“It was down in the thirties last night,” Cody said.
“And Tony hates the cold. Can’t ya tell? It’s like a sauna in here.” Farrell looked around nervously. “Shit, I ain’t even heeled.”
“Me either.”
“Fine pair a cops we are.”
“How long you been out there?”
“Twenty minutes maybe. I also checked the back door. Nothin’.”
“If anybody beside Tony was in here they’re long gone by now. What time is it?”
“Seven-twenty.”
“Exactly.”
“Seven-twenty-three.”
“Stay right where you are.”
Cody took a couple of steps and swept the flashlight beam around the office. The room was empty. He turned on the lights, took out his cell and called the Loft.
“Vinnie. It’s Cody. I’m not sure what we have here but Jimmy Farrell and I just made a forced entry to the Venezia Restaurant on Mott St. Start a new case tape rolling.
Entry time: Seven twenty-one. Then patch in Rizzo.”
“What’s going on there?”
“Uncle Tony didn’t come home last night. Just a precaution.”
There was a click and Annie answered from the RR car.
“This is Annie.”
“Where are you?”
“Elizabeth Street approaching Hester.”
“Okay, I’m not sure whether we have a problem or not. You and Frank go through the parking lot at Hester and Mott to the alley behind the Venezia and park at the rear door.”
“Copy that,” Annie said.
“Vinnie, acting on the advice of Captain James Farrell of Precinct Five that Mrs. Anthony Crosetti, wife of the owner of the Venezia Restaurant, reported he did not return home from work last night. I want you to call Wolf and alert him that we may have a problem here and send a car for him. Alert the garage to have a van on standby. I do not have, repeat, do not have a kit so I need somebody standing by to bring me one. I need everything including a headset. Copy all that?”
“Gotcha.”
“I’m going to see where Charley leads us. I’ll keep my phone open. We’ll get pictures and videos of these sites so I’ll keep the descriptions brief.”
Cody, anxiety nibbling at his stomach, was staring at four items of interest: Tony’s hat and coat; an oriental rug beside the desk; and the desk top itself, which was clear except for an empty water glass and a dinner plate and fork. The plate was a mess, the food was partly eaten, and the rest seemed to have splashed onto the desk.
“What the hell…” Farrell started.
Cody cut him off. “Jimmy, I want you to do me a favor…”
“You’re not gonna take this case, Cody. This is personal.”
“They’re all personal, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, but they’re all not Ricky’s godfather.”
“Look, I know you’re very close to the Crosettis, but if this is a crime scene please let my crew run the grid. You know we’re the best in the country.”
“God damn it!”
“Jim, just do what I ask. I’m not cutting you out, I just want to find Tony and keep this scene as clean as possible until we do. Charley will find him if he’s here. Meantime, I need you to go back the way we came in, get the shoes, go outside and lock the door behind you and pull your car into the lot next door. We need to low ball this as much as possible until we know what happened here.”
Farrell was breathing heavily. His shoulders sagged. Finally he said, “Okay. Just find him and fast.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find him.”
As Farrell left, Cody called Rizzo’s car which was pulling up to the restaurant.
“Annie?”
“Yes sir.”
“I want you to suit up and standby. Frank, is there any room back there? I want to clear the door?”
“Yeah. There’s a dumpster out here. I can pull down next to it.”
“Good, wait until I call you. I’ve got Charley with me. I’m going to see where he leads me. Farrell is bringing his car to the lot. Annie if I need you, enter through the rear door and lock it behind you.”
“Copied.”
“Hue?”
“Right here.”
“Bergman and Winters are running the North section, right?”
“Affirmative.”
”Didn’t Cal eat here last night?”
“Yes sir. He logged out at…eleven-twenty-two.”
