Silent Mercy

by Linda Fairstein

  “Tell me why you’re here tonight,” I said.

  “I’m here every night. My mother won’t let me be at her house. She got a boyfriend who don’t want me there.”

  “And Amos?”

  “He don’t have space for me. Him and my grandmother live in a studio. Ain’t no room.”

  “How do you get in here?”

  Luther fidgeted with the belt loops on his pants. “Amos. He the last one to leave every night, first one to come in the morning.”

  “Your friends, he lets them crib here too?” Mercer asked.

  “Not exactly. He don’t like most of them. Used to be you could sleep on the steps of almost any church. Even get food and all. Now every one got bars on them.”

  The city’s religious institutions had long been havens for the homeless. That situation, neither safe nor sanitary, had ended with the gating of most of them when a homeless man who had lived outside a church on the Upper West Side for three years froze to death just feet from the entrance.

  Luther described the habit that had developed because of his grandfather’s affection for him. Those nights that were too cold and raw, he called Amos and asked for shelter. His crew knew he would let them in later, when alone, and they’d leave at daybreak, before Amos arrived. In exchange for a warm place to crash, they would bring drugs to feed Luther’s habit.

  “What time did you get here last night?” I asked.

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Don’t mess with her, Luther,” Mercer said. “She’s got more juice than I do.”

  Luther closed one eye and studied me with the other.

  “What time did your grandfather let you in?”

  He didn’t like it when we brought Amos into the mix. “It was, like, midnight. A little earlier than that.”

  There was no watch on either of his skinny wrists. “How do you know?”

  “ ’ Cause of the bells. I was in here when they rang, when they done twelve times.”

  “And the others?”

  “I texted them when he left. Maybe fifteen minutes later.”

  “Give me your cell phone,” Mercer said, holding out his hand.

  Luther frowned.

  “Give it up.”

  The messages he sent to his friends, and their responses, would be captured in the memory of his phone. He drew the razor-thin machine out of his pocket and placed it in the large palm of Mercer’s hand.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Nuthin’.” He was watching Mercer scroll through the messages.

  “What did you do, Luther?” I asked again.

  “Me and them, we always hang in the basement. They brung me some food, is all.”

  “And crack?”

  He blew me off. “I don’t do that shit.”

  “Coke?”

  “L’il bit.”

  “So these guys you don’t know,” Mercer said, reading the name off the cell history, “which one is Shaquille?”

  Luther bit his tongue.

  “Shaquille, the one you texted.” Mercer leaned in closer. “He one of the dudes inside, or is he the one who skipped out on you?”

  The answer was slow and deliberate. “Inside.”

  “Which one deals?”

  No answer this time.

  “Must be Shaquille or you wouldn’t have been so anxious to invite him to join you.”

  Luther had nowhere else in the room left to look but at Mercer.

  “Go talk to him, Alex. I’ll get Luther here up to speed.” Mercer handed me the phone. “What else did you hear besides church bells last night?”

  “She gonna ask Shaquille. I don’t know nuthin’ else.”

  As I turned the corner into the sanctuary, I noticed another kid was gone. The remaining one was still cuffed to the end seat of a pew. His knee was bouncing up and down, nervously, at a furious pace, and when Mike stepped away from him, I could see that tears were streaming down his cheeks.

  “What happened?” I asked. “Where’s—”

  “Scotty took the tall one back down to the basement for a once-over.”

  “What’d you do to make this guy cry?”

  “He’s fifteen, Coop. Wants his mama, I think.”

  “Which one’s Shaquille?” I asked.

  The knee jerked and the kid shook his head.

  I held up Luther’s cell and texted a few words. I could hear the noise of the vibrating phone in his pocket over the insistent tapping of his foot.

  “I guess you’re Shaquille,” Mike said. “That solves that piece of the puzzle. Now, why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper what you saw last night? And remember, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.”

  “I was waiting for Luther to call me.” The kid wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I was around the corner, on 114th.”

