The man shook his head from side to side. “I’m not good with names. You’ll have to check with the office.”
“Is one of these cars assigned to you?”
“I just stick close with the reverend. That’s all I’m supposed to do.”
“The night before last—Wednesday evening—where were you?” I broke in.
The tall man glared at Mercer instead of responding to me.
“I’m just going to ask you the very same things he is,” Mercer said. “You might as well answer one of us.”
“Wednesday night,” I said, “did you go into Central Park?”
I could feel myself lurching out of control. There was an art to questioning people, a skill I had learned first from my father, and right now I wasn’t capable of exercising the patience and control it required.
“My mother always cautioned me to stay out of the park at night, you know? It kind of creeps me out to go there.”
“So tell me what you did on Wednesday,” Mercer said. “Start around five o’clock in the afternoon.”
“I’m being square with you. I just don’t recall.”
“Try harder,” Mercer said.
“I was with Reverend Shipley. I know that for sure. You ask him and I’m certain he’ll remember.”
“Where’s Keesh?” I blurted out. “Takeesha Falls. Where is she?”
The tall man looked at me and laughed. “Now, there’s a mystery for you, isn’t it? The reverend’s looking high and low for that girl. We think she’s in mourning. Gone into seclusion and all that.”
If Shipley wasn’t hiding the woman, then he was certainly looking for her. He must have figured she made off with some of the Wynan Wilson cash that belonged to Shipley himself.
More footsteps. Two uniformed cops showed themselves on the ramp, with the wide-eyed attendant at their heels.
“Good timing,” Mercer said. “These three cars—that third one in particular—we’re going to get them taken out of here. You’ll have to—”
“One thing before that,” I said. “This gentleman works for Hal Shipley. He needs a lift over to the North Homicide office. He’s ready to spill the beans on Takeesha Falls.”
The man laughed at me again, but not before the attendant scurried back up in the direction of his office. He was about to drop a dime on the tall man. It was never good form to snitch on the Reverend Shipley’s friends.
“No such thing, Detective.” He cocked his head and grinned at me. “You trying to get me hurt?”
“I’m afraid word is out on the street already. That old guy has a pipeline to important people, right from his little bulletproof cage,” I said. “Once he squeals on you, you’ll be safer in the homicide squad than on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard.”
His jaw locked in place.
One of the two cops radioed in for backup to take an informant to the squad. “We can stay with the car. Another team will be here in four minutes to transport Mr.—”
“Mr. Who?” I asked.
The tall man wasn’t talking.
I walked toward him to pat him down before I left him with the cops. He flinched when I made him raise his hands over his head, but he complied. He leaned against the hood of an Acura while I searched him.
“No hardware,” I said. “Give these guys your ID.”
He removed his wallet from his pocket. I looked at the name on the license—Ebon Gander, which meant nothing to me—and handed it to one of the uniformed men. Then I took hold of the wallet.
“Well, well. You are just awash in hundred-dollar bills, dude. Four or five thousand of them.”
I handed him back the money. “Let’s be sure to tell the detectives to look over the Franklins for possible blood, in case these bills just tiptoed out of Wilson’s apartment along with Keesh.”
Ebon Gander twitched.
“Let’s go, Detective Wallace,” I said. I had just diverted enough of my mental energy to keep Coop out of this narrative—to form the thought that maybe this man had been Keesh’s getaway driver, which would account for the bloodstain in the car and the big bills in his wallet.
“We got a condolence call to pay.”
Mercer hesitated, like he didn’t quite know what to do about me.
“Don’t you want to know where?” I asked.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Mercer said to me softly, pleading for some kind of rational thought on my part.
“Time to pay a visit to Fat Hal, pardner. Once we tell him Mr. Gander’s been talking to us—”
“I’m not saying a word to you or anyone else.”
“I don’t see it that way, Mr. Gander. The way I figure, you might as well be talking. I’m pretty certain once the reverend learns you’re up at the homicide squad and the cars are impounded and your wallet has grown pretty damn wide, I’m quite certain your goose will be cooked.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“I’m going to save you from yourself,” Mercer said.
“I want to see Shipley. I want to do it now.”
We were in the car and Mercer was headed south, away from Shipley’s home.
“I had a call from the police commissioner’s office as I walked out of the garage.”
“They’ve got news?”
“No news, Mike. No news. But Scully wants you down there at headquarters.”
“The meeting’s at seven A.M. We got time for—”
“You got no more time to make a fool of yourself, man. Scully wants you in early because he’s also called for someone he wants us to talk to,” Mercer said. “About Alex.”
It was probably just a ploy to distract me.
“You are in no shape to rip Shipley into bite-size pieces at the moment,” Mercer said. “Your head’s somewhere else. You were asking questions like a third grader back there.”
“Did you call Vickee, too?”
“Yeah. All quiet. She’s been sleeping with the phone at her ear. Checks it regularly for e-mails and texts, but nothing’s come in.”
“So who does Scully want us to talk to?” I asked
“Don’t know. The commish tells you to be somewhere and you show up. Probably the guys from Major Case, don’t you think?”
“I’d like to handpick the players. Put together the best of the best. For Coop, I mean.”
