The Battle of Jericho Read online

These days the theater showed independent and foreign films no major movie chain would book.

  Maria rang the bell at the service entrance and was let in by the projectionist. He said Soledad was in the theater, cleaning.

  Maria entered the auditorium. It had frayed red velvet seats and tan walls with peeling paint, lit by ’20s light sconces. She inhaled the theater’s unique smell: a combination of stale popcorn, celluloid film, and what she imagined to be the faint scent of greasepaint, left over from the theater’s vaudeville days.

  Soledad Ramírez looked up from her work, alarmed by the sight of a cop in uniform.

  In Spanish, Maria told her not to worry, she was just looking for information.

  “Please,” Soledad said. “Please to speak English. I try to learn, practice. One day — citizen.”

  Maria told her the police were investigating missing persons. She asked about her daughter.

  Soledad shook her head and looked away.

  “Don’t be afraid, Mrs. Ramírez,” Maria said. “I’m from here, so I understand why folks don’t like talking to the police. But it’s okay.”

  Soledad nodded but said nothing.

  “I just want to help you,” Maria said.

  The woman looked into Maria’s eyes. Could this cop be trusted?

  “¿Usted es una de nosotros?”

  “Sí. Vivo en Sag Harbor. Crecí aquí.”

  After a few moments Soledad spoke, in a whisper. “Teresa she run away. Fourteen years old, she has boyfriend. I never met. She say he has agency, could make her supermodel, movie actress. She tell me boyfriend is sweetest, nicest man — he love her so much. Once she come home with both eyes black, swollen. Lips bloody. She say she fell down, but I don’t believe.

  “Then one night she don’t come home. I go crazy. Next day she call — she say ‘Mama, I’m okay. Don’t worry.’ I say ‘Where are you?’ She hang up. I never hear from her again. I only hope…” She broke off, tears running down her face.

  Maria reached over and hugged her.

  “My Teresa,” Soledad went on. “I miss my Teresa.” She wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “That man, he knows how young girls dream, how they want to be models, movie stars.”

  “Can you describe your daughter for me?” Maria asked.

  “Beautiful girl. Sixteen years old now. Wait, I have picture.” She took out her wallet.

  “See how beautiful?” she said, handing Maria the photo.

  Maria looked closely at the picture. “What’s that hanging from her necklace?”

  “Pendant — Our Lady of Guadalupe. Supposed to bring her luck.”

  Maria used her phone to snap a picture of the photograph. She moved in tighter and took close-ups of the pendant.

  “You know where is my Teresa?” Soledad asked.

  “I’m sorry, right now I don’t,” Maria said. “Does she have any identifying marks?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like scars, tattoos?”

  “No. But she’s gone two years. By now…¿quien sabe?”

  “Let me ask you something,” Maria said. “Did you report your daughter missing to the police?”

  “No.”

  “¿Tiene miedo?” Maria said, knowingly. “No green card, huh?”

  Soledad nodded. “Please, you won’t tell.”

  Maria pressed her hand reassuringly. “You live alone, Soledad?”

  “Yes. Single mom. Used to live in Sea View Motel with Teresa. Then Teresa disappear. Landlord turn motel into condo and he throw me out. So now I live in mattress house.”

  “Mattress house?”

  “Yes. Number 10 Clinton Street.”

  “What do you mean — mattress house?”

  “Many big, old houses up there. Inside — many mattresses, for sleeping.”

  Maria took out a notepad and wrote down her phone number. “Call me if you want to talk.”

  “You give me pad, I write down my number.”

  “You have a phone?”

  “Claro,” Soledad said. “Everybody have cell.”

  Maria left and got in her car. She didn’t know Clinton Street, so she checked Google Maps and saw it was in the hamlet of Springs, right off Fireplace Road.

  After a half-hour drive, Maria saw the sign reading “ENTERING SPRINGS — home to Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Phillip Roth, Nora Ephron, John Steinbeck.”

  The area was heavily wooded and the forest had an eerie look. The dark branches of the leafless trees seemed almost to be writhing in pain as they reached up into the ashen gray sky. The only exceptions were the pitch pines and cedars, which remained defiantly green.

