We hit as little traffic as we expected, once away from central Fraser’s traffic lights; and in a few more minutes, we merged onto what was now four-lane Broadway, which ran down the middle of the county seat’s black ghetto. A depressing succession of the kind of two-story developments that had been laid out in the 1960s, the neighborhood was a dangerous place for white people after dark, perhaps the only part of the county of which such could be said. Because we were native New Yorkers, this fact generally made Mike and me less nervous than it did local and state law enforcement, although it did not make us any less realistic: experience had taught us that, though North Fraser was not a patch on, say, East New York, we would do well to show it the same careful respect we exhibited in that section of the southern metropolis, making sure not to exhibit the compensating arrogance that Fraser cops tended to do.
When we finally reached the address that Pete had given Mike, we found that we had special reason to heed the native New Yorker’s instinctive respect of unfamiliar neighborhoods: instead of being faced with a crime scene investigation around the particular abandoned building where the young boy’s body had been found, we encountered a cordon of more than two dozen police cars spaced some two blocks from the site. Local Fraser cops; almost every car in Steve Spinetti’s county fleet; several unmarked vehicles that I knew belonged to the officials with whom we had been summoned to conference; a hand-me-down MRAP armored combat vehicle, painted blue-black, one of half a dozen that the Army had given to the various regional units of the state’s Special Operations Response Team, most of whom were on hand to support a collection of Mitch McCarron’s Troop G State Police interceptors: all these and more were in attendance. It was as much law as I’d ever seen assembled in Burgoyne County; and when you added the fact that all the marked vehicles had their respective roof lights spinning and flashing, it created quite a display. Head- and searchlights, too, were on, all fixed on the building that should have been the quiet scene of activity on the part of Ernest Weaver and one of Nancy Grimes’ FIC techs—
And just then I noticed something: “Mike—can you see anybody from the FBI around?”
Mike scanned the area, then noised, “Hunh. No, I can’t, now that you mention it.”
“But they ought to have been called into this case by now, correct?”
“Yeah,” Mike answered. “Abandoned and supposedly murdered kids? Absolutely.”
“Odd” was all I could conclude, a bit uneasily; then, when we asked a Fraser cop at a checkpoint, we discovered that our names were on the guest list for the party, a fact that neither Mike nor I much liked:
“Trajan,” Mike said slowly, finally lighting the cigarette that had hung on his lip for half our drive. “This smells more and more like a trap…”
“Indeed,” I said; then I pointed suddenly. “There’s Pete, directing traffic. Let’s get over to him—we’ll have our chance to talk without the others butting in.”
Pete caught sight of our car, and indicated a spot to park, into which Mike pulled the car. “Just as long as we don’t get our heads blown off, in the process,” my partner murmured.
“Well, Michael,” I said, opening my door and planting my cane outside, “your mother did want you to be a lawyer.”
Mike opened his own door, then pulled deeply on his cigarette before flicking it away and murmuring, “Don’t fucking remind me…”
He might have gone on in this vein had not Pete turned his traffic duties over to a Fraser cop and rushed to meet us. “I’m glad you guys are here,” he said. “We have got one screwed-up situation on our hands—nobody spotted him earlier, but there’s a black guy in the same building as the kid’s body, and he’s talking pretty nuts, we can’t really make out about what. Looks like he’s got a gun—and the only person who even pretends to be some kind of hostage negotiator here is Frank Mangold.”
“Oh, Jesus,” I groaned; for the hard-nosed Frank Mangold of the state’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation was about as unsuited to such a role as could be imagined. Yet even as I considered this unfortunate fact, the full peculiarity of Pete’s words hit me. “But what the hell do you need a hostage negotiator for? The kid’s dead, Pete, isn’t he?”
“It’s not the kid, Doc,” Pete said. “The guy’s got Weaver in there.”
