Death Angel (8 page)

We both shook our heads.

“Google just acquired a company called PittPatt. It’s out of a project at Carnegie Mellon. Recognition software called Pittsburgh Pattern that was developed from an army grant after 9/11. Supposedly one could take a photograph of a crowd, highlight a single face within it, and compare that face automatically to images on Facebook and social media sites.”

Chirico was writing as fast as he could manage. The well-dressed dog walker had just gone from promising information about his daughter’s once-schoolmate—even though our corpse didn’t look much like a Brearley girl—to giving us an entirely new state-of-the-art way to identify an unknown victim. He handed Manny his card and walked off.

The next hour and a half continued to be frustrating. There was a woman who had seen a commotion—a couple fighting—and placed them near the beloved statue of Balto, the Alaskan husky who helped save the people of Nome during a diphtheria epidemic in 1925. She babbled for twenty minutes before recalling that the argument she witnessed had been on Saturday and not earlier in the week.

An elderly man with a canteen slung over his shoulder had stopped midpath to remove from harm’s way three young red-eared sliders—a turtle species that lived in the Ramble—and carry them deeper into the woods. He remarked to two cops that he had heard screams on his morning walk almost exactly one week ago. He engaged them for more than ten minutes before they realized he was also obsessed with a meteor headed for earth and the shrieking noises that it emitted.

By nine
A.M.
, everyone with purpose—people with day jobs—had finished their Park jaunts, and now there were the more casual visitors.

Manny and I were poking among leaves along the banks of the gorge when his radio crackled again.

“Sarge? I’m Officer Resnick, from your detail.” I could hear a woman’s voice. “I got a birder with something interesting.”

“Where are you? Can you make me?”

“Yup. I’m at 7322.”

“73? That’s way south of us. You must be almost at the Point.”

I picked up my head. That’s where Mike had started his morning.

“Just about the tip of it. I got a great shot of the Lake from where we are.”

“Will your witness stay?”

“She says yes. We’re waiting for her sister, who took a picture with her camera. There’s a detective here who’s giving me a hand.”

Manny Chirico turned off the radio and wagged a finger at me. “We’d better hustle. But promise me, Alex, you’ll stay out of Mike’s way. Let’s not add to the problem.”

“Well, apparently I
am
the problem. I don’t intend to stir it up, you can be sure.”

Although we were only the equivalent distance of three city blocks from where the message had originated, the complex series of twisted trails and narrow bridges made it almost a fifteen-minute walk.

Mike’s back was to us as we approached. The young police officer lifted her arm when she spotted us coming, and beside her was a gray-haired woman dressed in sensible clothes with low hiking boots, whom I guessed to be about seventy-five years old.

“Hey, Mike,” I said, following in single file behind Manny Chirico.

“Coop. Sarge.” He acknowledged both of us but didn’t make eye contact. “Meet Helen Austin.”

“How d’you do?” Austin said, stretching her arm out to shake hands with us. There was an old-fashioned manner to her speech, as well as her dress.

“Ms. Austin studies birds here. She was just showing us a great horned owl until your gentle tread scared him off.”

“What is it, Mike?” The sergeant’s annoyance was palpable.

“Helen?” Mike said to her. “Would you tell my boss what you saw?”

She held her head high but shook it from side to side. “I’d prefer you repeat it.”

“Ms. Austin was out here last Wednesday morning. She hikes here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She leaves her house on West 76th Street at nine, and her sister meets her right at the tip of the Point at 10:15.”

“Like clockwork,” Helen Austin said. “You can set your watch by us.”

“Last Wednesday, the sisters had just joined up when a man came toward them from between this stand of trees. Am I right so far?”

“Indeed.”

“He startled them.”

“That was clearly his plan, Sergeant,” the woman said. “To startle us.”

“He stood in front of them on the path and exposed himself, and—”

“He didn’t expose himself, Detective,” Helen Austin said. “He was already exposed. Fully dressed, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and dirty blue jeans. With his privates already hanging out for all the world to see. And then he began pleasuring himself just inches away from us.”

“Pleasuring . . . ?” the sergeant asked.

“Masturbating, Sergeant. Hoping to shock the two of us, I’m sure.”

“Were you able to do anything?” I said.

“Of course, young lady. My sister needs a walking stick. She’s older than I,” Helen Austin said—pausing for effect, I thought. “She lifted the stick and smacked the fellow right between his legs. Not bad for a couple of old spinsters, don’t you think?”

“You know what they say about a bird in the hand,” Mike replied. Helen Austin was as taken with his warm grin and sparkling eyes as the rest of us usually were.

“Well, it wasn’t in his hand very much longer, I can tell you that.”

“Can you describe him?” the sergeant asked.

“Better than that. My sister snapped a photograph,” Austin said. “She’ll be here any minute.”

Not every pervert went on to become a homicidal maniac, but the canvass had already yielded a potential offender in the Ramble.

“Might as well tell them,” Mike said to her.

“He was an African American gentleman—well, ‘fellow’ is more correct than ‘gentleman.’ In his midthirties, I’d say. Light skinned. Close-cropped hair, a mustache, about six feet tall.”

