Chasers (8 page)

Natalie stayed silent, caught slightly off guard by Boomer’s words, watching as he turned and disappeared into the darkness and the low-hanging mist of the muddy path.

12

Andy Victorino ran a rubber-gloved hand slowly across the dead man’s bare chest, his long fingers resting on the two large bullet wounds just below the breastbone. They were in a dark tunnel, the rumblings of cars and trucks racing across the Cross Island Expressway sending loose dust particles and paint chips to the damp ground around them. The body belonged to a middle-aged white male with a swollen stomach and a Klondike Bill black beard. He was in full rigor, and his low liver temperature meant that he had been dead a full day shy of a week. Rats had feasted on the body, gnawing gaping holes in the areas around his neck and thighs. He was naked except for one soiled brown construction boot, minus laces and leather lip. “Has the look of another pump-and-dump,” a voice to Victorino’s left said. “It’s that time of year. This and half a dozen or so floaters are what come in like clockwork every spring. Sure as bees work flower beds.”

“Maybe,” Victorino said. “I’ll know more once I break down the crime scene, or what’s left of it, and then have him autopsied downtown.”

“You’re not going to find yourself much in either place, you ask me my thoughts on the matter,” the voice said, stepping closer to Victorino, the soles of his shoes leaving thick marks on the dark soot piled up next to the right side of the dead man’s head. “Both the scene and the vic have been stepped on like they were a fuckin’ dance floor.”

“You’ve been working homicide, what is it now, six, seven years?” Victorino asked, still not looking up at the man hovering over his crime scene. “And you still know as much now as you did six months in. It’s what’s
not
here means more to the solve than what you can see. You’re a good cop, Bennett, solid. But what keeps you from the next level is you always come in looking for the easy, and there’s never anything easy about death.”

“All right, Quincy,” Detective Sam Bennett said, calling Victorino by the nickname the department had pinned on him within weeks of his joining the Crime Scene Unit, Forensic Division. “Educate me. What am I not looking for that for sure you can plainly see?”

“The ones who killed him weren’t the ones who stripped him down and took away all his biologicals,” Victorino said, his words calm, measured, and confident. “That was done later—a day, maybe two on the outside, after the murder. The killers left him clean, didn’t take anything that belonged to him. Other than his life.”

“How do you know that?” Bennett asked, the sarcasm replaced now by a raised police antenna.

“First, the vic took two close-contact hits—first bullet stopped his heart, second was pumped in just to make sure there wouldn’t be a curtain call,” Victorino said, standing now, hands folded across his thin chest, eyes still on the dead man. “The doer was a pro, knew why he was sent here and wasted little time in getting it done. He came in clean and calm, pocketed the shell casings. Even if we had the gun in hand, the prints would lead us nowhere but some upstate cemetery.”

“How does all of that take you to where the shooter leaves here without doing a Salvation Army on the clothes?” Bennett asked.

“Logic, for one,” Victorino said with a slight shrug. “I mean, give it a second of thought and then tell me why a pro, paid in cash left in a safe-deposit box in a city that’s not this one, would strip a guy he just killed down to next to nothing. There’s no link between the two—none that we’ll ever find, at any rate. Two, you’re telling me he walks away from a murder site with his arms filled with a dead man’s clothes or, even worse, lugging a large black Hefty bag? Just so some pain-in-the-ass innocent bystander out taking his dog for a quick piss could spot him doing so? Never happens.”

“That’s your gut talking to you,” Bennett said, his gray jacket and crisp white shirt tight against the expanse of a set of broad gym-worked shoulders. “And, while all of what you say may be on the mark, you can’t really prove it; you can only argue in favor of it. You still don’t know with one-hundred-percent certainty that the shooter didn’t also lift the clothes.”

“Riddle me this then, Bennett,” Victorino said, leaning across the much taller detective and pointing toward the dead man’s feet. “Why would he go to all the hassle of a clothes raid and then leave behind one lonely little construction boot? And, before you answer, toss this little factoid into your head. The boot in question doesn’t belong to the vic.”

“To who, then?”

“If I had the answer to that, I would know who it was that took the clothes,” Victorino said. “And then you and me would maybe both be one step closer to tagging the hitter.”

“So who is it I’m supposed to go hunt down, exactly?” Bennett asked. “Other than maybe a construction worker minus a boot.”

“Soon as I get an ID on the departed I can maybe start to give you an idea,” Victorino said, turning to look down the length of the dark passageway. “Meantime, while I finish up here would you do me a solid?”

“If it’s doable,” Bennett said.

“Ask the lab boys to bag that large dead rat up against the wall behind us,” Victorino said. “And have them do a perimeter search around his body—five feet on either side ought to do the trick. They can bring everything they find to me down at the lab.”

“And what the fuck would I ask them to do all that for?” Bennett asked, disgust mixed with displeasure.

“The rat’s got a bullet in him,” Victorino said. “Could be just a strange coincidence—that happens every day, as you are well aware. Or it could be our shooter didn’t leave with all his shell casings. Either way, it’s worth us taking a look.”

“You are indeed one odd duck, Quincy,” Bennett said, walking away, careful not to step with too heavy a foot on the dirt patches in his path as he made his way toward the dead rat and the two technicians in blue windbreakers.

Victorino watched him leave, one gloved hand resting on the dead man’s chest, and nodded. “You have no idea,” he whispered.