  “You know what time it was?” Mike asked.

  Shaquille shook his head.

  I looked at Luther’s outgoing messages. “A little bit before twelve forty-five.”

  “All three of you there?”

  “Nope. I was alone.”

  The bounce in his leg was like a lie detector. It sped up whenever the topic got more sensitive. He didn’t seem to care about the time of night, or his companions.

  “What’d you see?” Mike asked.

  The knee was rocking now. “I told you, I don’t know. It was like a man, but then it didn’t move like any man I ever seen.”

  “How’s that, Shaquille?”

  “It was almost like he could fly. Like a cartoon character, you know?”

  “I don’t know. You tell us,” Mike said. “What’d he look like?”

  “Too dark to tell,” the kid said, sniffling back his tears.

  “Black? White? Big? Small?”

  “He was a big guy, that’s the thing. Big but he moved real quick and light. Couldn’t see his skin ’cause he had a hoodie on. Black hoodie and sweatpants. Just figured he black ’cause—I don’t know—’ cause it’s, ’cause …”

  “’Cause it’s the middle of Harlem in the middle of the night?”

  “Why some white guy be breaking into Mount Neboh?” Shaquille asked.

  “Breaking in?” I said. “Is that what he tried to do?”

  “I didn’t stay to see that. I just know if he was any friend of Luther’s, he’d be goin’ by the back door.”

  “Tell her what you saw. Tell her where he came from.”

  “Don’t know where he came from. He was already near the gate when I got to the corner. He had a sack with him. Big sack, like a duffel. I mean, really big. First thing he did when the street got quiet, he reached up and dropped the bag over the gate.”

  “Were you smoking yet, Shaquille?” Mike asked.

  “Let him tell his story,” I said. “Stop interrupting.”

  “I just want you to understand he wasn’t high. Okay, Coop? What’d he do?”

  “He got himself up that fence. Like he hung on to the railing from the side, and then he kind of flew himself over.”

  “Threw himself?” I asked.

  “Flew, ma’am. He, like, flew.”

  “Don’t roll your eyes at me, Coop. That gate is tall,” Mike said.

  “We’ve tried lots of times to get over that fence, ma’am. You can’t do it. It’s really tall. Must be like ten feet, and there’s no crosspieces to climb on.”

  “Did you watch him after that?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I wanted to see what was in that bag.”

  “The man opened the bag?” I asked, wondering how this kid—how anyone—could have watched somebody be set afire on the church steps and walk away from it.

  “Yeah. He took it up the steps and unzippered it.”

  “Anyone else around besides you?” Mike asked.

  “Nope. There were cars on the boulevard, but it was too dark for people driving by to notice much.”

  I positioned myself directly in front of Shaquille. “What did you see when the man opened the sack?”


  The kid’s knee was going wild.

  “I thought it was, like, a person. Like, I thought I saw legs coming out, you know? Then I figured out it couldn’t be a real person, like a body or anything. That it must have been some other thing he got flopping around. It was real creepy-like, so I just left, is what I did.”

  “Why did you think it wasn’t a person? That it wasn’t a body?”

  “’Cause there couldn’t be a body, ma’am, without no head.”

  FIVE

  “WHAT time do you have to be in court?” Mercer asked.

  “Not until eleven. The judge has to take care of an abscessed tooth first. Don’t worry, I’ll get to put my head down for a couple of hours.”

  It was four a.m. and we were sitting in an all-night coffee shop on 125th Street. Luther Audley and his pals had been released after Mike’s Homicide Squad partners took statements from them. Sergeant Grayson had two teams looking for the fourth kid, who fled—with information from Shaquille, a willing snitch—in the unlikely event that he had any useful tidbits to offer. The Crime Scene Unit had started its painstaking work on the church steps and inside the sanctuary. And Amos Audley was left with the sad task of cleaning up behind them and his wayward grandson.

  We left as the tabloid newshounds and photographers had clustered in front of Mount Neboh, grumbling to Grayson that they had missed their most salacious shots.