Mike and I were both dumbfounded. “But—who the fuck would take Weaver as a hostage?” Mike murmured; and then, suddenly, the musical chime that indicated the arrival of a text message on my partner’s phone sounded from inside his jacket. “Whoa!” he said eagerly. “Hang on.” He snatched the phone out, quickly read the lengthy message, and then looked up at the deputy. “Okay, Pete—it appears we got what we were waiting for.” Without bothering to tell me what he was talking about, Mike went on to ask, “Did you bring that sack?”
“Yep,” Pete answered. “Come on to my car and check it out there, before the others notice you’ve gotten here—they see you and we won’t have time to go over it.”
We followed Pete through the maze of busily chatting officers, keeping our faces as obscured as possible with our hands; but I nonetheless demanded of Mike, “You want to tell me what’s going on, or are you in one of your inscrutable moods? This is a hostage scene, Mike, it may not be the time for evidentiary analysis.”
“Oh, yes it is, gweilo,” Mike replied earnestly. “And you’re going to want to get it straight before we see that collection of saps. Because it could be confirmation that your demented ramblings back on the highway weren’t so twisted, after all—and that’s going to make you think twice about just what you want to say to our hosts…”
{ii.}
When we reached Pete’s car, I caught sight of a large knapsack lying on the floor behind the driver’s seat. It was a worn, olive-drab number, not the kind of thing you saw kids carrying much, anymore, save in wealthier prep schools and colleges, where the style was intended as radical chic; even so, I quickly realized that it looked familiar. And then I remembered the crime scene photos of the first victim, Kyle Howard, who’d been found hanging in an abandoned house on the outskirts of Surrender: a knapsack much like the one Pete was evidently hiding from view had lain below the boy’s body. The thing had plainly been carrying books, in the photo; and it was just as plainly carrying them now, though just what use such a collection could be to our work was as yet obscure to me.
Pete opened the rear door of his cruiser very slowly and quietly, although no noise he might have made could possibly have risen above the confused din of the siege that was tightening on the central section of one of the long rows of brickface-and-clapboard structures that ran east of us in a herringbone pattern. Broadway had been closed off and barricaded with patrol cars, first some two blocks to the north, and, since our arrival, at a similar distance to the south: the Fraser cops were evidently expecting quite a show, within their cordon, of the variety that was best kept shielded from the public. Yet their efforts had apparently been in vain. Even from a distance, it was easy to see that curious, boisterous crowds (“aggressive with intent to incite,” the Fraser cops would later call them, the kind of meaningless jargon employed by officers unused to dealing with such situations) were gathering and growing, most of their members black, some probably just trying to get home after a long week and a longer Friday. But others, particularly the younger men in the crowds, were pulling off their shirts and waving them as they hollered vague indictments at the various officers on the perimeter.
“All right, you two,” I said, moving as quickly as I could into the front passenger seat of Pete’s cruiser. “Whatever it is you’re up to, make it fast. This thing’s set to blow.”
“What’d I tell you?” Pete said, as I turned on his radio and listened to several voices that were arguing over whose actual hostage specialist could get to the scene first, the BCI’s or the state troopers’. “Hey, Doc, go easy, there,” the deputy went on. “It’ll be my ass if somebody sees you listening in on confidential police matters.”
“Yeah,
and it’s gonna be both your asses if you don’t tell me what the fuck you’re doing,” I said, giving up on getting anything clear from the radio, lowering its volume, and then peering over the seat. “What gives with the books and the messages, Mike?”
“It’s very simple, Trajan,” Mike mumbled, his eyes once again on his phone, which had sounded again, bringing in a new message that was accompanied, this time, by several photos. After enlarging them, Mike handed me the phone and said, “What’s that look like?” Then he opened the knapsack and began pulling volumes out of it.
I studied the photos, enlarging details of them, but gaining no insight that would have allowed me to improve on my initial, rather dim answer: “Hair. Animal hair, if I had to guess. Two samples, side by side.”
