“You went way too far, Mike.”
“He pressed the wrong buttons with me.”
“Your buttons are so loosely attached that anybody pressing them might get tangled in the threads,” I said. “I’m only surprised Battaglia hasn’t beeped me yet to try to rein you in.”
We were just leaving the back steps of Gracie Mansion.
“Relax. Statler will never admit to being humiliated by the likes of us. You want to see how Hal’s doing with Salma’s apartment?”
“Sure.”
“Here, Alex,” Mercer said, reaching into the pocket of his overcoat. “This should get you past the photographers without a problem.”
He handed me a black knit watch cap, and I stood at the curb, twisting my hair into a knot and pulling the hat down to cover half of my face.
“Perfect. You look like an ordinary mook,” Mike said. “Nobody’d ever make you.”
Cops had set up wooden horses to keep the paparazzi back from the entrance of the building. “Why don’t we back-door it?”
No one seemed to notice as we trekked around to the rear. Mike buzzed, and this time, with a uniformed cop at his side and the camera focused on the badge Mike held up next to his face, we were let in immediately.
When we stepped off the elevator on the tenth floor, the apartment door was ajar and Hal waved us in from the foyer. “Hey, guys. Alex. You here to get in my way?”
“Nah. Just trying to make sense of all this,” Mike said. “ESU did a great job getting the body out.”
“So I heard. My second team’s over there.”
“You alone?”
“No. Jack Egan’s beginning to work the back rooms.”
“What’s taking you so long, Hal? You’ve been here half the day.”
“Interruptions like you, pal. Explaining things to all the big-wigs.”
“Like who?”
“Like Scully. Like the mayor’s office. Like Leighton’s old man, who thinks he had a right to come in here ’cause his son paid for the pad. I’m trying to get it done, Mikey. You want to help? Gloves and booties, please.”
“Have you found anything of interest yet?” I asked as Mike passed us each another pair of latex gloves.
“Sarge called from ESU. Took a white wool blanket covered with blood out of the bottom of the well,” Hal said. “Jack found white fibers in one of the trash bins they use to take recyclables down in the service elevator.”
“We saw some of those out in back.”
“That must be how whoever did it got her out of here.”
“But she had these awful gridlike marks on her shoulders,” I said. “What do you think could have caused those? Is there any surface like that in the apartment?”
We were following Hal through the living room toward the kitchen.
“I’m not sure exactly what you mean. Nothing in here that I’ve seen.”
“I can do a sketch of it for you,” I said.
“Coop’s not content unless she’s butting into everybody’s job,” Mike said, throwing up his hands. “The ME will tell you what did that to her skin.”
Two people rarely saw the same things when they looked at a dead body. The medical examiner searched for signs of the fatal injury, cops for any clues that might offer a solution to the killer’s identity, and often I was hoping-quite unrealistically-that the corpse would tell me how its final moments were spent.
“Any word yet on your corkscrew?” Hal asked.
“Human blood. Now they’ll have what they need to compare,” Mike said.
“Isn’t it odd that the place would be in such good order but the killer would leave that behind?” I asked.
“You wanna know what I think?”
“Yes.”
Hal planted himself in the middle of the living room floor. “First of all, Salma wasn’t entertaining a stranger, right?”
“She may have started life here as a hooker,” Mike said, explaining the tattoo to Hal. “Can’t rule that out entirely.”
“This guy knows the building well enough to get himself in, and there’s nothing in the apartment to suggest a struggle.”
“So it was a blitz attack,” Mercer said.
“She’s in her nightie,” Hal went on. “Gets rid of her kid for the evening-no word on that front?”
“Nothing.”
“Sets out the vino and the glasses, and when she goes into the kitchen, bam! Her buddy gets her into a chokehold and jabs the tip of the screw right into her neck.”
“Good thinking, Hal,” Mike said. “He’s either a surgeon or a damn good wine steward, right?”
