Death Angel (10 page)

I didn’t think the commissioner brooked fools or comics, so I thought he wouldn’t take that question seriously. He turned to Peterson and asked if there had been any progress in identifying the victim.

“No, sir. We had a possible lead this morning—a man who thought the girl might have gone to Brearley with his daughter. But we have the yearbook now and we’ve made contact with the young lady in the picture and she’s alive and well.”

“Are you still thinking your victim might have been homeless?”

“That’s our best guess, so far.”

So although it first seemed the commissioner was ducking the question about where might be a good place to kill someone, he was instead building to an answer in a most logical way.

“Since this Park was created, it has always been a magnet for the homeless. In the 1860s they were called ‘tramps’ and ‘bums,’ and they migrated to the new Park in droves. In the Great Depression, the poor pitched tents and made shanties around the Reservoir and on the margins of the parks. In every period of economic downturn, the disenfranchised find their way into the Park. So it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why your victim found solace here.”

But there are so many different reasons for why people are homeless, so many kinds of psychological and emotional distress, and not all of them have to do with financial needs. Until we knew why she was here—if homelessness was the reason—we’d have no idea with whom she might have come in contact, if her killer was not a total stranger.

“Places to kill someone,” Davis said to himself, turning to the map behind him, his hands tucked in his pants pocket. “Starting from the south, one could get lost in the nature sanctuary just off the 59th Street entrance, which is pretty dense and has no formal paths. I’ve always thought the arches get a bit spooky after dark—Greengap or Driprock or Willowdell—but, hell, they’ve been used in a thousand movies and crime shows. Way too obvious.”

The Davis deadpan made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or joking around, but most of the men were furiously writing down the names of Park sites—obscure to most of us but clearly Davis’s home territory—in their memo pads.

“The polar bear den at the zoo is a natural—but then, this girl wasn’t mauled, was she? Literary Walk is one of my favorite places. Your victim would have to be a writer, though, if put to death somewhere between the statues of Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare.”

“How many statues you got in here anyway?” McAvoy asked.

“Thirty-six. But they don’t make good places to hide.” Davis’s long slender fingers moved deftly over the map. “Simon Bolivar, Hans Christian Andersen, Alexander Hamilton . . .”

“How many of the statues are women?” I said, smiling at the commissioner.

“Two, young lady. Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose.”

As a kid, I had always wondered why there weren’t any women important enough to be commemorated in the City’s great park. “I could nominate a few real ones.”

“I’d appreciate that,” Davis said. “Back to crime scenes. Strawberry Fields—makes me sad to think that the guy who killed John Lennon spent the whole afternoon before the shooting enjoying himself in our Park. The Ramble? That’s as good as it gets for being remote. Like a world apart, but it’s hiding in plain sight. You’ve got glacial erratics . . .”

“Erotic what?” Same guy, Major Case squad.

“Erratic. Something like yourself. Glacial rock deposited thousands of years ago on top of bedrock that’s entirely different in composition. One of my recurrent nightmares is a tourist being crushed by one of those glacials toppling off its base. We wouldn’t find him—or her—for years. The Great Lawn, if you don’t mind an audience. The Loch, the Ravine, the North Woods, the Harlem Meer. What do you think, gentlemen? This Park is probably the size of four or five of your precincts—and yet there’s only a fraction of the crime in here. I can think of dozens of places to kill someone, although I can’t imagine depositing the deceased in the Lake, as this guy did.”

“I’ll bite,” Manny Chirico said. “Why not?”

“Because it’s clear she’s going to be found. A few of the spots I’ve mentioned, it could be forever before somebody came upon her. In any of the grottoes, under one of the waterfalls in the Ravine—hell, if you’re dumping her in a body of water, she’s a lot more likely to bottom out in the Reservoir, which is enormous.”

“So the killer wants to be caught,” I said.

