Devil's Bridge (18 page)

“What?” Peterson asked.

“Scramble the letters and I get the word
beard,
with an extra
B.
So it’s Bluebeard or Blackbeard.” The old-timer threw his hands up in exasperation. “Let me know, Chapman, when you come up with what was going on in Ms. Cooper’s personal think tank.”

“We ready to get to work?” Peterson asked Scully.

“I got some snitches who might be helpful with the Estevez angle of this. I’ll get right on it,” the Bluebeard aficionado said to the commissioner. “If you can take a little more heat, Chapman, I gotta say I never worked a case with Ms. Cooper, but I think you’re giving more credit than she’s due with this breaking-the-code crap.”

“Why’s—?”

“She always seemed like an Afghan to me—the dog, not the tribesmen. Long and lean, a fine, shiny coat of hair. Nice to walk out with, show dog and all that, but not so much brainpower as she’s cracked up to have. I’m with the captain on the
bar
and
bed
thing. I’ll buy the first few rounds if I come up wrong on this.”

“Start saving your dimes,” Mercer said. “I’ll be drinking big.”

The group began to break up as the executive officer on the desk outside came into the room and took the commissioner aside.

“Get me out of here, Detective Wallace,” I said. “You and I need a plan.”

The commissioner held up his hand and we all stood still. He finished his conversation with the XO and turned back to us.

“I’d like to have some volunteers, gentlemen,” Scully said. “The commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct just called in. One of his men who worked midnights just told him about some unusual activity he saw near the park on his way in on Wednesday.”

“A damsel in distress?” the old-timer asked. “The iPhone toss? Something real, or just make-believe?”

“Everything’s real until proven otherwise, okay? It’s nothing as dramatic as the sighting of a kidnap victim or as specific as a cell phone coming from an identified vehicle. But it’s an SUV incident worth a follow-up, so they tell us. You want this one, Mike?” the commissioner asked.

“I’ll pass.” Homicides spoiled you for working the grunt jobs and minor incidents.

“What else you got?” the lieutenant asked.

“Hal Shipley’s on his way to the pound to try to liberate his three vehicles.”

“That’s rich,” I said. “Yeah, Mercer and Jimmy and I would much rather go to Queens and do a face-off with the reverend.”

“Exactly the scene we don’t want, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “I’ll get a man on that immediately. What else?”

“What is this? You gonna transfer me to the rubber-gun squad before this operation even gets started?” I asked, eager to have a confrontation with almost anyone who crossed my path. “Take my weapon away ’cause you think I’m a danger to myself?”

“Or others,” Dr. Friedman said. “Yourself or others. That would be my standard.”

“Nobody’s taking your gun, Chapman. Just keep quiet,” the commissioner said. “The third call probably has nothing to do with this matter, but the notification just came in and we have to think of every possibility.”

“What is it?” Battaglia asked.

Keith Scully grimaced and looked away from me. “There was a jumper on the George Washington Bridge this morning. Roughly four
A.M.
A woman who climbed over the railing from the walkway, poised to go into the river, but thought better of it and went on her way before the cops could get to her.”

“Mary, Mother of God. I’m taking that one. We’ll go to the bridge, the Port Authority Police,” I said. “No way that was Coop.”

The GW Bridge was one of the most popular sites in the metro area for suicides. Fifty million dollars had been set aside by the legislature to build a nine-foot fence above the walkway to prevent the jumps, which averaged almost twenty a year, but construction hadn’t even started.

“There are surveillance cameras twenty-four/seven that sweep the bridge,” Scully said. “I’m told there are grainy images of the woman. Not great close-ups but should be good enough to ID.”

“What makes you so damn sure it wasn’t Alex?” Peterson said.

I was walking to the door of Scully’s office. “Because she’s terrified of heights, Loo. Because she’s so damn scared of heights I doubt you could get her to walk over the Hudson River if I tethered her to my waist, much less climb on a railing and look down.”

“So you’re not saying she wouldn’t have reached that point,” Dr. Friedman said, “because she wasn’t so depressed, are you? The woman on that bridge—who might just be Alex, if she had made the decision to end her life—has apparently reached the depths of her despair. You’re not addressing the issue of Ms. Cooper’s possible depression.”

“I’d address your front teeth with my right fist, if you were a guy.”

“Chapman!” Peterson roared at me.

“The woman is not depressed, Loo. She had nothing to be depressed about.”

“C’mon, Chapman,” Battaglia said. “She had the rug pulled out from underneath her in the courtroom and—”

“That’s happened to her before. She fights back from it every time, with the best team in the world to back her up.”

“And someone hacked into all her secrets. Who knows what the hell is going to hit Page Six, and when?”

