“What about this Tanner mope?” Abruzzi asked.
“Street bum. Crazy like a fox, but I don’t think he has the connections from inside the can, just hours after his arrest, to have someone lined up to do harm to the DA,” Peterson said. “Down the road it might be a different thing with him. No question he’d like to see Alex dead.”
It had been one thing to hear threats from time to time about cops or prosecutors when they were sitting in your presence, but really different when the subject of the conversation was out of range, presumably in danger.
“I’m taking Estevez,” Mercer said. “That’s an evil dude. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
“Have you got a command log that goes back a few years?” Peterson asked Abruzzi. “Get one of your two guys to hammer it out tonight. Check whether anyone who’s been trouble before is in or out of jail.”
“Sure. One of them can run things from here. The other is good to go with Mercer.”
I knew they’d try to shut me out of this investigation. I wasn’t surprised. But I could still get Jimmy North to come out with me and take a stab at Shipley after Peterson signed off. There was still a legit connection to Wynan Wilson’s homicide that had to be explored.
My phone rang and I practically slid off the desk to get it out of my pocket and answer it.
“Chapman.”
“Listen, Mike, it’s Bowman.” The detective from TARU who’d been looking for Coop’s cell phone.
“Whaddaya got?”
“Nothing good. Looks like her last communication was a text around ten something last night. She called for an Uber car service, and a driver responded. His name is—”
“Sadiq. Yeah, we got that.”
“Well, you ought to look for him. There’s no receipt, no end-of-job survey.”
“We’re past that point, Bowman. Where is she?”
“I got no idea, Mike. It’s that kind of situation. She’s not talking to anybody. Nobody at all.”
“Pings, Bowman. You got any pings? Everything with you is a situation,” I said, ranting into the phone. “What’s Coop’s situation? You tracking the GPS on the phone? You must know where it is.”
“I can’t tell you where it is. Last trace of the phone, best I can make it out, was just north of the 85th Street Transverse, in the middle of Central Park.”
TWENTY-TWO
“You know what you’re doing is going to bring out all the rug rats you’re trying to keep from knowing about Alex, from finding out she’s lost in space?” Mercer said. He had rolled over the curb and parked the car on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I got out and slammed the door. “I can’t tell if you’re just playing devil’s advocate or if you’ve forgotten you’re my best pal. You’re saying no to every idea I come up with.”
“I’m trying to focus you on getting the right kind of help for her,” Mercer said, “and doing that without getting yourself a paid vacation in a nuthouse.”
I crossed the transverse entrance and started into Central Park. It was twelve thirty in the morning. When I lost the light of a streetlamp, it was as though I was off to trek in the woods.
“You’re either with me or not,” I said.
Casual park regulars were home and tucked tight in bed. There would be a couple of dog walkers, some afraid-of-nothing runners, scores of homeless people, and an occasional stray. The roadways were closed to vehicular traffic.
“I’m always with you, Mike. Even when you go off the charts.”
“I’ll start searching,” I said, turning on the compact high-beam flashlight that Abruzzi had given me before we left the station house. “You wait on Fifth for Emergency Services.”
“You know what you’re looking for?”
“Everything.”
“I don’t have to remind you how many cases Alex has prosecuted that took place in—”
“In this park? No, you don’t,” I snapped. She had sent countless sex offenders to jail for attacking nannies pushing strollers and environmentalists in the Ramble, and dragging joggers off the reservoir path as well as the paved walkways. Two homicides—one in the Ravine and one linked to the Indian Cave—had been headline cases for months at a time.
“The lieutenant is calling in a team right now to work with Alex’s crew from the office to pull every perp she’s put away and check their parole status,” Mercer said.
“I heard him. I’m not one to sit in front of a computer screen if I can do something more useful. Neither are you.”
“Tanner’s stalking ground was this park.”
“I’m telling you Tanner’s not in my scopes at the moment,” I said. “This would take a perp with the means to launch a major operation.”
“Estevez could do that. So could Shipley. But neither one has a link to this location.”
“So it’s a scam to throw us off track for a while,” I said. “Maybe we’re being gamed. That’s what the judge accused Estevez and his lawyer of doing. Gaming her. Tell the guys from ESU to use their floods to light up the area north of the transverse like a Christmas tree. No piece of paper, no kind of debris, is unimportant. Tell them to bag it all.”
“Leave some bread crumbs so I can follow your trail.”
“You’ll hear me loud and clear.”
I left the search of the pathways for the guys who would follow shortly. There had been twenty-four hours during which passersby might have picked up items of significance—pieces of Coop’s jewelry if it had been discarded, her iPad and phone, any files she might have been carrying. By now, if not kept by the finders, the items would have worked their way to the Central Park Precinct station house, and the lieutenant had promised to follow up on that idea.
I ducked behind a thicket of bushes, hunched over, and used my beam to scan every inch of the ground.
There were piles of leaves almost everywhere. It was October and the trees were shedding.
I got on my knees and tamped them down. Most of the leaves were scattered into small groupings. Other piles were large enough to conceal a body.
