Death Angel (3 page)

Before I reached the elevator bank that led to the interior entrance to the New York County District Attorney’s Office, the men’s room door opened. Willie Buskins must have been waiting for me in there, stepping forward boldly to walk almost at my side as I passed by.

I picked up my pace and turned to the row of elevators, headed for the first open door, not caring whether it was going up or down.

“Just seein’ how fast I could make you move, Ms. Cooper,” Buskins said, holding the heavy doors open while I pressed the button to close them, laughing so hard that the gold jackets on his two front teeth—the ones his victim had described—were exposed to me. “Don’t you play dirty with me at that trial. I’ve had mines, Ms. Cooper. Mess with me and I’ll see that you get yours.”

I was standing at Laura Wilkie’s desk, in the cubicle in front of my office. She had been my secretary since I had taken over the unit, and was as loyal as any person with whom I’d ever worked.

“I understand the Boss wants to see me, but I’d like you to take this down first.” I dictated to her exactly what Buskins had said and done in the courtroom, and the behavior that followed.

“You’ve got to do something about this, Alex. Want me to send a copy to Judge Heller?”

“No. Just get one up to the DA’s squad, for their threat file. I’m sure Buskins is all mouth and not about to do anything stupid before trial, but his words did rattle me and I’d like to have it all on record.”

“Will do.”

“And put through assignments, please, for doctors Caragine and Mitchell, for a Frye hearing on July 8th.”

“Got it.”

“Nothing from Mike or Mercer?”

“All quiet.”

The phone messages and requests from assistants in the Special Victims Unit to meet with me would wait another hour.

“I’m off to brief Battaglia.”

Paul Battaglia had been Manhattan’s elected district attorney for six terms—twenty-five years—and was the only person most voters remembered in that role. He had grown the legal staff to more than five hundred lawyers during his long tenure and was responsible for many innovations in crime fighting. He never tried to micromanage his supervisors, but he had an unquenchable desire to be the first to know every important fact in a case or on a matter of personnel.

The gatekeeper to his office was my good friend Rose Malone—a superb executive assistant whose discretion, memory for detail about almost everything that had transpired under her watch, and great good looks made her the DA’s most valuable asset.

“It’s your lucky day,” Rose said with a smile. “He’s in a particularly upbeat mood. Whoever he met with at breakfast gave him a box of Cuban cigars. You can go right in.”

Battaglia was sitting at the head of the conference table, flanked by Pat McKinney, chief of the trial division. Although my relationship with McKinney had been a rough one for many years, he’d been unusually gracious to me since we’d worked together on a major international scandal earlier in the spring.

“Good mor—”

Battaglia’s elbows rested on the arms of his chair, his fingers templed below his chin, with a fat cigar stuck in the middle of his mouth.

“Practically midday, Alex. I’m having lunch with the commissioner, and I don’t have a damn clue about what happened in the Park last night.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. You weren’t here when I went up to court.” And McKinney was rarely in his office before late morning, either because he couldn’t tear himself away from his harebrained girlfriend or because his shrink appointment ran overtime.

“What does it look like?”

I pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down.

“Dump job. The body was found in the Lake, but they don’t think she was killed there. I was only in the Park for half an hour, but the guys haven’t come up with much yet or they would have left me a message.”

“Is she anybody?” Battaglia asked, thinking—no doubt—of which part of his constituency he would have to work. Priest, preacher, rabbi, councilman, community group—someone to whom he would need to express interest and give assurances that his best people would be on the case. “Do we have a name on her?”

Of course she’s somebody. Somebody’s daughter,
I wanted to say.
She is somebody’s broken and battered child or sister or aunt or girlfriend. There’s most likely a relative who is going about the ordinary business of his or her daily life but will soon get the news that a loved one has been murdered.

“No name. Chapman thinks she’s probably homeless.”

“Raped?”

“We won’t know till after the autopsy. Her skull was bashed in. No clothes on, but that could be for a variety of reasons. She was in the water for a couple of days at least.”

“Do you want to keep it?” McKinney was directly above me in the chain of command. On many occasions he had tried to strip me of cases I wanted to handle. If the homicide victim had been sexually assaulted or killed at the hand of an intimate partner, it fell to my unit and Battaglia usually backed me.

