Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  We both knew that was Ken Aretsky’s Patroon. We both knew she’d intended to keep her date with Jake.

  “The job got entered into the system as incomplete,” Mercer said.

  “Meaning what?”

  “Alex got charged for the ride she never took. She didn’t cancel the car, and the driver waited ten minutes at the site before the base cleared him to leave. Incomplete.”

  “Call the guy,” I said.

  Mercer glanced at his pad and dialed. His message went to voice mail.

  “Sixty-Fifth Street doesn’t have NYPD surveillance cameras,” I said. “Let’s cross to the north and see if we get lucky.”

  We walked past a bagel joint, a dry cleaner, and the old-fashioned diner on the corner. I jogged across the street.

  “Bingo!” I turned to wave Mercer on. “Just what we needed. Sunshine Deli.”

  Korean delis were consistently the site of more armed robberies than any other kind of business in the city. Almost every one of them had installed security cameras over the register and outside the entrance to the store. I looked above the door, at a corner of the awning, and saw the small black device.

  “Police,” I said to the young woman behind the counter. She looked terrified, even after she saw the gold shield. “The video camera—how much tape is on it?”

  “What?”

  “The camera? How many hours at a time does it record?”

  Her English was lousy. I understood it, though, when she said, “Twenty-four.”

  “We need to look at it,” I said. “Right now.”

  A customer came in for juice and a quart of ice cream. The woman made his change and then looked back at me.

  “My boss not here. Come back tomorrow.”

  “No way, lady,” I said, hoisting myself up onto the counter and reaching for the camera, which was mounted on the wall. If I didn’t look now, there would be little chance of getting what I needed tomorrow morning. “You know how this works, Mercer?”

  “Is it digital or is there tape in there?”

  I was pulling at the camera and its small black case. “Looks like tape.”

  The woman had picked up the landline and was jabbering into the phone in Korean.

  “Then it will just loop over itself,” Mercer said. “It will rerecord every twenty-four hours, replacing the old images.”

  I pulled the entire unit out of the wall while the woman let out a yelp. I handed it to Mercer, who took the case apart.

  “An empty spool,” he said. “Just meant so that if anyone thinks about doing a stickup in here, there appears to be a video.”

  “Nothing there,” the woman said. She had started to cry.

  “Cheaper this way,” I said, telling her to stay calm. “How about the one on the outside of the building? Any film in that?”

  “No, sir. We never been robbed. Very safe neighborhood,” she said. “Not like last place in Queens. Many robberies.”

  I threw the useless camera on the counter after I jumped down, handing her a twenty-dollar bill. “Sorry for the trouble, ma’am.”

  We walked out and I followed Mercer up and down the block on both sides of the avenue. We didn’t see any cameras and most of the businesses were shut down for the night.

  Mercer’s phone rang again. “Wallace here.”

  He turned his back to me.

  “Southwest corner of 65th and Second,” he said. “There’s two of us. I’m a really tall black guy, and my partner is about six foot one, dark hair. Seven minutes? Thanks very much.”

  I put my face up into the falling rain, then lowered my head and shook it off. “Who’s coming?”

  “That was my Uber friend. The driver who was supposed to pick Alex up is working again tonight. He just dropped a passenger off at New York University Medical Center. He’ll come up First and be here as fast as he can.”

  We ducked into the diner to get out of the rain while we waited. I called the cop at the Midtown Security Initiative.

  “I know you’ve got a lot of images to go through. We can narrow it down for you,” I said. I gave him the time of the incomplete Uber pickup. “Fast-forward to the top of that hour. The woman will be coming out of a restaurant midblock on the east side of Second, walking north. She should cross at the first light. Get as much of 65th Street as you can capture. There’s a black sedan—an Uber, if you can make out the sign in the driver’s side window—that pulls into the block either shortly before or after the woman does. I’ll have more for you in fifteen minutes.”

  Five minutes later, a black Mercedes E500 came across 65th Street from First Avenue and stopped in front of the fire hydrant near the entrance to 230 East 65th.

