Bad Blood (13 page)

“Last night. It happened again last night, and whoever answered the phone in the detectives’ squad didn’t want to do anything at all for me.”

“What time last night?”

“Ten thirty. I had stopped in the corner deli to get some milk for my coffee. He — he, um — he was waiting for me outside the door.” She blew her nose with a tissue. “He looked so menacing, like he was going to attack me this time.”

“What did you do?”

“I ran back inside and used the phone in the rear of the store to call the precinct.”

“Did he have a weapon?”

“I don’t know, Ms. Cooper. I didn’t get close enough to find out.”

“Did he follow you in? Did the counterman see him?”

She looked down at her shoes. “No. He said he never did.”

“That’s too bad. It would be useful to have another witness.”

“Why? Why is that? Because you don’t believe he was there?”

“Of course I believe you. It would be helpful if someone else could confirm an identification — it always is — once we get the guy.”

Her voice quivered as she seemed to lose control again. “Well, how the hell are you going to get him if the police don’t even respond to my call? How?”

“Carol, are you aware of what happened in midtown last night? Do you know there was an explosion? People were killed? Every precinct in the city had to direct manpower to the scene, can you understand that?”

“So my case means nothing to them, right? I’m the bottom of the pecking order, aren’t I? You think the newspapers won’t be interested in that? You think I can’t get some reporter to do a story on how this has impacted me both emotionally and professionally?”

“Tell your story to anyone you think will help you, Carol,” I said, rising again, aware that I’d be losing points on the sensitivity scale today. “Threats don’t work very well with me, so now I’m going to suggest that you leave and let me get back to business. You got home safely, didn’t you?”

“I had to wait in that damn place until one of my neighbors came in and walked me home. I guess the police wouldn’t have cared if I had to stay there all night.” She got up from her chair and fumbled in her bag to find lipstick to apply.

“That’s a silly thing to say, Carol. They’ve been very concerned about this. I’ll give the cops a call, but I think you’ve got to cut them a break about last night. Where are you going now?”

“Back to work.”

“Would you be more comfortable if I had one of the detectives from the DA’s squad give you a ride?”

“Yeah. That would be great.”

“Then have a seat in the waiting area, okay?”

I led her out past Laura’s desk and returned to my office, closing the door behind me. I dialed Steve Marron in the squad, one flight above me. “Steve, have you got twenty minutes?”

“Every time I give you twenty you manage to turn it into an hour. Five hours. Ten.”

“Come on down. I need you to drive a witness to her office on Wall Street. Tell Joe Roman to stand outside our building entrance and get a good make on the young woman who’ll be coming out with you.”

“Be right there, Alex.”

When Steve Marron knocked on my door and came in, I explained the situation. “I need Joe to do surveillance on her. I don’t want to wait for her to call the next time the stalker shows up. I want Joe to follow her from her office when she leaves tonight, onto the subway, then to her house. And then he needs to take her in the reverse direction, from home to work, the next few mornings.”

“Aren’t there detectives assigned already?”

“Yes, but I don’t want her to know we’re doing this. She’s met those guys. I want to use a team she doesn’t recognize. If this is for real, then the perp also must have figured out who the cops are by now.”

“And if it’s not for real?” Steve asked. “Don’t roll your eyes at me.”

“We have to assume it is. Give it a try.”

Few investigations were more frustrating than stalking cases. Victims were rightly terrified by criminals or psychos who lurked outside their homes and offices, following them for months, often without making any overt gestures. Law enforcement agents and judges had traditionally responded to complaints with a cavalier and dismissive attitude that “nothing” had happened over time. But when the behavior might escalate was often unpredictable, and until resolved, every break had to go in favor of the victim. Threat assessment had burgeoned since stalking had been recognized as a crime category only a decade ago.

I introduced Carol to Steve Marron and saw them to the elevator, then returned to my office to grab my jeans and driving moccasins before heading to the ladies’ room to change.

Artie Tramm was sitting in Laura’s desk chair when I got back, flipping through the copy of
Cosmo
that sat on top of a pile of the unit’s latest indictments.

“What do you need?” I asked.

