Devil's Bridge

by Linda Fairstein

  I made sure Dr. Friedman saw me pick up two egg sandwiches and a large black cup of joe. I lifted the hot cardboard cup in her direction and mouthed, Cheers.

  The commissioner was ready to open the plan up for discussion.

  “I say we hold the disappearance back at least one more day—maybe two—before we put it on the news,” the district attorney said. “Let her family absorb it tonight, when they get to town.”

  “You’ve got to weigh that,” Abruzzi said, “against the likelihood of getting useful tips from the public if we give the information out. See something, say something. People love to call in all kinds of sightings.”

  “Total waste of time,” one of the Major Case guys said. “No disrespect, Captain, but you end up chasing down a whole bunch of bullshit. Someone saw a tall skinny blonde in a Costco in Queens; someone watched one shooting up at Hunts Point; someone tailed a brunette who looks an awful lot like the missing lady except for her height and hair color. We’re more likely to find Judge Crater with those callins than Alex Cooper. Let’s leave it to the pros for forty-eight hours.”

  Most of us were in agreement about that.

  “Who’s meeting her parents at the airport?” Battaglia asked.

  “I can do that,” I said.

  “I told them I would,” Vickee said. “You want to come—?”

  “All yours.”

  This experience was the kind of explosive event that could rip friendships apart. I had seen it happen over and over again as people subconsciously ascribed blame to others. Most of the time, when the dust cleared, it was impossible to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

  “Okay,” the commissioner said, “where were we? Tell me about the SUVs in Shipley’s fleet, Mercer. What’s happening there?”

  “Three of them have been impounded, sir. Just waiting on manpower to drive them in,” Mercer said. “I called the lab a minute ago. Got a confirm that the stain on the seat is human blood.”

  “My lawyers don’t even have the search warrant signed yet,” Battaglia said. “How’d you get to the stain?”

  “I cut a piece of the seat leather before Mercer and I left the garage,” I said.

  “Without a warrant?” Battaglia asked.

  “Exigent circumstances.”

  Keith Scully grinned. He liked the boldness of my move and the fact that I could meet Battaglia’s incredulous smirk with a legal term of art.

  “Wilson’s murder? Exigent? I wouldn’t think so.”

  “The blood is either Wilson’s,” Mercer said, stepping in because he sensed I would choke on the thought he was about to express, “or it’s Alex Cooper’s.”

  Battaglia closed his mouth.

  “She was seen getting into an SUV, if the Uber driver is to be credited. The lab will have a blood type any minute, which will eliminate one of the two—they have different types. And DNA,” Mercer said, “by noon.”

  “I had Shipley’s man—Ebon Gander—being questioned in the squad at four A.M.,” Peterson said to Scully. “He had thirty-seven hundred in big bills. Talked pretty good until my guys took that away from him to voucher. Then he ponied up with a lawyer.”

  “He’s under arrest?” the commissioner asked.

  “Waiting on the blood results. If it’s Wilson’s blood, we’ll hold Gander as an accessory. He admits to being the driver of the car. One of the drivers, anyway.”

  Scully’s orders were clipped and comprehensive. Everyone in the room was assigned a list of things to do or to oversee. Aviation was ready for choppers to go airborne if leads took us over bridges and through tunnels. Contacts with other agencies were to be cleared through the chief of Ds on a need-to-know basis.

  “So this task force is official as of 8:37 A.M.,” Scully said.

  He’d give it a name. He always did.

  “I’m calling it Operation Portia.”

  “That sucks, Commissioner,” I said.

  “Watch your mouth, Chapman,” Peterson said.

  “Sorry, Loo,” I said. “I apologize, Commissioner. It’s just that you told me to think like Coop. That’s what I’m doing.”

  “Portia’s a Shakespearean character in The Merchant of Venice,” Battaglia said, giving new meaning to the word pompous. “She’s a lawyer—a smart and beautiful lady lawyer, and—”

  “She’s a cross-dressing heiress who pretends to be a lawyer,” I said. I had the advantage of having seen the play with Coop and knew her feelings about the character. “A rich girl who was anti-Semitic and a bit of a racist, and all the guys in town are after her for her money. Don’t do it to Coop.”

