The Borzoi Killings

20.

Kathy Schiavoni entered her seven-digit code on the keypad next to the door that led to the windowless, musty locker room in which current case evidence was stored. Once inside the room, her first task was to write in an old-fashioned ledger her name, her time of arrival, and the purpose of her visit. She wrote: “Examination of the Richardson sheets.”

There was always a metallic chill in the room; there was also always the smell of chemicals and compounds-formaldehyde, ammonia, and cordite and gun grease from the confiscated bullets, pistols, and weapons that were stored there.

She walked directly to box 6773, one of the more than two thousand lockers in the warehouse-size building. She knew the combination to the lock and opened it.

The box was empty.

Kathy Schiavoni walked to the computer near the entrance to the icy room. The computer contained information disclosing who had access to lock box 6773. Only her name appeared on the screen, with seven different dates of removal and return. No one else had signed in to remove the sheets and no one had signed them out.

Kathy was methodical and deliberate, so different from her earlier self when she was rootless and confused in her six fugitive years in Manhattan. As soon as she left the building, she scrolled on her cell phone to Bo Halsey’s number. He was the only man in the world she believed she could trust.

After leaving the Army in 1987, Bo became a friend of her difficult father, a Vietnam veteran. Bo joined the VFW club in Sag Harbor, the youngest member of the group, because her father had asked him to do that. Years later, she and Detective Halsey, now approaching early retirement age, had worked on three cases together. Her contacts were usually with the haughty lawyers in the District Attorney’s office, who treated forensic technicians like servants. Whenever she needed to speak to a field person-a cop with “boots on the ground” as they liked to describe themselves ever since Bush invaded Afghanistan and Iraq-she turned to Bo Halsey. Without ever expressing it, he felt an obligation to give special treatment to Kathy Schiavoni; she had been a lost, unhappy teenager when he first knew her but had evolved into a dedicated professional. He admired her. Transforming yourself was tough. He knew that to move from lost to found, from dead to alive, to be the prodigal child returning home, was a kind of miracle.

He recognized her number on his own cell phone when it vibrated and lit up. He was fishing in the channel of salt water that flowed under the stone bridge linking Sag Harbor to North Haven. Bo Halsey spent hundreds of isolated hours fishing there every season of the year, even in the winter on the days when the weather was mild. He had found as he grew older that he preferred the slowness of fishing for salt-water bass in this channel to deep-sea fishing or fishing from the beaches along the Atlantic coastline in Southampton, East Hampton, and Montauk. And he preferred the winter months, when he was almost always the only fisherman.

“I’m in Riverhead,” she said. “I’d like to see you. It’ll take me forty-five minutes, maybe thirty, to get there.”

“Take your time,” he said, “I’ll be here all day.”

Almost an hour later, Kathy parked on Long Wharf in Sag Harbor and walked to the bridge. The marinas, which in the summer were crowded with colorful boats and yachts, stretched around her, entirely empty. The American flag snapped at the top of the flagpole at the entrance to the marina: the metal fastenings on the ropes struck the hollow pole, resonating. Below the bridge Bo Halsey stood on the stony shore. He was alone. His hands were on the filament-line of his fishing rod. The water that raced through the channel was shallow, passing over rocks and sand rivulets, like rapids in swift water in the mountains.

A somewhat overweight, ungainly woman, Kathy walked unsteadily down the slope to the shore. She held her left hand above her eyes to shield them from the bright winter sunlight that glittered over the water. Bo Halsey was gazing at the place in the icy, fast-moving water where his lead had landed.

He said, “To what, as they say, do I owe this honor?”

They didn’t need any small talk or pleasantries to start a conversation. They knew each other that well.

“Something’s really pissed me off.”

“What can bother anybody on a great day like this?” He moved his fishing pole like a wand: the sinuous line again arced above the fast-flowing water and then came down thirty yards from the shore. Bo hadn’t once looked at her. Never married, he was essentially shy with women, even with her.

“I was testing the sheets from the Richardson bedroom for the Suarez case. I looked in the evidence box an hour ago. The sheets have gone missing.”