“I think you dropped something on your way out of the courtroom. Thought I’d bring it to you myself,” he said, giving me a small white business card with a handwritten notation on the blank side.

I hadn’t any cards with me when I went upstairs to Part 83 this morning, so I was puzzled as I reached for it.

The name that had been written on it was not familiar to me. It was in a bold script that I recognized from looking at hundreds of documents signed by Brendan Quillian and said simply
Lawrence Pritchard.

I flipped the card, surprised to see the logo of Keating Properties.

I reddened as I handed it back. “C’mon, Artie. You know this isn’t mine. We’d better go back up to the judge and make a record. It could be Brendan Quillian’s.”

“It don’t belong to anybody. I told you I picked it off the floor. It’s garbage, wouldn’t you think? Just garbage.”

I shook my head at Artie.

“Besides, Gertz is gone until Monday, after the funeral. Meantime, Alex, the least you could do is find out who this guy is — the one whose name is written here. You never know, maybe he’s somebody who could be useful to you.” Artie pocketed the card and walked to the door. “And your case needs all the help you can get.”

I parked at the corner of Eleventh Avenue and walked east across Thirtieth Street to the front of the barbed-wire entrance to the construction site at three forty-five in the afternoon. I had called Mike on his cell phone and he was waiting for me at the gate.

“I can’t believe you told Lem about this Lawrence Pritchard business before you even found out who the guy is.”

“It’s a little thing called ethics, Mike. If it has anything to do with our case, Lem would be likely to move for a mistrial. This one won’t get any better the second time around.”

“He’s baiting you. That’s all it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Lem Howell? Dropping a piece of paper on the floor by mistake? There’s a guy who never had a spit curl where he didn’t want it to be and he’s playing loose with a clue or a potential suspect’s name? Not his style, Coop. You know your players better than that. You know he wanted you to be misled by that business card. What’d he tell you?”

“He was very gracious about it. Said it had nothing to do with the trial. Thanked me for the call and said I could make a record of it when we resumed next week.”

“Sucker,” Mike said, and started to walk through the yard.

“I googled this guy Lawrence Pritchard,” I said, stepping over enormous pieces of mechanical equipment and walking between two tall cranes to keep up with Mike. The site was a beehive of activity. The sandhogs were in work clothes, the detectives had eschewed sports jackets for T-shirts, and the officials from a mix of city agencies were the only ones standing around in suits, kibitzing with each other. I hadn’t smelled this much cigarette smoke in any one place since my first midnight visit to a homicide squad.

No one seemed happy to see me, but that was hardly a new crime-scene experience.

“What’d you get on him?” Mike asked, calling to me over his shoulder.

“Former chief engineer on this project. Fired two years ago. Has his name come up?”

“Watch your step,” he said, waiting for me and holding out his hand. “It gets really sloppy over here from the fire hoses last night. Never heard of him.”

“There are a few articles about it. Max is going to pull them for me. Looks like he was involved with kickbacks. Pocketed more than a hundred thou, took lots of expensive gifts, went on a few gambling trips and boondoggles.”

“And Quillian knows him?” Mike was standing at the bottom step of a trailer, a dust-covered double-wide that seemed to be the headquarters of the operation. He climbed the four stairs and held open the door, which was draped with black bunting. “Welcome to hog house. No kidding, that’s what they call it.”

“Thanks,” I said, pausing at the threshold. “That’ll be your job to figure out, don’t you think? We’ll be looking for a link between Duke Quillian and Pritchard. Obviously, I think Brendan was trying to put Lem Howell on Pritchard’s trail for some reason. Lem said it has nothing to do with my murder case, but he must figure there’s a connection to Duke’s death.”

“We’ve got the main man from the Department of Environmental Protection here. The entire tunnel project — everything having to do with the water supply in New York — is under their watch. He’s supposed to tell us what we need to know. Later, we can ask him if he’s got the scoop on Pritchard.”

