Silent Mercy

TWO

“DON’T you think the guys should move her inside?” I asked. The fire had been out for almost an hour and everyone on duty was growing restless.

Mike Chapman didn’t look up at me when he answered. “She can’t feel the cold quite like you do, Coop.”

My gloved hands were deep in the pockets of my ski jacket. “I’m not talking about the weather. I’m talking about the size of the crowd we’re attracting.”

“Breaking into a church is against my religion. Besides, the arson investigators have to check her out before we can take down the scene.”

I glanced at the pathologist who’d been dispatched from the medical examiner’s office. He was standing against another of the six columns at the far end of the portico, talking on his cell phone.

“The ME’s word isn’t enough?”

“Not when the perp was playing with matches. Got to make nice with the fire department,” Mike said, standing to turn and look down the steps at the growing number of passersby pressed against the wrought-iron fence.

“What do you want us to do, Chapman?” asked one of the four uniformed cops guarding the gated sidewalk entrance. It always seemed harder to get things done on the midnight shift.

Mike didn’t answer. He scanned the crowd of faces — all African American, mostly young-adult men with a handful of women among them. “It’s two o’clock in the morning. You mooks got nothing better to do with your time? Come back on Sunday for the full service. Be sure to bring something to throw into the plate.”

“I know you — you a DT,” one tall kid yelled out, using the uptown street name for detectives. “I seen you lock up dudes in Taft Houses last year, after that pimp got whacked. Who dead?”

Mike waved him off and speed-dialed the veteran lieutenant in charge of the Homicide Squad, Ray Peterson. “How about that backup you promised, Loo? Northeast corner of 114th Street and Powell Boulevard.”

This stretch of Seventh Avenue that spiked into Harlem, north of Central Park, had been renamed Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard in honor of the pastor turned politician, the first black congressman from New York.

“What did he say?” I asked Mike as he flipped his phone shut.

“Should be lights and sirens any minute now.”

“Who’s the shorty, man?” The kid with the big voice was pushing through the crowd, referring to me — despite my five-foot-ten-inch frame — with another street term used by many teens in Harlem to tag their women. When that question failed to get Mike’s attention, a string of curse words followed.

“Yo, keep it sweet. This is sacred ground, don’t you know that?” Mike pointed over our heads to the large white wooden sign that appeared to have been added to the limestone façade of the old building more recently. I knew it read MOUNT NEBOH BAPTIST CHURCH, though I wasn’t sure how visible the lettering was in the early morning darkness. “And the shorty is my sister. So keep it sweet.”

I suppressed a smile at Mike’s form of crowd control. It was less controversial to claim me as kin than announce to the agitated onlookers that I was the prosecutor in charge of the Sex Crimes Unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.

“Chapman!” the uniformed cop shouted again. “I asked if you got a plan.”

I could see the revolving red lights as a fleet of squad cars approached from both directions on the boulevard.

“Here comes your mob management, guys,” Mike said. “They’ll help you clear the sidewalk.”

An unmarked car moved through the vehicular snarl with urgent repeats from its screaming whelper. When it braked to a stop across from the church, I could see Mercer Wallace, one of the city’s only African American detectives to make first grade, his six-footfour inches towering over the noisy kids.

Officers began to push back against the curious crowd as one of the sergeants from the local precinct came through the gates and up the steps, followed by Mercer.

“Counselor.” Sergeant Grayson nodded at me as he shook Mike’s hand. “What’s going on here, Chapman? Why’d you pull Alexandra out of bed in the middle of the night?”

“She got something better to do I don’t know about?”

I walked behind Mike to try to get a closer look at the body, wrapping the end of my scarf around my mouth and nostrils, although it provided little protection from the powerful odor. We had all put on booties and been cautioned to minimize foot traffic close to the dead woman because of the need for the crime-scene team to collect debris that might also yield valuable clues.

“You just can’t learn to stay back, can you, Coop?” Mike said as Mercer joined us at the top of the staircase, in front of three pairs of tall wooden doors that fronted the six columns of the old church.

