Chapter 18
Bloch
The truth doesn’t come easy.
Detective work is a laborious, detail-driven process of elimination.
For a private detective, it’s slightly different.
You come into a situation where an investigation has already been conducted.
The stones have been overturned, or at least most of them.
The job then becomes examining what was beneath those stones afresh, without bias, without a suspect in mind, without prejudice.
And then you look at the little rocks. The ones the police didn’t bother to kick over. What story lies under there.
In the end, and in the beginning, it all comes down to hard work and good eyes.
Bloch ended the call on her cell phone, stared across the table of the diner at Gabriel Lake.
There was a hint of gray in his stubble, and at his temples.
He was still in his late thirties. The bags under his eyes, the gray hair and the wrinkles on his face weren’t from age.
They had worked together for long enough now.
Her partner didn’t sleep much, didn’t really eat a lot, didn’t work out and hadn’t unpacked the boxes in his apartment since he’d moved in a year ago.
His fingers tapped lightly on the table as he stared at the remnants of the poached eggs on his plate.
This was a guy whose motor revved high all the time, the needle constantly hovering over the red line.
His mind never rested, not fully. Judging by the time of night she had received texts from him, she knew he didn’t sleep much either.
He had spent his life hunting monsters. Real monsters. Serial killers, mostly.
You can’t run on red for long. Sooner or later, something was going to blow.
And Lake did blow, from time to time. Usually when he found his prey.
For a former FBI agent, he had a casual disregard for the system.
It was his pushback against this system that almost got him killed.
Someone in the bureau had set him up, making sure he walked into a kill house full of armed men – drug dealers protecting their product.
Lake had been carried out by the paramedics on a stretcher. The dealers came out in body bags.
This had scarred him, both on the outside and the inside. In his soul.
Now, when Lake found a monster, he didn’t hesitate.
Bloch wondered if Lake being a killer somehow helped him find others who shared his dark nature.
‘What did you find out?’ he asked.
Bloch drained the last of her coffee, folded up the wrapper of her blueberry muffin and tossed it on her empty plate.
‘Carey and Larkin weren’t on shift when the body was found. They weren’t even partners,’ said Bloch. ‘Carey got her detective promotion the day the body was found. This is her first homicide. The whole precinct is talking about it. The captain is pissed too.’
‘So he got orders from higher up the chain of command. Somebody with power put a rookie and a world-class fuck-up on a high-profile murder. Doesn’t make sense,’ said Lake.
‘It makes sense if that person wants to control the investigation.’
‘Any hits on Teresa Chase?’ he asked.
‘Not yet. My contact checked most of the databases, nothing showing in New York. She’s doing a wider search, and she’s still waiting for VICAP results.’
The violent criminal apprehension program was a database of unsolved violent crimes statewide. While it had its drawbacks, it sometimes helped identify violent offenders through victim profiles and common patterns.
‘Do you still have your forensic kit in that . . . car?’ asked Bloch, checking her watch.
‘Yeah, why?’
‘Larkin and Carey are not flavor of the month in the precinct. The rest of the detectives see the Molly Green case as a promotion ticket. They’re pissed.
There’s a patrolman named Terry Johnson due to perform a check on the crime scene at seven.
He’s a friend. And his brother is homicide, one of the people Carey stepped over to land this case.
Terry will have a fresh crime-scene seal with him when he performs his check. ’
Lake glanced at his watch, tapped it. It was an old digital Casio. The face was scratched and the LCD display was fading out with the rapidly diminishing battery. He pressed the side button, adjusted his view to block out the light, but still couldn’t read the display.
‘What time is it?’ he asked.
‘Time you got a new watch. It’s five thirty. The building is a half hour from here.’
‘We can take my car.’
Bloch said, ‘We want to get there today. Get the kit. We’ll take my Jeep.’
West Harlem, 135th Street, a line of gray-brick apartment buildings sitting opposite the Bus Stop Diner on the corner of Broadway.
The buildings were four stories high, with a solid steel-fronted security door leading to the lobby and a bank of apartment buzzers on the wall.
Bloch made a call, the door buzzed and Lake pushed it.
A single elevator served the residents, with a staircase to the left. The walls were either painted yellow or had aged into that color.
No cameras anywhere.
They took the elevator to the second floor.
A cop in uniform waited in the hallway. There were four apartments on each floor. They passed two apartments to get to the cop who stood outside a door with a yellow seal, about the same size as a dinner tray, stuck over the frame and the door.
The cop held a fresh seal in a packet in his hand. As Bloch and Lake approached, they put on black disposable gloves so as not to contaminate the scene.
‘You’ve got ten minutes. You haven’t seen me. I haven’t seen you,’ said the cop.
He turned, took a key from his pocket and used it to split the seal, then unlocked the door and stood back.
The apartment was in darkness, curtains drawn. Bloch found a light switch, flicked it up. The door opened into the living space of the apartment.
‘Watch your step,’ said the cop.
Bloch looked down, saw a large dark stain on the gray carpet.
It was about three feet wide and crusty, a pool of blood that had soaked into the fibers.
The stain was in the middle of the floor.