“I’d expect blood to be everywhere,” I said, holding my hand to my throat as Hal spoke.
“And it was, Counselor. And it was.”
“No, Hal, there was nothing when we got here last night except the wine opener.”
“Bleach, Alex. He bleached the kitchen floor and sink. Just took a couple of minutes to sponge it down. Might have been more blood on him than on the tile. But we picked up some spatter in there. Probably thought he’d gotten the corkscrew too. Then he sprayed air freshener to mask the smell.”
“The princess wouldn’t know from cleaning the kitchen floor. The only bleach she cares about is the kind that keeps her hair blond.”
“What does that tell you about him?” I asked. “Chance he’s an ex-con?”
We had seen lots of cases recently in which men sent to jail by DNA evidence continued their criminal ways when released, but came to crime scenes armed with condoms when they raped or prepared to destroy evidence as they departed.
“Or he watches too much TV,” Hal said. “Everybody’s an expert on TV, you know? Every lazy slob thinks he could do my job. Find this guy soon and get a warrant for his laundry bag. He’s gonna have blood all over his shirtsleeves, if I’m right about how he was holding her. And blood on his shoes. It had to drip on his shoes.”
“I should be that lucky I find him soon,” Mike said. “Or her.”
“Her?” I asked.
“Why, you think it couldn’t be a broad? You don’t figure Claire Leighton had a grudge to settle? Maybe while Salma was waiting for her date, Claire knocked on the door and the girls had a catfight.”
My stomach churned a bit. I’d never thought about Leighton’s wife as a possible suspect, but there was good reason to consider her.
I was scanning the clean white walls and stainless steel appliances, looking for any signs of blood, but there were none. “Too clean for a catfight.”
“Just like a dame to straighten up the mess.”
“Hey, Hal!” His partner was shouting for him from the other end of the apartment. “Bring your equipment and get your ass down here quick.”
Mike stepped aside so Hal could go first, stopping to pick up his camera from the living room sofa.
“Whatcha got, Jack? You find a skeleton in the closet?” Hal made his way quickly down the hall to the master bedroom.
Jack Egan was standing on a stepladder. At his feet were half a dozen cardboard shoe boxes-all designer labels-with their lids removed, and another two dozen stacked on shelves in the closet.
“Better than that,” Jack said, opening the cover of the box he was holding. “I found a gold mine.”
Like the one in Jack Egan’s hands, the boxes on the floor were filled with money. Mike crouched beside them and scooped out a fistful of bills.
“Hundred-dollar bills-Ben Franklins all,” he said, playing the edges of them as he counted the wads. “Each one of these little wrappers holds ten thousand dollars. I know Coop would just as soon have the shoes, but we’re probably looking at a million or more in cash.”
“What the hell was this broad doing with all that money?” Hal asked. “Where’d it come from, do you think?”
“You’ll be the first to know, Hal. Meanwhile, you better tell your other team to check the bottom of the well for loose change.”
NINETEEN
“You don’t want to be where the
money is, Coop,” Mike said. We had taken the elevator down to the rear entrance, making our way out past the lineup of shopping carts left behind the building, no doubt, by lazy deliverymen who’d been relieved of their bags.
“Why not?”
“By the time it’s sorted and accounted for, some muckety-muck will demand that Internal Affairs empties the pockets of all of us who were up there. Big money scares me.”
“Why don’t we go back down to my office? We can spend the evening putting this whole thing together. It’s so much more quiet than the squad.”
“She’s right, Mike,” Mercer said.
“You take her with you. I’ll stop by the morgue and then meet you there.”
The damp cold and darkness didn’t seem to bother the press corps. They were still staked out on East End Avenue, hoping for a sighting of someone related to the scandal of the disgraced congressman or news of the missing woman.
I got in Mercer’s car and as he made a U-turn to get on the Seventy-ninth Street entrance to the drive, I called Nan to tell her everything that had happened. I also asked if she could round up at least one of the other women in our group so that we could reboot our investigation over takeout and triple doses of caffeine.