  “C’mon,” Mercer said, pushing open the door and crossing the avenue. I was just a few steps behind him.

  We introduced ourselves to the nervous man who had stepped out of his car.

  “I’m Sadiq,” he said. “My boss says there’s a problem.”

  “No problem,” Mercer said, holding his arm out to keep me back. “We need your help, okay? It’s about last night.”

  “I didn’t do nothing. Nothing at all,” he said, talking with his hands, which were trembling as he made circles in the air. “The lady didn’t wait for me.”

  “What lady?”

  “Miss Alexandra. That was the name on the order.”

  Since Uber drivers didn’t know their fares personally—as many car service regular accounts do—it was common for them to ask for the passenger by first name when they pulled up to a location.

  “Were you late?” Mercer asked.

  “The request came in,” Sadiq said. “I was only about twenty blocks away. I gave a response time of six minutes.”

  “Did you make your estimate?”

  “I ran into a Con Edison crew, which slowed me down,” he said, rain dripping off the folds of his turban and streaking his face like tears. “Maybe one minute late. Maybe two.”

  “Did you actually see the lady when you reached here?” Mercer asked.

  “Well, how do I know? How do I know her?” Sadiq asked. “Very impatient lady.”

  “What do you mean impatient?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

  “He’s mine, Mike, okay?” Mercer didn’t want me flipping out on Sadiq.

  How would this driver have known about Coop’s quick temper unless he’d had her in his car and she snapped at him?

  “Slow it down,” Mercer said. “No need for you to be shaking, my friend. Just tell us what you saw when you pulled up last night.”

  Sadiq shook his head up and down. “Well, I knew I was running a bit late. I was at the light on the far corner. It turned red just when I reached it.”

  The driver pointed across the avenue.

  “It wasn’t very cold. There were people—many people—crossing the street in front of my car. I couldn’t really see into the block ahead, where I was supposed to make the pickup,” he said. “But I was trying to look for Miss Alexandra.”

  I hated that he called her by name. It sounded more like they had actually met.

  “When the light changed, I started to drive. I pulled up a little beyond where we are right now,” Sadiq said, gesturing with his left hand. “I saw a lady. I saw Miss Alexandra and I began to honk my—”

  “How did you know it was her?” I asked. “Did she speak—?”

  “Yo, Mike,” Mercer said, pushing me back with his outstretched arm. “I can handle this.”

  “Well, I don’t actually know,” Sadiq said. “She seemed to look up like she was expecting me, but then she got into another car. A car parked a few feet in front of me.”

  “You called her ‘impatient,’” Mercer said. “Why’s that?”

  “Because I was only a minute or so late, and she wasn’t polite enough to cancel the job. So I had to charge her for it. That’s the only reason I said it.”

  “Could you see if there was anyone in the vehicle ahead of you?” Mercer asked.

  “Not really, Mr
. Detective. Not at all. The windows were tinted, actually.”

  “This woman you saw, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “Can you describe her?”

  “Not really.”

  “Anything. Anything at all?”

  Sadiq looked from Mercer’s face to mine. “You talk to me like I did something bad.”

  “Not yet, you didn’t,” Mercer said. “What did she look like?”

  The driver seemed almost fearful to admit that he could give a description of Coop, like that would implicate him in some inappropriate conduct.

  “Even your turban is sweating, Sadiq,” I said, watching the rain fall from it. “What do you know? What are you so worried about?”

  The young man looked as shocked as Mercer.

  “Excuse my partner, sir,” Mercer said. “You haven’t met the real incarnation of ‘impatience’ till he chimes in. And on top of that he’s just rude.”

  “I believe the woman I saw had light-colored hair. Blond. And she was wearing a raincoat, even though it was dry.”

  “Young? Old?”

  “About my own age, sir,” Sadiq said. “I’m thirty-four.”

  “What did you do when she got in the other car?”

  “I waited in this very spot. I actually waited ten minutes, perhaps twelve, just to be sure that my passenger wasn’t someone else. Someone who’d been delayed.”

