The World's Finest Mystery Part 82

Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The Silence.

QUITE UNLIKE her other story, with which Kristine Kathryn Rusch led off this volume, "The Silence" is a quiet yet chillingly effective story. It first appeared in the June 2000 issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine.

The Silence.

Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

It was the city's fifteenth day without a homicide. The tabloids blared the news, almost daring the crazies to break the streak. I worried too, worried that there were deaths we weren't seeing, worried that something had turned, making the world into a strange and unrecognizable place.

I missed the mayhem. I didn't want to admit it, to myself or anyone else, but I missed the uncertainty of walking into a murder scene and feeling that edge of violence still lingering in the air. Not that there wasn't violence. In New York, violence is as common as air, but during the last fifteen days, it hadn't led to anything. People got mugged, just like always, beaten, just like always, but no one seemed to have the urge to haul out a gun and fire it at someone else.

And they should have. That's what got me. It was August- hot, stinking, humid August- and we'd just come off a full moon. The lunatics should have been out in force, and they weren't.

For the first time in years, I wished I was a flatfoot and not a member of the mayor's special Homicide task force. I wanted to ride a car, have a partner, walk a beat. I wanted to bust up a few fights, threaten a few crackheads, rescue a kid from a tree.

I wanted something, anything, except the old cases in front of me, the ones whose trails were so cold that the ice on the files was thick and blue. On day three of The Silence, as the Daily News was calling the strangeness, the chief called the entire Homicide task force into his office and gave us options: We could a.s.sist some of the other task forces- Narcotics or Robbery or, G.o.d forbid, Missing Persons- or we could close some cases we didn't normally have time to close. Me, I thought closing would be good. It would keep the task force together, and the task force was one of the few things from the mayor's anti-crime initiatives that was working. Closing would also prove what I had always said, that a good cop could solve any case given enough time.

A man should carry a tape recorder around to know how fatuous he sounds when he makes p.r.o.nouncements like that. Then he wouldn't have to eat his words twelve days later when not one cold case had turned hot, when not one file, iced open, warmed shut.

I didn't even have anything promising: not the Puerto Rican wife stabbed fifteen times in her apartment; not the street thug shot once through the heart and left inside a dumpster on 42nd; not even the bloated, naked, fish-belly-white corpse that had floated up the East River one July afternoon. On him, I couldn't even get an ID.

So it didn't seem strange when Evelyn sauntered over to my desk wearing a light brown suit that made her look as if her mother had dressed her in her older sister's clothes. She slapped her hand on the gray Formica surface, and the sound echoed in the nearly empty House.

Three other Homicide detectives looked up. They were surrounded by stacks of files, just like I was. Only the five of us remained. The others in our task force had scattered like the winds, knowing early that the need for action was much more important than the need for closure.

"I say what we need is a wager." She leaned against my desk because I was best known as the task force's betting man. I'd wager on anything legal, and even some things that weren't, given Vice didn't hear about it.

Because I was intrigued and because I didn't want to show it, I gave her a good old-fashioned up and down. "What do you need a wager for?" I asked. "You got court today. That's enough excitement for any person."

She snorted through her nose, an unladylike habit that somehow made her more appealing. "Shows what you know," she said. "I got an interview on WPIX about The Silence."

"What's the wager?" Bob asked. He was a skinny man with too much hair and a deceptively relaxed air about him. Beneath it was one of the best detectives I ever knew.

"First one to close a case buys a round?" she said, although she sounded uncertain.

"h.e.l.l," Weisburg said, tugging on his coffee-stained yellow jersey, "the way things've been going, the first one to close should get a medal."

"Yeah." Hawkins slammed a hand on top of his files. "These things are colder than a witch's t.i.t."

I would have expected a cliche from him, just like I would expect him to lose the wager. Hawkins was a political appointment who rose in the ranks because he knew how to play the game- and how to take more credit than he was due. He'd done that to me once; he wasn't ever going to do it again.

"Glad to hear I'm not the only one having trouble closing," Evelyn said.

"Maybe this is part of The Silence," Bob said. We all stared at each other. Cops were just superst.i.tious enough to worry about such things. This dry spell, this Silence, or whatever you wanted to call it, was making us nervous; to think our own inability to close was tied to it only made us even more nervous.

Finally it was Hawkins who broke the mood. "Yeah," he said. "Tell that to the chief."

And we all laughed, not because he was being funny- he wasn't- but because we needed to.

"Whatcha working on, Spence?" Evelyn asked, leaning over my desk.

"Nothing great. How 'bout you?"

"Same," she said. "You guys?"

The other three shrugged in unison. It almost looked as if they'd planned the gesture.

"Narc arrests are up," Bob said.

"Vice arrests are down," Hawkins said.

"None of our people went to Vice," I said.

"There you go," Evelyn said with a smile. "What we gotta worry about is when all them missing persons get found."

