Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  “I understand.”

  “Two brothers—I’d say their kids are pretty important to Coop,” I said, putting my elbows on the table so I could rest my head in my hands. “It would be pure torture for her to think of anyone going after her family.”

  “Thank you. I know how hard this is, but we need to figure the pressure points. As many of them as we can.”

  “Yeah. You better count in her friends next—all the people in her unit. They go to the mats for each other. Her best friends outside the office, too—Nina Baum and Joan Stafford, from way back in her life …”

  We spent the next fifteen minutes going through my personal index of things that meant something to Coop—people, principles, ideas, even material things. Friedman was good. She knew how to draw things out of me that I hadn’t even thought were there.

  “How about the district attorney himself?”

  “Battaglia? Better think again, Doc. Coop idolized him when she was a kid. Came to know that after thirty years in office he’s a politician—what a surprise—just worried about covering his own ass. Uses her and all his staff to take care of those needs. It’s amazing justice gets done as often as it does.”

  “Good to know. I can take him off the list.”

  “I hope somebody’s told you that Reverend Shipley may be mixed up in one of Coop’s big cases. This guy Antonio Estevez—the one who had her so upset this week—is probably linked to Shipley.”

  “I hadn’t known that. The lieutenant did mention that you have Shipley in your sights. He and the mayor—you’ve got a thing about them.”

  “Is that the medical term for it, Doc? A ‘thing’?” I pushed back from the table and started pacing up and down the room. “Shipley’s lower than dirt and the mayor’s an asshole. What’s his biggest accomplishment of the year, do you know?”

  “Well, I—”

  “He passed legislation that allows New Yorkers to keep ferrets as pets. Got that? And what was my first homicide after the law passed, Dr. Friedman? Death by ferret. Did you read about that one? A pet ferret bit the nose off a two-month-old baby. The nose first, and then the lips. The ferret-fucking mayor ought to be in jail, where he belongs, for causing the death of that child.” Dr. Ricky Friedman let me vent. She watched me as I walked back and forth, ranting about the politicians when all I really wanted to do was get back on the street and find Coop.

  “Are you done?” she asked me.

  I had taken an apple off the chief’s desk and was tossing it in the air.

  “You’re a very angry man, Detective.” Dr. Friedman was frowning at me.

  “Tell me something I don’t already know.”

  “Are you often this way?”

  “Ask the lieutenant.”

  “I’m asking you, Mike. Peterson said nothing about this.”

  “So you’re worried that this is what Coop has to put up with on a regular basis, huh?”

  She forced a smile. “Inappropriate aggression, foulmouthed, violent—”

  “I’m not violent, Doc. Not violent,” I said, trying to modulate my voice so I didn’t sound like a madman. “And what’s inappropriate here? The woman I love has gone missing. You haven’t seen what you think is aggression yet.”

  “There could actually be good news in your behavior, Mike,” Friedman said. “Maybe this soft-as-a-marshmallow, sweet Alexandra—”

  “I never said ‘sweet,’ did I? Don’t ever mistake Coop for sweet.” Jake Tyler had called her that, but it was too washed-out a word to describe her.

  “What I’m trying to say is that maybe there’s a chance she decided you weren’t the right man for her after all. Perhaps she’s embarrassed and needs to step down for a while, or then again—”

  “You’re not the first genius to think of that since the other night, Doc. Don’t pat yourself on the back quite yet,” I said. “What’s the other possibility?”

  “Not a brilliant observation on my part, either, Detective. But if I wanted to get at you,” Friedman said, “if I wanted to cause you more pain than you’ve ever experienced in your lifetime, the way I might go about it—the way you weren’t vulnerable even two months ago—is by targeting Alexandra Cooper.”

  “That’s crazy, Doc. You’ve got to be crazy to think that,” I said.

  “You’ve probably made more enemies than she has, Mike. Maybe we ought to be looking for someone who’s got a grudge against you.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  “What press inquiries have you had?” Commissioner Keith Scully took his place at the head of the table in his office at One Police Plaza at exactly 7:02 A.M. Behind him was his desk, the same one used by Teddy Roosevelt when he was appointed NYPD’s commissioner in 1895.

