“Did you get his ID?”
“No reason to, Detective.”
“I guess.” I was short on understanding and long on Monday morning quarterbacking.
“When he opened the car door to get in, that’s when the lights went on and I could see another guy in the backseat.”
“Awake or asleep like the girl?” I asked.
“Totally awake. He asked me how long they’d be held up.”
“Anything distinctive about the men? About their looks? Scars, marks, tats—anything at all?”
“Not that I can think of. The driver and his pal, they both had real dark hair,” Stern said to me. “Kind of black, like yours. The guy in the backseat was sort of red. He may have had a slight brogue, too.”
“May have? Or did he?”
“He said all of one sentence to me, Detective. Maybe he did.”
Irish? I’m sure in Coop’s rows of file cabinets there were mutts she’d prosecuted who were as Irish as me and my ancestors, but I couldn’t pull any up in the moment.
“Anything else about her? About any of them?”
“Yeah,” Stern said. “She smelled something awful.”
“Smelled?”
“Too much perfume, I figure. Just when the door was opened I got a touch of it. Sickly sweet.”
Mercer and I exchanged glances.
Peterson had let the cigarette burn down to his lips. He heard Stern’s comment and walked over to continue giving us the details.
Harold Harrison was an investment banker from Connecticut, in the city drinking with friends to celebrate his recent divorce. They were in a crowded sports bar in the East Eighties, sometime after nine P.M. on Wednesday, and he didn’t know that his pocket had been picked until he went to pay the tab. His friends covered the bill, but when Harrison went outside to see whether he’d left his wallet in his car, the vehicle was still parked there but the license plates were gone.
“Professionals,” Mercer said. “Total pros. They undoubtedly scouted their mark—or they had a couple of potential marks—going into the bar, already a bit tipsy. One of them stayed with Harrison’s car. The minute his wallet was pinched, off with the plates.”
“Maybe it took longer than they thought,” Peterson said. “So they scoop Alex up, then pull over to put the clean plates on in case they’re stopped, in case one of her friends had happened to follow and got a partial.”
“Damn it,” I said, turning to the unhappy young police officer. “Didn’t you get the VIN off the SUV?”
“What for? The plates, the license—they checked out clean.”
“We’d know who owns the car, now, wouldn’t we?”
“Lay off him, Chapman,” Peterson said, thanking Stern for his follow-up and asking him to wait on a bench outside the café till he was cleared to go. “There’s another piece of the puzzle to give you.”
He walked out the other side of the café—toward the paths to the east, which led into Riverside Park or up the enormous winding staircases to the asphalt roadway—and returned with a middle-aged cop in uniform.
“Hey,” he said, taking his hand off his frayed belt and extending it to Mercer first. “Seen you around. I’m Jaworski.”
“Mercer Wallace. And this here is Mike Chapman.”
“Jaworski does steady midnights in the two-four,” Peterson says. “He was working Thursday morning.”
“Tell me,” I said.
The Twenty-Fourth Precinct included the boat basin, a lot of Riverside Park, and the Upper West Side.
“I didn’t think much of it until my boss called me about the blast from the commissioner’s office this morning, with the alert about a missing woman in a black SUV,” Jaworski said. “My partner and I were patrolling in an RMP early Thursday morning, not that we ever saw a woman in the vehicle.”
“What vehicle?” Radio motor patrol cars were the familiar blue-and-whites of the NYPD. What the hell did he think was so important if he never had his eyes on Coop?
“It was just coming up on two A.M.,” Jaworski said. “We’ve got Sector Charlie, which includes the marina, so we usually swing by a few times during the night. There’s not very much action on the water this time of year, but we always check it out in case someone goes all Natalie Wood on us. The sergeant had us patrolling the park extra heavy this week because of the big arrest Wednesday morning. You know about that?”
“Yeah,” Mercer said. “Raymond Tanner.”
“Okay. So it’s one of those make-the-public-feel-safe programs,” Jaworski said, resting both hands on his paunch, which hung out over the belt. “Lots of visibility and police presence. Step up the patrols.”
“Got it.”
“My partner was the driver. We just finished checking out the park. Decided to take the underpass and come out on the roundabout up above here,” he said, pointing up and circling his arm to indicate the road overhead. “I spotted an SUV, a black one, pulled over out of the traffic flow, like at the very top of the staircase down to the marina. The driver was on his knees behind the car, so I thought maybe he had a flat or something.”
“You stopped,” I said.
“Sure. Got out and walked over to him. He was working in the dark, so I beamed my flashlight at him to give him a hand.”
“Was it the tire?”
“Nope. He had a screwdriver,” Jaworski said. “Told me one of the bolts had come out of his rear plate and it was flapping like crazy when he drove.”
“Connecticut plates,” I said matter-of-factly.
“No. New Jersey, actually. I gave your lieutenant the plate number.”
“Did you call it in?”
“What for?” Jaworski said. “The tag on the front of the car was fastened on tight. The man’s story made sense. He didn’t do nothing.”
“And in the car?”
“Nobody there. I shined my light in before I left, when he got back in the driver’s seat. Then he thanked me and took off.”
