“You said you spoke to Coop twice.” I found myself frantically looking around the room for something to hang on to, something that would have been a physical link to Coop. Now I hated the piece of me that was full of green envy. I wanted her in reach.
“Yes. Alex texted me from Primola.”
I hadn’t been close enough to her during most of the evening to notice whether she’d been sending messages or not. It wouldn’t have struck me as unusual if she had.
“She told me about the man who was arrested yesterday and about the impromptu celebration with the cops and with Catherine.”
“She broke the date?” I asked.
“It wasn’t a date, to begin with.”
“Excuse me, Jake. A business meeting, in the evening, at a big-ticket restaurant like Patroon. Stupid of me to confuse it with a date.”
“Alex told me about how things had changed with you the first time I called her. So did Vickee, before I even got through to Alex. Vickee didn’t want me to upset what you’ve got going. Alex is in love with you, Mike. The spirit in her voice was infectious. You know what I think? I think she wanted to see me in person to make it clear to me that she was glad we split. That she actually came out where she wanted to be.”
“So that text from the restaurant is when she told you she wasn’t coming, right?” I said. “But did she give you any idea of what she was going to do after the dinner with the guys?”
Jake shook his head from side to side. “She didn’t break it off, Mike. That second call just pushed the time back. Alex said she probably wouldn’t get to Patroon until after nine o’clock.”
The girl was sending me mixed signals. It wasn’t like Coop to be all business after dinner and drinks at Primola. She must have really wanted to see Jake, despite the way he was downplaying it. She obviously had no intention of making the short walk home when she left the others. She had ordered a car service to bring her to meet Jake.
“She actually called Stephan herself,” Jake said, referring to the maître d’. “She suggested to him that he put a drink or two for me on her tab—which was really sweet, I thought.”
I never thought of describing Coop as sweet. Kind and thoughtful and warm—except when she wore the armor, the tough veneer she thought conformed to the image of her held by her adversaries.
“But then the owner himself came along. Do you know Ken?”
“Yeah, I do,” I said.
“I hadn’t seen Ken in a year or more. So we had dinner together—time kind of flew by while we talked. Cuban cigars, now that the embargo is lifting, fly-fishing—”
Like I had a life share in a river in Scotland to catch salmon with my fly rod. Not my style, newsboy.
“And I kept on waiting for Alex after Ken left.”
“Did you hear from her again?”
“Nothing. No call, no text, no e-mail. It got to be after ten and I just figured she was—well, that she was with you.”
“Look, Jake,” I said, growing more worried and agitated by the minute. “I’ve got no idea where Coop is. None of us do. No one at the office heard from her all day and the ladies politely assumed she was holed up here with you. Didn’t you think to reach out to Vickee or to Catherine when—?”
Jake held out his arm toward me when the phone rang. “Yes, yes, I’m here in my room,” he said, presumably to someone at the front desk. “Yes, you can send her right up.”
“If you don’t mind, Mike, I’m expecting a guest now,” he said, walking to the door of the suite and holding it open.
“You didn’t wait long to make a backup plan, did you?” I said.
“Looks as though we both got stiffed last night. And like I said to you earlier, Mike, now Alexandra Cooper is your problem.”
NINETEEN
“You look like shit, man,” Mercer said to me when I opened the door of Coop’s apartment to let him in.
It was about an hour after I left Jake at his hotel. Mercer had been working an evening tour but took off early when I told him Coop was gone.
“That’s better than how I feel. I didn’t take this seriously till—”
“Nobody did. Vickee’s been tearing her hair out,” he said, tossing his iPad on the sofa. “Where do we start?”
“Call in every chit we’ve got,” I said. “Get TARU working on her phone and e-mail. Use a contact at the Taxi and Limo Commission to track the car services to see if anyone picked her up. Check whether traffic has video cameras on Second Avenue that might have caught her leaving Primola.”
