“One thing,” the detective said.
Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.
The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. “Stay at your own risk.”
Hopeless.
Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield’s green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.
There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.
Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type — tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.
New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn’t laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitoes.
Slap.
And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.
Slap.
The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.
He wasn’t surprised searchers hadn’t found her brutalized corpse.
And there was plenty of land, too — in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.
He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.
A flash of red caught his eye.
What’s that?
It was a couple of people in a canoe.
New Jersey Meadowlands Commission was printed on the side.
Eddie Caruso’s first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.
His second thought was: Shit.
This was government land, Caruso realized.
Meadowlands Commission…
John Westerfield claimed he’d come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There’d be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He’d done that intentionally. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn’t get convicted if the body was never found. So they’d left a trail here to stymie the police.
In fact, they’d buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.
Where…?
Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto’s office. He believed he knew the answer.
An hour and a half later — thank you very much, New York City traffic — Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.
He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.
A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.
“Sign for these.”
He did.
“Can I check these out?”
“No.”
“But the thing is—”
She said reasonably, “You can read ’em, you can memorize ’em, you can copy ’em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody’s been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change.”
“Do you have—?”
“We don’t give change.”
Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.
These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman’s townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield’s police file, the one that Sellitto let him look through. They’d been discovered in the man’s desk. John had claimed to be involved in real estate work, so who would have thought twice about finding these folders? No one did.
But Eddie Caruso had.
Because why would John Westerfield have copies of permits for construction of buildings he’d had nothing to do with?
There was only one reason, which became clear when Caruso had noted that these three permits were for pouring foundations.
What better way to dispose of a body than to drop it into a pylon about to be filled with concrete?
But which building was it? Eddie Caruso’s commitment to Carmel Rodriguez was to find out exactly where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.
As he looked down at the permits he suddenly realized how he could find out.
He copied the first pages of all three permits, after getting change from another customer because, yeah, his dollars’d all been rejected by the temperamental Xerox machine. Then, returning to the cubicle, he carefully — and painfully — worked the industrial-sized staples from the paper and replaced the originals with the copies.
This was surely a misdemeanor of some kind, but he’d developed quite an affection for Mrs. Carmel Rodriguez (he had dropped his rate by another twenty-five dollars an hour). And, by the by, he’d come to form an affection for the late Mrs. Sarah Lieberman, too. Nothing was going to stop him from learning where the poor woman was resting in peace.
To his relief, the clerk missed the theft, and with a sincere smile Caruso thanked her and wandered outside.
Lord be praised, there was no ticket and in a half hour he was parked outside the private forensic lab he sometimes used. He hurried inside and paid a premium for expedited service. Then he strolled down to the waiting room, where to his delight, he found a new capsule coffee machine.
Eddie Caruso didn’t drink coffee much and he never drank tea. But he loved hot chocolate. He had recipes for eighty different types and you needed recipes — you couldn’t wing it. (And you never mixed that gray-brown powder from an envelope with hot water, especially envelopes that contained those little fake marshmallows like dandruff.)
But the Keurig did a pretty good job, provided you chocked the resulting cocoa full of Mini-Moo’s half-and-half, which Eddie Caruso now did. He sat back to enjoy the frothy beverage, flipping through a Sports Illustrated, which happened to describe the Nigeria-Senegal match as the Game of the Century.
In ten minutes, a forensic tech — a young Asian woman in a white jacket and goggles around her neck — joined him. He’d been planning on asking her out for some time. Three years and four months, to be exact. He hadn’t been courageous, or motivated, enough to do so then. And he wasn’t now.
She said, “Okay, Eddie, here’s what we’ve got. We’ve isolated identifiable prints of six individuals on the permit documents from the city commission you brought me.”
Technicians were always soooo precise.
“Two of them, negative. No record in any commercial or law enforcement database. One set is yours.” She regarded him with what might pass for irony, at least in a forensic tech, and said, “I can report that you are not in any criminal databases either. It is likely, however, that that might not be the case much longer if the police find out how you came to be in possession of an original permit, which by law has to remain on file with the city department in question.”