Death Angel (16 page)

“But why would they take the best views—the most prime real estate on the highest floors—and use it on servants’ quarters?”

“It wouldn’t happen again today,” I said. “But before penthouses became fashionable, back one hundred years ago when these buildings were put up, rich people were reluctant to live closest to the chimneys that puffed out black soot and rooftops where maids hung laundry. That’s where they housed their workers.”

“Wait a minute,” Mike said. He had scoped the prestigious addresses of Fifth Avenue and gone back to the Dakota. “So think about Lavinia Dalton’s apartment. Her building looks out directly over the Lake, over the Angel of the Waters, right?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, they’re both a bit north of 72nd Street,” he said. “If you were in the Dalton apartment, or even a flight up in the dormers, you’d be at a perfect height and ideal vantage point to see what was going on at the Lake.”

“And at a lot of other places in the Park.”

“You’re shivering, Coop.” Mike put the glasses down and reached for his jacket, wrapping it around my shoulders. “Why didn’t you tell me you were cold?”

“I’m not cold, really,” I said. “Something just—I don’t know—just chilled me.”

“It makes no sense that the Dalton apartment and the pieces of silver have anything to do with the dead girl, does it?”

“Don’t know.” I was beginning to fade, a combination of exhaustion and feeling emotionally spent. My back was to the stone wall, while Mike faced out at Central Park West.

“When we get into the Dakota, we should ask to check out the servants’ quarters.”

“Sure. But you’re getting ahead of yourself,” I said, pulling the jacket tighter around me. “Have you studied the Panoscan photographs yet?”

He put the binoculars down on top of the wall and looked at me.

“No, but I get where you’re going.”

The Crime Scene team had used the new equipment to do a 360-degree shot from the point at Bow Bridge where Angel’s body had been found. “I imagine, in addition to everything else it shows, that it will point you directly back to the Dakota.”

“Course it will. Good thinking, Coop.”

“Am I off duty now?”

“Is that what you want to be?”

“Totally. And I think you can take me home, too. If Jessica Pell hasn’t given up on confronting me by now, the doormen will have to run interference. I’m really tired, Mike.”

“Let’s not go yet. It’s kind of—I don’t know—kind of magical up here.”

“But it’s so late, and we have a lot to do tomorrow.”

“You’re right, Coop. It’s so late, and I still haven’t apologized to you properly. And you’re cold.”

“I told you I’m not cold. I’m—I’m nervous, I think. That’s why I’m trembling.”

I was looking around everywhere, at everything, except into Mike’s eyes. He touched my face with his right hand and aligned it with his own. We had flirted with this moment more times than I could remember clearly.

“There’s something I want to do, Coop. And I’m nervous about it, too.”

“Then we’re even.”

Mike smiled again, and I closed my eyes for a second.

“YOLO,” I said, smiling as I channeled Vickee’s heart-to-heart with me.

You only live once.

Mike Chapman grinned with all his dazzle and brought his lips to meet mine. He kissed me. His touch was tender and warm as he lifted my chin and pressed his lips against mine, holding us in that position for several seconds, although it seemed like an hour.

Then he took his hand away and stepped back, running his fingers through his hair. “Are you okay with this?” he asked.

I let the tuxedo jacket fall to the ground. “Very okay.”

He came toward me again. “Do you mind?”

“Mind what?”

“The pins. The ones holding your—style?—whatever it is—in place. I have no idea what they’re called, but could you take them out of your hair?”

I was breathing fast, fumbling a bit as I reached up and started pulling out the pins that held my formally arranged twist in place.

“It’s just not you,” Mike said, taking them from my hand and putting them in his pants pocket. Then he tousled my hair so that it fell to my shoulders, loose and long, curling softly around my face.

“Now is it me?” I asked, smiling back at him.

“I’ll tell you in a minute.”

We kissed again, and this time we embraced and caressed each other till I needed to stop for air. “This is crazy, isn’t it?” I said. “Good crazy, but crazy.”

“You still want to go home, Coop?”

“I’m not sure about anything. But if we’re going to—if you’re going to—well, can you stop calling me ‘Coop’? It’s not the most—well, feminine name for me.”

“I can’t do Alexandra or Alex. Those names are for everyone else to use. ‘Coop’ is my own. I’m not the least bit confused about your gender identity.”

