Terminal City (18 page)

EIGHTEEN

“I’m telling you I came directly back here and asked Laura to alert security,” I said to Mercer. “I wanted Raymond Tanner stopped before he got out of this building.”

“The guy must have moved like lightning. I came out of the conference room and everybody was scrambling.”

Mercer was out of breath, having chased the sociopathic rapist who had somehow gotten himself past security and up to the corridor where Gerardo Dominguez’s case was being heard.

“Tanner’s wanted for a handful of violent crimes and escape from his psych facility. Now he slips into the courthouse,” I said, “to the very room where a cop who stopped him on the street and let him go has his own encounter with the law?”

“Not just with the law, Alex. With you, in particular. That’s why this isn’t any kind of coincidence,” Mercer said. “And now there’s not a sign of Tanner anywhere.”

“Did anyone think to horse-collar David Drusin? He may have set the whole thing up. Or try dragging Gerry Dominguez over to Internal Affairs?” I was shaking, and both Mercer Wallace and Nan Toth were trying to calm me down.

“Dominguez is facing state time. You don’t really think Drusin is going to let him talk to IAB, do you?” Nan asked. “I’m taking the case. You going to let me in on the guy’s recipes, or am I flying blind?”

“That would be a recipe for disaster, Nan. And I know you’re trying to lighten me up, but this case is not for you.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s mine.”

“That was before Raymond Tanner showed up today. It has to go to one of the men in the unit. Tanner adds a very sinister undertone of misogyny here. Both he and Dominguez clearly hate women, and touching these case folders is like bringing on a personal vendetta.”

“Alex is right. I got someone at Special Vic trying to dig up a connection between these two men—serial rapist and cannibal cop,” Mercer said. “Till we find it and can prove it, best you stay out of the mix before you wind up in a microwave, Nan.”

“Give me the folder,” she said. “What if I assign it to Evan?”

“Perfect.”

Evan Kruger was a senior trial lawyer, as smart and even-tempered as they come. He would dive into this case—as he had with many others of the toughest in the bureau—and master the facts and legal issues, steering clear of the baiting that David Drusin had stooped to with me.

“Are you going to be reachable?” Nan asked.

“We’re off to the Waldorf,” Mercer said. “Gonna clear her mind with some old-fashioned murder. Call anytime.”

“You might need to fill Evan in on the facts.”

“It won’t take long to do. All the e-mails Dominguez wrote are in the file, and the grand jury minutes with his wife’s testimony takes it the rest of the way,” I said. “He’s going to get slammed with a bunch of bullshit motions, but the facts hold up.”

“Case of first impression?” Nan asked. “Not quite like the Donner Pass.”

“I was just beginning to research an online encounter. He’ll find my notes. The only case on point is about a decade old, in Germany. A guy who trolled the Web looking for an adolescent willing to be butchered,” I said, stopping to brush my hair at the mirror behind the door—mostly an attempt to see if my arm had stopped trembling. “Miewes is the perp’s name. Cut off his victim’s penis and then fried it. They ate it together before he killed the kid.”

“We don’t need to go there,” Nan said.

“Judge Aikens will actually be looking for some support if he needs to be convinced this isn’t just magical thinking. Drusin wants everyone to believe the eating people part is fantasy. Be sure to tell Evan that the website on which Armin Miewes found his victim is called the Cannibal Café. Check out the menu.”

“She’s stalling, Nan,” Mercer said.

“Damn right. I want to be here when they haul Raymond Tanner back in the courtroom. I can’t believe he got very far.”

“He wasn’t sticking around to get cuffed, girl. That little appearance was well orchestrated. You never saw him coming and you saw only the part of him that he wanted you to see, to scare the daylights out of you,” Mercer said. “Seems to be working fine, that plan.”

“But you agree with me, then? Dominguez is behind this.”

“We’ll sort it out. The last place you need to be is roaming the courthouse when we bring Tanner’s sorry ass in here.”

“Too bad Mike’s not back in town,” Nan said, smiling at me. The senior women in the unit were among my closest friends. They had followed the slow path of my relationship with Mike Chapman for years. “Sounds like you’re in need of a bodyguard. That could take your mind off work.”

