Fresh Kills

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Fresh Kills

A Cass Jameson Mystery

Carolyn Wheat

For Mom, my first editor

For Dad, my first opposing counsel

P
ROLOGUE

Little Fresh Kill. The name rolled around in my head as I trudged through the long grass, eyes intent on the boggy, soggy ground underfoot. I thought about what we were looking for and shivered.

I was part of an army of searchers. Men in red checked hunting jackets, cops in blue windbreakers, teenaged boys in leather jackets. I was one of a few women, plodding behind the men's longer strides, feeling like a camp follower.

Staten Island is full of kills, narrow inlets that were once the despair of captains maneuvering wooden ships around the island toward the bustling harbor of Manhattan. The word comes from the Dutch, meaning creek. Nothing sinister. Or so the old Staten Islander who walked next to me said. Now the tall ships were gone, and the swampland we trudged along lay between the Con Edison plant and the sanitation landfill.

Ecological types have taken to calling places like these “wetlands”—and the name was apt; I was up to my ankles in chilly water hidden beneath tall reeds—but to me it was still a swamp. Full of secrets. Capable of sucking people into the marshy ground, never to be seen again. An obstacle course in brown and gray.

It was a great place to dump a body.

It was getting late: dark and cold and raw. The calendar said April; this particular evening would have felt at home in November. My denim jacket, even with a wool sweater underneath, wasn't warm enough. My feet, in sneakers, had been soaked for hours. But it wasn't just the cold that froze my heart.

Every muscle ached as I plodded through the spongy, overgrown swamp, pushing aside brown, feather-topped grass. But I couldn't stop, couldn't knock off and call it a night the way some of the other searchers were beginning to do.

In the distance I heard the frantic barking of police dogs. The cop next to me broke into a run. I stumbled as I tried keeping pace with him, damp cold stabbing my lungs. As I ran on frozen feet toward whatever the dogs had discovered, my shins cried out in pain with each ragged step. Reeds whipped my face; I no longer bothered to push them out of the way before rushing toward the place where the dogs bayed.

As I tripped over hillocks of sphagnum moss, my sneakers sinking into the boggy ground, I prayed to the God I didn't believe in that the dogs had found a dead rabbit.

They hadn't.

Little Fresh Kill clung to its dead tenaciously, moss and weeds grasping at the girl's body as though pulling her into a watery underworld.

It was my fault. I stood on the bank watching the Emergency Services cops lowering ropes, knowing I should leave and knowing that I couldn't. That my punishment was to watch my client being pulled from the swamp like a discarded boot.

She was so small. Not a child, not yet the adult she'd tried to be. Long, blonde hair weed-tangled, face bleached white. A Staten Island Ophelia, with foam coming out of her open mouth. Her hands were clenched; had she grasped in death at the reeds, trying to pull herself out of the watery grave?

Around me the voices of the civilian volunteers who'd combed the area for the last several hours began to swell with speculation.

“Poor kid must've drowned herself,” a man with a pipe in his mouth said, shaking his head.

“But what was she doing here?” a heavyset woman in an Army fatigue jacket wanted to know. “I thought she was staying at that place in New Springville.”

“What place?”

“Home for unwed mothers. Didn't you hear the story on the news?” Fatigue Jacket's eager face proclaimed her ready to provide an update for anyone who'd missed the story.

“Didn't know there were any unwed mothers anymore,” the pipe smoker replied, “what with abortion and all.”

I moved away from the crowd, away from the cops trying in vain to keep the volunteers from turning into ghoulish rubberneckers. Turned toward—what? The stand of misshapen dwarf trees? The willow in the distance, head bowed as if weeping? The acres of swamp turned from wasteland into a wildlife refuge big enough to hide a hundred bodies?

The sun was setting, blood-red spilling into all the watery lanes of the kills. The sky was streaked with improbable colors, creams and lilacs and pinks as artificial-looking as a paint-by-number landscape. I kept walking, head bent, legs moving like pistons, aching like hell.

She was dead. Amber was dead.

I wasn't feeling too good myself.

The truth stabbed through me like the ice-cold swamp air: It was my fault. It was all my fault.

I wasn't the only one who thought so. Squishing footsteps behind me made me turn, fear jumping into my throat. “What the hell—”

It was Detective Aronson. The last guy in the world I wanted to see.