“If I’m the biggest secret you thought she has, Mr. Battaglia, then the gossip columnists are in for a major disappointment. There’s no other personal dirt on Coop’s hard drive,” I said. “You, on the other hand, sir—you’ve been playing pin the tail on the reverend with Hal Shipley and some of your other constituents for years, rumors have it. It seems to me that it’s your secret deals that are about to unravel.”

I opened the door and motioned to Mercer and Jimmy to follow me.

“Don’t go anywhere, Chapman,” Peterson cautioned me.

“Holding tight, Loo.” Although my left leg was jiggling like I’d been bitten by a tarantula. “But I think we need to get a move on.”

Commissioner Scully told one of the Major Case guys to deal with the Central Park debrief, agreed to let Peterson intercept Shipley at the auto pound, and confirmed that I should look at the GW Bridge video to prove—or disprove—that the distraught woman was Coop.

“And, Doc,” I said, halfway through the door, reminded of the language in the campaign poster that was framed and hung behind Battaglia’s desk, “if you’re worried about anyone jumping, keep your eye on the district attorney. It’s not nice to play politics with people’s lives.”

“This is a fool’s errand,” I said to Mercer and Jimmy as the three of us took the elevator up to the Port Authority Police office on the Manhattan end of the spectacular double-decked suspension bridge that had spanned the Hudson River since 1931.

“Then I’m happy to be one of the fools,” Mercer said. “We can make quick work of this.”

“Scully’s trying to keep me at arm’s length from this investigation.”

“He hasn’t put you in a straitjacket yet, Mike. Let’s keep on.”

We were met at the top by one of the patrol officers from the PAPD’s Emergency Services Unit, who led us into a small room, like a watchtower, perched above the great river that separated New York State from New Jersey at this point.

It was ten thirty on a brilliantly clear fall day. I could see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south past the new Freedom Tower and beyond the majestic Statue of Liberty, which stood at the mouth of the Hudson in New York Harbor.

“Are you the man with the video?” I asked after our introductions were complete.

“Yes, sir.”

“Were you actually working at four
A.M.
?”

“Yeah.”

“Emergency Services—you’ve got the toughest assignment in the book,” Mercer said, “and on a bridge hung hundreds of feet over the water.”

In all police departments, these were the cops who handled every imaginable hazardous task, from structural collapses to car and rail accidents to victim rescue from every kind of life-threatening situation. The GW was the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge, and I had seen Emergency Services officers climbing towering cables to rescue workmen whose gear had broken, truck drivers whose trailers had jackknifed perilously close to the edge of the span, and dying patients stuck in ambulances when a political stunt resulted in the intentional jamming of the bridge during rush hour not long ago.

“Hey, I asked for this work,” the officer responded. “It’s pretty exhilarating.”

“The woman last night,” I said, as he went about turning the monitor around to show us the footage, “did you actually get to see her? I mean, close up? In person?”

“Nah. The bridge is more than half a mile across. Almost forty-eight hundred feet to be exact. By the time we got the call and I was dispatched—I was handling a car accident on the far side of the river, where the Palisades Parkway merges with the bridge entrance—she was already hoofing it back to this side.”

“You followed?”

“Yes, but she disappeared into thin air,” he said. “That’s pretty common, once these suicides change their minds. I’ve talked my share of jumpers down off the ledge when they’re right at the tipping point, but if they’ve backed off before we get to them, they don’t stick around for me to give them a parking ticket or a recommendation for counseling.”

“How about rolling the tape?” I asked.

Mercer and I sat in front of the large screen, with Jimmy North behind me. The officer stood beside Mercer so he could point out the figures.

“There was a lot of fog at that hour of the morning, so you won’t see much at first,” he said. “I’ll freeze-frame it when she comes into view.”

The screen lit up when the video started to run. Between the blackness of the water and the hazy sky, all I could see were the endless vertical cables and the striking gray aluminum color of the steel tower on the Jersey side, obscured in places by the wisps of fog.

“Four
A.M.
and there’s all that traffic?” Mercer said.

“There’s always traffic, man,” the officer said. “This is when the early-morning commute begins. Firemen, cops, nurses—all the essentials whose tours start in an hour or so. They get into town to avoid traffic, park, eat breakfast, and go to work.”

I was focused on the walkway on the south side of the bridge, but the fast-moving cars created a blur. “Hard to see,” I said.

“Fourteen lanes of traffic. Over a hundred million vehicles a year. You can understand why we don’t get to everyone in time.”

“Now that I watch this, sure.”

“You’ll see a guy going westbound on a bicycle on the upper level. Then she comes out of the night murk.”