“Okay. If we have a problem here I want them both to come to the scene. Everybody parks in the lot next door. I don’t want it to look like a police convention around here, and let’s consider the restaurant’s lot a crime scene for now. I want Si to come with the van if we need it. Right now, Annie is the primary, Si will assist her and Bergman and Winters will work the cleanup. Assign whoever is available to replace Rizzo on south RR and Bergman on the north end. And keep after Wolf.”
“All affirmative.”
“Are you taping everything?”
“Yes sir.”
“Cap, what if he’s just asleep in the john?”
“In that case, Vinnie, all this never happened.”
Cody signed off. He stood next to the desk and studied the office for a moment. A sense of apprehension swept over him but he shook it off. He took Tony’s hat off the rack and held it close to Charley’s nose.
“Find him,” he said.
25
Cody judged the room to be about twenty feet square. It had no windows. The wall facing the door and the two adjacent walls were lined with bookcases about five feet high to accommodate Tony’s height, the books neatly arranged with bric-a-brac filling in the empty spaces. Paintings and photographs adorned the walls. Crosetti’s desk was centrally positioned in the room, with a moveable computer desk and printer angled beside it. A leather sofa occupied the wall facing the desk with a large painting of an ancient church mounted on the wall above it. A four by six Oriental rug lay between the desk and the wall adjacent to the entrance and the hat rack was angled in the corner facing the door. The room was compulsively neat. From the small crystal chandelier over the desk to its polished wood floors, everything about it reflected the ritualistic mien of Anthony Crosetti; everything except the messy dinner plate on the desk.
The dog seemed a little confused at first. He turned away from the hat and walked to Tony’s desk chair, worked it over before the scent led him to the top of the desk. His nose worked the area in front of the chair, initially distracted by the messy food platter, but then he shifted his attention to the area around the corner of the desk and from there to the rug, where his scrutiny became more intense.
Ignoring a smear of food near one corner, he circled the length and width of it and then, his nose an inch above the floor, he walked through the door and headed for one of the swinging doors that led to the kitchen. Cody was close behind, his flashlight surveying the scene before them. When Charley reached the doors he stopped, tapping it with his nose and scratching the door with one foot.
“Stay,” Cody said. As the dog sat, he pushed one side of the door open a foot or two and, leaning in, flashed the light around the large kitchen. The beam swept past two shuttered windows on the back wall, then streaked around the darkened kitchen as it reflected off the stainless steel pots and pans hanging from the overhead racks. He knelt down, scanning the floor.
Charley wasn’t waiting. He shoved his nose past Cody and went through the door.
“I said ‘Stay’,” Cody snapped.
Charley stopped but did not sit. He stood, head forward, tail curved downward and looked back at Cody who peered around the edge of the door, threw a switch.
An aria from “Tosca” blared into the room. Cody jumped a foot off the floor. Charley’s ears stood straight up and almost spun around as the sound blasted them. Cody quickly flicked the switch off and tried the other one.
The room lit up like Times Square.
“Sorry about that, pal, didn’t mean to break your ear drums
.”
Charley shook his head and yawned.
Uncle Tony’s penchant for cleanliness was obvious. The big kitchen glowed; grills and stoves lining the island in the middle glittered as if new; sinks and ovens were greaseless; the white tile floor was radiant.
Except…
Cody knelt down and gently flicked a tiny thread of cloth stuck in slender black grout between the tiles. He leaned forward and squinted down a straight line ahead of Charley’s intended path. More specks. Some streaks adjoining them. He looked over at Charley who was staring impatiently at him.
“Okay, swifty, so far, so good. You’re in such a hurry, show me how good you really are.”
Charley walked straight ahead. To his left was the kitchen, to his right a wall. Ahead of him was the back door. A long counter and stainless steel sinks ran the length of the wall to the left of the door and curved back along the opposite wall. A narrow hallway ran to their right at the end of the wall beside them.
Charley, his nose roaming left and right, walked straight ahead and stopped at the hallway. Cody joined him. The hallway to their right ended at the restaurant’s private dining room and another hallway stretched back toward the main dining room from its entrance.
