The Bone Vault

17

“You’ve already missed the cartoons and first feature, Alex. Pull up a chair and tighten your seat belt. This one’s really a bumpy ride.” Colin West was a lieutenant in the detective squad of the First Precinct, an area that covered a primarily commercial part of the city-Wall Street-and a fast-growing residential community as older buildings were converted into lofts and apartments. He was a big man, with a broad, handsome face, shaved head, and terrific mind.

“The squad commander himself? To what do I owe this honor?” West, one of his detectives, and a tech guy from our video unit had set up in the small conference room opposite my office and had a stack of tapes piled up on the table. One of them was playing on the monitor as I walked in. It was only a few minutes after 8A.M. “Sorry I’m late.”

“You’re not. We seized forty-six tapes with the warrant Sarah drafted. We got down here an hour ago so I could start running through them and pick out the highlights for you.”

“How about the weapons?”

“A regular torture chamber. More than twenty whips, an assortment of things that look like hairbrushes with metal spikes on them, restraints at the foot and headboard of the bed, sex toys you can’t begin to imagine, and a metal pulley that’s recessed into a panel in the ceiling, with handcuffs attached to it. All the comforts of home. Black?”

West reached into a cardboard carton and pulled out some coffee containers and doughnuts.

“I hear the perp’s a lawyer.”

“Yeah. Kalder. Peter Kalder. Lives in Battery Park.”

“You lock him up?”

“Nope. Just knocked on the door, showed him the warrant, waited while he went into the bathroom to throw up, then cleaned out the joint. Sarah told us to let him be until you viewed the evidence.”

“What’s the story on the victim?”

“That’s her, handcuffed to the pulley.” West pointed at the monitor, which was frozen on a frame that showed a woman I guessed to be about my age, anorexically thin, stretched out across a disheveled set of striped sheets on a king-size bed, her lower face covered with a gag.

“Cooperative?”

“She is now. But it took her a while to get to this point. Met him through a personal ad in theVillage Voice. No pain, no gain kind of thing. The relationship started off fine, moved into verbal abuse, then to some mild S and M. The last few months have been this heavyduty stuff.”

“More than once?”

“Our girl kept going back. A perfect target. She’d been an incest victim for most of her adolescence. Low self-esteem, every kind of eating disorder you can imagine, inability to maintain any stable relationships. Kalder has her convinced this is what she deserves. You’ll find a shrink who can explain it to you better than I can.”

“Is she coming down here today?”

“She’s in a better place. Last night she checked herself into a private clinic in Connecticut. For her addiction.”

“What to?”

West picked up the clicker and forwarded the tape a few inches, then froze it again when the woman turned onto her side. “He’s about to come into view, Alex. Watch her flinch. She’s turning away because he’s got a six-foot whip raised over his head, poised to slap down on her left thigh.”

As the woman rolled her body, her entire leg and buttocks came into view. They were bloody and swollen, flesh stripped away and welts seeming to form on top of other open wounds.

“Painkillers. She dopes herself up when she gets to the apartment. Gotta be the only way she could let herself be subjected to this.”

A squat man wearing only gray briefs and white athletic socks appeared at the side of the bed. He had a hideous hairpiece, which he must have knocked askew in his excitement. He turned his head to smile into the video camera he had set up on his bureau to capture himself and his playmate for posterity.

“Promise me one thing, Alex. When you give me the go-ahead for the collar, I get to pluck that cheap toupee off the top of his fat head and voucher it as evidence, okay?”

I nodded as I watched the tape roll, and Kalder hauled back with his arm and cracked the whip down against the woman’s broken body. I rested my elbow on the conference table as I sat beside Colin West, lowering my head and closing my eyes, rubbing them with my thumb and forefinger.

“I don’t think I could take much of this under the best of circumstances.”

The lieutenant fast-forwarded the tape as he talked. “I know you have to sell this one to your supervisors. I mean, after that other case you lost. You’ve got to watch some of this to see just how vicious he gets.”