“Would you be able to recognize him, do you think?” I asked.

“Take it easy, Coop. She just told you they’ve got a photograph,” Mike said. “You interrupted the most important thing. Helen?”

“Not that I wanted to be looking at his private parts, but there was a tattoo on his right hand, with which he was holding his penis. That’s the most disturbing part of this. I’ve seen plenty of impolite young men before. But there were two words tattooed, just below his knuckles.”

Helen Austin drew a line across her own hand, suggesting the position of the inked letters. “The words printed were
KILL COPS
.”

Manny Chirico and I exchanged glances. The harmless masturbator who liked to shock unsuspecting birders might have much deeper felony roots.

“Jailhouse art,” the sergeant said. “That tattoo information and a photo will be a huge help to us, Ms. Austin.”

She was peering over our shoulders, and I turned my head to see whom or what she had spotted. It must have been her sister who was approaching.

“Come quickly,” she called out. “These police people are asking questions about our interloper last week. I told them you managed two photographs of him.”

The sister took her time on the rocky path and approached us with an enthusiastic greeting. She asked me to hold her stick while she removed her camera from her cross-body bag and handed it to Manny Chirico.

“They should be the last two images, sir. I haven’t touched them. We tried to tell one of the rangers about the incident on our way out of the Park, but he wasn’t much interested.”

And that of course was Wednesday, two days before the body was found in the Lake.

The sergeant opened the viewfinder and was trying to bring the images up. “I’m sorry, Ms. Austin, but there’s no photograph of the man’s face, is there? I can’t find it.”

“I’m not sure I got much of his face,” she said. “I was so rattled I was lucky to get the bottom of his chin, down to his knees.”

Chirico rolled his eyes and passed the camera to Mike.

“Be patient, Sarge,” Mike said, laughing at Manny’s short fuse. “Let me zoom in and see what’s here.”

I stood closer to Mike and watched as the image enlarged. But Helen’s sister must have been moving when she hit the button to take the photo because it was too fuzzy to see clearly.

Mike’s smile vanished when he brought the second shot into view and framed it on the camera’s small screen. “You were close about the tattoo, Helen. Just a few letters off, but they make a hell of a lot of difference.”

“What is it?” Chirico asked.

Mike passed the camera over my head. “What the jailhouse tat says, Sarge, is
KILL COOP
.”

Ten minutes later I was sitting between Mike and the sergeant on the porch of the Loeb Boathouse, overlooking the Lake. It had been closed off to tourists, and Lieutenant Peterson was using it as a mini command center because of its unspoiled vista of the Bow Bridge and the area surrounding the place where the body was found.

“I’m not the only Coop in the world, you know. That might not be referring to me.”

“You’ve made more than your share of enemies,” Mike said.

“Just following in your footsteps, I think.” He’d yet to be alone with me this morning, so there had been no mention of Judge Pell.

“The Alexandra Cooper Wing at Dannemora. Everybody doing twenty-five to life, sitting around in their therapy sessions making voodoo dolls of Coop and her team at SVU.”

The sergeant put his finger to his lips to quiet our bickering. He was on the phone with an analyst at One PP, in the tech information hub known as the Real Time Crime Center. The Center was a rabbit warren of computer screens and technicians—a modern effort to centralize all the information gathered by the NYPD.

Every arrest report and detectives’ steno pad contained valuable nuggets of detail. One database recorded descriptions of birthmarks and scars; another was the source for dental irregularities—missing teeth, grids, gold or silver caps; and yet one more listed unusual gaits—limps, if suspects had them, as well as how pronounced or severe they were.

The tattoo database had become one of the most regularly used. Frequently, based on things victims had told me about their attackers, I called to request a search of a particular body part—like the left shoulder blade or the back of a man’s neck—for a certain word or symbol. With a few keystrokes by a good detective analyst, a single phone call could lead to a suspect with a criminal history, and a subsequent arrest.

“Kevin? It’s Manny Chirico. I’m up in Central Park and I need a check of your tattoo base.”

He waited while his contact got ready to take the information.

“Can you enter the word ‘kill’?” Manny asked.

Chirico put his hand over the receiver. “He says ‘kill’ is really common in gang art. The search will pull up lots of kills.”

“Great. All Coop needs is an angry banger.”

I was trying to think of guys I had put away recently who had been gang members.

Chirico whistled. “Okay, 276 hits with the word ‘kill.’ Now try ‘kill cops.’”

The answer came within a minute. “Twenty-three. I guess we’re not too popular, are we? Now search for ‘kill Coop.’”

It took two or three minutes for a response because the officer must have tried entering the words several times.

“No luck, eh? Thanks for trying.” Chirico looked at me and said, “Got a blank on that one.”

“I’m sure you’re overreacting,” I said.

“A guy jerking off in the Park? He’s one of your boys, Coop,” Mike said. “Either he got the ink after he did his time and that’s why he isn’t in the database, or he hasn’t gone to trial yet. But he’s definitely part of the SVU posse.”

“Let me call Laura.”