He grabbed my arm. It hurt, but he wasn't going to know that.

“Where do you think you're going, Ms. Jameson?” The voice was as smooth as the hand was rough. Aronson could play good cop/bad cop all by himself.

“I don't know. I—” I grabbed a deep breath and looked the detective in the eye. I had to know the worst. “Any sign of the baby?” I asked, my voice a dry croak.

“You hoping for a perfect score, Counselor? Two for two?”

“That's not fair,” I protested. Yet even as I spoke, I felt a perverse comfort in the fact that Aronson knew it was my fault. At least I wasn't on a self-blame trip for nothing.

“All I did was represent her in court. I'm not responsible for what she—” My voice broke. I turned away. If I wasn't responsible, who was?

Detective Milt Aronson released my arm and sighed. “No sign of the baby. We're going to keep looking.”

I nodded. When I was able to speak again, I said, “I'll go back with the others and help search.”

The look he gave me was ninety percent contempt and ten percent pity. “Don't you think you've done enough?”

He turned on his heel and walked back toward the clumps of searchers.

I marched like a zombie toward the place where I'd left the car. Once I tripped over a hillock of moss and sank to my knees in cold water. It was hard getting up; I felt as if I deserved to lie in the stinking, freezing muck that had claimed Amber's life.

I'd known girls like Amber existed. I'd known there were people in the world who sold babies, others who bought them, and lawyers who did the deals.

I just hadn't known I'd be one of them.

C
HAPTER
O
NE

I was number eighty-four on the calendar, a one-case lawyer with nothing to do but wait. If I'd been in Criminal, I'd have had other courtrooms to cover, clients to greet, calendars to answer. But here on the Civil side, I was a stranger, as out of place as a Wall Street corporado in Brooklyn night court.

Other lawyers milled around, calling out names, looking for clients or opponents. “Anyone here on
Thompson v. Powell
?” a stoop-shouldered man with a bald spot asked everyone who came through the door.

“Who's here for the Transit Authority?” a woman in a size-four black suit asked in a tiny voice.

“Who'd admit working for the Transit Authority?” the lawyer sitting next to me said under his breath. He was a young, upwardly mobile type with a Land's End briefcase and a supercilious smile. Clearly the Brooklyn Supreme Court motion part was a comedown in his professional career.

It was oddly soothing, the lazily expectant atmosphere of the motion part. There was bustle; there were brisk clerks hauling tons of official paper; there were the Service “girls” who answered motions for absent attorneys. There were deals in the hallways, slaps on the back. Typical lawyer stuff. With one difference from my daily fare in criminal court. No one was here because she'd drowned her children in three feet of scalding water.

“Anyone here a notary?” The voice was unmistakable, though it had been a while since I'd heard it. East Bronx Irish, loud enough to cut through the din of legal chitchat but not so loud as to render the speaker unladylike.

Marla Hennessey. Sometime friend, sometime rival, sometime bitch. Which of her multiple personalities would be out today?

Before Marla got her answer, the bailiff called out, “All rise,” and the judge took the bench. Sixty lawyers stood, then flopped back down on the benches. Somehow, during the thirty seconds we were up, Marla substituted herself for the Land's End briefcase.

“No, I'm not a notary,” I whispered, as the calendar call began. “How are you? Haven't seen you in ages,” I went on, doing the Greeting Old Law School Friend number as though there had never been any bad blood between us.

“Can you come out in the hall for a minute?” Marla's green eyes had a calculating look I knew all too well.

“I don't dare miss the first call,” I whispered back. “I'll be in this damned courtroom for the rest of my natural life as it is.”

As the clerk droned out the names on the calendar, lawyers jumped up and said, “Ready For,” “Ready in Op,” or as an occasional variation on a theme, “For the Motion.”

“Cass, don't bullshit me.” Marla was one of the few people I knew who could shout in a whisper. “I checked the calendar. You're number eighty-four. It'll take two minutes to explain, you say yes or no. The worst thing that happens is you're second-called.”

Second call is the civil court equivalent of the Chinese water torture. It meant waiting until at least noon. But such was the force of Marla's personality—or the depth of my curiosity—that I followed her into the hall.

Once there, she lit a cigarette and began waving it in her hand, her huge hammered-silver bracelet riding up and down on her wrist.