  “Did you try to contact her?” Mercer asked.

  “I did. I texted two more times that I was on location before I canceled the job. That was when I left.”

  “Where did you go next?” Mercer asked.

  Sadiq’s hands were going in circles again. “Nowhere.”

  “What does that mean? How could you go nowhere?”

  “I stayed right here, Mr. Detective. There’s usually a lot of business on the Upper East Side in the late evening. People coming out of bars, movies, going home late.”

  “What was your next job?” Mercer asked.

  “I—uh—I didn’t have a next job, sir,” Sadiq said, staring at a crack in the pavement. “I had only planned to work until midnight. The next order that came in from an address on 79th Street had a destination in New Jersey.”

  Mercer didn’t seem to like the fact that Sadiq had shut his operation down shortly after the time Coop disappeared. “What don’t you like about Jersey?”

  “Nothing in particular, Mr. Detective. It’s just that I live on Long Island, and if I had accepted the job, I wouldn’t have gotten home till after two A.M.,” Sadiq said. “My wife wouldn’t have been pleased.”

  “Was your wife awake when you got home?” Mercer asked.

  “Not exactly. I mean, she never is when I work that late.”

  I liked that Mercer was putting the screws to the nervous cabbie, who’d been the last person we knew to see Coop.

  “Did you see anyone between the time you arrived at this corner and the time your wife—well, woke up?”

  Sadiq clasped his hands together and thought. “No, sir. Not that I remember.”

  “Think hard, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “You want to tell me anything else you can think of about the woman you saw? Anyone else you can describe on the street?”

  I couldn’t help myself from butting in. “You didn’t happen to get a plate number of the car that took your fare away from you? Even a partial plate? Some letters or numbers?”

  “Excuse me for correcting you, sir.” The young man couldn’t even look at me when he spoke to me. “You are mistaken.”

  “What about?”

  “I wasn’t mad at the lady or at the other driver. I still charged my fare,” he said. “And it wasn’t a car she got into. You’re wrong about that. I didn’t look at the license plate so I cannot tell you that. But it wasn’t a car. It was an SUV.”

  Mercer jumped in over me. “What kind of SUV? You know the make, Sadiq? Do you know what an Escalade is?”

  Mercer was on high alert. He was thinking of Antonio Estevez and his Slade.

  “I don’t know all the models. But it for sure wasn’t an Escalade,” Sadiq said. “All I know is definitely it was an SUV.”

  Mercer was ready to go after Estevez—the man who wanted to bring Coop down.

  I was hell-bent on pinning the Reverend Hal Shipley against a wall to get the whereabouts of his SUV fleet and posse of pallbearers.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “We got a mess on our hands,” Lieutenant Peterson said to the captain in charge of the Nineteenth Precinct, sitting in the squad room on the second floor.

  It was eleven o’clock at night and guys were getting ready for the shift change. The midnight tour would be understaffed, like it was all over the city. Those who were ready to knock off were looking at us like we’d walked into their offices with the Ebola virus, staying far enough away to avoid contagion but curious about what we’d brought into their tight little village.

  “And you’ve decided now was the right time to lay it on me?” Captain Abruzzi said. He looked like a man who had someplace to go. Well-cut double-breasted suit, designer tie too expensive for a cop’s salary, carefully styled comb-over—he should have learned to cope with the bald bit years ago—and way too much cologne at this hour. “The commissioner knows?”

  “Scully wants Mike, Mercer, and me at One PP at seven hundred. The district attorney, too,” Ray Peterson said. “He’s expecting a call from you tonight. He insisted that we make a formal report so you can have one of your men get started on the basics.”

  Peterson had a slender, bony frame—like a skeleton with some clothes thrown over it. He was tall, and he leaned his elbow on top of a file cabinet while he ran down the story for Abruzzi.

  “Why’d you sit on this, Chapman?” the captain asked. “Too busy with your Jeopardy! bullshit to know you had a ‘gone girl’ on your hands?”