They were in a small alcove formed by the rear entrance, the hallway, and a heavy steel door to their right. Charley followed his nose to the rear door, sniffed around, came back, still working the floor. He stopped at the heavy steel door, sniffed along its bottom edge.
He sat down and looked up at Cody.
“Annie?”
“Right here.”
“I’m gonna open the back door. Hand me the two kits and then hop inside. I’m gonna close the door behind you and lock it. Frank, pull down beside the dumpster.”
“Right.”
“Here we go.”
He opened the door. Annie handed him the two kits which he put behind him. He grabbed her hand as she hopped inside, slammed the door and locked it.
“What have we got?” Annie asked.
Cody nodded toward Charley who had not moved.
“I’m guessing that’s the door to a walk-in meat freezer.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. Your headset hooked up?”
She nodded. Cody hooked his up.
“Copy me, Hue?”
“Yep.”
“How about me?” Annie asked.
“Yep.”
“We are about to open the door to what I assume to be a large walk-in meat freezer near the rear entrance of the restaurant. Dr. Rothschild is the forensic pathologist on the scene. She will take it from here.”
Cody moved Charley to one side and opened the hatch of the door. As he pulled it open there was a hurricane of frigid air which turned immediately to a thick mist as it rushed into the hot air in the kitchen. Annie and Cody tried to flap the swirling fog out of the way. Then, as it began to dissipate, a human being took form.
They saw his face first.
His skin was blue, his eyes partially open, his mouth agape. Frost covered his hair and head. Small icicles hung from his eyelids and nostrils. A thin film of frost started in his mouth, coated the side of his face and ended in a large icicle which hung from his jaw.
The rest of his body quickly became visible as the steam vanished. He was naked, seated on a dining room chair. His fragile body emerged, blue and rigid, hands in his lap, feet flat on the floor. A partially filled bottle of wine and an empty glass sat beside the body. The floor was covered with a thin sheet of ice.
Annie’s expression did not change.
“Is it Crosetti?” she asked.
Cody nodded.
She stepped carefully into the doorway and leaned forward, wrapping her left hand around Crosetti’s throat for a second or two and pulled it back.
“Not anymore,” she said. “We’ve got us an iceberg that used to be Mister Crosetti.”
Cody sighed and leaned against a counter. “Annie, I think what we’ve got is Androg 2.”
26
The first person he called was Jimmy Farrell. He deserved that. Annie was doing her thing, working the crime scene, which meant working in the Frigidaire—tiptoeing around the eggs, stepping over the leftover potato salad, looking for needles among the ice cubes. Hue was directing traffic, keeping everybody in the right square on the chessboard, waiting patiently for things to go a little haywire, which they usually did. Rizzo was standing by—waiting to catch the leftovers and no complaints. The crew had one thing in common: The rush.
Ricky had the nastiest job of all. He had to tell his godmother that her husband of fifty years was never coming home again. Not that he was naked in the freezer, not that some nut job had killed him for reasons her imagination would never comprehend. For now, he was just dead. And she would know that the minute Farrell walked in the door. Before he said a word, she would know. Women know those kinds of things.
Δ
“He’s dead, Jimmy, and it’s not pretty,” Cody told Farrell.
“Oh Christ.” He paused and Cody could hear him swallowing. “Aw, Jesus, Micah, what happened?”
“Charley led me to him. He was in the freezer. Been in there—I’m guessing—four or five hours.”
“I told him he had to put a two way opener on that goddamned thing. I warned…”
“It wasn’t an accident.”
Farrell did not immediately answer. His hung over brain was slow processing the information.
“He’s stark naked, sitting on a chair.”
“Whaaat? Maybe he, uh, maybe…”
“It wasn’t robbery or suicide, his clothes aren’t here. But it may tie in with something we’re working on.”
“You mean some sicko…”
“That’s a substantial guess, Jimmy.”
“The kid’ll be here in about five minutes.”