“No killer wants to be caught, Coop. Did you drop out of Psych 101 in favor of English lit?” Mike’s friends laughed with him. “If they wanted to be caught, we’d be out of business and schmucks would just be lining up at the courthouse to throw themselves at you. Norman Bates had his mother up in the bedroom for how many years? You didn’t have to look far, but he didn’t want to be caught. Bonnie and Clyde? They left bodies in every bank from Louisiana to New Mexico, in plain sight. No desire to be riddled with bullets in a police ambush. Son of Sam? Murder after murder, they’re all strangers to him, and he’s nailed by a parking ticket. Psychobabble at its best, Madame Prosecutor. If he wanted to be caught, where the hell is he? And Commissioner Davis didn’t say anything about what the killer wanted for himself; he said the killer wanted his
victim
to be found. He left her in the heart of Central Park, in the heart of this city.”

“A man who listens to me,” Davis said, cocking his head and turning on his most electric smile. “A rare and wonderful thing. I’m guessing you two are married, the way you talk to each other.”

Mike blushed while he protested, and half the guys in the room guffawed.

“Just lovers,” I said to the commissioner. “Not married yet.”

The room went instantly quiet. McAvoy scoped his team—some bemused and others smirking, homicide detectives looked from one another to the lieutenant—and I was paranoid to read into all of the glances that each of them knew about Jessica Pell’s threat to bring Mike down. Manny Chirico acted like he was ready to gag me.

“May I ask you something about Seneca Village, Commissioner?”

“Sure, Ms. Cooper. What would you like to know?”

“You may have heard about some objects that were recovered near the Lake on Friday.”

“Actually, I don’t know anything about them.”

“Well, one was a figure of an angel. It appears to be quite old—I can show you a photo after the meeting—and she’s black. A detective told me about Seneca Village, and I was wondering if this artifact might have come from there.”

Davis put his finger to his lips, and his brow wrinkled as he thought. He took a few minutes to describe the short history of Seneca to the group.

“I wouldn’t have any idea about the source of your object, but there’s no access to the area of the village right now,” he said. “The last excavation was in 2011, by the archaeologists from Columbia.”

“Digs?” I asked. “They opened the area?”

“Very carefully executed and supervised, Ms. Cooper. They used ground-penetrating radar to study the village, using it to detect what was a rich trove of artifacts.”

“What did they find?” Peterson asked.

“Most significantly, the walls of the home of the sexton of one of the churches in the village. All Angels’ Church.”

I slipped my phone out of my pocket and tried to avoid distracting the others by holding it in my lap to pull up the photo of the ebony angel.

“They found remnants of clothing, some ceramics, butchered animal bones—really a fascinating record of the kind of life these people led. Most of the dig is preserved on video. Radar allowed the scholars to keep it very narrowly confined so they neither destroyed any remaining structures nor disturbed the five cemeteries that remain under the Park.”

“Cemeteries under here?” someone murmured. “That’s creepy.”

“But now, Commissioner, could someone access those areas today?”

“That wouldn’t be possible, Ms. Cooper. After the dig, the soil and plantings were completely restored. The men who work in that zone would have noticed any attempt to interfere with the ground cover. Why?” Davis asked. “These objects you’re talking about, do you think they’re connected to the murder?”

Peterson moved to the front of the room, next to Davis. “We’ll get back to you on that, Commissioner, once we’ve gotten further along with our investigation.”

“But why did you ask, Ms. Cooper?” Davis wasn’t easily put off.

“It’s like what you said about the girl’s body.”

“What? That the killer wouldn’t have put her in the Lake unless he wanted her to be found?”

“Yes. You’ve got half the NYPD doing a strip search of your Park. There’s no garbage, of course. We get that’s a cardinal sin. So they’re not wasting any time picking up candy wrappers and soda bottles. But they find three objects—each of which looks antique, and each of which is not a child’s toy or a broken sailboat—three objects that appear to be of substance and of value, on the shore of the Lake, just dozens of yards from the girl’s body. We’ve got no other leads at this point, so perhaps you should take a look at them.”

“I’m happy to do that,” Davis said. “Maybe your killer wanted them to be discovered.”

“Or maybe,” I said, “maybe it’s our victim who’s talking to us.”

Mike stopped shaking his head and picked it up to stare at me.

“Could be the dead girl,” I said, “who’s leaving us a sign. Could be she’s the one who wanted something to be found.”