“We do all those things ourselves starting right now,” Mercer said. “But who do we tell?”
I looked at him like he was crazy. “Tell? How do you mean? There’s nobody to tell till we figure out what’s going on.”
“Wait a minute, Mike. Let’s get on the same page here. Alex walks out of a restaurant to meet a guy for a drink and she gets, what, vaporized?”
“You said it right. She gets what? Where’d she go? We’re all starting from the idea that she’s in the wind ’cause she wants to be. There’s no suggestion of any kind of foul play. We’re not even twenty-four hours out yet.”
“It’s not aliens that swept her away from here, okay?” Mercer said. “That’s the only thing I’ll give you.”
“Good. One group of suspects eliminated,” I said, pacing back and forth. The bright city lights from the living room windows illuminated the dark night sky like search beacons, but we had no ideas about where to look.
Mercer sat down, opening his device to start his compulsive list making. “You know Alex better than anybody.”
“Don’t make that assumption. She doesn’t let people in. Not the parts of her she doesn’t want to expose. Not even to me.”
“Yeah, well, maybe you waited too long to try.”
“Take your best shot, pal.” I turned my back to Mercer and stared out at the slice of Central Park visible between the tall buildings.
“You’ve got to tell someone, Mike.”
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“I mean her parents, for example.”
Coop’s mother and father had retired to the Caribbean. “They’re not in the country. And what do I tell them that doesn’t have them going berserk before we know anything’s wrong?”
“I’d want to know. I’d want to know the second there was a suspicion that something was off-kilter,” Mercer said. “And now there is.”
“Then you call them. I’ve got better things to do.” I flipped my steno pad onto the dining room table and started dialing my phone.
“Battaglia will go ballistic if you leave him out of this.”
“I don’t work for him.”
“How about the lieutenant? You’ve got no secrets from him,” Mercer asked. “And the commissioner? Scully’s been great to you.”
“When’s the last time you looked at the patrol guide?”
Mercer grumbled. He went to the refrigerator, pulled out two cans of Diet Coke, and handed me one. I snapped the ring and took a drink.
“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.
“Okay, Detective Wallace. What’s the crime we’re reporting, exactly?”
“I’m hoping to God there isn’t one.”
“Good. What do you expect the police commissioner to do, in that case?”
“We sure as hell have a missing person.”
“Not according to the NYPD patrol guide,” I said. “A missing person can be a lot of things. She can be under the age of eighteen or over the age of sixty-five. Not Coop. She can be mentally or physically impaired. Not the broad I saw yesterday. Possible victim of drowning. Not on the sidewalk on Second Avenue on a clear night in October. A person who indicated an intention of committing suicide. Not one of Coop’s problems. She just invited me to slip away to the Vineyard with her this weekend. Broiled lobster, chilled wine, warm fire, and hot lips, if I can make light of this. Last category in the guide is absent under circumstances indicating involuntary disappearance
. Maybe we’ll develop that—you and I. But as of this moment, we don’t have a single one of the categories for the commissioner himself to declare Alexandra Cooper a missing person.”
Mercer picked up a silver-framed photograph of Coop from the sideboard in the dining room. It was taken at Logan’s christening, and she was holding the baby in her arms.
“You’re not wrong,” he said. “We’ll get pushback from the top.”
“Damn right we will. That last category—involuntary disappearance? If you remember this crap half as well as I do, that little group of complaints gets lodged in the local precinct. They don’t go to Major Case; they don’t go to some elite unit. They just sit and rot for an entire week on some squad commander’s desk in the Nineteenth because there isn’t a damn thing to investigate. It’s not even twenty-four hours since one of us has heard from the diva of the DA’s office, Mercer. We’d be laughed out of the station house.”
“Major exception here, Mike,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“It’s hard for a human being to have more enemies than a career prosecutor,” Mercer said, taking his time to speak. “Alex has to be up top on a lot of hit lists.”
