Death Angel

FOUR

I was standing at Laura Wilkie’s desk, in the cubicle in front of my office. She had been my secretary since I had taken over the unit, and was as loyal as any person with whom I’d ever worked.

“I understand the Boss wants to see me, but I’d like you to take this down first.” I dictated to her exactly what Buskins had said and done in the courtroom, and the behavior that followed.

“You’ve got to do something about this, Alex. Want me to send a copy to Judge Heller?”

“No. Just get one up to the DA’s squad, for their threat file. I’m sure Buskins is all mouth and not about to do anything stupid before trial, but his words did rattle me and I’d like to have it all on record.”

“Will do.”

“And put through assignments, please, for doctors Caragine and Mitchell, for a Frye hearing on July 8th.”

“Got it.”

“Nothing from Mike or Mercer?”

“All quiet.”

The phone messages and requests from assistants in the Special Victims Unit to meet with me would wait another hour.

“I’m off to brief Battaglia.”

Paul Battaglia had been Manhattan’s elected district attorney for six terms-twenty-five years-and was the only person most voters remembered in that role. He had grown the legal staff to more than five hundred lawyers during his long tenure and was responsible for many innovations in crime fighting. He never tried to micromanage his supervisors, but he had an unquenchable desire to be the first to know every important fact in a case or on a matter of personnel.

The gatekeeper to his office was my good friend Rose Malone-a superb executive assistant whose discretion, memory for detail about almost everything that had transpired under her watch, and great good looks made her the DA’s most valuable asset.

“It’s your lucky day,” Rose said with a smile. “He’s in a particularly upbeat mood. Whoever he met with at breakfast gave him a box of Cuban cigars. You can go right in.”

Battaglia was sitting at the head of the conference table, flanked by Pat McKinney, chief of the trial division. Although my relationship with McKinney had been a rough one for many years, he’d been unusually gracious to me since we’d worked together on a major international scandal earlier in the spring.

“Good mor-”

Battaglia’s elbows rested on the arms of his chair, his fingers templed below his chin, with a fat cigar stuck in the middle of his mouth.

“Practically midday, Alex. I’m having lunch with the commissioner, and I don’t have a damn clue about what happened in the Park last night.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. You weren’t here when I went up to court.” And McKinney was rarely in his office before late morning, either because he couldn’t tear himself away from his harebrained girlfriend or because his shrink appointment ran overtime.

“What does it look like?”

I pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down.

“Dump job. The body was found in the Lake, but they don’t think she was killed there. I was only in the Park for half an hour, but the guys haven’t come up with much yet or they would have left me a message.”

“Is she anybody?” Battaglia asked, thinking-no doubt-of which part of his constituency he would have to work. Priest, preacher, rabbi, councilman, community group-someone to whom he would need to express interest and give assurances that his best people would be on the case. “Do we have a name on her?”

Of course she’s somebody. Somebody’s daughter, I wanted to say. She is somebody’s broken and battered child or sister or aunt or girlfriend. There’s most likely a relative who is going about the ordinary business of his or her daily life but will soon get the news that a loved one has been murdered.

“No name. Chapman thinks she’s probably homeless.”

“Raped?”

“We won’t know till after the autopsy. Her skull was bashed in. No clothes on, but that could be for a variety of reasons. She was in the water for a couple of days at least.”

“Do you want to keep it?” McKinney was directly above me in the chain of command. On many occasions he had tried to strip me of cases I wanted to handle. If the homicide victim had been sexually assaulted or killed at the hand of an intimate partner, it fell to my unit and Battaglia usually backed me.

“I’d like to, Pat. Obviously, I don’t know what we’ve got, but chances are once we confirm an ID, a lot of the people we’ll need to talk to-the girl’s friends-are the population we’re good at dealing with.” My colleagues in sex crimes work specialized in vulnerable young women.

“I spoke with Lieutenant Peterson a few minutes ago,” McKinney said. “He’s not thinking this will be a quick fix. Needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing. Catch a lucky break is all they can hope for. You in for the long haul?”

“I’d like to be.”

“Then it’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

Battaglia asked me a dozen more questions to which I had no answers before he dismissed me with a wave of his half-chewed cigar.

The rest of the day flew by with phone calls and staff meetings. Most of the lawyers seemed eager to get out in time for weekend travel, and I was one of them.

I was going to my home on Martha’s Vineyard, catching the last flight out of LaGuardia at nine P.M. with Vickee Eaton, who was Mercer’s wife and a second-grade detective assigned to the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at One Police Plaza.