“The chief assistant will back me on this one, Colin. No human being should be allowed to do this to someone else-it’s pretty extreme. The one that got dismissed? That was just McKinney overruling me, and a young prosecutor with no balls who flacked for him. They made a decision to redact some of the evidence in that case without telling me-took it over my head to McKinney-and then when the appellate court threw out the verdict, the woman who had tried the case the first time just walked away from it. Claimed to be sick. Seems to have gone to Lourdes in the interim so now she’s back doing McKinney’s bidding again. Don’t worry-we can handle Kalder. How much of this do you think you have here?”

“I don’t know yet. This is only the eighth tape we’ve gotten through.”

“Any sound to go with the video?”

“Yeah. Lots of time spent putting her down, calling her his slave. And games, he plays lots of games with her.”

I couldn’t conceive of anything frivolous happening in the middle of these beatings. As West rewound the tape Mike Chapman walked into the room and closed the door behind him. He leaned over the table to shake Colin’s hand, then put a finger on his lips and pointed outside, mouthing to me that I had company.

“Anyone I know?”

“Some broad who claims she represents a lawyer you’re investigating. I thought maybe you were expecting her, so I told security I’d bring her up with me.”

West and I exchanged glances. “She can wait,” I said as West played a portion of the tape I hadn’t seen.

Kalder stood at the foot of the mattress, shouting words at his companion. She was handcuffed and had her ankles in leg irons, but there was no gag on her mouth. On the bedside table, next to a studded dog collar, was a Barbie doll, her head and wrists locked into a colonial-style stock.

The pathetic-looking lawyer yelled at his subject. “Exegesis!”

The woman squirmed on the bed, and in a tentative, whispered voice began to spell the word she had just heard. “E…x…i…”

Kalder snapped the length of leather whip back over his shoulder and brought it down on the trembling woman’s bloody thigh. “No! That’s not right.” She continued to guess at the spelling.

“They’re both screaming pretty damn loud.”

West ran his finger across the top of the screen. “It’s all been soundproofed in here, Alex. The whole apartment was rebuilt to suit his needs. We canvassed the neighbors last night and they’ve never been disturbed by any noise, although you can hear how loud the volume is on the tape.”

“Syzygy!” Kalder shouted out, over our chatter.

Now she was writhing and whining at the same time. “I don’t know that word,” she cried. Then, choking as she tried to talk, she made an effort to spell out loud. “S…y…z…z…?”

This time the whip licked the ceiling on its way down to her thigh, streaking it with blood from its last contact with her body.

Chapman helped himself to one of the coffee cups. “Shit, Colin, who is this perv? I’d hate to play a game of Scrabble with him.”

I stood up and West put the tape on pause. “Just think of it as one of those reality TV shows. We’re calling itSurvivor Jeopardy.

“Let me see what Kalder’s pal has to say for him.”

Mike held the door open and I motioned for the woman who was waiting outside my office door to come in. “Good morning, I’m Alexandra Cooper.”

“Marcy Arent.” She extended a hand and introduced herself to each of us. “I represent Peter Kalder. I’m here to find out what your intentions are in this case.”

“My intentions? Right now the detectives and I are reviewing evidence that was taken from your client’s home last night. I didn’t ask for this meeting. You did. That’s about all I’m prepared to tell you this morning, so feel free to explain what brings you here if you want this conversation to go on any longer.”

“Are you planning to arrest Mr. Kalder?”

“If there is informationyou want to give to us, I’m happy to take it from you. I’m not going to answer any of your questions now.”

Arent’s facial expression was as severe as her dark brown ladylawyer suit and thick-heeled shoes. “There’s no sex crimes case here, Ms. Cooper. All of the sexual activity between Mr. Kalder and his friend was consensual.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“Then why is this any of your business? What does your unit have to do with this?”

Mike spoke. “Something unpleasant happens to a woman, between her knees and her neck, on the island of Manhattan, it’s Coop’s territory. Anything else we can help you with today?”

“She consented to the physical assault, too.”

I bristled. “Our court of appeals says you can’t consent to be beaten and whipped, Ms. Arent. Want the cite? I happen to agree with them.”

She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out her business card. “You obviously don’t have a clear understanding of sadomasochism. We’d like to help you with that.”

I didn’t reach for the card so Arent set it down on the conference table.

