Death Angel

TWO

Mike led Hal, Mercer, the lieutenant, and me along the path to the first pavilion on the north shore of the Lake. The large boathouse itself, where rowboats could be rented by the hour, was to our east. Four covered wooden sheds were scattered about the edges of the water as landing docks for rowers, a throwback to their Victorian origins.

We set ourselves up out of the direct sun, and Mike asked Hal to show me the digital photos he had taken when he first arrived.

“So the initial call to 911 came in at 5:49 this morning,” Mike said. “Two guys out for a run on the pathway approaching Bethesda Terrace from below, to the west. One of them saw what he thought was the head and upper torso of a woman under the bridge, against the foundation, and stopped his friend.”

“What time was sunrise?” Mercer asked.

“5:24. Plenty of light to see across.”

“They touch anything?” I asked.

“Too spooked to get closer.”

“What if she’d been alive and needed help?”

“Decomposition was evident, Coop, even from a distance,” Mike said. “Hal, you got those shots?”

He cupped his hand over the viewer as Mercer and I leaned in.

The girl’s face was mostly intact, but her skin was a ghastly shade of gray. Her head was to the side, one cheek hugging the concrete structure. The only eye we could see was closed and her mouth was agape, with stringy dark-brown hair plastered across her face. The area below her shoulder blade was discolored, and it looked like her bones were protruding through what once had been skin.

“Late teens is Johnny Mayes’s estimate,” Mike said. “No tats, no track marks. No surgical scars. Badly malnourished, lousy dentition, filthy nails all bitten down and cracked. I’m going with homeless.”

“How long has she been dead?” I asked.

“Mayes figures it’s been at least a month, but she was only left in the water for a day or two.”

Mercer studied the photographs of the full body taken after the victim had been pulled from the water. “So, a dump job?”

Killed somewhere else and deposited in the Lake. Dumped here, by the murderer.

“Likely. But who knows where she’s been all this time? That’s a big problem.”

“How’d she die?” I asked.

“Blunt force trauma. Check the photos of the back of her head.”

Hal advanced the shots. Some object had crushed the skull with a couple of blows. Two different angles of injury suggested repeated applications of the weapon.

“Does Johnny know what might have caused this?”

“Lead pipe, maybe. Or a baseball bat. I’m hoping Derek Jeter has an alibi ’cause we’re only two months into the season and he’s hitting four hundred. Whoever did this has a pretty perfect swing.”

“A tree branch?” I said.

“They got redwoods here I don’t know about, Coop? I mean, why do you ask me a question and then take your own guess at an answer?”

“I’d like to stop by the morgue later,” I said. I was fidgety and knew that I was annoying Mike before we’d even gotten out of the blocks. “I had a good chance to see what immersion in water did to a body when I helped with that girl who was murdered in France this spring.”

“Save me, Jesus.” Mike closed his eyes and shook his head. “Give me a break for a change, will you? Whose idea was it to call Coop in on this so early?”

The lieutenant looked at Mike, puzzled by his outburst at me. “What-?”

“I wanted her here,” Mercer said. “It’s going to be her case.”

“We don’t know that this is a sexual assault yet. Coop spent ten minutes with a lady in a lake on one of her holiday jaunts and-”

“It was a pond, not a lake, but go ahead, Mike. I made some observations that the French police found useful, so I thought maybe you would, too.”

“Well, tell them to the medical examiner because he knows how long my vic’s been dead and what killed her. You got any wild guesses on figuring out the ‘who,’ then stick around.”

“Drain the Lake,” I said.

“What?”

“Drain the Lake. That might give you her clothing, some form of ID, possibly the weapon. Maybe even other victims. If this fits together with your cold cases, maybe you get a bit closer to solving the whole thing.”

Ray Peterson angled his head and looked at me.

“It’s been done before. Draining the Lake, I mean.”

“Who’s going to sign off on that one?” Peterson asked.

“Don’t confuse the Lake with the Reservoir. I’m telling you it can be done.”

“You think I don’t know that, Coop?” Mike said. “One of my vics was found when the Central Park Conservancy restored this hole ten years back, when all the DA would let you handle were petty thefts.”

The Reservoir, above 86th Street in the Park, was originally built to hold the city’s entire supply of drinking water, piped in by a complicated system from upstate New York and distributed throughout the boroughs via massive underground tunnels. The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir was now more than one hundred acres of exquisite scenery-no longer used to relieve New Yorkers’ thirst-forty feet deep, holding a billion gallons of water.