  As she drove to Clinton Street, Maria saw many well-kept homes. But scattered among them were rundown, old houses with as many as six cars parked in front of them. On their overgrown lawns were bicycles of every description, leaning against trees and porches.

  The house at 10 Clinton Street was a large decaying Victorian. It reminded Maria of the house above the Bates Motel, where Norman lived with his Mummy Dearest.

  Maria pulled up in her police car.

  She rang the doorbell. There had to be people at home; she could see a curtain move in a window, but no one responded.

  A few blocks over on Washington Street she saw what once had been a stately mansion. But it had not been painted in years. The faded yellow shades were all drawn and at first glance it appeared to be abandoned. But the cars and bikes in front of it showed it was still in use.

  Maria rang the front doorbell, knocked, but again she was ignored.

  She got back in her car and drove around, stopping at what appeared to be “mattress houses.” The response was always the same. There was none.

  She finally spotted a pedestrian, a Latina woman wheeling a baby carriage. When Maria tried to talk to her, the woman made signs indicating she was deaf and mute.

  She was getting nowhere, so Maria started back to the precinct house. In the next block she saw a well-dressed gentleman using a plastic bag to pick up after his Irish setter. The dog stared into space, blissfully unaware of his master’s distasteful task.

  The man looked up, saw the squad car, and flagged Maria down.

  “When the hell are you cops gonna clean up these damn slum houses?” he shouted. “Illegals sleeping eight to a room and playing fucking salsa till four in the morning. They’re turning this neighborhood into a ghetto and ruining my property value.”

  “We’re working on it, sir.”

  The man noticed her nametag with the Hispanic name. “Oh, I get it, señorita!” he said, giving her a disgusted look.

  “Have a pleasant day, sir,” said Maria as she pulled away.

  CHAPTER 13

  A harsh ocean wind blew in Jericho’s face as he walked along Two Mile Hollow Beach, where Ann Richman had gone jogging. There was nobody around. He saw what could’ve been a body at the edge of the woods abutting the beach. But it turned out to be the trunk of a fallen cedar.

  He stopped and took photos up and down the deserted shoreline. When he finished, he checked the pictures on his phone. They were tranquil beach images — foaming surf crashing on taupe-colored sand, with graceful gulls caught in mid-flight — the antithesis of a crime scene.

  He walked on slowly, hoping someone or something would give him a clue about Mrs. Richman’s disappearance.

  Up ahead he saw a dark object at the water’s edge. It could have been a rock, or a piece of driftwood, or a horseshoe crab. But as he drew closer, he knew it was what he feared most — another foot.

  As he approached, he could make out the logo on the sneaker — NB, New Balance. There was only the ankle and the edge of a low-cut sock showing. It was a right foot.

  He knelt down and prodded the foot with his pocketknife. Pushing back the tongue of the shoe, he could read the size – 6EEE. Ann Richman!

  He looked down at the foot. Its flesh was pale white. It had been broken off, leaving a bit of the shinbone showing. Jericho could see the tibia�
��s hard outer bone, the spongy inner bone, and the yellow marrow. Seawater had washed away all traces of blood.

  He took a series of photos, then picked up the foot with his knife and placed it in one of the evidence bags he always kept in his shoulder bag.

  Jericho stopped off at Mickey’s Deli, bought some ice, and repeated the whole process he’d gone through with the first foot. Then he took off for Hauppauge.

  “Same beach as the first one?” Alvarez asked.

  “No, that was on the Sound. This was on the Atlantic side. I’m pretty sure it’s from a woman reported missing this morning. As you can see, it’s a right foot, same as the first one.”

  “Let’s check out this tootsie in the ’scope room.”

  Alvarez got up and crossed to a file cabinet. “Let me get photos of the first foot. We’ll need them for comparison.”

  Down the hall was a room with long tables. A number of doctors and technicians huddled around microscopes, chatting softly and making notes on their tablets. There were some traditional microscopes, but most were digital, linked to screens, enabling specimens to be viewed by more than one person.

