It was not yet ten o'clock when dozens of detectives, uniforms, and two EMS units arrived to deal with what had been variously reported as one to three homicides in the park. Peachy was still at it, and Mike had hopes that she would 'find' Maslow, too. He was scrambling down a hill after the dog as Peachy dragged her trainer along a footpath, then plunged into the bushes, came out, galloped parallel to the paved walk, then finally stopped abruptly, shivering all over. She pointed her long snout at a bench and yelped crazily. Mike picked up his pace and trotted up just in time to see Zumech give her a biscuit that was big enough to choke a horse.
The dog was yelping at a powerful odor that was like a dead mouse rotting behind a wall, maybe a little stronger. Mike's first thought was how it didn't fit with the bucolic park scene. It didn't fit at all. Central Park had a wide variety of aromas. On a summer morning, tree and flower aromas mingled with essence of hot dog, falafel, and pretzel. Mike could smell them now. The zoo on the East Side and the rowboat lake closer to the West Side added their own extracts to the potpourri. In the fall and winter there was the enticing smell of roasting chestnuts. In the late autumn and early spring, musty odors of wet earth and decaying leaves predominated. Garbage emanated from waste-baskets more powerfully when it was warm and not at all when it was cold. And other forms of human effluvia were from time to time clearly discernible-urine, vomit. But the stench of old corpse was one smell visitors didn't come upon in Central Park.
'Don't touch anything,' Mike cried as he made a quick assessment of the site. On the bench was a Styro-foam coffee cup that might have fingerprints or better yet saliva that contained DNA of their killer. On the grass beside the bench was an empty, crumpled-up potato chip bag. Ditto with fingerprints there. The shocking item that didn't belong was the tip of a man's shoe. Peachy was yapping up a storm, but Mike was still puzzled by the odor. The dog's first 'find' also had smelled like this, but he doubted that here lay the body that yielded it.
He took a few seconds to form an impression of the site. He didn't see things with the precision of a criminologist, but he was methodical and had an eye and nose for detail. While he couldn't name the bushes behind the bench, he could see they'd been trampled and that branches had been broken off, not cut with a knife. The shoe that poked out from under the bench was a brown, loafer-like slip-on. He sucked the end of his mustache. Maslow Atkins had been out for a jog. He'd been wearing sneakers. This shoe was not likely to have been his.
Suddenly the dog threw herself on the ground and lay there with an air of dejection. Zumech gave her a last pat and straightened up. 'I hate this part,' he muttered. 'So does Peachy. Look at her; she gets depressed when they're dead.'
Mike didn't remind Zumech that the dog had known that someone was dead before she ever got out of the car. She had no idea she'd been brought here to Central Park to find a living person. The dead smell had gotten her right away. He wondered if the dog knew the difference between the smell of a dead man and a dead something else. He wondered if the dog was smart enough to 'find' things in their order of importance. It occurred to him that the tissue samples were a hoax of some kind.
The two men each took a side of the park bench and moved in for a closer look. There was not much to see. Set back from the path, a large branching oak tree had some kind of overgrown bush on either side. Once they got behind the bench it was clear that the two shrubs had been disturbed quite a bit. Several branches that had connected the two bushes had been broken off to create enough space for a nest of leaves. It was a small space, not nearly big enough for a body. The reek that had driven Peachy nuts might have been hidden under the leaves at some point, but now it could be seen clearly. The fist-sized chunk of 'soft' tissue looked as if it had been dragged out and chewed on by a small animal.
'Don't touch,' Mike warned again.
Zumech stood back, frowning. 'This is weird,' he said uneasily.
'Very weird,' Mike agreed.
'Looks to me like someone's hunting.'
'How do you mean?'
Zumech lifted the Yankees cap off his head and scratched at his crew cut. 'I haven't seen the use of body parts to attract prey in a long time. The
Mike shook his head. He was only a boy in the sixties and seventies.
'I was. But before that I used to do a lot of hunting upstate. The first lesson I learned from my uncles was if you'd killed the doe and wanted to catch the buck, you cut out the uterus and laced the area with her scent. The buck would come running.'
'Hardly sounds fair,' Mike muttered.
'All's fair in love and war. This guy I used to know hunted humans that way in 'Nam.'
Mike pulled out his radio and tried not to react irritably to John's acing him with his war stories.
'There was this guy they called Tunnel Rat. The Cong lived in this seventy-five-mile maze of what were called the Cu Chi tunnels, you know. To hunt them, Rat would slither down two-foot-by-two-foot holes on his stomach all alone except for his army dog, called Rocket.'
'That's interesting. Does it have anything to do with our case here?'
'Oh yeah, it pertains.'
'Give me a minute to call this in.' Mike lifted his police radio and called in Peachy's fourth 'find.' It sounded just as weird to him as the others. In fact, this whole thing was looking more and more like a nut job. Zumech looked pretty strange himself, crouching on all fours with his face close to the ground.
'You were telling me about deer uterus,' Mike reminded him. 'Did they cut up women out there in 'Nam?'
Zumech finished his examination and jumped to his feet. 'People, yeah, not just women. I'd heard of lacing scent to attract animals for hunting, even done it myself. But the
'Oh yeah, how did our guys know whose ears they were?'
'Just a story I heard from a guy I used to know.' Zumech hunkered down again.
'How does it compute here?'
He shrugged and changed the subject. 'When I got back in '69, the Department was hiring without background checks, giving special consideration to veterans, you know-especially those with combat experience. You weren't around in the late sixties, but it was riot time here.'
'Yeah, I know all about that.' Mike didn't want to hang around for the lecture.
'They had a special unit manned by former marines and paratroopers. Those were the guys they wanted on patrol in the street. Tactical Patrol Force, it was called. Sounds good, huh?
'This guy, Tunnel Rat, was in that. He was there for the riots in Harlem, the riots at Columbia, too. After that, he was assigned to training the Department's bomb-detecting dogs. Until '86 he trained dogs and responded to suspected explosive devices. He worked over at Rodman's Neck.'
'Uh-huh.' Mike nodded. Most everybody trained at the firearms ranges and tactical house there. So what? The sun was on its ascent, getting hotter by the minute. They were waiting around for the forensic unit.
John glanced at his watch. 'In '86, the Department decided to obtain additional dogs and it was the Rat's job to train the cops and their trackers. They're especially effective in missing or abducted children's cases.'
Mike glanced at his watch, too. The history lesson was informative, but where was it leading? Zumech didn't seem to mind his impatience.
'As you know, Rodman's Neck is one bridge away from City Island. During his years in the Bomb Squad unit, the Rat used to go over there for lunch. And he made friends with a deputy warden of corrections. Know what this guy's job was?'
'Ah, this is where the body parts come in, right?'
'Smart.'
'I'm a detective,' Mike murmured.
'So, Warden Kelly supervised the fifty-man prison inmate crew that buried the City's unknown dead. The site was Hart Island, a ten-minute ferry ride. Every day, fifty to a hundred bodies lay there in the sun, in the cold, in the rain, whatever. The unclaimed bodies were put in flimsy wooden boxes. If the bulldozer that buried them broke down, sometimes they sat there for several days oozing fluids. Pretty putrid. The sweet smell of death was perfect for training the dogs. The Rat went over there once a week. And you know, sometimes those inmates were clumsy and accidentally knocked over a few of those boxes and the stuff just oozed right out.'