“We need to get a statement from him. He’s the last one to see Tony alive. He doesn’t have to see him now, I think it best to wait until after the autopsy. Maybe late this afternoon. But you’re gonna have to tell Mama Crosetti so maybe you could come to the rear door and take a look.”
“Of course. Sure.”
Annie was shooting pictures when Farrell tapped on the door. He stood in the doorway for a full minute or so and then turned his back on the corpse.
“I been a cop for thirty goddamned years and I’ve never, ever seen anything like that before. I thought maybe he had a heart attack or fell down the stairs to the wine cellar or something. Christ, what’ll I tell Ricky? Shit, what’ll I tell Mama?”
“You can buy us both some time. Tell them he doesn’t have a mark on him and we won’t know exactly what killed him until after the autopsy. It’s not a lie.”
“What if Ricky wants to see him?”
“It’s just grotesque, the way he’s…positioned. Distract Ricky. Tell him we need to talk to him in Rizzo’s car down by the dumpster. Make him comfortable. Go with him. Make sure he understands he’s not a suspect, that we need his help.”
“Yeah, that’s good. That’ll work.”
Farrell returned to his car and Cody joined Annie who was shooting a picture of Tony’s feet. She was using her kit to prop open the door of the freezer.
“We have some impressions here in the frost in front of the corpse,” she said.
“Sole prints?”
“No. My guess is surgeon’s booties.”
“Like on Handley’s carpet?”
“Uh huh.” She handed the camera to Cody and leaned closer, took a pair of tweezers and a small test tube from her kit and plucked a small fiber from the side of the one of the impressions and put it in the tube. She held it up so they both could get a better look.
“Light blue. Probably cotton. You’re right, the killer was suited out, just like at Handley’s. Roughly the same size feet. So far no fibers, no semen, no prints, and I’m guessing the only DNA will be Crosetti’s.”
“Why is he naked?”
“My guess? Make him freeze faster.??
?
“And the clothes?”
“Killer wasn’t taking any chances. Maybe something incriminating on them. Notice that brown stain on the corner of his mouth? Some food particles in his hair and on his chin. I’m guessing maybe something he ate and some of that wine. Maybe he threw up. There are some abrasions on the back of his throat but I couldn’t pry his jaws apart to get a good look.”
“How long will it take to thaw him out?”
She shrugged. “He’s frozen solid, Cap. We’ll have to move him out as he is. We try to straighten arms or legs out, they’ll break like twigs. When we get him back to the lab maybe we can speed things up with a heated blanket or a portable heater. Wolf’ll know. I’ve never had one quite like this.”
“Déjà vu. We had to take Handley out in the sitting position.”
“And naked.”
“Yeah. And they probably both died about the same time of night.”
“He was undressed before he was put in here and he didn’t put up a fight. Except for those bootie prints there’s nothing on the floor. No signs of a struggle.”
“I think I can answer that for you. You finished here?”
“Yeah. I’ve got all the pictures I need. Gotta bag that wine bottle and glass. I also picked up some brownish-red fibers in front of the freezer door.”
Cody looked around. “Where’s Charley?”
“He was here a minute ago.”
“Charley?” Cody called. He heard a low “ruff” from the hallway leading away from the kitchen. They followed him around a corner and the dog was sniffing at a door. It led to the private dining room. When they opened it, Charley walked straight to the head of the table, sniffed around. All the chairs were in place except one.
“That chair Crosetti’s sitting on came from the head of this table,” Cody said. “Charley’s picked up another scent.”
Charley left the room, his nose leading them down the hallway toward the main dining room. He sniffed at the door to the men’s room, kept going and then stopped at the entrance of the women’s rest room. He scratched at the door.
Rothschild reached under her arm and drew her .38 as Cody opened the door. She looked through the crack in the door, then shoved it open and flicked on the lights. She knelt down, looking to right, left, and under the three stalls to their left. Charley walked to the third stall, nosed it open and went in.