“Which makes you smarter than most so-called trace experts,” Mike said, “who can’t tell the difference between animal and human samples. They’re from two horses’ manes, actually. A colleague in Louisville sent them along as examples. One is taken from a horse very much like the ones bred by Kelsey Kozersky’s family; the second from a pure thoroughbred. Our concern, however, isn’t with their looks, but with their DNA.”
Mike had suddenly switched gears, and was now talking about the second victim in the case. Kelsey Kozersky had been fifteen at the time of her death, and for most of her life had lived on a hardscrabble horse farm not all that far from Death’s Head Hollow. Two parents and a like number of younger brothers had rounded out the family, which had been thrown into a prolonged crisis when Kelsey—a tall, very pretty girl whose affection for horses Lucas had understated on our first meeting—had reached adolescence and begun to violently question her father’s treatment of his stock. This indicated more than just a classic example of a young girl’s passing infatuation with horses: Kelsey had proved willing to sustain domestic discord in the name of decent treatment of the Kozersky horses, which were undistinguished beasts, in terms of bloodlines, but were hardworking, easily ridden, and quite strong; and the girl’s principled commitment to them had been unusual for anyone her age.
The crisis had come when Kelsey’s favorite horse—a mongrel born of a sire who’d had a smattering of thoroughbred blood, and happened to produce a colt who was unusually beautiful and quick, leading Kelsey to claim it for her own—had come down with equine protozoal myeloencephalitis, or EPM, an infection of the central nervous system. The disease is wasting and heartbreaking, often leaving afflicted animals unable to use their legs and, eventually, dead. The treatment for EPM is fairly lengthy and expensive, and for Kelsey’s father, who was barely eking out a living, there had been a far easier solution: a bullet from a .30-30 Winchester. The death of the horse that had been her great love had caused Kelsey’s behavior to become increasingly unmanageable: not only deliberately disruptive but dangerous, involving all-night drinking binges and other self-destructive patterns.
Mike and I had learned all this from Kelsey’s file, which contained statements from the girl’s parents as well as from an independent pathologist, whom Steve had brought in when Ernest Weaver had delivered another superficial verdict. Kelsey had apparently run away from home, and several months later been found by her father hanging in the family’s barn, from a beam above the empty stall that had once been her horse’s home; and for Weaver, that had been that. The pathologist’s report, however, had shown that Kelsey’s fate had been similar to Kyle Howard’s and then to Shelby Capamagio’s: the girl had been dead for far longer than the barn incident indicated. Her blood lividity said that she’d been cut down after the original event, laid out somewhere for a number of hours, and then rehanged. In addition, several hairs from a horse’s mane had been found on the girl’s clothes. These were thought to belong to one of the animals staying in the barn at the time Kelsey’s lifeless body was discovered there, and no one had thought to examine them any further; that is, until Mike made his determination about the drugs on Shelby’s clothes, and went looking for an element common to the two girls’ deaths.
“I was about to tell you about it, along with the Kyle Howard evidence,” Mike said, as he continued to scan the books in the knapsack, one by one, “when Pete called. Then you got into your insanity on the highway, so I figured I’d just wait until I knew for sure. See, earlier today, while you were—” He was about to say “meeting Lucas,” but thankfully did not. “—walking Marcianna, I did a quick DNA sequence on the sample that Pete sent over—”
“You can do that?” Pete asked in some astonishment. “With your operation in the plane?”
Mike shook his head with a smile. “Listen, Pete—I’m betting ADA Donovan has told you county guys that her boss plans to update as many local law cruisers as possible with portable DNA sequencers, right? So they can keep up with Albany’s plans for the Staties?”
“Yeah,” Pete said, wiping his brow. “But to tell you the truth, I thought she was full of it.”