I stared at the parts of the young woman’s body that were visible. Her left thigh was bruised, her torso was badly burned, and mutilated fingers protruded from beneath the tattered blanket.

“Who’s the ME?” Grayson asked, glancing over at Mike.

“Rookie named Bixby, who’s about to die from a cell phone being forcibly impacted in his cochlea if he doesn’t hang it up and get back over here,” Mike said, whistling to get the doctor’s attention. “I take it you’ve met Ms. Cooper.”

“About six rapes and thirty-seven domestic assaults ago,” Grayson said. “How you doing, Alex?”

“Okay, Sarge.”

“Coop’s been handling a bias crime from last summer,” Mike said. He walked away from the steps and led us behind another of the columns, farther away from the dead woman. Bixby sauntered toward us. “Gay guy whose body was mutilated.”

“A barbecue, like this?” Grayson asked.

I shook my head.

“It’s pretty obvious the girl wasn’t burned alive,” Dr. Bixby said, squinting to read a message on his BlackBerry. “I want the arson team to have a look before I disturb the body, but I think the fire was set to cover up the manner of death.”

“What kind of cover-up? She’s behind a locked fence, on the steps of one of the most prominent churches in Harlem, and she’s torched like a bonfire in the middle of a dark, cold night,” Grayson said. “That’s hardly hiding anything. It’s like inviting all the locals to stop by for a drink.”

“I got a call at eleven. Pair of cops in the Charlie/David sector of the precinct,” Mike said, running his fingers through a shock of black hair against the direction that the wind was trying to take it. He was wearing his trademark navy blazer and chinos, and as always, no matter how bitter the weather, no overcoat. His explanation for why we were together, so close to the crime scene, was directed at Mercer. “They found fingertips — four of them — nicely manicured, most likely a woman. Garbage pail on Lenox near 120th Street.”

“Like, six blocks from here,” Grayson said. “No head, huh?”

Chapman grimaced.

“I had a decapitation once. Guy carried the head all over town in a bowling bag. Left it on the six train going downtown in rush hour. Some jerk thought he scored himself a major steal. Opened the bag and the damn head rolled out. Cleared the whole freaking train in thirty seconds. Don’t worry — it’ll show up.”

“I’m not worried, Sarge,” Mike said, turning back to Mercer. “I knew Coop had that other mutilation case, so I thought I’d pick her brain. Never even made it to Lenox Avenue to scope the fingers when this call came in.”

“That victim last summer was a guy, right?” Mercer asked me.

“Yes, but cross-dressing. Perp might have thought he was picking up a woman and gone berserk.”

“Now I’ve got a naked cadaver dumped in a public place. Headless. I gotta think sexual assault, I gotta think torture, I gotta think mutilation again,” Mike said. “And I gotta think possible hate crime’cause the perp picked a religious institution for the drop. Sex crimes, torture, hate — it’s got Alex Cooper written all over it.”

I had run the Special Victims Unit in Paul Battaglia’s office for more than a decade and partnered often with Mercer, who worked in the counterpart NYPD bureau almost as long. Mike was assigned to the elite Manhattan North Homicide Squad — responsible for all of the murders above Fifty-Ninth Street — and knew that so many of the sadistic serial rapists Mercer and I investigated often escalated to killing their prey.

Mercer walked over to the body and kneeled to pull back the sheet Dr. Bixby had placed over it so he could eyeball the woman. “And she’s white. Dead center of Harlem and you’ve got a white girl snuffed out on a big stage.”

“We’ve been gentrified, Mercer,” Grayson said. “Don’t go playing the race card here.”

“I’m betting you she’s not from the ’hood.”

“When’s the last time you stopped into Sylvia’s for some ribs?” the sergeant asked, referring to the legendary soul food restaurant. “Looks like the limos full of ladies who lunch got lost on their way to tea at the Plaza.”

Mercer’s jurisdiction was countywide, like mine. He knew about the cross-dressing victim who had been bludgeoned to death in the Ramble by a guy he’d picked up on the street. The gay man who got his signals mixed was black. His fingertips had been mutilated, probably in an attempt by his killer to slow down the identification process. His penis had also been cut. The NYPD had classified the unsolved murder as a hate crime, though it was safe to say that most assaults that occurred within the thirty-six-acre enclave of Central Park’s densely foliated Ramble were assumed to have an element of bias.

