Death Angel

NINETEEN

Shortly after dawn crept over the horizon, Mike somehow steered me over the brick wall and onto the narrow rungs of the ladder, cautioning me not to look down as I stepped one foot below the other. He dropped me off at home at 5:45. The doormen were used to the odd hours of my comings and goings, but I looked terribly bedraggled in my well-worn evening outfit of twelve hours earlier.

I showered and ate breakfast, passing up the temptation to nap in order to get to the office early. It was 7:30 when I got off the elevator and went to unlock my door. I was startled to hear Mercer’s voice call out to me from the far end of the hallway.

“C’mon down to the conference room after you open up,” he said.

“Anything wrong?”

“I got a girl here. I’m hoping she can make an ID.”

I threw down my handbag and tote and hurried down to the conference room, which had become the default headquarters of the Park investigation.

Mercer intercepted me outside the closed door. “You all right, Alex? You look like you haven’t had any sleep.”

“I haven’t. I spent the night with Mike. The whole night.”

“You what now, girl?”

“I don’t mean that way, Mercer. And I am getting such mixed signals about what everyone-including you and Vickee-think I ought to do with my love life. Forget it. We went to the Conservancy dinner, and we found out about the silver miniatures and about their connection to a kidnapped baby who’s never been recovered-dead or alive. I was busy, and it looks like you were, too.”

“Sure enough, St. Michael’s Church is a mainstay for the homeless. It’s on the list that the team is working off-shelters and such-distributing pictures and stopping in for questioning. They just hadn’t reached here yet.”

“So who’ve you got?”

“Calls herself Jo ’cause it could be a guy or girl’s name-she tells me-and she’s gay. Claims she’s nineteen, but I’d guess younger. She’s afraid we’re going to turn on her and send her back home. Jo’s a runaway from somewhere down south. The accent sort of gives up that much.”

“Does she know Angel?” I asked.

“I’m not sure whether or not she’s bluffing. Came into the church soup kitchen for her meal last night, and one of the deacons asked her-like everyone else coming through-to talk to me. She looked at the photos and the sketch and thinks she’s spent time on the streets with Angel. The church took her in for the night, and I had Uniform do a fixer out in front in case she tried to leave. But there she was waiting for me this morning, maybe looking for some meal money and a witness fee. She’s a gamer, Alex. I don’t want her to work us over.”

“Understood,” I said. “Take me in.”

Jo was sitting at an empty space at the conference table. She was eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich that Mercer had bought her, washing it down with a bottle of juice, a large cup of coffee, and soda cans for later on.

I introduced myself and although she glanced up at me, Jo kept on eating. She had an androgynous look, small and very thin, with short-cropped hair clipped in a boyish style and bright dark eyes that darted back and forth between Mercer and me as we talked.

Jo had run away from a family that didn’t accept her sexual identity, and a town in Alabama in which hostility against LGBT youth was a point of pride for many citizens. She had taken money out of her mother’s wallet for the bus fare to New York and left home while both her parents were at work one March morning. She had chosen Manhattan, as thousands of runaways do every year, because of its reputation for open-minded acceptance and a large network of gay youth. There was also a plethora of information available online about underground life and survival techniques for people who come to the big city with no place to stay.

I pushed one of the morgue photos-a picture of Angel after she’d been autopsied and cleaned up-across the table to Jo. “Did you know this girl?”

“Yes, ma’am. At least I think I did.”

I went right to the facts we needed. “Do you know her name?”

I shouldn’t have been disappointed when Jo said she did not. “It was just a hi-and-bye kind of thing. We weren’t friends or anything like that.”

“Do you remember where you saw her the first time?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. I do, because it was the night I got to New York. I had no place to sleep, so a girl I met at the Port Authority told me about Uncle Ace’s house. She taught me how to jump the turnstile and all that.”

Estimates were that about four thousand young people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five are homeless on the streets of New York every night. The city has, at best, two hundred fifty shelter beds to offer them. “Uncle Ace” is the name for the A, C, and E subway lines-the longest ride in the city-stretching from the northern tip of Inwood to the farthest end of Far Rockaway. It frequently served as a refuge for kids who wanted to get off the mean streets of the city.

Mercer told Jo we’d been calling the dead girl Angel. He asked how they had met on the train that night.

“You know the way it is.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“I was the new girl. There were four others who were riding with my friend, and one of them was Angel, or whatever you want to call her. When you’ve got no roof over your head, you’ve got to sleep for as long as you can whenever you can. And somebody in the group has to stay awake, making sure no cops come along to bother us. Or no perverts either.”

“So you spent the night together?”

Jo scowled at me. “Not how you think. She wasn’t a lesbian. Your girl was straight.”

