Blood Relatives (87th Precinct) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Praise for Ed McBain & the 87th Precinct

  “Raw and realistic…The bad guys are very bad, and the good guys are better.” —Detroit Free Press

  “Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series…simply the best police procedurals being written in the United States.” —Washington Post

  “The best crime writer in the business.” —Houston Post

  “Ed McBain is a national treasure.” —Mystery News

  “It’s hard to think of anyone better at what he does. In fact, it’s impossible.” —Robert B. Parker

  “I never read Ed McBain without the awful thought that I still have a lot to learn. And when you think you’re catching up, he gets better.”

  —Tony Hillerman

  “McBain is the unquestioned king…light years ahead of anyone else in the field.” —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “McBain tells great stories.” —Elmore Leonard

  “Pure prose poetry…It is such writers as McBain who bring the great American urban mythology to life.” —The London Times

  “The McBain stamp: sharp dialogue and crisp plotting.”

  —Miami Herald

  “You’ll be engrossed by McBain’s fast, lean prose.” —Chicago Tribune

  “McBain redefines the American police novel…he can stop you dead in your tracks with a line of dialogue.” —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “The wit, the pacing, his relish for the drama of human diversity [are] what you remember about McBain novels.” —Philadelphia Inquirer

  “McBain is a top pro, at the top of his game.” —Los Angeles Daily News

  BLOOD RELATIVES

  AN 87TH PRECINCT NOVEL

  ED McBAIN

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright ©1975 Ed McBain

  Republished in 2011

  All rights reserved.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781612181578

  ISBN-10: 1612181570

  This is for Jeff and Anita Ash

  The city in these pages is imaginary.

  The people, the places are all fictitious.

  Only the police routine is based on established investigatory techniques.

  She came running through the rain shoeless, neon signs and traffic signals splintering in liquid reflection beneath her flying feet. She fled like misjoined Siamese twins, feet touching mirrored feet on the slick black asphalt, puddles of red and green, orange and blue splashing up tintlessly to stain her legs with the gutter filth of the city.

  She was bleeding.

  She was bleeding from a gash on her right cheek, and she was bleeding from cuts on the palms and fingers of both hands. The front of her dress had been ripped, and she tried to hold the torn sides of the V closed over her brassiere as she ran through the rain. It had been raining since 10:00. The rain was neither cruel nor driving now; it had changed to a gentle drizzle that sent mist drifting up from the pavement. In the distance, the green globes of the 87th Precinct shone through the rain and through the mist.

  The girl slipped, her feet skidded out from under her. There was a bone-jarring wrench as her hip collided with the pavement. She expelled her breath in pain, and then sat quite still on the sidewalk, her head bent, the rain gently pattering around her. There was blood on her slip, and on her brassiere, smears of blood on her nylon pantyhose. Blood seeped from the open wound on her cheek, blood flamed in the horizontal slashes that crossed her palms and fingers. A traffic light turned to red, suffusing her with color so intense that—for a moment only—it seemed the steady ooze of blood had entirely engulfed the girl. The light clicked into the emptiness of the street. The girl’s face, her dress, the cones of her brassiere, the rain-spattered pantyhose, the seething cuts on her hands, the gash on her cheek, all turned green. She struggled to her feet and began running toward the station house.

  Detective Bert Kling was at the muster desk, booking a young man who spoke only Spanish. He had just pointed to the Spanish-language version of the warning-of-rights poster. The young man looked up at the sign, nodded, and was beginning to read it silently when the girl burst into the muster room. There were two glass-paneled inner doors behind the wooden doors at the front of the station house. The girl hit those doors with the palms of both hands. Kling heard the thud of her hands hitting the glass panels, and turned immediately. Bloody palm prints. He would always remember seeing first the bloody prints, one on each of the glass-paneled doors. And then the doors swinging open and the girl spilling into the room. Arms wide, hands imploring, cuts on the fingers and palms, open wound on the cheek, wet black hair hanging limply about a pale mascara-streaked face, blue dress torn open over white blood-smeared bra, she lurched toward the muster desk, beseeching Kling to help, for God’s sake, help.

  Patrolman Shanahan had wet feet.

  The rain had stopped some ten minutes ago, but he’d been sloshing around in it all day now (or at least since 3:45 this afternoon, when he’d relieved Donleavy on post), and his feet were wet and he was developing a chill, and he’d probably be home in bed for a week with the miseries. He was a large man, Shanahan, looking even bigger in the black raingear that billowed out from his massive shoulders like Batman’s cape, or maybe Count Dracula’s. He carried a nightstick in his right hand, and a flashlight in the other, and he walked along the deserted pavements of this section of his beat, thankful that the rain had stopped, and thankful that it was already 11:30, which meant he’d be relieved in fifteen minutes or so, but not too thankful for the wet feet or the squishy shoes.

  He was surprised to see the hand.