“We’re on this, Sarge,” Mike said. “Thanks for your help.”

“She staying?” he asked, pointing at me.

“I am.”

“Coop’s useful sometimes, Sarge. You ever give that a try?”

It wasn’t unusual for a Manhattan prosecutor to come to a crime scene. Smart detectives called us into cases early on, to work as a team so that the most important evidence could be preserved and presented in the courtroom if the investigation was solved and the case went to trial. Matching seemingly unrelated crimes, overseeing forensic testing, and giving legal guidance for search warrants, lineups, and confessions had proved invaluable teamwork in seeking justice for those victimized.

“I’ll hang around, too, then,” Grayson said.

Mercer rose to survey the rest of the scene. “That gate was locked when you arrived?” he asked Mike.

“Yeah.”

“So, you’re saying the murderer got over the gate carrying a dead body, Doc? You’re not thinking he killed her on this portico?”

“Most likely the former,” Bixby said. “She’s rather petite, easy to move around. Lighter without, you know—”

We all knew. Lighter without her head.

“Or he had a key,” the sergeant said, trying to make himself relevant. “Or maybe he came out of the church with her. It’s possible he killed her inside there.”

“A regular Quasimodo,” Mike said. “Hunchback of Mount Neboh. Why don’t you go check the bell tower, Sarge?”

I had noticed two towers on the church as I approached it earlier. Its neo-Gothic design looked squarely out of a London landscape. The cops would obviously have to sweep the entire building before any determination could be made about whether this distinguished house of worship had harbored a killer.

“Where’s the preacher man?” Grayson asked. “He’s a good guy. He’ll help.”

“Lieutenant Peterson reached him on his cell. He’s in Atlanta, at a church retreat. The custodian is supposed to be coming over to let us in.”

A red-and-white station wagon was guided around the parked vehicles by one of the cops. Two men got out and were admitted through the gates, quickly mounting the steps to introduce themselves as fire marshals, Dan Daniels and Frank Russo. Both of them knew Mike.

“Who’s the deceased?” Russo asked.

“Don’t know,” Mike said.

“Any kind of ID?”

Bixby tore his eyes away from his BlackBerry and introduced himself. “I didn’t do a full exam. Didn’t want to turn her over until you gentlemen arrived. Have you got a camera?”

Daniels put his heavy case on the ground and opened it to get his equipment out. A camera and large flash attachment were on top. As he set up, I checked the progress of the uniformed cops, who were hanging yellow crime-scene tape to establish a wider perimeter on the sidewalk in front of the church, pushing back the ever-growing group of gawkers.

“Looks like they used straight-stream to put out the fire,” Russo said.

Mike had talked to the men on the truck that had first responded to the 911 calls of a blaze at Mount Neboh. “Said they had no choice. They didn’t know when they got here if whoever was under that blanket was dead or alive.”

The straight-stream nozzle was effective in dousing the flames quickly, but more destructive in dispersing the evidence.

“She must have been decapitated first, don’t you think?” I asked Bixby while Daniels finished dressing himself to move in and work on the body.

“I assume so.”

Something more interesting than my questions caught Bixby’s attention as his BlackBerry vibrated in his hand. His lack of focus was annoying.

Mike caught it too. “Hey, Doc, you with us, or do you plan to tweet your way through the autopsy?”

“Sorry. Trying to advise one of my colleagues.”

“She appears to be badly burned,” I said. “Can you tell how long the fire was going?”

“The body itself is part of the fuel load, Ms. Cooper. The clothing — or blanket, in this case — provides fuel; so does the body fat, and even the skin and muscle.”

A lanky black man, dressed in a pea jacket and jeans, was escorted through the gate and up to where the group of us was standing. “One of you, Detective Chapman?”

“You got me.”

“Amos Audley. This here’s my church. I’m the caretaker.”

He opened the jacket to reveal a large brass ring with more than a dozen keys on it. He sniffed at the strong odor while he sorted his stock to produce the two that would unlock the building.

