Devil's Bridge (14 page)

“We got a mess on our hands,” Lieutenant Peterson said to the captain in charge of the Nineteenth Precinct, sitting in the squad room on the second floor.

It was eleven o’clock at night and guys were getting ready for the shift change. The midnight tour would be understaffed, like it was all over the city. Those who were ready to knock off were looking at us like we’d walked into their offices with the Ebola virus, staying far enough away to avoid contagion but curious about what we’d brought into their tight little village.

“And you’ve decided now was the right time to lay it on me?” Captain Abruzzi said. He looked like a man who had someplace to go. Well-cut double-breasted suit, designer tie too expensive for a cop’s salary, carefully styled comb-over—he should have learned to cope with the bald bit years ago—and way too much cologne at this hour. “The commissioner knows?”

“Scully wants Mike, Mercer, and me at One PP at seven hundred. The district attorney, too,” Ray Peterson said. “He’s expecting a call from you tonight. He insisted that we make a formal report so you can have one of your men get started on the basics.”

Peterson had a slender, bony frame—like a skeleton with some clothes thrown over it. He was tall, and he leaned his elbow on top of a file cabinet while he ran down the story for Abruzzi.

“Why’d you sit on this, Chapman?” the captain asked. “Too busy with your
Jeopardy!
bullshit to know you had a ‘gone girl’ on your hands?”

“I didn’t—”

“He didn’t sit on it,” Peterson said. “The people in the DA’s office as well as the guys in the department—and Vickee Eaton from DCPI—thought they knew what they were dealing with.”

I probably hadn’t missed a Final Jeopardy question in a few months. I couldn’t focus on anything after Vickee put this in my lap.

“Scully knows I’m using a Jane Doe to take the report?” Abruzzi asked. “Not Alex Cooper’s name anywhere on paper?”

“That’s his decision,” Peterson said. “The media would be all over the fact that a prosecutor has disappeared, and it’s not what any of us want until we make a plan tomorrow morning.”

“I got only two men working.”

“That’s all you need,” I said. “Mercer and I will fill them in. TARU’s trying to pull up her phone now. We got some ideas already that he and I are going to follow up on.”

I didn’t need any hairbag detective with good manners supervising my late-night interface with Hal Shipley.

Peterson pointed the two fingers holding his cigarette at me. “Forget your ideas, Chapman. The captain’s gonna run this tonight.”

“Yeah,” Abruzzi said, not seeming to be very interested in Coop’s status. “We’ve had lots of security details on her apartment over the years. Dances to her own drummer, that one. Jet-sets around. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s on a jaunt somewhere.”

“She’s not on a jaunt, Captain,” I said. “Trust me on that one.”

“You the one filing the report, Ray?” Abruzzi said to Peterson. “I need a name.”

“It’s me,” I said, trying to get the captain’s attention.

“I need a next of kin. Does she have family or—?”

“Her family doesn’t know yet,” I said.

“You better check with them before you put me through hoops, gentlemen.” Abruzzi shook his head. “Maybe there’s a reunion you don’t know about.”

“You want me to help with a list for tonight?” Peterson asked.

“I know where her crib is. Start there, I guess.”

“Mercer and I have been to the apartment. Everything’s in order,” I said. “Nothing from the doormen, either.”

Abruzzi squinted and stared at me. “You been inside or you just asked them?”

“In case you don’t know it, Captain,” Peterson said, “Chapman’s been dating Alex. That’ll be a factor in how this whole thing goes forward.”

He tilted his head and looked at me again. “Hats off to you, Chapman. You the latest in a long line of unsatisfied customers?”

There was no point in wasting my energy by belting the man temporarily in charge of Coop’s well-being.

“You got an alibi?” he said, jamming a stick of chewing gum in his mouth as he smiled at me, happy to work his way under my skin.

“Dead man with a hole in his head where his brains used to be,” I said. “It’s worked for me before.”

“Maybe she just wanted a night off,” Abruzzi said. “Everyone except the lieutenant knows you’d be hard to take on a regular basis.”

“True enough, Captain. I’m no prize. Good thing whoever’s waiting up for you isn’t allergic to that musk crap you’ve poured all over yourself. She might gag on it while she’s chowing down on your—”

“Cut it out, Chapman,” Peterson said.

“Did you know, Cap, that
musk
comes from the Sanskrit word for
testicle
?” I said. “And I didn’t even have to learn that on
Jeopardy!
One whiff of the stuff and it was pretty obvious.”

“I got all the plate numbers,” Mercer said. He had planted himself at an empty desk and done something constructive while I churned about Abruzzi’s reaction. “That’s a way to get started. Three SUVs registered to Shipley’s Gotham Center and one to Antonio Estevez.”

“I read about this Estevez character in this morning’s paper,” Abruzzi said, directing his comments to Peterson. “What does Shipley have to do with Alex Cooper?”