“She knows that. Knows that her specialty attracts some mean motherfuckers. Rapists, child molesters, wife-beaters.”
“She’s been threatened before. Big-time.”
“Comes with the territory. Most of her colleagues have also.”
“She’s in the middle of a huge screw-up right now,” Mercer said. “Antonio Estevez. And what did Drew Poser tell Alex when they discovered the computer hacking? That somebody was trying to bring her down.”
I kicked the base of a huge terra-cotta planter that held some kind of tall, exotic plant. “Makes no sense, Mercer. If they were out to kill her,” I said, not meaning the words to be as cold as they sounded, “she’d have been dead on the street. And if it was a kidnapping, there would already be signs of it—someone claiming credit or demanding ransom.”
Mercer took a minute to think about those points. I had gone from unconcerned throughout the day, to pissed off when I learned about her date with Jake, to beginning to lose my mind at the thought of Coop in the hands of the bad guys.
“Unless,” Mercer said, “it was a kidnapping gone wrong.”
I lowered myself onto a chair, put my elbows on the table and my head in my hands.
“Look at the time I’ve wasted, Mercer.”
“We’ve got to stay cool, Mike. Not going to help her if we don’t think it through. I was just throwing out a far-fetched idea, a reason why no one has claimed to have her yet.”
I picked up my phone again and continued dialing.
“TARU,” the voice on the other end said after three rings. “Detective Bowman.”
“Bowman? It’s Mike Chapman here,” I said, giving Mercer a thumbs-up. “I need a favor.”
“Again? Dude, you are like deep into me over here. We’re swamped this week. Haven’t you honchos at homicide ever heard of terrorists?”
“Can’t stand those guys. Wish they’d just stick to blowing each other to bits,” I said. “But I’ve got something more urgent. I need you to find a cell phone for me. Stat.”
“Like a where’s Waldo situation?” Bowman said. “Who’s Waldo and where’s his phone, right? Like, whatever happened to good old pounding-the-pavement detective work?”
“Love to chew the fat with you, Bowman, but this time Waldo’s a prosecutor who hasn’t been heard from in almost twenty-four.”
“Didn’t hear it on the nightly news.”
“Still under wraps.”
“Like he’s pranking you, maybe?” Bowman asked. “A pranking situation?”
“Like she’s taking a breather.”
He whistled into the phone. “She? Is it your main squeeze, buddy?”
“Good news travels fast,” I said.
“I just did a ton of work on that today for Drew Poser. DA’s squad. Alex Cooper’s computer. You know it got hacked?”
“Yeah. Heard that. I want to talk to you about what’s on it—at least, I’m sure she’ll want to—but she took the day off and we can’t raise her now.”
“Difficult broad, Chapman. Always has been,” Bowman said. “Hope nobody snatches her, because he’ll live to regret it. ‘Ransom of Red Chief’ situation. They’ll be wanting to give her back to you faster than you can say Alex Rodriguez.”
“Here’s the phone number,” I said, reciting the ten digits of Coop’s phone. “How fast can you get me a location?”
“Depends. The DA puts all kinds of blocks on their phones. And it depends how far she’s traveled. These e-mails I downloaded today from her account talk about her place on Martha’s Vineyard, and that can take longer because it’s out of range, so—”
“Forget about reading those personal e-mails, Bowman,” I said.
“How’s life in the fast lane, Chapman? Didn’t know you could write poetry like Shakespeare.”
“Lose it, man. I don’t send her e-mails. Just lose your plan to play with me,” I said. “When will you have an answer?”
“Consider it done. Cover me with a subpoena tomorrow, okay?” Bowman said. “I’ll call you back.”
I hung up and waited until Mercer finished his conversation.
“I got Bowman at TARU. He’ll do a GPS search on Coop’s phone,” I said. “What did you get?”