I adjusted my seating and stared at the walkway. The cyclist lit up the path with his neon-yellow windbreaker, reflectors on his sneakers and the rear of the bike, and a bright-white helmet.

It wasn’t quite the final airport scene in
Casablanca,
but a woman emerged from the fog just seconds later.

“It’s not Coop,” I said. Then I watched her walk, holding my breath as I did, and looked again. “Maybe. Maybe so. Freeze it right there. How high is that railing?”

“Just three feet above the concrete,” the officer said. “No barriers, no nets. It’s why we’re such a magnet for jumpers.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out her height against a known marker.”

All we could see at this point was the back of the woman’s head. She was tall and thin, and her hair was medium length and blond, like Coop’s.

“Let it run, Mike,” Mercer said. “Run it through once before you keep stopping it. I don’t think this one moves—you know—like Alex.”

The officer hit the
PLAY
button and the woman continued walking, briskly, away from us. She was dressed in a short jacket and dark slacks. I cursed the slacks. If I could have seen the shape of her legs—the slender calves down to perfect ankles—I’d have known Coop anywhere.

She took ten or twelve steps and I knew Mercer was right. “Not Coop,” I said. “The walk is off. I was looking at the height and general build, but you nailed it.”

“How do you mean?” Jimmy asked.

“She’s bouncing on the balls of her feet,” Mercer said. “It’s a little thing, but it’s just not the way Alex carries herself.”

The fog had cut into our line of sight. Then the woman reemerged, stopping abruptly just past a phone mounted on the railing with a sign that read
LIFE IS WORTH LIVING: CALL LIFE-NET
and an 800 number.

She grabbed the railing, looked down at the water, and swung her leg over the side. “So not Coop.” I was practically shouting. “What was I thinking, for even a minute?”

The woman’s profile was all wrong. Her nose was prominent and hooked, not straight and patrician. She had bangs on her forehead that reached her eyebrows, and a double chin, not Coop’s chiseled bones and angular lines.

“Definitely not.” Mercer let out a sigh, too. Relief, I assumed. “Definitely not Alex. And Alex could never swing her leg out over that iron rail after looking straight down from that height—she would have passed right out.”

“Big-time,” I said, pushing back to stand up and look down at the land below us.

Mercer hit the
PLAY
button again and leaned in to watch, two or three more times. He was careful that way. I didn’t need any more convincing.

“What do you guys want me to do about this person?” the officer asked. “She’ll be back, sooner or later.”

“Your usual follow-up,” Mercer said.

My moment of euphoria had passed. The woman who’d been ready to jump just hours earlier was, to the best of our knowledge, still alive. I didn’t have the emotional energy to worry about her. Coop’s fate was still a mystery, which I seemed powerless to solve.

“Here’s the elevator, Mike,” Mercer said.

“I’m walking down.”

“It’s like nine hundred steps, twenty flights of stairs or more.”

“C’mon, Jimmy. Let the old dude with the football player’s knees ride to the bottom,” I said. “I’m taking the scenic route. What do you know about Fort Washington?”

“This neighborhood? Washington Heights? I hear it’s coming back.”

“The hood was lost to Dominican drug gangs in the 1980s. The Red Top Gang, the Wild Cowboys—real urban marauders,” I said, slowly starting down the staircase, which was enclosed in steel mesh, offering the same great views as the walkway above. “It’s back all right. But I’m talking about the fort itself.”

“I’m not as good on my military history as you, Mike.”

I stopped on the first landing and looked to the north, pointing out the spot to Jimmy. “Not even fifty yards from here is where the remains of the walls of the fort are, inside Bennett Park. I used to come here to play as a kid.”

“I’ve never even heard of Bennett Park.”

We wound down to the next level. I kept taking deep breaths of the morning air, happy for the brief distraction. “Well, the fort was built in 1776 so that George Washington could defend New York during the Revolution.”

I pressed against the steel caging and looked across the Hudson. “Fort Lee was built on the other side, to prevent the British from going upriver and to provide the troops with an escape route to the west—to Jersey and Pennsylvania—in case they did.”

“So Fort Lee is named for an actual fort?” Jimmy laughed. “I thought it was just a bunch of condo livers hanging off the Palisades, waiting for Governor Christie to screw up the traffic patterns in some kind of political vendetta.”

“You wouldn’t be entirely wrong,” I said, grabbing the banister for the next flight down and allowing myself to laugh at the Bridgegate memory. “Nope. Not only was Fort Lee the birthplace of the motion picture industry—”

“For real?”

“Yup. Thomas Edison’s film studio, Black Maria, was built here, and dozens of others followed. Long before there was a Hollywood. And more than a century earlier than that, General Charles Lee of the Continental army held down this escarpment for old GW himself.”

