Scraps of paper blowing along the roadbed of the tracks. Dust dervishes swirling about her like angry ghosts.
Then a low wail . . .
Five-foot-nine Patrol Officer Amelia Sachs found herself facing down a thirty-ton Amtrak locomotive, the red, white and blue slab of steel approaching at a determined ten miles an hour.
"Hold up, there!" she shouted.
The engineer ignored her.
Sachs jogged onto the roadbed and planted herself right in the middle of the track, spread her stance and waved her arms, signaling him to stop. The locomotive squealed to a halt. The engineer stuck his head out the window.
"You can't go through here," she told him.
He asked her what she meant. She thought he looked woefully young to be driving such a big train.
"It's a crime scene. Please shut off the engine."
"Lady, I don't see any crimes."
But Sachs wasn't listening. She was looking up at a gap in the chain-link on the west side of the train viaduct, at the top, near Eleventh Avenue.
That would have been one way to get the body here without being seen--parking on Eleventh and dragging the body through the narrow alley to the cliff. On Thirty-seventh, the cross street, he could be spotted from two dozen apartment windows.
"That train, sir. Just leave it right there."
"I can't leave it here."
"Please shut off the engine."
"We don't shut off the engines of trains like this. They run all the time."
"And call the dispatcher. Or somebody. Have them stop the southbound trains too."
"We can't do that."
"Now, sir. I've got the number of that vehicle of yours."
"Vehicle?"
"I'd suggest you do it immediately," Sachs barked.
"What're you going to do, lady? Gimme a ticket?"
But Amelia Sachs was once again climbing back up the stone walls, her poor joints creaking, her lips tasting limestone dust, clay and her own sweat. She jogged to the alley she'd noticed from the roadbed and then turned around, studying Eleventh Avenue and the Javits Center across it. The hall was bustling with crowds--spectators and press. A huge banner proclaimed, Welcome UN Delegates! But earlier this morning, when the street was deserted, the perp could easily have found a parking space along here and carried the body to the tracks undetected. Sachs strode to Eleventh, surveyed the six-lane avenue, which was jammed with traffic.
Let's do it.
She waded into the sea of cars and trucks and stopped the northbound lanes cold. Several drivers tried end runs and she had to issue two citations and finally drag trash cans out into the middle of the street as a barricade to make sure the good residents did their civic duty.
Sachs had finally remembered the next of the first officer's ADAPT rules.
P is for Protect the crime scene.
The sound of angry horns began to fill the hazy morning sky, soon supplemented by the drivers' angrier shouts. A short time later she heard the sirens join the cacophony as the first of the emergency vehicles arrived.
Forty minutes later, the scene was swarming with uniforms and investigators, dozens of them--a lot more than a hit in Hell's Kitchen, however gruesome the cause of death, seemed to warrant. But, Sachs learned from another cop, this was a hot case, a media groper--the vic was one of two passengers who'd arrived at JFK last night, gotten into a cab and headed for the city. They'd never arrived at their homes.
"CNN's watching," the uniform whispered.