  Murder never got in the way of Mike Chapman’s appetite or conscience. While Mercer and I sipped coffee, Mike was working his way through an order of scrambled eggs with onions and a slab of crisp bacon, using cornbread to mop up the grease on his plate.

  “I know, I know,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how I can eat like this after what we saw this morning, and I’m wondering why you’re drinking black java when you’re already so wired you could tap dance in the well of the courtroom while you’re cross-examining your worst enemy and not even come up for a breath of air.”

  The three of us had worked together on some of the city’s most horrific cases for more than ten years. We knew our respective foibles and strengths, considered ourselves family, could shoot barbs directly to the heart of either of the others without a second thought, but covered the others’ backs from any outside attacks. We came to this alliance from backgrounds so different that sometimes it was inconceivable to me that we understood one another as well as we did.

  “How soon till we find out who she is? That’s what I’m thinking about.”

  “Somebody’ll miss her, Coop.”

  “And who did she cross to come to such a hideous end?”

  The counterman walked over to the booth to refill our mugs.

  “It’s the setting that gets me,” Mike said. “Does Neboh speak to you, Mercer?”

  Mercer had been born in Harlem and worked in Manhattan North Homicide with Mike before transferring to Special Victims. He knew the streets and the people, even though he had been raised in Queens by his father—a mechanic for Delta at LaGuardia Airport—after his mother’s death in childbirth. He was forty-two, five years older than I, and married to another detective, Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a young son.

  “I’m not sure. Like Gaskin said, Mount Olivet Baptist, that was built as a synagogue too. It was Temple Israel in 1906. Abandoned with white flight. Baptist since 1926. They took the ark the Torah used to sit in and turned it into a baptismal pool.”

  “So?” Mike asked, crunching the bacon while he talked.

  “You said that you and Alex were headed to 120th and Lenox because of the fingertips in a garbage pail on the street.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s only one block from Mount Olivet. Gives something to your theory that the dead woman’s religion may be tied up in this. I mean, the best-known Baptist church in Harlem is Abyssinian. Built Baptist, stayed Baptist. Your murderer wants to send a message about Baptists, that’s where he goes. Not to both of these recycled synagogues.”

  “Maybe he didn’t know Neboh’s history,” I said. “I certainly didn’t.”

  “Too much of a coincidence, then, that he chose both Neboh and Olivet. I think Mike’s onto something.”

  Mike’s investigative instincts were probably in his DNA. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD, proud that his son had excelled in academics and had chosen Fordham University, majoring in history, as a way out of the dangerous street life in which his own career had been forged.

  Two days after retiring from the force, while Mike was in his junior year at Fordham, Brian Chapman died of a massive coronary. Mike honored his promise to get his degree but immediately enrolled in the Police Academy to follow his passion, to shadow the steps of the man he most revered. Six months older than I—thirty-eight—Mike’s bachelor existence had only once been threatened by a serious romance, which ended in the accidental death of the young architect to whom he’d been engaged.

  “You got a dish of ice cream? Chocolate, two scoops?” Mike called out to the waiter. Then to Mercer, “So how did Abyssinians get involved with New York City Baptists?”

  “Goes back two hundred years, right down near the courthouse. Way before we were known as black or African American, seems the Negroes didn’t like being segregated—forced to sit apart—while they were worshipping in God’s house. It was a bunch of rich Ethiopian merchants who broke away from the First Baptist Church, way down on Worth Street, to start this one.”

  “Where do you begin to look for a woman’s head?” I asked.

  “She’s fixated on that, Mercer.” Mike was starting to soften his frozen dessert by swirling the spoon around and around the dish. “Coop’s not going to be happy until we have all the body parts.”

  “Don’t play with your food,” I said.

  “They teach you that at Wellesley, Miss Manners?”

