Chapter Text
The uniformed officers manning the barricades recognized Detective Nikki Heat’s gold Crown Victoria as an unmarked police car, and moved them aside to let her pass through to park with the other police cars, CSU vans, and the M.E. wagon clustered around the entrance to Central Park.
She got out of her car, her hand unconsciously brushing over her hip to assure herself that her SIG Sauer service pistol was in its proper place. She let her leather jacket flap open as she strode toward the scene, showing the gold detective’s badge clipped to her belt to anyone who looked her way.
It was a beautiful spring morning. The nighttime frost was disappearing from the areas that the sun reached through the breaks in the trees, but the shadows were still cloaked in white. Birds were singing; new growth was sprouting all around her. It had rained yesterday, but this morning had dawned bright, and clear. The day was new enough that the scent of fresh growth from vegetation in Central Park hadn’t yet been overpowered by the fumes from car exhausts.
Nikki Heat paused twenty yards short of the yellow tape surrounding the crime scene, both to take in the environs of the homicide, and to pay a moment of homage to the victim … someone that she didn’t know anything about yet, but it was part of her ritual. Whoever lay dead on the other side of that yellow plastic ribbon was a human being. They were certainly someone’s child. They might have siblings, a spouse, and children; an ever expanding network of friends, acquaintances, and enemies. Their death might have come at the hand of any one of those — statistically speaking most people were killed by someone they knew — or it might have been a random act of violence perpetrated by a stranger. The vic — Nikki hated thinking of them that way, but she didn’t have a name yet — might just have been someone who was in the park at the wrong time.
The yellow tape was blocking off public access to an area of the woods at the eastern side of Turtle Pond in Central Park. Joggers who liked to loop around the pond were being diverted onto a slightly longer path along West 79th, and East Drive.
The officer guarding this side of the perimeter wasn’t anyone Heat had seen before, but he saw her gold shield and lifted the tape for her to pass under it. CSU had already been all over the scene, putting down their little, yellow, numbered markers by everything that they thought might be relevant to this case. She gave the markers a wide berth as she moved in toward the body, but she kept her eyes down at the ground, to make sure that she didn’t step on anything that CSU might have missed.
Roach — as everyone called the team of Detectives Raley and Ochoa — were standing by the body. “What have we got?” asked Detective Heat, then she got her first good look at the victim.
She was lying on the ground, sheltered from view by anyone on the jogging path by the shrubs and other undergrowth. She was dressed in a jacket, and a short, faux-leather skirt over fishnet stockings. There were a couple of obvious problems with the crime scene. Detective Heat addressed the most obvious one, first. “Where’s her head?”
Lauren Parry, the Medical Examiner who was making a more detailed inspection of the body looked up. “I don’t know. I doubt if our vic was killed here. This looks more like a body drop, to me.” That conclusion was pretty obvious too, from the second problem with the crime scene: there wasn’t anywhere near enough blood to go with a headless corpse.
“Can you give us a time of death?”
“Not a very accurate one,” said Lauren. “With most of her blood gone, and the body having been moved, it complicates things, but I’d say sometime between midnight and two a.m.. I might be able to give you a more accurate time, once I’ve got her back to the lab.”
“Do we have an ID on her yet?”
“She still had her purse,” said Detective Ochoa. “The driver’s license in it IDed her as Margaret Winston. One of the uniforms recognized the name. He says she’s been picked up for prostitution a couple of times. She worked the clubs and bars along Central Park West. I’ve had them start a canvas, to see if anyone saw her last night.”
“Who found her?” Heat knew that whoever reported a murder was a likely perpetrator.
“A jogger, Ray Johnstone, and his dog,” said Raley, nodding his head toward a man on a nearby bench with a golden retriever sitting in front of him, and a uniformed officer standing watch over him. “He says that his dog pulled him off the path, and led him to the body. That’s his breakfast over there.” He pointed to puddle of vomit, a couple of yards from the body.
“Any indication that he knew the victim?” asked Heat.
“Not so far,” said Raley.
Nikki took one more look around at the scene, and then went to talk to their witness: not because she doubted anything that Raley had told her, but because she wanted to make him repeat his story, to her. He might add a detail that he had left out earlier that could become significant, or he might slip and change his story if he was trying to cover something up.
“Mr. Johnstone, I’m Detective Heat. I’m told that you found the body?”
Johnstone nodded. “Yes, well, it was really my dog, Rawlf, who found her. We were jogging around the pond, and he swerved off into the bushes. I thought at first that he’d seen a squirrel, or something, but then I saw her.”
“What did you do?”
“Rawlf was sniffing around her, and I pulled him back. At first I thought that she might have been drunk, or a druggy that had passed out here, but then I saw that her head was gone. I’m afraid that I threw up.”
“That’s not an uncommon reaction,” said Detective Heat, in her most sympathetic voice.
“After I got done heaving up my breakfast, I called 911,” said Mr. Johnstone, “and then I pulled back to wait for the police.”
“Did you touch the body at all?”
