Terminal City

by Linda Fairstein

  The three of us exited and started our way up. At the intersection on top, where a right turn led to the old waiting room and the left toward the concourse, it was obvious that even more uniformed officers from a cross section of agencies had arrived.

  Some of the men and women looked like SWAT team members, with guns and helmets and bulletproof jackets obvious to all. There were more K-9 patrols than I had ever seen in one place. Everyone seemed to be herding civilians to exits on the sides and ends of the vast terminal.

  “Attention, please,” the rich male voice spoke sternly to the stragglers. “Grand Central Terminal is closing down in fifteen minutes. You have fifteen minutes to get yourself to the platform if there is a train headed for your destination, or to make your way back onto the street. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause. Watch your step, ladies and gentlemen. Watch your step and remember to mind the gap.”

  We stopped for a minute to let a group of men who seemed slightly intoxicated weave past us prodded by two agents, who were in street clothes with their badges flapped over their pockets. They appeared to be coming up from the Oyster Bar, unhappy to have their revels interrupted.

  “That voice sounds so familiar to me,” I said to the cops.

  “It’s one of the men from Homicide,” the young man said. “He’s taken over the controls in the stationmaster’s office and seems to be having a mighty fine time of it.”

  We made the left turn and headed for the concourse. There was indeed a commotion, and most of the officers seemed to be struggling to respond to angry and confused commuters who were standing their ground.

  I had never been in Grand Central when the information booth that was in the center of the floor was empty, but those employees had obviously been dismissed for the night. Cops with dogs were standing along each of the departure gates on the far side of the room, guiding passengers to the last trains waiting to pull away from the platforms.

  Police had even taken over the carts that sanitation workers used to scoot around the station. There was a small fleet of machines, zigzagging across the floor, trying to round up the more stubborn people who weren’t moving toward the exits. They looked like a fleet of Zambonis clearing the ice after a hockey match.

  I glanced up at the constellations painted on the ceiling. The majestic celestial figures seemed to be the only part of the terminal undisturbed by all the activity below.

  As we crossed the floor, headed for the stationmaster’s wing—out of sight behind the staircase to Vanderbilt Avenue—I was conscious of stares from many of the officers patrolling the terminal. I must have looked a bit bedraggled at this late hour, in my sloppy outfit, escorted by a pair of cops—more like a belligerent passenger than part of the law enforcement team.

  Rocco Correlli saw me coming and waved me into the office.

  “Good work. You found a sibling already?”

  “Pug did it, believe it or not. I’m not sure it’s such a good thing.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s Blunt’s kid sister, twenty-three years old. Same name as the mother, so she wasn’t that hard to find. And she’s a waitress at a joint in the theater district, six blocks from here.”

  “What’s the bad news?”

  “She’s refusing to talk. I got Chapman in there, hoping he can use some of his charm to weasel something out of her. Then I thought maybe you being a woman and all, she might open up to you.”

  “Feels like that’s the only use you have for me, Loo. It doesn’t always work that way, but let me give it a try.”

  Rocco walked me down the short hallway to the office in which Mike was sitting with Zoya Blunt.

  “Hey, Coop. C’mon in. Meet Zoya.”

  “Good evening. I’m Alex Cooper.” I held out my hand, but she wouldn’t take it.

  “Pug found her on Facebook. Drove right over to the west side and picked her up. Isn’t that right?”

  Zoya Blunt was slight and small in stature. Her dirty-brown hair was short, framing her pale, unsmiling face with waves. She was wearing a tight black skirt over opaque black stockings, a white T-shirt, and a short apron with pockets, which still held order slips from the restaurant at which she worked.

  “I don’t want to be here, miss. I want to go back to work.”

  “I’ve explained to you, Zoya,” Mike said, “you’re not going anywhere until you talk to me about your brother.”

  The girl couldn’t have been here very long, but already Mike was short on patience.

  “Maybe I could sit down with you for a while,” I said. “There’s a private room upstairs. We could just be talking there, out of the way of these—uh, bullies.”

  She looked from me to Mike.

  “Really, Zoya, Mike’s got a tough job to do. He’s not unreasonable. I can make you comfortable upstairs, where I’ve been working.”

  “I’m not going to be comfortable anywhere. I’ll get fired for leaving the floor during a Friday night dinner hour.”

  “We’ll see that you don’t get fired,” I said. I leaned in toward her and tried to cut through the scowl on her face. “Young women have been murdered, Zoya. We have every reason to—”

  “I read the newspapers. I know about the murders.”

  “If for some reason it’s not Nikolay—”

  “You can’t even pronounce his name right.”

  “Sorry for that. But if for some reason we’re wrong, you can help clear him.”

  Mike was standing behind me now. “I’ve told her all that, Coop. She’s determined to stand by him, I guess. If that’s her game, there’s nothing any of us can do about it.”

  “Let me work with her a while.”

  “Maybe she had a hand in it, you know? I never thought he got this done all by himself. Didn’t I always say I thought he had an accomplice?”

  Zoya Blunt threw her head back in disgust. When she faced me again, there were tears streaking down her cheeks.

  I needed Mike to lay off the “bad cop” stuff, but I feared that it might not be an act.