“Go ahead, please,” Mike said. “I’ll follow you in.”

Audley turned the large dead bolt and unlocked the knob below it. “Not like the days you could leave a church open for the poor souls what needs it in the dead of night.”

“You’re not old enough to know those days.”

“I’ve been knowing this place since I was a boy, Detective. Be sixty-seven years come November. Used to be, whether the Lord’s lions or lambs came calling, doors was wide open and all was welcome twenty-four hours of the day.”

“This was a lamb, all right. To the slaughter, Amos. We’re going to have to bring her in now, if you don’t mind,” Mike said. “C’mon, Coop. Step inside.”

I paused at the entrance as Audley marched in the dark to the panel of light switches that illuminated the vestibule and this part of the church. When he came back to us to explain that he’d be going to the far end to turn on the rest of the lights, I extended my hand to introduce myself.

“I’m Alexandra Cooper. I’m an assistant district attorney. Sorry to bring you here for such an unpleasant mission.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said, head down as he walked up the nave. “You need to set yourself down and have a little prayer, young lady. That’s what you all be needing.”

“If you don’t mind, Mr. Audley,” Mike said, “I’ll have to ask you to stay close. We’ve got to look around the church before you touch anything, just in case the killer was in here.”

Audley narrowed his eyes and stared at Mike as though he was crazy. “Not likely, Detective. I won’t cause you any grief, but not likely. Not a fit place for a killer.”

From this point in the entryway, I could see enormous stained-glass windows in the ceiling of the sanctuary. It was streaks of moonlight from above that made me conscious of them, although it was still too dark for me to make out any of the images.

“You heard Mr. Audley,” Mike said. “Take a seat.”

“Well, since everybody’s here now, and both Bixby and Russo have done a visual and taken photos, why don’t you just take her straight to the ME’s office?” I asked.

“No can do.”

“Why not?”

“Her body’s going to be pretty brittle because of the fire.”

A blast of cold air blew in the doors that Audley had opened. I looked over my shoulder at Russo and some of the cops who were spreading another clean white sheet on the ground beside the victim.

“Brittle?” I said, shivering against the chill of the night and my thoughts of the deceased.

“Just the ambulance ride downtown could jostle things. Change the way she presents at autopsy. That sheet will capture any trace evidence that falls off the body. Keep her as intact as possible.”

Mike watched, too, and inched a few steps closer to the doors as the team took direction from Russo and moved in to lift the woman. I stood beside him. When he walked back out onto the portico to oversee the change in positioning to the sheet, I went along.

“Jeez, Coop. In or out,” he said, stooping as Bixby raised the woman’s left arm several inches away from her body. “Something there, Doc.”

I leaned over his shoulder as Mike used a pair of tweezers to lift what looked like a piece of blue silk fabric from the fold beneath the woman’s right arm. I gagged at the sight of her body and neck — closer up this time than I was before — and from the smell that intensified with the cold wind.

“Man up, Coop,” Mike said. “This is as ugly as it gets.”

He stood and offered the material around for the others to see.

Mercer motioned to me but I wasn’t moving. “I’m okay.”

“May be as close as we come to figuring what she was wearing before she was set on fire,” Mike said.

Dr. Bixby talked to me as he explained. “Even on the most badly charred bodies, fragments are protected in the flexures of the armpits or groins. Might help you later on.”

Russo asked everyone to step away from the sheet as he ran his flashlight across the section of the portico where the body had been. There was a glint of something sparkling on the ground.

“Mike,” I said, “see that?”

The men who were tending to the deceased looked around, too, as Russo’s beam fixed on the tiny object that caught the light.

“Coop could find a freaking nugget in a pile of manure, as long as it’s gold,” Mike said to Russo. “Take a picture of that, will you?”

“What is it?” I asked.

The flash went off several times before Mike lifted the paperthin object with the tips of his tweezers.

“It’s a star. A six-pointed gold star. One of yours, Coop,” he said. “A Jewish star.”

Bixby ordered the cops to hold up before folding the sheet over the deceased. He rolled her body gently to one side, examining the skin on her back.