I dialed my secretary. “Good morning, Laura. I trust you got the voice mail that I’d be spending most of the day in the Park.”

“I did. That’s what I told Rose when she called looking for you.”

“Battaglia wants to see me?” I said, wincing as I looked from Mike to Manny. “Tell him it will have to hold till tomorrow.”

“That’s what I said. No blowback so far. Need anything?”

“We do. I’d like you to go back through all the unit indictments for the last five years. Pull out screening sheets on convictions of any male, black, twenty-five to thirty-five, that I had anything to do with. Review the pending cases, too. And see if you can match our list against parole—make sure we know all our offenders who’ve been released within the last year. Double-check anything that took place in a park—Central or any other city park. Will that keep you busy for a few hours?”

“It’s a slow day, Alex. I don’t mind at all.”

“Thanks. Call me if you need anything. We’ll be working with the parks commissioner most of the afternoon.”

I hung up and asked the sergeant what to do next.

“That Reservoir rapist that you and Mercer put away,” Chirico asked. “What kind of time did he get?”

“Four victims, so he’s doing the better part of two hundred years.”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “but did he run with a gang? Maybe he’s got somebody on the outside who has it in for you.”

“That’s a lot of ‘maybes’ to check when you’re a prosecutor who specializes in violent felons. Why don’t you see how many convicted offenders named Cooper are in jail?”

“We can do that, too,” the sergeant said. “We’ve got an hour till we get our briefing from the parks commissioner. That’s a good time to let everyone know about the Austin sisters’ perv. In the meantime, while we’ve got some privacy, would you two like to tell me anything I should know for my dealings with Judge Pell?”

I stepped out onto the patio of the boathouse restaurant and leaned against the railing. “I seem to be the last to know, guys, so feel free to fill me in.”

Mike was running his fingers through his hair, which he always did when he was nervous. “I really don’t want to do this right now, Sarge. I’ve sort of sandbagged Coop on this.”

“I’d say we’ve all been sandbagged. You don’t have time to waste,” Chirico said. “You ever appear before this woman?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I testified in a hearing once or twice. I fucked up, Sarge, is all I can say. The lieutenant had me on the detail ’cause Pell claimed she was getting threats.”

“Claimed?”

“I never heard the threats. There were some notes—typed—that came in the mail to her office. One with white powder.”

“Like anthrax?” the sergeant asked.

“Like talcum pretending to be anthrax.”

“Who from?”

“Supposedly it all involved a Wall Street trader gone too greedy. She presided over the case and sent him up the river for ten years. A piker compared to Coop.”

“And the threats?” Chirico asked.

“The guy hired a hit man. The letters started coming to Pell in December, and the chief administrative judge called in Battaglia and the chief of detectives immediately. They put security on her 24/7.”

“I know we only let them have you two nights a week,” the sergeant said. “Who else?”

“They pulled a female detective from Major Case, and two guys from the DA’s squad did most of the work. Between Christmas and the end of February, there were no more threats and nothing unusual happened. Scully ended the detail.”

“Then what?” I asked.

“Then I got really stupid. Is that what you’re waiting for me to say?”

“I guess so.”

“Pell was smart, tough, funny. Kind of quirky.”

“All the things you find resistible in
me.
”

“And sexy.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, she wasn’t always mooning about some guy who was out of reach.”

“So you got in bed with her,” Chirico said.

“But it was after my assignment was over.” Mike put his hands in the pocket of his chinos. “On my own time.”

“And it ended because . . . ?” the sergeant said.

“Don’t make it more dramatic than it has to be. The thrill was gone, Manny. It was just a fling. She gives off a lot of ‘crazy’ the minute you get close. I wanted out.”

“And how did I become your exit valve?” I asked.

Mike picked up a stone from the patio and skipped it across the smooth surface of the Lake below us. “It was that last week of April. Things were wild with Luc here and that murder case. I was working it with all my free time since I couldn’t do it officially because of my friendship with Luc and you.”

“I’m grateful for that. Seriously.”

“I must have told Jessica that it was your birthday. That I might be spending it with you. I was using that as an excuse ’cause I knew I wanted out,” Mike said, his fingers back in his thick shock of black hair. “I think it’s what really set her off. Made her believe it was all about you. End of story.”

“Except that somebody tried to kill her right after that?” Chirico asked.

Mike spoke the words slowly: “So she says.”

“How? I mean what was the attempt?”

“Pell has a house in the Hamptons. Claimed she was followed into her driveway late at night by two masked men in a car who got out and tried to jump her as she was opening her side door.”

“Anything forensic to back it up?” the sergeant asked.

“No evidence. No neighbors home to hear noise. No tire tracks. Just a lot of broken glass and one hysterical judge,” Mike said. “And she admitted she broke the glass herself because she was too nervous to get the key in the lock.”

“So what does the prisoner who hired the hit men have to say about it?”

“It would have been awfully hard for him to pay off the hit men if they’d been successful, Manny,” Mike said. “The schmuck had a heart attack and dropped dead in state prison last winter. You know any hit men who work without an advance and no insurance for the final payment? That’s why I think she’s off her rocker.”