Death Angel (28 page)

I was down in the kitchen at seven
A.M.
, noshing on toast and Froot Loops with Mercer. The bright sunlight streamed through the window. The almost-suburban sound of birds chirping and kids already honking bicycle horns on the street in front of the house was so relaxing, so unlike my high-rise lifestyle.

“Did you sleep okay?” he asked.

“Best night in weeks. Any news?”

“I’m meeting Mike in the Park this morning.”

“May I?”

“Don’t see why not. No ballet class?”

“I’ll make up for it by hiking with you. What’s he after?”

“Peterson got orders to pull his men out of the Park. Uniform will do the same, for the most part. Mike wants to explore the caves, although I really don’t see any mention of them on my map.”

“Mia Schneider of the Conservancy was going to get him some of the original Park plans,” I said. “How come it’s so quiet around here?”

“We just got Logan a bike with training wheels, and he’s pumping away out on the sidewalk with his mama.”

“So we can slip out? Stop by my place for some jeans and stuff?”

“Anytime you’re ready.”

We drove out of the quiet street and made quick time to Manhattan. Mercer waited for me in the driveway. I went upstairs and changed into jeans, a short-sleeved cotton shirt, and driving moccasins, and wrapped a cashmere crew neck around my waist in case the weather turned later in the day.

“Mike wants to meet us in the parking lot behind Lasker Pool,” Mercer said. “That’s near 107th Street, about midway between east and west. Thinks we ought to spend some time walking through the Ravine.”

It took us another fifteen minutes to get there. Unlike the southern end of the Park, with tourists constantly pouring in from midtown Manhattan, or the Reservoir, with its steady traffic of runners, the North Woods was quiet on this warm Saturday morning.

Mike was waiting for us when we drove up and parked against the wall that backs the pool, which turns into a skating rink every winter. “Welcome to the Ravine,” he said. “Ready to get down and dirty?”

“You bet.”

“This area is like the Ramble,” he said. “It’s meant to look like a nature retreat in the Catskills, just doesn’t have quite the same elevation.”

“But it’s got caves, I’m guessing.”

“So the Conservancy folks tell me. All but one or two of the caves in the Park are man-made, like most everything else. Built in the 1860s, but once bad things started happening in them, they were covered up.”

“What do you mean by ‘bad things’?” I asked.

“You name it. They faxed me over some of the old renderings of Park plans,” Mike said, “along with copies of newspaper clippings, some of them more than a hundred years old. When the landscapers started clearing brush for the Park, down on the southern tip, there was one rock formation that had been a hiding place for skeletal remains. Animals mostly, but some dead folk, too. But that’s the only cave that was in place at the time Park construction started.”

“Where are the others?”

“Scattered pretty much throughout, south to north. The problem is that nobody has a record of the locations now, because as things happened over the years, the caves and grottoes were covered over. They were thought to be too dangerous even a century ago.

“Then thirty years would go by,” Mike said, “and some hiker would stumble across a rock that had been rolled away from an opening in the ground. The history of bad things was lost to a new generation, so someone in the Parks Department would arrange to reopen that particular formation or cave. Five years later, a stabbing or a violent sexual encounter would occur, and a new rock pile would be formed. There’s no telling what’s out here without turning over every rock, as they say.”

Mike took his map out of his rear pants pocket. Rolled up in it were some of the design sketches of the land and copies of the old news stories. He read off the headlines as he handed them over to Mercer and me.

“Fifteen-year-old runaway lived in a cave, near 72nd Street on the west side. That’s a press clipping from 1897, can you believe it?”

“People have always lived in caves, man,” Mercer said. “No surprise there.”

“In 1904, a young man shot himself to death on the steps leading to a cave, this one in the ’80s, farther to the east side. And here’s a police blotter entry about an artist who was sentenced to three months in the workhouse for assaulting another man on a bench inside a cave.”

“A bench?” I said. “There are caves in here large enough to hold a bench?”

“That was 1929, Coop. I guess there were. The last piece is about a couple—a married couple—who lost their home in the Great Depression. The guy and his wife lived in one of the caves for a year. For an entire year. Living off berries and panhandling and drinking from the streams.”