I knew that would get Mike’s attention. Like most good homicide detectives, Mike developed a special bond with his victims. It started at the scene of the crime, when he saw the body at its worst, with the reveal of all that the murderer had done to take a human life. How much force, how many blows, what kind of injuries and how many of them were needed to cause death or were just an additional outpouring of some interpersonal venom.

He was there for the autopsy, when the brilliant pathologists coaxed more of the story from the bones and the tissue, the trunk and the limbs of the deceased.

And then he stayed on it, with fierce determination and a unique skill set—part from his father’s DNA and the rest from his own training and experience—until he could see that some measure of justice was done.

The detectives hammered Commissioner Davis with questions for another hour. We took notes of every mention, interested as always to see in how many different directions each one of these investigators could go with the same information.

The meeting broke up at two o’clock, most of the men as anxious to grab lunch as they were to get back to work.

Davis had invited Peterson, Chirico, Mike, and me to come to his office and had instructed his assistant to call out for sandwiches.

While he returned some of the calls that had come in during our session, Sergeant Chirico took me aside, steering me by the elbow into an alcove outside Davis’s office.

“It doesn’t help things if you start going rogue on me, Alex. Jumping up on the table in the boathouse to threaten to take your clothes off, letting go with a line about being lovers in front of the whole gang . . .”

“Look at the faces of your men, Sarge. I don’t think Judge Pell’s wrath is a well-kept secret. And according to Vickee, DCPI might as well put out a press release confirming that Mike and I are a couple. Whatever plan you think you have, I’m guessing it’s too subtle. I think you need to fight Pell’s fire with fire.”

“How?”

I exhaled. “I don’t know. Let me think about it. You just can’t let her win this battle.”

“Alex? Manny?” Peterson called from down the hallway. “Where are you two?”

We walked back to the commissioner’s office in silence, past the handsome murals of nineteenth-century soldiers in formation, a reminder of the original purpose of the building.

Davis asked to see the three photographs I had taken of the vouchered items. He studied the angel with intense focus. “All I can suggest is sending someone to the Columbia group with this figure, to see if it looks like anything they uncovered in the dig.”

“Will do,” Mike said.

“And these miniature statues of the fort and the Obelisk, they’re really interesting. Do they have any maker’s marks?”

“I left them at the lab the other day, just to see if they might have any forensic evidence on them. But that was a negative. So once the mud is off them, we can check for that.”

“What I need to do, Detective, is introduce you to the head of the Conservancy. This is the kind of thing that looks unusual enough that she or someone on her staff might be familiar with it.”

“That would be great,” Mike said, steno pad in hand to take down her information.

“Her name is Mia Schneider. My secretary will give you her number. But she’s out of town for another two days, and no one knows the Park’s history as well as she does.”

“Then I’ll pick them up tomorrow and be ready when she’s back on Wednesday or Thursday.”

“I can do better than that,” Davis said. “Wednesday evening is the annual Conservancy fund-raiser. It’s held in the Park—in the Conservatory Garden. It’s a pretty spectacular way to see Central Park. My wife and I have a table. Why don’t you be my guest, Detective? I can introduce you to anyone connected to the operation that you might need to know.”

“Thanks, sir, but I can’t—”

Gordon Davis’s eyes twinkled as he talked. “Sure you can, can’t he, Lieutenant? Hell, you can even bring your—Ms. Cooper here.”

“We’re not really involved,” I said. “I was just joking.”

Davis liked being mischievous. “I’ve got a sense of humor. I can roll with that.”

“It’s a good idea for you to go, Mike,” the lieutenant said. “Alone.”

“Sure,” Davis said. “After all, what if one of the zookeepers is the killer? Or a trustee? Might as well get to know the players. See them in their natural habitat.”

“Loo, I think the commissioner’s right,” Manny Chirico said. “No disrespect, Loo, but I think Alex needs to go with Mike. I’ll explain my reasoning later.”

Chirico clamped his lips together and nodded at me. If he didn’t have a plan to deal with Jessica Pell earlier, he was developing one now.

Mike planted his left hand on his hip, and the fingers of his right hand began working his hair. “Bad idea, Sarge. Let’s save the dirty laundry for when we get out of the commissioner’s office, but me and Coop? Not happening.”

