At eleven the Chief appeared with his terse statement—carbon monoxide, wild dogs, TPF roundup of dogs, case closed in one day.
The hell it is, she thought, the hell it is.
Chapter 3
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Mike O’Donnell hated this part of his daily journey. The streets around here were sullen, dangerous and empty. Openings in the ruined buildings exhaled the stench of damp rot and urine. O’Donnell liked the bustling crowds a few blocks away, but on the money a blind man made you couldn’t take cabs through these areas, you had to walk. Over the years the deadly stillness had grown like a cancer, replacing the noisy, kindly clamor that Mike remembered from his childhood. Now it was almost all like this except the block where Mike lived with his daughter and the block near the subway station a twenty-minute walk away.
Those twenty minutes were always bad, always getting worse. Along this route he had encountered addicts, muggers, perverts—every kind of human garbage. And he had survived. He let them shake him down. What could he lose, a few dollars? Only once had he been struck, that by some teenagers, children really. He had appealed to their manhood, shamed them out of their plan to torture him in one of the empty buildings.
Mike was tough and resilient. Sixty sightless years in the Bronx left him no other choice. He and his beloved daughter were on welfare, home relief. She was a good girl with bad taste in husbands. God knows, the kind of men… smelling of cologne and hair grease, moving around like cats through the apartment, voices that sneered every word… actors, she said. And she was an actress, she said… he groped his way along with his cane trying to put trouble out of his mind, not wanting to bring his feelings home, start an argument.
Then he heard a little sound that made the hairs rise along the back of his neck. It didn’t quite seem human, yet what else could it be? Not an animal— too much like a voice, too little like a growl.
“Is somebody there?”
The sound came again, right in front of him and down low. He sensed a presence. Somebody
Something slid along the pavement. At once the strange sound was taken up from other points—behind him, in the abandoned buildings beside him, in the street. There was a sense of slow, circling movement.
Mike O’Donnell raised his cane, started to swing it back and forth in front of him. The reaction was immediate; Mike O’Donnell’s death came so suddenly that all he registered was astonishment.
They worked with practiced efficiency, pulling the body back into the abandoned building while blood was still pumping out of the throat. It was a heavy, old body, but they were determined and there were six of them. They worked against time, against the ever-present danger of being discovered at a vulnerable moment.
Mike O’Donnell hadn’t understood how completely this neighborhood had been abandoned in recent years, left by all except junkies and other derelicts, and the ones who were attracted to them for their weakness. And now Mike O’Donnell had joined the unnumbered corpses rotting in the abandoned basements and rubble of the empty neighborhood.
But in his case there was one small difference. He had a home and was missed. Mike’s daughter was frantic. She dialed the Lighthouse for the Blind again. No, they hadn’t seen Mike, he had never appeared for his assigned duties. Now it was six hours and she wasn’t going to waste any more time. Her next call was to the police.
Because missing persons usually turn up on their own or don’t turn up at all, and because there are so many of them, the Police Department doesn’t react instantly to another such report. At least, not unless it concerns a child or a young woman who had no reason to leave home, or, as in the case of Mike O’Donnell, somebody who wouldn’t voluntarily abandon the little security and comfort he had in the world. So Mike O’Donnell’s case was special and it got some attention. Not an overwhelming amount, but enough to cause a detective to be assigned to the case. A description of Mike O’Donnell was circulated, given a little more than routine attention. Somebody even questioned the daughter long enough to draw a map of Mike’s probable route from his apartment to the subway station. But the case went no farther than that; no body turned up, the police told the daughter to wait, not to give up hope. A week later they told her to give up hope, he wasn’t going to be found. Somewhere in the city his body probably lay moldering, effectively and completely hidden by whoever had killed him. Mike O’Donnell’s daughter learned in time to accept the idea of his death, to try to replace the awful uncertain void with the comfort of certainty. She did the best she could, but all she really came to understand was that her father had somehow been swallowed by the city.
During these weeks Neff and Wilson worked on other assignments. They heard nothing about the O’Donnell case; they were investigating another murder, locked in the endless, sordid routine of Homicide. Most crimes are no less commonplace than the people who commit them, and Wilson and Neff weren’t being assigned to the interesting or dramatic cases these days. It wasn’t that they were being muscled aside, but word was out that the Chief of Detectives wasn’t exactly in love with them. He knew that they didn’t like his handling of the DiFalco/Houlihan murders and he didn’t want to be reminded of it, primarily because he didn’t like it any more than they did. He was a more literal man than they were and much more concerned with his own potential appointment to the job of Police Commissioner than with following up bizarre theories about what genuinely looked to him like an even more bizarre accident. So the two detectives were kept away from big cases, effectively buried in the sheer size of the New York City Police Department.
The first words Becky Neff heard about Mike O’Donnell came from the Medical Examiner. “I thought you two had retired,” he said over the phone. “You got a heavy case?”
“The usual. Not a lot of action.” Beside her Wilson raised his eyebrows. The phone on her desk hadn’t been ringing too often; an extended conversation like this was of interest.
“I’ve got a problem up here I’d like you two to take a look at.”
“The Chief—‘”
“So take a coffee break. Just come up here. I think this might be what you’ve been waiting for.”
“What’s he got?” Wilson asked as soon as she put down the phone.
“He’s got a problem. He thinks it might interest us.”
“The Chief—”
“So he said take a coffee break and come up to see him. I think it’s a good idea.”
They pulled on their coats; outside it was a bright, blustery December afternoon and the cold wind coming