  The deputy commissioner in charge of public information answered the question as others filled in around the conference table. “A few calls a couple of hours ago asking why there were floodlights in Central Park, but I put out the fire with one of those looking-for-an-alligator-out-of-the-sewer scares. Nobody seems to know about Alex Cooper.”

  Scully motioned me to take a seat on the side of the long table, next to the end, where Lieutenant Peterson was positioned. The district attorney was on one side of Scully—shuffling in his seat to get a more commanding view of the group, clearly not used to being anything but the lead dog.

  Mercer Wallace sat next to me, as though he could protect me from myself if I got out of control. Vickee Eaton sat opposite me. Captain Abruzzi didn’t seem particularly pleased to be in the mix, but the chief of detectives, beside him, had insisted on his presence. The young detective I’d asked Peterson to throw in—Jimmy North—was next to Vickee, introducing himself to her.

  There were four men from Major Case, a sergeant from TARU, and another lieutenant from Aviation. I guess Scully was ready to pull out all the stops.

  Dr. Ricky Friedman, my new keeper, took a backseat behind Vickee, so she could keep an eye on me and monitor all signs of my psycho-unsuitability.

  “Thanks for coming,” Scully said. All his marine bearing was on display. He wouldn’t waste a minute on niceties. “The last contact any colleague or friend had from Alex Cooper was between ten and eleven P.M. on Wednesday. There’s a driver who claims to have seen her get into an SUV on East 65th Street at the end of that period. We’re checking him out, but we have no reason to think he’s not legit, and he has no criminal history. It’s now seven hundred, Friday morning, and we haven’t had the first sign or suggestion of her whereabouts.”

  Everyone in the group looked grim. I half expected that Perry Mason moment when Coop walked in the commissioner’s door and the show ended.

  “Where is she?” Scully asked. “And if someone has her—or had her—where and why?”

  The district attorney started to speak. “I think—”

  “I’m not looking for answers, Paul. I’m going to lay out the issues and then we can all address them,” Scully said, brushing the DA off with the back of his hand. “What do we tell the media, and when do we do that? Feed them a missing-prosecutor story before we have all our ducks in a row and the story—the search for Alex—takes on a life of its own.”

  Some of the folks were jotting down notes, even though we were still dealing with the obvious before getting down into the weeds.

  “How do we handle her family—her parents and brothers—and who is going to be the liaison for that task?”

  “Her folks don’t know yet,” I said.

  “Yes, they do, Mike,” Vickee said. “The commissioner asked me to call them late last night. They’re flying in today.”

  “You should have told me,” I whispered to Mercer, but he was in Scully’s corner on this. He kept his back to me and signaled his disregard.

  I didn’t think I could be more nervous than I was, but the idea of a face-off with the Coopers was daunting—even though my rapport with them throughout the years when I was just their daughter’s good friend had been great.

  “The chief of detectives will be in charge o
f consolidating all the efforts that the department is undertaking, and this will be massive. Nobody flying solo, am I understood?”

  We all nodded.

  “Peterson already has men working with Battaglia’s Special Victims Unit and IT team. They’re running every perp Alex has prosecuted, starting with the most recent and going back in time. The ones in state prison—Correction is working with their visitors’ logs and phone records. Parole is giving him every sex offender who’s been released, in the same order. Who they’re living with and whether they’re reporting to SOMU.”

  The Sex Offender Monitoring Unit had post-parole oversight of the alumni association of Coop’s bad boys. Some of the perps were loners, but most had tentacles to other criminal agents.

  “They’re going to go into overload pretty quickly. It’s a long list, between Alex’s investigations and the hundreds that have gone through the unit under her watch. I assume, Paul, that you can give us all the backup we need on tracking down connections?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Great. It all feeds up to the chief of detectives. Every bit of it. I’ve got to have one go-to man who knows everything,” Scully said. “TARU is in charge of all tech equipment. Phones, laptops, social media. They’re surfing twenty-four/seven for posts and tweets and anything related to the stuff that just got hacked on Wednesday. Drew Poser said it best the other day—Alex Cooper has no more secrets. Not professional, not personal.”