“You know who Alex Cooper is?” I leaned in and asked.
“Should I?”
“She’s a prosecutor. DA’s office. You ever take a sexual assault arrest down to Centre Street?”
“I don’t do arrests,” Jaworski said, smiling at me. “The city don’t pay me enough.”
There were plenty of guys in the department who thought like he did, especially as the time to collect a pension grew closer. They didn’t want to mess up their steady tours, risk injury, deal with erratic court appearance dates, and be required to testify under oath to anything.
“Why are you here?” I asked, throwing up my hands in Peterson’s direction.
“My sergeant called me at home this morning, after that message from the commissioner was sent out. I guess ’cause we’re not that far from the transverse crossing, and me and my partner saw this SUV with a guy screwing on a plate in the middle of the night.”
“It gets better,” Peterson said.
“Yeah, he brought me in for a day tour. Overtime,” Jaworski said. “The guys in the squad ran the Jersey plate this morning, just ’cause it’s a black SUV in the general location from late Wednesday night, Thursday morning.”
“They were stolen,” I said. “Right? Like it’s a big surprise at this point, Loo, right?”
“MD plates,” Peterson said. “Taken from a doc’s car while he was supposedly paying a house call to a lady friend on West 80th Street, sometime after he parked at midnight and before Jaworski spotted them at two A.M. Pretty bold to lift them—two separate times and places—from a city street.”
“Mercer’s right. We’re clearly dealing with professionals. Three of them, at least.” I was trying to think like the bad guys. “Two sets of plates if not more. Fresh. A well-conceived plan to keep the common-looking black SUV moving to their destination, maybe stopping to kidnap someone along the way. Even if the license number is captured on a traffic video or made by a cop on the beat, we’d never be able to prove after the fact that it was the same car.”
“You start checking all the TWOCed tags?” Plates that were taken without the owner’s consent were TWOCed.
“Of course.”
“Any ideas to find the SUV? Anything about it that was distinctive?”
“We’ve got the car, Chapman,” the lieutenant said. “Abandoned sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Right outside a chop shop in Queens.”
“VIN?”
“Completely disfigured. It will take a day or two to run all the possible configurations of the digits to see if we can pull up an owner.”
“Prints? DNA? There must be some way to tell if Coop was in that car,” I said, sailing my empty coffee cup across the room, missing the garbage pail by several feet. “How about that sickly sweet odor? Maybe there’s still a rag on the floor of the car?”
“There’s a familiar odor all right,” Peterson said. “That car’s been wiped so clean you could perform heart surgery on the backseat with no risk of infection. The whole thing reeks of Clorox.”
THIRTY-TWO
“Are you following me because you don’t trust me or because you want to talk?”
“What do you think, dude?” Mercer said.
“You like it, these two sightings?”
“It’s all we’ve got. Work with these facts till something better comes along.”
I was already racing ahead of the facts. Bad images of this trio and their captive were forming in my mind’s eye like clouds colliding in a thunderstorm.
“Sadiq puts Coop on East 65th Street between Second and Third, getting into an SUV, behind the driver, no ruckus. I’m figuring that’s at something like ten fifteen, ten thirty,” I said, shading my eyes from the bright sunlight to look at Mercer. “Officer Stern gets off his bike on East 73rd Street, maybe forty-five minutes later.”
“How about all the time in between?” Mercer asked.
“Maybe they were driving around, looking for a quiet side street to make the switch. Think how smart it is, really. There are surveillance cameras on all the main avenues and intersections that are capable of capturing plate numbers twenty-four/seven to give speeding tickets and violations. So these guys are savvy enough to think of plate changes. Maybe just pause for a while out of sight—make sure their captive is subdued—and that way there’s no straight line of travel if we set out to examine the video footage.”
“Glad you can think like the bad guys, Mike,” Mercer said. “So figure they’ve killed an hour doing like you just hypothesized. Now they pull over. One of them is putting new tags on the car—that would throw off the scent of anyone who saw the abduction and reported the old license numbers.”
“Script matches Coop’s disappearance so far as it goes.”
“But she’s still out cold,” Mercer said.
“You can keep reapplying something like chloroform anytime your vic comes around, long as it doesn’t kill her by causing cardiac arrhythmia.”
“So after Officer Stern heads off to work, maybe Alex comes around.”
“Maybe.”
“At some point,” Mercer said, as we walked away from the massive granite rotunda and turned south, out toward the main dock of the marina, “she hears the three talking about where they’re taking her. That’s when she slips the phone out of her pocket and tries to text you.”
Bar, I thought. The words Bar and Bed.
“The car goes from 73rd Street off Lex to 85th Street, to the transverse that cuts through to the West Side,” he went on. “We know that because Alex’s phone was thrown into Central Park and landed there. She’d composed a text to you by then—”
“Or part of one,” I said. The two words simply made no sense.
“The perps toss the phone and keep on going. Driving west.”
“And TARU owes us a time for the toss, but it’s got to be between eleven twenty and twelve fifteen.”
“That puts the group on the West Side, in time to steal another set of license plates.”
