Triple Threat

Caruso as if he’d gotten stupid himself. “Remember, it was gangbangers who killed her. Or she decided to take a cruise and forgot to tell anybody. To the quote couple, there was no third guy.”
    “So I go searching in Jersey. Where exactly is this Kearny Marsh?”
    Sellitto nodded at the file.
    Caruso took it and retreated to a corner of Sellitto’s office to read.
    “One thing,” the detective said.
    Caruso looked up, expecting legalese and disclaimers.
    The detective nodded at the bowl of black beans he was eating. “Stay at your own risk.”
    # # #
    Hopeless.
    Eddie Caruso stood about where John Westerfield’s green Mercedes had been parked as the man had surveyed the area, looking for the best place to hide a body.
    There was no way he could find where Sarah Lieberman had been buried.
    Before him were hundreds of acres of marshland, filled with brown water, green water, gray water, grass, cattails and mulberry trees. A trillion birds. Gulls, ducks, crows, hawks and some other type—tiny, skittish creatures with iridescent blue wings and white bellies; they were living in houses on poles stuck at the shoreline.
    New Jersey housing developments, Eddie Caruso reflected. But he didn’t laugh at his own cleverness because he was being assaulted by suicidal and focused mosquitos.
    Slap.
    And in the distance the crisp magnificence of Manhattan, illuminated by the midafternoon sun.
    Slap.
    The water was brown and seemed to be only two or three feet deep. You could wrap a body in chicken wire, add a few weights, and dump it anywhere.
    He wasn’t surprised searchers hadn’t found her brutalized corpse.
    And there was plenty of land, too—in which it would be easy to dig a grave. It was soupy and he nearly lost his Ecco.
    He wiped mud off his shoe as best he could and then speculated: How much would it cost to hire a helicopter with some sort of high-tech radar or infrared system to detect corpses? A huge amount, he guessed. And surely the body was completely decomposed by now. Was there any instrumentation that could find only bones in this much territory? He doubted it.
    A flash of red caught his eye.
    What’s that?
    It was a couple of people in a canoe.
    New Jersey Meadowlands Commission
was printed on the side.
    Eddie Caruso’s first thought was, of course: Meadowlands. May the Giants have a better season next year.
    His second thought was: Shit.
    This was
government
land, Caruso realized.
    Meadowlands Commission…
    John Westerfield claimed he’d come here to look into a real estate deal. But that was a lie. There’d be no private development on protected wetlands. And using the toll road, which identified him? He’d done that
intentionally
. To lead people off. Not being the brightest star in the heavens, he and his mother had probably figured they couldn’t get convicted if the body was never found. So they’d left a trail here to stymie the police.
    In fact, they’d buried Sarah Lieberman someplace else entirely.
    Where…?
    Eddie Caruso thought back to the police file in Lon Sellitto’s office. He believed he knew the answer.
    # # #
    An hour and a half later—thank you very much, New York City traffic—Caruso parked his rental illegally. He was sure to incur a ticket, if not a tow, here near City Hall since it was highly patrolled. But he was too impatient to wait to find a legal space.
    He found his way to the Commercial Construction Permits Department.
    A slow-moving clerk with an impressive do of dreadlocks surrounding her otherwise delicate face looked over his requests and disappeared. For a long, long time. Maybe coffee breaks had to be taken at exact moments or forfeited forever. Finally, she returned with three separate folders.
    “Sign for these.”
    He did.
    “Can I check these out?”
    “No.”
    “But, the thing is—”
    She said reasonably, “You can read ‘em, you can memorize ‘em, you can copy ‘em. But if you want copies you gotta pay and the machines say they take dollar bills but nobody’s been able to get it to take a dollar bill in three years. So you need change.”
    “Do you have—”
    “We don’t give change.”
    Caruso thanked her anyway and returned to a cubicle to read the files.
    These were originals of permits issued to three construction companies that were building high-rises on the Upper East Side not far from Sarah Lieberman’s townhouse. Caruso had found copies of these in John Westerfield’s police file, the one that Sellitto let him look