Entombed

19

"Why did Hal call you?" I asked. "It's Scotty's case now."

"'Cause Scotty's a stand-up guy. When Hal reached out to him, Scotty said to play dumb and give me the first heads-up. After all, I was in the basement after the skeleton was discovered and Hal took the photos. So it would make sense for him to have to call me in order to find out that Taren's got the case now. And why should I know McKinney forbade him to talk to you about it?"

"Don't think you're leaving me behind on this one."

"McKinney'll go nuts if you show up at the scene, Coop."

"That fact alone is enough to make me want to go twice as badly. You're always telling me how much I'd love the Bronx. So far I've limited most of my experience to Yankee Stadium. Now's your chance to show me the borough's charms."

Mike had gone to college at Fordham and loved the rich history of the borough, once the seventeenth-century farmland of Swedish-born Jonas Bronck, the first European settler to live on the mainland northeast of Manhattan.

"Yeah, but a death scene wasn't my vision of an introduction."

"I guess Crime Factor will have to go with a rerun for tonight's show. Dr. Ichiko won't be revealing the identity of our skeleton on this episode. C'mon, let's see what happened to this greedy shrink. Where to?"

Mike shifted into gear and pulled out into the traffic. "The gorge."

"What?"

"The Bronx River Gorge."

"Never heard of it," I said, as he took advantage of the early evening lull in traffic to race across town to the Triborough Bridge, and up the Major Deegan Expressway to wind through what to me was the unfamiliar territory of the Bronx.

"You've never been to the Botanical Gardens?"

"Not since I was a kid." I had grown up in the suburbs north of the city and remembered visits to the gardens with my mother, who took me there for the brilliant spring displays of roses and the seasonal show of dozens of orchid varieties that she so loved.

"That's where we're headed. The gorge is inside the grounds of the Botanical Gardens. The Fordham campus is right across the street."

"I know the hothouses and the-"

"No flowerpots, Coop. This is part of the Bronx River. You know that's the only freshwater river in New York City?"

"What about the Hudson, or the East River?"

"They're tidal estuaries, Coop. You got to pay more attention to your surroundings."

For much of the ride, Mike gave me the early history of the area. After its discovery by Henry Hudson and its control by the Dutch West India Company as New Netherland, there were frequent and violent clashes with the local Indian tribes.

"You would have had your little prosecutorial hands full here, even in the 1640s."

"Doing what?"

"Ever hear of Anne Hutchinson?"

"Yes. She was exiled from Massachusetts by the Puritans. Brought a whole little colony somewhere down here because of religious intolerance."

"This is it. Chief Wampage was a bit peeved about the slaughter of some of his people, so he made his way to Hutchinson's house and whacked her right in the forehead with his tomahawk. Scalped her and her kids."

By the time we reached Bronx River Park, I had a thumbnail sketch of the county's major military skirmishes, from the revolutionary fortifications at the King's Bridge to the Battle of Pell's Point.

At the entrance to the park, long after closing time, a uniformed officer opened the gate when Mike flashed his badge. He directed us south and told us that the Crime Scene Unit and some grounds-keepers were waiting for us there, half a mile inside.

My childhood memories of sun-filled gardens with vividly colored flowers bore no resemblance to the vast, darkened park that we had entered. There were occasional streetlamps along the route, but the roadway was surrounded on both sides by a tall, dense growth of trees. The wind caused tall shadows to dance in front of our headlights, and the sprawling grounds seemed an eerily sinister place.

Some snakelike curves in the road and half a mile later, Hal Sherman waved us down and came over to open my car door.

"I doubt you were ever a Boy Scout, Chapman," he called out over my head, "but you might wanna rub a couple of sticks together and start a little fire if you're thinking of keeping me out here any longer. I can't stand much more of this cold."

"That the doctor?" Mike asked, pointing at an ambulance parked at the curb.

"Not a pretty picture."

Mike held his arm straight at me, palm out. He walked to the open end, said something to the two EMTs, and they unzipped the black body bag. He leaned in with a flashlight and studied the head and chest of the dead man.

"Looks like he went ten rounds with Mike Tyson," he said, returning to us. "Who's calling this a suicide?"

Hal shrugged his shoulders. "It sure as hell wasn't a mugging. You got enough dark alleys between his house in Riverdale and his office in the Village for someone to do him in. You think a member of the Polar Bear Club brought him up here for a dip in ice water to off him? His wife says he was up all night tearing his hair out because of the bad press over his decision to go on that crappy show and give up a patient's name. Finally was about to get his time in the limelight, but was ready to kill himself once he realized the professional consequences of doing something so stupid."

"Who found him?"

"We're waiting on a translator," Hal said. "That's the head groundskeeper-the tall guy in the khakis. The two others who pulled the body out of the river are the short ones with him. They're Vietnamese."

I followed Mike over to the trio, who were shielding themselves from the wind against a stand of pine trees.

"You in charge?"

"Phelps. I'm Sinclair Phelps," the groundskeeper said. "These men work for me."

I could see Phelps's profile silhouetted against the light gray rocks lining the riverbed behind me. He was, at about five-eleven, a little shorter than Mike. His hair was long and thick, but flecked with enough silver to suggest that he was in his mid-fifties. His aquiline nose gave him a stern mien, and the years of outdoor labor had lined his face as if it were the hide of a gator.

"You know anything?" Mike asked, after introducing us.

"Only what Trun has told me," Phelps said, pointing to the slighter of the two men, who were shivering as badly as I was.

"You speak Vietnamese?"

"No, no," Phelps said, smiling. "They can manage a few words of English and some fairly effective body language. I can tell you as much as they've told me. Late this afternoon-Miss Cooper, you seem to be uncomfortable. Would you like to move inside?"