  “Operation Portia.” Scully stood up and pushed back his chair. “No detail is too unimportant to pass along to me. Nothing.”

  He paused to get everyone’s commitment on that.

  “A communication goes out to every command and patrol car in the force at nine hundred hours. ‘Operation looking for unnamed woman of Alex Cooper’s physical description, last seen on Wednesday evening in a black SUV going westbound on East 65th Street. Possibly across 85th Street Transverse road in Central Park. Anything else?”

  “You want to mention chance of injury or may not be conscious?” Abruzzi asked.

  “Not on this first salvo,” Scully said. “I just want every man and woman looking for her, and if anyone saw anything suspicious on Wednesday evening, maybe this will wake them up.”

  No one disagreed.

  “The chief of detectives will be coordinating everything from right here in One PP. Questions? Or are you ready to—?”

  My phone began to vibrate on top of the conference table.

  “I hope it’s important, Chapman,” the commissioner said to me, annoyed by the interruption. He turned back to the team. “So are all you guys ready to go ahead and find Alexandra Cooper?”

  “It’s a text,” I said, my hand trembling as I picked it up and saw it was coming from Coop’s phone. “From her.”

  “Real time? She just wrote it now?” Mercer pushed back from the table and got on his phone as he leaned in toward me.

  Everyone in the room started buzzing about the text. I hoped they were all so stunned they wouldn’t notice I had the shakes.

  I opened the message and stared at the two words before I said them out loud. I was trying to make sense of them, trying to be the hero—Coop’s hero—and cut the operation short. But it was just two ordinary words.

  “Bar, it says. And then there’s a space, and it says, Bed.”

  Mercer was talking to someone, one finger plugged in his ear to keep out the noise in the room. When he hung up the phone after ninety seconds he looked dejected.

  “One of the rookies found the phone fifteen minutes ago, caught in the branches of a bush in Central Park, just west of the roadway overpass,” he said. “The team bagged it and took it into the station house. Alex must have typed the message Wednesday night but apparently didn’t have the opportunity to hit SEND.”

  “Then how—?” I asked. I had set my phone down on the long table and planted my hands firmly on either side of it.

  “The cops immediately charged it up to see if anything that might help us had come in or out, before they sent it downtown,” Mercer said. “One of them noticed the draft on the screen and tapped SEND.”

  “She must have written the words Wednesday night,” I mumbled. “Maybe she got caught doing it and her abductor tossed the phone into the park.”

  Keith Scully slammed his hand on the table to restore order. “Give me the text again, Chapman. What does it say?”

  The two words that Coop had texted to me before her phone was discarded gave no clue to her location. I spoke them aloud three times for the commissioner and his task force, and then read them silently again. Bar … Bed.

  She hadn’t told me anything at all.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  “So this text addressed to Mike,” Commissioner Scully said, “is the last thing Alex tried to get off from her phone Wednesday night.”

  I loo
ked across at Dr. Friedman and just stared her down. I was the person Coop reached out for—not rejected—when something went bad.

  “Where’s the phone now?” Scully said.

  The text had succeeded in keeping everyone in the room.

  “Crime Scene’s going over it for touch DNA and prints,” Mercer said. “Then they’ll rush it down to TARU.”

  The tech guys would work their magic. If it were possible to pinpoint the exact time and location that the phone landed in the park, it could be a help. And they would dump her device for any incoming calls—something that might have diverted her Wednesday night—as well as outgoing messages Coop may have sent.

  There would certainly be some of her DNA on the phone, and perhaps partial prints of someone else. If she had in fact been abducted, there was the chance that her captor’s DNA was in the data bank and his prints in the system.

  I tore two sheets of paper out of my memo book. On one of them I printed the word BAR in all caps. On the other I wrote BED.

  Peterson saw me do it, then walked to the commissioner’s desk. He grabbed a stack of paper and passed it around so everyone could follow suit. Ricky Friedman just watched.

