched down next to a particularly large stain. “The blood patterns are weird, don’t you think? Were they chasing him? Was he trying to get away? Then why didn’t he run toward Route 40? No one was going to help him back here.”
“He fought,” Nancy said. “It’s instinctive, to fight back when someone comes at you with a knife.”
“Women don’t fight.”
“He wasn’t a woman. He was the New York Fried Chicken Employee of the Month seven out of the last twelve months. Maybe he even got the weapon away from them. Maybe he pulled the knife on them, and they took it away from him.”
“Them?”
“Definitely a them. One-on-one, I think this guy had a shot.”
Franklin Morris had been found in the Dumpster by the morning crew, lying on top of the previous day’s garbage. He would have looked peaceful if it weren’t for the multiple stab wounds and the fluids that had leaked out of him throughout the early morning hours. He was, by his boss’s account, a model worker in every respect. Perhaps a little humorless, but not a hard-ass, not a guy whose attitude might invite what looked to be a truly sadistic death, even by stabbing standards. Later, the medical examiner would catalog the number of stab wounds, calculate the eerily exact numbers in which his science specialized. He would note which wounds were defensive in nature, specify which cuts were superficial and which were lethal. He would take out the organs, examine and weigh them. The need for this precision was sometimes lost on Nancy. Eyeballing the scene, all she could think of was a magician passing a sword through a wicker basket again and again.
The victim’s boss, a sixty-something white man, had fallen to his knees in the parking lot and started to cry after making the ID. “He’s been with me three years,” he said. “He’s the best worker I ever had.” Nancy, conscious of the camera crews arrayed along the perimeter of the yellow crime scene tape, had hustled the boss into his restaurant, seating him at a table where he wouldn’t get in the way of the lab techs. The reporters kept trying to get her attention, flag her over, elicit a tidbit or quote, but she ignored them. That was the unofficial protocol in the county department. No one talked to the media. Not on the record, not off the record, not on background, or whatever term reporters used when wheedling. Nancy wouldn’t be caught dead talking to a reporter.
It was going on eleven o’clock now and the television trucks were in place, ready to go live at noon. The Beacon-Light reporter had come and gone, was probably already stalking the dead boy’s mama. Nancy saw the tall young corporal who handled media, Bonnie something. Nancy and Bonnie were about the same age, although Nancy had started in city PD and Bonnie had always been out here in the county. She was said to be good police, fairly solid, and an excellent marks-man, not that county cops drew their weapons very often. Yet she had asked for the communications office when the number two job had opened up. Nancy couldn’t imagine wanting a job in which you did nothing but talk to the press. She especially couldn’t imagine being smug about it, as Bonnie seemed to be. “Corporal of communications,” Infante liked to say. “Corporal of crap.”