I wanted the night to last forever. We were alone together in our own aerie, apart from everyone in the world, in the middle of the most beautiful park in the most exciting city—visible to any of the ritzy neighbors who wanted to look out their windows from high above but unidentifiable to all.

We kissed several more times, laughing and whispering to each other, as comfortable as I would expect to be in the arms of my best friend.

“Taking it slow, right?” Mike said when I pushed away and turned around, inhaling the fresh night air, trying to comprehend what was happening to us.

“Slow would be good. It would be smart.”

“You don’t always have to be smart, you know?”

“Yes, I know. But don’t you think we have to talk about some—?”

“Shh shh shh shh shh. Plenty of time for talk, Coop. Will you stay here with me for a few hours? Watch the sun break through?” He was behind me, kissing the top of my head and stroking my arms. “I’ve got a blanket in with my supplies. We can just sit down and lean back, use my jacket for a pillow. Just sit and hold on to each other.”

“I’d like to do that. Fall asleep with your arms around me.”

There was no street noise, no sirens or garbage trucks, no one to burst into this night’s fantasy. We spread the blanket and stretched out. It was as though we were all alone on the island of Manhattan.

Shortly after dawn crept over the horizon, Mike somehow steered me over the brick wall and onto the narrow rungs of the ladder, cautioning me not to look down as I stepped one foot below the other. He dropped me off at home at 5:45. The doormen were used to the odd hours of my comings and goings, but I looked terribly bedraggled in my well-worn evening outfit of twelve hours earlier.

I showered and ate breakfast, passing up the temptation to nap in order to get to the office early. It was 7:30 when I got off the elevator and went to unlock my door. I was startled to hear Mercer’s voice call out to me from the far end of the hallway.

“C’mon down to the conference room after you open up,” he said.

“Anything wrong?”

“I got a girl here. I’m hoping she can make an ID.”

I threw down my handbag and tote and hurried down to the conference room, which had become the default headquarters of the Park investigation.

Mercer intercepted me outside the closed door. “You all right, Alex? You look like you haven’t had any sleep.”

“I haven’t. I spent the night with Mike. The whole night.”

“You
what
now, girl?”

“I don’t mean that way, Mercer. And I am getting such mixed signals about what everyone—including you and Vickee—think I ought to do with my love life. Forget it. We went to the Conservancy dinner, and we found out about the silver miniatures and about their connection to a kidnapped baby who’s never been recovered—dead or alive. I was busy, and it looks like you were, too.”

“Sure enough, St. Michael’s Church is a mainstay for the homeless. It’s on the list that the team is working off—shelters and such—distributing pictures and stopping in for questioning. They just hadn’t reached here yet.”

“So who’ve you got?”

“Calls herself Jo ’cause it could be a guy or girl’s name—she tells me—and she’s gay. Claims she’s nineteen, but I’d guess younger. She’s afraid we’re going to turn on her and send her back home. Jo’s a runaway from somewhere down south. The accent sort of gives up that much.”

“Does she know Angel?” I asked.

“I’m not sure whether or not she’s bluffing. Came into the church soup kitchen for her meal last night, and one of the deacons asked her—like everyone else coming through—to talk to me. She looked at the photos and the sketch and thinks she’s spent time on the streets with Angel. The church took her in for the night, and I had Uniform do a fixer out in front in case she tried to leave. But there she was waiting for me this morning, maybe looking for some meal money and a witness fee. She’s a gamer, Alex. I don’t want her to work us over.”

“Understood,” I said. “Take me in.”

Jo was sitting at an empty space at the conference table. She was eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich that Mercer had bought her, washing it down with a bottle of juice, a large cup of coffee, and soda cans for later on.

I introduced myself and although she glanced up at me, Jo kept on eating. She had an androgynous look, small and very thin, with short-cropped hair clipped in a boyish style and bright dark eyes that darted back and forth between Mercer and me as we talked.

Jo had run away from a family that didn’t accept her sexual identity, and a town in Alabama in which hostility against LGBT youth was a point of pride for many citizens. She had taken money out of her mother’s wallet for the bus fare to New York and left home while both her parents were at work one March morning. She had chosen Manhattan, as thousands of runaways do every year, because of its reputation for open-minded acceptance and a large network of gay youth. There was also a plethora of information available online about underground life and survival techniques for people who come to the big city with no place to stay.

I pushed one of the morgue photos—a picture of Angel after she’d been autopsied and cleaned up—across the table to Jo. “Did you know this girl?”

