Death Angel (30 page)

There was so much dirt in my mouth that I couldn’t speak. My eyes were bleary as well, my vision obscured by the large particles of earth clustered on my lashes.

My captor was inside the cave. He had one foot on the ground—I could see his rubber-soled shoe—while his other knee pressed against my neck to hold me in place. He pulled back my head by grabbing a handful of hair, lifting it just high enough to slip a strip of cloth across my mouth, tying it behind my head.

Once the gag was secure, he moved from my side to in front of me, grabbing me under the arms. He dragged me over the top of the rocks that formed the mouth of his retreat and slid me deeper into the cave. Then he flipped me over, like a piece of meat on a cutting board, and tied my hands together with a similar strip of cloth.

I was staring into the face of Eddie Wicks, the man I had seen in the photograph at Dr. Hoexter’s Bellevue office.

“Who are you?” he asked.

That may have been the only advantage I had at the moment. I knew my captor, but he had no idea there was anything unusual about his prey, except that I had invaded his territory.

My answer—“Take this off”—was muffled, and I doubt he understood me.

Wicks put his hands in the pockets of my jeans, front and back, rolling me from side to side. My ID was in my wallet in the glove compartment of Mercer’s car. In my effort to travel light this morning, I had nothing on me with my name or professional credentials. There was only half a protein bar that he removed and tossed aside.

“Who were you talking to out there?”

I shook my head from side to side.

I didn’t know much about psychiatry, but all my amateur instincts kicked in. Eddie Wicks was bipolar, and if he was indeed living in this cave, he was likely to have been off his meds for an extended period of time. He appeared to be agitated and jumpy, and from the deep rings beneath his eyes he looked as though he had not slept well in days.

He was literally twitching with indecision. He wanted to find out who I was and why I was there, but he didn’t dare release the gag. Meanwhile, the clumps of dirt in my mouth were pushed toward my throat every time I tried to speak. I knew that if I panicked I would have even greater trouble breathing.

“Why are you here?” Wicks asked, prodding me in the side with his foot.

“Birds,” I said.

“Words?”

I didn’t want to upset him by speaking more loudly and cause him to hurt me. I was beginning to choke on the dirt particles, and my chest was heaving up and down as I tried to urge myself to say calm.

I spoke the word again. “Birds.”

“Birds?”

I nodded my head up and down.

“Atlantic Flyway,” I said, having no idea what that sounded like through the gag but hoping that the bits the park rangers and Commissioner Davis had taught us would sound like birder talk.

Eddie Wicks understood what I had said. He muttered “Flyway” as he stared at me. He didn’t seem any happier to have me in his space than I was to be here.

“Birds don’t live in caves.”

I was biting at the gag, trying to moisten it with my saliva to make it move, to bring it down off my mouth so that I could engage with Wicks. “Swallows. Cave swallows.”

“And that’s why you were climbing out of the stream, looking for swallows?” He was standing almost upright in this black hole. The silver objects were behind my head, out of sight. I was on my back, struggling to keep an airway open, and all I could see around me was the darkness, and Eddie Wicks’s pale, pasty face looming over me. “I don’t think so.”

I knew better than to try to play the homeless card. My jeans had been laundered and pressed, my cotton shirt bore a designer label, my nails were manicured, and there still might have been a whiff of my favorite scent if fear had not consumed all of it.

“What are you looking for, miss?”

Wicks’s eyes were bulging. His paranoia was on full display, even though I was shaking my head from side to side in the negative.

I started coughing because of the dirt that was going down my throat. “Sit me up, please.”

He was pacing the floor behind me. I had surprised him in his lair, and he was obviously concerned with what to do about me.

“Why should I listen to you? Why should I care if you choke to death?”

I used my tongue to move the gag even lower. “Look, mister. I don’t know who you are or why it freaks you out to see me. I’m not from around New York. I’m just exploring the Ramble and looking for birds and glacial rocks—”

Half of him wanted to hear me, and half of him looked like he wanted to put me out of my misery—and out of his way.

“If you just let me out of here, you know I’d never be able to find this hole again. I’m turned around as it is, I—I’m lost and—”

There would be no reasoning with Eddie Wicks. He was so strung-out looking—dirty and disheveled, stinking like someone who hadn’t bathed in weeks, and always that crazed, bug-eyed look about him as he stared down at me like I was an animal in a cage.

