Death Angel (7 page)

“How do you know about this?” I asked. “I mean, maybe it’s nothing—our victim’s Caucasian—but what if it’s related to the perp or the scene?”

I picked up my cell phone and dialed Mike’s number. It went to voice mail immediately, and I left a message for him to call me.

“It’s called black history, Ms. Cooper. Just like that graveyard you stumbled into near City Hall. And this place has a special connection to my family. So you know that Logan is named for my great-granddaddy Logan Bateman?”

“I do. He was a carriage driver for a wealthy family that lived on Fifth Avenue.”

“That’s right. Well, one of
his
great-greats—I don’t know how many greats, girl, but Big Logan, as we called him, was born in 1893—and one of his ancestors was a man named Epiphany Bateman, born in Tuskegee.”

“Who gained his freedom before the Civil War.”

“Long before that,” Vickee said. “Epiphany made his way to New York, where he established himself as a bootblack. He did well enough to buy one of the first lots of land, in 1825, in what became known as Seneca Village. Epiphany was a trustee of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church—”

“Built right in the Park? Or what became the Park?”

“Just where that playground is now on 85th. Dig down, you’ll find the pew that Epiphany Bateman sat in every Sunday. It’s all in the family Bible. The Mother AME Zion Church, Alex, was considered the wealthiest black church in America at that time. These folk even built their own schools for their kids. Colored School #3 is what it was called.”

“And All Angels’?” I asked.

“That was the third church in Seneca Village, built closer to 1850. The community was so upscale that whites began to move in, German and Irish immigrants mostly. All Angels’ was the only one of the three churches in the community that was integrated, so Epiphany moved his family over to worship there.”

“Does Mercer know all this?”

Vickee smiled at me. “Well, that depends on whether he listened to my father when he’d tell all those family stories. I got no guarantee of that.”

“When these villagers were moved out of the Park, Vickee, did they set up another community? Are there lists of the family names in church or city records?”

“So the dead girl is white. You’re looking to make the killer a scion of Seneca, are you, Ms. Alex?”

“I’m looking for long shots, Vick. Are there names?”

“The families all scattered, sadly enough. Some of my ancestors moved down to Little Africa.”

I gave her a blank stare.

“C’mon. Don’t you know? Little Africa was a small black community on Minetta Lane in Greenwich Village, but the people of color were later forced out of there. Some stayed on the Upper West Side, like the rest of my relatives, and some moved on to the Bronx.”

“You started me on this track. The black angel, could it really be a relic from a church that’s now buried beneath Central Park?”

“Columbia University anthropologists did a dig a few years ago. Talk to them. They found dinner plates and cow bones and teapots, and a few crosses from one of the churches. Of course there are relics. It was a vibrant community for the thirty years of its existence. Then it was just razed to the ground and covered with plantings and grasses.”

Vickee’s phone rang, and she grabbed it. “Hey, babe. Everything good?” She listened while Mercer told her something and then she replied, “I’ll tell her. And Alex is real interested in Seneca Village. She thinks you ought to have the Rothschild anthropology team from Columbia look at the black figure—in case angels are part of the theme here, and in case one of my long-lost relatives is still wilding through the Park. See you tonight.”

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“So Mike’s just dropping off his mother after Mass. He’s agreed to spend the afternoon with Mercer, and he said he’ll open up about Jessica Pell. That’s all good.”

“Thanks a million.”

“And Mike said he forgot to tell you last night, but the autopsy was negative for any signs of trauma in the vaginal vault. No semen. Sexually active, it appears, and never pregnant. Plus, so long in the water, there’s nothing on the body for DNA. Dead end there.”

“Mechanism of death?” I asked Vickee, whom I assumed had heard it from Mercer.

“Depressed fracture of the skull.”

A blow or blows of such force that the smooth outer bone of the vault was cracked and depressed inward.

“Nothing from the canvasses, I guess,” I said.

“We’d each have heard about it from someone by now, don’t you think? Let’s get some clothes on and go for a run on Black Point. And leave your phone right here. Be off duty for an hour or two.”

