“Say again, Central.”
“The RP said he hoped the victim was dead. For his sake. K.”
“K.”
Hoped the vic was dead?
Sachs struggled over a wilted chain-link and searched another empty lot. Nothing.
She wanted to quit. Call in a 10-90, unfounded report, and go back to the Deuce, which was her regular beat. Her knees hurt and she was hot as stew in this lousy August weather. She wanted to slip into the Port Authority, hang with the kids and have a tall can of Arizona iced tea. Then, at 11:30 – just a couple of hours away – she’d clean out her locker at Midtown South and head downtown for the training session.
But she didn’t – couldn’t – blow off the call. She kept going: along the hot sidewalk, through the gap between two abandoned tenements, through another vegetation-filled field.
Her long index finger pushed into her flattop uniform cap, through the layers of long red hair piled high on her head. She scratched compulsively then reached up underneath the cap and scratched some more. Sweat ran down her forehead and tickled and she dug into her eyebrow too.
Thinking: My last two hours on the street. I can live with it.
As Sachs stepped farther into the brush she felt the first uneasiness of the morning.
Somebody’s watching me.
The hot wind rustled the dry brush and cars and trucks sped noisily to and from the Lincoln Tunnel. She thought what Patrol officers often did: This city is so damn loud somebody could come up right behind me, knife-range away, and I’d never know it.
Or line up iron sights on my back…
She spun around quickly.
Nothing but leaves and rusting machinery and trash.
Climbing a pile of stones, wincing. Amelia Sachs, thirty-one – a mere thirty-one, her mother would say – was plagued by arthritis. Inherited from her grandfather as clearly as she’d received her mother’s willowy build and her father’s good looks and career (the red hair was anybody’s guess). Another jolt of pain as she eased through a tall curtain of dying bushes. She was fortunate to stop herself one pace from a sheer thirty-foot drop.
Below her was a gloomy canyon – cut deep into the bedrock of the West Side. Through it ran the Amtrak roadbed for trains bound north.
She squinted, looking at the floor of the canyon, not far from the railroad bed.
What is that?
A circle of overturned earth, a small tree branch sticking out of the top? It looked like -
Oh, my good Lord…
She shivered at the sight. Felt the nausea rise, prickling her skin like a wave of flame. She managed to step on that tiny part inside her that wanted to turn away and pretend she hadn’t seen this.
He hoped the victim was dead. For his sake.
She ran toward an iron ladder that led down from the sidewalk to the roadbed. She reached for the railing but stopped just in time. Shit. The perp might’ve escaped this way. If she touched it she might screw up any prints he’d left. Okay, we do it the hard way. Breathing deeply to dull the pain in her joints, she began climbing down the rock face itself, slipping her issue shoes – polished like silver for the first day of her new assignment – into crevices cut in the stone. She jumped the last four feet to the roadbed and ran to the grave.
“Oh, man…”
It wasn’t a branch sticking out of the ground; it was a hand. The body’d been buried vertical and the dirt piled on until just the forearm, wrist and hand protruded. She stared at the ring finger; all the flesh had been whittled away and a woman’s diamond cocktail ring had been replaced on the bloody, stripped bone.
Sachs dropped to her knees and began to dig.
Dirt flying under her dog-paddling hands, she noticed that the uncut fingers were splayed, stretched beyond where they could normally bend. Which told her that the vic had been alive when the last shovelful of dirt was spooned onto the face.
And maybe still was.
Sachs dug furiously into the loosely packed earth, cutting her hand on a bottle shard, her dark blood mixing into the darker earth. And then she came to the hair and a forehead below it, a cyanotic bluish-gray from the lack of oxygen. Digging further until she could see the dull eyes and the mouth, which had twisted into a horrible grin as the vic had tried in the last few seconds to stay above the rising tide of black earth.
It wasn’t a woman. Despite the ring. He was a heavy-set man in his fifties. As dead as the soil he floated in.
Backing away, she couldn’t take her eyes off his and nearly stumbled over a railroad track. She could think of absolutely nothing for a full minute. Except what it must’ve been like to die that way.
Then: Come on, honey. You got yourself a homicide crime scene and you’re first officer.
You know what to do.
ADAPT
A is for Arrest a known perp.
D is for Detain material witnesses and suspects.
A is for Assess the crime scene.
P is for…
What was P again?
She lowered her head to the mike. “Portable 5885 to Central. Further-to. I’ve got a 10-29 by the train tracks at Three-eight and Eleven. Homicide, K. Need detectives, CS, bus and tour doctor. K.”
“Roger, 5885. Perp in custody, K?”
“No perp.”
“Five-eight-eight-five, K.”
Sachs stared at the finger, the one whittled down to the bone. The incongruous ring. The eyes. And the grin… oh, that fucking grin. A shudder ripped through her body. Amelia Sachs had swum among snakes in summer-camp rivers and had boasted truthfully she’d have no problem bungee-jumping from a hundred-foot bridge. But let her think of confinement… think of being trapped, immobile, and the panic attack’d grab her like an electric shock. Which was why Sachs walked fast when she walked and why she drove cars like light itself.
When you move they can’t getcha…
She heard a sound and cocked her head.
A rumble, deep, getting louder.
Scraps of paper blowing along the roadbed of the tracks. Dust dervishes swirling about her like angry ghosts.
Then a low wail…
Five-foot-nine Patrol Officer Amelia Sachs found herself facing down a thirty-ton Amtrak locomotive, the red, white and blue slab of steel approaching at a determined ten miles an hour.
“Hold up, there!” she shouted.
The engineer ignored her.
Sachs jogged onto the roadbed and planted herself right in the middle of the track, spread her stance and waved her arms, signaling him to stop. The locomotive squealed to a halt. The engineer stuck his head out the window.
“You can’t go through here,” she told him.
He asked her what she meant. She thought he looked woefully young to be driving such a big train.
“It’s a crime scene. Please shut off the engine.”
“Lady, I don’t see any crimes.”
But Sachs wasn’t listening. She was looking up at a gap in the chain-link on the west side of the train viaduct, at the top, near Eleventh Avenue.
That would have been one way to get the body here without being seen – parking on Eleventh and dragging the body through the narrow alley to the cliff. On Thirty-seventh, the cross street, he could be spotted from two dozen apartment windows.
“That train, sir. Just leave it right there.”
“I can’t leave it here.”
“Please shut off the engine.”
“We don’t shut off the engines of trains like this. They run all the time.”
“And call the dispatcher. Or somebody. Have them stop the southbound trains too.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Now, sir. I’ve got the number of that vehicle of yours.”
“Vehicle?”
“I’d suggest you do it immediately,” Sachs barked.
“What’re you going to do, lady? Gimme a ticket?”
But Amelia Sachs was once again climbing back up the stone walls, her poor joints creaking, her lips tasting limestone dust, clay and her own sweat. She jogged to the alley she’d noticed from the roadbed and then turned around, studying Eleventh Avenue and the Javits Center across it. The hall was bustling with crowds – spectators and press. A huge banner proclaimed, Welcome UN Delegates! But earlier this morning, when the street was deserted, the perp could easily have found a parking space along here and carried the body to the tracks undetected. Sachs strode to Eleventh, surveyed the six-lane avenue, which was jammed with traffic.