He approached the pine-board-and-brick bookshelves next to the window and studied their contents. Romantic novels, a few standard reference works, carefully piledup fashion and travel magazines. Gaps between volumes were filled with plastic figurines or a cheerful piece of inexpensive pottery. He recognized an odd-looking rock she'd collected when they'd been walking together near the river back in Brattleboro, and which he'd told her was a stupid thing to lug around. There were other familiar odds and ends he saw from their time together.
A few pictures stood among the books, either framed and free-standing on a pop-out cardboard leg or simply propped up and slightly curling. He recognized the mother who would have nothing to do with her-a hardbitten woman with cold, judgmental eyes. There was a sunset photograph of some Vermont mountain, probably Jay Peak. And a group shot of Mary surrounded by five others, all laughing at the camera, their arms interlaced. Willy brought this last off the shelf and held it under the light, studying the faces before him, his eyes lingering over Mary's. She looked absolutely, totally happy. In the background was a sign mounted against a gritty, urban brick wall, which he assumed belonged in this city. It read, "The Re-Coop." There was nothing written on the back of the photograph, but tucked into the corner of the actual image was a burned-in date. The picture has been taken only two months before. Willy slipped it into his breast pocket.
He continued his search, carefully riffling through the books, checking the magazines for earmarks or stray pages or notes. He looked under the small rug, checked under the pillows of the couch and armchair. Other than some change, a couple of paper clips, and a petrified pretzel, he found nothing.
Finished at last, he was left standing beside the coffee table, almost absentmindedly staring at the one utterly discordant note in the whole place: the clotted, fetid remains of what Mary's body had left behind, and the reemboldened army of cockroaches that had taken his ignoring them as encouragement to resume their meal.
After a pause, Willy moved to the kitchen, retrieved what he needed, and set to work cleaning up the mess, double bagging what he could collect using a sponge, and scrubbing the remaining stains with disinfectant and cleaning fluid. It took him over an hour, and when he was done, the damp spots he'd created looked worse than what had been there before. But he knew they would dry and disappear, and already the air smelled better. It wasn't as good as Mary could have done, but it returned the apartment to being a more suitable monument. As for the scene's integrity, Willy didn't even want to think what the cops would say of his handiwork. Assuming it mattered. He knew this police department. He knew this city. He even knew how he would have dealt with this situation had he caught the case. This wasn't a crime scene, as far as the NYPD was concerned. It was just an apartment caught in the limbo of a ponderous bureaucracy which would take six months or more to decide that nothing unusual had happened here.
And maybe they were right, although Willy now had some questions.
He gathered his refuse together, added to it the increasingly odorous garbage from under the kitchen sink, and dumped it all down the chute he found partway down the third-floor corridor.
Afterward, he neatened the disarray the cops had created in their search, killed most of the lights, lifted the window shade, settled into the dry corner of the couch, and watched the play of lights and shadows in the windows across the alleyway.
Eventually, without intending to, he finally yielded to the anxiety and adrenaline that had fueled him most of the day and drifted off to sleep.
Chapter 4
NYPD precinct houses generally come in two basic models: old, dating back to before Teddy Roosevelt and awkwardly retrofitted for almost everything, including electricity; and modern, meaning circa 1970, implying some up-to-date conveniences, but only in exchange for an architectural style as lacking in taste as the clothing of the same era. When Willy Kunkle had worked for the department, he'd been stationed at one of the old-timers, which, despite its many drawbacks, had appealed to him for its sheer sense of place. The huge, elaborately carved golden oak sergeant's desk in the entrance lobby, the wrought-iron and brass details throughout the building, and its solid stone appearance had all reminded him of the history and traditions that helped see the department through its rough times-and occasionally led it straight into them.
The Seventh Precinct house, however, had none of that. Of the modern era, made of red brick, and sharing its roof with a fire department ladder company, it was blandness personified, as creatively and sensitively designed as a security-minded high school or a low-profile prison. It was spacious, though, or a least bigger than many of its ancient brethren, and so had more room for its occupants to complain about.
One detail all these buildings shared, however, came back to Willy's memory before he was a half block from the front door: The parking was lousy. For some reason, none of the precincts were equipped with more than a minuscule number of designated spots, which meant anyone who wasn't in management double-parked on the street, pulled up onto the sidewalks, or otherwise caused enough of a problem that the precinct commander was constantly in meetings with irate neighborhood representatives.
Willy walked past car after haphazardly parked car with special plates thrown onto their dashboards before finally passing through the Seventh Precinct's front door. He was greeted with a familiar chorus of sights, sounds, and smells he doubted was much different from any one of the other seventy-five houses sprinkled across the city's five boroughs. The ringing phones, general milling population, and the institutional decor consisting of framed portraits of department leaders and motivational posters all brought him back to the very first day he'd entered this world, feeling awkward in his bulky new uniform. It was early enough in the day, in fact, that the morning patrol shift was still in the muster room across from the long, battered, pressed-wood sergeant's desk. Willy could see, through its broad doors, the uniformed assemblage facing the duty sergeant at his podium, taking notes as he read from a binder and pointed from time to time at a collection of glassed-in wall maps covered with variously colored pins-crime maps indicating current trends in the precinct.
"May I help you?" the receptionist asked him from her school-style desk.
He looked down at her as if she'd interrupted him in mid-dream. "I'm here to see Detective Ogden. My name's Kunkle."
She glanced at his left arm, its hand as usual stuffed into his trousers pocket. "Upstairs, second floor, third door on the right."
He glanced over her head at the activity at the long front desk, manned by an oversized, avuncular sergeant and his frazzled-looking aide. These were the precinct's air traffic controllers. They knew which prisoners were in holding, who was out on patrol and where, what weapons had been logged in for safekeeping, and a multitude of other details that helped keep the place running. They took messages, handled phone calls, assigned tasks throughout the building, and acted as human bulletin boards, all amid a din of colliding human voices. They were the keepers of the Patrol Guide, the bible of the uniformed cop, and knew its contents the way they knew their own family members, dispensing advice whenever called upon. The flow of officers and civilians alike in front of this desk, picking up or dropping off paperwork or just chatting briefly, was nonstop.
Upstairs, the noise was less of a commingled babble, being segregated into a series of offices extending off to both sides of the landing. He counted three doors on his right, walked past several stacks of old boxed case files, and stepped into an office with a cardboard sign labeled, "Detectives."