I hated to run, preferring to get my exercise stretching and doing pliés in a ballet class I tried to attend on Saturdays when I was in the city. But Vickee had started her regimen when she was training at the Police Academy and kept her well-toned body in shape by jogging five miles a day.

“On the beach, no less? We can’t run in sand.”

“Stop whining. It’s packed as hard as concrete when the tide’s out. Let’s go.”

In five minutes we were on our way to Black Point, one of the many gated beaches that lined the spectacular south shore of the Vineyard, where the Atlantic surf pounded the island. Massachusetts was one of only two states that allowed ownership of property down to the mean low water mark, so even in the height of the season, only owners with keys could access the wide strips of sandy seashore that were punctuated every few miles by handsome public beaches.

There were only three other cars in the parking lot. We made our way over the dunes, where the sight of the seemingly endless ocean with its variety of blue and gray and aqua waters roiled and pounded against the sand.

We dropped our bags near the entrance and stretched, warming in the sun that was almost directly overhead.

Vickee’s body—she was an inch taller than my five-foot-ten—cast a long shadow as she took off to the east. I satisfied myself by staying well behind her, trying to keep a steady pace.

I was drawn to the ocean view. Many years ago I had scattered Adam’s ashes on this beach—his favorite place to be with me—and I always felt connected to him here, whether I sat high on the dunes as the sun went down or swam in the waves, soaking up his spirit.

And I glanced down from time to time while I ran, not looking for beach glass like a child, but one day expecting to see the shimmer of a small diamond on a gold band. It was here, after Valerie’s violent death, that Mike had thrown the engagement ring he’d bought for her into a surf that appeared to be as full of rage as he was, though I tried in vain to console him.

Vickee and I stayed at the beach for most of the afternoon—reading crime novels, napping, and gossiping. We went back to the house to shower and pack up, stop for an early supper at the Chilmark Tavern, and drive to the airport. In the morning, my caretaker would bring the car home for me.

The flight back was also easy. We hugged good-bye and each took a cab to our homes, Vickee to Queens and me back to Manhattan.

It was only nine
P.M.
when I unlocked my door and went inside. I poured a drink for myself and went into the bedroom to play back my messages.

The first one was from Mike, who had obviously chosen to avoid talking to me by not calling my cell. “Hey, Coop. Thanks for putting Mercer on to me. It helped to open up to him. And when you come to the canvass in the morning, Sergeant Chirico wants you to hang with him, not me. Just in case word is out about Jessica Pell, he doesn’t want to add any fuel to the fire. G’night.”

Seconds after that message had come in at eight, there had been a second call. No one spoke, but from the background noise it sounded as though the caller was standing on a city street. I walked to my large window, which offered such a grand vista twenty stories above the sidewalk, just reassuring myself of the normal traffic below.

It was a hang-up, but the number registered on the caller ID wasn’t familiar to me. Even though there was no name displayed, the number had been captured on my dial because it was one that I had apparently phoned at some previous time.

I reached into my desk drawer and pulled out the emergency numbers for the DA’s office, running my finger down the pages, scanning for those with a 646 area code. At the very end was the list of judges who had agreed to make themselves available to take nighttime calls when our assistants needed a signature on a search warrant.

Of course I had phoned that number in the past. When I had worked the Reservoir rapist case with Mercer, our big break came from a tip I received in the early hours of the morning.

It was Jessica Pell who had placed the hang-up call tonight. Judge Jessica Pell, who was going to try to take me down with Mike.

At six
A.M.
, standing on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 72nd Street, I texted Sergeant Chirico, asking where to meet him. It was an overcast morning but expected to clear. Already, hundreds of the people who would use the Park this day were pouring into it on foot, bikes, blades, and pedicabs before the seven
A.M.
auto traffic would be allowed.

“I’ll wait for you in the parking lot behind the boathouse,” he replied. “Know it?”

“Yes.” It was three blocks north of where I would enter, just off the east drive.

