Silent Mercy (17 page)
“Alex? Pick up. Why aren’t you home yet? Call me,” Joan said. “You’ve got to tell me everything about this case. It’s so gruesome.”
Luc again. He was sleepless and restless, and I could hear the rustle of his sheets in the background as he changed position to get more comfortable while he rambled on. It amused and excited me, and his visit gave me something to look forward to while immersed in such turmoil.
“Don’t you dare call Joan before you call me. I’ll bet she’s looking for you.” It was Nina Baum, at her most protective. “I’m worried about you. Heard the news on the radio and assume this could be your case. Take care of yourself, sweetie. Have a nightcap and try to separate your work from your dreams. G’night.”
I ran a steaming hot bath, poured in my scented oils, and agreed with Nina that a nightcap was in order. Ten minutes of letting some of the stress soak out of me worked wonders. I toweled off, put the drink on my bedside table, and stretched out under the covers. I usually read for half an hour before turning out the lights, but I didn’t think George Eliot was up to keeping me awake.
I slept soundly. When the landline rang at 4:47 in the morning, I reached for the receiver, almost knocking over the cocktail that I had thankfully left unfinished before dozing off.
Mike’s cell number was displayed on the caller ID. “I know there’s a perfectly good reason you’re calling me at this hour.”
“What is it exactly you told me that you said to Battaglia, about where the body was found and whether it could be connected to the priest you’ve got on trial?”
“What’s this—a ‘refresh your recollection’ wake-up call?”
“Not really. What’d you say?”
“That it would be a different story—or something like that—if the victim had been dumped on the doorstep at St. Patrick’s Cathedral instead of a Baptist church.”
“Now you’re beginning to scare me.”
“Why? Are you drunk?”
“No. But there’s a second body.”
I sat bolt upright and switched on the light with my free hand. “A woman? You think it’s our guy? Was she decapitated?”
“Yeah, a woman. Her throat was slit. Looks like she just bled out on the site. Really fresh kill. You either got a crystal ball or the DA has a point. She was dumped at the doorstep of St. Pat’s.”
Adrenaline moved faster than the speed of light. The questions tumbled out of my mouth before I could complete them. “Was she sexually assaulted?” I asked, though it hardly seemed to matter. “Mutilated. Was she mutilated too?”
“The perp cut out her tongue, Coop. He slit her throat and he took her tongue.”
EIGHTEEN
“THERE’S
got to be witnesses,” I said. “You can’t kill someone on the steps of the most famous cathedral in America, no matter what time of night, when Fifth Avenue is as well-lit and heavily trafficked as a shopping mall.”
got to be witnesses,” I said. “You can’t kill someone on the steps of the most famous cathedral in America, no matter what time of night, when Fifth Avenue is as well-lit and heavily trafficked as a shopping mall.”
Mike was waiting for me in the driveway, throwing the clutter from the front seat of his department car into the rear. “You get any sleep?”
“Yes, thanks. Six hours. And you?”
“A few. Here’s the tabs.”
I unfolded the
New York Post,
never tasteful in its insatiable appetite for crime stories. The headline ran: UNHOLY AX—and beneath it, in bold print, A DIVINE PLAN? I skimmed the first few paragraphs and found the expected buzzwords—“headless torso,” “flaming flesh,” “baptism by fire,” and “St. John’s divine resting place.”
New York Post,
never tasteful in its insatiable appetite for crime stories. The headline ran: UNHOLY AX—and beneath it, in bold print, A DIVINE PLAN? I skimmed the first few paragraphs and found the expected buzzwords—“headless torso,” “flaming flesh,” “baptism by fire,” and “St. John’s divine resting place.”
I tossed the paper over my shoulder, into the back with Mike’s junk. “Now the newsroom boys have got a full twenty-four to work on something irreverent for the new girl. They live for this.”
He handed me a hot cup of black coffee. “There’s probably a stale bagel in one of those bags at your feet.”