Most of the counselors we worked with told us that 40 percent of the country’s homeless youth are LGBT, unable or unwilling to stay at home or in foster care, free to take risks and experiment by moving out into the world, even without a roof over their heads.

“Did you have a chance to talk to Angel?” I asked.

“Lots of chances. She was nice to me. She was a good person. Taught me lots of ways to take care of myself.”

But in the end Angel was unable to keep herself safe.

“Did she ever tell you where she was from?” Mercer asked. “Why she left home?”

“I didn’t care where she was from. Most of us don’t like to talk about that because we don’t ever want to go there again, and you never know when someone is going to snitch on you.”

Jo sat back and gulped some of her coffee. “She didn’t have much of a home. Her mother died when she was ten, and that’s when her father started abusing her. Sexually abusing her.”

Sexual and physical abuse were the next most common reasons for teens to leave their families. Mercer and I saw these kids more regularly than we would have liked.

“You must have spent a lot of time together for Angel to tell you something like that,” I said.

“Not really. No reason not to be open about that stuff. We all need each other to survive is how I look at it. It was two nights on the train, that group of us.”

“Where did you go during the day?”

Jo put down her container of coffee and stared straight ahead. “Not saying.”

“It’s nothing Mercer and I haven’t heard before. I can promise you we’re not looking to get you in trouble.”

There were few decent ways for the homeless population to provide for themselves. The older guys had the can-recycling business pretty well locked up, scouring garbage pails on the street for empties to return to stores. Begging worked for men with no legs and women who panhandled with babies in their arms. Healthy teens were more likely to shoplift than to recycle or to beg.

“I tried to get work,” Jo said. “I left home with a résumé that I kept in a folder with my backpack. I would have waitressed or worked in a grocery store or a Walmart. But it’s hard to find a job when the economy sucks.”

And harder when you don’t have a place to shower or clean clothes to wear to work.

“What else did Angel help you with?” I asked, hoping for more connections to get us into her world.

Jo took a minute to answer, perhaps wondering whether to give up the information. “She’s the one who took me to the museum.”

“What museum?”

“Natural History. The one with the dinosaurs and all the dead animals behind glass.”

Another link to Central Park. The great American Museum of Natural History was merely five blocks north of the Dakota, facing the Park.

“What did you see at the museum?”

Jo looked at me as though I was clueless. “We didn’t go there to see anything. We went there to sleep.”

“To sleep? But where?”

I thought of the huge hallways in the museum, filled during weekdays with schoolkids on field trips and on weekends with families and tourists enjoying the treasures housed there.

“After two nights on the train, I spent a week on the streets. I couldn’t hardly sleep ’cause it’s pretty dangerous to do that. Angel? I ran into her again in Port Authority, and she took me to the museum. The bathrooms there are gigantic, but the stalls are really narrow. So once you lock the door of the stall, you can lean your head against the side of it and sleep till the end of the day when the janitor comes in to mop. Everybody on the street knows about the history museum.”

Desperation, like necessity, was the mother of invention.

“Didn’t you ever try to get into a shelter?” I asked.

“Not at first. I knew there weren’t a lot of beds available, and I was mostly afraid they’d try to send me back home, all those social workers and stuff.”

“Covenant House? Did you ever go there?”

“No, ma’am,” Jo said. “Y’all got any cigarettes?”

“We’ll get you some as soon as we’re done,” I said. “Why not?”

Again the look that caught her frustration with me. Covenant House had been in business rescuing teens for forty years and had 70 percent of the beds for them in the city.

“It’s run by the church, Ms. Cooper. The Catholic Church. I’m not real comfortable with that, any more than they are with me.”

“Did Angel ever talk about Covenant House?”

Jo thought about it and answered in the negative. I knew the detectives had started their search to identify Angel at the revered institution that had long ago weathered its own sex abuse scandal, but was hoping that Jo could make a link to a different point in time, several months back, when she first met the dead girl.

“Did she ever mention any other shelter?” Mercer asked.

“She took me to a church once. I think it was way downtown. But there were no beds. And it might have been Angel who told me about Streetwork.”

“You know Streetwork?” I said. “Was she ever there?”

It was a brilliant program run by Safe Horizon, the country’s largest and best victim advocacy organization. The nonprofit had done groundbreaking work with survivors of domestic violence and established cutting-edge centers for child advocacy. The DA’s office worked closely with the well-trained staff, and Streetwork was their latest initiative to reach out to the city’s disenfranchised and homeless youth-making contact with twenty thousand of them a year.

“I don’t know the answer to that, ma’am,” Jo said. “I wasn’t ever there when she was.”

“Did you use any of their facilities?”

“Yes, I did. I went for meals sometimes, and to take a shower. And once when I got all depressed and tried to cut myself, it was that girl-that Angel-who told me to go to Streetwork for, like, psych services.”

