Hail to the Chief

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They found the bodies in an open ditch on the northernmost extreme of the 87th Precinct. The telephone company had torn up the street early the morning before, to get at the underground cables. The repairmen finished the job by nightfall, when the temperature dropped below freezing. They had covered the ditch with temporary wooden planking, and had erected blinking barriers around the excavation, to keep motorists away from the long, narrow, covered trench in the earth. Someone had ripped up the planking and dropped the six bodies into the ditch. Two radio-car cops, on routine patrol near the boat basin, spotted the ripped-up sections of planking and flashed their torches into the excavation. The date was January the sixth. The time was three in the morning. By three-ten, Detectives Steve Carella and Bertram Kling were on the scene.

The bottom of the ditch was a maze of electrical and telephone cables. Water had seeped into the ditch, combining with the freshly spaded earth to form a quagmire which had frozen over at nightfall, so that the cables now seemed embedded in brown plastic. The six bodies were lying in angular confusion on top of the mud-colored ice. There was another color staining the ice. The color was blood. The bodies were naked. Their nakedness made the night seem even colder than it was. Carella, wearing a fleece-lined leather jacket, brown woolen gloves, and earmuffs, looked down into the ditch. Kling was fanning the beam of his flashlight over the bodies. Ten feet from where they were standing, two radio motor patrol cars blinked their revolving red lights into the night. Now that the detectives were here, the patrolmen had gone back into the cars to keep warm.

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