“Nothing,” I said. Nobody was going to get in the way of my tryst with the reverend. “Mercer pulled it up for me ’cause it has to do with my homicide.”

“I think the most important thing at this point is Antonio Estevez,” Peterson said. “He pulled some very sophisticated stunts to get out of his trial, and they involved hacking into the computer files in Alex’s office.”

“What about this Tanner mope?” Abruzzi asked.

“Street bum. Crazy like a fox, but I don’t think he has the connections from inside the can, just hours after his arrest, to have someone lined up to do harm to the DA,” Peterson said. “Down the road it might be a different thing with him. No question he’d like to see Alex dead.”

It had been one thing to hear threats from time to time about cops or prosecutors when they were sitting in your presence, but really different when the subject of the conversation was out of range, presumably in danger.

“I’m taking Estevez,” Mercer said. “That’s an evil dude. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”

“Have you got a command log that goes back a few years?” Peterson asked Abruzzi. “Get one of your two guys to hammer it out tonight. Check whether anyone who’s been trouble before is in or out of jail.”

“Sure. One of them can run things from here. The other is good to go with Mercer.”

I knew they’d try to shut me out of this investigation. I wasn’t surprised. But I could still get Jimmy North to come out with me and take a stab at Shipley after Peterson signed off. There was still a legit connection to Wynan Wilson’s homicide that had to be explored.

My phone rang and I practically slid off the desk to get it out of my pocket and answer it.

“Chapman.”

“Listen, Mike, it’s Bowman.” The detective from TARU who’d been looking for Coop’s cell phone.

“Whaddaya got?”

“Nothing good. Looks like her last communication was a text around ten something last night. She called for an Uber car service, and a driver responded. His name is—”

“Sadiq. Yeah, we got that.”

“Well, you ought to look for him. There’s no receipt, no end-of-job survey.”

“We’re past that point, Bowman. Where is she?”

“I got no idea, Mike. It’s that kind of situation. She’s not talking to anybody. Nobody at all.”

“Pings, Bowman. You got any pings? Everything with you is a situation,” I said, ranting into the phone. “What’s Coop’s situation? You tracking the GPS on the phone? You must know where it is.”

“I can’t tell you where it is. Last trace of the phone, best I can make it out, was just north of the 85th Street Transverse, in the middle of Central Park.”

“You know what you’re doing is going to bring out all the rug rats you’re trying to keep from knowing about Alex, from finding out she’s lost in space?” Mercer said. He had rolled over the curb and parked the car on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I got out and slammed the door. “I can’t tell if you’re just playing devil’s advocate or if you’ve forgotten you’re my best pal. You’re saying no to every idea I come up with.”

“I’m trying to focus you on getting the right kind of help for her,” Mercer said, “and doing that without getting yourself a paid vacation in a nuthouse.”

I crossed the transverse entrance and started into Central Park. It was twelve thirty in the morning. When I lost the light of a streetlamp, it was as though I was off to trek in the woods.

“You’re either with me or not,” I said.

Casual park regulars were home and tucked tight in bed. There would be a couple of dog walkers, some afraid-of-nothing runners, scores of homeless people, and an occasional stray. The roadways were closed to vehicular traffic.

“I’m always with you, Mike. Even when you go off the charts.”

“I’ll start searching,” I said, turning on the compact high-beam flashlight that Abruzzi had given me before we left the station house. “You wait on Fifth for Emergency Services.”

“You know what you’re looking for?”

“Everything.”

“I don’t have to remind you how many cases Alex has prosecuted that took place in—”

“In this park? No, you don’t,” I snapped. She had sent countless sex offenders to jail for attacking nannies pushing strollers and environmentalists in the Ramble, and dragging joggers off the reservoir path as well as the paved walkways. Two homicides—one in the Ravine and one linked to the Indian Cave—had been headline cases for months at a time.

“The lieutenant is calling in a team right now to work with Alex’s crew from the office to pull every perp she’s put away and check their parole status,” Mercer said.

“I heard him. I’m not one to sit in front of a computer screen if I can do something more useful. Neither are you.”

“Tanner’s stalking ground was this park.”

“I’m telling you Tanner’s not in my scopes at the moment,” I said. “This would take a perp with the means to launch a major operation.”

“Estevez could do that. So could Shipley. But neither one has a link to this location.”

“So it’s a scam to throw us off track for a while,” I said. “Maybe we’re being gamed. That’s what the judge accused Estevez and his lawyer of doing. Gaming her. Tell the guys from ESU to use their floods to light up the area north of the transverse like a Christmas tree. No piece of paper, no kind of debris, is unimportant. Tell them to bag it all.”

“Leave some bread crumbs so I can follow your trail.”

“You’ll hear me loud and clear.”