Davis pointed a finger at Mike. “I’m expecting you, Chapman. You and Ms. Cooper. Don’t disappoint me.”

“I know Coop looks very
Downton Abbey
on the outside, Commissioner, but this broad is totally
Homeland.
There’s a Carrie Mathison inside her, obsessed with me like I’m Nick Brody, waiting to burst out,” Mike said, faking half a smile, “and I’d just hate to see it in full bloom at your fund-raiser.”

“Black tie, Detective. Cocktails at six, dinner at seven.” Davis said, dismissing us. “Anything else right now, Lieutenant Peterson?”

“Thanks, sir. Thanks for your time.”

Davis’s secretary gave us a small office so that we could eat our sandwiches. I carried them in, and Mike slammed the door behind me.

“Deal breaker. I don’t own a tux, Loo.”

“It’s a good opportunity, just like Davis says. Rent one.”

“I’ve got to spend a hundred bucks to go to fund-raiser for the squirrels and wildflowers?”

“Use some of the dough you made on all that overtime guarding Judge Pell,” the sergeant said before biting into his roast beef sandwich.

“Whew, Manny,” Mike said. “We’re into tough love now, I guess.”

“Don’t let it ruin your appetite, Mike. I’ve been thinking about how we deal with Pell and—”

I tipped my chair back and shook my head so the sergeant could see me. I didn’t want him blaming—or crediting me—with his strategy.

“I just think we’re smarter to draw her out. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to send Alex with Mike to the Park on Wednesday night. To let them keep working together. If that smokes Pell out into the open, all the better for us. Any other way, she wins.”

I munched on a corner of my turkey wrap.

“And if this gets to Scully?” the lieutenant asked. “It’s the mayor who appointed Pell.”

“For all the wrong reasons,” I said. “And it’s the same mayor who appointed Scully, too. That’s the good news.”

“So far I’m in charge of dealing with Pell,” Chirico said. “We’ll try it my way. What’s the rest of the day?”

“I’m heading back out to see how the canvass is going,” Mike said.

“Me, too. I mean, not the same place you’ll be, but that’s what I’m going to do,” I said.

“Tomorrow morning I’ll pick up the statues and bring them down to the office. Your photography unit can document them, and you can set someone on tracing them.”

“I’ll be free as soon as Battaglia finishes with me.”

“What does he want?” Mike asked.

“I can only guess, but I think it has to do with a pound of my flesh.”

Peterson and Chirico were finishing their lunch and ready to leave. “I’ve had two teams working since yesterday morning on circulating the girl’s photo to some of the homeless shelters. I’d better get a buzz on that,” Peterson said. “And I’m calling SVU. We might as well bring Mercer back in on this, along with some of their other senior people.”

Mercer had been in Homicide for years before asking for the transfer to Special Victims. He liked the rapport he developed with survivors of sexual assault, helping them triumph in the courtroom and restoring their dignity. Mike preferred work that did not involve hand-holding the victim. He saved his compassion for the dead.

Mike and I walked out behind them. “Are you going back to the Point?” I asked him.

“Nah. I’ve had my excitement for the day. I’m going to try the other side of Bow Bridge. See what the shoreline looks like over there. You?”

“Bethesda Terrace.” It was where all the gathered information was being centrally reported to one of the sergeants from Intel. “Best place for me to keep up to speed.”

We fell back behind the bosses as we walked out of the Arsenal. “How late are you staying?”

“Don’t know. It’s getting close to the longest day of the year. Till it gets dark, I guess.”

Many of the Park regulars had evening rituals—jogging, biking, blading, dog walking, in the hours after work. If there had been any kind of confrontation between our victim and her assailant that started at dusk or in early darkness, these would be the people who might have snippets of information.

“So how about if I pick you up at Bethesda at nine tonight? We knock off and have dinner?”

I turned to look at Mike, puzzled by his offer. He was running so hot and cold, frazzled by Pell’s threats and frustrated by the lack of progress in the case, that I still didn’t know how read him. “Me?”

“Is there anyone else in earshot?”

