Death Dance

25

"I asked you to throw the damn cup away. Why do you risk getting good evidence by being a cowboy?" I asked Mike.

"Hey, the first time we were in Berk's apartment, you were hoping to pick up some white hairs, weren't you?"

"I didn't do it then, did I?"

"Garbage. I took the cup because it was garbage. Argue that to the stiffs who sit on the appellate court bench and wouldn't know a crime scene from a cocktail party. Let's go-out of the car."

"I'll wait for you down here."

"Battaglia said to keep an eye on you. I got this far so there's no point in letting you be a sitting target on a street corner. Don't pout about Joe Berk's DNA. I got what we need, didn't I?"

I followed Mike up the narrow staircase that led to his fifth-floor apartment. It was a studio that he had long ago christened "the coffin" because of its small size and dark interior. Since Val's death, that nickname must have made each homecoming a reminder of his loss.

"Just throw those things on the floor and have a seat," he said, pointing to a chair in the corner of the room. He grabbed clean clothes from the closet and dresser and went into the bathroom to shower.

The disarray in the apartment was startling. While his department car was usually littered with empty coffee containers and food wrappers, Mike's personal appearance-most often a blazer, button-down-collar shirt, and neatly pressed slacks or jeans-was ordinarily reflected in his home surroundings. I started to hang up a wind-breaker that had fallen to the floor and stuff socks and underwear in his laundry bag.

But more disturbing than the messiness was that this intimate space had been transformed into a shrine to Valerie. There were photographs of her on every surface, and her belongings were crowded onto shelves-architectural design books stacked on top of Mike's collection of historical biographies, and the exotic shells she brought back from her tropical vacations. I didn't know whether Val had moved all these things into Mike's apartment, or he had retrieved them from her place and set them up here after her death.

I bent over to study a photograph of Val I had never seen before. It was a close-up of her face, beaming back at the photographer- Mike, no doubt-from beneath the brim of an NYPD baseball cap. I was ashamed to catch myself making superficial comparisons-how much more even Val's features were than my own, what a fine beauty she possessed. I straightened up and dusted off the picture with any sleeve.

And then there were the clothes-several pastel-colored crewneck sweaters stacked on a closet shelf beside Mike's darker ones, strappy sandals lined up next to his loafers, and a diaphanous robe in Val's favorite lavender hues that was still draped across the back of the wooden chair that he had offered me to sit on.

I was smoothing the covers on the bed that had been unmade, probably for days, when Mike came out of the bathroom. "What are you doing?"

"We can come back later on and I can help you straighten things up."

"It's not Buckingham Palace, Coop. It's the way I live, okay?"

"It didn't used to be."

"A lot of things didn't used to be. C'mon. Twelve-minute turnaround. Not bad, huh?"

"Would you like me to-well, to sort of go through some of Val's things with you?"

He looked at me as though I had said something crazy, something unthinkable. "Can you just leave it alone? I'm not ready. Can you make a goddamn effort to understand that? Can you get it?"

I opened the door and started down the steps. I don't think Mike would have said anything to hurt me intentionally, but the shot was painful. "Better than you think."

I scanned the Sengor story in the newspaper as Mike drove the short distance to 56th Street and Park Avenue, near the town house to which Elsa's salon had moved. We picked up enough coffee for ourselves and the early-morning staff from a deli at the end of the block.

Elsa buzzed us in through security and we took the elevator upstairs. She groaned when she saw my hair, before either of us could greet her, and we walked to the rear of the sleek salon where the col-orists worked. We had been friends for years, and I relied on that relationship as much as on her talent and eye.

"You gotta be a magician for this job," Mike said. "But she's unbearable if she isn't blond enough, so give those charred ends a go."

Elsa went into the supply room to mix a formula and came back with my stylist, Nana.

"Well, if it isn't Nana-from-Ghana," Mike said, getting up to embrace her. "This is like the hair ICU this morning, no? All hands on deck for Coop's toasted tendrils."

Nana fixed her broad smile at Mike and looked at the nape of his neck. "While you're waiting for Alex, I think I'd better shape you up, detective," she said in her distinctive West African patois. "Come with me."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

They walked to the front together and I told Elsa what had happened yesterday while she wrapped my ends in tinfoil to set the bleach.

After the color processing, Nana tried to even the damage that I had compounded after the explosion with my amateur clipping. It was almost nine when Mike and I left the salon to continue on down-town to my office.

Laura was waiting for me at the door when we came in, apologizing for having left the deadly letter on my desk.

"You couldn't have known any better than I did. There's no reason for you to blame yourself. Thank God it didn't get you-I'm helpless without you," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

"Battaglia wants to see you. He told me it's got to be right away, 'cause he's going down to Washington to testify at a Senate hearing on gun control. Don't even sit down, Alex. He means immediately."

"You coming?" I asked Mike.

He sat at my desk and spread out a napkin beneath the powdered jelly doughnut he was dissecting. "The man didn't ask for me. I'm dining now."

Battaglia was packing his briefcase with papers, ready to leave for the airport.

"How do you feel?"

"Fine, thanks. It was a good scare."

"You getting anywhere on the Met?"

"Not much further than I told you yesterday. Only development is that a man's glove found near the scene of Talya's attack has Joe Berk's DNA inside it."

Battaglia's cigar wiggled at the news. "Interesting."

"Don't get too excited about that fact, Paul. I don't want to keep it from you, but there may be an issue about the admissibility. We'll find a way to get a clean sample. Chapman may have jumped the gun getting this one."

"That's why I like him. Take him a cigar for me, but forget you ever told me this little factoid. I only want to know about the clean one. I'll pretend this one's just a product of my wishful thinking."