“That was the main business office at Uber—the night manager,” Mercer said. “I gave Alex’s name and the fact it was charged to her American Express account. Date, time, location of pickup, and supposed drop at 46th Street at Patroon.”
“He’ll do a search for you?”
“Yeah. He may or may not give me the info depending on whether I can back it up with a subpoena.”
“Of course we can. Call Catherine. She’ll cut them tonight.”
“Look, Mike,” Mercer said. “I’ll stick with you until midnight. I’ll give you four more hours before we make this an official report. I’ll call anyone you say and poke my nose in any place you tell me if you think it will lead us to Alex. But don’t go dragging anyone else into this phony operation and put their jobs at risk.”
I looked at the time on my phone. “Fair enough,” I said. “Four hours it is.”
I searched for the number of the Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative and hit CALL when I found it. The networked surveillance project—a joint venture of private businesses and public agencies—was staffed by NYPD officers 24/7.
I didn’t know the guy who answered the phone. “I’m Mike Chapman. Manhattan North Homicide.”
“How can I help you?”
Teams of these cops sat in front of banks of monitors that streamed video of streets and avenues all throughout the day and night. It seemed like a thankless job to me, but it had become a popular counterterrorism tool and in the meantime captured crimes in progress and countless traffic violations.
“I’d like you to check video for a particular location last night.”
“Okay. If we’ve got it covered on camera, I can get a guy to do it. You say it’s about a homicide?”
I was chewing on the inside of my cheek. “A possible lead. Just that.”
“What location?”
“Second Avenue. Start at 63rd and go up to about 68th. I know you’ve got Second ’cause of the bridge. Seven P.M. till midnight.”
There was nothing out of the ordinary about this request. And since bridges and tunnels were such vulnerable locations for terrorist activity, I knew there would be cameras all along the busy avenue leading downtown to the 59th Street entrance.
“What am I looking for?”
“Anything unusual. A car parked too long, with someone waiting in it. Thugs on the sidewalk, maybe with weapons they draw on a pedestrian. Scene that looks like an abduction,” I said. “Person being yanked off the street.”
“Man? Woman? Kid?”
“Woman,” I said, pausing for a deep breath. “Tall blon
de in her late thirties, maybe in a trench coat. Possibly on the east side of Second, heading north.”
“Alone?”
“You tell me,” I said, giving the cop my name and number. “How about those side streets? Have you got cameras on them?”
“Mostly no. Sixty-Sixth and 67th are the streets with crosstown buses. They’re covered, but the others aren’t.”
“Okay,” I said. I didn’t like the answer. “I need this as fast as you can do it.”
“On it, Detective Chapman. Call you back.”
I turned to Mercer. “You’ve got to be patient,” he said. “Now you’ve set some things in motion, we wait for the responses.”
“We wait for nothing,” I said, grabbing my steno pad. “Let’s hoof it down to the restaurant. Retrace Coop’s steps. Maybe we can scare up a witness or two.”
TWENTY
A light drizzle had begun to fall. Mercer and I were on Second Avenue, just outside of Primola restaurant.
Giuliano told us Coop had slipped out after saying good night. He hadn’t seen which way she went.
“Home is to the north,” I said. “That’s the logical direction.”
“She wasn’t going home, Mike. Get that through your brain,” Mercer said. His phone rang as he was talking to me. “Wallace here.”
Coop hates teeming rain in the dark of night, I thought while Mercer fielded the call. I couldn’t think of where she might be and how she would feel if the weather continued to grow more foul.
Mercer listened to the caller and then spoke, leaning against a lamppost to write something down. “I understand. Give me his name and phone number, please.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“That was the night manager from Uber. Everything’s computerized and since it’s charged to the customer’s account immediately, the information is easy to retrieve.”
“Shoot.”
“Alexandra Cooper ordered the car. Pickup in front of 240 East 65th Street.” Mercer pointed across the avenue, into the block that ran between Second and Third. The destination she punched in was 160 East 46th Street.”
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