“Shut up!”

“Please let me sit, sir. I can’t breathe.”

I was clinging to what I knew from his mother, from Jillian Sorenson, from his Bellevue records—and to the hope that Eddie Wicks didn’t have a violent history. If I could reach him on some human level, if I could find some chord to connect with him, then maybe I could talk my way out of the cave.

He walked away, several steps at least. I was tallying any advantages I might have, and added that he was close to sixty years old to the fact that I knew more about him than he could hope to guess about me. Surely if I could work my way out of the material that bound me, I would be faster and stronger than he could possibly be.

Now Wicks stepped closer to me, one foot next to each of my ears. He leaned over and again reached under my arms, dragging me across the floor of the cave—over rocks and sticks that scraped my back. He stepped out of the way as he propped me against the uneven stone wall, so that my head bobbed and struck against the pointed end of a boulder.

He knelt beside me and tried to adjust the gag to fully cover my mouth, then thought better of it until he found out more about me.

“Tell me why you are here, damn it.”

“I’ve told you, it’s just a mistake.”

Wicks slapped me across the face. My head rocked back and forth, and my cheek stung from the smack.

“Think about it while you have some time to yourself,” he said.

He stood up, walking across the cool, damp space until he was almost out of sight. Then he returned, carrying a huge rock that caused him to bend practically in half as he positioned himself to place it in front of the hole through which I had entered.

Half the daylight—and most of my hope of somehow staggering safely down the steps—disappeared. Four more loads of rock and it was entirely dark around me.

Then Eddie Wicks disappeared, too, in the same direction from which he’d moved the rocks that formed his portable door—there must have been some other kind of exit. I squinted and focused my eyes on that area, and as it came more clearly into view, there appeared to be an incline—not an opening to the outside—that curved around the corner of the largest interior boulder.

Suddenly above me I heard noise. He was walking just overhead, the rubber-soled steps of his footwear only made audible by the echoing nature of the cave. Surely there was another way of egress, which meant an alternate opening for Mike to find a way in to me.

I leaned my head back and tried to make myself go through my options. Eddie Wicks wasn’t a killer. He was mentally ill, in desperate need of treatment, unlikely to trust me no matter what I said. He seemed to have abandoned his plan to hurt his mother. And now, if all the psychiatrist’s predictions were to be believed, what he was most at risk to do was to kill himself.

I didn’t want Wicks to hurt himself, nor did I want to be an accidental casualty of his paranoia and self-loathing.

I looked to the right and saw the shiny silver figures that had been stolen from Lavinia Dalton’s storage vault. Had Wicks been giving his possessions away, as the Bellevue shrink suggested yesterday, in preparation for taking his own life? Had he been getting his things in order? Or had the homeless girl who wound up in the Lake stumbled upon something that distressed him—something that caused him to hurt her?

My wrists were tied in front of me. I knew that if I had enough time, I could work loose the binds. The material was no stronger than the gag in my mouth.

I glanced again at the Carousel as I wriggled my hands. And then at the miniature form of the Angel of the Waters—or the death angel, as Mike had called her just a little more than one week ago. I shivered as she stared back at me with her icy-blue eyes. I didn’t want her to claim another victim.

Five minutes, maybe ten went by. I didn’t hear any noise above me, and not a sound from outside, not even the stream whooshing below this solitary spot.

At last the cotton material started to give slightly as I pulled on it. I got up on my knees, faced the sharp-edged boulder that made up the foundation of the cave’s wall, and rubbed the strip against the edge, slicing it in two.

I kept it in one hand, figuring I could pretend to retie it if Eddie Wicks came back before I could get out of here.

I rushed to the pile of rocks he had stacked to cover the opening and lifted one off the top. It was so heavy, it practically fell out of my arms to the cave’s floor. I let it down and made no effort to get it out of the way.

I heard a noise above me. I stood still for a few seconds, not able to tell whether Wicks had said something or whether he was moving in my direction. I’d never be able to redistribute the large rocks fast enough to escape if he was on his way back down to me.

I turned and made my way over to the silver objects across the room, if that was what one called this claustrophobic site. I picked up the carefully carved stone that represented the Warriors’ Gate and stuffed it in one pants pocket.