“Scary stuff,” Mercer said.

“That’s why the city ended up closing all the caves. Covering the openings over with boulders and redesigning every last one of them. By the 1940s, no one involved in the original landscaping was around to worry about the plan for a return to nature. All they cared about was safety for people using the Park.”

“So if there are cave entrances left,” I said, “we’ll have to find them ourselves.”

“That’s what I got for you,” Mike said. “A walk on the wild side.”

“Wild?”

“The Ravine is considered to be forty acres that are the wild heart of the North Woods. More remote than the Ramble. The surrounding buildings outside the Park are completely hidden from view because the elevation here is depressed—unlike the Ramble—and then this stream bubbles all through it, with three waterfalls and several arches.”

“Are there grottoes?” Mercer asked.

“Yeah. And you know what you said about where Tanner’s rape victim was living in Prospect Park the other night? Well, in the Ravine, the fallen trees are treated the same way as in Brooklyn. So there are homeless people who make shelters out of the dead logs, just like the Brooklyn rape victim on Elephant Hill, and who camp out inside the log structures.”

“And maybe Angel was one of them,” I said. “This is the end of the Park where that homeless girl Mercer brought in to see us—”

“Jo,” he said.

“Yes. Jo claimed she stayed up here somewhere until Verge led them away. Took them farther south to Muggers Hill.”

“Now why the hell would he lead them away?” Mike asked.

“Jo said he didn’t think it was safe enough for them.”

“I get that. But what if he had something up here he didn’t want her to see? In a makeshift log hideaway, or in one of the small caves. Anyway, the commissioner isn’t interested in anyone else digging around anymore. Might as well give it a day.”

We left the cars and started due south on the narrow path that led from the parking lot. In just a few yards, it joined with one coming in from the east, and they merged to lead us directly to the Huddlestone Arch.

“I hope this all wasn’t just a plan to get me to Tanner’s hunting ground,” I said. “This is a magnificent structure, but it’s the perfect crime scene, too.”

Even as we stood twenty feet in front of its gaping mouth, the blackness of the opening was unwelcoming. It was a long tunnel, the walkway against one side of the stone wall and the streamlet running against the other. I thought of Flo entering this very spot a few nights ago, with Tanner waiting to pounce on her when she emerged on the far end.

“I wanted to see it the other night, when we were at the Conservancy,” Mike said, “but you reined me in. I hear it’s one of the great construction marvels in the city. You probably know who Huddlestone is, right? Some rich dude who wanted a rock pile named in his honor?”

“I have no idea.”

Mercer pointed up at the massive boulders that created the semicircular foundation of the arch and the bridge it supported. “I got the info when I came here the morning after Flo was attacked. So the arch got its name,” he said as we walked toward the entrance, “because the stones, as big as they are, are just huddled together. No mortar, no binding material of any kind.”

“And I’m walking inside it? What holds them up?” I asked. “It doesn’t seem possible.”

“It’s an architectural principle as old as the Romans. Keystone foundations, they’re called. That huge rock directly overhead—it weighs a hundred tons—it’s the keystone of the entire arch. All the other boulders press against it and against one another. Been doing that since 1866, even with all the automobile traffic that drives over it. It’s ingenious.”

I quickened my pace to get through the dramatic underpass. I paused at the spot where Flo was attacked, uneasy at the thought that this was a comfort zone for Raymond Tanner.

“Which way?” I asked. One trail continued south. The other crossed the stream and led deeper into the North Woods.

“Let’s follow the water. There are three waterfalls in the next half mile. Flo was talking about a recess in one of them. About a place she used to sit in.”

The growth around the path was dense and lush after all the spring rain.

“The Park lost almost one thousand mature trees to Hurricane Sandy,” Mike said. “So there are lots of dead logs all over the woods. Scully left a small detail of uniformed guys here to look through them in the North Woods, on the theory that potential vics—like the Brooklyn girl—may be shacking up.”

“Not to mention a Tanner or Verge or Eddie Wicks,” Mercer said.

