Death Angel (9 page)

“What are you doing, Coop? We’ve got most of the police force saturating the Park,” Mike said. “You look like you’re ready to undress.”

“I am only half ready, but maybe it makes sense to do it all the way.” I held on to the railing and stepped out of my driving moccasins and onto the seat of one of the chairs, hoisting myself up to the top of a dining table. Then I pulled off my cotton crewneck sweater. “Hold my belt for me, will you, Sarge?”

I unbuckled it and whipped it out of the loops.

“What do you think—?”

“C’mon, Mike. Off with your blazer.” I crossed my arms and looked at my watch. “We’ve got fifteen minutes. Ready for this? I bet you’re quick about it, aren’t you? No foreplay. Not too much small talk.”

Manny Chirico got my point first and started to nod his head, laughing with me. “I’m trying to quench the rumors, Alex, not stoke the fires.”

“Be careful what you wish for, guys. The rumors about Mike and me pale in comparison to his—his—”

“Stupidity, Coop. You can say it.”

“Stupidity it is. Thanks for that, Mike. And apparently half the department and everyone in my shop from Battaglia on down—you might as well throw in your mother and mine, too—think that we’ve been in each other’s pants, Mike. So maybe if we just get it on in broad daylight—”

“Keep your voice down, Coop. You’re sounding wacky.”

“I figure you like wacky. I can do wacky, too, Mike—you know that. I can do over-the-top crazy as well as Jessica Pell, I promise you that. In fact, I feel it coming on,” I said. “Here we’ve got the other half of the department watching us, in this beautiful setting all around the Lake, so maybe we can defuse the gossip and let people know that
we
know that
they
know about us. Whaddaya say? Get naked right now. Who knows? You might even enjoy it.”

“Why’s that?” Mike asked. “Because you think so many others have?”

“Legions. More than I can count.”

He grabbed me around the knees and pulled me toward him, folding me over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry to plant me on the ground next to Manny Chirico. “I give up, Sarge. She’s all yours. I can’t handle her right now.”

“At least I tried. I thought a little comic relief would beat blowing my top. Besides, I’m better for your sorry reputation than Pell is, don’t you think?” I picked up my sweater and knotted it around my shoulders. Then I waved my arms at the cops who had stopped in their tracks to watch the commotion I’d tried to create. “Back to work with all of you.”

“Where’s the big meeting?” Mike asked. His phone rang, and he walked toward the exit to answer it.

“At the Arsenal,” the sergeant said, turning to me. “That’s where the commissioner’s office is.”

“64th Street. We can walk from here,” I said. “Would you mind telling me what you’re going to do about Judge Pell and her—well, her story about Mike? I hear she gave you a deadline.”

“Better you don’t know, Alex. I’m working on a plan.”

The boathouse parking lot had become a staging area for different teams sent in to relieve officers walking the grid. Chirico and I threaded our way through them, stopping to examine plastic toys, fragments of cloth, and all the other objects that had been recovered in the search.

“That was the lab,” Mike said when he caught up with us. “You know those two miniature statues and the angel I dropped off on Friday night?”

He was directing his conversation to the sergeant, not to me.

“Yeah.”

“No forensic value. I thought maybe one of those metal sculptures could have been the weapon. Either one of them is heavy enough to have cratered the girl’s skull. But no luck.”

“Any DNA?” Chirico asked.

“Smudges and overlays. Nothing there.”

“Do you mean smudges or mixtures?” I asked. “You know I’m doing a Frye hearing on mixtures in two weeks. If there are only three samples in a mix—”

“I probably would have said ‘mixtures’ if that’s what I meant, Coop, don’t you think? Those items are hopelessly smudged, okay? And coated in mud on the parts that aren’t smudged.”

“Seventy-two hours and the clock is ticking,” Chirico said, leading us on the roadway—closed off to traffic for the next three days of police activity—to the southeast. “I really hoped to turn up something this morning.”

The three of us knew the age-old policing rule that homicides went cold after forty-eight hours. Modern forensics had breathed new life into old investigative styles, but outside crime scenes were always the worst, then and now. It was rare to have fingerprints on any surfaces, weather wreaked havoc on evidence of every kind, and boundaries were often hard to fix.