  “Does any of this speak to any of you?” Scully asked.

  Captain Abruzzi wasn’t writing. “Yeah, she was on her way to a bar—which we already knew—and then she was going to bed with whoever she was off to meet at the bar. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, what are you jumping through hoops for?”

  “I doubt she’d be texting me about the going-to-bed part, Cap. Not with another guy,” I said. “Unless it was you.”

  “Maybe she was trying to tell you it was over, Chapman,” Scully said. “Meant to be cryptic till she could get the entire message to you.”

  “She’s not a cryptic woman,” I said. “The English lit major in her, Commissioner. She writes—she overwrites every thought she’s ever had. Two-word texts? That’s not the way she communicates.”

  “What are the options?” Lieutenant Peterson asked. “First call is whether Alex got into the SUV voluntarily. What’s his name—Sadiq? He didn’t see any signs of force, did he?”

  “Coop knows the first rule of kidnapping. Never get into the car. Never. Once you do it’s too late.” I had heard her give that lecture dozens of times, backed up by every FBI statistic in the country. Kick, scream, bite, fight. Just don’t get into the car or your chances of being found alive ever again are significantly diminished. “Sadiq wasn’t in a position to see into the SUV—tinted windows and all.”

  “But he doesn’t describe a struggle?”

  “No.”

  “So did Alex get in because someone she knew pulled up and offered her a ride?” Peterson asked. “What do you think?”

  I reversed the order of the words by shifting the papers in front of me. BED and BAR. It didn’t matter. Maybe they were meant to be as obvious as Abruzzi thought.

  “You can’t rule it out,” Vickee said. “But who? And that would be just way too coincidental to be credible. There’d be something on her phone to confirm it, don’t you think? A communication with somebody, even it if wasn’t Mike.”

  “You can say it out loud,” I said. “If Coop was in a friendly situation—if she had been secure, in the company of a person she knew, she probably would have texted Jake Tyler to apologize for being late and to ask if he was still waiting for her.”

  “If she did,” the TARU sergeant said, “it will all be on her phone when we get it. Are they rushing it downtown to Bobby Bowman?”

  “On the way,” Mercer said.

  Lieutenant Peterson was back to how Coop got into the car. “So let’s assume it wasn’t a friendly encounter, okay? Assume the worst. How’d they get her off the street? And I’m saying ‘they’ because there was a driver, and Sadiq says she got into the side of the SUV behind the driver, so if there was force used, it’s coming from at least one more person in the backseat.”

  “Could have been she was smacked on the head with a billy club or a jack,” one of the Major Case guys offered. “Sorry, Mike. I’m just being real. I don’t mean like gray matter all over the interior of the SUV—I mean just stunned is all. Stunned enough to pull her into the car.”

  “Look, Chapman,” the commissioner said, “if this is too raw for you to listen to, we can pull back and you can work with Peterson out of the squad office. It’s understandable. In fact, it’s probably the smartest way to go.”

  “Did I say anything? I’m thinking just the way the rest of you are.”

  Except that every now and then the idea of a physical blow to Coop hit me like a tire iron in my chest.

  “I wouldn’t imagine it was anything that split her skull in pieces like a cracked egg,” another detective said. “This text was written—what—maybe ten minutes to half an hour after she was grabbed, right? TARU will nail that timeline down, but it had to be written after she got into the vehicle.”

  “I just said ‘stunned,’ didn’t I? We’re not talking permanent brain injury,” his colleague responded. “Still together enough to write the words. Bar—that’s Patroon. Bed—it’s whoever she was cheating with.”

  “What else would just temporarily knock her out?” Peterson asked.

  “A knife to her throat or a gun to her temple would keep her quiet,” Abruzzi said. “Might gain her compliance without leaving a mark.”

  “I’d be in at the show of a weapon,” Peterson said. “Nothing more than that necessary to get me into a car.”

  “How about something toxic over her face?” the TARU sergeant added. “What are the current drugs of choice?”