Several desks and lots of folding chairs were in the long room. Stacks of paper, small tools, lunch boxes, and ashtrays covered the tabletops. Stained yellow slickers and protective gear were hanging from hooks on every side. Several workers were clustered near the entrance, manning a bank of phones, and appearing to be exhausted from long hours of vigil for their lost colleagues. A few more were glued to the local all-news channel on the television set mounted on a stand in the corner. Most of them stared at me as I passed through but offered no greeting.

Mercer introduced me to George Golden, a senior geologist with the city’s DEP. “Four of your task-force detectives are already in the tunnel. Are you expecting anyone else?” Golden asked. He was about fifty-five years old, with a deep tan, hooded eyes, and a sharply pointed nose that looked like a hawk’s beak.

“That’s it,” Mike said. “Start from the top. What have we got here?”

“We’re standing directly above the main artery of Water Tunnel Number Three. I’m talking about a sixty-mile-long tube that sits six hundred feet below street level and is going to cost more than six billion — not
million
— six billion dollars before it’s completed. And we don’t expect that until 2020, if we get lucky.”

“Why so deep?” Mike asked.

“Construction on New York’s first tunnel began in 1911. For more than a century, we’ve been building a subterranean city under your feet, a whole maze of pipelines that nobody but these workers will ever see. You’ve got subways and electrical systems and sewers down there, and farther below that is the second water tunnel. So there was nowhere for this one to go but deeper underground.”

“How much water does it take to quench our thirst?” Mercer asked.

“And bathe you? And flush your toilets? Start with 1.4 billion gallons every day.”

I could tell from Mike’s pensive expression that his fascination with history was driving his need to know more about this dig.

“I’m missing something here. When the island of Manhattan was settled in the seventeenth century — when they kicked the Indians off to the mainland — weren’t those Dutchmen smart enough to know they needed something to drink?”

“Sure, they knew they were completely surrounded by salt water, Mike. But it wasn’t so much a problem a few hundred years back,” Golden said. “The major settlements were all on the southern end of the island, as you’re probably aware.”

Most New Yorkers were familiar with the tale that Mannahatta had been purchased from the Lenape Indians by the West India Company for sixty guilders — the equivalent of twenty-four dollars. New Amsterdam was colonized close to the tip of the waterfront, and the population pushed northward slowly over the next two centuries.

“In those days, there were a lot of freshwater streams and brooks all over the island,” Golden went on. “Sherman’s Creek up in Washington Heights, Harlem Creek, Lispenard Meadows. And there were several kills — like the Great Kill, right at Forty-second Street, and the Saw Kill in Central Park.”

“Yeah, we happen to know some of the kills pretty well,” Mike said, looking over at Mercer. The Dutch word for “channels” had given its name to inlets and waterways all throughout the New York harbor.

“The greatest natural feature of Manhattan was probably the Fresh Water Pond. Seventy acres of perfectly pure spring-fed waters. Added to the neighborhood wells that were dug near many of the residences and the cisterns that folks filled with rainwater, it seemed like more than enough for everybody.”

“Fresh Water Pond? Never heard of it,” Mike said.

“How about the Collect?” Golden replied. “That’s what it was called when the English took over.
Kolck
is Dutch for a small body of water.”

Mike shrugged. “So where is it today?”

Golden pointed to me. “You work in the courthouse, Alex? One hundred Centre Street?”

“Yes.”

“Well, right about there. The pond covered most of the area east of Broadway, from Chambers to Canal streets. Your offices were built right on top of the Collect.”

That acreage now encompassed the grid of concrete government buildings in lower Manhattan, from City Hall to Federal Plaza to all of the civil and criminal court structures that exist today — the ones the original city planners had called the Halls of Justice.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Mike said. “Why build over a water source when the stuff was so scarce? Did it dry up?”

“Easiest to say a combination of population expansion and sanitary implosion did in whatever fresh water there had been. The wells were stressed by the growing numbers of people arriving in the city every day, and it didn’t take long for the streams to become putrefied by carcasses of dead animals and human waste. Totally polluted,” Golden said. “Then throw in some plagues — it was yellow fever in the 1790s that caught the city fathers’ attention about clean water, followed by a typhoid outbreak from time to time. And the cholera epidemic of the 1830s that got them off their asses.”