This time we matched her smile, and meant it. "So what's going wrong here?" I asked. "Did only the incompetent ones vote to remain in Homicide?"

"That's what the chief's gonna think," Hawkins said.

Bob shook his head. "Chief knows these cases are cold."

"You'd think at least one would break, though," Weisburg said.

"You'd think," Evelyn agreed.

I pushed my chair away from the desk. "Maybe we're going about this wrong."

"You up for the wager?" Evelyn asked.

"Maybe," I said. "How're you approaching cases?"

"Traditionally. Newest to oldest."

"Bob?"

"Same."

"Weisburg?"

"Same."

"Hawkins?"

"Yeah, man, me too."

I sighed. "And me too. Maybe that's what's wrong."

"Go again?" Evelyn said.

I leaned forward. "What's your favorite case?"

"Favorite how?"

"Weirdest, strangest, most intriguing. Most unsolvable. I don't give a d.a.m.n. Whatever rings your bells."

She didn't even have to think for a minute. "I got a shoe on Fifty-third, middle of the d.a.m.n street. Some bike messenger picked it up, was gonna give it to his girlfriend, I don't know. But it's full of blood. He don't drop it. He carries it to the curb and uses his cell to call the cops. They show up, order a DNA on the blood, find it matches the interior of a b.l.o.o.d.y car found on Lex three days before. Car belongs to a young married over Central Park West. The wife's been missing two weeks. She takes fifty grand in cash and disappears, and the husband don't think nothing of it."

"You think the husband did it?" Hawkins asked.

"I think we got strange breaks in the case. The DNA on the blood, for one. Who'da thought there'd be a match?"

"Who thought to look?" Weisburg asked.

"I did," she said. "I figure you got a blood-filled shoe, you gotta have other blood-filled items."

"The problem is," I said, "how'd the shoe get to Fifty-third, full of blood, three days later?"

"Give the man a cigar," she said. "That's the most interesting case to me."

This last she said almost as a topper, as if she dared someone to do better. Of course, Hawkins tried.

"I got that torso found in the Hundred-and-tenth Street station."

"Some jumper," Weisburg said.

"Yeah, they probably couldn't find the rest of him 'coz it was mashed against some subway car."

"I think it's more than that," Hawkins said.

"Why?" I asked, more to find out how Hawkins's brain worked than out of any real curiosity about the torso.

"Because the cuts was real neat. Jumpers, they get ragged sheer. This looked like it was done with one of them surgeon's knives. And the skin was clean, too. No dirt, except where it was on the floor. And no blood."

"When was this?" Weisburg asked.

"May. About the fifth. You know, that freaky rainstorm?"

"No wonder I didn't hear," he said. "I was upstate with the kids." Weisburg usually got the body parts.

"Well, I think it's d.a.m.n strange," Hawkins said.

Weisburg leaned forward a little. "A torso with arms or a torso without?"

"Without. What do you think, I'm some kind of idiot? I'd'a known to run the prints."

Weisburg shrugged. "I'll look at it if you want."

Hawkins looked at me. "If he helps me close, does that make it his case or mine?"

"What are you looking at me for?" I asked. "The wager's Evelyn's idea."

"But you're the one who mentioned favorite cases," she said. "Right, Weisburg?"

He scrunched up his narrow little face. "I think having favorite homicide cases is sick."

"Yeah, like you didn't just get jealous that Hawkins has a torso and you don't," Evelyn said.

I leaned back in my chair. "Come on, Weisburg. You must have a case that intrigues you."

"It's not a favorite," he said a bit defensively.

I shrugged. "I phrased it wrong."

He ducked his head, and I could have sworn that he was blushing. "It's the puppies."

I'd never heard of this one. "The puppies?"

He nodded, raised his head, and sure enough, there was color in his pasty white cheeks. "Outside the Port Authority Terminal, in April, you know that really sunny stretch around tax time?"

We all nodded. Who could forget that weather?

"Some woman calls Animal Control because there's eight German shepherd puppies, about six months old, just sitting curbside. They're well behaved, ain't doing nothing, but they was there all day, and this lady got worried. So Animal Control shows up and finds they're sitting in a ring around this corpse. Now you'd think the guy was homeless except for the dogs. They're purebred, or so the pound tells me, and they have on expensive collars but no tags. It took Animal Control a long time to round 'em up, too. They was guarding this guy, so they were attached."

"What happened to the dogs?" Bob asked.

Weisburg grinned. "I gave 'em to my daughter." His daughter had married money and had a country house near the Catskills. "They're great dogs."

"Nothing on the guy?" I asked.

"No missing breeders, no nothing. We didn't even know it was a homicide for two days."

"What was it killed him, then?" Evelyn asked.

"Choked."

"Choked?" Bob asked.

Weisburg nodded. "On some woman's left index finger."

We let that sit for a few minutes, then Evelyn said, "Bob?"