Cold Hit (2 page)

“Doesn’t look like a local girl, does she, Mercer?” Chapman remarked. The Thirty-fourth Precinct still housed some elegant old apartment buildings, but it was not one of the tonier neighborhoods of the city. “Check out the fingernails and pedicure. From the shape she’s in, I’d bet she spent a lot of time on the StairMaster.”

The vermilion polish on her toes and nails had been slightly chipped by her struggle with her assailant or by the tides. It was clear that she had taken good care of herself, until this week.

The Eyewitness News truck had joined the posse. “Hey, Mike,” I heard a voice call out from the far side of the blanket Carrera was holding, “got anything for us?”

“Gimme a break, Pablo. Have a little respect for the dead. C’mon, Doc. Can we get her out of here now?”

Fleisher told him to cover the body, move the waiting ambulance in, and load up the ladder as it was, its cargo still lashed to the wood. “Need anything else from me?”

Chapman shook his head and said he’d be at the morgue for the autopsy proceeding the next day. He bent over and noted the name of the manufacturer on the underside of the ladder before an attendant loaded it onto the van.

“Summer backlog,” Fleisher said. “I won’t get to this one until two p.m., and that’s with jumping her over a few unclaimed souls I’ve got in the cooler.”

Four new arrivals from the precinct formed a human chain to separate the growing crowd from the diminishing group of us who were standing where the lady on the ladder had been.

Chapman walked over to talk with the lieutenant, who was watching the scuba team members tether themselves to huge pieces of equipment that Emergency Services had ferried to the scene. They were going to attempt to crawl around the border of the whirling passage in the unlikely possibility that they could feel for any evidence or weapon. It was obvious that there would be nothing to see along the silt-lined sides and bottom of the treacherous waterway gap.

“Don’t waste their time or energy, Loo,” Chapman urged Peterson, using the informal nickname that rank evoked from all detectives. “She didn’t go into the drink anywhere near here. Could have been Yonkers, could have been the Bronx. It’s just my good fortune that she stubbed her toe and washed up on a little piece of Manhattan North. I haven’t picked up anything except drug shoot-outs in weeks.”

Only Mike Chapman would consider this discovery to be his good fortune. I looked around the neglected plot that had become this woman’s temporary graveyard, its surface littered with broken beer bottles, empty crack vials, scores of spots of pigeon droppings, and a few dozen used condoms.

Mercer Wallace came up beside me, grasping my elbow in his enormous black hand and guiding me out to the street, running interference for me through the rows of news teams and the neighborhood cronies who were looking for excitement now that darkness had fallen. He unlocked the passenger door of his car and I ducked into the seat.

People moved back to the sidewalk as Mercer made a U-turn on the narrow road, and we drove off. He turned in and out of a maze of one-way streets, accelerating when he reached Broadway, taking me downtown and across Central Park to my apartment, on the Upper East Side. I was silent for blocks.

“Where are you, Alex? Talk to me. I can’t let you go upstairs alone just thinking about that body. She’ll be with you all night. You’ll never close your eyes.”

I knew that without being told. But I was deeply distressed and much too wired to sleep after what we had just seen, despite my exhaustion from a couple of weeks of hard-fought courtroom battle in front of a demanding judge. “Thanks, Mercer. Just wondering about the obvious, knowing that there aren’t any logical answers. I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll get him, Alex. It doesn’t seem very likely tonight. But Chapman and me, we’ll get him. In spite of the devil, Miss Cooper. In spite of the devil.”

A cold blast hit me as I opened my apartment door. Thank God I had forgotten to turn down the air conditioner. The coolness felt good as I moved into the bedroom to take off my wilted suit.

The green light flashed on my answering machine. I smiled at the thought of hearing a friendly voice or two, someone who would ease my transition from a scene of violence to the peace of my home, secure and comforting, on the twentieth floor of a high-rise apartment. I pressed the playback button as I began to undress.

I was on my way to the shower when I heard the voice that I had been waiting for, so I walked back and sat on the side of my bed. “Alex?… Alex?… It’s Jake…” The telephone connection sizzled and faded. Before I could move, it started again. “Don’t know if you can hear me… still in China… and… must be about nine o’clock your time. Sorry I missed you… I’ll see you… and just wanted to tell you that…” I pushed the replay button. The machine hadn’t captured any more words than I had heard, but it was Jacob Tyler’s voice that I wanted to listen to over and over. We had been dating for only a couple of months and the newness of the relationship still got me tingling when I heard him speak. I pushed the save button and went in to shower.

I lifted my face up to the steaming water that poured out at me and drizzled down the length of my legs. I reached for the bar of soap and stared at my fingernail, noticing the chip of polish at its tip. My eyes closed and all I could see was the bright red on the nails of the dead woman’s hand. I opened my eyes and shook my head, willing myself not to call up other memories of that body on the ladder. There would be all night for such visions, as I knew too well from past experience. I scrubbed the day’s grime off my face and body, then dried and wrapped myself tightly in a warm, thick terry robe.