“Which bag is yesterday’s and which is last week’s? I’m afraid I’d break my teeth on it. What do you know about her? Any ID?”
“Starkers. No clothing, not even a blanket this time.”
“You didn’t answer me. What about witnesses?”
The first major American cathedral built in Gothic Revival style was once a city landmark visible for miles. Now its twin spires were surrounded by the modern office complexes—including Rockefeller Center—that pressed upon it from every direction.
“Old St. Pat’s, Coop. The original one.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The cathedral that had been the centerpiece for the city’s Catholic population since 1879, and the scene of great ceremonial splendor for visitors of every faith—or no faith—from all over the world, was just twenty blocks from my home. But Mike was speeding east to go downtown on FDR Drive.
“Two hundred years old. 1809. New York’s first cathedral church.”
“Where?”
“So close to your office they can probably hear you sounding off when someone lies to you and you go ballistic. The corner of Mott and Prince Streets. NoLita.”
North Little Italy—NoLita, bordering on SoHo—was less than ten blocks from the courthouse.
“You know it?” I asked.
“’Course I do.”
Mike had been raised in a devout family, attended Fordham University after parochial school, and though not a regular churchgoer, had an abiding trust in his religion that carried him through the incomprehensible depravity of our work. His widowed mother and her siblings had steeped him in the knowledge of all things Catholic, about which he loved to lecture me.
“How did I miss it all these years?” The drive was empty and Mike was cruising down the center lane.
“It must have been grand when it was built two hundred years ago, but once the neighborhood deteriorated, brick and mortar walls were put up to protect it from vandalism. You’ve probably seen it, but didn’t know what was behind the walls.”
“And it’s still active?”
We had passed the United Nations building, and the earliest glimmer of light reflected from all the glass of the Secretariat onto the East River. The city was beginning to wake up and shed the eerie quiet of the still night, although only a few tugboats were moving on the choppy waterway.
“The Irish and Italian congregants have long given way to the Dominicans and Chinese, but it’s still active.”
“You know anything else about this girl you’re not telling me?”
“Quit it, Coop. We’ll be there in five. You know all I got.”
The lights on the Manhattan and Brooklyn Bridges danced above the crossing cars and trains as we sped toward them.
“You think Battaglia will really try to connect this to me?”
“We’ll know the minute he demands to put a bodyguard on your ass.”
“That could be you. We’re working together anyway.”
“Been there. Never doing that again.”
“What’s the part you didn’t like?”
Mike took his eyes off the road and grinned at me. “Think of a better question.”
“All right. What’s the difference between a church and a cathedral ? I thought St. Peter’s in Rome was the largest church in the world, but St. John the Divine claims to be the largest cathedral.”
“St. Peter’s isn’t a cathedral. It’s a papal basilica. Holds sixty thousand. Aunt Eunice took me over every square foot of it. Said more novenas than the pope. A cathedral holds the seat of a bishop.”
“So this little church in NoLita is a cathedral?”
“Not so little in its day. And yes, it was built to be the seat of the bishops of the newly formed Diocese of New York. Held that honor until part of it was destroyed in a fire. Enough wealthy Catholics had moved uptown so that the bishop, too, headed to Fifth Avenue. The new cathedral is St. Patrick’s to most of the world. But this beauty is the original.”
We were off the FDR, threading the narrow one-way roads of the Lower East Side to get to the corner of Mott Street. Mike was on the phone to the sergeant in charge of the Night Watch Unit. “Where are you exactly? We’re just a few blocks away.”
He got an answer as they talked back and forth about how many men were on hand and what reinforcements were needed.
The streets we drove through held a mix of the modern and remains of the scores of tenement buildings that had warehoused the immigrants who poured into this city in the 1880s and thereafter. Families crowded together—usually several generations plus in-laws and boarders—sharing toilets in the hallways and bathtubs in their kitchens. Before World War I, this densely populated area of the Lower East Side was home to five hundred synagogues and religious schools. I wondered if that fact would figure into the case of the woman who’d been found at the old cathedral.
