The Butcher Read Free Page A

bald spots; no sudden bursts of greenery—no telltale sign of human death. The crows continued to caw. Their ruckus was distracting. A chain-smoker, the informer lit one cigarette after another. Beads of sweat ran down hisface. Jim called an impromptu brainstorming session among all the law enforcement there that day. They, as a collective body, believed what the informer had said. They knew Pitera was murdering people as though he had a God-given right, as though he had a license to kill, and that the informer had no reason to lie. They decided that until proven otherwise, they’d believe him and move full out until they found Pitera’s victims. Hunt and Geisel believed that Pitera had killed over sixty people.
    The NYPD set up a command center. Uniformed cops were posted all around the bird sanctuary, roughly twenty-five acres in size. They knew that once the news media got wind of a Mafia burial ground, they’d have reporters sniffing around like hungry hounds within hours. Finding bodies buried months and years ago here, without coordinates, without landmarks, would be no easy task, like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, though none of that was going to dissuade any of the hardcore law enforcement professionals there that fateful day. They continued looking without luck. The fierce June sun reluctantly dropped below the line of trees. Long shadows appeared. Silently, dusk descended onto the sanctuary. The sounds of crickets and frogs came from every direction at once. Large flocks of sparrows chattered rapidly. The birds, troubled and nervous by the cops’ sudden presence, knew the secrets that their sanctuary held.
    Foul flesh, silent screams, and nightmares. As dark continued to envelop the sanctuary, agents and police there decided they would again start up the search the following morning.

CHAPTER TWO
DARK SECRETS
    M echanized, organized, as succinct as a well-run military operation, the Pitera task force gathered at eight A.M. the following morning.
    Again, the skies were clear. The birds that dwelt in the sanctuary made a racket. They were used to peace and quiet. They did not like the hurly-burly gathering around their homes. Above, a pair of red-tailed hawks circled over the sanctuary, hunting for prey, hunting the abundance of food they knew lived below.
    It was decided that the first thing the strike force would do was bring in cadaver dogs. Given the circumstances, this seemed logical. When the dogs arrived, unremarkable mutts anxious to please, anxious to find the rotting bodies they would receive rewards for, they made their way into the sanctuary. They moved north and south and east and west in prearranged grids. This went on all that day to no avail. Everyone there was sure that if there were bodies, these dogs would find them; they had proven themselves in the past.
    Nothing.
    Not willing to accept defeat, the task force brought the dogs in a second day. They worked slower but still found nothing.
    How, the task force members wondered, could the dogs miss thescent? Some of the victims here were buried several months ago. Some of the victims one year, some two or even three years ago. Surely, the stench of death, the stench of putrid meat, organs, should still have been real and tangible—outright offensive—but the cadaver dogs seemed oblivious.
    Later, at a meeting back in Manhattan at the DEA’s office on West Fifty-seventh Street, the task force members sat down and brainstormed some more. They questioned the informer’s validity. They discussed the probability of his being mistaken about the William T. Davis Wildlife Refuge. They consulted maps to see if there were other bird sanctuaries nearby, to see if there was another logical explanation. There wasn’t.
    One of the task force members talked about a machine a man in California had developed that could find bodies. His name was George Reynolds. They kicked the idea around of bringing him out,