  “Why don’t you give us some time, Mike?” I said. “Leave us alone in here.”

  “Time isn’t gonna change anything,” Zoya said. “You’re both too stupid to know that.”

  “It’s not the first time I’ve been called ‘stupid,’” Mike said. “I usually like to know why.”

  “You actually think I might have had something to do with these killings?” she asked. “Or with my brother?”

  Mike took his handkerchief from his pocket and passed it to Zoya. “Maybe so. Maybe that’s why you’re all clammed up.”

  “You really think you can keep me here against my will?”

  “That’s the last thing we’d want to do,” I said. “But the commissioner might direct me to get a material witness order.”

  “What the F is that?”

  I wouldn’t have a prayer getting one for Zoya Blunt at this point in time. “It means a judge would agree with us that you have information about your brother that’s too important to us to let you go.”

  “Screw it. You can’t find a judge in the middle of the night,” she said, blowing her nose, as her mood went from tearful to defiant.

  “I can’t tell you how good Detective Chapman is at doing just that.”

  Mike pulled on the back of my shirt collar.

  I let her take a few breaths before I went back to what she had said a minute ago. “Why shouldn’t we think you’d have something to do with your brother? Aren’t you close?”

  “Nobody’s close to him.”

  “When’s the last time you saw him, Zoya?” I asked.

  She lowered her head and twisted Mike’s handkerchief into a ball.

  “I haven’t seen Nik in more than a year, okay?”

  “You remember when it was?” I asked, pressing her harder than she wanted to be pressed. “Do you remember if you’ve heard from him since then? We need to know everything about him we possibly can.”

  “We need your help try
ing to find him,” Mike said. “There are dozens of cops out here looking for him. If you don’t give us a hand, he’s likely to get hurt.”

  “You think that matters to me, Detective?”

  The tears were flowing again.

  “He’s your brother,” Mike snapped back. “I’m sure it matters.”

  “Here’s why you’re stupid, Detective. I don’t give a damn if he gets hurt,” Zoya Blunt said. “The last time I saw Nik was the night he raped me.”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Why don’t you leave us alone for a few minutes?” I said to Mike.

  Zoya Blunt had put her head on the table and cried to the point that her shoulders shook.

  “I didn’t mean to be so rough on you, Zoya,” Mike said, kneeling beside her to try to get her attention. “I—I didn’t know.”

  “You couldn’t have known. I never told anyone.”

  “I can get you all the help you need,” I said. “We’ve got counselors who deal only with this issue.”

  She didn’t speak. I wanted to hold out the hope of psychological support but didn’t want to waste a minute of time in the search for Nik Blunt.

  “Would you like me to do that?” I needed to get a conversation started with the suspect’s sister. I wanted to take her back up to the operations room with Yolanda and get her talking.

  “There’s only one thing I need, and you can’t give me that.”

  “What is it? I’ll certainly try.”

  “I lost my family, Ms. Cooper. I lost my entire family because of Nik. You can’t do a goddamn thing for me.”

  I walked away from the table, to the far end of the room.

  “You’re right about your family. I can’t change that. But I can do things for other people, for people who don’t deserve to be damaged any more than you do.”

  “Not my problem.”

  “Would you mind getting one of the crime scene photos, Mike? I think the lieutenant has a folder of them. A picture of Corinne Thatcher is what I want.”

  Mike nodded and left the room.

  “I don’t want to see any pictures, okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay with me, Zoya. I want you to look. I want you to pick your head up off this table and stop wallowing in your own misery. Tell us what you know about Nik and where he might be hiding. I’m not going to let go until you do that.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Have you ever met either one of the young women he killed?” I asked. “Or the young man? Did you recognize their names and their photographs in the papers?”

  “I’m not interested.”

  “Did you know any of them? Do you know if Nik knew any of them?”

  “More stupid questions.”

  “I’m going to keep asking them until I hit one you know the answer to. I’ve got friends out in this terminal. Great friends, who cover my back every day of the week. And I’m not going to let a single one of them get cornered by your brother.”

  Mike returned to the room with three eight-by-ten photographs in his hand. I took them from him and laid them on the table just beyond Zoya Blunt.

  “This is what we do for a living, Zoya. Day in and day out. We see people who’ve been violated in the worst possible ways, who’ve been butchered and battered and left for dead,” I said. “Take a look at this.”

  She didn’t move.

  I walked around her, so that her head—still resting on the table—was facing me. “Pick up your head, young lady,” I shouted in her ear.

  Zoya’s head practically bounced off the table, but still she wouldn’t look at me.

  “We know that Nik hears voices,” I said. I was hoping my bluff would work, counting on my intuition that the person Jean Jansen heard fighting with Lydia was Nik Blunt.

  Her eyes opened and focused on me for the first time. My hunch was confirmed.

  “Look at these photographs, Zoya.”

  “No, no. You tell me what you know about the voices. How did you find that out?”

  “We have a witness.”

  “Then you don’t need me,” she said. “Tell me who the witness is.”

  “Look at the pictures,” I said, grabbing the photos that showed Corinne Thatcher’s throat, sliced open from one side of her neck to the other. “Look at what Nik did to her.”