  “I didn’t—”

  “He didn’t sit on it,” Peterson said. “The people in the DA’s office as well as the guys in the department—and Vickee Eaton from DCPI—thought they knew what they were dealing with.”

  I probably hadn’t missed a Final Jeopardy question in a few months. I couldn’t focus on anything after Vickee put this in my lap.

  “Scully knows I’m using a Jane Doe to take the report?” Abruzzi asked. “Not Alex Cooper’s name anywhere on paper?”

  “That’s his decision,” Peterson said. “The media would be all over the fact that a prosecutor has disappeared, and it’s not what any of us want until we make a plan tomorrow morning.”

  “I got only two men working.”

  “That’s all you need,” I said. “Mercer and I will fill them in. TARU’s trying to pull up her phone now. We got some ideas already that he and I are going to follow up on.”

  I didn’t need any hairbag detective with good manners supervising my late-night interface with Hal Shipley.

  Peterson pointed the two fingers holding his cigarette at me. “Forget your ideas, Chapman. The captain’s gonna run this tonight.”

  “Yeah,” Abruzzi said, not seeming to be very interested in Coop’s status. “We’ve had lots of security details on her apartment over the years. Dances to her own drummer, that one. Jet-sets around. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s on a jaunt somewhere.”

  “She’s not on a jaunt, Captain,” I said. “Trust me on that one.”

  “You the one filing the report, Ray?” Abruzzi said to Peterson. “I need a name.”

  “It’s me,” I said, trying to get the captain’s attention.

  “I need a next of kin. Does she have family or—?”

  “Her family doesn’t know yet,” I said.

  “You better check with them before you put me through hoops, gentlemen.” Abruzzi shook his head. “Maybe there’s a reunion you don’t know about.”

  “You want me to help with a list for tonight?” Peterson asked.

  “I know where her crib is. Start there, I guess.”

  “Mercer and I have been to the apartment. Everything’s in order,” I said. “Nothing fro
m the doormen, either.”

  Abruzzi squinted and stared at me. “You been inside or you just asked them?”

  “In case you don’t know it, Captain,” Peterson said, “Chapman’s been dating Alex. That’ll be a factor in how this whole thing goes forward.”

  He tilted his head and looked at me again. “Hats off to you, Chapman. You the latest in a long line of unsatisfied customers?”

  There was no point in wasting my energy by belting the man temporarily in charge of Coop’s well-being.

  “You got an alibi?” he said, jamming a stick of chewing gum in his mouth as he smiled at me, happy to work his way under my skin.

  “Dead man with a hole in his head where his brains used to be,” I said. “It’s worked for me before.”

  “Maybe she just wanted a night off,” Abruzzi said. “Everyone except the lieutenant knows you’d be hard to take on a regular basis.”

  “True enough, Captain. I’m no prize. Good thing whoever’s waiting up for you isn’t allergic to that musk crap you’ve poured all over yourself. She might gag on it while she’s chowing down on your—”

  “Cut it out, Chapman,” Peterson said.

  “Did you know, Cap, that musk comes from the Sanskrit word for testicle?” I said. “And I didn’t even have to learn that on Jeopardy! One whiff of the stuff and it was pretty obvious.”

  “I got all the plate numbers,” Mercer said. He had planted himself at an empty desk and done something constructive while I churned about Abruzzi’s reaction. “That’s a way to get started. Three SUVs registered to Shipley’s Gotham Center and one to Antonio Estevez.”

  “I read about this Estevez character in this morning’s paper,” Abruzzi said, directing his comments to Peterson. “What does Shipley have to do with Alex Cooper?”

  “Nothing,” I said. Nobody was going to get in the way of my tryst with the reverend. “Mercer pulled it up for me ’cause it has to do with my homicide.”

  “I think the most important thing at this point is Antonio Estevez,” Peterson said. “He pulled some very sophisticated stunts to get out of his trial, and they involved hacking into the computer files in Alex’s office.”