Andy Victorino was raised among the dead.

His father, Francesco, arrived in New York City from his birthplace of Naples, Italy, fresh off a four-year sentence as an Italian POW in a camp run by a force of British and Australian troops. He was one of 272 prisoners, all of whom were treated as nothing more than mild annoyances who needed to be tolerated and, on rare occasions, admonished. Francesco moved into a back one-bedroom in a cold-water walk-up near the Manhattan West Side piers and, in less than a week’s time, found work at a local funeral parlor. There, working under the steady gaze of Gerald Miller, a thirty-year veteran of the death business, Francesco loaded and unloaded coffins into the back of idling hearses; picked up bodies from cramped apartments, stifling workplaces, and overrun hospital wards. He found comfort in the silent and difficult work, and solace in bringing a final peace to the suffering bodies he saw on a daily basis. He had grown accustomed to the face of death after the onslaught of a major world war in his native land had stripped him of his only home and the few relatives he had left. In his spare time, he mastered a new language by reading the daily tabloids tossed aside by the other workers at the funeral parlor, always with an English dictionary close at hand. And through those early months of hard work and peace, Francesco began to set his sights on two major goals, both key ingredients in any immigrant’s dream: he wanted to open his own business and start a family.

He met his future wife, Lucia Selvaggi, at a funeral Mass for a middle-aged butcher who suffered a fatal heart attack as he sliced his way through a thick double-cut rib eye. She was twenty-five and had been married to a handsome young man who lost his life in a gambling dispute in a Tenth Avenue bar. The few friends Francesco had made during his short time in the States all advised him to wait and perhaps find a more suitable bride, one who wasn’t “tainted” by the widow’s stain. But living through the end trails of a war had drummed into Francesco the simple but uncomfortable fact that death reaches a hand to touch everyone, some sooner than others, and leaves in its silent wake a vast ocean filled with altered lives. He felt safe in Lucia’s presence, finding a comfort zone he had never known before, and allowed her entry into the gates that he kept locked and lowered to ward off any intrusion. There existed a mutual understanding between the two, shared sentiments that life was indeed a fragile gift—one that could be quick to evaporate. So he ignored the dire warnings pressed on him by concerned friends and settled down with the only woman he would ever profess to love, and they began their life together.

Within five years of his wedding day, Francesco opened the doors to a small funeral parlor that bore his name. He worked the long hours required to get a competitive business off the ground, catering to the needs and requests, religious or otherwise, of the working-class Italians who made up the bulk of his clientele. While he serviced the dead on the first two floors of the four-story brownstone that housed the parlor, Lucia worked out of their third-floor apartment, designing and stitching white dresses and dark suits. These would then be offered up for sale at reduced prices to bereaved family members eager to make the dearly departed look their best in their final resting place.

The couple had enough money to cover the mortgage and their monthly expenses, with enough to put aside for the occasional dinner at a restaurant outside their neighborhood. They enjoyed each other’s company, treated each other with a mutual respect not common in most of the marriages in their circle, and were not afraid to display their affection in public. All was perfect, except for the fact that they had yet to have children. “It will happen when it’s meant to happen,” Francesco told his wife after yet another futile visit to a doctor long on sympathy but short on answers. “And when it does, it will be more than worth the wait. A special kid just takes a little longer to arrive.”

Andrew Victorino made his appearance one week shy of his parents’ tenth wedding anniversary, on a sultry August night in 1956. The couple, as expected, doted on their only child, happily catering to his every wish, and allowed to do so by the substantial income Francesco enjoyed from his now thriving business. There were camps for gifted children and trips to Europe in the summer, and private school the rest of the year. And if these outlets could not provide or fulfill a need, Francesco and Lucia brought in a tutor who could and did. For Andrew, it was, both above and beneath the surface, an ideal childhood. “My mom used to read me these bedtime stories—some in English, others in Italian, most of them sad—about kids my age going through all sorts of hardships I could never imagine existed,” he once told a college roommate. “I would sit in my bed at night, long after she had turned out the light and closed the door to my room, and wonder what it would be like to have to live like one of those kids. By the time I hit my twelfth birthday, I didn’t have to wonder about it anymore. I was one of them.”

Francesco Victorino was putting the final touches on the corpse of a young man who had fallen victim to an unforgiving lung disease. It was late, closing in on midnight, the large basement room shrouded in darkness and enveloped in silence. Francesco stared down at the young man with the sunken cheeks and the thinning hair and slowly shook his head. It was indeed a thin line that separated those who lived from those who died, those who were spared illness from those who were haunted by its hard clutch. The longer he lived, and the more days he spent working in the company of those who were touched by death’s hand, the more Francesco had come to appreciate life’s short attention span. He had long ago come to the realization that he ranked among the lucky few, the ones for whom death had yet to reach out its iron grip. He had skirted its grasp during the madness and suffering of the World War II years and had emerged from that period a determined man, made much older than his age by the horrors he had lived to witness. This, he had later realized, was why he had chosen a profession that kept him in death’s company on a daily basis. And it was also why he took such pride in ensuring that the deceased were afforded as comfortable and as warm a final parting as he could conjure. If you walk among the shadows of death, it might make you a less appealing target, he reasoned. Or maybe it was all just a matter of luck: the unseen flip of a celestial coin that ultimately decided who would live and who would die.