Entombed

10

"Did you see the damn article on the cover of that rag this morning?" Paul Battaglia shouted into the phone about five minutes later.

"Yes, boss. I haven't had a chance to read it yet-"

He was quoting from its opening. "'Police sources are puzzling out whether the skeleton found in the basement of an NYU building is just a sad postscript to another age, or actually Edgar Allan Poe's crypt.' What the hell is this, Alex?"

"You want to give me a chance to look at it before-"

"Pat McKinney just called me. Says you know all about it. Says you gave this story to Diamond."

McKinney was deputy chief of the trial division, a wretchedly petty supervisor who seemed to take great pleasure in undermining my work. The week before Christmas his wife had thrown him out, embarrassed by his long-term affair with a coworker, and McKinney was flailing out in all directions as though making other people miserable would ease his own suffering.

"I do know all about it and I should have come in to tell you. I know how Diamond got the tip but it wasn't from me. I'm sorry- I was just so busy in the grand jury yesterday and I never imagined this would be of any press interest. Certainly not before the police figured out who she was and how she died."

Falling on one's sword often helped with Battaglia, but sometimes you had to do it repeatedly before he'd back off.

"What's the deal on these bones? Tell me everything."

I gave him the scant information I knew and he asked another dozen questions for which I had no answers.

The rest of my day was planned to be relaxing. I dressed for my Saturday morning ballet class, and covered my tights with warm-up pants and fleece-lined boots to trek through Central Park to the dance studio. I stayed for two hours of lessons, stretching and bending before taking my place at the barre for the exercise routine that helped relieve the week's tension.

Then I hiked back across town to the salon where Elsa and Nana would pamper me, highlighting my blonde hair and cutting it for a midwinter lift.

On the way home I stopped at Grace's Marketplace for some takeout, a lemon chicken breast and steamed broccoli that I could nuke at dinnertime. Mercer would pick me up at midnight and we would remain on our patrol until 4A.M., so I decided to nap in the early evening and eat dinner before going out on our profiling expedition.

When the doorman called up to tell me Mercer was waiting, I pulled on a black ski jacket over my jeans and went down to the car.

Mercer opened the rear door to let me in a beat-up old Chevy Malibu with chipped paint that had once been a deep navy blue. "Whose wheels?"

"My next door neighbor's kid. Won't stand out quite as much as a department car or medallion cab. Alex, this is Greg Karras."

I reached over the seat back and we shook hands. "Good to meet you. Thanks for flying in. How do we do this?"

"You've got your hands full with this guy. I've studied the old reports and Mercer confirms this is about the time of night he starts to strike, right?"

"Nothing earlier."

"I'd like to visit each of the locations to get a sense of what his approach has been, what the egress opportunities are."

Mercer and I had graphed out the crimes for Karras. We decided to start at the northern end of the map and drove to the quiet street where one of the earliest attacks had occurred. Mercer stopped the car in the middle of the block and pointed to a stoop thirty feet farther on. "Left-hand side, the steps with the wrought-iron handrail."

Karras got out of the car and walked from our position midblock to the corner of the avenue. A couple sauntered down the street with their arms around each other's waist, stopping to kiss under a street-light, the guy looking back over his shoulder at Karras. There were no trees anywhere near the victim's building and no place for an assailant to hide in waiting.

"Look at this, Mercer," I said, pointing at someone approaching the rear of our parked car. "She's likely to be in my office on Monday if she isn't careful."

The heavyset young woman was unsteady on her feet. She looked as though she was intoxicated, talking to herself and fishing in her purse for her keys. She stood between two buildings with her back to me, trying to decide which one was her destination.

"I almost want to get out and help her," Mercer said, "but she'd probably start screaming bloody murder."

She pulled herself up the six steps by leaning on the handrail and then fumbled for the right key on the ring to open the door. She would have been an easy target for any thug.

Karras got back into the car and asked us to go to the next location. He was quiet as he made notes on a PalmPilot. Mercer circled down to York Avenue and back to Seventy-eighth Street. Scene after scene, we watched the profiler walk each block and check the intersecting cross streets. He measured distances between street-lamps by walking between them, counting the steps as he put one booted foot in front of the next, and made notations of fire hydrants and the occasional tree.

After the round of visits, we went to an all-night coffee shop on Second Avenue. I was ready to put toothpicks in my eyelids to hold them open.

"What ideas did the task force work on last time?" Karras asked.

"Our first thoughts were businesses in the area. The fact that nothing started until after midnight made us think the guy worked here, got off a duty shift at midnight or oneA.M. Victims told us he was clean and that he smelled good. We were thinking restaurants or bodegas. Someone who washed up when he left work," Mercer said.