At five, I dialed Vickee’s cell. “Do we have a plan?”

“Our office has been totally swamped with calls about the homicide in Central Park.”

“Does that mean we’re grounded?”

“Not a chance. Scully and the mayor did a stand-up at City Hall an hour ago. Bare bones. Not many facts to go on. And they put out a hastily done sketch of the girl. If anyone recognizes her from this one, I’ll be amazed. No more to be said by my guys till there’s a new development.”

“Does that mean you expected me to make the plan? ’Cause I totally dropped that ball. We can take a cab to LaGuardia.”

“Girl, I just want to be sitting on your deck in Chilmark with an ice-cold glass of your best white wine when that full moon is straight overhead,” Vickee said. “Mercer’s picking me up behind One PP at six sharp. Meet me here. He says a quick dinner at Primola with Mike and they’ll have us both up to speed on the day’s happenings in the Park and get us to the airport in time for the flight. You cool with that?”

“Beyond cool. See you shortly.”

I locked up at a quarter to six, leaving behind all my case folders for a change. I couldn’t remember taking off for a weekend in months without having to grind through a closing argument or prep witnesses without a break to relax.

The lawyers who hadn’t cut out earlier in the day were coming out the doors of both buildings in hordes, like a fire alarm had gone off. Most of the young ones had getaway bags on their shoulders, heading to Hamptons share houses or the Jersey shore. I crossed behind the Federal Courthouse on Worth Street, cutting through the building next to Police Plaza to the parking garage, where Vickee and Mercer were already waiting for me in his SUV.

“Are we good to go?” I asked, climbing into the rear seat.

“Nothing to stop us now,” Vickee said. “One more phone call to Logan before Mercer’s sister wrestles him into bed and I am airborne.”

Vickee and Mercer’s four-year-old, Logan, often came with us on our Vineyard escapes, but this time his mother wanted the chance to sleep late while her husband and son did some male bonding.

“Did you spend the day in the Park?” I asked Mercer as he turned under the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp and nosed onto the uptown FDR Drive.

“Only another hour after you left. Peterson’s been really territorial about this one. He’s calling it a plain and simple homicide-”

“Like there is such a thing.”

“And he didn’t want any other units there with his own guys except for a uniformed detail doing a grid search of the area around the Lake.”

“Around the Lake?” Vickee said. “That’s the whole park. How do you limit how far they go?”

“You don’t. The ring just grows larger every day the men don’t come up with evidence to link to the body.”

I glanced across the river at the enormous glass box that covered the antique carousel that had been restored and opened on the Brooklyn waterfront last year. It was where I had celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday in April, a most bittersweet end to a difficult day.

“You hungry?” Mercer asked.

“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten dinner this early. But I didn’t have much for lunch, and you can bet there won’t be much stocked up in the house, so I’m glad we’re stopping.”

Mercer Wallace was one of the handful of African American detectives to make first grade in the NYPD more than a decade ago. He was five years older than I, and although his solid six-foot-four-inch build made a fierce impression on the bad guys he chased, there was an exceptionally gentle quality about him that won him the trust of the most traumatized crime victims we encountered.

After his mother died in childbirth, Mercer was raised in Queens by his father, who was a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. He had married Vickee ten years back, but she had left him shortly thereafter because she’d been emotionally torn-as the daughter of an NYPD detective-by the toll the job took on most marriages and a terrific fear that it would overwhelm her own. After a shooting that almost cost Mercer his life, she came back to him, and they remarried and started life over again with Logan. To Mike and to me, their relationship offered a model of stability-of trust and of love-that neither of us had been able to imitate.

I listened as they talked to each other, Vickee reciting a checklist of things that were part of Logan’s routine from the time he opened his eyes in the morning till the end of a long day. How much milk in the cereal, who was expected for a playdate, what parts of the house were off-limits to the kids, what she’d prepared for Mercer to heat up for dinner-everything sounded so enviably cozy and normal.

“You with me on this, Alex? I guess my wife thinks she’s been raising this boy by herself the last four years.”

“She’ll get real by the time I return her to you Sunday night.”

Mercer parked illegally on Second Avenue in the 60s, throwing his laminated NYPD plaque on top of the dashboard. Primola was one of my favorites-an upscale Italian restaurant with consistently good food, where the regular customers are showered with attention by an efficient and cheerful staff.

Mike was seated at the bar, sipping on his vodka as he chatted up the bartender. Giuliano, the owner, greeted us more quickly than Mike did. “Signorina Cooper. Detectivo-buona sera.” He called out to the headwaiter, “Dominick, give Ms. Cooper table one, subito.”

