Death Angel

NINE

At six A.M., standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, I texted Sergeant Chirico, asking where to meet him. It was an overcast morning but expected to clear. Already, hundreds of the people who would use the Park this day were pouring into it on foot, bikes, blades, and pedicabs before the seven A.M. auto traffic would be allowed.

“I’ll wait for you in the parking lot behind the boathouse,” he replied. “Know it?”

“Yes.” It was three blocks north of where I would enter, just off the east drive.

As I walked toward it, wearing slacks and a blazer in an attempt to look casual but professional, I passed more cops than I ever remembered seeing in one place at any time. My keys and ID were in my pants pocket, and I carried only a pen and a thick notebook.

All along the roadway that was still barred to vehicular traffic, cops were trying to stop every jogger, biker, and dog walker-having started before sunrise almost two hours ago-to ask whether they had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary on any of the mornings the week earlier.

Many people seemed eager to stop and answer questions, some expressed annoyance but complied, and a few didn’t slow down for a moment, just waving off the cops who tried to approach them.

“Good morning, Sarge. Thanks for letting me be here.”

“No problem, Alex. I know you’ve done it before.”

“Is Mike-?”

Chirico cut me off. “He’s out on the Point. I don’t think you’re likely to see him.”

“The Point?”

“It’s that long piece of land at the southern tip of the Ramble that juts into the Lake. It sits directly opposite Bethesda Terrace-straight in front of the angel-and due east of Bow Bridge. The Point is wooded and remote. There won’t be many people around, but Mike’s got a secluded spot where he can take in all the action around the Lake, in case our killer is the kind of guy who wants to watch our operation.”

“So is there a rush to judgment here, Sarge? Punishing Mike before you know what happened?”

Chirico shook his head at me. “You know me better than that. I’m trying to cover his back. He’s out there with the squirrels and the chipmunks and the red-throated warblers till I can talk this Pell woman down off the ledge.”

“So Lieutenant Peterson doesn’t have a clue?”

“Sure he does. He just doesn’t want to give Pell the satisfaction of thinking it rises to the level of needing his attention,” the sergeant said. “You’ve got to ease up, Alex. Otherwise people will start to think she’s got real ammunition. Let’s get going.”

“Just so you know, she called my apartment last evening. Hung up when she didn’t get me at home.”

“I’ll make a note. But you ought to tell the DA.”

My heart sunk. “I’m sort of hoping he doesn’t have to find out.”

“Where’s your backbone, Alex? This broad’s on a mission. And your common sense? If she hasn’t told Battaglia yet, I’d be mighty surprised. He’s got more sources than the pope,” Chirico said. “Let’s get my team in place.”

The sergeant called out to the sixteen young cops-three women and thirteen men-who were gathered in small groups in the parking lot, waiting for orders. “Listen up!”

The clusters came together around Chirico, who introduced them to me and to Tom O’Day, the park ranger who was going to accompany us to our canvass site.

“We’ve got our assignment, guys,” the sergeant said. “We’re going up in the Ramble this morning, and our goal is to stop everyone who will talk to us, to see if they saw or heard anything unusual last week.”

He passed around a small paper with a headshot of the dead girl, after she’d been autopsied and cleaned up at the morgue. “Show them this face. She might have been homeless, and a lot of homeless men and women hang out in the Park, so it gives us another chance at getting her ID’d.”

“What’s the Ramble, Sarge? I work on Staten Island,” one of the cops said. “I’ve never set foot in this Park.”

Manny Chirico turned to O’Day to field questions. He pointed over his shoulder to the winding wooded path that led uphill behind the boathouse.

“This is actually the most complex area of Central Park, in terms of its topography,” O’Day said. “It was all pretty much a swamp when the Park was laid out. But the designers wanted New Yorkers to feel like they could escape from the city, so they brought in mountains of soil and boulders to create this woodland walk.”

“This is man-made?”