  The hand lay just outside the open doorway of an abandoned tenement. He could not see an arm attached to the hand, could not in fact see anything beyond the hand and the wrist, and he thought for a frightening moment that the hand had been severed from the rest of the body. But then he saw the faint outline of an arm, and beyond that, the shape of a body lying just inside and athwart the entrance to the building. He went up the wide flat steps of the front stoop to where the hand lay palm up on the top step, and he flashed his light onto the curled fingers and saw the cuts on the palm and the fingers and the wrist, and knew before he threw his light into the hallway that this was going to be a bad one.

  He realized with a start that he was standing in blood, and recoiled from it in horror, as though it were capable of dissolving the soles of his shoes. As he backed away from the sticky puddle underfoot, the beam of his torch swung slightly higher, and he saw the body now and felt immediately sick to his stomach. He looked over his shoulder quickly, perhaps because death was so suddenly palpable in that narrow cubicle, perhaps because he was embarrassed by his reaction and wanted to make certain no one had seen it. The girl lay on her back in the blood. She was perhaps sixteen years old, and she had dark hair, and brown eyes that were open wide and staring up at the ceiling overhead. The
ceiling was bloated with water that seemed ready to burst through the plaster and inundate the small entryway. The girl was wearing a pink dress that had been slashed to tatters. The knife had been relentless, cutting through fabric and flesh indiscriminately, gashes crossing and crisscrossing, overlapping in frenzy and fury, open angry trenches on her breasts and on her face—Shanahan turned away and vomited into his hand when he realized the girl’s nose was hanging from her face by a single sliver of skin.

  Then he went to the box on the corner and called the precinct.

  Monoghan without Monroe was like bagels without lox—Carella hardly recognized the man without his partner. In this city, the detective catching a homicide was responsible for the case from that moment on, but the Homicide Division nonetheless sent an obligatory team of detectives to the scene, presumably to lend their expertise to the investigation, or perhaps to guarantee a dignity appropriate to the seriousness of the crime. Monoghan and Monroe worked as a team out of Homicide, but tonight there was only Monoghan, and he sounded like a voice without an echo, looked like a body without a shadow. His partner was sick, he explained. The flu. More damn flu around this month. Wearing a black overcoat, white handkerchief in the breast pocket, black snap-brim fedora, black leather gloves, white silk muffler, black bowtie behind it, Monoghan seemed dressed for the Governor’s Ball, or at least the opera. He told Carella at once that he had been dragged away from an anniversary party, a golden anniversary no less, and hoped he could get back to it before long. He seemed to imply that Carella had personally caused the death of the young girl who lay in the hallway in her own blood.

  “How old you suppose she is?” Monoghan asked. “Her age, I mean,” he added immediately, as though sorely missing Monroe and trying to supply in monologue the endlessly redundant dialogue that had become their trademark over the years.

  “She looks sixteen or seventeen,” Carella said.

  He was staring at the open wounds all over the girl’s body. He could never get used to it, would never get used to this senseless reduction of flesh to rubble. Ten minutes ago, a half-hour ago, the girl had been alive. She now lay in angular disarray in an alien hallway, her life juices spilled around her as carelessly as dirty water from a dish basin. He looked at her corpse and squinched his eyes in pain, and when Monoghan commented that the guy had probably raped her first, since her pantyhose were all ripped and bloody around the crotch, Carella said nothing.

  In a little while the assistant medical examiner arrived. Like any other physician called out on a rainy night, he was grumpy. The fact that this was a Saturday, when people were supposed to be out having a good time instead of examining homicide victims, did little to enliven his spirits. “No rest for the weary,” he said, and put his black bag down beside the dead girl.

  “Well, at least the rain’s stopped,” Monoghan said.

  “You know what they do in England when it rains, don’t you?” the ME asked.

  “No, what?”

  “They let it rain,” the ME said, and both men burst out laughing.

  “Rain brings out the bedbugs,” Monoghan said. “Had to be a bedbug did something like this.”

  “A lunatic,” the ME said.

  “A crazy person,” Monoghan said, and smiled. He had found a substitute for Monroe. Even on this damp Saturday night, criminal detection could proceed in an orderly Tweedledum and Tweedledee fashion. His mood perceptibly brightened. “Did a nice job on her,” he said conversationally.

  “Yep. Cut the trachea, the carotid, and the jugular,” the ME said.

  “Notice her hands?” Monoghan said.

  “Getting to them,” the ME said.

  To Carella, apparently feeling amplification was necessary, Monoghan said, “In some of these incised wound homicides, you get these defense cuts. Person puts up his arm to block the knife, he’ll get cut on the fingers someplace.”

  “Or the wrist,” the ME said.

  “Or the forearm.”

  “Or the palm.”

  “I hate knife wounds, don’t you?” Monoghan said. “You get a bullet wound, it’s neat. Knife wounds are messy.”