I left the search of the pathways for the guys who would follow shortly. There had been twenty-four hours during which passersby might have picked up items of significance—pieces of Coop’s jewelry if it had been discarded, her iPad and phone, any files she might have been carrying. By now, if not kept by the finders, the items would have worked their way to the Central Park Precinct station house, and the lieutenant had promised to follow up on that idea.

I ducked behind a thicket of bushes, hunched over, and used my beam to scan every inch of the ground.

There were piles of leaves almost everywhere. It was October and the trees were shedding.

I got on my knees and tamped them down. Most of the leaves were scattered into small groupings. Other piles were large enough to conceal a body.

I didn’t make much progress in the first fifteen minutes. I was zigzagging from the south end of the grid—the transverse wall—going north for twenty feet, and then reversing my direction. Trees got in my way, and boulders, too. Coop would have been cursing the brilliant landscapers who had put every one of these in place to create what she called this great man-made playground.

The first thing I found was a pair of men’s sneakers. I didn’t know whether they’d have any significance, so I tossed them ten feet over to the paved walkway for Emergency Services to voucher. There was a bong that I slipped into a plastic baggie in case we needed DNA from the saliva on it. I didn’t put gloves on until I clamped my hand onto a dead squirrel.

“Hey, Chapman,” I heard a familiar voice calling. “Get your ass out of the bushes. It’s time for the bright lights.”

I stood up. It was one of the senior Emergency Services detectives. I raised my hands and smiled at him. “Don’t shoot.”

“Got my orders from Abruzzi and Peterson,” he said. “Don’t ask any questions about who you’re looking for, relieve you of this particular assignment, put on my biggest spots, and go over every square foot of—”

“Correction. Square inch. And no relieving me.”

“The CO of the park precinct is sending his anti-crime squad to do the grid with me. Whatever kind of case you got, try and make yourself useful somewhere else.”

He turned his back on me and gave his men the order to set up the floodlights and get to work.

Mercer was on the path. “Why don’t we leave this to ESU and go for a ride?”

“Don’t humor me.”

I was snapping at my best friend. The fear that was gnawing at my gut was disrupting a normal interaction with the cop I trusted most in all the world. I should be making professional decisions, but I had a horse in this race and I was losing my focus.

“Mike,” Mercer said. “Let’s go look for Shipley’s SUVs. See if we can find them. You got a legit reason to be snooping around him. You’re still looking for Keesh as Wilson’s likely killer.”

I didn’t answer.

“For a murderer,” he said. “Let these guys get on the ground. Odds are they won’t find anything here, Mike. You know that as well as I do.”

I wanted to say that they didn’t know what they were looking for. But truth was, neither did I.

“You ought to go home and get a few hours’ sleep,” I said.

“When you do, man.”

“It’s different with me,” I said, pulling off my gloves and tossing them in a garbage pail as we walked toward Fifth Avenue. “It’s Coop. I got my heart in this now.”

“Course you do,” Mercer said, almost in a whisper. “That’s good to hear.”

I stood on the sidewalk and watched as the lights perched atop the giant tripods burst on.

“You Chapman?” a young detective asked.

“Yeah.”

“My boss gave us the instructions,” he said. “I’m watching the perimeter while the others search. If paparazzi start showing up because of the activity here, we tell them nothing, right?”

“Why, what do you know?”

“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Missing girl, is all.”

“Then you know too much already,” I said. “Tell them it’s a practice run. Like for a potential terrorist threat. Nothing about a girl.”

“Good idea. They all buy into that terrorist shit.”

Mercer was about to cross the street to get to his car. The senior detective was walking toward us, holding out a clump of plastic bags. “Help me here, Chapman, will you?” he said.

“Sure. What you got?”

“This one has cigarette butts with lipstick on them. Your victim, does she smoke?”

The inside of my cheek was already raw when I bit down on it again. I couldn’t think of Coop and the word
victim
in the same sentence.

“Not a smoker,” I said. “But keep the butts for possible DNA. We don’t know who she’s with.”

He held up a second bag. “Expired MetroCard.”

“Good. We can track the purchase. Make sure Peterson gets that ASAP.”

“Ten-four,” he said. “And I know this park is like a regular lover’s lane. This here’s a thong. A bright-red lacy thong. Like the last lap dancer who parked herself on me.”

Not a pretty picture.

“I figure we gotta grab all the underwear we come across.” The detective was laughing as he held the thong up in my face. “Any chance this belongs to your missing broad?”

“No way,” I said, turning my back on him. Nausea swept over me as I thought of Coop without clothes, without underwear, in the hands of a psychopath.

“Can’t ever be sure, Chapman. She’s not a nun, is she? Give us a clue.”

I knew her lingerie as well as I knew my own shorts. I just couldn’t say that out loud.

“Trust me on this one,” Mercer said to the detective, slapping me on the back to get me moving toward his car. “We know our vic, dude. Somewhere between a lap dancer and a nun, but it’s definitely not her thong.”