The Bone Vault

32

Jorge was adamant. And scared. He refused to open the garage door when the police started banging on it because he could not see who they were and had no idea who or what I had been running from. The cops finally gave up and came downstairs through the entrance that led from within the building’s lobby.

“Would one of you guys mind taking my friend up to her apartment?”

“Are you kidding? You think we’re leaving you now?” Renee said. “Besides, I’d like to know what all the excitement was about.”

It took me ten minutes to explain the Shirley Denzig story to the police, who called in a description of her for transmission to other patrol cars in the area. They escorted us upstairs to our apartments, and arranged to meet me in the lobby at 7:45 in the morning, to make sure I got out of the garage without incident, so I could pick up Clem and get down to my office.

I ignored the blinking light on my answering machine and went in the den with Katrina Grooten’s file, holding the portable phone on my lap while I tried to calm myself and concentrate on the investigation. If my adrenaline had not already been fueled by Angel’s predicament, my episode with Shirley ensured that I would be unable to sleep.

I turned on the television to NY1, muting the sound, waiting to see whether they cut to live coverage of the unfolding drama in East Harlem.

Another hour passed, and then two. An out-of-control blaze in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx had spectacular flames that kept the local news crew engaged. My notes to myself were no longer making sense, the to-do lists I created for Mike were growing unreasonably long, and the relaxing weekend on the Vineyard seemed like it had ended a month ago.

At three-ten the phone rang.

“She’s fine. Go to sleep now, girl.” Mercer’s deep voice allayed my worst fears.

I exhaled into the mouthpiece, too upset to speak.

“Hey, we got a pretty good track record for saves. I sure as hell wasn’t gonna let that little punk break it for me. I’ll be in late tomorrow. Catch up with you guys in the afternoon.”

“Whatever you need. Thanks a million, personally, on this one. I’ve got to ask you, Mercer, did she go there because-?”

“She went there for exactly the reasons you think. And she liked it there fine, gettin‘ it on with Ralphie. Turns out he’s dealing crack from the apartment. Kept her pretty well tuned up since she arrived. Angel decides to pocket some vials before she’s ready to leave, to make a few bucks on the visit.”

“I see it coming.”

“He catches her, smacks her around. Now she wants to scoot, but she’s got a black eye and he doesn’t want to let her out. Angel threatens to snitch, and he’s got a reason to go ballistic, ‘cause he knows she’s called the police before, to have Felix locked up. She picks up the gun and points it at Ralphie, but he grabs it back and can’t think of any place to stick it except right up against that underutilized bundle of brains the child has. Neighbor hears screams, dials 911.”

Maybe this is the wake-up call Angel needed. Why couldn’t she come out of this like Dorothy in Oz and realize that at her age there’s no place like home?

“Look, Alex, I’m whipped. I’ll give you chapter and verse tomorrow. Angel’s being treated at Mount Sinai, Ralphie’s spending the night courtesy of my brothers in blue down at central booking. We recovered two guns, a load of ammo, and forty-two crack vials from his apartment. Everybody’s safe and sound. Tell Mr. Chapman to let go of your hand and go home. See you tomorrow.”

There was no point in telling Mercer that Mike hadn’t waited out the siege with me. I turned off the tube, rolled over on the sofa, and fell asleep.

In the morning, I showered and dressed, met the cops in my lobby, who took me to the garage so that one of them could ride with me over to Park Avenue. No sign of my nocturnal stalker, so I let him out, continuing on to pick up Clem from the hotel at eight. We found a space on Mulberry Street and I tossed the laminated NYPD parking plate on the dashboard.

We walked through the small asphalt-paved park that only twenty-five years ago had been the heart of Little Italy but was now the center of a greatly expanded Chinatown. Mike called it Tiananmen Square. Men and women dressed in black mandarin-style jackets bustled back and forth, carrying plastic bags from the Canal Street fish markets and the Division Street vegetable trucks. Kids from the local elementary school played kickball. Nobody was speaking English.

As we emerged from the gates on the Baxter Street side of the park, the sound of the screeching children was replaced by the chants of about twenty adults who were marching in two rows, up and down the length of Hogan Place. Some of them were carrying posters and placards, hand-lettered with an assortment of slogans. All of them were shouting in unison.