  I was the most incongruous part of our trio. My parents’ middleclass existence changed radically during my childhood when my father, a cardiologist, and his research partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that was used in almost every open-heart surgical procedure worldwide for nearly two decades thereafter. We moved to Harrison, an upscale suburb in Westchester County, and my parents were able to provide my brothers and me with the best educational opportunities available—for me, at Wellesley, where I majored in English literature before getting my JD degree at the University of Virginia School of Law.

  They fostered my interest in public service and were pleased that I found such fulfillment in my work as an advocate for women and children who’d been victims of intimate violence. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was the premier prosecutorial model in the country, and I had thrived there under the leadership of Paul Battaglia and his hand-chosen staff of dedicated lawyers.

  If my work seemed depressing to some, they had no understanding of how uplifting it was to help this long-underserved population triumph in the courtroom. In just the past thirty years and through the diligence of those who came before me, archaic laws that treated women as chattel were abolished, investigative techniques had been developed to match forensic advances, and the application of DNA technology to law enforcement methods had revolutionized the criminal justice system.

  “You know what I learned at Wellesley, Mike?” I smiled at his ability to bring humor to the most dire situations. “If you’ve been out all night with a guy, and he’s about to ask you to pay for his meal, you ought to find someone else to take you home. Ready to go, Mercer?”

  “Even when the sucker who’s had you out with him doesn’t even bother to try to jump your bones?” Mike asked. “That’s a sorry situation, kid. What’s today, anyway?”

  “Wednesday. Soon as the sun comes up, it’ll be Wednesday.”

  “Put it on my tab, Coop. I’ll catch up to you on payday.”

  “By my count, you’re about three years of payday overdue, Mike. You’ll be at the autopsy?” Mercer asked.

  “Yeah. Late this afternoon.”

  �
�Could you tell anything about the killer from looking at the neck injuries?” I asked.

  “Other than that he meant what he was doing, what is it you want to know?” Mike asked.

  “The obvious questions. Do you think it was done by a surgeon, or by a butcher? You know, someone skilled anatomically?”

  “Don’t go all Jack the Ripper on me, Coop. Somebody whacked off the poor broad’s head. The only thing I’d say about him for sure is that he was powerful. Not artful and no surgical precision. Really strong. Must have used something like an ax or a hatchet. A machete, maybe.”

  I leaned back against the cracked vinyl padding on the seat of the booth. “Where do you even begin on this one?”

  “It’s got ‘personal’ stamped all over it,” Mike said. “Nothing random about this victim. Nobody goes to all this trouble hacking up a stranger. Get a make on her, it’ll tell us half the story.”

  “You know, Alex,” Mercer said, “morning news shows will blast this story everywhere. All the nuts respond to gruesome. Your office, the local precincts, the squad phones—they’ll be ringing off the hook. Every woman who didn’t come home last night will have someone looking for her. Prepare yourself for the onslaught.”

  “I’ll be in court. Thoroughly preoccupied.”

  “And we’ll be pawing through every Dumpster and incinerator north of the DMZ,” Mike said, referring to 110th Street, where Harlem unofficially began. “Hoping this madman didn’t toss her head or the murder weapon in the river. And the zoo. I’ll send Grayson to the Bronx Zoo. Keep him out of my way. Egg on my face, Coop?”

  “Not the usual kind,” I said, reaching over with my napkin to wipe the ice cream from the side of his chin. “I’ll bite. Why the zoo?”

  “Could be an orangutan, no?”

  “You lost me.”

  “Everything you ever taught me about Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Rue Morgue.’ The monstrously fierce killer who defied Parisian police’cause he could scale the sides of buildings and kill women, getting away undetected.”

  “Perfect, Mike. The monkey did it. Flew over the gates of Mount Neboh with his headless torso before making his escape. The DA’ll be impressed.”

  “Great ape, Coop. Orangutans are apes, not monkeys.” Mike was chewing a toothpick, his dark eyes flashing with the energy his breakfast provided. “How do I start, you want to know? Just like Poe. Ratiocination. Forget the hysterics that are going to surround this case and think rationally. Make sure no orangutans escaped from the zoo.”