7. Marie Gotteskind was twenty-eight years old and employed as a substitute teacher in the New York City primary schools. For three days, including the day of her abduction, she had filled in for a fourth-grade teacher in Ridgewood. She was about the same height as Francine Khoury and within a few pounds of her in weight, blond and light-complected where Francine was dark-haired and olive-skinned.
There was no photograph in the file except for those taken at the scene in Forest Park, but testimony from acquaintances indicated that she was considered attractive.
There were differences. Marie Gotteskind was unmarried. She had had a few dates with a male teacher whom she'd met on an earlier substitute assignment, but their relationship does not seem to have amounted to much and his alibi for the time of her death was in any case unassailable.
Marie lived at home with her parents. Her father, a former steamfitter with a disability pension for a job-related injury, operated a small mail-order business from his home. Her mother helped him with the business and also served as a part-time bookkeeper for several neighborhood enterprises. Neither Marie nor either of her parents had any demonstrable connection to the drug subculture. Nor were they Arabs,
or Phoenicians.
The medical examination had been detailed, of course, and there was a lot to report. Death had come as a result of multiple stab wounds to the chest and abdomen, any of several of which would have been fatal. There was evidence of repeated sexual assault, with traces of semen in her anus, her vagina, and her mouth, as well as in one of the knife wounds. Forensic measurements indicated that at least two different knives had been used on her, and suggested that both could be kitchen knives, with one having a longer and wider blade than the other.
An analysis of the semen indicated the presence of at least two assailants.
In addition to the knife wounds, the nude body showed multiple bruises indicating that the victim had been subjected to a beating.
Finally, and I missed this on first reading, the medical examiner's report supplied the information that the thumb and index finger of the victim's left hand had been severed. The two digits had been recovered, the index finger from her vagina, the thumb from her rectum.
Cute.
READING the file had a numbing, deadening effect on me. That's very likely why I missed the thumb-and-finger item first time through.
The report of the woman's injuries and the image they conjured up of her last moments was more than the mind wanted to take in. Other entries in the file, interviews with parents and coworkers, had painted a picture of the living Marie Gotteskind, and the medical report took that living person and turned her into dead and grossly mistreated flesh.
I was sitting there, feeling drained and exhausted by what I had just read, when the phone rang. I answered it and a voice I knew said,
'So where's it at, Matt?'
'Hey, TJ.'
'How you doin'? You a hard man to reach. Be out all the time, goin' places, doin' things.'
'I got your message but you didn't leave a number.'
'Don't have a number. I was a drug dealer I might could have a beeper. You like it better that way?'
'If you were a dealer you'd have a cellular phone.'
'Now you talkin'. Have me a long car with a phone in it, and just be sittin' in it thinkin' long thoughts and doin' long things. Man, I got to say it again, you hard to reach.
'Did you call more than once, TJ? I only got the one message.'
'Well, see, I don't always like to waste the quarter.'
'What do you mean?'
'Well, you know, I got your phone figured. It's like those answering machines, how they pick up after three or four rings, whatever it is? Dude on the desk, he always lets your phone ring four times before he cuts in. And you just got the one room, so it ain't about to take you more than three rings to get to the phone, 'less you be in the bathroom or something.'
'So you hang up after three rings.'
'And get my quarter back. 'Less I want to leave a message, but why leave a message when I already left one? You come home an'
there's a whole stack of messages, you think to yourself, 'This TJ, he musta tapped a parking meter, he got all these quarters he don't know what to do with.' '
I laughed.
'So you workin'?'
'As a matter of fact I am.'
'Big job?'
'Fairly big.'
'Any room in it for TJ?'
'Not as far as I can see.'
'Man, you not lookin' hard enough! Must be something I could do, make up for some of the quarters I burn up callin' you. What kind of job is it, anyway? You not up against the Mafia, are you?'