My next call was to Donovan Baynes. I hesitated before dialing, wondering whether he was passing information to his old friend Ethan Leighton, but his position in charge of the task force left me no choice but to tell him. He was as intrigued by the news of Salma Zunega’s abduction and murder, and the rose tattoo, as we were. Baynes agreed to participate in our evening meeting.
Traffic slowed us as we inched downtown on the FDR Drive. I put the phone in my pocket, my head on the headrest, and closed my eyes.
“Things okay with you, Alex?” Mercer asked.
“Everything’s been good till this series of disasters.”
“Your folks?”
“Happy to spend some downtime with me,” I said, shaking off my exhaustion to talk about something more personal than the investigation. Mercer knew that my parents, who retired to a small island in the Caribbean, had spent the week leading up to Christmas with me in the city, before going out West to visit with my brothers and their kids in Colorado.
“And Luc?”
I had flown to Paris the day after Christmas. Luc Rouget, the divorced restaurateur I’d been dating, lived in a small village in the south of France. But we had planned a romantic interlude in the glamorous city of lights.
“We had a wonderful time together. He’ll be here next month,” I said. He was making progress in his business plans to open here in Manhattan, where decades ago his father had created one of the world’s classic French restaurants, Lutèce. “You and Vickee will have to have dinner with us.”
“Happy to do that. You know how I feel about this.”
Mercer had become so grounded and pleased with his newfound family life that he had taken to urging me to ease up on my professional duties and put my relationship with Luc in full gear.
“It scares me a bit, Mercer. I’ve told you that.”
We were slowed to a standstill in the underpass next to the United Nations. “It wouldn’t mean anything if it didn’t do that.”
“It’s different,” I said, looking at him. “I know these decisions aren’t easy for anyone, but Luc doesn’t live here. Even if he gets the restaurant going, he’s in this country six months a year at best. I’d have to give up all of this-”
“Give up what? Chasing these animals around town? Righting all the wrongs of the world? You’ve proven you can do some of that. Time to turn a page, maybe.”
“I’m afraid I like it too much.” I knew it seemed strange to my friends outside the criminal justice system when we described our jobs in such upbeat terms. But the satisfaction in doing justice-convicting the guilty, exonerating the innocent, and trying to restore some measure of relief to those victimized-was a constant source of pride. “I can’t see myself sitting on a stool behind the cash register in Mougins, asking people if they enjoyed the special of the day.”
Mercer laughed. “The man’s too smart to have you doing that, Alex.”
“That’s why his first wife split.”
“Is that what makes you leery, my friend, or is it the intimacy? The fear that if you give in to happiness something will come along to destroy your center again?”
I had been engaged to marry a medical student I’d fallen in love with while I was at law school in Virginia. Together Adam Nyman and I had bought our dream house on Martha’s Vineyard, and I’d allowed myself to plot out all the fantasies of a long life together. On the drive from Charlottesville to Chilmark for the wedding weekend, Adam died when his car plunged from a bridge on the interstate to the riverbed below.
I bit my lip. “Maybe that, Mercer.”
“Why is it you fall in love with guys who are impossible to fit into your life? First Jed, then Jake, now Luc. You’ve got to work at it some yourself, Alex. This guy is mad for you, isn’t he?”
“Who set you up for this chat?” I said, reaching to turn on the car radio. “Nina? Joan?”
My two closest friends had teamed up, from Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to hector me about my love life and raise the volume of the ticker on my biological clock.
“Vickee’s been talking about you a lot.”
“That’s bad for me. I can tell.”
Vickee Eaton was a second-grade detective herself, with a great desk job in headquarters, and had married Mercer many years earlier. But as the daughter of a cop who’d been killed on the job when she was fifteen, she had broken up their relationship, unable to cope with the dangers that he was constantly exposed to in the field. We had all celebrated with them when they remarried several years ago.