"Mike and I are going back to see Berk this afternoon. Hear what he has to say. I know I promised you something before Saturday, but-"

"That isn't why I was asking. Why don't you get out of town for a few days, if nothing's cooking on the case? Sarah can handle the Carido arrest if they find the guy," Battaglia said, referring to my deputy. "Your Turkish doctor's taken himself out of range and you've got Chapman to run the investigation at the Met. Stay out of harm's way for a few days. Relax."

He was looking at my unusual hairstyle as he talked.

"I was planning to go to the Vineyard tomorrow night, to open the house for the season. I just hate leaving with all this going on."

"Go tonight, okay? Then I don't have to worry about somebody watching your tail. If we need you before Monday, you can always fly in."

We walked out of his office together and I thanked him for the time off, well aware that he was banishing me in hopes that the bad press would evaporate if I wasn't around to fuel the reporters with leaks and updates on the three high-profile cases that were hogging the headlines.

Mike had his feet up on my desk, reading the sports news while waiting for me to return from the executive wing. "D'you show him your burn?"

"He didn't ask, so I didn't tell. He encouraged me to fly up to the country today, but that depends on what you think we've got going." I tossed him the Cuban cigar.

"I'm with Battaglia on that," Mike said, sniffing it through the wrapper and sticking it in his jacket pocket. "We can surprise Joe Berk with a visit, and I can get back to helping out at the Met. I'll take you to the shuttle this afternoon." There were no direct Vineyard flights this early in the year, so I'd have to travel through Boston and take the nine-seater Cessna twin engine from Logan Airport.

"Excuse me, Alex," Laura said, standing in the doorway, "there's a young woman at the security desk in the lobby. She read the story in the paper about Sengor and she wants to talk to an assistant DA about something that happened to her last month. She thinks she was drugged at a club."

"By him?"

"No, no. She just decided to come forward because of your case."

"Do me a favor. Find someone in the unit to talk to her, will you?"

Whenever an unusual MO became public, women who'd been reluctant to tell their stories to detectives or prosecutors often came out of the woodwork, eager to see if their claims would support criminal charges. In the case of drug-facilitated rapes, the failure to get prompt medical attention and testing most often proved fatal to the case. It didn't surprise me that the Sengor indictment would result in a rash of new complaints that would keep busy many of the forty senior assistants in the unit.

Five minutes later Laura buzzed me on the intercom. "Your phones are wild today, Alex. This one's a Dr. Thorp-from the New York Botanical Garden. You want it?"

"Absolutely." I picked up the phone and introduced myself to the caller.

"I've been told to talk with you about my analysis of the leaf particles that the NYPD submitted to me the other day."

"Would you mind if I put you on speakerphone? I've got the case detective with me."

"That's fine, unless you'd rather come up here to my office to meet with me."

There were very few places in the city as magnificent as the vast acreage of gardens and conservatories, but my most recent visits there had sated my curiosity for the time being. "Perhaps we can start this with just a call, if you don't mind."

"I've had a look at your leaf, and frankly, you don't see many of these."

"Why is that, Dr. Thorp?" I asked, as Mike got out his pad and flipped to a new page to take notes.

"Pycnanthemum torrei, Ms. Cooper."

"Sorry?"

"Pycnanthemum torrei. This plant is quite rare. In fact, it's G.I."

I was shaking my head at Mike, who leaned in to speak. "Look, doc. We gotta go through this in Pig Latin or what? Ixnay on the scientific lingo. I'm a cop."

"That's just the way we do things in botany. G.I.-that means it's a globally imperiled plant. It's known as Torrey's mountain mint."

Just the name of the leaf explained the distinctive odor that we had smelled at the scene. "So, in Manhattan, would it be hard to find?" I asked.

"Not hard, Ms. Cooper. Impossible. It doesn't grow on your island."

"Where then?"

"There are only ten places in the world where Torrey's mountain mint survives, so far as we know. There's a site on Staten Island called Clay Pit Ponds State Park. You can check with the city's Department of Environmental Preservation. There was a big brouhaha last year over a large shopping plaza that was planned for the location. Pickets and protesters and green-lovers. This sweet little endangered plant held up construction of a hundred-million-dollar mall project."

Mike was writing down the names. "Where else?"

"High mountain, detective. The mint thrives for some reason in the Preakness Range of the Watchung Mountains. Do you know where that is?"

I said, "No," while Mike answered at the same time, "Yeah, doc. Across the river in New Jersey, right? I'll explain it to her. Anywhere else in the Northeast?"

"No. No. Just these two patches. We're keeping a close watch. We'd obviously love to find more of it."

"Thanks a lot for your help," Mike said, ending the conversation.

"So what don't I know about the Watchung Mountains that I should?"

"It's a nature preserve with some of the most magnificent vistas of the city. Now, if you'd paid a little more attention in your history class, you'd know that it's got some of the highest ridges anywhere along the Hudson, and that Revolutionary soldiers used those points for signaling stations against the British troops."

"Nice to know, but-"

"And in World War Two, the army mounted mobile antiaircraft guns on top of High Mountain in case the Nazis made it over the ocean. They should have kept the frigging things there to welcome those Al Qaeda bastards in 2001. A lot of people I care about might still be alive."

"Where in New Jersey is it, Mike?"

"I was serious, Coop. Right across the Hudson. I'll tell you what else is there. Rock shelters-caves that were used by the Indians for hundreds of years."

"So?"

"So how about that it's not very far from where your spelunker friend lives."

"My what?"

"Chet Dobbis. Artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera. Rock climber, wig collector, former lover of Natalya Galinova. Maybe he tracked in a little mint on his cleats."