I didn’t make much progress in the first fifteen minutes. I was zigzagging from the south end of the grid—the transverse wall—going north for twenty feet, and then reversing my direction. Trees got in my way, and boulders, too. Coop would have been cursing the brilliant landscapers who had put every one of these in place to create what she called this great man-made playground.
The first thing I found was a pair of men’s sneakers. I didn’t know whether they’d have any significance, so I tossed them ten feet over to the paved walkway for Emergency Services to voucher. There was a bong that I slipped into a plastic baggie in case we needed DNA from the saliva on it. I didn’t put gloves on until I clamped my hand onto a dead squirrel.
“Hey, Chapman,” I heard a familiar voice calling. “Get your ass out of the bushes. It’s time for the bright lights.”
I stood up. It was one of the senior Emergency Services detectives. I raised my hands and smiled at him. “Don’t shoot.”
“Got my orders from Abruzzi and Peterson,” he said. “Don’t ask any questions about who you’re looking for, relieve you of this particular assignment, put on my biggest spots, and go over every square foot of—”
“Correction. Square inch. And no relieving me.”
“The CO of the park precinct is sending his anti-crime squad to do the grid with me. Whatever kind of case you got, try and make yourself useful somewhere else.”
He turned his back on me and gave his men the order to set up the floodlights and get to work.
Mercer was on the path. “Why don’t we leave this to ESU and go for a ride?”
“Don’t humor me.”
I was snapping at my best friend. The fear that was gnawing at my gut was disrupting a normal interaction with the cop I trusted most in all the world. I should be making professional decisions, but I had a horse in this race and I was losing my focus.
&
nbsp; “Mike,” Mercer said. “Let’s go look for Shipley’s SUVs. See if we can find them. You got a legit reason to be snooping around him. You’re still looking for Keesh as Wilson’s likely killer.”
I didn’t answer.
“For a murderer,” he said. “Let these guys get on the ground. Odds are they won’t find anything here, Mike. You know that as well as I do.”
I wanted to say that they didn’t know what they were looking for. But truth was, neither did I.
“You ought to go home and get a few hours’ sleep,” I said.
“When you do, man.”
“It’s different with me,” I said, pulling off my gloves and tossing them in a garbage pail as we walked toward Fifth Avenue. “It’s Coop. I got my heart in this now.”
“Course you do,” Mercer said, almost in a whisper. “That’s good to hear.”
I stood on the sidewalk and watched as the lights perched atop the giant tripods burst on.
“You Chapman?” a young detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“My boss gave us the instructions,” he said. “I’m watching the perimeter while the others search. If paparazzi start showing up because of the activity here, we tell them nothing, right?”
“Why, what do you know?”
“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Missing girl, is all.”
“Then you know too much already,” I said. “Tell them it’s a practice run. Like for a potential terrorist threat. Nothing about a girl.”
“Good idea. They all buy into that terrorist shit.”
Mercer was about to cross the street to get to his car. The senior detective was walking toward us, holding out a clump of plastic bags. “Help me here, Chapman, will you?” he said.
“Sure. What you got?”
“This one has cigarette butts with lipstick on them. Your victim, does she smoke?”
The inside of my cheek was already raw when I bit down on it again. I couldn’t think of Coop and the word victim in the same sentence.
“Not a smoker,” I said. “But keep the butts for possible DNA. We don’t know who she’s with.”
He held up a second bag. “Expired MetroCard.”
“Good. We can track the purchase. Make sure Peterson gets that ASAP.”
“Ten-four,” he said. “And I know this park is like a regular lover’s lane. This here’s a thong. A bright-red lacy thong. Like the last lap dancer who parked herself on me.”
Not a pretty picture.
“I figure we gotta grab all the underwear we come across.” The detective was laughing as he held the thong up in my face. “Any chance this belongs to your missing broad?”
“No way,” I said, turning my back on him. Nausea swept over me as I thought of Coop without clothes, without underwear, in the hands of a psychopath.
“Can’t ever be sure, Chapman. She’s not a nun, is she? Give us a clue.”
I knew her lingerie as well as I knew my own shorts. I just couldn’t say that out loud.
“Trust me on this one,” Mercer said to the detective, slapping me on the back to get me moving toward his car. “We know our vic, dude. Somewhere between a lap dancer and a nun, but it’s definitely not her thong.”
TWENTY-THREE
“You know he doesn’t park these expensive pimped-up wheels on the street in the middle of Harlem,” I said.
“Why not? Can you think of anybody who messes with the reverend?” Mercer answered. It was close to two thirty in the morning and we were cruising the streets in the area between the Gotham center and Shipley’s apartment. “Probably the safest cars in the hood.”
“We’ve been around three times,” I said, holding a printout of the cars and plate numbers. “Nada. Absolutely nada. Let’s check out the parking garages.”
The car stopped at a light and I opened the door. Mercer pulled over and parked in front of a fire hydrant.
The first two garages we walked by had closed at one A.M.
Teenagers we passed on a street corner started taunting Mercer with chants of, “Five-oh. We know you five-oh.”
