One thing remained: the blue cup. He must have dropped it climbing through the fencing.
Had this been a real crime, Chung would, of course, have collected the cup in gloved fingers to preserve it until Crime Scene arrived.
But, while he was pissed at the guy, there was no way he was going to start a case.
He snagged the cup, and after taking the change — he’d give it to a Ronald McDonald House, or some other charity — he tossed it into the back of a garbage truck filling with debris.
Wondering: What had the guy found that was so valuable he didn’t care about what was in the cup?
Chung headed quickly back to his original station, where a group of teen girls had breached the yellow tape. The quartet was well within the site, doing — for God’s sake — a coordinated dance for TikTok, or whatever, in front of a cell phone they’d propped up on what must have been a convenient photo tripod: a porta-potty crushed into a small cube by the weight of the huge mast.
17
Ron Pulaski pulled up to the assembly of emergency vehicles, lights flashing — white and blue and red.
Blue, like patrol uniforms.
Red, like blood.
White, like a corpse.
He told himself to can the soft thinking. He climbed out, hitched up his gun and looked around the site where Andy Gilligan had been murdered.
A dozen vehicles, two dozen emergency workers.
All right, Mr. Locard, what do you have in store for us here?
Orienting himself, he happened to gaze up the street, blocked off by a squad car. On the other side of it, pausing in the middle of the north-south avenue, was a sedan. The windows of the dark-red vehicle were tinted and Pulaski couldn’t see the driver clearly. It might have been merely pausing, like many others, to check out the excitement.
Then again, the minute he squinted, focusing on it, the driver sped away.
Watch yourself...
He proceeded past the CS bus, calling, “A minute” to the pair of evidence collection techs from Queens Crime Scene.
On the street, near the yellow tape, was the gold shield Lon Sellitto had put on the case. He was directing two uniforms to storefronts nearby, for the canvass. Pulaski’d never worked with Al Sanchez, but he knew of him. Out of One PP, the stocky man, with thick, wavy hair, was senior in Homicide. Sellitto had picked a senior investigator, Pulaski supposed, rather than a gold out of the local house, because of the victim — NYPD detective.
Joining him, Pulaski identified himself.
Sanchez said, “Yeah, Lon said you’d be running the scene. You work with that Lincoln Rhyme.”
“I do.”
“I gotta meet him some day. Okay. Let me show you what we got.” They walked under the yellow tape and ducked through a chain-link gate. Soon they were at the body. Sanchez clicked his tongue. “Pro. Three rounds. Double chest, one face.” He shrugged. “Don’t know why he was down here. Don’t even know what he was working on.”
“Some minor OC stuff. Mostly the DSE case.”
“What’s DSE?”
“Department of Structures and Engineering. Perp stole charts, diagrams, maps, construction permit requests, inspection schedules. Stuff like that.”
“Why?” He looked as perplexed as anyone would be at a theft that didn’t involve money, diamonds, trade secrets or the like.
“No idea.”
“You have an unsub?”
“Not yet. But...”
Meaning that Gilligan’s death might get them closer to one.
Sanchez scoffed. “You steal a bunch of paperwork, then triple tap the gold shield who drew the case? That’s a septic system of bad.”
Pulaski looked around. “Funny place for a hit. Not the street. And how’d the shooter get to him?”
Rhyme had taught him that there is no single crime scene.
The body — if we’re talking homicide — is the hub of the wheel. The unsub had to get there and then he had to leave. Those spokes’re as important as where the deed was done.
The body was in almost the direct center of a bulldozer-cleared field, beside a pit that would have been the basement of an old tenement, of which there were plenty in this neighborhood. Pulaski had checked on the property and there were no plans to do anything with it. No permit requests — not since 1978. And the developer never finished the paperwork.
The perp could have come at him from the gate, a half-dozen buildings across the field, a pathway that led to the next east-west street a block away. It was barred with chain-link, but at six feet high that fence would stop only the most out-of-shape killers.
“That’s his car?”
A white Lexus sat at the curb.
“Yeah.”
“ME?”
“Released him. You’re good.”
“Canvassing?”
“Got a half dozen on it.”
“Reports of shots?”
“No.”
Not unusual. Only a fraction of those within hearing distance actually called a report in. Why volunteer to report a person who was, obviously, armed with a deadly weapon?
“Nothing from ShotSpotter either.”
This, however, was odd. The gunshot detection system the NYPD used could triangulate on the sound of a gunshot, give the approximate location and tell if the shooter was in motion — sometimes even determine which direction he was headed in. The system was active in Manhattan, though it didn’t cover all neighborhoods with equal accuracy.
Pulaski reminded himself: Move. Fast.
He walked to the ECTs, a young pair, two men, with the short hair favored by techs of the male variety, in the belief there was less of a chance of shedding one of their own strands at a scene.
The latter seemed pleased to be working a case with Pulaski. His eyes radiated — what was it? Admiration?
Probably. And the source was because he worked with Lincoln Rhyme.
Here he was on their case, Lincoln’s protégé.
And successor?
Pulaski’s gut did a flip with this thought.
He put the subject aside and nodded his acknowledgment. “Let’s move.”
“Yessir.”
“I’m going to run the car and the corpse. You two take that path to the fence — and comb the fence real good. And then those two buildings there. Ground floors have views of the site.” They would have been perfect spots from which to stalk Gilligan.
Doing whatever it was he was doing.
The two donned their space suits and set to work, while Pulaski too garbed up. He had just started toward the corpse when Sanchez called, “Uh-oh.”
The detective nodded toward a shiny black sedan that had just parked nearby, the occupant of the backseat now climbing out. He was in his late fifties, in a nice-fitting charcoal suit. Silver-haired. A long, stern face. He looked over the crime scene and then scanned the press — a half-dozen reporters and camerapeople behind yet another line, some distance from the scene.
Sanchez said, “Everett Burdick. Dep inspector, One PP. You know him?”
“No.”
“We call him Anchor Amber.”
Pulaski chuckled. Cops’ irreverence was legendary. Amber Andrews was a popular newscaster for the local affiliate of a national network. Her broadcasts were always far more about her than the story. Ah, so Burdick was an airtime hound — the sort who ran unnecessary press conferences displaying stacks of cash and packages of drugs seized in raids.
Sanchez added, “Ego and talent, you know. They’re not — what do they say? — mutually exclusive. He’s not a bad cop. Was good on the street, and he’s good at One PP. He just has to let everybody know it.”
Burdick strode up to Sanchez, ignoring Pulaski.
Fine with him. He had work to do. He slipped through the gate and began vacuuming up trace on the way to the corpse and then started on the body, collecting from the victim’s clothing, scraping fingernails, taking a hair sample, looking for the slugs, which turned out to be still within the body. The autopsy doc would remove them and have them sent to ballistics in Queens. Aside from the huge Desert Eagle.50, or the tiny.17 HMR, it’s hard to tell the caliber of the slug from the wound. Most guns are in the 9mm, 380 or .38 range — all basically the same. And these rounds appeared around that size, but there are thousands of weapons with that caliber, so it was pointless to speculate what the make and model might be.