“Seventy-two since we found her, Sarge,” Mike said. “And she was killed weeks before that.”

“Miracles happen.”

“Rarely on my watch,” Mike said.

“That’s not the way the judge tells it.”

“Are you going to let that subject be or what, Coop?”

“I thought this relentless approach would resonate with you, but I guess I’m wrong,” I said. “Do either of you know anything about the parks commissioner?”

“My City Hall sources tell me he’s a great guy,” the sergeant said. “Brilliant lawyer, passionate about civic causes—don’t you remember, he’s on the Public Library board?”

“No wonder the name sounds familiar,” I said, thinking back on the murder of a rare book conservator we’d worked more than a year ago. “Gordon Davis. A very elegant man. Witty and charismatic. African American, almost as tall as Mercer. Light skin with piercing green eyes.”

“You talking Match.com or the parks department?” Mike asked.

“Did I leave out the part that he’s got a fabulous wife who’s a law professor? Just saying he’s a man you notice,” I said. “Now, the strange part is why anyone would create a public park and build an arsenal inside it, storing all that ammunition right where you’re inviting everyone in the city to hang out.”

I knew I had hit a ground ball to Mike. If there was a question about military history that Mike was unable to answer, I hadn’t yet come upon it. The staid Arsenal building, dark brick and turreted, was a Fifth Avenue landmark. With hand railings carved in the shape of muskets, it had a façade as serious as the zoo directly behind it was whimsical.

“There’s a lot I don’t know about the Park, but that part I do,” Mike said. “There are only two structures left inside the Park—between 59th Street and 110th Street—that predate the Park itself. The Arsenal was opened in 1851, far north of most of the residential population of the city, to hold all the munitions for New York’s National Guard. A pretty short-lived purpose, once the plan changed.”

“So it was only an Arsenal for ten or fifteen years?” the sergeant asked.

“Yeah. Then they had to move all the dangerous explosives out of the area. It actually became the first building of the Museum of Natural History, before the one we have today. Now it’s headquarters for the parks commissioner and the zoo.”

“What’s the other building? The one that’s even older than that,” I asked.

“The Blockhouse.”

“Yeah, Peterson mentioned that. But I don’t remember it.”

“Do you know where the Cliff is?”

“Inside the Park?” I asked. “No.”

“Up on 109th Street, on the far west side, at the edge of a very high precipice. The Blockhouse is the last remaining fortification built in 1814 to defend against the British. It’s a great-looking stone stronghold, but I wouldn’t advise a visit at night without a police escort.”

“Why?”

“’Cause it’s in such a remote area—roofless now and hopefully securely locked.”

“Have we checked it out, Sarge?” I asked. “What if someone got into it?”

“It’s happened before,” Mike said. “Not murder or rape, but a great place for kids to use a makeshift ladder and scramble inside. I’m not thinking any individual could get a body out of the Blockhouse and down to the Lake without running into someone. They’re more than thirty city blocks apart.”

“Good place to hold a hostage till you figured out what to do with him or her,” I said. It was fast becoming obvious that the Park was a small city within Manhattan, with more places to hide out than I had ever imagined.

Chirico tipped his head my way to assure me he’d have it checked out.

The roadway led us directly down to the Central Park Zoo. A harem of California sea lions was rafted together on top of their pool, basking in the sun to the amusement of scores of tourists. Chirico led us around to the front steps of the Arsenal. He and Mike tinned the guard with their gold badges and we were admitted to the lobby for our meeting with Commissioner Davis.

The anteroom was full of detectives from Manhattan North Homicide, Major Case, and the Central Park Precinct squad. We milled around, trading ideas about what had brought the dead girl to such a brutal ending, until the secretary guided us into the conference room.

There was almost a spark of electricity when Davis entered. He introduced himself, instantly engaging and vibrant. “Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to the People’s Park.” Davis was the only one standing. The rest of us were seated around a long rectangular table. “What many have called the most important work of American art in the nineteenth century.”

Lieutenant Peterson thanked Davis for taking the time to talk with us.

“I’ll tell you whatever you need to know about this place, and you make sure to solve the crime before tonight. Deal?”