“And by two A.M.,” I said, “the only one left in the SUV is the driver.”
Lieutenant Peterson hadn’t wanted officers Stern and Jaworski talking to each other, comparing notes and observations, until he had gotten all the information from each of them. Now he would be trying to confirm that the man each described as the driver was the same individual.
“So why the 79th Street Boat Basin exit?” Mercer asked.
I turned around to look back at the West Side Highway. “It’s a pretty central point of contact,” I said. “You can go either south or north on the highway from right here. South shoots you straight down to the Battery, so you’re on the way to Queens or Brooklyn in a flash. Even Staten Island. You pass the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel entrances to get to New Jersey.”
“Wrap under the overpass to go north,” Mercer said. “Gives you the George Washington Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway north to the Saw Mill, to Westchester and Connecticut.”
“So the vic could have been transferred to another car right there. Another make, another model, another color vehicle, to further complicate things for us,” I said, pointing up at the asphalt roundabout where Jaworski had witnessed the second plate change. “She could be in Georgia by now. And we’ve got an entire department looking for her in a black SUV that’s already been trashed. She could be in North Dakota or Arizona or—or in a landfill on Staten Island.”
“Now, that’s fucked-up, Mike,” Mercer said, gripping my arm at the elbow. “Hold yourself together, man.”
I swiveled around again, breaking loose and heading for the end of the dock.
“Why here?” I said out loud, rolling the two texted words over and over again. “Why are we standing right here, at the boat basin?”
The gray-green water was calm now. Two men were loading live eels into a pail on their Boston Whaler to serve as bait, heading out for an afternoon on the river.
There seemed to be an unusual amount of activity on the Hudson, maybe because of the warm, sunny day. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, because I had been overcome by inertia and the futility of my efforts to find Coop.
Bar and bed were simply two common syllables, and I was pushing them to give me a meaning they didn’t have.
The Circle Line tour boat was full of passengers taking in the scenic shoreline. Water taxis crisscrossed from New Jersey towns to lower Manhattan, optimistic fishermen were motoring south to Sandy Hook to look for the ever-elusive October stripers, and athletic young men and women were paddling kayaks and canoes against the current.
I walked to the farthest point on the dock, enjoying the breeze that came up from the water.
The quiet—the distance from all the chatter that had surrounded me since before dawn—was also a relief.
Mercer gave me some time alone. He leaned against one of the wooden piers and let me try to clear my head.
I did a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree revolution, fixing on the highway entrance to the boat basin on the land to the east above me, and once again due north to the mammoth engineering feat that was the GW Bridge. I scanned the Jersey coastline to see if it might hold a clue to Coop’s whereabouts, and then stretched out over the end of the dock to look for the colossal arm and torch of the great lady, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World—as her creator had named her—standing tall on Liberty Island.
Why the boat basin? I asked myself. If not just a traffic stop for the perps to change cars and move their passenger, then there had to be a boat involved. And if a boat was involved, then where was it headed?
I squatted on the broken boards and drew imaginary letters with my finger. What had Coop heard the men in the car say to make her write Bar and Bed?
I looked up again and scanned the Hudson River one more time, as though searching out its source in the little town of Lake Tear in the Cloud and sailing away past its mouth at the head of Upper New York Bay.
What I needed now was an epiphany, a lightning strike to my brain that wo
uld make things as clear to me as Coop thought she had done.
I played with proper names like Barton and Barstow and Barbara. I thought of crazy things like bedlam and bedbugs and bargains. I conjured objects that would be on this river, like barges and barrels and bedrock.
I must have spent ten or fifteen minutes fighting with the alphabet, pacing the dock and then squatting down to focus myself.
Coop had meant to send these words to me because she trusted that I would be able to make sense of them. But I was trying to force the six letters to talk to me, and they wouldn’t comply.
I thought it through again. She must have heard the men say they were taking her to an exact location. She must have known by the time she wrote the two words, before they drove through Central Park to the West Side, that their next stop was the boat basin. And then someplace jumping off from right here, maybe someplace we had both been together.
Bar and Bed. I started over again. I babbled all the words that came to me from a mental scan of dictionary and encyclopedia Bs.
I looked upriver and downriver and tried to recover factoids about every landmark on this vast waterfront.
Slowly, I pushed up from the dock. I stretched my legs and nodded.
Bar was short for the name of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who conceived and designed the Statue of Liberty. My wordsmith had given me the help I needed with the shorthand text she never got to send. Bed must have meant Bedloe Island, where the great statue had originally been sited.
I fist-pumped the air over and over again.
“What is it, Mike?” Mercer called out to me.
“I have it, man!” I shouted back at him. “Go get Jimmy North. It’s time for a sea cruise.”
THIRTY-THREE
“Slow it down, Mike,” Mercer said. “Talk me through it.”
We stood on the end of the dock and looked downriver.
“It makes sense from every angle. Who knows how many clues Coop would have tried to give me if she’d had time. The words she wrote were never going to be obvious as place names,” I said. “These clues wouldn’t have been clear to her kidnappers unless they knew as much about New York City history as she does.”
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