“It’s safe and sane! End Battaglia’s reign!”

I could read the signs now as we approached the corner. It was a group from the American Alliance for Sexual Freedom, protesting my arrest of their sadomasochistic spelling whiz, Peter Kalder. A few had their organization logo labeled on large cardboard signs while others had printed more original thoughts:WHIP SOME SENSE INTO ALEX COOPER! andCOOPER-SHOW SOME RESTRAINT-STAY OUT OF OUR BEDROOMS! Stick drawings of me, cat-o‘-nine-tails in one hand and cuffs dangling from the other, would have pleased Mike Chapman immensely.

Prosecutors and cops were weaving their way among the demonstrators, visibly annoyed at having to maneuver around the rowdy cluster to get to the office entrance.

“Shit.” I stopped in my tracks when I saw aPost cameraman waiting opposite the building. This was a good morning to avoid a photo opportunity, obviously arranged by the alliance. “Do you mind if we go in through the back door of the Tombs?”

“Whatever’s easiest for you,” Clem said, standing on tiptoe to try to read all the comments. “I never realized there was a unit like yours, just specializing in sexual assault cases. You must walk a tight line, trying to keep everybody happy.”

“I gave that idea up a long time ago. Most people have no reason to know we exist until the unimaginable happens to them or a loved one.”

“Doesn’t this make the district attorney angry with you? He’s elected, isn’t he?”

“Battaglia’s the best. He’s got one rule, Clem, when we make decisions about prosecuting. ‘Do the right thing.’ Don’t play politics with people’s lives, don’t try to think how something will spin in the next day’s op-ed pieces, just try to do justice. He hates all the tabloid titillation with sex crimes, but he’ll stand behind any decision his top people make.”

“Lucky for you.”

I pounded on the heavy door behind the building, where the grim green trucks of the Department of Correction were depositing the day’s defendants who were being bused in from Rikers Island.

“Hey, Jumbo, can you let us in? There’s a lynch mob at my front door.”

The eight-to-four guard on the rear door of the Tombs was the size of a Mack truck. He pressed the button to open the wide mouth of the garage, and Clem and I walked inside. The pens were still empty but the crew was getting ready to receive its allotment of felons-in-waiting.

“G’morning, Ms. Cooper. You need any help with that little commotion outside? I could round up some of my guys and show them what black and blue looks like, in living color.”

“Save your strength, buddy. Nothing out there I can’t handle with a tough hide and a decent sense of humor.”

He took us through a lock-and-block system of corridors. The one behind us had to be secured before he could open the next door in front. There were five from the point at which he admitted us, until we emerged from the cells into the arraignment part, which would be called to order in less than fifteen minutes, at nine o’clock.

A rookie prosecutor I recognized, who was nearing the end of his first year in the office, was reviewing case files. He would be manning the court calendar for the rest of the day. He was puzzled to see me enter from the prisoners’ doorway.

“Need anything here?”

“Just taking a visitor on tour. What’s your name?” When he told me, I wrote it on a Post-it in my wallet, telling him I might be down with a search warrant later in the day, and asking him to tell the judge to expect me.

I stopped for coffee in the cafeteria in the courthouse lobby, which had long been known as the roach coach. We rode up on the elevators that carried convicted felons to the probation office. I tried to avoid eye contact with one of them-a taxi driver who two weeks ago had been found guilty of fondling an intoxicated passenger who had fallen asleep in the rear seat of his Yellow Cab.

The circuitous routing had added almost twenty minutes to the trip to my desk.

I unlocked the door and told Clem to settle in while I checked my voice mail and organized my desk after the long weekend.

“Here’s what we’d like you to do.” I set up my laptop on the table between a row of filing cabinets. “I want you to log on a guest account, so it will show your regular address. Last night at dinner, we drafted an e-mail that we’d like you to send.”

“To?”

“You tell me. Our thought was that you would send it to the team that was working on the exhibition. Was there a user-group address?”

“Yeah. There was a special ‘org’ account set up for joint access by workers from both museums.”

“Would it be logical that you could still get into it?”

“Sure. It’s meant to be used by interested people in museums all over the world. A lot of them are former employees or student interns, and many are scholars who know the collections. We’re all encouraged to send in suggestions for the exhibition. Things like that.”

