Buried on Avenue B by Peter de Jonge Read Free Book Online

Washington Square. Faulk flips, and Henderson, my perp, does three years in Attica. When does he get out of jail? In 1990—seventeen years ago—and a couple weeks later Faulk disappears. His mother files a missing person report, and he hasn’t been seen since. It’s a ridiculous case—the perp has Alzheimer’s, thinks Schwarzenegger is president, and would never go to trial—but I got a confession, a motive, a body, and the place where it’s buried. All I got to do is dig him up. Now look at this.”
    O’Hara bends over the calculator again, jabs it a couple times, and spins it so the screen faces Kelso. “Point-nine-one-six,” she says. “Which rounds up to ninety-two percent. We go from barely over ninety to well over ninety percent. And one more thing, I just got off the phone with Lucas Bradley, the forensic anthropologist they hired after 9/11. He says he doesn’t need a backhoe or any other heavy machinery. Just an assistant, a shovel, and five hours.”
    O’Hara is spouting nonsense, but it’s Kelso’s favorite variety of nonsense.
    â€œYou got six hours,” he says. “But that’s it, because it’s on our dime. So don’t come running back to me asking for even five minutes more. And one other thing.”
    â€œWhat’s that, Lieutenant?”
    â€œThanks, Darlene. For caring.”

 
    CHAPTER 10
    THE NEXT MORNING at 6:00, Kelso, O’Hara, and Jandorek stand beneath the willow in the community garden at Sixth Street and Avenue B as Lucas Bradley makes his first incision in the downtown dirt. To thwart rubberneckers, an orange tarp went up around the tree overnight, along with a new padlock on the gate and notification that the garden will be closed for forty-eight hours so Con Edison can repair a gas leak. To give the cover a ring of truth and further impede the view, half a dozen Con Ed trucks are parked along the perimeter. The thirty-four-year-old Bradley, who has lank brown hair and the kind of open boyish face rarely seen on a native New Yorker, was hired to oversee the sifting and identifying of remains at the base of the World Trade Center towers. He made such a good impression, he was appointed the city’s first full-time forensic anthropologist. O’Hara heard that he got his PhD from a department at the University of Tennessee known as the Body Farm, because of a wooded plot strewn with stiffs where students can observe them in various states of rot. To O’Hara, he looks like a kid in a sandbox, particularly when he unzips his nylon backpack and removes a Teenage Ninja lunch pail. It would drive O’Hara crazy to work with strangers looking over her shoulder, but Bradley seems to appreciate an audience. As he strips away the topmost layer of soil, he points at the hardy weeds around the base of the tree.
    â€œNormally, you wouldn’t have this much grass or weeds near the base of a tree, but sometimes you see opportunistic growth above a grave site,” he says. “There’s no better fertilizer than a juicy corpse.”
    With the help of an intern, Bradley exposes an area of dirt about the size of a picnic blanket. The outer ring of dirt is darker than the area inside it, and according to Bradley that’s another propitious sign. “When you dig a hole and refill it, the dirt from various levels get mixed together. Overall that makes it lighter.” The intern sets aside the loose sections of sod. Bradley opens his juvenile lunchbox and extracts a handful of plastic chopsticks. He sticks them into the dirt about sixteen inches apart around the border of the possible grave.
    â€œI don’t think I’ll be going Chinois for a while,” whispers Jandorek to O’Hara.
    â€œYou don’t eat it anyway,” says O’Hara. An Asian guy would kill himself before he shared his marital woes with Jandorek.
    Using the trowel like a shovel, Bradley begins to dig,