"Take us through it once out here, will you?" Mike said, rolling his eyes while Hal Sherman passed me a pair of rubber gloves to put on, this time just for warmth. Phelps had a crew-neck sweater over his uniform and seemed as impervious to the damp wind as Mike did in his navy blazer, collar turned up. The rest of us were miserable.

"Do you know the river?"

I shook my head while both Hal and Mike nodded.

"It's twenty-five miles long, seven in the city and the rest going up through Westchester."

"It seems bizarre to me for someone to think of killing himself in a river in the wintertime. I'd expect it to be frozen over," I said, looking at the icy surfaces that gleamed from the rocks in the riverbed and the snow-laden branches overhanging it.

"In the shallow places further north, that's quite true. There are some spots where it's only a few inches deep," Phelps said. "But that's not the case here, because of the falls."

"Waterfalls?" I asked.

"Yes, ma'am. This is a gorge you're looking at. Y'see, there's an ancient fault that was created by the glaciers that moved through here," he said, turning on the beam of his torch lamp and bending to knock some pine branches out of the way so we could follow him a distance into the woods.

I could hear the sound of water, like a rushing torrent, as we neared the basin at the foot of the falls.

It looked as though we were standing in the Adirondacks, not in the middle of New York City. The frigid water cascaded down an enormous drop from the heavily timbered chasm above us and got caught up in the spinning whirlpools below, which whipped it into a frenzy before whooshing it off downriver.

"Quite spectacular, isn't it? On the more mundane side, once a week," Phelps said, "our maintenance men gather trash from the river. Used to be, Detective, that you could find shopping carts, spare parts of automobiles, mattresses, all sorts of flotsam and jetsam in here. We've tried to change that. Today, Trun and Hang were responsible for cleaning up this area."

The two workers were behind us, dressed in heavy rubber suits-like fisherman-with hip waders and watch caps. Phelps motioned them to stand beside him.

"The man you found," he said to them, "where was he?"

"Between rocks," the one called Trun said. "There."

He pointed about fifteen feet out into the water, where two enormous rock formations guarded an eddy of frothy water.

"How'd they get him out?" Mike asked.

"They used a grappling hook," Phelps said.

Hal whispered in my ear, "I don't care who does the autopsy. Going over the falls and landing on these rocks would have pummeled the daylights out of anybody. Then these two guys stick a pitchfork in him? Ichiko's a bloody mess and I don't know how the best medical examiner on earth is gonna figure this one out."

Chapman turned back to the area where we had parked our cars. "Ask them why they moved him before they called the police," he said to Phelps.

"They didn't actually. I can answer that. They raised me on the intercom and I raced over," he said, pointing at a golf cart he obviously used to get around the grounds. "That couldn't have taken more than three or four minutes. I called nine-one-one at the same time I ordered them to pull the man out."

"Why'd you do that? I mean, tell them to move the body before we got here?"

Phelps seemed taken aback by the question. "Well, Detective, just suppose he was alive. Unconscious or, or… Well, it seemed to be taking an awful chance to leave him there if he was still breathing. I'm sorry if I did the wrong thing."

His two workers hung their heads, seeming to understand that Phelps was being blamed for something they did.

"Hey, Hal, you look above for any signs of where the guy went in?"

"Yep. There's a car parked on top, near the head of the falls. It's Ichiko's."

"Tracks? Any tracks in the snow?"

"Yeah. It looks like Roseland up there. Like people were dancing all over the place. Not to mention the wildlife. You go up there, Mr. Phelps?" Hal asked him.

"No, sir. Trun? Hang?" The groundskeeper questioned his men, pointing up at the heights of the gorge.

Both men nodded in the affirmative. "I go there look for help," Hang said.

Mike turned to Hal. "Charlie Chan he's not. What's in the car?"

"Dr. Ichiko's wallet. ID, cash, credit cards. None of that touched. We dusted for latents, just in case."

"Any note? Anything to suggest he was going to end it all?"

"Nope."

"Signs of a struggle?"

"Nothing like that either."

"Gentlemen," Mike said, addressing Trun and Hang, "you were taking trash out of the river when you saw the body?"

Both men nodded eagerly.

"Where is it now?"

Each pointed at a row of three dark green plastic bags.

"Not much to speak of this time of year," Phelps said. "It's the other three seasons we're overloaded with bottles and cans, picnic remains-"

"Get a tarp, Hal," Mike said.

Sherman walked the few steps to his station wagon and came back with a large canvas that he dropped on the hard ground.

"Dump 'em out."

"Right here? This is going to be messy," Phelps said, helping his two workers untie and empty the bags. Food wrappings, wads of paper, empty coffee containers, and several small bird carcasses were spread out on the tarp. Mike ran his flashlight over the day's take, kicking larger items out of his way with his foot.

Something small and silver gleamed amid the rubble. Mike reached for it and threw it back-a crumpled aluminum soda can.

Another shiny object caught the light. I bent over and picked up a small cell phone.

"Way to go, Coop. You guys get this out of the water?"

Hang spoke. "No," he said, pointing up at the top of the gorge. "Snow."

I flipped it open to see if it was still working and hit the recall button.

"Don't touch it. Let the tech guys figure out what's on it."

"Sorry. I just wanted to see if it's connected to Ichiko and who the last call went to," I said, holding the phone to my ear as Mike started to circle around the tarp to take it from me.

It rang four times before rolling over into voice mail and I signaled to Mike to wait a minute.

A deep voice with a heavily accented Southern drawl spoke to me. "You have reached the office of the Raven Society. Please be so good as to leave a message after the tone."