“I could really use a cocktail,” I said to Mike, rubbing my forehead with my fingers.
We were all alone in the ME’s conference room, trying to figure out whom to tell—and in what order. Commissioner Scully? Lieutenant Peterson? The district attorney?
“I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with the stress once the department declares this a homicide.”
“No point getting pickled now, Coop. This is a morgue, not a day spa,” Mike said. “Think this through with me.”
“What’s there to think about? If you tell the lieutenant first, then you can continue to go about your business like a total professional. If you’re serious about letting Paul Battaglia in on this news right now, he’ll play it to suit whatever angle pleases him, including which reporter he graces with the leak.”
I had spent a decade being loyal to Paul Battaglia, trusting his integrity and believing that his oft-used campaign slogan—“You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives”—was actually a principle he embodied.
But I had learned some hard lessons about him not long before my abduction. Politics makes strange bedfellows, I know, but Battaglia should never have hooked up with the sleazy Harlem minister—the Rev. Hal Shipley—who was no better than a street thug.
The possibility that the DA could be bought or bribed loomed all too large in my mind.
“You just don’t want me to call Battaglia because he’ll be peeved that you’ve jumped into the middle of this mess while you’re on leave from the office.”
“I don’t care what you tell him, Mike. I think he’s sold his soul to the devil—to Shipley. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to go back to that office.”
I was struggling with how to handle my suspicions about Battaglia. I didn’t think I could face him without confronting him on his duplicity.
“C’mon, babe. Work with me,” Mike said, pacing up and down the long room. “Somebody kills Tanya Root, okay? Female, black, close to thirty years old. Nobody seems to miss her, want her, or care about her. She winds up laying on ice in a refrigerator next to a seventy-year-old white guy—millionaire type—who seems to be her biological father. Start there.”
“Chapman’s Rules of Homicide Investigations,” I said. “Volume One, Rule One: There’s no such thing as coincidence in a murder case.”
“Correct.”
“I’d start with the fact that whoever killed Tanya Root didn’t expect her to be found. The East River is not a river, right? It’s a tidal estuary. Tanya was supposed to sleep with the fishes forever, flushed out into the ocean beyond New York Harbor.”
“Check. The killer didn’t know her breast implants were immortal.”
“How come neither her half-sister, Lily, or her half-brother, Reed, made any mention of her?” I asked.
“Half?”
“Same father. Black mother, Mike. Start with the obvious,” I said. “Either they didn’t know of her existence or they figured we wouldn’t find out about her existence because she was permanently out of the picture.”
“Check that. Add Hal to the silent Savitskys.”
“Tanya’s a rough ten years younger than Lily. So it’s possible she’s the child of wife three or wife four,” I said. “You can’t rely on the hastily drawn-up obits for accuracy.”
“You don’t have to be married to have a kid, Coop.”
“Check that, too.” My mind was racing in a dozen different directions. “Had he abandoned her, like Lily? Did he acknowledge paternity or even know of her existence? You’ve got to reinterview everyone involved.”
“Triple-check.”
“Tanya described herself to the Brazilian plastic surgeon as a model.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“But maybe she was a model, or trying to be one. Maybe she was in contact with her father all along.”
“Hey, maybe Wolf’s the one who wanted her dead, Coop. Throw that into the mix. She might have been blackmailing him about their relationship.”
“Way too many unknowns,” I said.
“Someone kills Tanya. And her death is likely to have something to do with her father. Once we nailed an ID on her—assuming he happened to have still been alive at the time—we’d know to give him a hard look. Her death has something to do directly with Wolf Savage. That’s the trail I have to follow.”
He picked up his phone, checked the contact list, and pressed the number he was looking for.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Jimmy North,” he said to me, then spoke into the phone. “It’s Chapman. We’ve got a development on Tanya Root. Can you meet me at the morgue?”
“Is he coming?”
“Yeah. And you’re going.”
“Where? I’m with you, right?”
“You’re going home, kid. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do not stop in at the Beach Café and test drive an afternoon Bloody Mary, much as you’d like to. Just go directly home. Can I trust you to do that?”
“I can help with—”
“This investigation is going to take off now. The lieutenant won’t want me babysitting the rest of the day, okay? I need to be at the offices of Savage’s lawyer before the family comes out of the meeting about his estate. Jimmy and I have to separate the players and pin them each to the wall like they were butterflies stuck into Styrofoam.”
“You’re mad at them now,” I said. “That won’t help, Mike.”
“They’re a greedy bunch of self-serving liars. Then we’ve got the housekeeper who disappeared on us—and the other one who was hoping Wolf would help her. I’m back to square one.”
The door opened and Emma Parker came in, wearing her sternest Chief Medical Examiner face. “I’ve just gone over those results with the two senior forensic biologists. No mistake about it.”
“Paternity confirmed?”
“Yes, Mike. You’d better get your ducks in a row. I’ve got to call the Savage family. I’m declaring Wolf Savage’s death a homicide. There’ll be an autopsy conducted tomorrow morning.”