The Carousel horses caught my eye. Each one was small, but their legs were long and sharp and might be useful to me in fighting off my enemy. I pulled two out of their bases and put them in the right pocket of my jeans.

And then I saw the box. Right next to the Carousel, and much larger than the miniature objects.

It was made of wood—homemade, it appeared—and perhaps had been used to store or steal the valuable pieces from Lavinia’s collection.

Maybe there was a tool inside—a screwdriver or a hammer or something with which I could arm myself.

I lifted the lid.

The only thing in the box was bones. Human bones.

I was looking at the skeleton of a small child. I was looking, I guessed, at the skeleton of Baby Lucy.

I was engulfed by a wave of nausea.

More than forty years had passed since the kidnapping of Lucy Dalton—most likely by someone who knew her, by someone who knew his way around the home in which she lived, by someone who knew his way in and out of all the service entrances and design anomalies of the luxurious Dakota apartment building.

I needed to get out of this burial vault before Eddie Wicks came back for me. I needed to find a way to return Lucy Dalton’s remains to the grandmother who had lived four decades with the uncertainty of the fate of this beloved child.

I closed the lid on the box and went back to the stone wall, redoubling my efforts to clear the blockage and escape. Two of the oversized rocks were out of my way, but there was still not enough room for me to climb up and over the others.

When I reached for the third small boulder and swung it around, I wasn’t able to hold it up. It was much heavier than I’d anticipated and it slipped out of my arms, landing with a thud on top of another one.

Now I could hear Wicks moving above me, padding on his soft-sole shoes in my direction. I was certain he’d heard the commotion I’d created.

I pulled at the next-to-bottom rock but could barely budge it, so I climbed up on it and started to stick my right leg through the opening. I was over the top of the pile, and I was stretching to make contact with solid ground below, but Eddie Wicks had me by the neck.

“Mike!” I screamed. I thought the noise could be heard for miles around. But it was the last thing I got to say before Wicks clamped a hand over my mouth, shoving more dirt inside as he pulled me back onto the floor of the cave.

“I didn’t think you’d come alone.”

“It doesn’t matter what you think. If my friend was still around, he would have followed me in here by now,” I said, spitting out dirt as he tried to keep my head from moving. “We got separated hours ago.”

“Don’t move or I’ll have to hurt you.”

I was struggling against him, pushing at his chest with both arms. I could feel blood trickling down the backs of my legs where they had scraped against the rock surfaces when he dragged me inside again.

Eddie Wicks was about my height and outweighed me by a good thirty pounds. He kneed me in the abdomen this time, more worried now about my flailing arms than about my mouth.

“Let me out of here,” I screamed.

He had more of the same material: a pale-pink gauze that he wound around my hands in a crisscross motion, and then another length that he loosely wrapped—despite my kicking—around my ankles. He knew as well as I did that it couldn’t hold me very long, but I didn’t know what else he had in mind to do to me.

Then Eddie Wicks stood up to assess his handiwork. He backed up, keeping an eye on me, while he refortified his fallen wall. He was so used to this dark interior that he didn’t seem to need anything to illuminate his way around.

That’s when he caught sight of the wooden box, the makeshift coffin that held the child’s yellowed bones. He saw—as I just realized now—that I had not replaced the lid properly, and that it was slightly ajar on top of the box.

He went into a rage, screaming at me—his words bouncing off the walls of the cave—until finally he knelt beside the box and lifted the lid off it completely.

“Why did you have to open this?”

“I—I didn’t open it.”

“You moved it. The box wasn’t open like this before.”

“I didn’t touch it. Maybe I backed into it when the rock fell,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady, on an even pitch. “All I want is to get out of here. Out of your—your life. You have no reason to hurt me, and I have no reason to hurt you.”

I was trying to stretch the gauzy fabric he’d tied me with by pressing my legs apart while Wicks was preoccupied by the thought that I had seen the bones.

He was rocking back and forth on his haunches. “You saw her, didn’t you?”

“Her? All I can see are those silver things and a box. I just want to go home. I didn’t see anyone.”

“You saw the child, didn’t you?” Wicks rose up to full height, turning back to me.

“What child? There’s no child here.”

“My friend,” he said. “That little girl was my friend.”

