Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

“And the hair. That is definitely a hundred dollar haircut.”

She leaned forward again and studied the photographs. She nodded. “So,” she said and handed back the glass. “How do we figure this? He’s in the neighborhood of Lafayette, maybe looking for a whore, he gets mugged…”

Even as she was saying it, she was seeing the flaws. I said, “Let’s suppose he had a thousand dollar suit that, by some fluke, happened to be the right size for our killer. So he kills him, takes his suit, his shoes and his watch, plus his wallet. Why then go to the trouble of dressing him as a homeless person and dumping him in a dumpster?”

She looked back at the file.

“Single gunshot wound to the back of the head. Execution style.” She shrugged. “These days any kid who wants to be in a gang is likely to shoot you in the back of the head just so he can boast he killed you ‘execution style’.”

“True enough.” I stood. “But if you look at the ME’s report…” She leafed through to the report and read while I spoke. “You’ll see that entry was at the base of the skull, and the exit wound was where the two clavicles meet above the sternum. Which means the shot was at about a ten to twenty degree angle. Like so.” I demonstrated. “John Doe was kneeling, the killer was standing behind him.”

“Execution style.”

I nodded. “You haven’t got a lot of dark back alleys around there. It’s all mainly big, broad streets and open spaces. Plus we know they searched the area and found no blood, no slug. There was no bleeding inside the dumpster.”

Dehan was watching me and nodding. “So it’s clear he was killed somewhere else and then thrown in the dumpster.”

“Right, so the killer gets him on his knees. Shoots him in the back of the head. He has either already made him strip, or he now strips off his clothes, and he dresses him as a vagrant. Then, presumably in the small hours of the morning, he takes him and dumps him. What benefit does the killer get from doing that?”

Dehan arched her eyebrows and spread her hands. “The benefit he actually got was that the case went cold almost immediately, and if you hadn’t pissed off Captain Jennifer Cuevas it would probably have stayed cold.”

“Hidden in plain sight,” I nodded, “a guy nobody cares about murdered by another guy nobody cares about. So there is probably a missing persons report that relates to this guy, but nobody ever made the connection with our victim, because they assumed he was a vagrant. Let’s find out who he is.”

“Something else.” She tapped the photographs. “Why that particular dumpster? Is it because it was close? Did they own it and they were planning a more thorough disposal, but it went wrong? Maybe it was just random, but I think it’s worth looking into.”

“Good, I agree.”

The next couple of hours were drudgery fuelled by coffee. The dumpster belonged to a company called Hagan’s Dumpsters, which was a spawn from a parent company called Hagan Construction, which in turn belonged to Conor Hagan, a guy known to be the head of a clan in the Irish Mob. Hagan’s head office was on East 116th Street, one block from the Supreme Criminal Court. You’ve got to love the Irish and their sense of humor.

I was about to tell Dehan when she stretched out in her chair and sighed. “A lot of people went missing in New York in 2005. But when you filter out the women, guys over thirty-five and under twenty-seven, and people with a criminal record, you wind up with two, and one of them was a car mechanic.”

I could hear the printer churning out a photograph. She stood and walked away, coming back a few seconds later with a photograph and a sheet of printed paper. She dropped the photograph in front of me and sat. This was our guy. She read from the printed sheet.

“Sean O’Conor, thirty years old at the time of his disappearance, an attorney specializing in human rights, junior partner at Stanley and Cohen, in Brooklyn. Also worked on a pro bono basis at the Drop In Center, on Sheridan Avenue, a free representation unit funded by charities, which he helped to set up. There was him, David Foster, and Arnav Singh. The office closed down shortly after Sean disappeared.

“Parents, James and Kathleen O’Conor, apparently still living.”

I sat back and scratched my chin.

“So, we have a case of an Irish human rights attorney from Brooklyn found, dressed as a vagrant, murdered execution style, in the Bronx, in a dumpster owned by the Irish Mob.”

“Really?”

“Hagan construction.” I told her what I’d found.

“Where do you want to start?”

I stared at Dehan’s face. It was a nice thing to stare at and she stared back at me. It was a thing we did. Other people found it unsettling but it helped us to think.

“My gut,” I said, “tells me whatever Sean O’Connor was doing in Brooklyn did not get him killed in the Bronx. I want to talk to his partners at the Drop In Center, then maybe we have a chat with his mom and dad.”

“My thoughts exactly, Sensei. You want to forage some food while I find out where Foster and Singh are?”

I left her to it and made for the deli on the corner.

Two

I got two beef on rye and Dehan met me outside the station, sitting on the hood of my Jaguar. Not many women can sit on the hood of a 1964 Mark II and look good. Mostly you want to move them off so you can get a good look at the car, but Dehan looked like she belonged there. I handed her her sandwich