“Yes, ma’am. At least I think I did.”

I went right to the facts we needed. “Do you know her name?”

I shouldn’t have been disappointed when Jo said she did not. “It was just a hi-and-bye kind of thing. We weren’t friends or anything like that.”

“Do you remember where you saw her the first time?” I asked.

“Uh-huh. I do, because it was the night I got to New York. I had no place to sleep, so a girl I met at the Port Authority told me about Uncle Ace’s house. She taught me how to jump the turnstile and all that.”

Estimates were that about four thousand young people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five are homeless on the streets of New York every night. The city has, at best, two hundred fifty shelter beds to offer them. “Uncle Ace” is the name for the A, C, and E subway lines—the longest ride in the city—stretching from the northern tip of Inwood to the farthest end of Far Rockaway. It frequently served as a refuge for kids who wanted to get off the mean streets of the city.

Mercer told Jo we’d been calling the dead girl Angel. He asked how they had met on the train that night.

“You know the way it is.”

“Not exactly,” I said.

“I was the new girl. There were four others who were riding with my friend, and one of them was Angel, or whatever you want to call her. When you’ve got no roof over your head, you’ve got to sleep for as long as you can whenever you can. And somebody in the group has to stay awake, making sure no cops come along to bother us. Or no perverts either.”

“So you spent the night together?”

Jo scowled at me. “Not how you think. She wasn’t a lesbian. Your girl was straight.”

Most of the counselors we worked with told us that 40 percent of the country’s homeless youth are LGBT, unable or unwilling to stay at home or in foster care, free to take risks and experiment by moving out into the world, even without a roof over their heads.

“Did you have a chance to talk to Angel?” I asked.

“Lots of chances. She was nice to me. She was a good person. Taught me lots of ways to take care of myself.”

But in the end Angel was unable to keep herself safe.

“Did she ever tell you where she was from?” Mercer asked. “Why she left home?”

“I didn’t care where she was from. Most of us don’t like to talk about that because we don’t ever want to go there again, and you never know when someone is going to snitch on you.”

Jo sat back and gulped some of her coffee. “She didn’t have much of a home. Her mother died when she was ten, and that’s when her father started abusing her. Sexually abusing her.”

Sexual and physical abuse were the next most common reasons for teens to leave their families. Mercer and I saw these kids more regularly than we would have liked.

“You must have spent a lot of time together for Angel to tell you something like that,” I said.

“Not really. No reason not to be open about that stuff. We all need each other to survive is how I look at it. It was two nights on the train, that group of us.”

“Where did you go during the day?”

Jo put down her container of coffee and stared straight ahead. “Not saying.”

“It’s nothing Mercer and I haven’t heard before. I can promise you we’re not looking to get you in trouble.”

There were few decent ways for the homeless population to provide for themselves. The older guys had the can-recycling business pretty well locked up, scouring garbage pails on the street for empties to return to stores. Begging worked for men with no legs and women who panhandled with babies in their arms. Healthy teens were more likely to shoplift than to recycle or to beg.

“I tried to get work,” Jo said. “I left home with a résumé that I kept in a folder with my backpack. I would have waitressed or worked in a grocery store or a Walmart. But it’s hard to find a job when the economy sucks.”

And harder when you don’t have a place to shower or clean clothes to wear to work.

“What else did Angel help you with?” I asked, hoping for more connections to get us into her world.

Jo took a minute to answer, perhaps wondering whether to give up the information. “She’s the one who took me to the museum.”

“What museum?”

“Natural History. The one with the dinosaurs and all the dead animals behind glass.”

Another link to Central Park. The great American Museum of Natural History was merely five blocks north of the Dakota, facing the Park.

“What did you see at the museum?”

Jo looked at me as though I was clueless. “We didn’t go there to see anything. We went there to sleep.”

“To sleep? But where?”

I thought of the huge hallways in the museum, filled during weekdays with schoolkids on field trips and on weekends with families and tourists enjoying the treasures housed there.

“After two nights on the train, I spent a week on the streets. I couldn’t hardly sleep ’cause it’s pretty dangerous to do that. Angel? I ran into her again in Port Authority, and she took me to the museum. The bathrooms there are gigantic, but the stalls are really narrow. So once you lock the door of the stall, you can lean your head against the side of it and sleep till the end of the day when the janitor comes in to mop. Everybody on the street knows about the history museum.”