  “I don’t want to look.”

  I slammed my hand on the table, next to her ear. She sat upright. I wrapped one of my arms around her shoulder and held her in place, sticking the image directly in front of her.

  Zoya Blunt gasped.

  “We’re out of time,” I said, softening my voice. “What happened to the boy who loved to come to this terminal with his father, Zoya? How do we find him before he does this to someone else?”

  She shook her head from side to side. “Nik could be anywhere. He doesn’t have a home.”

  “Everything he’s been up to has been connected to Grand Central.” I didn’t need to point out that the bodies were piling up closer and closer to the main concourse to make my point. “If you tell me what you know about him, maybe that will help.”

  She was silent.

  “You say you want your family back,” I said. “What happened to everyone?”

  “My father was an engineer, like his father before him. A hostler. You know what that is?”

  “We just found out tonight.”

  “We came here with him all the time, especially my brothers, but I loved it, too. More inside the terminal, and riding with my dad on the train. Not so much the tunnels and tracks.”

  “I’m with you on that,” I said. “Tell me about your mother, Zoya.”

  She exhaled and closed her eyes. “I’m named for her—Zoya. She—she had a lot of problems, too. Nik’s like her. A lot like her.”

  “Was she from Russia?” Mike asked.

  “What difference does that make?”

  “Maybe none,” I said. “But one of the victims was an exchange student from Russia. Maybe there’s some—some cause that Nik believed in. That might have been the way they met each other.”

  “No causes except himself. That’s always been Nik.”

  “In what way is he like your mother?”

  “I’m sure the men who worked with my dad will tell you anyway,” she said. “The mental illness. The voices. She heard them, too.”

  I had handled cases with schizophrenics before, both as victims and as perps. I knew that in at least 10 percent of people with the condition, there is a first-degree relative—a parent, uncle, cousin—that the disease is most often inherited from.

  “Was your mother ever diagnosed?”

  “Pretty late in her life. But she was in denial. She blamed everything for the difficult life she’d had.”

  “How was it difficult?” I asked. “In what way?”

  “She’d grown up in Russia. Her family was very poor. They couldn’t feed all the children, so they actually encouraged her to leave. To emigrate here. She met my father, which is the only good thing that ever happened to her.”

  “Why do you say that? She had three children, too—that must have been a happy thing.”

  Zoya Blunt sneered at me. “My father was a rock. Just a good solid guy, who loved his family, loved his work. Married my mother before she went crazy, he used to say. The kids? Yeah, we made them both happy at first, but I can’t really remember a time that Nik wasn’t a problem.”

  “A problem in what way?” Mike asked.

  “Hard to know where to start. Nik was a wild child. A daredevil, a fighter. My dad wanted the three of us to go to college. Nik’s really smart. I mean scary smart about some things. He got into a good school on Long Island—but he was drinking and smoking pot—and dropped out the first semester.”

  “Did he have an influence on your other brother?” I said, thinking of the middle child.

  “You think,” Zoya said, sarcasm dripping from her tongue, “that killing him was a bad influence, Ms. Cooper?”

  That answer got Mike�
�s full attention. “Nik killed your brother? How’s he been this violent but never arrested?”

  “If you want to know what broke my mother’s heart, it was the night five years ago when Nik was twenty-four. He got my brother drunk, stoned—whatever it was—then put him behind the wheel on the Long Island Expressway and passed out on the backseat.”

  Zoya Blunt paused.

  “The car skidded on black ice and was crushed against a tree on the side of the road. My other brother—who was really a sweet kid, like my dad—was killed instantly. Of course, Nik was thrown clear.”

  “It’s always that way,” Mike said.

  “It’s why I never went to college. My dad had already died of a heart attack a few years before that. My mother cracked up, and I was left to stay home and take care of her.”

  “More than any teenager should have to cope with,” I said.

  “Yeah. I didn’t do it very well.”

  “Nik’s violence,” Mike said, “when did that all surface? Did schizophrenia cause your mother to be violent?”

  “Never,” Zoya said. “My mom lost touch with reality. She’d watch television and think that characters on a show were sending messages to her, you know? She had delusions all the time, so she wasn’t able to function outside the house.”

  “That’s what trapped you at home with her?” I asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Were there ever delusions about politics?” Mike asked.

  Zoya looked at him, giving the question some thought. “Actually, yeah, there were. She used to have all these crazy thoughts that were about people she knew back in Russia. That they were trying to make her do things. Nightmares about her childhood there.”

  “Was her family persecuted for political beliefs?”

  “Depends on who you asked. When my mom started losing it, she claimed that was the case. That we’d all be killed—back in her hometown and here—because of political beliefs, from back when the Soviet Union broke up,” Zoya said. “But my father told me none of that was true. I never knew if he said that just to keep me from being frightened, or because it was a fact.”

  “What did he think?”

  “What my dad thought, Detective, is that my mother’s family were a bunch of thugs. Gangsters was the word he used. That what they did was smuggle tobacco in from Kyrgyzstan, and not one of them knew the first thing about politics. They weren’t dissidents; they were thugs. And anything else she thought about her relatives was a total delusion.”