“He is back, or did I forget to tell you? Besides, his last babysitting job was a disaster, or don’t you remember?”

Mercer laughed. “Good thing you didn’t go into dentistry, Nan. I think you just hit a nerve.”

I tossed my hairbrush into the bottom drawer of my desk and held up my hands. “I’m cool with it. The man’s a wolverine.”

“Aren’t they part of the weasel family?” Nan asked, poking me in the side.

“If they weren’t, they are now,” I said as I passed by her. “Talk later.”

I opened the door and told Laura that Mercer and I were off to the Waldorf.

“Rose called. She said Battaglia needs to see you. He’s very unhappy that you went to court on Dominguez and set off this firestorm with the fugitive.”

“Tell Rose it’s Evan Kruger’s case. I don’t have time for a dressing-down by Battaglia. Tell her you’ll give me the message when you see me.”

“But I am seeing you, Alex. Don’t cross the district attorney.”

“You thought you saw me, Laura. But it’s just a fantasy.”

“I’ll bring her back to you safe and sound,” Mercer said. “Tell the boss I was ordered to get her out of the courthouse.”

We were downstairs in three minutes and in Mercer’s car, headed uptown to the Waldorf Astoria. By 1:00
P.M.
, we had parked the car and entered through the rear lobby on Lexington Avenue, now well guarded by uniformed cops and additional private security.

We made our way to the basement of the great hotel, still the headquarters for the investigative team.

One of the Manhattan South detectives, Gary Stryker, saw me coming and cupped his hand over his mouth to shout down the hallway. “Hey, Chapman? Your minder is here.”

Gary high-fived me as I walked past.

“He went out without his leash today, Stryker. I had to bring it along.”

“Mike’s roughing up the video techs something awful, Alex. Better get in there and calm him down.”

“I’m fresh out of calm myself. What’s the problem? Mercer couldn’t even get anyone to tell him what’s the latest when he called.”

I reached the cubicle in which two men from the hotel’s AV system were working with Mike and Rocco Correlli.

“I’ll tell you what the problem is, kid,” Mike said, without even straightening up from his position, leaning over the shoulder of the video operator who was sweating bullets. “There are more gaps in this surveillance system than there were between your front teeth before you got braces, Coop. It’s a joke, this system.”

“How so?” I asked as Mercer crowded into the small room behind me.

“Dr. Azeem narrowed the time frame for us. We actually pulled feed from fifty-two cameras. Decided it would double the work to take off every single floor, because the elevators and stairwells would catch the action going from one to the other. These men have been on this—with teams of six detectives backing up the work—for the last twenty-four hours. Not a thing to show for it. Half of them drew blanks.”

“Blanks?”

“Yeah. Either the cameras themselves weren’t working or the software was so outdated that no images were captured. Not one single frame of any use.”

“Show me what you’re talking about.”

“Bring up Monday afternoon for her,” Mike said, wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. “High noon, in fact. Show us the elevator that leads to the fortieth-floor suites.”

One of the techs had his nose so close to the monitor that it was practically touching the screen. Mike provided the sound track as the grainy video began to play. I could see Monday’s date and time in the upper right corner.

“First of all, only the newest equipment—like the cameras in the main lobby elevators—have the latest technology. The hallways and stairs are mostly old-fashioned tape. They loop over again and again in twenty-four-hour cycles, and the images are so muddy there’s not much to see.”

I stepped back so Mercer could get a good look. “Useless,” he said. “I can make out movement, and a couple of suited men from time to time, but nothing or nobody you could recognize.”

“Out of the fifty-two cameras we started with,” Mike said, “more than a dozen of them are flat-out broken. Not working. Just there to rope-a-dope any would-be felons into thinking they’re being recorded.”

“Exits and entrances?” Mercer asked.

“I can give you some clear shots of those,” the tech said. He played with the computer and brought up footage from the Park Avenue entrance of the hotel, midday on Monday. “Your detectives have been over these films, reviewing the hours from noon to six
P.M.
, dozens of times.”

“Why?” I asked.

“Different people see different things,” he said. “Your brain gets fried pretty quickly watching so many hundreds of people coming and going. Then the bellman brings the luggage in ten, fifteen minutes later, so you can’t possibly connect it to the people who might own it.”

