Fisk tried to stop him. “It wasn’t on me.”

“On your thing, with the tower, and your girlfriend—”

“I didn’t have anything to do with it and I didn’t watch it,” said Fisk, turning back toward the bodies. He would rather have dealt with corpses than talk about a television “documentary” that apparently made a soap opera out of his and Gersten’s love life. All he knew about it was that they had broadcast video of him walking into his mandated therapy meeting, shot from the backseat of a car across the street. Until then, Fisk had never known what it was like to be one of the people he followed for a living.

Kiser realized he had spit in Fisk’s coffee here. “Do you want to get inside?”

The plastic sheeting, he meant. Fisk shook his head. He could see plenty from where he was.

Each corpse was naked, male. No wallets to go through, no cell phones to check for messages or unanswered calls, no IDs or credit cards. He noticed that a few were missing one or both hands as well as their heads; others retained their hands, even a few wedding and pinky rings. One of the more heavily tattooed bodies had burn marks around his thighs and genitals. Two others showed bruising inconsistent with lividity or decomposition. They had been, if not tortured, sadistically beaten before they were beheaded.

Kiser said, “Colombians, maybe? Going by the skin, which is a little dark. Spanish in the tattoos. Salvadorans?”

Fisk turned his head sideways to try to read one of the tattoos. Across one pair of shoulders, partially obscured by dried black blood, over the rendering of a scarlet red pistol was the word SINALOA.

“Mexicans,” said Fisk. “At least that one is.”

Kiser tried to read what Fisk was seeing. “Cartel stuff?”

“That’s the idea.”

“In Rockaway?” Kiser hooked his fingers into his belt loops. “We don’t see too many Mexicans here in the One-oh-one. Puerto Ricans, sure. Over off Mott, some Colombians. Salvadorans, as I said. But not like MS-13-type guys,” he said, name-checking a prominent El Salvadoran drug gang. “We get workers. Quiet people. Housekeepers, maintenance workers. Gardeners.”

The wind shifted for a moment and Fisk and Kiser got a noseful. “Doubtful they were killed here.”

Kiser said, “So maybe somebody mistook all this sand for a landfill. I think if you dump bodies on a beach, you’re trying to say something.”

“Agreed,” said Fisk.

“If you have the space and the tools to decapitate thirteen grown men and get rid of heads, you can certainly get rid of the rest of the body.”

Fisk nodded. “This is cartel-level violence.” He looked at Kiser. “This is why your captain had you call me.”

Kiser nodded. “The T-word.”

Fisk winced. “Maybe. They used to call it crime. Now if it hits a certain number on the meter it becomes terrorism. In this case, narcoterrorism.”

“You’re not interested?”

“You mean Intel?” said Fisk. “Not my call. Depends on what you get. Processing these hunks of meat is going to be a bitch.”

“You’re telling me.”

“I would reach out to OCB. The Organized Crime guys have a good grip on gang stuff, at least stateside in NYC. Maybe you’ll get one guy on ink alone, and that ID might beget another, and so on. Word to the wise. Be meticulous. You caught a big fish here, everyone’s going to want to get in on it. Every police inspector in all of Queens is going to want to come down here for a look himself, but don’t let them. No stomping around your crime scene. This is your realm now. If any i’s don’t get dotted, it’s all on you.”

The wind came back on them again. Kiser spun away hard.

“I’m going to go find a nice clean spot in the weeds for a good puke.”

“Do it,” said Fisk. “You’ll feel better.”

CHAPTER 17

Fisk returned to Intel, still unsettled by what he had seen. The sight of thirteen beheaded humans, dumped on a beach in Rockaway looking like they had washed ashore from Mexico, had rattled his cage. This was cartel-level violence here in New York City.

It did not take much checking to confirm his assumption that the pervasive and extreme violence of the Mexican drug gangs had not migrated north of the border. If anything, drug-related violence in the United States was trending downward. The overall murder rate in Mexico was more than five times as high as the United States. Fifteen percent of all drug-related murders in Mexico involved torture, including roughly five hundred beheadings in the past year. Fisk found exactly one case of a drug dispute resulting in a beheading in the United States, and that was in 2010.

So why here? And why now? There hadn’t been any uptick in turf wars or drug prices that he was aware of. As a strange anomaly, he was intrigued but as the point man for United Nations Week, he was too preoccupied to do anything about it.

FISK COULD NOT IMAGINE a more complicated tangle of law enforcement agencies and conflicting jurisdictions than he was seeing here during United Nations Week.

The United States Secret Service is the designated agency for protecting the president, vice president, and their families, of course. It is also charged with protecting visiting heads of state. This week provided an unusual challenge, obviously. The Secret Service has a uniformed division of roughly thirteen hundred officers—they resemble military cops in their blue uniforms and baseball caps—many of whom had been summoned from Washington, D.C., for the week. Fisk was in contact with their New York agency, but it was more of a courtesy situation involving information sharing and daily briefings.

The State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service played a smaller role. Their primary job is to provide bodyguard-level protection for U.S. diplomats overseas, as well as police-level work inside U.S. embassies and consulates. They also protect State Department people and facilities in the United States, as well as visiting political dignitaries unqualified or not warranting full Secret Service protection. DSS special agents tend to be ex-military, and DSS does not have a uniformed division. They provided the protection detail to the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

The United Nations Headquarters property itself in Turtle Bay, occupying six city blocks on the site of former slaughterhouses overlooking the East River, is policed and protected by the UN’s own police force. (The UN also has its own fire department and postal service.) The sovereignty of the United Nations is such that New York Police Department personnel may not enter the property without being invited.

The FBI had more of a presence than usual in the Big Apple that week. They were responsible for domestic counterintelligence, and United Nations Week represented a premium opportunity for foreign nationals to enter the country as part of a nation’s diplomatic contingent or security detail. It was also the opportunity for some spy gamesmanship, which was probably why the FBI had allowed itself to be made outside the Chinese embassy earlier that day.

Of course, there was the New York Police Department, Fisk’s own employer and the largest police force in the country, with more than thirty-four thousand sworn officers. The department represented the outer ring of general security, doing crowd control, bomb sniffing, metal detectors, and pat-downs, as well as the all-important traffic details. But the NYPD had little or no authority inside the inner security ring, including embassy properties, which are considered foreign soil.

Finally, there were the visiting dignitaries’ own security teams, who were subject to the laws of New York State but carried concealed weapons and generally enjoyed certain courtesies that occupied a gray zone between local and international laws.