TRIPLE HOMICIDE
A Novel By Charles J. Hynes
Suffolk County, Long Island, New York,
December 20, 1990, 7:30 A.M.
“Oh my God, David.” Alyson Keeler sobbed uncontrollably at her gruesome discovery. “Come here, quickly,” she pleaded, her body trembling.
Alyson had soft blond hair with streaks of chestnut, worn slightly above her shoulders. Her large hazel eyes were deeply set above high cheekbones in an oval-shaped face. Her aquiline nose was neatly sculpted, and her lips were drawn up in what seemed to be a perpetual smile. She was very pretty, perhaps even beautiful, but this morning her lovely face was twisted by fear, contorted with revulsion at the sight of what lay on the ground only a few feet away from where she stood. She looked at the bodies lying there and then looked away, only to look back again. She repeated this sequence a few times until her fiancé, twenty-three-year-old David Rapp, joined her and held her closely, protectively. The bodies of two young men, who appeared to be in their early thirties, lay there on the snow-covered beach looking peaceful enough, staring sky ward. A brief glance might have suggested that they were lost in contemplation of their majestic surroundings. But on close examination, each man had a bullet hole on the left side of his temple, haloed with a small pool of coagulated, frozen blood.
Alyson Keeler, twenty-one years old, was a sophomore at the Stony Brook campus of SUNY, or the State University of New York, located in Long Island’s Suffolk County. She was enrolled in the school’s premed honors program. David was in his third year of premed at the same school. They had driven earlier that morning to Robert Moses State Park, named for New York’s notorious master builder. They arrived early enough to see daybreak. It was their favorite time of day at their favorite place.
Alyson’s shocking discovery was two dead men dressed in denim shirts and trousers. They wore canvas jackets with cheap imitation black fur collars and sleeves. Their footwear was worn black work boots.
When she had somewhat recovered, Alyson used a nearby phone booth to summon police. As soon as Alyson’s call to the Suffolk County 911 Police Emergency Operation Center was transmitted to a police car patrolling the perimeter of the park, every emergency unit with a police monitoring scanner would, with flashing red lights and blasting sirens, began to roar toward Robert Moses State Park. Police cruisers from both the Suffolk County Police Department and the New York State Police, fire engines, emergency medical vans, and investigators from the Suffolk County district attorney’s office would soon be joined by a full armada of news media.
Two murdered men found five days before Christmas in a crime free suburban state park was a twenty-four-hour news story. Who these murdered men were would only increase the interest. The first responding police officers notified their patrol sergeant. “We got two male Hispanics, apparently shot to death with one bullet each to the head. It looks like they were carried here from the main road after they were shot. We found pay stubs probably their own from a factory in Brooklyn on each of the bodies.”
Ned Leon, the on duty reporter for Long Island’s cable television Channel 21, was the first reporter to hear the call over his police scanner, which was mounted on the dashboard of his mobile van, along with his unauthorized red police emergency light. Leon had been a police reporter for more than a dozen years, having spent much of his early days with the now-defunct Long Island Press. His heavy drinking and chain-smoking were habits he intentionally acquired trying to fit the image of a hard-bitten, leather-tough street crime reporter. These abuses were having predictable results on Ned Leon, who was afflicted with chronic coughing and bleeding ulcers and the sad and drawn look of an old man. Leon and, for that matter, all so-called police reporters loved the trappings or the instruments of police authority. Some carried phony police badges, and some even carried licensed guns. They flaunted these symbols, without having to deal with the awesome responsibilities and the dangers faced by real cops. Still, Ned was respected by the cops and the other police reporters because he had the uncanny investigative skills of a street detective. His ability to analyze raw data often led to the solution of a case before an arrest was made.
Two Hispanics killed execution style in 1990 meant one of only two things to Ned Leon: These two victims were taken out in a bad drug deal in Brooklyn, or the murders were racially motivated. A veteran reporter like Leon, whose workday went from idle speculation to the ugly reality of homicide, abused wives, and abandoned kids, could not conceive of any other reason. Since the factory where the two murdered brothers, Hiram and Ramon Rodriguez, were employed was in a notorious Brooklyn neighborhood where drug-related murder was commonplace, and since race relations in New York City, and even its eastern neighbor counties of Nassau and Suffolk, could not have been worse, Ned Leon’s guesses were not merely cynical. But his conclusion wasn’t even close.
“Jimmy,” said Suffolk County Police Chief of Detectives Phil Pitelli, “my homicide detectives think that those two guys we found in Moses State Park yesterday morning were killed by a city cop.”
“What proof do they have?” DA James Crowley demanded.
“Frankly,” Pitelli responded slowly, “they don’t have much other than a few facts and a cop’s instincts. The ME places the time of death, based on the degree of rigor mortis, sometime between six and eight hours before the bodies were discovered. Since the victims were from Brooklyn, my guys figure that they were killed there and brought to Moses to be dumped.” Pitelli waited for DA Crowley to respond. When he didn’t, the chief continued.
“The doc retrieved two rounds, one from the head of each victim. Our ballistics lab identified the rounds as those used in a .38caliber Police Special, which, as you know, is a revolver issued to the NYPD. And then there’s this: A gas station attendant on the Northern State Parkway gave a fill-up to a guy in a van about two in the morning of the twentieth, the day the bodies were found. He said that the driver looked like a cop and that the two passengers in the van also looked like cops. Finally, the attendant said that when the driver took out his wallet to pay for the gas he had a gun butt protruding from his waistband.”
“Well,” Crowley observed, “now if we only had a confession.”
“Now, Jimmy,” Pitelli scolded, “just be patient. My guys are working with the NYPD’s Internal Affairs. Who knows, if we get the right photo maybe we’ll have your confession.”
“Why not?” replied Crowley. “With thirty thousand city cops, maybe you’ll get lucky and give me that confession before my term ends in ’93.”
Triple Homicide - Chapter One