I didn’t want him to talk. I didn’t care why he had Lucy Dalton’s remains in a box in a cave in the middle of Central Park. I just wanted to see daylight and run as far away from him as I could.

“Don’t tell me anything about it, sir. I don’t—”

“Nobody ever calls me ‘sir,’” he said, smirking at me.

“I’m very squeamish. I—I just want you to let me out of here before I get sick.”

“You’re the only one, then, that doesn’t want to know about the child,” Wicks said. “Why is that?”

“Because I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know anything about a child—and I’m so tired and hungry. Let me out of here and I’ll run and I’ll never look back. I promise you that.”

“The girl was my friend,” Wicks said, coming closer to me. He had picked up another length of the pink gauzy fabric somewhere across the room—perhaps from behind the wooden box—and he squatted beside me, wrapping it around both his fists. “I didn’t have many friends when I was a young man. Do you?”

“A few. Only a few,” I said. But I knew they would do anything for me if they could only find me. I tried to stay confident that they would come back before too long, unless I could get this unhinged madman to let me loose.

“There was someone you called out to when I grabbed you.”

“Not a friend. Just a guy I met on the path today. He loaned me his field glasses to look at the birds.”

“If he’s your friend, he’ll try to find you, won’t he?”

“I’m very shy, really. He’s not my friend. I’ll never see him again.”

“I was seventeen when Lucy died,” Wicks said, jumping around from subject to subject, as though he was unable to hold a thought for very long.

“You were a kid yourself,” I said, trying to be empathetic.

“You’ve heard of her, of course. Lucy Dalton?” he asked.

“No. No, I haven’t. But I’m not from here. I’m—I’m from Wisconsin. I’m just visiting. That’s why if you just—”

“You must be ignorant, young lady. She’s a very famous little girl,” Wicks said, his bug-eyed sneer seeming so sinister in the dark surroundings of the cave. “She was kidnapped a very long time ago. More famous than the Lindbergh baby, people say.”

I couldn’t tell if he was getting madder because I claimed not to know the story of Lucy Dalton, but there was no going back on my decision to play dumb about her.

“Are you the one who—?” I asked. “Did you hurt your friend?”

“That’s a stupid thing to say, isn’t it?” Wicks said, raising his voice as his cheeks reddened. “She was just a little girl, only three years old. I had no reason to hurt her.”

I picked up my head to look at him. “But she died, and—”

“It was an accident. All the brilliant reporters and the police investigators and even the servants who knew me as well as they knew Lucy, they all got it wrong. And I couldn’t tell them the truth because Lucy was with me when she died.”

Eddie Wicks sat on the floor of the cave, just inches away from me. He started to stroke the fabric that was wound around my legs—not my legs themselves but the gauzy cloth. And then he began to cry as he continued to talk.

“We loved this place—this Park. It’s what Lucy and I had in common. The zoo, the Carousel, all the playgrounds. And one day she asked me to take her with me to the Park, to play there in the afternoon.”

The crying stopped. He was angry again. The mood swings were violent and abrupt.

“We lived in a big house, in a great big house, right near the Park. It was Lucy’s house, and sometimes I felt like it was my house, too. I thought it was the safest place in the world,” Wicks said, now winding the gauze more tightly around his own hands, holding them up in the air like he was playing a game of cat’s cradle.

“I don’t want to know any of this,” I said. I wanted to buy time by talking about almost anything, but I feared that if he disclosed too much to me about Lucy’s death, he would become more determined to do me harm.

“But you can’t go now, dear. That wouldn’t be right. There has to be someone to tell the truth to people after I’m dead, don’t you think?”

“You’re very much alive. And you’ve frightened me horribly. And if the child’s death was an accident, then just let me go and you can tell them that by yourself.”

“I might not be alive for long,” he said. “It’s a terrible burden to live with this.”

“With what? To live with what?”

“Lucy’s dead because of me,” Wicks said. “My father’s dead because of me.”

“How do you mean?”

“I was thirteen when my father jumped out of the kitchen window in our home. I was sitting at a table ten feet away from him, and I didn’t stop him. Do you understand how that made me feel? Do you understand how people blamed me for that—my mother? My sister? How they told me it was my fault?”

“But you were a child yourself. I doubt you could have stopped him,” I said, trying my amateur psychology on a man who’d been through years of treatment, most unsuccessfully. “If he was intent on killing himself—if those were his demons—then he would have succeeded another time whether you stopped him that day or not.”