  My cheek was so raw from biting that it had started to bleed. I could taste the blood when I swallowed hard.

  “That brings us to Detective Chapman.” Commissioner Scully fixed his eyes on me and everyone followed suit, except Mercer, who still had his back in my face. “Nobody knows Alex Cooper better than Mike Chapman.”

  Battaglia couldn’t conceal his scowl.

  “I don’t have ten detectives as good as Chapman,” Scully said. “But the tabloids are going to have a field day with this angle.”

  “Don’t tell them,” Battaglia said.

  “It’s out there, Paul,” Scully answered. “It’s all over the courthouse.”

  “It’s got nothing to do with this investigation,” Ray Peterson said. His e-cigarette was a poor excuse for the real nicotine he craved. “They’re both single adults. You know I don’t like scandal, but that’s not what this is.”

  “I’m with you, Ray. I just haven’t figured out whether to be up front with the reporters or let them think they’re surprising me and go with it a few days down the road, when they’re looking for a piece to give the story legs.”

  “Do I get to be heard on this, Commissioner?” I asked, trying to keep my voice level. “I don’t know what’s worse. That you’ve got an attitude that we won’t have Coop back for days, or that my only use is to be ‘legs’ to titillate the public when the Post is out of red meat.”

  “Bottle it, Chapman,” Scully said. “I’m getting to you.”

  I didn’t move a muscle. I didn’t want to give Dr. Friedman the satisfaction of reacting.

  “Antonio Estevez,” Scully said. “I’m putting Major Case in charge of this one. Not the trafficking part. Finding that Aponte girl, checking out the guys who work for him, locating any vehicles, and making whatever the connection is to Hal Shipley.”

  “My people started that on Wednesday afternoon, when the case blew up in Alex’s face,” Battaglia said.

  “Your people don’t seem to get the urgency of all this, Paul. They knock off at cocktail hour most of the time. We’ll run it from headquarters, and you,” Scully said, pointing at one of the Major Case men, “you’re the man in charge.”

  The detective acknowledged the assignment.

  “What about Shipley himself?” Lieutenant Peterson asked.

  Scully turned to Paul Battaglia first. “When this session breaks up, you and I need a private sidebar about the reverend, okay? I’m hearing things I don’t quite understand.”

  The district attorney said, “Certainly,” but he was clearly unhappy to do it.

  “Chapman’s got the Wynan Wilson homicide to wrap up—and he’s got to be interviewed for that—and then there’s this possible link to Estevez, too. Reassign Wilson to anyone in your office, Ray,” the commissioner said. “You’ve got a prime suspect in the girlfriend—what’s her name?”

  “Takeesha Falls,” I said, pissed that Scully was taking the case away from me.

  “I’m not doing this—I’m not superseding you—because of the mayor’s chief of staff and Shipley’s complaint,” Scully said, turning from the lieutenant to me. “I promise you that, Chapman. The lieutenant can stick anyone out there to find Ms. Falls. The case seems pretty open-and-shut. But I’ll need you available for every question that comes up on Alex. We’ll need you to think for us the way she does.”

  “You taking me off the street, too?” I asked, pressing my forefinger against my lip to make sure no blood was visible. I didn’t want it to show any more than I wanted to reveal my inappropriate aggression.

  “No. Not if you follow commands. You and Mercer and Jimmy North—you three can take orders as well as use your best instincts. You’ll be part of the task force, okay? As long as you can compartmentalize your very short emotional fuse.”

  I looked at Scully and nodded in the affirmative.

  “Bottom line, Alex Cooper is AWOL, and we’re going all-out to get her, am I clear?” Scully said. “First time it’s happened, and—”

  “Actually, Commissioner, Alex did something like this once before,” Vickee said.

  All eyes turned to her, except for Scully, who slapped the table in front of the district attorney. “Nobody told me that.”