“You must have started at five
A.M.
today. You know they won’t pay you OT for this?”

“Like I’m in it for the big bucks, blondie? It’s my case, remember? And it’s Mercer’s idea to have dinner.”

“Then I’ll see you at nine,” I said. “Thanks for including me.”

Mike called out to the lieutenant and caught up with his two supervisors. I walked behind the building and headed north again, cutting across paths until I got to the foot of the Promenade on the Mall, walking that single straight line right to Bethesda Terrace.

The rest of the afternoon and evening was uneventful. Tourists were curious about the massive police presence, so it seemed as though as many people were stopping to ask us questions as there were to answer them.

Most of the Park regulars were willing to be helpful, pausing to express concern, ask who the dead girl was, and offer advice of every kind. Police noted descriptions of men who had shouted obscene comments to women joggers, men who had come on to college students in bikinis spread out on blankets on the Great Lawn, and men who had been rowboating on the Lake.

The cops had me spend an hour with an NYU professor who encouraged me to study Dreiser’s
An American Tragedy
to see if there were any clues in that classic about the drowning of a poor working girl—knocked out of a rowboat in a lake—by the boyfriend who’d found a richer prospect he wanted to marry.

By the end of the day, we had thousands of generic descriptions of unpleasant men who frequented the Park. We had nothing that remotely pointed to a killer.

Shortly after nine, Mike pulled up in his car on the roadway adjacent to the Terrace.

“How do you do this grueling legwork day after day?” I asked him. “I’m beat.”

“Beat is good,” he said. “As long as you’re hungry, too.”

“Thirsty.”

“Even better. Mercer’s holding a table for us at Patroon.”

“Now I’m hungry and thirsty. Nothing could make me happier.”

We headed east, down to 46th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, where my friends Ken and Di Aretsky owned one of the classiest restaurants in the city. Patroon featured the best steaks in town, and a grilled Dover sole that was off the charts. Ken was as nice as anyone in the business, providing a clubby atmosphere that ensured relaxation as much as it did fine dining. And he had been a great resource for Luc Rouget when my Frenchman had tried to open a fancy restaurant in New York earlier this year. Mercer and Mike were taking me to one of the places that I was most comfortable, most pampered.

Mike was moving swiftly down Fifth Avenue. There was no traffic, and we had the lights with us. “You know why those two dudes—Mr. Olmsted and your buddy Vaux—you know why those guys beat out all the other landscapers who entered the contest to design the Park?”

“I just assumed they had the most experience.”

“What experience? This was the very first landscaped urban park in America.”

“So what then?”

“There were thirty-three official entries,” Mike said. “But your guys were the only ones who insisted that the Park—to work as an artistic pastoral landscape—had to be completely separated from the city streets. No coal wagons or fire engines or dust carts wandering through it.”

“That makes sense.”

“It was their plan—Olmsted and Vaux—to sink all the transverse roads, the ones that cut east to west from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, below the road surface.”

Of course Mike was right.

“Four huge transverse roads and they’re all below the surface of the Park grounds,” he said. “That’s ingenious. No commercial vehicles at all on Park drives, and nothing that even obstructed any of the views. Pretty damn clever.”

“It is. But you’re thinking about something. About the case.”

“Yeah.”

“That most dump jobs would involve a car, right?”

“Yeah. That if our girl was killed somewhere else—’cause there’s no sign of a struggle near the Lake, and no drag marks around it—then she’s likely to have been killed somewhere else in Manhattan and then dumped from a car.”

“And since there are no transverse roads anywhere near the Lake, the closest place a car could have stopped is where you just picked me up, on top of the grand staircase at Bethesda Terrace.”

“And the Park is closed to traffic from seven
P.M.
to seven
A.M.
, so that pretty much means if the killer came by car, he would have been hauling the body in broad daylight, at the height of tourist season.”

“Impossible.”

“So where did he come from, Coop?”

“How I wish I knew.”

We were silent until we reached the restaurant and parked several spaces away from the front door. Annie, the hostess, greeted us with her characteristic enthusiasm, and Stephane, who had been maître d’ from opening day, escorted us to the tiny elevator.