“Entirely, except for some glacial bedrock that was laid down twenty thousand years ago,” O’Day said. “We’re going to climb up this web of pathways-there are all kinds of steep angles and sharp turns-”

“I’m a straight-line kind of guy myself,” the cop said, growing an audience of comrades for his wisecracks.

“Then you’ve pulled the wrong assignment. There’s only one straight line in this entire Park, Officer. It’s the Promenade on the Mall, taking you from Bethesda Terrace back toward 59th Street. Just that one. I’m about to lead you into thirty-eight acres that look like you might as well be in the Adirondacks. If you’ve never been here before, you won’t believe you’re in the city.”

“A guy like me could get lost,” another cop said.

“Good point,” O’Day said. “See the streetlights? Every one of these lampposts has a location marking on it-four numbers that tell you exactly where you are.”

He stopped at the foot of the path and pointed to the small plaque affixed to the post. “See that? 7500. The next one up there will be 7502. The first two numbers tell you what street is our parallel outside the Park-that would be 75th Street-and then they go in order, even numbers only when you’re east of the center of the Park, from double-0 to 02. Above 100th Street, they’re tagged with the last two digits, so the first post at 101st Street becomes 01-00.”

“Where’s 7501?” the same guy asked.

“Just off 75th Street on the west side. The numbers over there are odd, like everything else about the west side.”

We started to walk, two at a time, up the incline, which began as an asphalt path but soon became gravel and dirt. Within minutes, the sights and sounds of urban New York were far below us, as we were shaded by overgrown trees and serenaded by what sounded like varieties of songbirds.

Tom O’Day stopped all of us at the first fork in the trail. “Some of you are going to head that way, up to the Gill.”

“What’s the Gill?” a female officer asked.

“It’s a stream. Runs out of Azalea Pond up above us, by 77th Street. It twists and turns with a few cascades, then takes a pretty steep drop down a gorge into the Lake.”

“Even the stream is artificial?”

“Yes, ma’am. Same pumped-in-from-upstate water that runs out of your tap. But you’d never know it.”

“So the body that was found in the Lake could have been thrown in the water up here and floated down?”

“Not a prayer,” the sergeant said. “There would have been quite an accumulation of postmortem skin tears and discolorations. Wait till you see this stream-and the boulders in it. Tom, why don’t you tell them who’s likely to be around?”

“Sure. At this hour of the day we get your more adventurous runners. Guys on the clock prefer the roadway or Reservoir trail, not just because of how steep it gets here but because the ground is so rough, with tree roots and rocks in the way. They rarely stop for anyone. Your dog walkers are the friendliest by far.

“There are plenty of tree-huggers here. See this-this mini forest? All of it brought in more than a hundred years ago, to look subtropical and exotic. You got tupelos and American sycamores, cucumber magnolias and sassafras. The place is dominated by black cherry and black locust ’cause they self-seed so aggressively.”

“But they don’t talk,” the Staten Island cop said. “So what do I give a shit about the trees?”

“Because the people who study the trees, kid, are extremely observant,” Chirico said. “They can tell you the difference between the leaves on a Kentucky coffee tree and on a scarlet oak. I listened to them all weekend. They’ll be able to tell me if you were on this path last Wednesday, and whether or not your nose was running like it is now.”

The cop wiped his nose with his handkerchief and stepped back.

“And then there are the birders,” O’Day said. “Another super-friendly bunch. And also great eyes for detail. There are more than 275 species of birds that drop into the Ramble and forty that stay here-we’re part of the Atlantic Flyway.”

“What’s that? The Flyway?” It was the female officer again.

“The migration route that birds follow from Canada down to Mexico. They like a line that doesn’t have high mountains in the way, and plenty of food to eat. They love it here.”

“Birders are also keen observers,” Manny Chirico said. “Keep in mind that many of them have binoculars and cameras with them to take pictures of rare birds-to prove that they saw them and that kind of thing-so be sure to ask about that. And lots of them do sketches, so check if they have a pad with any relevant drawings.”

“The Ramble had a certain reputation once,” a serious young cop said. “Is that still an issue?”