“It’s been good for her, Alex. She wants it for you too.”
“But she didn’t give up the work she loves, and she got you in the deal. How do I make that kind of thing happen?” I said, reflecting for a few seconds before I spoke again. “Want to do a movie tomorrow night? Get our heads out of this mess for a few hours? Let Vickee tell me herself?”
“Wish we could,” Mercer said. “Her cousin’s engagement party is tomorrow. I got the whole mother lode of Eatons to contend with.”
“Who’s minding Logan?”
Mercer’s son was almost three years old. Vickee worked her schedule so that she could be with him every evening and weekend, while her younger sister was the main babysitter at other times.
“Vickee’s on the hunt. One of her pals will turn up.”
“Forget that. The boy is mine for the night.” I was delighted to be able to offer the comfort of a close friend to stay with Logan while they celebrated with family. Mercer twisted his head and smiled at me. “I hear you right?”
“I’ve done it before. I haven’t even given him his Christmas presents yet. You tell Vickee that I’ll drive out and take care of everything.”
“It may get late. Those Eatons can party.”
“If it gets too late, I’ll sleep over. Let’s see if this domestic tranquillity is all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Deal.”
It was almost six o’clock when Mercer parked in front of the entrance to the DA’s office on Hogan Place. The space for Battaglia’s car was empty, and the security officer greeted us and let us pull in.
Laura was still at her desk when we walked down the quiet corridor to my office.
“You are the most loyal human being in the world,” I said to her, hanging my jacket and scarf. “Why didn’t you go?”
“Nan told me it would be a late one. I ordered in a vat of coffee for all of you and some sandwiches. Your phone’s been going off the hook.”
“Anybody I want to hear from?”
“Not a one. I’m happy to stay if I can be useful,” Laura said. “Mercer, that guy from Verizon wants you to call him. Some kind of problem with the information I faxed over to him. And nobody touch the chocolate chip cookies-they’re for Mike.”
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Laura had an unabashed crush on Mike and did everything she could to provide his creature comforts in our sterile bureaucratic environment.
Mercer helped Laura on with her coat while I flipped through the messages. “How’d I get lucky enough to miss the district attorney tonight?”
“Rose called to ask if you were back yet. Said he was on his way to City Hall.”
“Again?”
“No, no. Nothing to do with you.”
“Really?”
“You trust anyone more than Rose? She told me that it has something to do with either a fraud case, or a judicial appointment. Maybe both.”
“Good.” If it was about Tim Spindlis, I didn’t need to take the heat.
Mercer went inside my office, sat at the desk, and made his call to the phone company. I was saying good-night to Laura when Howard Browner appeared in the doorway.
“I’d say Happy New Year to you, Alex, but it doesn’t seem to be starting off like a good one.”
“Thanks, Howard. You must be swamped with everything that’s come into the lab in the last forty-eight hours.”
Browner was one of my closest friends at the forensic biology lab. With every cutting-edge advance in this scientific field that continued to evolve, Browner and his colleagues educated us and prepared us for the challenges of the courtroom.
“Can I talk to you about Karim Griffin for a minute?”
I stepped into the hallway with Howard so Mercer could finish his conversation. “I don’t ever mean to blow you off. I just can’t concentrate on anything but today’s events, Howard. Let me get back to you in a couple of weeks, when things calm down.”
We were an incongruous pair. Howard was much shorter than I and a lot rounder, with a head of dark, untamed hair and a full beard. But he had helped me through some of the most difficult issues I had ever faced with patience and a wisdom that he was pleased to impart to others.
“I was here to testify on that murder case in Times Square. I ran into Catherine and she said you’d been meaning to call me about Griffin,” he said. “That’s the only reason I dropped by. I have an idea on the push-in with your eighty-two-year-old victim, but it’ll wait.”
“Here’s hoping she has time to wait. I shouldn’t have put you off, Howard. What is it?”
Hell Gate Page 14