The picturesque Lake, on the other hand, was only eighteen acres in area and just a few feet deep-also manmade by the Park’s designers to replace the great untamed swamp that sat on the current site in the nineteenth century.

“Alex is right,” Mercer said. “If the commissioner asks the mayor to do it, it’ll happen.”

Keith Scully had been commissioner for most of the mayor’s tenure in office, and they enjoyed a strong respect for each other.

“I’ve got Scuba on its way here,” Mike said. “Let’s see what they come up with. You’re over the top, Coop.”

“Not if you believe this case is linked to your two old ones. About time you solved them, don’t you think?”

“That wasn’t my point. I was just saying the angel is falling down on her job.”

“Missing persons?” Mercer asked.

“Figueroa’s going down to look through files. We can’t put up a photo or sketch of the girl until the ME cleans her up,” Mike said. “And we’re going to need a detail, Loo, to canvass the area around the Terrace and perimeter of the Lake.”

“Yeah. Every morning for at least a week,” the lieutenant agreed with Mike. “I’ll start them at four A.M. and run it till ten at night. Creatures of habit, these Park people.”

“Say it, Coop. Stop biting your lip and speak up,” Mike said. “You look like you have that burning need to throw another rope out to rescue us.”

“I’m not correcting the lieutenant. But today’s Friday. A business day. You’ll get an entirely different rhythm with any canvass you do over the weekend. Mercer and I had the same experience with our rapist who was targeting bikers up near the Reservoir.”

Mercer nodded in agreement.

“Tomorrow and Sunday you’ll have all the gawkers who hear this story on the news,” I said. “But most of the working people who jog before going to the office have a different weekend schedule. People sleep in, dogs get walked later, businessmen who ran today at six are pushing a stroller at ten on Saturday. Your heavy days, the ones likely to yield value, will start on Monday.”

“I guess I was right about your crystal ball.”

“Who’s going to be on top of the homeless parkies?” Mercer asked.

“I left that mess to Sergeant Chirico,” Peterson said. “Problem with springtime is that they’re all back out on the street. This place is so damn big you can find them anywhere, from the Sheep Meadow to the Blockhouse. Harmless and homeless, or toothless and ruthless. Takes all kinds to survive on the streets of this city.”

“Detective Sherman!” one of the cops at the top of the steps yelled out to Hal. “You want me to send these guys down?”

Hal gave him a thumbs-up. “That’s my Panoscan team, Mike. We’ll do a couple of setups on each side of the Bow Bridge from this bank, and then a few from the foot of the fountain.”

Just a few years in operation, the Panoscan was a vast improvement in crime scene technology. It would take only minutes to assemble a kit with a fish-eye lens to create high-resolution, 360-degree images. Things that may not have seemed obvious to first responders-clues possibly overlooked at a scene-would be available to Mike and Mercer by pointing and clicking on the panoramic image from their desktops.

“Great. Let’s get out of the way, guys,” Mike said, herding the rest of us back across the bridge to the footpath.

I waited until Peterson was a few steps ahead of us. “How come I don’t know anything about your two cold cases, Mike?”

“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid.”

“But you usually come to me with-”

“Bags of bones, Coop. Partial remains. That’s what I’ve got. From back in the day, before you hitched yourself to my star. No way to know who they are or how they died. No way to prove they were sexually assaulted.”

“Throw in that woman from Brazil who was killed in the Ravine in ’95,” Mercer said, referring to a remote area in the northern end of the Park, “and the body in the Harlem Meer. Both cases colder than the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.”

“So what are you two telling me?” I asked, although the picture was coming together for me without any more narrative. “Is this like those unsolved murders of young women out on Long Island, near Gilgo Beach? Some deranged killer sets up shop in the heart of the city’s most populated public space and operates season after season?”

Mike and Mercer exchanged glances over my head.

“We don’t know what it is yet. But we do know that it’s been real stable here for the last couple of years,” Mike said. “So nobody’s going public with the bigger story, do you understand that? Not the district attorney or any of his flacks, or Scully has me walking a foot post in Bed-Stuy.”

Mike stared at me until I nodded.

“Maybe there’s nothing to connect any of these victims with one another. Maybe this poor broken body is a one-off. That’s the approach we’re taking for now.”

“And so it’s your idea just to make believe the Park is a safe place to be?” I asked.

“Safest precinct per square foot of any property in the city,” Mike said. “I think the mayor’s got the last word on what’s a threat to his voters, Coop, and when he decides to tell them about that. There’s a primary in three months and he’s hoping it’s a mandate for another term. You just figure out who this dead girl is, and I’ll stay on top of the cold cases.”