“You mean the gay thing?” the sergeant asked.

“Yeah. Like in the ’60s and ’70s. Wasn’t there a lot of gay bashing up here?”

Tom O’Day answered. “Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the seclusion of this part of the Park made it especially popular for gay men to cruise. And then, you’re right. It was the perfect place to beat and rob them. Very few gays were open then, so many of the crimes never got reported.”

“But now it looks like just a remote nature reserve,” I said.

The ranger smiled at me. “It’s still a haven for gay sex. Maybe it’s the retro feel of sneaking off into the woods instead of hanging out in a bar. Anyway, by the time you each set up a post, you’ll be overrun by my Ramblers.”

“Okay,” the sergeant said. “Start in pairs and see how it goes. Try not to let anyone give you the brush-off. Everything’s in the details, so have your memo books ready and take it all down. And guys? Canvassing is tedious work. Maybe the most tedious. So expect a lot of rejection before you make any headway.”

Within seconds, at the fork in the path by the antique luminaire, or lamppost, numbered 7528, all sixteen of the cops had vanished from sight. The overgrown foliage and the curving pathways provided perfect camouflage. We were in a wilderness aerie, climbing and climbing away from the city streets but able to see the tips of skyscrapers that ringed the entire Park.

Manny Chirico was wearing a brown linen jacket, chinos, and a polarized pair of Ray-Bans. He looked more like a GQ cover model than a homicide sergeant. “Stick with me, Alex.”

“Okay, but what are we going to do?”

“Walk every square inch of this park within a park-I’d get them to turn over every boulder if I could.”

“I thought the groundskeepers here were meticulous.”

“They are,” Chirico said. “The rules are zero tolerance for garbage and graffiti. But we’re talking about physical evidence.”

“You like the Ramble for finding the perp, or for thinking the crime scene is here?”

Manny’s expression suggested he was as frustrated as one might imagine. “Like it? We’ve got four sergeants, Alex, and each one is assigned an area adjacent to the Lake to supervise and hope to find a weapon or a piece of clothing or a real clue. Me? I pulled the short straw of the northern border. You think I wouldn’t rather be talking to half-naked sunbathers on Bethesda Terrace than crawling through the Ramble? Everybody else has wide-open spaces with some trees and bushes around them. Me? I got such a tangle of rocks and streams and tree stumps that I’ll be lucky if I don’t find three more bodies under the dead leaves.”

“Well, you put on a good show for the kid cops,” I said.

“Let’s start at Azalea Pond.”

We wound around more pathways, over short rustic bridges that spanned the gorge, until we came upon an opening just after lamppost 7736. There was a large pond surrounded by bright fuchsia azaleas in bloom, with several benches-empty at the moment-and vines and creepers everywhere underfoot around the water’s edge.

Chirico was taking detailed notes, and both of us were snapping photos with our cell phones.

“Ever been up here before?” he asked.

“Not this far. It’s spectacular.”

“Glad to see it through your eyes. To me, there’s a perp behind every bush.”

Chirico’s walkie-talkie crackled, and he held it up to talk. It was still more reliable than a cell in some of the Park’s more remote locations. “Go ahead.”

“Sarge? I’m Jerry McCallion. Staten Island, remember? Read me?”

“Yeah.”

“Got a man who thinks the deceased looks like someone he knows.”

“Keep him there,” the sergeant said. “Where are you?”

“7616.”

“Give me five.”

I tried to keep up with Chirico as we wound our way down the path. Several of the teams had engaged a variety of morning walkers, showing the copy of the dead girl’s photo and asking for help. Most of the cops shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads as we passed by, suggesting they had come up empty so far, despite cooperative citizens.

Manny Chirico introduced both of us to the man who was waiting beside the cop. “I want to thank you for talking with us, sir. Do you think you can help?”

The man was holding a cocker spaniel on a leash. “I was out of town all last week, so I can’t be useful in that regard. But this girl does look sort of familiar to me.”

“Someone you know?” I asked.

“She might have gone to school with my daughter.”