“I’d like to, Pat. Obviously, I don’t know what we’ve got, but chances are once we confirm an ID, a lot of the people we’ll need to talk to—the girl’s friends—are the population we’re good at dealing with.” My colleagues in sex crimes work specialized in vulnerable young women.

“I spoke with Lieutenant Peterson a few minutes ago,” McKinney said. “He’s not thinking this will be a quick fix. Needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing. Catch a lucky break is all they can hope for. You in for the long haul?”

“I’d like to be.”

“Then it’s yours.”

“Thanks.”

Battaglia asked me a dozen more questions to which I had no answers before he dismissed me with a wave of his half-chewed cigar.

The rest of the day flew by with phone calls and staff meetings. Most of the lawyers seemed eager to get out in time for weekend travel, and I was one of them.

I was going to my home on Martha’s Vineyard, catching the last flight out of LaGuardia at nine
P.M.
with Vickee Eaton, who was Mercer’s wife and a second-grade detective assigned to the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at One Police Plaza.

At five, I dialed Vickee’s cell. “Do we have a plan?”

“Our office has been totally swamped with calls about the homicide in Central Park.”

“Does that mean we’re grounded?”

“Not a chance. Scully and the mayor did a stand-up at City Hall an hour ago. Bare bones. Not many facts to go on. And they put out a hastily done sketch of the girl. If anyone recognizes her from this one, I’ll be amazed. No more to be said by my guys till there’s a new development.”

“Does that mean you expected me to make the plan? ’Cause I totally dropped that ball. We can take a cab to LaGuardia.”

“Girl, I just want to be sitting on your deck in Chilmark with an ice-cold glass of your best white wine when that full moon is straight overhead,” Vickee said. “Mercer’s picking me up behind One PP at six sharp. Meet me here. He says a quick dinner at Primola with Mike and they’ll have us both up to speed on the day’s happenings in the Park and get us to the airport in time for the flight. You cool with that?”

“Beyond cool. See you shortly.”

I locked up at a quarter to six, leaving behind all my case folders for a change. I couldn’t remember taking off for a weekend in months without having to grind through a closing argument or prep witnesses without a break to relax.

The lawyers who hadn’t cut out earlier in the day were coming out the doors of both buildings in hordes, like a fire alarm had gone off. Most of the young ones had getaway bags on their shoulders, heading to Hamptons share houses or the Jersey shore. I crossed behind the Federal Courthouse on Worth Street, cutting through the building next to Police Plaza to the parking garage, where Vickee and Mercer were already waiting for me in his SUV.

“Are we good to go?” I asked, climbing into the rear seat.

“Nothing to stop us now,” Vickee said. “One more phone call to Logan before Mercer’s sister wrestles him into bed and I am airborne.”

Vickee and Mercer’s four-year-old, Logan, often came with us on our Vineyard escapes, but this time his mother wanted the chance to sleep late while her husband and son did some male bonding.

“Did you spend the day in the Park?” I asked Mercer as he turned under the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp and nosed onto the uptown FDR Drive.

“Only another hour after you left. Peterson’s been really territorial about this one. He’s calling it a plain and simple homicide—”

“Like there is such a thing.”

“And he didn’t want any other units there with his own guys except for a uniformed detail doing a grid search of the area around the Lake.”

“Around the Lake?” Vickee said. “That’s the whole park. How do you limit how far they go?”

“You don’t. The ring just grows larger every day the men don’t come up with evidence to link to the body.”

I glanced across the river at the enormous glass box that covered the antique carousel that had been restored and opened on the Brooklyn waterfront last year. It was where I had celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday in April, a most bittersweet end to a difficult day.

“You hungry?” Mercer asked.

“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten dinner this early. But I didn’t have much for lunch, and you can bet there won’t be much stocked up in the house, so I’m glad we’re stopping.”

Mercer Wallace was one of the handful of African American detectives to make first grade in the NYPD more than a decade ago. He was five years older than I, and although his solid six-foot-four-inch build made a fierce impression on the bad guys he chased, there was an exceptionally gentle quality about him that won him the trust of the most traumatized crime victims we encountered.

After his mother died in childbirth, Mercer was raised in Queens by his father, who was a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. He had married Vickee ten years back, but she had left him shortly thereafter because she’d been emotionally torn—as the daughter of an NYPD detective—by the toll the job took on most marriages and a terrific fear that it would overwhelm her own. After a shooting that almost cost Mercer his life, she came back to him, and they remarried and started life over again with Logan. To Mike and to me, their relationship offered a model of stability—of trust and of love—that neither of us had been able to imitate.