“That could happen,” Mercer said, merging onto the drive to go downtown. “She means a lot to a lot of guys in the department. And to Scully.”
I was quiet for most of the drive. So was he.
We parked in the garage at One Police Plaza and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where all the brass were assigned.
The executive officer of the chief of detectives was expecting us. “The chief wants you to go into his office and stretch out for a while. I’ll let you know when he comes in.”
The office had a striking view over New York Harbor, with the bridge lights glittering across to Brooklyn and then over to Staten Island. The chief had a massive desk and a conference table with a dozen chairs. There were also two leather couches against the walls.
“Get yourself half an hour,” Mercer said. “You’ll be no good without it.”
“I’m not much good as it is. I got bad things running through my brain.”
“Your head has to be clear, Mike. You can’t go there,” Mercer said. “Alex is a strong woman. She’s a fighter.”
He sat down and made himself comfortable, his head on the armrest and his feet hanging off the end of the six-foot-long couch.
“In a fair fight, my money’s on her. But what was that with the SUV? An abduction? She doesn’t stand a chance with some animal who means to tear her limb from limb.”
Mercer pretended to be sleeping. I took his lead and laid myself down on the other couch.
My eyes closed and immediately I felt guilty. I opened them wide and rubbed them with my fists. How could I be still for even a minute with so many unknowns to be resolved?
I must have dozed for a couple of hours. Fitfully, I
knew, because I had been checking my phone and my e-mails from time to time.
The XO—executive officer—knocked on the door and stuck his head in at 6:25. “Rise and shine, Chapman,” he said. “The doctor’s making a house call for you.”
Mercer was upright before I was. A fiftyish-year-old woman in a dark gray suit came into the room. “Are you Mike Chapman?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my fingers instantly combing through my hair. Mercer’s head was down as he walked to the door to leave the room.
“I’m Dr. Friedman. Ricky Friedman. I’m a psychiatrist, and I sometimes work with—”
“Whoa, Mercer,” I called out. “You knew about this? You brought me down here so some shrink could try to get inside my brain? You—”
“Scully and Battaglia will be in the big office in half an hour, Mike. Listen up, will you?” Mercer said. “Somebody a helluva lot smarter than you is working on a plan here.”
“It’s not about you,” Friedman said. “It’s about Alex Cooper. Do you understand that?”
“Of course I do,” I said, flailing my arms as I looked out the window at the commuters starting to fill the Brooklyn Bridge roadway. “You going to use a Ouija board, Doc, or a Freudian dream analysis to find her?”
“What I’d like to—”
“You want to know what I was just dreaming? That some sexual predator—some miserable fuck that Coop put away for brutalizing young girls—is holding her hostage, forcing himself on her repeatedly. Will that really be helpful to—”
“That’s quite possible, Detective Chapman. It’s certainly one of the most likely scenarios, just like you say, isn’t it?”
I stopped in my tracks and turned around to look at the doctor. She was carefully coiffed and well dressed—a full-figured woman with an intelligent face, if there is such a thing, who was clearly a straight shooter—willing to confirm that my worst nightmare might be true.
“As long as you don’t tell me I’m nuts,” I said.
“No guarantees, Mike,” she said, seating herself at the conference table. “I’m calling you Mike, okay? I know a lot about you already.”
“From?” I asked, as I pulled out a chair opposite her.
“Lieutenant Peterson. The commissioner directed him to give me a thumbnail sketch a few hours ago.”
“What about you? What do I need to know before I open my mouth?”
“Med school at Columbia. A healthy private practice for twenty-five years,” she said. “I like what I do. I like helping people in desperate situations. The department brings me in from time to time to work with the profilers.”
“That’s utter bullshit, Dr. Friedman. No disrespect, but profilers aren’t detectives,” I said, starting to mimic a typical profiling discussion. “‘The deceased was bound by an electrical cord so you guys should be looking for a killer who has one ear and plays Mahler symphonies on his piano. The petechial hemorrhages in the eyeballs of the corpse suggest a Rorschach pattern, which means the perp is an artist who fancies himself a Jackson Pollock type.’ You think that kind of psychodrivel is going to find Alexandra Cooper?”
“Stop wasting my time, Mike,” Friedman said. “Tell me about her.”
“What for?”
“Because the more we know, the greater the likelihood we can get a handle on this.”
“Because nothing else has worked, right?”
“Where’s the Chapman humor I’ve heard so much about?” she asked.
“No place for it in this.”
“Don’t lose it, Mike, whatever you do. She’s going to need that when we get her home,” Friedman said. “You want coffee?”
“Red Bull. Two of them.”
“I have coffee and an egg sandwich on the way. It’s better for you than an energy drink,” she said. “Eat a real meal every few hours, get your caffeine from coffee like you usually do, take cat naps several times throughout the day, and rely on the professionals that Scully is pulling together. Your adrenaline is only going to carry you for so long before it fizzles out.”
I liked that she was forthright.
“Tell me about Alexandra. Tell me why you love her.”
I stared at the diamond pin on the lapel of Dr. Friedman’s suit. I had barely been able to communicate those thoughts to Coop. I couldn’t speak them out loud to a stranger.
