Had the killer known that? Yes. All the witnesses reported that the killer had moved surely — not swiftly, but deliberately — straight for one of the room's rear service doors, down a hall, through the kitchen, and out. He knew the layout of the place, knew the doors were unlocked, knew the gates blocking the back lane would be open, knew that it led to 54th Street and the anonymity of the crowd. Or a waiting car. Because this had all the appearance of being a well — planned crime.
D'Agosta rubbed his nose, trying to breathe slowly, to reduce the pounding in his temples. He could hardly think. Those bastards at the Ville were going to realize they had made a serious mistake in assaulting a police officer. They were involved in this, one way or another, he felt sure. Smithback had written about them and paid dearly for it; now the same fate had befallen Caitlyn Kidd.
Why was he still here? There was nothing new he could extract from the crime scene, nothing that hadn't already been examined, recorded, photographed, picked over, tested, sniffed, eyeballed, and noted for the record. He was utterly exhausted. And yet he couldn't bring himself to leave.
Smithback.
That, he knew, was the reason he couldn't leave.
The witnesses all swore it was Smithback. Even Nora, whom he had interviewed — sedated but lucid enough — at her apartment. Nora had seen the killer from across the room, so she was less reliable — but there were others who had seen the killer up close and swore it was him. The victim herself had shouted out his name as he approached her. And yet a few days earlier, D'Agosta had seen with his very own eyes Smithback's dead body on a gurney, his chest opened, his organs removed and tagged, the top of his skull sawed open.
Smithback's body gone… How could some jackass just walk into the morgue and steal a body? Maybe it wasn't so surprising — Nora had charged right in and nobody stopped her. There was only one night receiver, and people in that position seemed to have a history of sleeping on the job. But Nora had been chased, and ultimately caught, by security. And charging into a morgue was a lot different than leaving with a body.
Unless the body left on its own…
What the hell was he thinking? A dozen theories were swimming in his head. He'd been certain the Ville was involved somehow. But of course he couldn't dismiss that software developer, Kline, who had threatened Smithback so openly. As he'd told Rocker, certain pieces of his African sculpture had been identified by museum specialists as voodoo artifacts with particularly dark significance. Although that brought up the question of why Kline would want to kill Caitlyn Kidd. Had Kidd written about him, too? Or did something about her remind him of the journalist who had once destroyed his budding career? That was worth looking into.
And then, there was that other theory that Pendergast, despite all his dissembling, seemed to take seriously: that Smithback, like Fearing, had been raised from the dead.
"Son of a bitch," he muttered out loud, turning and walking out of the reception hall into the foyer. The cop guarding the front door signed him out, and he stepped into a chill, gray October dawn.
He glanced at his watch. Six forty — five. He was due to meet Pendergast downtown at nine. Leaving his squad car parked on Fifth, he walked down 53rd to Madison, stepped into a coffee shop, eased himself into a chair.
By the time the waitress arrived, he was already asleep.
Chapter 37
At ten after nine in the morning, D'Agosta gave up waiting for Pendergast and made his way from the lobby of City Hall to an anonymous office on a high floor of the building, which took him another ten minutes to find. At last he stood before the closed office door, reading its engraved plastic plaque:
MARTY WARTEK
DEPUTY ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR
NEW YORK CITY HOUSING AUTHORITY
BOROUGH OF MANHATTAN
He gave the door a double rap.
"Come in," came a thin voice.
D'Agosta entered. The office was surprisingly spacious and comfortable, with a sofa and two easy chairs on one side, a desk on the other, and an alcove containing an old bag of a secretary. A single window looked into the forest of towers that constituted Wall Street.
"Lieutenant D'Agosta?" asked the office's occupant, rising from behind his desk and indicating one of the easy chairs. D'Agosta took the sofa instead: it looked more comfortable.
The man came around the desk and settled himself in a chair. D'Agosta took him in quickly: small, slight, ill — fitting brown suit, razor — burned, tufts of thinning hair springing from the middle of a bald head, nervous shifty brown eyes, small trembly hands, tight mouth, self — righteous air.
D'Agosta started to remove his shield, but Wartek quickly shook his head. "Not necessary. Anyone can see you're a detective."
"That so?" D'Agosta was somehow offended. He realized he was hoping to be offended.
Vinnie — boy, just take it easy.
A silence. "Coffee?" "Thank you. Regular."
"Susy, two regular coffees, please."
D'Agosta tried to organize his thinking. His mind was shot. "Mr. Wartek—"
"Please call me Marty." The guy was making an effort to be friendly, D'Agosta reminded himself. No need to be an asshole in return.
"Marty, I'm here to talk about the Ville. Up in Inwood. You know it?"
A cautious affirmative nod. "I've read the articles."
"I want to know how the hell it is these people can occupy city land and block off a public access road — and get away with it." D'Agosta hadn't meant to be so blunt, but it just came out that way. He was too damn tired to care.
"Well, now." Wartek leaned forward. "You see, Lieutenant, there's a point of law called a 'proscriptive easement' or 'right of adverse possession' " — he indicated the quotation marks with nervous darts of his fingers—"which states that if a piece of land has been occupied and used in an 'open and notorious' manner for a certain specific period of time without the permission of the owner, then the using party acquires certain legal rights to the property. In New York, that specific period of time is twenty years."
D'Agosta stared. What the man had said was just so much noise in his ear. "Sorry. I didn't follow you."
A sigh. "It seems the residents of the Ville have occupied that land since at least the Civil War. It was an abandoned church with numerous outbuildings, I believe, and they simply squatted there. There were a lot of squatters in New York City at the time. Central Park was full of them: little kitchen farms, pigpens, shacks, and so forth."
"They're not in Central Park now."
"True, true — the squatters were evicted from Central Park when it was designated a park. But the northern tip of Manhattan was always something of a no — man's — land. It's rocky and rugged, unsuited to farming or development. Inwood Hill Park wasn't created until the thirties. By that time, the residents of the Ville had acquired a right of adverse possession."
The man's insistent, lecture — hall tone of voice was starting to grate. "Look, I'm no lawyer. All I know is, they don't have title to the land and they've blocked a public way. I'm still waiting to hear how that's possible." D'Agosta folded his arms and sat back.