The four of us made ourselves comfortable at the round table in the front window and ordered our drinks. Vickee and I decided to stay light with a glass of white wine.

“Tell us everything,” I said to Mike.

“It was a really frustrating day. I’m hoping we get a jump after the autopsy tomorrow. That’s set for two P.M., and I’ll be there. Not much to go on so far.”

“I’m glad you’ll stand in. I never got a chance to swing by the morgue today.”

“Did you catch Scully’s clip on the news?” Vickee asked.

“I heard it on the radio coming over.”

“Did the search turn up anything?” I said.

“Yeah. About ten minutes after you took off this morning, one of the rookies walked out of the bushes.” Mike pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and held it up with his knife centered inside it, the white cotton cloth draped around it. “He had his pen hoisted up and a pair of white panties-like maybe the biggest size they make-hanging off the pen so he didn’t mess them up. ‘These must have come off the dead girl,’ the kid says proudly.”

“But she’s so thin.”

“That’s only half the point. Within minutes, four other guys nosing into four other bushes come out with white panties in the air. Some with polka dots, one with glitter, one with lace-and a bright green thong, too. There was so much white cloth waving in the air, I thought the NYPD was surrendering to Hannibal.”

“What does that tell you?” I asked. “The underwear, I mean.”

“Springtime in Central Park, Coop. It tells me that all the young lovers with no place else to go try to find a sweet spot between there and Strawberry Fields to get it on late at night. It tells me that the lab will be up to its eyeballs in analyzing jism from intimate garments that have nothing to do with our homicide. But you can’t chance to ignore a single one of them.”

“Do you have any idea how big that Park is?” Mercer asked.

“Yeah, actually. We got some stats today,” Mike said. “843 acres, and we haven’t even done a thorough job on one of them so far. And they’re all being trampled by the press-hounds who are hoping to beat us to a solution. You’ve got entire countries-like Monaco-that are smaller than Central Park. It’s only 489 acres, the whole thing.”

“It’s not a country,” I said. “Monaco, I mean. It’s a principality.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “Another factoid from the vast archives of a Wellesley College scholar.”

“I wasn’t correcting you. I was just-”

“I know you weren’t, Coop. You were just being yourself. Hey, Dominick,” Mike called out. “What are the specials? We’ve got to get these broads to the airport.”

Vickee and I split a tricolore salad and an order of orecchietti con broccoli rabe, while Mike and Mercer both started with the penne pasta special followed by veal chops. Murder was never an inhibitor for Mike’s appetite.

“Obviously, you know you can call me if anything develops before we’re back,” I said. “Vickee will be getting constant info from DCPI. Are you working all weekend?”

“I was supposed to anyway. Today was my first day back on. I’ll start at the canvass in the morning both days, be at the ME’s office tomorrow afternoon.”

“Can I canvass with you on Monday?”

“Suit yourself.”

Mercer put his drink down. “Alex was really helpful to us on the Reservoir rapist case. People that didn’t want to be bothered breaking their jog for a tough old cop like me were willing to talk to her.”

“Didn’t I just say she could come along? By then, Scully will have announced the formation of a task force, right?”

Every major case that wasn’t solved immediately and might benefit from the collaboration of some of the special agencies within the NYPD wound up being run by a task force. Mike and his superb team of detectives who worked the Manhattan North Homicide squad would rather keep this case-like all their others-to themselves, taking it down methodically and strategically with the vast experience and knowledge that made them such pros.

“Undoubtedly,” Mercer said.

“So Peterson’s holding Monday afternoon for a crash course on the geography of the Park. Scully already has a promise from the parks commissioner, Gordon Davis, to lead the session himself.”

“Davis is a big deal,” I said. “He’s one of the mayor’s favorite players.”

“No kidding.”

Central Park seems so integral to the life and landscape of Manhattan that most people assumed it had existed in its present form naturally and forever. Instead, as the city grew from its commercial roots and settlements on the southern tip of the island in the 1600s, landowners and merchants became increasingly aware that the open land north of 59th Street was likely to be overrun and strangled by the growth of this nineteenth-century metropolis-which had spread without any thought for a public park in its master plan. At last, in 1857, legislation was finally passed to enable the creation of this glorious enterprise, known first as the Greensward.