  “I’ve seen messy bullet wounds, too,” the ME said.

  “But not as messy as knife wounds. I hate knife wounds.”

  “I hate blunt-force wounds,” the ME said. “But your bullet wounds can get pretty messy, too.”

  “I’m not talking about your shotgun wounds now,” Monoghan said.

  “No, I’m talking about your average exit wound from a .45-caliber slug, for example. Drive a subway train through that exit wound. That’s a messy wound.”

  “Still, I hate knife wounds worse than anything else.”

  “Well, to each his own,” the ME said, and shrugged, and snapped his bag shut. “She’s all yours,” he said, and rose from where he’d been crouching over the girl.

  “Was she raped?” Monoghan asked.

  “Can’t tell you that till we get her downtown,” the ME said.

  In the girl’s handbag, they found a comb, a package of menthol cigarettes, a book of matches, $3.40 in cash, and a Social Security card that told them her name was Muriel Stark.

  At twenty minutes past midnight a woman named Lillian Lowery called the precinct and asked to talk to a detective. When Sergeant Murchison asked what it was in reference to, she told him she was worried about her daughter and her niece, who had gone to a party at 8:00 and who were not yet home. Murchison asked her to hold, and then put her through to Detective Meyer Meyer upstairs in the squadroom.

  The woman immediately told Meyer that the girls were only fifteen and seventeen years old respectively, and that they had promised to be home by 11:00 at the very latest. When they had not arrived by 11:30, she had called the house where the party was still going on, and a boy who answered the phone told her they’d left at least an hour before that. It should have taken them no more than twenty minutes to get home. It was now almost 12:30—which meant that nearly two hours had elapsed since they’d left the party. Meyer, who had a daughter himself, gently suggested to Mrs. Lowery that perhaps her daughter and niece had decided to take a walk with some of the boys who’d been at the party, but Mrs. Lowery insisted her daughter was very good about keeping her word; if, for example, she knew she was going to be late, she always called home to say so. Which is why Mrs. Lowery was worried. Meyer took down a description of the girls, and then asked for their full names. Mrs. Lowery said her daughter’s name was Patricia Lowery, and her niece’s name was Muriel Stark.

  Meyer asked her to call him again if the girls showed up; if he did not hear from her by morning, he would pass the information on to the Missing Persons Bureau. In the meantime, he phoned down to the desk sergeant and asked him to put out a 10-69 to all the precinct’s radio motor patrol cars, specifying a non-crime alert for two dark-haired, brown-eyed, teenage girls, one wearing a blue, the other a pink dress, last seen in the vicinity of 1214 Harding, and presumably heading south toward their home at 648 St. John’s Road. Meyer gave the desk sergeant the girls’ names, of course, but neither of those names meant anything to him. He had come on duty shortly before midnight, and did not know that both Kling and Carella were actively investigating two separate cases involving two teenage girls. His ignorance wasn’t particularly uncommon; no one expected every detective on the squad to know what every other detective on the squad was doing at any given hour of the day. Kling, for example, did not know that Carella was at this moment in the hospital mortuary waiting for a necropsy report that would tell him whether or not Muriel Stark had been raped. And Carella did not know that Kling was on the eighth floor of that same hospital talking to an intern who said it would now be all right for him to interrogate the girl who had burst into the muster room two hours earlier. Kling hadn’t even known her name until the intern gave it to him.

  At 12:33 A.M. Patricia Lowery put some of the pieces together for them.

  The first thing she told Kling was that her cousin Muriel had been killed. She t
old Kling where the slaying had taken place, and Kling went immediately to the telephone at the nurse’s station in the corridor outside and called the precinct—only to learn that Carella had responded to the homicide an hour ago. The desk sergeant checked the log, in fact, and told Kling that Carella was at that moment in the hospital mortuary. Kling thanked him, and before going back into Patricia’s room, called down to the mortuary to tell Carella where he was and to advise him that he was about to interrogate an eyewitness to the crime. Carella told him to hold off for a minute, he’d be right upstairs.

  They had washed her and dressed her wounds and given her a clean hospital gown. Her hair was neatly combed and her eyes were dry. A police stenographer sat by the bed, his pencil poised over his pad, ready to record every word. Carella and Kling asked their questions softly. Patricia answered in a clear, steady voice, recalling emotionlessly and without horror the events that had taken place after she and her cousin left the party.

  CARELLA: That was at what time?

  PATRICIA: We left at about ten-thirty.

  KLING: Were you heading home?

  PATRICIA: Yes.

  KLING: Can you tell us what happened?

  PATRICIA: It began raining again. It was raining on and off all night. It slowed down when we left, and then it began again. So we were running down the street, ducking in doorways and under awnings, like that. We weren’t wearing raincoats because when we went to the party it wasn’t raining. We were maybe two blocks from Paul’s house when it started raining.