Thomas Cook - Blood Innocents

In the dream Reardon was not at all shocked or frightened by the body. It had seemed to come on shore as naturally as a wave, and he stared at it without emotion, as if it were no more than a brightly colored shell. His eyes moved calmly over her dress. He noted the flowers in the design, small red rose buds alternating in diagonal lines with rows of pink dogwood petals. He remembered that he had seen this same dress in a shop window at the corner of 60th Street and Second Avenue almost twenty-five years before and had almost bought it for his wife’s birthday. He wondered how many such dresses had been made and in how many shops they had been sold. He bent over and started to look for a label, but in so doing he touched the woman’s bright-red hair, and a blade of terror pierced his loins and drove upward into his brain. Instantly he tried to run, but the hair transformed itself into a claw and seized his hand and began dragging him into the water. Frantically he tried to pull free, but the claw gripped his hand like a steel vise, and by the time his first scream broke through the fog he was waist-deep in the sea. His eyes ravaged the shore for someone to rescue him, looking for help, overturning garbage cans and stripping wharves. They burned off the surrounding fog and split open the dunes and overturned the cottages behind them, but still there was no one to save him. His last scream was stifled by the salt water flooding his mouth as he went down.

Reardon woke, gasping for breath, his hand groping in the darkness, at last finding the light switch near his bed. For a while he sat up in bed and allowed his eyes to roam about the room, rooting his mind once again in the familiar, comfortable objects around him. But he could not find comfort in them. He felt almost like an intruder in his own room, as if the old brown suit that hung in his closet had been molded to the body of some other man more composed than himself. He rested his head in his cupped hands and waited for dawn.

The next morning Reardon did not go directly to the precinct headquarters. Instead, he walked to the Children’s Zoo. For a while he sat on a bench opposite the cage of the fallow deer. The bodies had been taken away, and the cages had been meticulously washed of all signs of the violence that had taken place before dawn on Monday morning.

He gazed around the park, trying to determine in which direction the killer might have fled. Then he looked beyond the bars to the chalk-drawn positions where the bodies had been found. The back of the cage was a solid stone wall almost fifteen feet high. Without a ladder or a rope no one could have climbed over it. But in front of the cage two sidewalks led in different directions. The one to the right turned into a winding trail that eventually led all the way to the opposite side of the park. The other led directly to a flight of stairs which ascended to Fifth Avenue. The killer would have taken the route through the park, Reardon thought. He shrugged. It was a mundane assumption. Bloodied as he must have been, of course the killer would not have lurched up onto Fifth Avenue, even between three and three-thirty in the morning.

“Morning, John,” Mathesson said. He stood towering over Reardon, a breeze gently flapping the collar of his coat. He brought his large hands out of his coat pockets and pressed his hat more firmly down on his head.

Reardon had not seen him approach. “Hello, Jack,” he said.

“Trying to think like a freako this morning?”

“No,” Reardon said. “I’m trying to think like an inexperienced murderer.”

“So what did you come up with?”

Reardon smiled at the absurdity of what he had come up with. “That the killer probably took the trail through the park rather than the stairs to Fifth Avenue.”

Mathesson laughed. “That ought to get you a citation,” he said. “How are you this morning, John?”

Reardon knew Mathesson was still bothered by his response to the deer on Monday morning. “I’m fine.”

“Get a good night’s sleep?”

“I guess,” Reardon said. He looked at the cage again. “Did you check with the precinct this morning?”

“Yeah.”

“Anything interesting?”

“Well, the lab is finished with the autopsy on the deer. There were fifty-seven wounds on one of them and just that one on the other.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, they’re bringing out another crew to look for the weapon. I guess the first crew just did a quick search. Anyway, the first group didn’t come up with anything, so they’re sending out another one.”

“Since when do they send out two separate crews to search for a weapon?” Reardon asked.

Mathesson smiled. “Since Wallace Van Allen got his deer sliced up, that’s since when.” He glanced resentfully at the great houses and luxury hotels that towered over the park. “Don’t this goddamn hubbub about a couple of animals seem a little much to you?”

“I suppose.”

“Two deer!” Mathesson said. “Can you believe that? Can you believe the amount of trouble and expense the department’s going to when it’s not even a murder case yet?”

Reardon said nothing.

“Two lousy deer. And you’d think it was the only crime in the city.” He shrugged and changed the subject. “What’s your plan for today?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Reardon said.

“That ought to please Piccolini.”

“What would you suggest then?”

Mathesson placed his hands in his overcoat pockets and looked helplessly at Reardon.

“Crews are covering the area looking for witnesses, right?” Reardon asked.

“Right.”

“And they haven’t come up with any, right?”

“Right.”

“And crews are looking for the weapon, right? And they haven’t found it yet, right?”

“Yeah,” Mathesson said.

“And there must be crews keeping it out of the papers for a while, right?”

Mathesson smiled and said, “Right.”

“Okay, that’s it. No witnesses, no weapon and no publicity.”

“How about the wounds?” Mathesson asked. “Could they mean anything?”

“What?”

“I don’t know.”

“Fifty-seven wounds on one body and just one on the other?” Reardon said. “You’re grabbing for straws, and that’s always a mistake.”

“Yeah,” Mathesson said. He sat down next to Reardon. “Two lousy deer.” He leaned back, arms stretched casually along the backrest of the bench, and stared up through the trees. “You know, old Wallace himself could have been a pretty good witness if he had some binoculars.”

“What do you mean?”

Mathesson pointed to a line of trees at the top of a twenty-five-story apartment house overlooking Fifth Avenue. “See those trees, the ones on top of that building?”

“Yeah,” Reardon answered.

“That’s the Van Allen penthouse.”

Reardon stared for a moment at the building. He could tell that the wind was rustling through the trees that grew incongruously and imperiously hundreds of feet above Fifth Avenue.

When Reardon returned to the precinct house later that morning, he reviewed the arrest sheet for the previous day. For the last twenty-four hours people had been molesting each other in the accustomed fashion. They had been stealing from and killing each other, raping and falsely accusing each other, and running out on debts. Someone named Bill Rob-bins had attacked his mother with a ballpoint pen in a restaurant on 79th Street. Two teenagers named Thompson and Berger had drunkenly run down a pedestrian on Second Avenue. A homosexual had propositioned a plainclothes officer in the washroom of Grand Central Station. Two construction workers had wrecked a bar on First Avenue. At another bar a few blocks away an off-duty policeman had beaten his wife to a pulp in full view of twenty-seven people. Some of them had still been cheering him on when patrolmen arrived and arrested everyone, spectators included, for disorderly conduct.