"How about hospitals?"

"We've got two big ones in this zone-New York Hospital and Lenox Hill. Same thing-it's a natural fit with shift turnovers. We subpoenaed the files of every male who worked there, from brain surgeons to male nurses to orderlies. Took months to get them all. By the time we'd gone through most of them, he had vanished."

"And we swabbed plenty of the employees, too," I said. "They've been entered in the data bank against the profile."

"I studied all the police reports Mercer sent me while I was on the plane. Can you give me more details-personal details-about your victims?"

"Everything you want to know," I said.

"Alex and the lawyers do the most thorough interviews you can imagine. There's nothing we can't tell you about these women."

I operated on the theory that I needed to know as much about the victim as the defendant knew, and more than the best defense investigator could find out if he applied every resource he had. We also tried to reconstruct every second of the victim's interaction with the offender, things that might help us connect to a suspect and give us probable cause to swab his saliva for DNA comparison.

"Can you bring the task force members together for a brainstorming?" Karras asked.

"Of course. Alex and Sarah Brenner, her deputy, have handled all the victims themselves. I'll round up the team of detectives. For when?"

"I'll let you know when I'm ready."

"Sure. What do you do now?"

"All this data on street locations that I've been mapping, this tracks the spatial characteristics of the pattern. There's a prototype computer system called Rigel. Once I dump in every crime scene- every hospital, store, school, possible physical boundaries-"

"There are no physical boundaries."

"You can't have linkage blindness, Alex. There may be more clues that I can pick up on than you're even aware of. This case is going to create a very colorful map."

"We've already got a map." I was tired and impatient, growing fearful that this was as useless as the psychological crap.

"I'll give you a jeopardy surface, the rapist's center of operation. You haven't had that yet. The perp's most likely base or anchor point."

I rolled my eyes at Mercer. "A jeopardy surface, that's what it's called? Don't tell Mike Chapman, okay?"

"Yeah, I try to pinpoint that-his home or his job. It gets superimposed on the scene locations, which are the virtual fingerprints of the perp. The more crime sites there are, the better the predictive power of this system."

So Karras's goal was the exact opposite of ours-he'd be happy with even more crimes to fill his colorful grid. I was looking at one of his old samples. A bright red dot for the jeopardy center, orange shading for the offender's preferred area of operation, changing to yellow and then green, blue, and purple for the outer limits of his quarry.

"You basically provide us with where he selects his victims," Karras said. "He's got a clear comfort zone, and we know that some of the women are low risk-from his perspective-because he thinks they're alone and in some cases intoxicated. His signatures are obvious-the weapon, the kind of binds, not much profanity, minimal verbalization, the way he subdues his prey. The computer uses his movement patterns and his previous hunting habits."

"To do what?"

"Statistics tell us that right-handed criminals in a hurry to flee generally make their escape to the left. But they discard their weapons to the right. You haven't charted that fact yourselves, have you? See what happens if you take him left out of every one of these buildings. Where does it lead him? That's what I'm supposed to figure out."

"Oh," I said grudgingly, toying with my scrambled eggs and lukewarm decaf.

"Did you know that when lost or confused, men go downhill but women go up?"

He was losing me now. "It's a perfectly flat neighborhood, Greg. This isn't San Francisco."

"The guy who first developed this program ten years ago? He did it with a serial rapist in Vancouver. Came up with exactly the same kind of map I'm going to create. Charted seventy-nine crime scenes and the computer spit out a red dot on the exact spot in which his perp lived. Nailed him the next day."

I wasn't focused on the good news. "Seventy-nine cases before he got a solution? Couldn't have been many places left in Vancouver to look for the guy by that time. I'll be too old to celebrate if I live through that many more attacks."

"Wait that long and neither one of us will have a job," Mercer said.

Mercer's cell phone vibrated and he picked it up off the Formica tabletop. "Wallace here. Hey, loo, what's up?"

It was 4:17A.M. and I was fading. The lieutenant was undoubtedly worried about how much overtime he would have to authorize for Mercer on this untested caper.

He stood up and walked to the front of the shop to finish the conversation, scribbling something on a napkin the waitress handed him at the counter. He flipped the phone closed, motioned to us to come as he paid the tab.

"Can you take a cab back to your hotel, Greg? Alex and I have business."

Mercer moved away from the register and pushed open the front door. The blast of cold air revived me as I stepped onto the sidewalk.

"East Eighty-third Street, between First and York. Brownstone with a locked front door. Female white, panty hose, knifepoint assault."

Karras had his PalmPilot in his hand, entering the address. "Boy, once they get good at something, these perverts don't change their style."

"This one's different, Alex," Mercer said, ignoring the profiler. "This time the girl is dead."