Death Angel

SIXTEEN

“Get me out of here for a while,” I said to Mercer after Mike left for the lab. “Anywhere.”

“I’ll drop you at home. Nan Rothschild, the head of the Seneca Village anthropology team, wasn’t in yesterday. I’m going back to talk to her about the black angel.”

“Home actually sounds good.”

“I had you out awfully late, and you’ve got to meet all those bigwigs at the Conservancy tonight. Get a nap,” Mercer said. “And a hairdo.”

“Do I look as bad as all that?”

“You look tired, Alex. And anxious.”

“I’m both.”

I told Laura to make excuses for me and walked out with Mercer. He drove me home, letting me off in front of my hair salon. I took his advice and tried to relax while my head was massaged and my shoulder-length hair was swept up into a fancy knot that would complement the style of the outfit I was going to wear.

I napped for an hour, awakened by Mercer’s call.

“Feeling better?” he asked.

“Almost human, thanks to your suggestion. Did you meet with Rothschild?” The world-renowned urban archaeologist had helped the police before with a site near City Hall that dated back to the period of the Revolution.

“Yes. And she’s as fascinated with that little figure as you are.”

“Has she ever seen it? Or one like it?”

“She’s never seen this one, but there are a few carved antique angels that have been excavated from the site around the churches. And her team will compare ours, trying to date it and see if it’s made of similar materials.”

“Any reason to find an artifact like that near Bow Bridge?”

“She’s as baffled as we are.”

“The site she excavated, at Seneca Village, could anyone else have had access to it besides her team?” I asked.

“That’s one of her concerns. The holes that were made were very carefully figured by ground radar, and there were multiple entrances, well guarded at the time. But there are always scavengers around a dig site, and Rothschild can’t swear someone didn’t get in. Unless it’s a completely random object, which is why she’s interested in having an expert study it.”

“And that will take-?”

“Longer than you’re likely to want to know. But she gave me another lead.”

“What’s that?” I asked, looking at my watch. Mike was going to pick me up at 5:45, and I still needed to dress.

“So Vickee gave you her family history of All Angels’ Church, right?”

“She did. One of three in Seneca Village.”

“I had no idea-and I bet Vickee doesn’t either-that All Angels’ was founded by another church. By a church that’s still standing on West 99th Street and Amsterdam today.”

“What do you mean?”

Mercer went on to explain. “There’s an Episcopal church called St. Michael’s that was built on the Upper West Side in 1807-one of the very few of Manhattan’s houses of worship that’s been located on the same site for more than two centuries.”

“I’ve never heard of it,” I said, thinking back to a bizarre series of murders we’d investigated at old religious institutions. “But it’s been there even longer than St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral.”

“Exactly. I’m standing inside the place right now, looking at a whole bunch of antique Tiffany stained glass windows.”

“What was a fancy church doing way uptown when that part of New York wasn’t even populated then?”

“The deacon’s filling me in. He says in the old days these parishioners were all rich members of Trinity,” Mercer said, referring to the historic Episcopal church-one of the first in the city-that opened in 1698 on lower Broadway, a world away from St. Michael’s by the primitive street conditions and means of travel of that period. “When those folk started building summer homes along the Hudson River, this church was created to be like an annex to Trinity.”

“And then?”

“St. Michael’s is known for its social ministries. So the deacon tells me that when an African American community was growing in Seneca Village in the 1820s, it’s this very church-still standing-that helped to create All Angels’ Church. This is like the mother church to the one in Central Park. So when two hundred fifty people were thrown out of their homes so the Park could be built, a few of them came back to St. Michael’s.”

I was growing excited by the possibility that there might be a living link, a way to connect the artifacts found in the Park.

“Is there someone who can look at our statue? Our black angel?”

“There is, although the deacon hasn’t ever seen anything like it here. But I’m sticking it out till all of his flock finds a way back to the soup kitchen for dinner tonight.”

“Why?” I asked. “What’s that going to do for us?”

“Seems they do a lot of ministering to homeless youth at St. Michael’s. The deacon thinks the dead girl looks familiar to him. Wants me to talk to some of the young people who might have crossed paths with her. Maybe we can get an ID out of this.”