“You can see the form of it here, Detective. And even the suggestion of a chain extending up from the star. The heat almost embedded it in her back. It may prove to be a chain she was wearing when — uh, before she was killed.”

When she had a neck, is what he started to say.

Russo photographed the faint outline of the tiny symbol that was etched in the skin of our victim. Then she was finally ready to be wrapped in the sheet and lifted into the church vestibule so the rest of the scene could be examined for evidence.

“Go ahead, Coop,” Mike said. “Wrong church, wrong pew. Got to be something in this. More than your average murder-and-dump job.”

Sergeant Grayson didn’t agree. “Some local kills a girl. Maybe it’s a rape, maybe not. What else is he gonna do but toss the body? Maybe he’s a parishioner here. Could be he’s looking for salvation.”

“Aren’t we all?” Mike said. “The star might have belonged to the killer.”

“Too feminine a piece,” I said. “It’s tiny. And wafer-thin.”

“You still can’t assume it was hers. She could have ripped it off the guy’s neck during a struggle.”

I walked ahead of him, past Amos Audley, who was standing watch over the entrance to his beloved sanctuary. “I realize how unusual a decapitation is. What else did you mean about this not being an average murder, Mike?”

“Somebody went to a lot of trouble to make a statement. Kill a woman, decapitate her, get up and over that tall fence or come from within this place. Could have dumped his prey somewhere a lot more remote and make a much easier escape than climb to the front steps of Mount Neboh, get away clean. If the murder happened inside the church — and I guess we’ll know that shortly — he could have just left the body here. And if she’s Jewish, then what’s the point of bringing her to a Baptist church?”

Amos Audley mumbled something, but I couldn’t hear him.

“I’m sorry. What did you say?”

“The dead girl, she a Jew?” he asked.

“It’s possible. We don’t know who she is yet.”

“Well, maybe the Lord just brought her on home,” Audley said.

“Home?” I didn’t get where he was going.

“Take a look, Ms. Cooper.” Audley favored his left leg as he limped out of the vestibule.

I continued on after him, and saw that there must have been more than a thousand seats in the barrel-vaulted sanctuary of the church. A great organ with towering pipes filled most of the wall at the opposite end.

“Overhead,” he said.

I stretched my neck for a better view of the trio of splendid stained-glass windows that arched above me, forming a triptych of gigantic skylights.

“You see that?” Audley asked. “Those letters in the glass?”

“It — it looks like the writing is in Hebrew. Is that possible?”

“Indeed it is.”

I couldn’t read the ancient language, but the lettering was clear, as were the various symbols of the Jewish faith etched into the amber, emerald, and cobalt-blue glass. In the middle frame were the two tablets displaying the Ten Commandments, topped by a sixsided Star of David.

“Mercer — Mike,” I called out to them, “you’ve got to see this.”

“A hundred years ago, Ms. Cooper,” Audley said, proudly showing off the church he’d been associated with since his birth, “this here was built to be a synagogue.”

Mike rested his hands on my shoulders as he leaned back to look up.

“What kind of detective you be, Mr. Chapman?” Audley asked. “In that pediment up over the columns, above the front door, didn’t you see those tablets with the Ten Commandments?”

Mike didn’t have a ready answer.

“Didn’t you even notice those numbers carved in the cornerstone as you walked past? Big as you are? Says 5668. That’s the Hebrew calendar, year she was built. Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t miss no clue like that. Means 1908, when Harlem’s population was mostly Jewish. Rich and powerful ones, merchants and such. This girl just come home.”

“That’s one view of it,” Mike said. “I’d like you to show us all these things in daylight. I’ll bring Dr. Watson along. Make sure we don’t miss anything.”

“Just you come back with Ms. Cooper. I think she gets it.”

Maybe it was a hate crime after all. If the Star of David was in fact the victim’s, maybe it was no coincidence that her body was deposited on the steps of this particular church.

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways, Mr. Audley,” Mike said. “Strange and mysterious ways.”

“Amen, Mr. Chapman. The Lord be making these mysteries, He can help you solve them too. Just you figure it out before anybody else get dead.”