“But big pieces? Anything like the trunk we think is involved?”

“Not so easy. Around two fifteen that afternoon a group of thirty people arrived from a cruise ship on some kind of package tour. There were trunks the size of my apartment,” Mike said. “Once they got loaded on the luggage carts and hauled inside, it was impossible to see any of the individual pieces. Impossible to tell how and when they got to the rooms.”

“You think someone could have slipped one into the pile?” Mercer asked.

“Hand one of the bellmen ten bucks? You could slip a boatload of contraband right through the front door.”

“But the fancy-dancy suites in the Towers?” I asked. “There must be a real effort at security. I mean, just for antitheft purposes, not expecting this kind of violence.”

“Give her the Towers elevators,” Mike said to the tech.

Again, the young man moved in so close to the monitor that I thought he’d leave some of the hairs from his goatee on the screen.

The tape started to roll. The images were the clearest I’d seen yet. We watched several elevator trips—a tedious task at best—with well-dressed guests going up forty flights, then others leaving their floors to return to the lobby. My yawns were so big they were audible.

Suddenly the screen went white.

“See what I mean?” Mike said. “Is this lame or what?”

Mercer moved closer to the tech. “How long does this go on?”

“I suppose it just died. Must go on this way to the end.”

“You mean no one has watched it all the way?”

“You’ll have to ask the detectives down the hall,” the tech said. “I have no idea.”

“Fast-forward for me. Can you do that?”

“What’s the—?” I started to ask.

Mercer shushed me. We watched for several minutes while the tech kept us informed about the time.

“That’s half an hour since it went dead,” he said. “Now we’re coming up on an hour. I don’t know how long you want me to do this, but personally I think it’s pretty futile.”

“Stick with it,” Mercer said.

At least fifteen minutes went by until the tech told us that the timer showed that three hours of this past Monday afternoon had elapsed.

“Give up the ghost, Mercer,” Mike said. “It’s dead.”

About two minutes later, as though suddenly resuscitated, the footage came on with perfect clarity.

Mike elbowed me out of the way. A couple had gotten on at the thirty-ninth floor and spent most of the ride down to the lobby kissing each other in the corner of the cab. “It’s not dead after all.”

“It never was,” Mercer said.

“Then how the hell do you account for three hours of a total eclipse, my friend?”

“The security camera was intentionally blinded, Detective Chapman.” Mercer pointed his forefinger at the light fixture above our heads and pretended to pull it like a trigger. “It was temporarily blinded by a laser gun.”

NINETEEN

Rocco Correlli moved us all into a slightly larger windowless room. The long table was half covered with trays of food that catering had sent down to the bleary-eyed detectives. The other half was covered with papers—police reports, hotel bills, records of the various tape recordings, and photographs of both victims and the antique steamer trunk. The tech guy loaded the software from the Towers surveillance equipment onto a larger computer at the far end of the room.

“How do you blind a camera?” Rocco asked.

“All too simple,” Mercer said. “Remember when that Russian oil billionaire had his yacht in the city last year?”

“Ivanovic? Vladimir Ivanovic?” Mike said.

“Yeah. Well, there were some people walking on the pier, up near the
Intrepid
,” he said, referring to the steamship piers along the Hudson River, on the west side of Midtown Manhattan. “One of them was a good friend of Vickee’s. They tried to take photos of the mega-yacht, but they couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I asked.

“First of all, his staff goes nuts when anybody gets too close to the boat. When the story hit the
Social Diary
,” Mercer said, referring to the hottest gossip page in town, “it said that Ivanovic actually installed antipaparazzi shields all over the yacht.”

“So what do they have to do with this?” Rocco asked.

“They’re lasers, Rocco. They sweep the area around the boat, and if anyone tries to take photos or videos, the lasers blind the cameras. The cameras simply can’t take pictures.”

“You gotta be kidding.”

“Not for a second. You want to know how easy it is to do? For about twenty bucks—in case you’re not a billionaire with a yacht—all you need is a laser from an old DVD player, a lens you can focus, and a couple of double-A batteries.”