I could see Mercer scribbling a note to double-check with the team to see whether they had checked out both of the shelter locations Safe Horizon operated, as well as the drop-in centers for counseling.

“Did you ever have a phone or a laptop since you left home?” I asked. “Do you have either one of those now?”

“I sure don’t, ma’am.” Jo smiled for the first time. “Besides, I wouldn’t have anyplace to plug them in, would I?”

Walk into any of the Apple stores in New York and look for the section of the store with the older devices, not the trendiest new stuff. Any hour of the day or night there was bound to be a gaggle of homeless kids-obvious by the condition of their clothing and the beat-up backpacks-just hanging out to charge their cell phones and get back on the street.

“So how many times would you say you saw Angel between March and now?” I asked. “How did you keep in touch with her?”

Jo reached for a package of strawberry Twizzlers from the bag of snacks that Mercer had bought for her and ripped it open. I didn’t think of them as breakfast food, but she was still hungry. “I didn’t say I kept in touch with her. If I ran into her-which I did maybe ten times in all-she’d be kind to me, like I said.”

“Apart from the train, Jo, where did you see her?”

“The Park. Me and my girlfriend spent a couple of nights with her in Central Park.”

I tried not to show my excitement.

“Do you know that Angel-that this girl in the photograph-was killed there?”

“No, ma’am. There’s a story going ’round that someone drowned in the Park, in one of the lakes, but I didn’t know it was her.”

“We don’t have a real name for her, as you know, and we don’t know how to find her family.”

“That would be a waste of time anyway,” Jo said. “Her dad is all there was, and frankly I don’t think he’d care.”

“There must have been someone in her life-a teacher, a friend back home, the people she hung out with here.”

“She didn’t really hang out that much. She didn’t really trust most people she met.”

“Sounds like she trusted you,” Mercer said.

“My girlfriend says Angel-whatever you’re calling her-got along best with people who were wounded, just like she was.”

“Wounded?” I asked.

“Not like bloody and all,” Jo said. “Folks who’d been hurt hard along the way, sort of like I had. People who had handicaps-physical ones and mental, too. She had a kindness for them, likely grew out of her own pain.”

“Is she the one who took you to the Park?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody needs to take a homeless person to Central Park. Everybody knows how to work it there.”

“Work it?”

“If you’ve got nowhere else to sleep, you go to a park. Small ones, big ones. There’s parks everywhere, in any city. Me? I like Central Park best. So many places to be where nobody bothers you.”

“Don’t the police-?” I started to ask.

Jo blew me off. “Old guys, they sleep on benches out in the open, but most of the kids I hang with go deep in the woods. Hard to find us, and cops never give us a hard time.”

“Isn’t it dangerous?”

“So was being at home for me, and for-well, Angel. This is much easier,” Jo said, reaching out to pat the filthy blue bag beside her. “Me and my girl, we have a favorite tree we like to sleep under. And I got everything I need in my backpack. Did you find her-Angel’s-pack?”

“No,” I said. “Something special in it you can tell us about?”

“No, ma’am. Just we all keep everything we own in these. At night, it’s my pillow. Nobody could get to it without waking me up.”

“Can you describe her backpack?”

“Nope. I had no reason to notice. She just had one, like we all do.”

“What else did she have?” Mercer asked. “Do you remember anything else, anything about her clothing?”

Jo thought for several seconds. “A dark hoodie, last time I saw her. Cargo pants. Maybe a month ago or so is when I remember being with her, she had two shirts. Real pretty ones with ruffles and such.”

“Where did she get them?” I asked. “Did she have any money? Did she have a job?”

Jo looked out the window and hesitated before answering. “She told me she lifted them.”

“Shoplifted?”

“Yeah. From Macy’s.”

The idea that Angel had stolen things gave me a new source of hope. “Do you know if she was ever arrested?”

“She never said. But I don’t think so. She was good at swiping food from bodegas,” Jo said, remembering something that made her happy. “Last time I saw her she had one of those big jars of peanut butter and must have been five of us that ate dinner and breakfast off her.”

“Where in the Park did Angel stay, Jo?” I asked. “Where is your favorite place, and where was hers?”

She looked back and forth between Mercer and me. “I’m not telling you where I go. I don’t want any trouble.”

“You won’t get in any trouble,” I said. “I promise you. We want to find the man who killed Angel. We want to give her a decent burial. This isn’t about you, Jo.”

“Did she have a spot?” Mercer asked.

“Yes, sir. She was staying in a place they call the Ravine. You know where that is?”

“I do,” I said. “Up near 110th Street.”

“I’d never seen anything like it. Me and my girlfriend couldn’t believe we were in New York City. Angel said the woods were so thick there and it was so far off the road, down this big hill, that nobody would bother us. So we slept there, I think it was two nights.”

“Was Angel with anyone else?”