  “I doubt anything was delivered by syringe,” Mercer said. “She’d have to have been pretty still already, with a vein exposed, to ensure a hit. Discard that idea.”

  “No, I meant the old-fashioned way. A rag over her nose. Chloroform.”

  “You’ve seen too many bad movies,” I said. “Chloroform isn’t any kind of guarantee. You’d have to get it smack over the vic’s nose and hold it there. You picturing a tough guy in the back of an SUV coming on to Coop with an ‘Excuse me, miss, would you stick your head into this rag and tell me if you think it’s chloroform?’ Nah, not happening.”

  “Take a step back,” Mercer said. “I’ve had three, maybe four cases with it, and Alex worked on one of them with me.”

  “So?”

  “It’s easy to get. My perp bought it online from a chemical supply company in Canada. In fact, Vickee, call Catherine and tell her to pull the Juarez case from 2009,” Mercer said. “See if that fool is still locked up.”

  Mercer went on. “Suppose there’s someone strong enough to grab Alex by the arm when he opens the car door and calls her name. She leans over and he’s got a grip on her, and before she can open her mouth to scream, the soaked rag has her nose covered.”

  “What’s the point?” I asked.

  He practically put his face up against mine. “Maybe the point is that it’s good news, if you think about it.”

  “You and I must have very different definitions of good.”

  “Listen up, Mike. If somebody wanted to kill Alex Cooper—and those threats have been real from time to time—he apparently had the opportunity to do that on Wednesday night,” Mercer said. “She could have been taken out by a bullet walking alone on a side street. She could have been stabbed and left for dead. I’m looking at the fact that she may have been abducted as opposed to killed as a good thing.”

  “On East 65th Street? Have you got it confused with the South Side of Chicago? Anacostia or Watts? We don’t get so many drive-bys in the silk-stocking district, do we, dude?” I said, getting up to pace the perimeter of the room. “Now, we get to talking about dump jobs, you’ll have to admit this is prime real estate for that.”

  Dr. Friedman inched forward and asked Vickee what kind of job I was talking about.

  “That’s what we call it, Doc, when the bad guys pick a vic off the street, drive off to some remot
e place to do whatever piece of the nasty it is that they want to do, and then dump the body in another location altogether,” I said. “What’s to say Coop hasn’t been killed? What’s to say she’s not—?”

  I couldn’t finish the sentence

  “Sleeping with the fishes?” Abruzzi said. “Curled up in the weeds alongside the Belt Parkway? Use your head, Chapman. If someone was looking to snuff a prosecutor, he’d want it to be a very public dump. She’d be lying at the feet of the Angel of the Waters in Central Park. She’d be splayed across the information booth in Grand Central. He’d want the city to know she was offed. That’s not what we’ve got.”

  “Then, what?”

  “The alternative may be almost worse.”

  I didn’t think Abruzzi was wrong. The thoughts I couldn’t deal with involved Coop in the hands of a sexual predator.

  I needed to get out of headquarters and continue looking for the monster who had her, so I could rip his throat out. The air in the commissioner’s office was stifling.

  “Could we get back to chloroform for a minute?” Mercer asked. “It makes sense as a weapon if you’re telling me that Alex was alert and able to send—to try to send—Mike a text after she was forced in the car.”

  Several heads around the table were nodding.

  “I mean, all it does is provide a short-term knockout, if it works right. Five to ten minutes at best, unless it’s applied to her nose and mouth continuously,” Mercer said. “Suppose Alex was overcome by the chloroform, let’s say. Not hurt. The drug was just used to overwhelm her and get her off the street as quietly as possible.”

  Lieutenant Peterson was the first to agree. “Go with it.”

  “The driver takes off and Alex is in the backseat with another guy.”

  Mercer’s words had me squirming. I must have looked like I was going to fling myself through one of the commissioner’s windows.

  “Sit down, Chapman,” Scully said.

  “She comes around at some point, not long after the cloth comes off her face.” Mercer turned to me to deliver what he figured was the good news. “That wouldn’t have happened if they wanted her dead, Mike.”