  Alvarez found an empty table in the corner with a digital microscope. He snapped on latex gloves, opened the evidence bag, and placed the foot on the table.

  “I can tell you right off the bat,” he said, “this foot hasn’t been in the water very long. Look, the bone marrow is still a vivid yellow. The color would be washed out if it were in the sea for a long time. And the ankle skin pucker is fairly minimal. See, ocean water is hypertonic saline, which means it draws water from the skin cells through osmosis, causing the epidermis to wrinkle up.”

  “How long would you say it’s been in the ocean?”

  “Less than a day.”

  Alvarez unlaced the sneaker, gently extracted the foot, and removed the sock. “Hmm,” he said. “Hallux hyperkeratosis deformity.”

  “Say what?”

  “A corn, on the big toe.”

  “You love saying shit like that, don’t you?”

  “Hey, I didn’t go to medical school for nothin’.”

  He placed the naked foot on a pad. Then he turned on a Proscope, an electronic imager which, when passed over the foot, produced an enlarged image on the computer screen.

  Next to the screen he placed a photo of the first victim’s foot. He looked carefully at both images. So did Jericho.

  “This second foot was broken off the same way as the first one,” Alvarez said. “You can see the jagged edges of both tibias and fibulas.”

  “You think a fish did this?”

  “When I saw the first foot I thought it was bitten off by a fish,” Alvarez said. “But this second one makes me think they both could’ve been broken off by a person. Somebody might’ve cracked through the bones with, say, a hatchet or an axe. I don’t think a saw was used because I’d recognize saw-tooth striations. Still, I can’t be certain.”

  “So you can’t see in the ’scope whether the cut is man-made or fish-made?”

  “No,” Alvarez said. “To make a clear determination, we’d need a scanning electron microscope and the expertise of a forensic anthropologist. The fracture patterns and the grain of the bone’s collagen fibers would look different if they were made by a fish or an axe.”

  Jericho nodded. “At NYPD we used a forensic anthropologist downtown at the ME’s office.”

  “We use them too,” Alvarez said. “Budget cuts eliminated that service from our facility. I’ll send these two feet over there today.”

  “Okay,” Jericho said. “But in the meantime, can you give me an educated guess — man-made or fish-made?”

  “Well, let’s see,” Alvarez said. “The teeth of big predatory fish are sharp, and so is an axe blade. A fish like a shark tends to bite the flesh of its prey and then tear it off. But someone with an axe could cut and then tear off the foot the same way. So my educated guess is — I don’t know.”

  “If you had to choose?”

  Alvarez thought for a moment. “I’d say a person did this. I mean — two females, wearing running shoes, both missing right feet…”

  Jericho cut in. “…Broken off in the same fashion and washed up on different beaches. That doesn’t seem like a fish’s handiwork.”

  “Fish don’t have hands,” Alvarez said.

  Jericho nodded. “So tell me this,” he said. “Can we assume these women are dead?”

  “I’d say so,” Alvarez said. “If you cut off someone’s foot, you’d have to sever three arteries and five veins. They would bleed out real fast, unless someone with surgical skill tied off their blood vessels.”

  “So a doctor or someone like that could keep them alive?”

  “Maybe,” Alvarez said. “But that’s pretty far-fetched. You’re talking about a maniac with medical training and a foot fetish. What are the chances?”

  “Slim to none,” Jericho said.

  “I vote none,” Alvarez said. “At any rate I’d assume these women are definitely dead. Of course, we can’t know for sure unless we find their bodies.”

  “Shit,” Jericho said. “I’ve been worried we might be dealing with a serial killer. And now it looks like…”

  “Looks like you’ve got real cause to worry.”

  “Yeah,” Jericho said. “Listen, you can label this foot Jane Doe number two, but I’m pretty sure it belongs to Ann Richman, the wife of the guy who reported her missing. He said she wore New Balance extra wide and she had corns on her big toes.”

  “Well, you’ll still be needing DNA confirmation,” Alvarez said. “Can you get a comparison exemplar?”

  “Shouldn’t be too hard.”