“It doesn’t look like murder’s bad for business, Commissioner,” one of the detectives said. “I almost got trampled by a pack of tourists getting in here.”

“Almost forty million visitors a year, including the folks who use the Park every day.”

“Not exactly a crime wave when you got one dead body in forty million,” Harry McAvoy, a senior Major Case detective who’d been on the job almost thirty years, said half under his breath. “I don’t get the big deal here.”

“I’ve been asked to give you the lay of the land, and to make all our experience available to you,” Davis said as he walked to an enormous map hung on the far wall. “For management purposes, the Park is divided into ten sections, and each section has five zones. I’d advise you to break down the same way for this week’s work. Each of our sections has a supervisor, and every zone has a gardener. Those are the guys who have to drop their pruning tools to pick up a candy wrapper. So if anything is out of place or unusual, it’s your zone gardeners who are likely to have spotted it.

“Then we’ve got roving crews that move between the zones. Tree experts, turf and soil monitors, rodent control—”

“You oughta step that one up a bit, Commish,” McAvoy said.

“I have a few emerald boa constrictors in the zoo who could take care of most of the city’s rats in a couple of nights, Detective. Anytime you want to borrow my snakes for an evening tour of duty, give a call.”

“We’re looking at 843 acres, am I right?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yes. Six percent of Manhattan’s total size. Seven bodies of water, including the Lake and Reservoir; twenty-one playgrounds; nine thousand benches, which would stretch seven miles if you put them end to end; and twenty-four thousand trees. You’d be very smart to use our ground crews and our rangers—they’ve walked every inch of this place and can tell you things you couldn’t begin to imagine about it.”

All the guys had questions and started shouting them out. “Got any suggestions about where to do a quiet kill?”

“We spend a lot of our time ensuring that kind of thing doesn’t happen.”

“Well, it just did, sir, so if you can cut to the chase.”

I guessed Gordon Davis to be in his early sixties. “You’re all too young to remember what happened to this Park in the 1970s.”

“Seen it myself, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said.

“During the fiscal crisis of those years,” Davis said, “it was city services that suffered the most cuts. All of the parks—in every borough—were in an advanced state of deterioration. There were mobile task forces that cleaned them on a weekly basis. Weekly—can you imagine what this place looked like under those conditions? The parks were not only filthy and unkempt, but vandalized and virtually abandoned to the poor and the criminal element. The Sheep Meadow—which actually had sheep grazing on it until 1934—”

“I think I stepped in some sheep shit yesterday,” one of the clowns from Major Case said.

“I expect that stuff is petrified by now, Detective. But don’t be surprised if you come up with animal bones,” Davis said. “Every now and then, when the earth turns over after a big storm like Hurricane Sandy or kids dig a new spot off the beaten track, the remains of the sheep and pigs who lived here before the city fathers took it over come to the surface.

“As I was saying, though, the Sheep Meadow had become a dust bowl in the ’70s, petty thefts and muggers forced the closing of Belvedere Castle, and there was more graffiti covering Bethesda Terrace than there was grass on the ball fields.”

“What turned it around?” Manny Chirico asked.

“The public-private partnership,” Davis said. “The establishment of the Conservancy and its ability to fund-raise at a time of such fiscal austerity. Just to be clear, the annual budget for Central Park is forty-six million, eighty-five percent of which comes from the Conservancy, not the City.”

“Didn’t one individual give a fortune to Central Park just last year?” I asked.

“The largest monetary donation in the history of the city’s park system,” Davis said. “John Paulson, an investment banker, gave one hundred million dollars to thank the city for all that the Park meant to him throughout his life. As a teenager, he told us, he used to hang out at the statue of the Angel of the Waters—which was bone-dry back then. He called that statue the heart of the Park. Most of us who work here think it’s the heart of the city—and I’m expecting you gentlemen to make that right again.”

“Did he give you enough money so we can drain the Lake?” Mike asked.

“We’re starting by dredging it first, Detective. Those efforts begin tomorrow.”

“So in the meantime,” one of the Major Case guys asked again, “give me a hint, Mr. Davis. Where would you go to off somebody?”