The old TV show—Hawaii Five-O—had long ago provided the nickname for cops on ghetto streets. Even with the stunning gentrification of parts of Harlem, I gave away Mercer’s presence as surely as if I had worn my police badge around my neck.
Three blocks from our car, and half a block from Shipley’s home address, the mouth of a large garage yawned at us. Open twenty-four hours.
I followed Mercer down the ramp. The old black man behind the bulletproof window in what served as an office had fallen asleep. Mercer rapped on the glass.
The startled attendant sat up straight. “What you want?”
“These three cars. Let’s take a look at them,” Mercer said, passing him the plate numbers.
“I can’t help you.”
“Does that mean they’re not here or they’re here?”
“Means just what I say. I can’t help you.”
“Fat Hal got your tongue, Pops?” I asked.
“Don’t sass me, boy. I just park cars.”
There was no need for Mercer to show his ID. We were the man, and this guy didn’t like it any more than the kids selling weed on the street corner.
“Someone was murdered not far from here,” Mercer said. “A nice man.”
“Wynan Wilson,” he said. “Knowed him for a long time.”
I let Mercer worm his way back into the man’s good graces while I continued on down the ramp and around the corner. He was trying to cajole the attendant into talking to him by using Wilson’s daughter’s name and describing her despair.
There were about a hundred cars parked below. Most were Hondas and Toyotas and Fords. The three SUVs were easy to spot, lined up in a ready-to-go-at-amoment’s-notice position against the right wall.
I walked over to the first one and opened the door. The good thing about the cars being in an attended garage was that most probably they would be unlocked.
The interior was as clean as though the SUV were brand-new. I sat in the driver’s seat and opened the glove compartment. Nothing was inside. I pulled the lever to raise the rear door, got out, and walked around. The back was empty as well. Someone took very good care of the vehicle, or had gone to great lengths to purge it of any signs of a disturbance.
I closed the doors and swiveled to the second car. Mercer was coming toward me and the old man was limping along behind him.
“Stay out, boy!” he yelled to me.
“Just having a look.”
“You’ll cost me my job.”
The second car was as well tended as the first. Not the first crumb on the floor or seat, not a single slip of paper stowed in the side pocket.
“I promise we’ll watch out for you,” Mercer said.
The wide-awake attendant was in a frenzy. “Don’t be doing that.”
I pulled on the handle of the third SUV and the door opened. I sat in the driver’s seat and again reached across to the glove compartment.
Mercer had the door behind me. “Hold up, Mike. You’ve got to see this.”
I stood and pushed the old man out of the way. There was a stain on the camel-colored seat leather. A small one, but it looked like blood.
I couldn’t move. The rear seat, behind the driver’s position, was, according to Sadiq the Uber driver, where Coop had gotten into a black SUV.
“Lean in, man,” Mercer said, getting out of my way. “Take a look. It’s probably blood.”
“I get it,” I said.
I didn’t want to see Alex Cooper’s blood. I couldn’t tell the blood type of the spot I was looking at and I couldn’t know what its DNA fingerprint was—I just had it in my head that it was Coop’s and I needed to shake that thought.
“Your skin is completely ashen. You’ve gone gray, Mike.”
“No, I haven’t. Let’s call the precinct and get this mother impounded. Get it out of here before Shipley can spirit it away.”
“You’re thinking about Ale
x. That’s why you look so bad.”
“I’m not—I’m—”
“Meanwhile, I’m assuming the blood has something to do with Takeesha Falls—something bloody she carried out of Wynan Wilson’s apartment. Not Alex. Let the lieutenant stay on top of the search team.”
“I’m trying to do that, Mercer. It’s not going to work.”
The old man was on his way back to his little office.
I heard someone running and looked back at the ramp, knowing it could not have been his footsteps.
A tall African-American man, both hands tucked in the pockets of his black overcoat, was coming toward us. “Hands off, gentlemen. Hands off that machine.”
I threw a glance at Mercer.
“Pops pressed a button in his office. Must go straight to Shipley’s bodyguards,” he said.
My fingers were firmly wrapped around the handle as I dialed 911 with my free hand.
“I said don’t touch.”
“Can’t hear you, dude. I’m talking to the police,” I said.
Mercer identified himself and told the tall man to slowly bring his mitts out of his pockets.
“Mike Chapman. Homicide. Put me through to the two-eight, stat,” I said, holding until she got me connected to the desk officer. I explained the situation and asked for two cops to come to the garage to secure the car until it could be towed to the pound for evidence collection. I could always deal with warrants before the actual search got started.
The tall man turned around and started to walk away.
“Hold it right there,” Mercer said. “Right there.”
The man stopped but kept his back to us.
“Are you the driver of one of these machines?”
“From time to time.”
“You work for Shipley?” Mercer went on.
“Time to time.”
“Look at me when I’m talking to you.”
“Do I have to look at that prick you got with you? My boss really don’t like him.”
Mercer waved at me to step away. “Just talk to me.”
The tall man pivoted around.
“Do you have the names of the men who drive these cars? All the names?”
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