  Alvarez smiled at him knowingly. “You’ll be looking for her dead skin cells, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  Alvarez looked at his watch and apologized; he had to leave for a staff meeting. He’d clip a toenail sample from foot number two for DNA, then send both feet to the FA lab in New York. He promised to contact Jericho as soon as they determined how the feet were severed.

  “Oh, by the way,” Alvarez said. “Toxicology on foot number one reports traces of diacetylmorphine…”

  “Heroin,” Jericho said.

  “Right. Oh, and the nail polish on her toes does check out as OPO Fabuloso. So it’s probable that the first victim is Mexican.”

  “Thanks,” Jericho said.

  “I sure as hell hope there ain’t no foot number three!”

  “You and me both.”

  That afternoon Aaron sat at his computer Googling “foot fetish killers.” He’d already read about Dayton Leroy Davis — a Portland, Oregon, serial killer with a penchant for sawing off his victims’ feet. And Christopher Farrow, of Cookridge West York, UK, who’d murdered four women and stored their feet in formaldehyde.

  He clicked on a link to Murderpedia.com to see an article entitled “Podophiliac Killer: Jerry Brudos.” He’d just begun reading when he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairs.

  Quickly he brought up MS Word and typed “The Catcher in the Rye” — a book report he was supposed to be doing. He wrote “Holden Caulfield is a teenager who resents adult phoniness.”

  His MTB barged in. “Aaron, what are you doing?”

  “Ma, can’t you at least knock?”

  “You don’t deserve privacy,” she said. “Not when you’re always playing your stupid video games or e-mailing your no-good friends when you should be doing your homework.”

  “I am doing my homework — check it out.”

  She leaned over and read the start of his book report.

  “Told ya,” her son said, smirking. “By the way, did you know copies of The Catcher in the Rye were found on three assassins — John Hinckley, Mark David Chapman, and Lee Harvey Oswald?”

  “Stop being morbid and get back to work!” She turned and stomped out of the room.

  “Shut the door, Ma.”

  She ignored him. Aaron got up, closed the door, and returned to his compute
r. He saved his homework (which he would finish later, ripping off SparkNotes) and went back to reading about Jerry Brudos.

  CHAPTER 14

  At the six PM meeting with Krauss and Maria, Jericho told them he’d found a second foot on the beach, which, pending DNA confirmation, belonged to Ann Richman. He laid out everything he’d learned from the forensic pathologist.

  “So, it’s a near certainty these two women are dead,” Jericho said. “And the ME feels both these feet were cut off manually, by a person. Given the similarities of both cases and the anonymous note we got, we well may be dealing with a serial killer.”

  “It’s only two murders,” the Chief said.

  “The FBI says two or more victims, with similar MOs,” Jericho said. “You wanna play semantics and wait around for a possible third, or would you rather we keep investigating?”

  Krauss nodded.

  “I’d keep quiet about this second foot,” Jericho said. “We want to avoid public panic and the media frenzy. If this is the work of a serial killer, that’s just what he’d want.”

  “So what’s our next step?” Krauss asked. “I assume you’re gonna interview Richman again.”

  “Of course,” Jericho said. “For one thing, I need to get a sample of his wife’s DNA.”

  “But if you tell Richman about the foot,” Krauss said, “he might tell other people, the word’ll get around and…”

  “Yes. That’s why I won’t tell him about the foot,” Jericho said. “Or even that his wife is presumed dead.”

  “But the husband has a right to know.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “If his wife is presumed dead,” Krauss shouted, “you can’t keep that from him.”

  “Sir,” Maria interjected, “when we question someone we’re under no obligation to tell him anything.”

  “Criminal Justice 101,” Jericho said, smiling at Maria. For a moment she was hurt, till the warmth in Jericho’s face showed his remark was praise for her, and a putdown of Krauss.

  “Chief,” Jericho went on, “when you interrogate someone, the less information you give him, the more he’s likely to give you. For example, if Richman refers to his wife in the past tense and we haven’t mentioned her death — that would tell us a lot, wouldn’t it?”