He now turned toward her, smiling. “Funny how evidence can just get up and take a walk around the building.” When he met her at her parents’ house while she was still in high school, her father wanted them to feel as though they were older brother and younger sister, despite the age gap between them. Brothers tease little sisters, Halsey thought.

“Bo, cut out the shit please. I’m totally aggravated. I told Harding that Suarez’s DNA was on the sheets, that Brad Richardson’s DNA was there. And that Joan Richardson’s vaginal stains were there as well.”

“You should wash your mouth out with soap.” He laughed and wanted her to laugh as well. “You ladies in the lab talk pure filth.”

“Nice going, Bo. But I need you to listen. There was another person’s DNA. From sperm, on the sheets.”

“It’s always a good idea to wash your sheets after a murder.”

“I asked Harding to get a search warrant for a sample of Hank Rawls’s hair.”

Turning again toward the water, Bo Halsey steadily reeled in the line. He cast again. The tip of the rod, propelled by the deft motions of his left hand, swept back and forth, a blur except for the edges of the arc where each sweeping motion seemed to stop momentarily as though in a freeze frame before becoming a blur again.

“And you want hairs from the head and crotch of a once-upon-a-time Presidential candidate? Right?”

Kathy Schiavoni knew that every conversation with Bo Halsey was a process of excavating through his cynical demeanor, bred by four years in the Army, and more than twenty years as a cop in New York City, to a level where he was somewhat softer, somewhat more open, and thoughtful. It was difficult to get there. She said, “I think Suarez is entitled to know who put the extra semen stain on Joan Richardson’s bed. The jury’s entitled to hear that.”

A crystalline breeze blew inland from the wide harbor, chilling both of them and rattling the branches of the desiccated nearby reeds and brush. “Hey, baby, I think it’s up to the dark princess and her frog prince Lupo to decide who gets hit with the pleasure of a search warrant. Five cops crashing into your house with a search warrant for your crotch hair is a pretty big deal.”

“Bo, listen to me, there was obviously another man in the house sometime just before or during the day Richardson was killed. Suarez’s lawyer has a right to know that and to know who it was.”

“Rematti has no reason to have any idea that you’re testing the bed sheets, Kathy. Forget it. It is all, as they say, irrelevant and immaterial. That was not the room where Richardson lost his head. What happens in people’s bedrooms stays in the bedroom.”

“Isn’t that where the money was stolen?”

“Do you think people were having sex with Mrs. Richardson between the time her husband and the dogs had their heads taken off and when the money was lifted? Come on.”

“Come on, Bo, this is important to me. You’re the senior guy in the office. You might not even need a search warrant. Just contact Rawls and see if he’ll come in voluntarily to give it to you.”

Bo genuinely liked Kathy Schiavoni. He had once even thought about asking her out to dinner, but his innate, crippling shyness about women prevented him. “When I was in the Army, Kathy, a spade from Detroit was taking a shortcut in front of the company headquarters. It was a dirt yard. But it had signs on it saying ‘Keep Off the Grass.’ There was no grass, it was as bald as my head. A lieutenant from some fucking place like Louisiana, a classic redneck, Gomer Pyle-type of guy, walks by and yells, ‘Soldier, you’re walking on my grass. Say sorry to my grass,’ The black guy looks at the dirt, then says to the lieutenant, ‘Never gonna happen, sir,’ and walks away.” Bo paused. “Never gonna happen, Kathy. I’m a year away from retiring early. I could give a rat’s ass about some guy’s pubic hair, Juan Suarez, Margaret Harding, Richie Lupo, Brad Richardson, Raquel whatever the fuck her name is.”

He saw that Kathy was angry and struggling with what to say. “I’ll handle this myself, then, Bo.”

Staring at her, remembering her as a teenager, Bo said, “Be careful, Kathy. I want you to be safe.”

Just as Kathy Schiavoni turned to walk up the slope, the silvery line of Bo Halsey’s fishing rod rose, snake-like, iridescent in the bright air.