“Is everyone we talked about last night included in that grouping?”

Clem ticked off the names on her fingers and nodded her head in response.

“Did you bring your address book with you?”

“I followed all your instructions.”

“Look through it and include anyone else you think had a connection to Katrina,” I said. “Use your own greeting. I want people who know you to recognize your voice, if you will. Your language. And when they open the message, the header will show the hour you sent it as daylight saving time, which would make it pretty late back home.”

“What will you do about that? Won’t the e-mail display what time I sent it?”

“We’ve got a tech unit upstairs. I left a voice mail for one of the guys who works there, who was due in at eight. He’ll come down to reset it for us, so it shows UK time.”

“Good.”

“Mention that you’ve been so worried since the police called you that you haven’t been able to sleep.” I handed her a slip of paper I had worked on last night. “Then tell them this.”

I’m coming to New York later this week. I thought some of you who were also Katrina Grooten’s friends might want to meet with me to plan a memorial service for her. She sent me a letter shortly before she died, as it turned out, and some of you may be interested in what she told me. Have the police been helpful? I’m wondering whether to give the information to them.

“It would be hard not to be curious about that, I guess. Most of the people we’ve talked about know I’m not likely to want to cooperate with government authorities. They think I enjoy being a troublemaker.”

“That’s the idea. Just the way people respond to you should be interesting. How did you set it up with your office in London?” I wanted to be sure that no one would answer Clem’s phone there and give up the fact that she was already in Manhattan. She was safely under our collective wing at the moment, and it helped to know that while we tried to lure Katrina’s killer into plain sight.

“Told my boss I had to make an emergency trip to Greenland, to see an ailing relative. Didn’t leave them a phone number. Just said I’d stay in touch by e-mail.”

“What will your secretary tell people?”

“No such luxury at my level. It’s voice mail. I just changed the outgoing message to say the same thing.”

“Anyone know where you’re staying in New York?”

“How could they? I didn’t have a clue myself until we got to the hotel lobby.”

“Then why don’t you get to work? I’m just going to stick my head into the district attorney’s office to see how he wants me to deal with my sidewalk cheering section.”

Rose Malone was untying her sneakers to change into the high heels that showed off her great legs. “I bet you needed those to dash through my swarm of admirers this morning. What time’s the boss due in?”

“He gave the commencement speech at Stanford’s graduation ceremony yesterday. He’s flying back today, so he won’t be here at all.” She straightened up and whispered to me across her desk, “McKinney already came by to see him about it. I think he’s going to have the Fifth Precinct squad commander cordon off the entrance and move the protestors around to the rear of the building. The police will call it a safety measure. At least it keeps them away from the judge’s entrance and all the grand jurors.”

“You think they have any openings in the appeals bureau, Rose? No witnesses, no lunatics, no controversies.”

“Your life would be so dull you wouldn’t be able to stand it. You thrive on this.”

“I like challenges, I like creative investigations, I like the people I work with.This? ” I pointed out her window to the sidewalk below. “There’s no way to win. If the big guy calls in, tell him I’ll do whatever he thinks is best. And that before the end of the week we should have some developments on the Grooten murder.”

Mike was already in my office when I got back across the hallway. “That’s some flogging you’re getting downstairs. I came mighty close to firing off a few shots to disperse the crowd but I thought I might accidentally get lucky and hit one of ‘em.”

“I’ve got Clem working on her first e-mail-”

“Done and gone. Hank Brock was in here tinkering with the time function on the computer. Said to tell you he got it set to read like she’s in London, okay?”

“Perfect. And I’m going upstairs as soon as there’s a quorum in the grand jury.” I’d be lucky if that happened by ten-fifteen. “I want to get some subpoenas ready for the Natural History Museum. We need a detailed floor plan and a list of anything that might be a private vault or closet.”

“Got my first fish on the line,” Clem said. I picked up my head and watched as she clicked on her new mail.

She read it aloud.

“When do you arrive and where will you be staying? Why don’t we meet for coffee? Katrina was such a sweet girl. The police seem determined to bungle this entire thing. We should talk first.”

“Who’s it from?”

“That woman who works for Pierre Thibodaux. Eve Drexler.”