The CBS Murders Read Online Free PDF Page B

Patterson had been dialing Barbera’s telephone number. There was never an answer. From that and from what had been found on the pier, and from Sicca’s story, it seemed likely that she was the woman who had been abducted and, perhaps, murdered. They had come in person now to find out if, indeed, the apartment was empty and she was missing. Cops from the 104th Precinct, which covered the area, were waiting for them. Patterson had called them to let them know he and Fisher were on the way and, because of jurisdiction, to ask them to meet the Midtown North detectives.
    And then the case and the investigation became a little more complex and tangled, took on a new facet. The cops from the 104th knew Barbera, had come to know her very well over the past months. On January 5, her close friend, perhaps her only real friend, Jenny Soo Chin, a forty-six-year-old New Jersey housewife and sometime bookkeeper, had disappeared about seven in the evening after leaving Barbera’s apartment, where she had spent the previous night. When Barbera learned that Chin had never reached her home in Teaneck and that her husband and four children had heard not a word from her, she got very worried. She went to the precinct and demanded an investigation, and in New Jersey, Chin’s family reported her missing to the Bergen County authorities. But Barbera did not stop with a mere report. She posted fliers with Jenny Soo Chin’s photograph and description on trees, lampposts, and in stores throughout Ridgewood, asking for information from anyone who might have seen anything that January evening. She hired a private detective to do a little investigating on his own. And she hounded the cops in the 104th, calling constantly, visiting often, incessantly prodding them to do something, anything, to find Chin.
    At the 104th, Detective Rudy Gregorovic caught the missing-persons case. Over the next weeks, he went up and down Grandview Avenue and through the neighborhood, talking to everyone he could find. Nobody had seen anything. He, and the cops in Bergen County, talked to Edward Chin, Jenny Soo’s husband, and to her sister and brother. The sister and brother were very concerned, wanted to help in any way they could, even offered to put up a reward for information. But Gregorovic and the New Jersey police, with whom he compared notes often, were struck by Edward Chin’s stoical manner. He seemed bothered more by his wife’s relationship with Barbera than by her disappearance. During the three years the two women had known each other, his wife had grown ever more dependent on Barbera, had spent more and more time with her, in her home in Teaneck and in Barbera’s apartment in Queens, had taken a job Barbera had gotten for her, one she was not particularly qualified for, had gone on vacations and trips alone with her, had grown increasingly distant from her husband and family.
    Nearly a week after Jenny Soo Chin vanished, what had appeared at first to be simply a missing-persons case, where the missing person might well have been missing because of her own actions and for her own personal reasons, took on a more troubling and serious complexion. On January 11, Chin’s red Pontiac station wagon was found, abandoned, far west on Thirty-sixth Street in Manhattan, only a few blocks from the entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Inside, there were bloodstains on the door and window handles, on the armrest in the front, and on the carpet. And there was a spent .22-caliber shell casing on the floor in the front of the car. There was no sign of Jenny Soo Chin.
    It was another two weeks before anyone learned anything more about her disappearance, and what they learned indicated violence, indicated that what had been found in that abandoned car in Manhattan might very well mean that Chin had vanished for good. These were weeks when Barbera did not let up on her steady badgering of the cops, who were making little progress, and of her own