“You decide what kind of injury is acceptable for a human being to sustain?” I asked.

“As long as the sex is safe, sane, and consensual, you’ve got nothing to prosecute.”

“I think where you and Coop here don’t see eye to eye is on the sane thing. It’s okay with you to draw blood, to rip skin off another person, to leave permanent scars-”

“And who might you be?” Arent glared at Mike, thrusting one of her cards at him. “I’m with AASF-the American Alliance for Sexual Freedom. We’ve got more than sixty-five hundred members across the country. The simple truth is that whether or not you know it, fifteen percent of your friends-each one of you-engage in some kind of bondage or sadomasochistic behavior.”

“Speak for yourself, sweetheart. Me, Coop, and the lieutenant just like to cuddle. No leather, no flogging, no dripping candle wax.”

Arent’s unsmiling gaze flipped back and forth between Chapman and West. “Which one of you was at my client’s home last evening?”

“That’s me. Colin West.”

“You’re with…?”

“First Precinct.”

She pointed at Mike. “And you?”

“Mike Chapman. ADU.”

“What does that stand for?”

“Acronym Designation Unit. You see, Ms. Arent,” he said, studying her business card, “everybody’s got some catchy phrase that describes their organization. Me, I would have come up with a better name for yours. The one you’ve got captures none of the flavor you’re trying to express here. Like, uh, National Union for Thrashing Someone during Sex. Then you could all just call yourselves NUTSS. Okay?”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing out loud and turned to roll my eyes at West. Battaglia would get a letter of protest about my insensitivity to the S and M community. So be it.

Mike ushered Arent to the door simply by taking two steps in her direction and watching her recoil. “Ms. Cooper’s got a lot on her plate today. Go tell your client to relax. The lieutenant’s not in any rush to lock him up. We know Peter’ll get a hard-on when we put him in cuffs, and we’d hate to make him that happy.”

Arent ignored Chapman and directed her ire toward me. “We’re going to go over your head on this one, Ms. Cooper. I’ll get an appointment with the district attorney.”

I walked across the hallway and unlocked my office as Mike followed me in. “I wish everybody would go over my head for a change. I might actually get some ordinary work done if I didn’t have to deal with every psycho who knocked on my door. I think there’s a support group for all the misfits in this country except cops and prosecutors. Let’s let Colin work on the videos in the conference room. Did you have a chance to look over Katrina’s file last night?”

Mike spread some of the papers from her personnel folder out across the top of my desk. “She didn’t punch a time clock, but a lot of these computer printouts reconstruct when she left the Cloisters to work at one of the other museums. It’s clear she spent a fair amount of time last fall going to both the Met and Natural History. She had passes that got her into each of them, and nothing to limit her access to any parts of the collection in both places.”

We spent the better part of the next hour trying to chart a time line of Katrina Grooten’s fall schedule. I told Mike about Jake’s message from the rich Mrs. Gerst, and we waited until after nine-thirty to call to set up a meeting with her. I couldn’t get past her social secretary, who invited us to come to Gerst’s Park Avenue pied-à-terre at the end of the afternoon, so we had no sense of whether the visit would be a complete waste of our time.

I was on the phone setting up the rest of the day and weekend with Sarah and Mike when Mickey Diamond came into the room, a rolled-up copy of the day’sPost under his arm.

“You got an answer for me?” I still wanted to know who had been the first leak on Katrina’s story.

“Good news or bad? What do you want first?”

“No bad. Not for another month or so.”

“You’d better look now. Otherwise you’ll just call and yell at me later.” He passed the newspaper across the desk and I unfolded it to see a half-page picture of Pierre Thibodaux. The photograph of his head was attached to the body of a Hollywood-style mummy, and in typical tabloid fashion, the headline read:TUT! TUT! MUSEUM BIGWIG DEPARTS UNDER WRAPS.

I skimmed the story, which linked his sudden separation from the institution to the discovery of the corpse in the coffin. “Very classy, Mickey. A lot of dignity over at your operation.”

“I didn’t write it, really. I would have made up a quote from you if I’d done the story myself.”