I toweled my hair as I played Jake’s message once more. I was smiling again, imagining what he might have said in between the snatches of words that were actually recorded and not gobbled up by the satellites. I’d have to phone my best friend, Nina, and tell her about Jake’s call. I could guess what her response would be: “What good is it to have a guy half a world away when you need him to put his arms around you right now?”

Maybe I’d wait and call her tomorrow. She wasn’t wrong about my needing Jake, but I had been dealing with images of victims for more than ten years. Most of the time, my work was with women who survived their assailants and who would triumph in the courtroom. But very little could soften the shock of seeing firsthand the destruction of a human life — a life as young as my own, as full of promise and hope as I dreamed mine would be.

I shook the dampness off my hair and looked at my watch. It would be morning in China. I had no idea where Jake was at the moment and no office number abroad at which to call him back. I wished he were here with me now. This was not a night to be alone.

My head ached and my stomach was making noises, demanding to be fed. I pressed the telephone button to speed-dial the deli on the next corner and order a turkey sandwich. I could nourish the body if not the soul.

“Sorry, Alex. It’s almost ten o’clock,” said Clare at P. J. Bernstein’s delicatessen. “We’re just closing up.”

I never cooked at home, so I knew there would be nothing in the refrigerator. I had cans of soup in the cabinet, but it was too warm out to entertain the thought of hot soup. I put some ice cubes in a glass, moving on to the den to fix myself a stiff Dewar’s. A mystery novel waited for me next to my bed, but there was nothing like the sight of a real corpse to alienate me from the genre for a couple of weeks. Jake had left a dog-eared Henry James on my dresser. Perhaps I’d start that instead of trying to go to sleep.

I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights before I sat on the sofa, drink in hand, and gazed out over the city. Soft music from my CD system distracted me until Linda Ronstadt began to sing about the hungry women down on Rue Morgue Avenue. I flashed again to the body on the ladder and visualized the setting where it rested tonight.

The sharp buzz of the phone startled me. I caught it on the third ring.

“You almost sound happy to hear from me for a change.”

“Mike?” I asked, having hoped it would be Jake.

“Wrong voice, huh? Don’t go getting dejected ’cause it’s me. It’s not like I’m the Unabomber or Ted Bundy calling you for a quick squeeze. The lieutenant asked me to get hold of you. Says he’d really like you to be at Compstat in the morning.”

Compstat — comparative computer statistics — the NYPD’s hot new demonstration for leadership accountability. Meetings held at headquarters several times a month, in the War Room, to show off the commissioner’s ability to identify and solve the city’s crime problems.

“What time do I have to be there?”

“Seven o’clock sharp. Seems the brass went berserk over this one tonight — it screws up all the mayor’s statistics for the month. The commish may even call on you if he gets frisky and wants answers for all his questions, or wants to blame your boss for refusing to prosecute some of the quality-of-life cases.”

“Thanks for the warning.”

“You sound really flat, kid. You okay?”

“My head’s still back at Spuyten Duyvil, if you know what I mean. Want to grab a pizza and come on up here for supper?”

“Sorry, Coop. It’s almost eleven o’clock. We’ll be working most of the night, trying to figure out who this broad is and when she got popped in the river. See you at reveille. Better sleep with the night-light on.”

It wasn’t the dark that frightened me. It was the fact that moving around out there, below my window, were creatures capable of splitting open the head of a young woman and throwing her body into the water. I stared out at the lights of Manhattan for the next hour, watching them gradually go off as people went to sleep. And all the time, as I sat awake, I thought about the monsters who walk among us.

There were still a few cars parked on Hogan Place near my office, most of which belonged to the lawyers working the midnight shift in night court, when I pulled my Jeep into a reserved slot behind the district attorney’s space at six forty-five on Friday morning. I took the shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities in some third-world country. I stopped at a cart being wheeled into place by one of the regular street vendors and bought two cups of black coffee, remembering that the brew served in the hallway outside the meeting room was too weak to start me up for the day.

One by one, black Crown Vics with red flashers mounted on each dashboard pulled into the tightly secured parking garage beneath Police Headquarters, marking the arrival of bosses from all the commands in Manhattan North, the upper half of the island. I continued past that underground entrance and jogged up the two tiers of granite steps, walking around in front of the building to display my identification to the cop at the door and run my shoulder bag through the metal detector.

“Eighth floor,” the guard said. “Elevator’s behind the wall to the back.”

I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now and then — under this administration’s budget-driven oversight — I walked over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.

Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several times a month, at seven o’clock in the morning, bosses from one of the city’s geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza, to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public Information deputy.

When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.

Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. “Hey, Coop! Meet Lenny McNab. Just been transferred over to clean up the Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I doubt he’ll be able to sit down for a week.”

McNab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in McNab’s territory. If he couldn’t account for progress in the investigation by this morning, he’d be made to look like a fool by the three grand inquisitors.

Lunetta’s voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. “Let’s get it going, guys. We’ve got a lot to cover this morning.” His entourage brushed past us and we dutifully followed.

Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths — to hold the crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more benign occasions — while the other wall was decorated with police shields and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies. Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear, around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that had attracted media attention.