As I walked toward it, wearing slacks and a blazer in an attempt to look casual but professional, I passed more cops than I ever remembered seeing in one place at any time. My keys and ID were in my pants pocket, and I carried only a pen and a thick notebook.

All along the roadway that was still barred to vehicular traffic, cops were trying to stop every jogger, biker, and dog walker—having started before sunrise almost two hours ago—to ask whether they had seen or heard anything out of the ordinary on any of the mornings the week earlier.

Many people seemed eager to stop and answer questions, some expressed annoyance but complied, and a few didn’t slow down for a moment, just waving off the cops who tried to approach them.

“Good morning, Sarge. Thanks for letting me be here.”

“No problem, Alex. I know you’ve done it before.”

“Is Mike—?”

Chirico cut me off. “He’s out on the Point. I don’t think you’re likely to see him.”

“The Point?”

“It’s that long piece of land at the southern tip of the Ramble that juts into the Lake. It sits directly opposite Bethesda Terrace—straight in front of the angel—and due east of Bow Bridge. The Point is wooded and remote. There won’t be many people around, but Mike’s got a secluded spot where he can take in all the action around the Lake, in case our killer is the kind of guy who wants to watch our operation.”

“So is there a rush to judgment here, Sarge? Punishing Mike before you know what happened?”

Chirico shook his head at me. “You know me better than that. I’m trying to cover his back. He’s out there with the squirrels and the chipmunks and the red-throated warblers till I can talk this Pell woman down off the ledge.”

“So Lieutenant Peterson doesn’t have a clue?”

“Sure he does. He just doesn’t want to give Pell the satisfaction of thinking it rises to the level of needing his attention,” the sergeant said. “You’ve got to ease up, Alex. Otherwise people will start to think she’s got real ammunition. Let’s get going.”

“Just so you know, she called my apartment last evening. Hung up when she didn’t get me at home.”

“I’ll make a note. But you ought to tell the DA.”

My heart sunk. “I’m sort of hoping he doesn’t have to find out.”

“Where’s your backbone, Alex? This broad’s on a mission. And your common sense? If she hasn’t told Battaglia yet, I’d be mighty surprised. He’s got more sources than the pope,” Chirico said. “Let’s get my team in place.”

The sergeant called out to the sixteen young cops—three women and thirteen men—who were gathered in small groups in the parking lot, waiting for orders. “Listen up!”

The clusters came together around Chirico, who introduced them to me and to Tom O’Day, the park ranger who was going to accompany us to our canvass site.

“We’ve got our assignment, guys,” the sergeant said. “We’re going up in the Ramble this morning, and our goal is to stop everyone who will talk to us, to see if they saw or heard anything unusual last week.”

He passed around a small paper with a headshot of the dead girl, after she’d been autopsied and cleaned up at the morgue. “Show them this face. She might have been homeless, and a lot of homeless men and women hang out in the Park, so it gives us another chance at getting her ID’d.”

“What’s the Ramble, Sarge? I work on Staten Island,” one of the cops said. “I’ve never set foot in this Park.”

Manny Chirico turned to O’Day to field questions. He pointed over his shoulder to the winding wooded path that led uphill behind the boathouse.

“This is actually the most complex area of Central Park, in terms of its topography,” O’Day said. “It was all pretty much a swamp when the Park was laid out. But the designers wanted New Yorkers to feel like they could escape from the city, so they brought in mountains of soil and boulders to create this woodland walk.”

“This is man-made?”

“Entirely, except for some glacial bedrock that was laid down twenty thousand years ago,” O’Day said. “We’re going to climb up this web of pathways—there are all kinds of steep angles and sharp turns—”

“I’m a straight-line kind of guy myself,” the cop said, growing an audience of comrades for his wisecracks.

“Then you’ve pulled the wrong assignment. There’s only one straight line in this entire Park, Officer. It’s the Promenade on the Mall, taking you from Bethesda Terrace back toward 59th Street. Just that one. I’m about to lead you into thirty-eight acres that look like you might as well be in the Adirondacks. If you’ve never been here before, you won’t believe you’re in the city.”