I listened as they talked to each other, Vickee reciting a checklist of things that were part of Logan’s routine from the time he opened his eyes in the morning till the end of a long day. How much milk in the cereal, who was expected for a playdate, what parts of the house were off-limits to the kids, what she’d prepared for Mercer to heat up for dinner—everything sounded so enviably cozy and normal.

“You with me on this, Alex? I guess my wife thinks she’s been raising this boy by herself the last four years.”

“She’ll get real by the time I return her to you Sunday night.”

Mercer parked illegally on Second Avenue in the 60s, throwing his laminated NYPD plaque on top of the dashboard. Primola was one of my favorites—an upscale Italian restaurant with consistently good food, where the regular customers are showered with attention by an efficient and cheerful staff.

Mike was seated at the bar, sipping on his vodka as he chatted up the bartender. Giuliano, the owner, greeted us more quickly than Mike did. “
Signorina
Cooper.
Detectivo—buona sera.”
He called out to the headwaiter,
“
Dominick, give Ms. Cooper table one,
subito.
”

The four of us made ourselves comfortable at the round table in the front window and ordered our drinks. Vickee and I decided to stay light with a glass of white wine.

“Tell us everything,” I said to Mike.

“It was a really frustrating day. I’m hoping we get a jump after the autopsy tomorrow. That’s set for two
P.M.
, and I’ll be there. Not much to go on so far.”

“I’m glad you’ll stand in. I never got a chance to swing by the morgue today.”

“Did you catch Scully’s clip on the news?” Vickee asked.

“I heard it on the radio coming over.”

“Did the search turn up anything?” I said.

“Yeah. About ten minutes after you took off this morning, one of the rookies walked out of the bushes.” Mike pulled his handkerchief from his pocket and held it up with his knife centered inside it, the white cotton cloth draped around it. “He had his pen hoisted up and a pair of white panties—like maybe the biggest size they make—hanging off the pen so he didn’t mess them up. ‘These must have come off the dead girl,’ the kid says proudly.”

“But she’s so thin.”

“That’s only half the point. Within minutes, four other guys nosing into four other bushes come out with white panties in the air. Some with polka dots, one with glitter, one with lace—and a bright green thong, too. There was so much white cloth waving in the air, I thought the NYPD was surrendering to Hannibal.”

“What does that tell you?” I asked. “The underwear, I mean.”

“Springtime in Central Park, Coop. It tells me that all the young lovers with no place else to go try to find a sweet spot between there and Strawberry Fields to get it on late at night. It tells me that the lab will be up to its eyeballs in analyzing jism from intimate garments that have nothing to do with our homicide. But you can’t chance to ignore a single one of them.”

“Do you have any idea how big that Park is?” Mercer asked.

“Yeah, actually. We got some stats today,” Mike said. “843 acres, and we haven’t even done a thorough job on one of them so far. And they’re all being trampled by the press-hounds who are hoping to beat us to a solution. You’ve got entire countries—like Monaco—that are smaller than Central Park. It’s only 489 acres, the whole thing.”

“It’s not a country,” I said. “Monaco, I mean. It’s a principality.”

Mike rolled his eyes. “Another factoid from the vast archives of a Wellesley College scholar.”

“I wasn’t correcting you. I was just—”

“I know you weren’t, Coop. You were just being yourself. Hey, Dominick,” Mike called out. “What are the specials? We’ve got to get these broads to the airport.”

Vickee and I split a tricolore salad and an order of orecchietti con broccoli rabe
,
while Mike and Mercer both started with the penne pasta special followed by veal chops. Murder was never an inhibitor for Mike’s appetite.

“Obviously, you know you can call me if anything develops before we’re back,” I said. “Vickee will be getting constant info from DCPI. Are you working all weekend?”

“I was supposed to anyway. Today was my first day back on. I’ll start at the canvass in the morning both days, be at the ME’s office tomorrow afternoon.”

“Can I canvass with you on Monday?”

“Suit yourself.”

Mercer put his drink down. “Alex was really helpful to us on the Reservoir rapist case. People that didn’t want to be bothered breaking their jog for a tough old cop like me were willing to talk to her.”