“Look, Mike. Lieutenant Peterson told me you’re lovers. Ten years of a very close friendship before that, is what Vickee Eaton says. I get that Alex is smart and has lots of backbone, and that she has far more compassion than you’re able to summon in any circumstance. I know from the work she does that she’s tough.”
“Not tough enough to stand up to something like this.”
“Take me inside her head, Mike. Let me get a feel for how she thinks and acts,” Friedman said. “It will help me understand how she’s dealing with her captors, if we’ve got a kidnapping here.”
My head snapped up. “Is that what Scully says?”
“Nobody knows. There’s no body, so that gives us hope.”
“There’s no ransom demand, either.”
“That could come at any time,” she said. “Or not at all. In some instances, the victim is held for days or even months—”
“Don’t tell me my business, Doc.”
“Then talk to me about the Alexandra Cooper who’s not in the newspaper headlines.”
I clasped my hands under the table, wringing them as I thought about Coop. Fatigue had overwhelmed me. Fatigue and a great deal of fear. “The part of her I like most—the part that scares me for her right now—is how soft she is.”
I didn’t just mean the touch of her skin, which was smoother than I’d imagined it to be for all those years I’d fantasized about taking her lady-lawyer clothes off and getting her in bed.
“Good start, Mike.”
“What you don’t see when you watch her rip apart a defense witness in the courtroom, or when she’s standing beside Paul Battaglia at a bank of microphones talking about some scumbag who sodomized a bunch of kids, is that she’s completely soft on the inside. She’s completely mush beneath that bruiser exterior.”
Dr. Friedman nodded her head.
“Scully, even Peterson, might think she can cope with one of these monsters, but I’m telling you that Coop can’t.”
“I understand you. We’ll come back to that,” Dr. Friedman said. “Why do you call her ‘Coop’? So far as I can tell, you’re the only person who does.”
“Just a nickname,” I said. “Don’t know, actually. I’ve been doing it since we first started working together, ten or twelve years ago.”
“It’s cold, Mike. She’s got a beautiful name. It’s an odd way to address your lover, by her surname.”
I brought my hand up and pointed it straight at the woman’s face. “If I wanted to talk to Dr. Ruth, I’d have asked Scully to call her in.”
Friedman worked around me, never breaking the calm demeanor of a shrink sent from central casting.
“How does Alex handle personal problems, Mike?” she asked. “I know that she tackles professional ones directly and with absolute resolve. When she’s confronted with a personal crisis, what does she tend to do?”
“This is no-win for me, Doc,” I said. “She’ll kill me for telling you.”
“I like your smile. You ought to use it more,” Friedman says. “What does Alex do?”
“She cries. She actually cries a lot, like, at the drop of a hat.”
“Really? That surprises me. No one else has mentioned it.”
“Not professionally. Man, you’d never see that at the office. It’s just—I don’t know.”
“Do you think you do things that make her cry?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, sitting upright. “Last thing I’d want to do.”
“So what is it?”
“Wait, go back a bit. I’d say the temper flares first. Yeah, usually the wild temper before the tears. This guy—these guys—they press the wrong button,
and no telling how Coop will react. If she shows a flash of her temper, they could come down on her hard, couldn’t they?” I took a deep breath and blew it out. “She’d better hold on to those tantrums.”
“What do you do, Mike? I mean, when she flares up? Do you fight with her?”
“No percentage in that, Doc. I just let it pass.”
“Really? You’ve got a strong personality yourself. You don’t take her on?”
“You never win. That’s the thing with her. At least I never win.”
“And what does that do to you, Mike? How do you react?”
“I turn on a classic movie, pour a strong drink, read an old Chandler or a new Connelly or Coben. Just give it up till it blows over.”
“Well, that’s unlikely to happen,” the doctor said, “if she’s being held by thugs. Just giving it up to her, I mean.”
“Then, tears,” I said, with a sober nod to reality. “Coop’s got this really tough hide—that’s what she wants the world to see. She took on this job when women weren’t always recognized for aggressive prosecutorial skills. She stood up when few others did. Built this team of Amazon warriors around her—they’re amazing women, and so are the guys who work with them. Talk to Ryan and Evan—two of her favorites in the unit. They know what makes her tick as well as I do. Get her home? Surround her with all the silks and satins that she was accustomed to, growing up in a privileged household? It’s a totally unfamiliar world to me. But I’ll tell you Coop melts. She goes to pieces at the first sign of a conflict.”
“Temper tantrums and emotional meltdowns,” Dr. Friedman thought out loud. “Those would present very different reactions to her captors, if indeed she’s in trouble. It would mean opposing ways to handle Alexandra.”
It was chilling to think of anyone “handling” Alexandra. Handling my Coop.
“Who would you say is the person—the people—who mean the most to Alex?” Friedman asked. “After you, of course.”
“By no means am I in first place, Doc. No way,” I said. “She’s got amazing parents. Both have worked hard, raised three nice kids, made some real money, and use it to do good for other people. A lot of good. They’re her first concern, if someone is, well, like, leaning on her to—whatever.”
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