“A guy like me could get lost,” another cop said.

“Good point,” O’Day said. “See the streetlights? Every one of these lampposts has a location marking on it—four numbers that tell you exactly where you are.”

He stopped at the foot of the path and pointed to the small plaque affixed to the post. “See that? 7500. The next one up there will be 7502. The first two numbers tell you what street is our parallel outside the Park—that would be 75th Street—and then they go in order, even numbers only when you’re east of the center of the Park, from double-0 to 02. Above 100th Street, they’re tagged with the last two digits, so the first post at 101st Street becomes 01-00.”

“Where’s 7501?” the same guy asked.

“Just off 75th Street on the west side. The numbers over there are odd, like everything else about the west side.”

We started to walk, two at a time, up the incline, which began as an asphalt path but soon became gravel and dirt. Within minutes, the sights and sounds of urban New York were far below us, as we were shaded by overgrown trees and serenaded by what sounded like varieties of songbirds.

Tom O’Day stopped all of us at the first fork in the trail. “Some of you are going to head that way, up to the Gill.”

“What’s the Gill?” a female officer asked.

“It’s a stream. Runs out of Azalea Pond up above us, by 77th Street. It twists and turns with a few cascades, then takes a pretty steep drop down a gorge into the Lake.”

“Even the stream is artificial?”

“Yes, ma’am. Same pumped-in-from-upstate water that runs out of your tap. But you’d never know it.”

“So the body that was found in the Lake could have been thrown in the water up here and floated down?”

“Not a prayer,” the sergeant said. “There would have been quite an accumulation of postmortem skin tears and discolorations. Wait till you see this stream—and the boulders in it. Tom, why don’t you tell them who’s likely to be around?”

“Sure. At this hour of the day we get your more adventurous runners. Guys on the clock prefer the roadway or Reservoir trail, not just because of how steep it gets here but because the ground is so rough, with tree roots and rocks in the way. They rarely stop for anyone. Your dog walkers are the friendliest by far.

“There are plenty of tree-huggers here. See this—this mini forest? All of it brought in more than a hundred years ago, to look subtropical and exotic. You got tupelos and American sycamores, cucumber magnolias and sassafras. The place is dominated by black cherry and black locust ’cause they self-seed so aggressively.”

“But they don’t talk,” the Staten Island cop said. “So what do I give a shit about the trees?”

“Because the people who study the trees, kid, are extremely observant,” Chirico said. “They can tell you the difference between the leaves on a Kentucky coffee tree and on a scarlet oak. I listened to them all weekend. They’ll be able to tell me if you were on this path last Wednesday, and whether or not your nose was running like it is now.”

The cop wiped his nose with his handkerchief and stepped back.

“And then there are the birders,” O’Day said. “Another super-friendly bunch. And also great eyes for detail. There are more than 275 species of birds that drop into the Ramble and forty that stay here—we’re part of the Atlantic Flyway.”

“What’s that? The Flyway?” It was the female officer again.

“The migration route that birds follow from Canada down to Mexico. They like a line that doesn’t have high mountains in the way, and plenty of food to eat. They love it here.”

“Birders are also keen observers,” Manny Chirico said. “Keep in mind that many of them have binoculars and cameras with them to take pictures of rare birds—to prove that they saw them and that kind of thing—so be sure to ask about that. And lots of them do sketches, so check if they have a pad with any relevant drawings.”

“The Ramble had a certain reputation once,” a serious young cop said. “Is that still an issue?”

“You mean the gay thing?” the sergeant asked.

“Yeah. Like in the ’60s and ’70s. Wasn’t there a lot of gay bashing up here?”

Tom O’Day answered. “Since the beginning of the twentieth century, the seclusion of this part of the Park made it especially popular for gay men to cruise. And then, you’re right. It was the perfect place to beat and rob them. Very few gays were open then, so many of the crimes never got reported.”

“But now it looks like just a remote nature reserve,” I said.

The ranger smiled at me. “It’s still a haven for gay sex. Maybe it’s the retro feel of sneaking off into the woods instead of hanging out in a bar. Anyway, by the time you each set up a post, you’ll be overrun by my Ramblers.”