“What school is that?”

“Brearley.” The man was referring to one of the most prestigious private schools in Manhattan. Something in the girl’s life had taken a dramatically bad turn if this man wasn’t mistaken.

“May we talk to your daughter?”

“Sure. But she’s in Hong Kong for the summer, on an internship.”

“Is there a Brearley yearbook at your home? We’re pretty anxious to identify this young woman.”

We took all the man’s information and told him there would be a uniformed cop at his door within the hour to follow up.

He started to walk away and then turned back to us. “Did either of you see The Wall Street Journal on Friday?”

We both shook our heads.

“Google just acquired a company called PittPatt. It’s out of a project at Carnegie Mellon. Recognition software called Pittsburgh Pattern that was developed from an army grant after 9/11. Supposedly one could take a photograph of a crowd, highlight a single face within it, and compare that face automatically to images on Facebook and social media sites.”

Chirico was writing as fast as he could manage. The well-dressed dog walker had just gone from promising information about his daughter’s once-schoolmate-even though our corpse didn’t look much like a Brearley girl-to giving us an entirely new state-of-the-art way to identify an unknown victim. He handed Manny his card and walked off.

The next hour and a half continued to be frustrating. There was a woman who had seen a commotion-a couple fighting-and placed them near the beloved statue of Balto, the Alaskan husky who helped save the people of Nome during a diphtheria epidemic in 1925. She babbled for twenty minutes before recalling that the argument she witnessed had been on Saturday and not earlier in the week.

An elderly man with a canteen slung over his shoulder had stopped midpath to remove from harm’s way three young red-eared sliders-a turtle species that lived in the Ramble-and carry them deeper into the woods. He remarked to two cops that he had heard screams on his morning walk almost exactly one week ago. He engaged them for more than ten minutes before they realized he was also obsessed with a meteor headed for earth and the shrieking noises that it emitted.

By nine A.M., everyone with purpose-people with day jobs-had finished their Park jaunts, and now there were the more casual visitors.

Manny and I were poking among leaves along the banks of the gorge when his radio crackled again.

“Sarge? I’m Officer Resnick, from your detail.” I could hear a woman’s voice. “I got a birder with something interesting.”

“Where are you? Can you make me?”

“Yup. I’m at 7322.”

“73? That’s way south of us. You must be almost at the Point.”

I picked up my head. That’s where Mike had started his morning.

“Just about the tip of it. I got a great shot of the Lake from where we are.”

“Will your witness stay?”

“She says yes. We’re waiting for her sister, who took a picture with her camera. There’s a detective here who’s giving me a hand.”

Manny Chirico turned off the radio and wagged a finger at me. “We’d better hustle. But promise me, Alex, you’ll stay out of Mike’s way. Let’s not add to the problem.”

“Well, apparently I am the problem. I don’t intend to stir it up, you can be sure.”

Although we were only the equivalent distance of three city blocks from where the message had originated, the complex series of twisted trails and narrow bridges made it almost a fifteen-minute walk.

Mike’s back was to us as we approached. The young police officer lifted her arm when she spotted us coming, and beside her was a gray-haired woman dressed in sensible clothes with low hiking boots, whom I guessed to be about seventy-five years old.

“Hey, Mike,” I said, following in single file behind Manny Chirico.

“Coop. Sarge.” He acknowledged both of us but didn’t make eye contact. “Meet Helen Austin.”

“How d’you do?” Austin said, stretching her arm out to shake hands with us. There was an old-fashioned manner to her speech, as well as her dress.

“Ms. Austin studies birds here. She was just showing us a great horned owl until your gentle tread scared him off.”

“What is it, Mike?” The sergeant’s annoyance was palpable.

“Helen?” Mike said to her. “Would you tell my boss what you saw?”

She held her head high but shook it from side to side. “I’d prefer you repeat it.”

“Ms. Austin was out here last Wednesday morning. She hikes here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She leaves her house on West 76th Street at nine, and her sister meets her right at the tip of the Point at 10:15.”