This area had a couch facing a TV and a bookshelf with dusty paperbacks, their yellowed pages facing outwards instead of the spine, perhaps arranged this way for aesthetic purposes.
A single door on the right stood open and Bloch could see a tiled wall and a small sink through the gap. The bathroom.
Beyond the living area, divided by a breakfast bar, was a small, neat kitchen. White cupboards, steel sink, a microwave, an oven below and an electric stove on top. Nothing on display in the kitchen, not even a dirty coffee mug.
To the left of the kitchen was a small bedroom. The double bed had been stripped to the bare mattress, and there was a wardrobe, a chest of drawers and some shoes arranged on the floor in a line below the window. Bloch took her time examining the mattress. No traces of blood.
Generic art hung on the walls of the bedroom, black-and-white photographs of the Manhattan skyline. Same in the living area and the short hallway leading into the apartment.
Apart from the bloodstain on the carpet, there were no signs of a struggle, no signs of violence. Nothing out of place.
Bloch sniffed.
‘You smell that too?’ asked Lake.
‘What is it?’ asked Bloch.
The odor was strangely familiar, a chemical of some kind.
‘Smells like a solvent of some kind,’ said Lake. ‘It’s like the solvent forensics use to lift fingerprint DNA. Although this is way more concentrated.’
The odor was strongest close to the front door, around the staining on the rug.
‘Maybe something used to treat the bloodstain?’ asked Bloch, then knelt down and sniffed at the floor.
She recoiled, holding her wrist over her nose.
‘No, they haven’t used anything on the carpet. I can still smell the blood.’
Lake went into the bathroom. Bloch returned to the bedroom and began going through the drawers.
Underwear, socks, sweaters, jeans. Dresses and coats in the wardrobe.
She went into the kitchen and began pulling open cupboards and drawers.
Just ordinary kitchen items. She abandoned the kitchen, moved to the living area.
A coffee table between the couch and the TV had a glass top.
A dozen pens sat in a coffee mug. The mug was old and had a faded picture of a windmill on one side.
There had been some writing on the back, but it had faded away.
It had been through too many cycles in a hot dishwasher.
Two large heavy books were arranged beside it.
One on coffee and one on industrial design in architecture.
A thin coating of dust lay on the top of the first book.
Bloch opened the books, leafed through the pages.
She stood, examined the bookcase, took a few books at random and flicked through the pages – nothing.
Lake came around the corner, said, ‘Check out the bathroom.’
She followed him.
The bathroom was tiny: toilet, baby sink, low bathtub with a shower and a yellow curtain. White tile on the walls, a single extractor fan on the wall and nothing else.
There was the same chemical smell in the bathroom, especially around the small sink.
‘I already checked the whole room with a black light. No trace of blood, saliva – nothing,’ said Lake.
‘Look for prints,’ said Bloch.
She reached into Lake’s bag, took one of his bottles of fingerprint powder and a large brush and went into the kitchen.
She coated the brush in the powder and began to quickly cover the counter, the drawer handles, the sink.
Then went back to the bedroom, dusting the door handles, wardrobe and drawers, even the shoes on the floor.
‘I got nothing. What did you find?’ asked Lake.
Bloch stood, shook her head.
‘You ever seen anything like this?’ asked Lake.
‘No, you?’
‘Never. Let’s get out of here.’
They packed up, and were walking toward the front door when Bloch stopped. A framed print hung on the wall. On the other side of this wall was the bathroom. It was painted white, just like the other walls, but this print caught her attention.
It was Monet’s waterlilies. Colorful, vibrant.
Wrong.
Bloch turned and approached the next picture she could find, this one above the TV. Another black-and-white Manhattan skyline. She ran her index finger along the top of the frame. It came back with dirt. She went back to the Monet print. This time, the other finger.
Clean.
Bloch looked at Lake, said, ‘Somebody cleaned this. The whole place has been wiped down.’
She gazed at the stain on the floor. Something terrible happened here. A life taken. A body mutilated. Whoever had taken this woman’s life had been careful to clean up after themself. This was a killing that had a cold edge. Something clinical and precise.
And planned.
In the car, on the way back to the office, she called Eddie.
‘We got a look at the crime scene,’ she said. ‘There’s a wide bloodstain from blood pooling on the carpet in the living area. Probably where the decapitation occurred. Everything else has been cleaned.’
‘Cleaned? By the NYPD? By the landlord?’
‘Not the landlord,’ said Lake. ‘First thing they would do is tear up the carpet. Bloch means the whole apartment has been cleaned. There’s not a single fingerprint in the place.
And that’s not all. There are no photographs of Molly Green.
No mail. No ID. No laptops, no phones, no iPad, not even a goddamn charger plugged into the socket.
The tech is probably in the inventory of exhibits taken by police, but there’s more.
There was no bedding. Just a bare mattress.
There are no bath products, no toothbrush, no toothpaste, not even a towel.
There is not a single trace of Molly Green in the whole apartment apart from her clothes and shoes. ’
‘What does that mean?’ asked Eddie.
‘It means she’s been erased,’ said Bloch.
‘Why?’ asked Eddie.
Bloch said, ‘Don’t know yet, but if we find out why then we’ve found the killer.’