“No!” said Johnstone, “and Rawlf didn’t either, really. He might have nudged her with his nose a couple of times before I pulled him away, but that’s all.”
Nikki decided to switch the subject. “Do you run by here often?”
“Once or twice a week, if the weather’s nice,” said Johnstone. “I don’t really have a fixed route. I like to mix things up, take different paths on different days.”
Heat nodded, and gave his clothes a look. He was dressed like a high end jogger, but nothing he had on was new. It was all showing the wear patterns of regular use. Johnstone was quickly dropping down her suspect list. She would have Roach do more digging to see if there was any connection between him and their victim, but she doubted if they’d find anything.
The trouble was that she had no suspects to put above Johnstone on her list. Maybe someone from Vice could tell her who Margaret Winston’s pimp was — always a prime suspect when a prostitute was killed — or it might have been one of her Johns. Then there were the toughest sorts of cases to crack: when there was no connection between the victim, and her killer.
“Thank you, Mr. Johnstone. We have all that we need from you, for now. Thank you for your cooperation.” Detective Heat led him, and Rawlf, back to the yellow ribbon, and lifted it for him and his dog to pass under. “We’ll contact you, if we need any more information.”
While escorting Mr. Johnstone and his dog out of the cordoned off area around the crime scene, Detective Heat scanned the crowd that had assembled to gawk like vultures over a carcass in the desert. It was a cliché that killers returned to the scenes of their crimes, but clichés only became clichés because they were repeated. Most of the people outside the tape looked like the usual sort of curious onlookers that any crime scene attracted in New York City, including a camera crew from a local morning news show and a reporter that Nikki knew was hoping to move up to a national news slot with one of the cable networks. She ignored them trying to get her attention, to make a comment on the record, as she looked over the crowd. One pair of onlookers stood out to her. At first she thought that they were both teenage girls, a blonde and a red-head, but then the blonde looked her way, and their eyes locked for a moment. There was something about those eyes that didn’t belong to a teenager.
Nikki blinked, and the feeling passed. The blonde was just a blonde teenager again. And coming down the path behind the blonde and her friend was the current bane of her existence. She couldn’t help noticing how Jameson Rook’s eyes flicked down across the blonde’s back, to check out her rear, before he passed her. He looked back over his shoulder at her, and her red-headed companion, as he came up to the tape.
He gave her his smuggest smile, and handed a paper cup of Dean & DeLuca coffee. “Detective Heat. What do we have this fine morning?”
If Nikki’d had her druthers, she’d have sent Rook off to trade shop talk with the TV reporter, but he’d pulled strings with the Mayor and Commissioner so he could shadow her for a magazine story he had written about her. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that the article had been published months ago: he still showed up at her crime scenes, and the brass still told her that she had to let him in.
Nikki lifted the tape for him. “Why don’t you tell me.” She might not like that he’d been granted full access to shadow her investigations, but the two time Pulitzer winning reporter did sometimes come up with an idea or two that was worth the bother.
He had also learned a few things in the time he’d spent following her around. He started out by getting a general overview of the entire area, before moving in closer to where the body had been found. The ME was in the process of moving her to a body-bag, for transport to the morgue.
He asked the same first question she had: “Where’s her head?”
“We haven’t found it, yet.”
He spun around, and had a good long look at the pond. It was covered by a thin film of ice. “It was pretty cold last night,” he said. “The ice might have formed after someone chucked her head in there.”
“That’s something that we’re going to have to check,” agreed Detective Heat. “Along with dragging the pond to see if we can find the murder weapon.” She wouldn’t be surprised if they found several knives, and maybe a gun or two. The pond was a convenient place to dispose of a lot of things.
Rook was looking back at where the body had been. “No blood, so we’re probably looking at a body drop. Have you turned up any witnesses who saw someone being carried into the park?”
“Not yet,” said Nikki.
“Even in New York, someone carrying a headless body is bound to attract attention. Maybe he had her wrapped in something, like a rug, or inside something he could wheel in, like one of those big trash cans.”
“No wheel or drag marks near the body.”
“So he didn’t wheel her right up to the drop spot. Do you have a time, yet?”
“Midnight to 2 a.m.”
“Okay, not many people around then. He could wheel her along the path in something that no one would look twice at. Stop and look around to make sure no one’s nearby, take out the body, carry it over and drop it, and be back to take his transport away in under a minute, easy.”
“A scenarios go, it works,” said Detective Heat. “The only problem is that we have absolutely no evidence to back it up.”
“Finding the evidence is your job,” said Jameson Rook.
“That’s not the way it works,” said Detective Heat. “You don’t come up with a theory, and then look for the evidence that fits it. You get your evidence first and then you develop a theory that fits your evidence.” She made a mental note to have CSU check for any sign that something with wheels had been stopped along the pathway near here last night though, as soon as she could talk to them without Rook overhearing. She didn’t have much hope that they’d find anything, even if that was how their perp had moved the body. The ground was frozen solid, and dozens of people had passed through the area before the body had been discovered.