We walked up the muddy incline, encountering only a handful of people along the way. The first waterfall was the one to which Flo had been heading when Tanner struck her down. Mike balanced himself on the slippery rocks that led to it from the side of the stream. He ducked behind the falls, getting doused with water as he did, and then called out to us.

“It’s sweet in here,” Mike said. “Flo’s right.”

“How big?” I asked.

“Just a stone seat. Three, maybe four people could sit on it. I wouldn’t call it a cave ’cause it doesn’t go any deeper. But it’s just as Flo described it to you.”

Mike came out from beneath the overhang and shook himself off.

“You’re all wet,” I said.

“Hardly the first time. Let’s keep going.”

At some points the path hugged the edge of the stream, while at others it meandered off into thicker woods. This was so densely forested and so peaceful, a part of Manhattan that most New Yorkers didn’t even know existed.

The second falls was constructed in an entirely different manner. The boulders used were longer and flatter. The distance in the drop from the running stream to the water below was much shorter than the first one, creating its own distinct sound—apparently part of the Olmsted and Vaux plan.

Again Mike made his way over the rocks as water gushed around him and disappeared.

“Can you see him?” I asked Mercer.

“Nope.”

“Mike?”

“Be right out,” he called, his voice echoing from a hollow space within. He was on his hands and knees when he emerged, and stood up when he got right behind the curtain of water. “A bear could hibernate in there.”

Mercer extended a hand to help Mike back onto solid ground.

“Anything inside?”

“Empty. Empty and cold and damp in there, but it’s about four feet deep. I wonder whether it was built that way specifically to have an effect on the sound of the water dropping on the rocks. Wouldn’t seem to have any other purpose.”

We continued southwest, where the stream narrowed and curved around a stand of tall trees. I felt as though we could have been lost in these woods, were we not in the middle of Manhattan. The only noise I heard was the sound of branches crackling as we stepped on them and the amazing variety of birdcalls overhead.

“Here’s another tunnel,” Mike said. “Glen Span Arch.”

It, too, was an imposing stone structure that shrouded the pathway in total darkness when I entered. I hurried through it, noting the small grottoes built into the walls on its side but anxious to escape the dank interior.

When I came out on the other end, there was an even larger cascade than the others. Water pounded down onto layered steps of rocks.

“Where’s that coming from with such fury?” I asked.

Mike came up behind me. “It’s the Pool.”

“Not the Pond, not the Lake, not the Reservoir.”

“Nope. It’s the Pool.”

I climbed up on the rocks that topped the waterfall and looked out over the body of water, surrounded by weeping willows on its grassy banks—another setting, another type of vista altogether.

“All artificial,” Mike said. “New York City tap water gushing out of here, the Conservancy guy told me. Take a peek, Coop. The whole length of the stream we just walked is fed from that Pool . . .”

“Which is pumped-in water from upstate New York.” I stepped down onto the top of the flat rocks that created the formation. Here, unlike below, there was a wide opening, and the waterfall flowed over it, so I could actually kneel on the inside without getting wet.

I handed my sweater to Mercer and got on all fours while he shined a flashlight over my head.

“How far back does it go?” he asked me.

“I’ve seen smaller studio apartments in the city,” I said. “Can you give me more light?”

“You see anything?”

“There’s some paper a few feet ahead. I’ll keep going. And two frogs who are moving a lot faster than I can.”

The rocks that bordered the gushing stream were more slippery to the touch than the ones outside the cave opening. They were coated with a layer of something slimy, soft, and green. I moved forward a bit more and reached for the papers, picking them up and shoving them in the rear pocket of my jeans.

“Any more light, Mercer?”

He must have ducked down behind me and aimed his beam right over my back.

“I’ve got a pipe, guys. No kidding, I’ve got a pipe.”

I could hear Mike laughing. “Those dudes built the pipes in a hundred and fifty years ago, kid. That’s what makes the waterfalls run all the time, even in a drought like we had this spring.”

“Not that kind of pipe,” I said. “Give me a glove.”

Mercer crawled forward, and I reached back to his hand.

“What kind of pipe?” he asked.