“So what’s the deal with the Park?” Vickee asked. “I had to make a lot of notifications today, not just to Davis’s office. It’s a public-private joint enterprise, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. The Department of Parks and Recreation is responsible for setting all policy-that’s why Gordon Davis is in charge. He’s a mayoral appointment. But it’s a monster to maintain. The budget is almost fifty million dollars a year, just for the Park. So when the city was in financial trouble in the ’70s and the Park was deteriorating from neglect, some philanthropic New Yorkers created the Central Park Conservancy. That’s the private fund-raising piece, which does most of the heavy lifting now. They come up with eighty percent of the money to run the place. So we have to make nice with them, too.”

“You’re right, Mike. I feel that task force coming on strong,” Mercer said.

“I get the sense that if this poor girl had been dumped behind a bodega on the Lower East Side,” Vickee said, “there wouldn’t be quite this frenzy, no matter who she turns out to be.”

“Homicide rule number three,” Mike said. “Never kill anybody in a landmark location. It always ups the ante.”

“Amen to that,” Mercer said.

“Did you talk to Battaglia about keeping the case?” Mike asked me.

“Yes. Both he and McKinney are fine with it.”

“Then I’ve got a present for you. When you and Vickee take a break from gossiping this weekend,” he said, handing me a thick brochure, “you can get familiar with the Park. I realize we all think we know it, but I’m talking about the ball fields and waterfalls and streams and glacial rocks and all the other hideaways that we’ll have to look at. Study up.”

I started to unfold the map on the table in front of me.

“This whole thing is the vision of two men,” Mike went on, “who planned it down to the number of trees and rocks and footpaths, gates and promenades and terraces. Nothing between 59th Street and 110th Street is there naturally. Nothing. And none of it was left to chance. These two guys-Olmsted and Vaux-they were geniuses.”

Mike tapped his glass to tell the waiter he wanted a second drink.

“Who?” Mercer asked.

“Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the two dudes who created Central Park.”

“They were landscape architects. They won a major competition to design the Park. And it’s not Vaux,” I said, pronouncing the name as Mike had, rhyming with “so.” “It’s Calvert Vaux-sort of rhymes with ‘hawks.’”

Mike slammed his hand on the table, sloshing my wine over the rim of the glass. “What is it about you that you can’t stop yourself from telling me I’m wrong? Telling me I’m wrong with more regularity than I bet you have when you go to the bathroom?”

“What did I do? The commissioner will correct you on Monday if I didn’t do it now. You might as well go in on top. Let him know how smart you are.”

“This morning it was about the lake that you had to tell me was a pond. Now I call Monaco a country and you say it’s a principality. The architect’s not Vaux like ‘so,’ he’s Vaux like ‘hawks.’ I haven’t seen you in more than a month, and I was actually beginning to look forward to hanging out with you on this one. Not anymore, I’m not. You wanna know why you’re spending a weekend alone?”

“She’s not alone, Mike,” Vickee said, getting to her feet and fanning herself with her napkin as though the heat was too much to take. She smiled and patted me on the head. “Alex will have me. I’ll show her what my cougar talent can do to spice up her life. Is the restroom down those stairs in the back?”

I nodded.

“You’re alone because you are so damned critical and picky and self-righteous.”

“I’m nothing like that, am I, Mercer? I-I just corrected the pronunciation thing. I didn’t mean anything by it.” I started to reach for my drink, but my hand was shaking so visibly that I rested it in my lap.

“You are so doomed to be alone in your ivory tower, blondie. Waiting for King Louis the twenty-something of France to return and rescue you.”

“Back off, Mike,” Mercer said, catching the dig at my relationship with a Frenchman-Luc Rouget-that had recently splintered and left me with a heavy heart. Luc and I were trying to figure out whether to pick up the pieces, and how to do that with an ocean between us. “That’s over the line.”

“No, it’s not. When Coop’s unhappy, she thinks we all need to be unhappy with her.”

“I’m not unhappy.”

“Get honest with yourself. You’re miserable. And have you figured out why Pat McKinney and the district attorney were so agreeable about giving you this case? Isn’t it strange that your weasel-faced supervisor didn’t try to pull it out from underneath you today, like he always does?”

Mike sucked in more vodka before he answered his own question. “They want you to fail, Alex Cooper. This case, this woefully sad murder that is going to play out in the media all over the world, has all the earmarks of a dog. I expect it’ll be barking at me from now till the day my pension vests, like the rest of those ice-cold cases from the Park. McKinney wants you to fall on your face so he can grind his shoe into the back of your neck. They’re all looking for you to fail for a change, and just maybe, they found the case that will accomplish that for them.”