“Okay,” the sergeant said. “Start in pairs and see how it goes. Try not to let anyone give you the brush-off. Everything’s in the details, so have your memo books ready and take it all down. And guys? Canvassing is tedious work. Maybe the most tedious. So expect a lot of rejection before you make any headway.”

Within seconds, at the fork in the path by the antique
luminaire,
or lamppost, numbered 7528, all sixteen of the cops had vanished from sight. The overgrown foliage and the curving pathways provided perfect camouflage. We were in a wilderness aerie, climbing and climbing away from the city streets but able to see the tips of skyscrapers that ringed the entire Park.

Manny Chirico was wearing a brown linen jacket, chinos, and a polarized pair of Ray-Bans. He looked more like a
GQ
cover model than a homicide sergeant. “Stick with me, Alex.”

“Okay, but what are we going to do?”

“Walk every square inch of this park within a park—I’d get them to turn over every boulder if I could.”

“I thought the groundskeepers here were meticulous.”

“They are,” Chirico said. “The rules are zero tolerance for garbage and graffiti. But we’re talking about physical evidence.”

“You like the Ramble for finding the perp, or for thinking the crime scene is here?”

Manny’s expression suggested he was as frustrated as one might imagine. “Like it? We’ve got four sergeants, Alex, and each one is assigned an area adjacent to the Lake to supervise and hope to find a weapon or a piece of clothing or a real clue. Me? I pulled the short straw of the northern border. You think I wouldn’t rather be talking to half-naked sunbathers on Bethesda Terrace than crawling through the Ramble? Everybody else has wide-open spaces with some trees and bushes around them. Me? I got such a tangle of rocks and streams and tree stumps that I’ll be lucky if I don’t find three more bodies under the dead leaves.”

“Well, you put on a good show for the kid cops,” I said.

“Let’s start at Azalea Pond.”

We wound around more pathways, over short rustic bridges that spanned the gorge, until we came upon an opening just after lamppost 7736. There was a large pond surrounded by bright fuchsia azaleas in bloom, with several benches—empty at the moment—and vines and creepers everywhere underfoot around the water’s edge.

Chirico was taking detailed notes, and both of us were snapping photos with our cell phones.

“Ever been up here before?” he asked.

“Not this far. It’s spectacular.”

“Glad to see it through your eyes. To me, there’s a perp behind every bush.”

Chirico’s walkie-talkie crackled, and he held it up to talk. It was still more reliable than a cell in some of the Park’s more remote locations. “Go ahead.”

“Sarge? I’m Jerry McCallion. Staten Island, remember? Read me?”

“Yeah.”

“Got a man who thinks the deceased looks like someone he knows.”

“Keep him there,” the sergeant said. “Where are you?”

“7616.”

“Give me five.”

I tried to keep up with Chirico as we wound our way down the path. Several of the teams had engaged a variety of morning walkers, showing the copy of the dead girl’s photo and asking for help. Most of the cops shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads as we passed by, suggesting they had come up empty so far, despite cooperative citizens.

Manny Chirico introduced both of us to the man who was waiting beside the cop. “I want to thank you for talking with us, sir. Do you think you can help?”

The man was holding a cocker spaniel on a leash. “I was out of town all last week, so I can’t be useful in that regard. But this girl does look sort of familiar to me.”

“Someone you know?” I asked.

“She might have gone to school with my daughter.”

“What school is that?”

“Brearley.” The man was referring to one of the most prestigious private schools in Manhattan. Something in the girl’s life had taken a dramatically bad turn if this man wasn’t mistaken.

“May we talk to your daughter?”

“Sure. But she’s in Hong Kong for the summer, on an internship.”

“Is there a Brearley yearbook at your home? We’re pretty anxious to identify this young woman.”

We took all the man’s information and told him there would be a uniformed cop at his door within the hour to follow up.

He started to walk away and then turned back to us. “Did either of you see
The
Wall Street Journal
on Friday?”