“Was there a battle here?” Jimmy asked.

“Yeah,” I said, looking down. “This point is the highest piece of land in all of Manhattan. Pure schist. Washington decided that twin forts here could stop the British warships.”

I had never brought Coop to this point. She would have loved it for the spectacle of the river view, if I kept her away from the edge and the open heights, and she would have listened to my history with her usual keen interest. I leaned on the banister for fear my own knees would go weak on me each time I envisioned her with captors.

“I guess they didn’t,” Jimmy said.

I shook my head. “Did you ever hear of chevaux-de-frise, kid?”

“Never took French.”

“I wish the same were true of Coop.”

Jimmy grabbed both my shoulders from behind me, a step above, and rocked me a bit. “She’s going to be okay, Mike. With the info going out to the entire patrol force this morning, we’re going to get lucky today. I’m sure of it.”

I was babbling to keep my mind from wandering back to visions of Coop’s condition. I was staying in my comfort zone, in the history that was my escape from death and darkness.

“Chevaux-de-frise were a medieval form of battle defense,” I said. “I clearly have a lot of educating to do with you. They were portable frames, Jimmy, usually made from logs. Anyway, Washington had them constructed to be sunk here into the river—right at the bottom of this staircase and all the way across to the Jersey side. They were loaded with boulders from the heights, where the fort was, sunk to the bottom, and chained into place with giant hooks on both sides of the river in order to paralyze ship movement on the Hudson.”

I put my hands in my pockets and kept spiraling down. “Can you see all the way to the ground?” I asked. “Washington had batteries directly beneath us—where this bridge foundation stands today. It’s called Jeffrey’s Hook, a piece of land that juts out into the water. And batteries on Spuyten Duyvil Creek, and on the King’s Bridge, crossing the Harlem River. The fort itself was shaped like a five-pointed star. Five bastions that—”

“Like Fort Jay?” Jimmy asked. “That’s a coastal star-shaped fort on Governors Island.”

He had probably been reminded of the fort by Vickee’s comments this morning—a scene that was apparently the genesis of Coop’s unhappiness with me.

“Fort Jay is four points. Fort Wood—that’s the one on Liberty Island, at the base of the statue—that one’s an eleven-point star. Fort Washington here was built like a pentagon, with five bastions.”

A sharp whistle screeched from below. It was Mercer trying to get my attention. Jimmy and I were about halfway down the tower.

“Yo!”

“Let’s move it, Mike,” Mercer yelled.

I picked up the pace and started trotting down the stairs. “You ought to read about the battle of Fort Washington,” I said. “Great story, bad ending. Three thousand troops in this very fort, with General Washington himself watching from across the river. The British had four thousand Hessian troops backing them up. Wiped this place out at the end of ’76, and Washington retreated to the west.”

“Will do,” Jimmy said. “Maybe I’ll come back with you and get the whole picture. Tour all the forts, okay?”

“You’re likely sucking up to me or you’re a good man,” I said, calling out over my shoulder. “Either way works fine for me.”

Mercer was waiting for us in the small enclosure at the foot of the giant tower.

“You got my girl?” I asked. “Or are you just whistling ’cause you’re lonely down here?”

“We got places to go, Mike,” Mercer said. “Peterson just called me. There’s some junk starting to float in from all over the city because of the alert that went out to every cop on the job when we left Scully’s office. Blondes in Brighton Beach, trench coats abandoned on the subway, an unidentified young woman who overdosed on Metro-North last night. But—”

“So he’s going to send me out on some wild-goose chase so I don’t—?”

“Suit yourself, Mike,” Mercer said, turning his back on me. “Just suit yourself.”

“What’s the ‘but’ about, man?”

“I was about to say to you that Major Case may have something to look at, is all. You’re either with me or—”

“I’m with you.”

“The cop in Central Park who saw something on his way into work?” Mercer said, reminding me of one of the items on this morning’s checklist. “Seems there’s a second piece to his encounter. Worth a shot, if you’ll come with me to see if it takes us anywhere. To see if it gives you any ideas.”

“Of course I will,” I said, tailing behind Mercer with Jimmy North. “Where to?”

“The boat basin. The 79th Street Boat Basin.”

The Upper West Side marina was in the Hudson River, about five miles in a straight shot downriver from the GW Bridge.

“A sighting?” I asked, closing my eyes to squeeze out a thought of any possible connection between Coop and a boat parked in a marina.

“Not that,” Mercer said. “But at two o’clock in the morning, in the off-season, it’s a weird time and place for a guy to be swapping out license plates on his SUV.”