Read Online The Graving Dock by Gabriel Cohen - Free Book Online

boardwalk were just two blocks to the south, and usually the whole area smelled of salt water and fried grease, but those odors were muted in these winter months.
    In the Brooklyn South Homicide office, things were business-as-usual: The bright fluorescent-lit space was filled with desks piled with paperwork, and the other four detectives of Jack’s team were hunkering down behind the piles, like drivers settling in for a demolition derby. Amid the usual wanted posters, union notices, and department paperwork, two computer-printed banners ran across the back wall. He who is not pursued escapes. Socrates. And, If a man is burdened with the blood of another, let him. be a fugitive unto death. Let no one help him. Proverbs 28:17.
    Jack signed in to the command log. “Please tell me there’s some coffee left,” he muttered as he headed for the makeshift little kitchen in the back storeroom.
    He didn’t get that far. Sergeant Tanney stuck his curly head out of his office. “Leightner, I’ve got a fresh one for you.”
    Jack winced. “Can’t you give me a couple more days on the Red Hook thing?”
    Tanney shook his head. “This one’s gonna be big, and I need you on it.”
    Jack sighed, but didn’t argue. As new jobs came in, the detectives caught them in turn. They could go “off the chart” for four days to focus exclusively on a fresh job, but unless the case was high priority, after that they went back into the rotation. He had worked the job involving the boy in the box as hard and as thoroughly as he could, and would continue to do so in every free minute, but this new case would have to take precedence. (He just hoped that Tommy Balfa would show a little initiative.)
    Five minutes later he and Hermelinda Vargas, another detective from his team, were speeding north toward the Seventy-eighth precinct.
    MIGHTY STATUES OF REARING horses flanked the entrance to Prospect Park’s southernmost corner. The inner roadway that circled the park was closed to cars between the morning and evening rush hours, but Jack steered around the metal barrier.
    Like Coney Island—and the harbor—the park provided the residents of Brooklyn with some respite from the miles of asphalt, concrete, and brick that covered the rest of the borough. The park had been designed by the same guy who created Central Park, and had similarly elegant features, but this place was not overrun with tourists; as befitted Brooklyn, it was a lot more low-key.
    Jack steered the unmarked Chevy along the park drive. To his left, bordering a small lake, honey-colored cattails swayed in the bright morning sun. Geese waddled along the shore, while out on the water hundreds of white seagulls rested, all facing the same direction, into the wind. In warm weather the park provided a refreshing blast of green, but now everything was brown and gray: the ground bare, the trees stripped to their stark branches.
    Somewhere in this wooded landscape, two bodies lay sprawled on the rotting leaves. More than a decade ago, that fact would have set Jack’s heart thumping. He had hardly been a rookie back then, with years of experience on patrol and as a precinct detective, but Homicide was a whole new challenge. Now he was just going to another day at work.
    His colleague, who had come along to provide a little extra support for what was sure to turn into a press case (a white jogger killed in a public park), was similarly calm. Hermelinda Vargas—whom everyone called Linda—was a short, self-assertive woman. After work, when the team went out for a beer, men would hone in on her because of her soccer-ball-sized breasts. When they caught a blast of her withering sarcasm, they would usually retreat. Hermelinda was fiercely in love with her husband, a scrawny little electrician. She liked to say that she had become a cop because it was her destiny: Her first name meant “shield of power.”
    Now she sipped a cup of coffee and checked out the passing scenery. Though the park