“Nope,” Mike answered. “They’re already doing it in other places. Pretty soon, when you pull somebody over, you won’t have to check their record against their license—you’ll just swab their mouths, or take a secondary source out of their car, if they’re being difficult, and then run it through your own fucking sequencer, and boom!—instant DNA matching. I’m sure it’ll be challenged on constitutional grounds—since it would give cops permission to assemble a database of anyone behaving even ‘suspiciously’—so it’s not as close as people like Donovan would like to think. But it gives her a great way to argue for increased federal funding. Anyway, my rig’s better than those gadgets, if I say so myself, and I used it to do the sequence on the sample you sent over, the hairs on Kelsey’s clothes, which the FIC techs had been more than happy to say were her father’s horses’. It was the simplest explanation, after all, and that’s what everybody wanted. But after I was finished, I sent my analysis on to my colleague in Louisville, who dug into it deeper. Ever heard, L.T., of the Equine Genetic Diversity Consortium?”
Shaking my head impatiently, I said, “You know damned well that I haven’t, Michael.”
Mike smiled in satisfaction. “And yet you’re the one they always call ‘Doctor’…Well, the EGDC, of which my colleague is a member, has been working to establish a genome database for horse populations, to increase the ability of scientists, breeders, and buyers to establish the origins of animals—particularly thoroughbreds, of course—from around the world, going back to their original, ancient herds. And what the message you’re looking at says, basically, is that the hairs on Kelsey’s clothing do not match the kind of horses that her father raises. Instead, they are samples from some very purebred, expensive lines—thoroughbreds.”
I began to nod, getting it. “So—she had not been cavorting with her father’s horses before her death, but had instead—”
“Had instead been riding,” Mike went on, “not long before her death, some very pricey animals. The kind most likely bred, if she stayed in our general neck of the woods during the months she ran away, in stables down in horse country. Meaning—”
“Meaning Westchester County,” I finished for him. “The nicest parts, that is. Maybe a few farms farther upstate, but most likely Westchester. And that places her…”
“That places her,” Mike said, again picking up the theme, “in close proximity to two things: Route 22, which cuts right through horse country, and New York City. Because most of the people who own those really nice thoroughbred farms don’t live on them. Not most of the time. And so—the indicators are the same as they were for Shelby: she likely never went any great distance; not in terms of miles.”
“But in terms of worlds,” I mused, staring at the photos of the magnified horsehairs, “very far from the life and the world she had known.” I handed Mike his phone. “On a farm owned, in all likelihood, by someone whose base was in the city—someone with whom she had probably been living.”
“Of course, we don’t know what conditions were put on her to get that lifestyle,” Mike said. “Remember—Kels
ey diverges from the others in one crucial aspect: she was a runaway. Not an abandoned kid. But if you place the cause of death and the lifestyle immediately before it in relation to what we’ve also posited about Shelby’s last days…”
“Then both girls made their way to the city,” Pete reasoned, somewhat sadly, “and took up with people who were pretty well off.”
“ ‘Pretty well off’ might be a big understatement, Pete,” I added. “And as to whether both girls ‘made their way to the city,’ or if they were taken there by someone who had made certain extravagant guarantees about the lives they would find there—well, that’s the crux of it.”
Pete just stared out the window of his cruiser blankly. “And you mention Route 22 for a reason,” he soon murmured. “Don’t think I don’t know it. You’re talking about something like the damned NAMBLA killings all over again.”
Mike quickly looked at me, then at Pete, and back at me. “I never said a thing,” I stated.
“Yeah, well,” Mike answered, returning to the books, “we have to make sure nobody says a thing. You’ll have to tell Steve, of course, Pete, but—that’s it. I’ve already explained to the Sorcerer that if you even mention the NAMBLA Murders to the senior people here—”
“You don’t have to tell me,” Pete answered. “They’ll lose it; and life’ll get a whole lot less pleasant, not to mention a whole lot less private, on this case. My God…”
Pete’s grim reverie was interrupted by a quiet cry of discovery from Mike: “Ha! Got one. Exactly what I was looking for…” Pulling a hardcover book from among Kyle Howard’s collection, Mike held it up to the lit roof dome of the cruiser. “Yep.” He handed the book to me and then shoved his searching hands back into the knapsack. “Notice anything, Trajan?”