“Like clockwork,” Helen Austin said. “You can set your watch by us.”

“Last Wednesday, the sisters had just joined up when a man came toward them from between this stand of trees. Am I right so far?”

“Indeed.”

“He startled them.”

“That was clearly his plan, Sergeant,” the woman said. “To startle us.”

“He stood in front of them on the path and exposed himself, and-”

“He didn’t expose himself, Detective,” Helen Austin said. “He was already exposed. Fully dressed, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and dirty blue jeans. With his privates already hanging out for all the world to see. And then he began pleasuring himself just inches away from us.”

“Pleasuring…?” the sergeant asked.

“Masturbating, Sergeant. Hoping to shock the two of us, I’m sure.”

“Were you able to do anything?” I said.

“Of course, young lady. My sister needs a walking stick. She’s older than I,” Helen Austin said-pausing for effect, I thought. “She lifted the stick and smacked the fellow right between his legs. Not bad for a couple of old spinsters, don’t you think?”

“You know what they say about a bird in the hand,” Mike replied. Helen Austin was as taken with his warm grin and sparkling eyes as the rest of us usually were.

“Well, it wasn’t in his hand very much longer, I can tell you that.”

“Can you describe him?” the sergeant asked.

“Better than that. My sister snapped a photograph,” Austin said. “She’ll be here any minute.”

Not every pervert went on to become a homicidal maniac, but the canvass had already yielded a potential offender in the Ramble.

“Might as well tell them,” Mike said to her.

“He was an African American gentleman-well, ‘fellow’ is more correct than ‘gentleman.’ In his midthirties, I’d say. Light skinned. Close-cropped hair, a mustache, about six feet tall.”

“Would you be able to recognize him, do you think?” I asked.

“Take it easy, Coop. She just told you they’ve got a photograph,” Mike said. “You interrupted the most important thing. Helen?”

“Not that I wanted to be looking at his private parts, but there was a tattoo on his right hand, with which he was holding his penis. That’s the most disturbing part of this. I’ve seen plenty of impolite young men before. But there were two words tattooed, just below his knuckles.”

Helen Austin drew a line across her own hand, suggesting the position of the inked letters. “The words printed were KILL COPS.”

Manny Chirico and I exchanged glances. The harmless masturbator who liked to shock unsuspecting birders might have much deeper felony roots.

“Jailhouse art,” the sergeant said. “That tattoo information and a photo will be a huge help to us, Ms. Austin.”

She was peering over our shoulders, and I turned my head to see whom or what she had spotted. It must have been her sister who was approaching.

“Come quickly,” she called out. “These police people are asking questions about our interloper last week. I told them you managed two photographs of him.”

The sister took her time on the rocky path and approached us with an enthusiastic greeting. She asked me to hold her stick while she removed her camera from her cross-body bag and handed it to Manny Chirico.

“They should be the last two images, sir. I haven’t touched them. We tried to tell one of the rangers about the incident on our way out of the Park, but he wasn’t much interested.”

And that of course was Wednesday, two days before the body was found in the Lake.

The sergeant opened the viewfinder and was trying to bring the images up. “I’m sorry, Ms. Austin, but there’s no photograph of the man’s face, is there? I can’t find it.”

“I’m not sure I got much of his face,” she said. “I was so rattled I was lucky to get the bottom of his chin, down to his knees.”

Chirico rolled his eyes and passed the camera to Mike.

“Be patient, Sarge,” Mike said, laughing at Manny’s short fuse. “Let me zoom in and see what’s here.”

I stood closer to Mike and watched as the image enlarged. But Helen’s sister must have been moving when she hit the button to take the photo because it was too fuzzy to see clearly.

Mike’s smile vanished when he brought the second shot into view and framed it on the camera’s small screen. “You were close about the tattoo, Helen. Just a few letters off, but they make a hell of a lot of difference.”

“What is it?” Chirico asked.

Mike passed the camera over my head. “What the jailhouse tat says, Sarge, is KILL COOP.”