Tallish, with a deep tan that set off his aquamarine eyes, Dr. Corey had a bedside manner that matched his voice: gentle, perhaps too gentle to be completely trusted. As he examined her he was slow and careful not to hurt her.
“You’re my pet project. I’ve sunk seven years into you.” He rotated her ankle. “Feel okay? Better than yesterday?”
“Much better.”
“That?”
“Ouch.”
“Just a pin. We want to be sure your nerves are waking up. Wiggle your big toe.”
She made an effort. The big toe responded with a twitch.
“Good girl. Cross your legs.” He bonged her knee with a rubber hammer.
Her leg bounded up.
“You’ve got fine reflexes, ma’am, and they’re getting finer, and one of these days they’ll be just about normal—for a woman your age.”
“Doctor, how old am I?”
“That depends when you were born.”
“But am I older than when I went into coma? Or did my body and mind just stay in a deep freeze?”
“Interesting question. Might take a philosopher to answer it—or a lawyer. Hey, see the shape your ligaments are in? Not bad—not bad at all. We walked you a mile every day so they wouldn’t shrink.”
“Thank you.”
“Thank your gene pool. You’re a robust woman. All we need to do now is build up your strength, exercise your muscles, feed you. How’s your appetite?”
“I’m dying for some decent food.”
“Good sign. We’ll move you to solids gradually. Your stomach’s shrunk. We have to stretch it slowly. No lobster Newburg in the first month.”
Her eye went to the wheelchair. “When will I be able to walk?”
“We’ll have you on crutches in a few weeks, and in a couple of months you should be able to make it on a cane.”
“Months!”
“Maybe sooner.”
“When can I leave the hospital?”
“We’ll see.” He made a notation on a clipboard. “How are you feeling—mentally, emotionally?”
“Angry to have lost seven years. Curious to know what caused my coma.”
His eyes flicked up at her. “Hard to say seven years after the fact. Could have been a bump on the head, or drugs—”
“Insulin?”
He laid down the clipboard. “What gave you that idea?”
“A police detective.”
He looked at her. “Police aren’t M.D.’s, you know. The only people their pathologists examine are dead.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s all you’re going to get from me because it’s all I know. Now hop into that chair and let’s skedaddle you out of here.”
13
A LITTLE AFTER 2:00 P.M., a truck with the logo Andy’s Dumping, Astoria, pulled onto the Fountain Avenue landfill in Queens. Its load had been held at a depot in Manhattan over the long weekend. The truck searched, proceeded farther down the area, found a dumping place under the slow drizzle, and reared up: there was a sudden intensification of the stink in the air as the debris slid down glistening into a pile on the earth.
Ten years ago there had been nothing here but Jamaica Bay, a finger of the Atlantic. Now there was a land built of garbage, raising its rotting mountains to the sun’s heat, pressing its soft shore into the ocean. All day long an unending cortege of dump trucks, escorted by clouds of hovering gulls, had been depositing their contributions.
Since Sunday an army of men and women in police rain gear had laboriously explored this new land. For over thirty-six hours they had sunk five-foot steel probes into the muck, turned pieces of slime, climbed over ridges and valleys, peered into the rusted refrigerators and stoves that dotted the gray moonscape like wrecked space probes from another planet.
With a deafening mechanical scream the truck changed gears, swung in a wide U, and lumbered back out of the dump area.
Seagulls came screaming down.
Patrolman Luis Estevez, on loan to the 22d precinct from Special Services, was checking piles on the north strip of landfill. He walked a distance, moving his eyes in short arcs along the garbage until some object or shape caught his attention, moved closer to poke, then moved on.
In the mound just left by Andy’s Dumping something half glimpsed caused him to turn around and take a second look.
About five feet up the new embankment there was a black glistening lump poking through the compacted putrefaction, and he wondered.
Boots sloshing, he made his way toward it.
The mountain changed shape beneath him, sucking him down.
He was six feet away before he could see the black plastic clearly, close enough to suffocate in the stench, and he had to get even closer to see the crisscrossing steel reinforcements, the paper-sheathed wire twist that held the neck of the bag shut.
He thought a minute, then bent down, placed both rubber-gloved hands around the neck and gave a strong, slow tug. Gradually the mountain yielded up the bag. The patrolman carried it down to the older landfill, where the footing was solid. He took a knife from his hip and with hurried grimness cut into the plastic.
A mass of red pulsing with maggots slopped into the open.
Meat—nothing but meat. This in itself was unusual.
His eye caught something white. With rapid efficiency he probed his blade along the ridge of white.
His face stiffened.
He knew what he had found, and it made him cold inside.
He ran back to his blue-and-white and radioed his supervisor. Police radio traffic was insecure and newspaper scavengers routinely listened in, so he kept the message brief and general. “Hey Lou,” he told his lieutenant. “It’s Estevez. I found something that’s going to interest you.”
It was early afternoon. The rain had almost stopped and Sheridan Square was swirling with Jersey drivers and pedestrians and pigeons all hell-bent on ignoring the traffic lights.
Cardozo approached the threshold of a darkened doorway and stepped into the coolness of the Pleasure Trove adult boutique.
The air smelled of banana incense. There was no sound except the whir of an air conditioner, the whisper of a radio turned to an easy-listening station. He looked around the shop.
A mousy-looking man was browsing nervously through a rack of high-gloss pornographic magazines. Two teenaged girls suddenly broke into giggles at a display case of tickler-dildos.
A salesman sat behind the counter, staring at the Times crossword puzzle, chewing somberly on a pencil eraser.
“Excuse me.” Cardozo stood at the counter and reached into the brown paper bag that held the plastic evidence bag. He opened the plastic bag and lifted out the leather mask.
“Ugly mother,” the clerk remarked. “You want to return it?” He was a slender man in his middle forties with graying brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard and moustache.
“No, but I’d like to get some information.”
“We don’t wholesale.”
“No sweat. This is item 706 in your catalogue, right?”
“Not anymore it isn’t. Last time we advertised any of these was in the March catalogue.”
“But you sold this mask?”
“Is there some kind of problem with it?”
“I’d like to know who bought it.” Cardozo quietly laid his wallet open on the counter.
The salesman’s glance went down to the shield and came back up, altered now into another sort of glance. He picked up the mask, turning it in his hands, studying it doubtfully.
“This isn’t a Pleasure Trove product. It’s a rip-off. These masks are made by Nuku Kushima.”
“You say that name like I should know it.”
“She exhibits in SoHo galleries, which makes her masks art. Ours are home entertainment. Hers go for thirteen thousand dollars. Ours go for three hundred fifty. We sued, but she has a grant from the New York State Council of the Arts and the court decided the case fell under the Warhol principle—remember, Warhol signed two cans of Campbell’s soup and sold them as art?”
Cardozo didn’t remember: civil suits weren’t his beat. “Could you show me the difference between your masks and hers?”
“Ours are machine-stitched on commercial leather stitching machines and hers are hand-stitched by couture seamstresses—so they don’t hold up.” The salesman turned the mask inside out and pulled at a seam. “Her stitching is at quarter-inch intervals. Ours is sixteenth-inch. She uses nylon thread, we use gut. Gut can take eight times the tension. See how this has already started pulling apart? This baby has sure seen some action, hasn’t she.”