  “I didn’t know,” Battaglia said.

  “It wasn’t nearly for this many hours,” Vickee said. “I didn’t remember it until I got home last night. I called her secretary, Laura Wilkie, on my way down here and she confirmed what I thought. It was a Friday and Alex just skipped out for the day with no notice to anyone. So there could be precedent for this, although way too much time has gone by now.”

  That would explain why Vickee hadn’t mentioned it when she drove off after stopping to see me last night. It didn’t explain why she hadn’t brought it up until right now.

  “It was just a single day, two years ago, the only time Alex went off the radar screen without alerting Laura,” Vickee said. “By the point I had started to worry about her, late that night at the beginning of a weekend, she checked in with me.”

  “What was that about?” Scully said. “I mean, before I send out all the troops, do you happen to know?”

  “I don’t have a really vivid recollection of the cause of the whole thing,” Vickee said, trying to do a lateral to me. “Mike probably does.”

  “Me? First I’m hearing of it.” I flattened both hands on the table and lobbed the ball back at her. “Thanks, Vick, for the vote of confidence.”

  “Do you remember, Detective Eaton,” Friedman asked, “whether it was an argument between Alex and Mike, if she reported it to you then, or something else he had done?”

  I was as curious about Vickee’s response as the doctor.

  “They’d just worked a big case together. Mercer was involved, too,” Vickee said. “It all ended on Governors Island, with a serial killer—and a particularly savage scene, even for those of us who deal with this kind of brutality on a regular basis.”

  “And Mike?” Friedman asked. “Did he—?”

  “I didn’t do anything to her, Doc.” I could see Friedman twisting thoughts of extreme violence around in her brain. “I swear on her life.”

  “I think, Mike, that the fact that you didn’t do anything was the problem,” Vickee said, addressing me directly while everyone around the table looked and listened. “Alex was devastated by that—by the scene she had witnessed with Abreu’s victims, by the fact that Mercer was injured by a sting grenade, remember?”

  “All too well,” I said. Mercer had been knocked unconscious—and temporarily blinded�
��when a military grenade was detonated just feet from him by the murderer.

  “And then her own close call with the killer, inside the fortress,” Vickee said, lowering her voice. “Alex wanted—well, intimacy and …”

  “Intimacy? Look me straight in the eye, girl, and tell me that again. There was a little something between me and Coop at that point, Vickee,” I said. “It’s called the Atlantic Ocean. She had all the intimacy she wanted with a certain Frenchman at that particular moment.”

  “That was an escape for Alex. Not the real deal, Mike. If it wasn’t affection she craved from you, it was certainly empathy.”

  “I’m not long on empathy, Vick,” I said, keeping a grip on my emotions. “Coop’s been aware of that as long as she’s known me, and it’s never going to change.”

  Dr. Friedman was waiting for me to crack open in front of her eyes, a pleasure I was determined to deny her.

  “Mercer and Coop—they deal in the living,” I said. “They hold hands with survivors, they offer compassion, they coax them back to life and get them beyond their ordeals. Me? I like working homicide exactly because that kind of shit isn’t for me. I could stroke Wynan Wilson till I’m blue in the face, Detective Eaton, and at the end of the day he’s still dead. I don’t do empathy, okay?”

  “Alex had been close to coming unglued that night, during that deadly storm,” Vickee said. “Even if you didn’t mean to disappoint her, Mike, that’s how she felt. She wanted to get away from you for a while to clear out her head. She wanted to get as far away from you as she could.”

  TWENTY-SIX

  “We didn’t disagree about anything,” I said to Scully. “She was clear as a bell when I left her. We were supposed to spend this weekend together on Martha’s Vineyard. We’re good on all fronts, if anybody’s interested.”

  He had called a short break and took me into the hallway when the coffee and sandwiches were delivered to pin me down on what my last exchanges with Coop had been.

  “She can make a fool of you, Chapman, if that’s her goal—but not the rest of us,” he said as we reentered the room. “You think of anything else, let me be the first to know.”