“But I didn’t even try.”

Survivor guilt, I knew, was a powerful paralytic.

“But the child— Is her name Lucy?” I asked. “You said her death was accidental.”

“Do you think anyone would have believed me at the time? Do you think anyone would have believed that if they had found her little body?”

“I don’t know what people would have thought. You’re a very intelligent man. I’m sure someone— Was your mother alive then?” I asking, feigning lack of knowledge. “I’m sure someone would have believed you.”

“My mother was a housemaid,” he said, baring his teeth as he snarled at me. “Nobody cared what she thought. Even
I
didn’t care what she thought.”

“I’m sure—”

“It was a day in June when the accident happened. A much cooler day than this one. I was staying in a room above Lucy’s home because my school year had finished. And because I didn’t have any friends to keep company with.”

“Why are you—?”

“Shut up,” Wicks said as he pulled on my restraints. “I told Lucy I’d take her to the Park. I promised her, even though no one would have allowed me to do that. To them, you see, I was damaged. I was my father’s boy, and too damaged to be around that happy child.

“After her nap she came upstairs looking for me. We had all these wonderful rooms in the house where we could hide from the adults, where I could amuse her and do magic tricks that made her laugh.”

I thought of the endless string of rooms we had seen yesterday at the Dakota—the quirky layout, the labyrinth of spaces, some private, some public—all removed from the living quarters where Lavinia Dalton and her pampered grandchild were cared for.

“Lucy had a dress on—a smock, really. Pink-and-white gingham, because her grandmother always insisted that she was dressed in pink.”

Then Wicks stopped and adjusted his position to get closer to me, to look me in the eye to make sure I was listening to him.

“And Lucy had
this
on, too,” he said, holding his hands out to me.

“This?”

“This beautiful material that her grandmother had ordered for Lucy from Paris. And my mother had sewn into a party dress for the child.”

It was the gauze that he had bound me with, the gauze he had primed in his hands for use on something—or someone.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

“Lovely.” I had nothing else to say.

“So pretty and so much of it that my mother made a shawl out of it for Lucy, too. A long strip that the child used for dress-up, that she liked to put around herself when she was pretending to be a princess,” Wicks said. “She wanted to wear it out to the Park, even though I thought that was kind of silly. That it was too warm to wear it. But she insisted on it because it was so light and filmy, not warm at all, and so I couldn’t disagree.”

“But how were you going to take her out if no one in the household would allow that?”

Eddie Wicks rocked back and forth again, never taking his eyes off me as he told me what happened—testing me, perhaps, to see how his story went over.

“I had a plan, of course, so that we wouldn’t be seen. No one would miss us because they’d all assume we were playing in the attic, that Lucy was happy to be with a friend who was part of the household.

“There was a dumbwaiter,” he said. “It could go all the way from the top floor of the building to a service room on the ground floor. Nobody used that room anymore, and nobody really used the creaky old machine.”

I thought of the archaic device, and even what an attractive nuisance—almost a game—it might have been for an inquisitive child.

“Lucy? Well, the dumbwaiter was her favorite place to hide. It wasn’t meant to fit people—just loads of laundry or cleaning supplies or dirty dinner service—so it could only hold a child at best. We decided together—” Wicks said, pausing for a moment before he went on.

We decided,
I thought—a damaged teenage boy, possibly sexually charged during one of his manic phases, and a three-year-old child who was his favorite companion.

“Lucy got in the dumbwaiter, in her gingham smock with her princess shawl wrapped twice around her shoulders and neck like a scarf, as she always wore it, smiling and laughing about our secret trip,” Wicks said. “That’s how I left her, how I always want to think of her.”

I tried to conjure up that cheerful image but brought to mind only a wooden box full of bones.

“I pressed the button to send her to the ground floor, and then I ran down the servants’ staircase—the rear staircase—just as fast as I could, so I’d be there to help Lucy out, so we could go on our way, through one of the back doors.”

Eddie Wicks stood up and started to pace back and forth.

“But when the doors opened, there was this helpless little child—she’d been strangled to death—whose knees were bent beneath her, hanging from the top of the tiny elevator car.”

The image was chilling and repellent. I bit down hard on my lip.