“Two other people.”

“Tell us about them,” I said. “Anything you can remember.”

“Guys. They were both guys. One was a tranny,” Jo said. “A white kid, maybe sixteen, from Long Island, who’d been beaten up pretty bad when one of the men he came on to found out.”

A wounded transsexual who sought shelter with Angel sounded just right.

“The other one was African American. Old, like maybe my grandfather’s age. Skin color dark like yours,” she said to Mercer, “with his hair all white. I don’t know where the tranny is now, but the old guy is Vergil. Folks call him Verge. Everybody in Central Park knows him, even the cops.”

“Knows him because he’s done bad things?” Mercer asked.

“Oh, no. ’Cause he’s lived there forever. Verge looks out for people. He knew Angel’s story, about her being abused and all. It’s Verge who made her leave the Ravine. Told her that bad stuff had happened there. He said there was a guy going around at night attacking people.”

Raymond Tanner? Could he have been Verge’s concern? Tanner’s work release had started in April and by mid-May he’d been AWOL. We needed to find Verge as soon as possible.

“When he made her leave the Ravine,” I said, “do you know where Verge took her?”

“Yeah. Yes, I do. We went together. Me and my girlfriend, and her and the tranny.”

“Where to?”

Jo hesitated again. “Verge took us to the Ramble. He said we’d be better off there.”

Again I kept a poker face.

“The Ramble covers a huge part of the Park,” Mercer said. “Can you describe where you were?”

Jo held her hands out to the side. “Verge said it was called Muggers Woods. That’s what I remember ’cause it sounded like a bad place. He said it used to be that way a long time ago, but not so much anymore. And it was perfectly fine.”

“Do you know it?” I asked Mercer.

“As of yesterday I do. It’s far north of the Point, way back off the paths,” he said to me. Then to Jo, “Does Verge have some kind of problem? Is there a reason our girl was with him?”

Jo smiled. “Yeah. Verge is real slow. I had an uncle like him, my mama used to call retarded. But fortunately people don’t use that word now. He’s simple, is what I’d say. Can’t read, and sometimes he talks nonsense.”

“What kind of nonsense?”

“Verge talks like a child, really. Likes to spend his time at the zoo, panhandlin’ for money. Speaks about the animals like they’re his friends. Says his family used to have a house in Central Park. Silly things like that.”

I leaned forward when Jo mentioned a house in the Park. “Does Verge say he lived in that house?”

“Oh, no, ma’am. He talks about it like there were houses there a hundred years ago. I told you it’s nonsense.”

“Not so crazy, Jo,” Mercer said. He didn’t stop to tell her about Seneca Village, but I knew that’s what he was thinking.

“Did you find her notebook?” Jo asked.

“Not yet,” I said. “Tell us about it.”

“Lots of us write in journals. Especially the girls. You know when you sleep outdoors, it’s always good to keep a book by you, ’cause then the cops think that you’re a student. But it really doesn’t have anything to do with that. Like my girlfriend, she makes lists. People she misses and people she doesn’t, stores where she lifted things so she can pay them back someday when she gets a job, which churches serve food and what times of the day.”

“And you? Do you write?”

“Mostly about places I’ve been on the street so I can tell other people about them-what’s good and what’s bad. Angel, she mostly wrote descriptions of folk. What their problems were, what she tried to do to help them. Sometimes she even sketched their faces. She could draw really good.” Jo paused for a few seconds. “She wrote in it every night, the times I was around her. You find that notebook, and you’ll pretty much find her life.”

“Did she let you read any of it?” Mercer asked.

“Not exactly. She showed me her drawings every now and then. Even made one of me with my girlfriend.”

“Was she afraid of anyone, Jo? Did she ever confide in you about that?”

“Just her father is all she told me. She told me nobody could hurt her as bad as he did.”

“How about Verge?” Mercer asked. “Did you ever see him get violent, get angry with anyone?”

I was sure he was thinking, as I was, about someone who knew the remote places of the Park so well and had attached himself to a vulnerable young woman. We needed to find to out who and where he was as quickly as possible. We needed to know whether he had a criminal history.

Jo rolled her eyes at Mercer. “No way Verge ever got angry. I told you he wanted to protect Angel. He’s got this thing he carries with him all the time, this little thing that he told her would make her safe. I guess that didn’t work.”

“What kind of thing?” I asked. “Was it a weapon of some kind?”

“No, ma’am. Nothing like that. I only saw it once, the last time we were with her,” Jo said. “It was some kind of cherub, some little creature that was painted mostly black with gold trim.”

Mercer was already reaching for the folder with the photographs of the ebony statue.

“Did she tell you that Verge gave her the cherub?” I asked.

“She never told me how she got it,” Jo said. “But there can only be two ways, don’t you think? Verge either gave it to her, or she stole it.”