“You check the crypt, Manny?” Mike asked the sergeant on the phone.
I drained the coffee cup and stashed it in an old paper bag. “This place has an underground crypt? I’ve sworn off those. I’ll wait in the car.”
“See you in three, Sarge. At the back entrance, on Mulberry Street.”
The pizza parlors and bodegas on Prince had been replaced by fancier latte shops and designer boutiques, as SoHo style crept into the old neighborhood.
“That’s the front door, on Mott, Alex. See it?”
The high wall shielded most of the church from view, until Mike parked the car and walked me to the wrought-iron gates that fronted the old building. There was a restrained simplicity in the design of the cathedral, easy to see how I had failed to notice though I had passed by it many times. From this side, there was no sign of police activity.
We cornered the street again and continued onto Mulberry. The investigation was still small, because of the remote location and the time of morning. The morgue van was already parked in the middle of the street, and several RMPs—radio motor patrol cars—blocked off both ends.
Manny Chirico was the sergeant in charge of Night Watch, the detail that caught all the major crimes on the midnight shift, sometimes getting to a murder scene before homicide detectives were available. He was one of the smartest men on the job. Both cops and prosecutors liked working with him, which wasn’t always the case.
“Hey, Mike. Alexandra,” Manny said. “I didn’t bother to call the South. Had a briefing on your case before we turned out and there didn’t seem to be any doubt they’re related.”
“Thanks for sparing me that,” Mike said. This half of the island was the jurisdiction of Manhattan South Homicide, but there was no point bringing another layer of supervision into this case. “Where is she?”
Manny pointed first to the sidewalk adjacent to a small stone archway that was attached to the church. “Blood, don’t you think?”
Mike squatted and looked at the strip of dark red stains that dotted the cement. “Probably so.”
Then he stepped through the threshold and we followed, emerging from the darkened entryway to a short hall lined with windows. Outside was a tiny eighteenth-century cemetery, fenced in by the wall, with several dozen primitive granite headstones—weathered and eroded by age. Most of them were leaning as though about to topple over with a gusty March wind.
“There she is,” Manny said.
CSU had beaten us here this time, and Hal Sherman was already at work taking photos of the body.
“How do you get into the cemetery?” I asked. Many of the centuries-old churches of lower Manhattan still had adjacent graveyards. Trinity Church and St. Paul’s were even tourist attractions, and my route to the DA’s Office took me past the last man-made remnant of Manhattan’s seventeenth century—the cemetery of Sephardic Jews from Brazil who immigrated here in the 1600s, neglected but still standing on St. James Place.
“This entrance is the only way, Alex, but it was gated and locked.” Manny led us down the corridor and onto the damp soil of the burial ground. “Maybe it was a couple of men—one helping the other scale the wall and carry the girl over. I’ve got Crime Scene checking out this old oak inside the walls, as well as the tree branches that overhang from Prince Street, for any trace evidence.”
“Still liking my orangutan theory, Coop. The guy must have been swinging from a tree.”
The exposed body of the young woman lit up in the flash of the camera. I stood about three feet from her, taking the measure of her young life. She might have been a few years older than I. She was certainly shorter—probably only five feet five or so—and rounder in the stomach and hips. Her cropped brown hair looked wet from the dew, and the gaping wound in her throat appeared to be large enough to spill out all her innards.
“Who found her?” I asked.
“The caretaker,” Manny said. “He doesn’t usually show up until six a.m., but he’s got a guy coming in to fix the organ this morning, so he just woke up early and strolled over at four o’clock. No better reason than that. I’d say he missed our perp—or perps—by less than an hour.”
Mike and Manny were crouched around the body like a pair of bookends. They had gloved up, and Manny was showing Mike the back of the victim’s head.
“I think he must have bludgeoned her with something to subdue her, in order to bring her in here and finish her off. See that crack in the rear of her head?”
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