That was a technique that the dean of the crime reporters had perfected over the years, often enough so that even Battaglia knew I wasn’t breaking his rules to talk about my cases.

“What have you got for me if I tell you what I know about the leak?”

Mike was reading the Thibodaux story. “What has she got? For once will you just do the right thing and tell her what she wants to know? We promise to call you before we call Liz Smith the next time some rich and famous bastard confesses to killing his wife.”

“It’s nothing you don’t already know, Alex. Pat McKinney is just trying to make your life miserable.”

“Don’t tell me he’s found a new way to do it.”

“His friend, Ellen Gunsher?”

“Yeah. An expendable member of our brilliant legal staff.”

“Do you know who her mother is? Well, who her motherwas says it better.”

“No, should I?”

“Before your time. Her mother, Daniella, used to be a network commentator. Like Jake, only never quite as established. Career washed up ages ago. She did something unprofessional, like sob onair during some speech at a political convention. She’s supposed to be a bit unbalanced. Still works in production for a newsmagazine show. My source tells me the call about your case came in from Daniella Gunsher’s assistant. Like they were calling from the network to check on whether we had heard the same story before they went with it.”

“My apologies to Jake,” Mike said.

“If you ask me,” Mickey Diamond continued, turning to leave the room, “I’d be willing to bet Daniella doesn’t even rate an assistant at this point in her career. Your pal McKinney probably made the call himself, using Daniella Gunsher’s name to establish press bona fides, so the call would be noticed. That guy hates your guts, Alex.”

“Always a pleasure, Mickey.” His news confirmed my own beliefs, but made it impossible for me to report it to Battaglia. He didn’t want to hear any more of the grousing that had become commonplace between McKinney and me. I’d just have to put the information away for future use.

Mike packed up the Grooten file and we waited for Laura to Xerox a set for each of us before we drove uptown to keep our eleven o’clock appointment at Natural History.

I reminded Mike that we needed to stop at the East Side shop to try to identify who had purchased the sweater that was found on Katrina’s body. We got off the FDR Drive at Sixty-first Street and went north on Madison Avenue until I spotted the store marquee that matched the logo on the cashmere label. We parked and went inside.

Mike identified himself to the saleswoman, who was alone in the small store, using the quiet morning hour to refold and shelve her stock in neat columns. Like most everyone we encounter in the course of a murder case, she seemed to hope that the two of us were mistaken that any connection-no matter how casual-could be made between her life and our investigation into the death of someone else.

I showed her the Polaroid photograph of the sweater that Mike had taken at the morgue, and then a copy of the label that had been sewn into the collar. She studied the picture, bringing it up close to her nose to examine the stitching and inset design. There was a trace of an accent-Italian, I thought-when she looked up to speak to us. “But it’s not from this year, is it?”

“We’re not the fashion police, ma’am. It’s what the girl had on when she died. We don’t know when it was purchased, or by whom. That’s why we’re here.”

The earnest young woman picked up the slip of paper with the information about the label. “This manufacturer, we don’t carry his things anymore. Ah, perhaps if I check our computer, it will tell me something.”

It seemed to take forever as she sat at the monitor and entered the name and code numbers into her machine. Refusing to give in to the need for reading glasses, she leaned in close again and squinted at the display.

“Ah, yes. Two years ago, in the fall. We had a shipment of nine of these in a crewneck style, from the fabricator in Milano who handknits them.”

“Just nine?” Mike asked.

He seemed pleased, realizing that it was not like trying to track down some mass-produced piece of department-store clothing.

“One in each size-small, medium, and large. And three colors only. Lime, raspberry, peach.” She looked at Mike as though he must surely know the reason. “Our customers, sir, they don’t like to see themselves-how you say?-going and coming. This was a very expensive sweater.”

She paused. “And you are interested in which one? The medium size, in peach, am I right?” She pressedENTER, and an answer that seemed to please her popped onto the screen.

“Allora,”she said softly, in her native Italian. “Of course, I should have remembered. Her favorite color, and she was such a beautiful lady. I’ll write down the address we had for her, but I don’t think it will do you much good. She’s dead now, also. We sold this one to Penelope Thibodaux.”