Desperation, like necessity, was the mother of invention.

“Didn’t you ever try to get into a shelter?” I asked.

“Not at first. I knew there weren’t a lot of beds available, and I was mostly afraid they’d try to send me back home, all those social workers and stuff.”

“Covenant House? Did you ever go there?”

“No, ma’am,” Jo said. “Y’all got any cigarettes?”

“We’ll get you some as soon as we’re done,” I said. “Why not?”

Again the look that caught her frustration with me. Covenant House had been in business rescuing teens for forty years and had 70 percent of the beds for them in the city.

“It’s run by the church, Ms. Cooper. The Catholic Church. I’m not real comfortable with that, any more than they are with me.”

“Did Angel ever talk about Covenant House?”

Jo thought about it and answered in the negative. I knew the detectives had started their search to identify Angel at the revered institution that had long ago weathered its own sex abuse scandal, but was hoping that Jo could make a link to a different point in time, several months back, when she first met the dead girl.

“Did she ever mention any other shelter?” Mercer asked.

“She took me to a church once. I think it was way downtown. But there were no beds. And it might have been Angel who told me about Streetwork.”

“You know Streetwork?” I said. “Was she ever there?”

It was a brilliant program run by Safe Horizon, the country’s largest and best victim advocacy organization. The nonprofit had done groundbreaking work with survivors of domestic violence and established cutting-edge centers for child advocacy. The DA’s office worked closely with the well-trained staff, and Streetwork was their latest initiative to reach out to the city’s disenfranchised and homeless youth—making contact with twenty thousand of them a year.

“I don’t know the answer to that, ma’am,” Jo said. “I wasn’t ever there when she was.”

“Did you use any of their facilities?”

“Yes, I did. I went for meals sometimes, and to take a shower. And once when I got all depressed and tried to cut myself, it was that girl—that Angel—who told me to go to Streetwork for, like, psych services.”

I could see Mercer scribbling a note to double-check with the team to see whether they had checked out both of the shelter locations Safe Horizon operated, as well as the drop-in centers for counseling.

“Did you ever have a phone or a laptop since you left home?” I asked. “Do you have either one of those now?”

“I sure don’t, ma’am.” Jo smiled for the first time. “Besides, I wouldn’t have anyplace to plug them in, would I?”

Walk into any of the Apple stores in New York and look for the section of the store with the older devices, not the trendiest new stuff. Any hour of the day or night there was bound to be a gaggle of homeless kids—obvious by the condition of their clothing and the beat-up backpacks—just hanging out to charge their cell phones and get back on the street.

“So how many times would you say you saw Angel between March and now?” I asked. “How did you keep in touch with her?”

Jo reached for a package of strawberry Twizzlers from the bag of snacks that Mercer had bought for her and ripped it open. I didn’t think of them as breakfast food, but she was still hungry. “I didn’t say I kept in touch with her. If I ran into her—which I did maybe ten times in all—she’d be kind to me, like I said.”

“Apart from the train, Jo, where did you see her?”

“The Park. Me and my girlfriend spent a couple of nights with her in Central Park.”

I tried not to show my excitement.

“Do you know that Angel—that this girl in the photograph—was killed there?”

“No, ma’am. There’s a story going ’round that someone drowned in the Park, in one of the lakes, but I didn’t know it was her.”

“We don’t have a real name for her, as you know, and we don’t know how to find her family.”

“That would be a waste of time anyway,” Jo said. “Her dad is all there was, and frankly I don’t think he’d care.”

“There must have been someone in her life—a teacher, a friend back home, the people she hung out with here.”

“She didn’t really hang out that much. She didn’t really trust most people she met.”

“Sounds like she trusted you,” Mercer said.

“My girlfriend says Angel—whatever you’re calling her—got along best with people who were wounded, just like she was.”

“Wounded?” I asked.

“Not like bloody and all,” Jo said. “Folks who’d been hurt hard along the way, sort of like I had. People who had handicaps—physical ones and mental, too. She had a kindness for them, likely grew out of her own pain.”

“Is she the one who took you to the Park?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody needs to take a homeless person to Central Park. Everybody knows how to work it there.”

“Work it?”

“If you’ve got nowhere else to sleep, you go to a park. Small ones, big ones. There’s parks everywhere, in any city. Me? I like Central Park best. So many places to be where nobody bothers you.”