“You know what you’re doing is going to bring out all the rug rats you’re trying to keep from knowing about Alex, from finding out she’s lost in space?” Mercer said. He had rolled over the curb and parked the car on the sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, just to the north of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I got out and slammed the door. “I can’t tell if you’re just playing devil’s advocate or if you’ve forgotten you’re my best pal. You’re saying no to every idea I come up with.”
“I’m trying to focus you on getting the right kind of help for her,” Mercer said, “and doing that without getting yourself a paid vacation in a nuthouse.”
I crossed the transverse entrance and started into Central Park. It was twelve thirty in the morning. When I lost the light of a streetlamp, it was as though I was off to trek in the woods.
“You’re either with me or not,” I said.
Casual park regulars were home and tucked tight in bed. There would be a couple of dog walkers, some afraid-of-nothing runners, scores of homeless people, and an occasional stray. The roadways were closed to vehicular traffic.
“I’m always with you, Mike. Even when you go off the charts.”
“I’ll start searching,” I said, turning on the compact high-beam flashlight that Abruzzi had given me before we left the station house. “You wait on Fifth for Emergency Services.”
“You know what you’re looking for?”
“Everything.”
“I don’t have to remind you how many cases Alex has prosecuted that took place in—”
“In this park? No, you don’t,” I snapped. She had sent countless sex offenders to jail for attacking nannies pushing strollers and environmentalists in the Ramble, and dragging joggers off the reservoir path as well as the paved walkways. Two homicides—one in the Ravine and one linked to the Indian Cave—had been headline cases for months at a time.
“The lieutenant is calling in a team right now to work with Alex’s crew from the office to pull every perp she’s put away and check their parole status,” Mercer said.
“I heard him. I’m not one to sit in front of a computer screen if I can do something more useful. Neither are you.”
“Tanner’s stalking ground was this park.”
“I’m telling you Tanner’s not in my scopes at the moment,” I said. “This would take a perp with the means to launch a major operation.”
“Estevez could do that. So could Shipley. But neither one has a link to this location.”
“So it’s a scam to throw us off track for a while,” I said. “Maybe we’re being gamed. That’s what the judge accused Estevez and his lawyer of doing. Gaming her. Tell the guys from ESU to use their floods to light up the area north of the transverse like a Christmas tree. No piece of paper, no kind of debris, is unimportant. Tell them to bag it all.”
“Leave some bread crumbs so I can follow your trail.”
“You’ll hear me loud and clear.”
I left the search of the pathways for the guys who would follow shortly. There had been twenty-four hours during which passersby might have picked up items of significance—pieces of Coop’s jewelry if it had been discarded, her iPad and phone, any files she might have been carrying. By now, if not kept by the finders, the items would have worked their way to the Central Park Precinct station house, and the lieutenant had promised to follow up on that idea.
I ducked behind a thicket of bushes, hunched over, and used my beam to scan every inch of the ground.
There were piles of leaves almost everywhere. It was October and the trees were shedding.
I got on my knees and tamped them down. Most of the leaves were scattered into small groupings. Other piles were large enough to conceal a body.
I didn’t make much progress in the first fifteen minutes. I was zigzagging from the south end of the grid—the transverse wall—going north for twenty feet, and then reversing my direction. Trees got in my way, and boulders, too. Coop would have been cursing the brilliant landscapers who had put every one of these in place to create what she called this great man-made playground.
The first thing I found was a pair of men’s sneakers. I didn’t know whether they’d have any significance, so I tossed them ten feet over to the paved walkway for Emergency Services to voucher. There was a bong that I slipped into a plastic baggie in case we needed DNA from the saliva on it. I didn’t put gloves on until I clamped my hand onto a dead squirrel.
“Hey, Chapman,” I heard a familiar voice calling. “Get your ass out of the bushes. It’s time for the bright lights.”
I stood up. It was one of the senior Emergency Services detectives. I raised my hands and smiled at him. “Don’t shoot.”
“Got my orders from Abruzzi and Peterson,” he said. “Don’t ask any questions about who you’re looking for, relieve you of this particular assignment, put on my biggest spots, and go over every square foot of—”
“Correction. Square inch. And no relieving me.”
“The CO of the park precinct is sending his anti-crime squad to do the grid with me. Whatever kind of case you got, try and make yourself useful somewhere else.”
He turned his back on me and gave his men the order to set up the floodlights and get to work.
Mercer was on the path. “Why don’t we leave this to ESU and go for a ride?”
“Don’t humor me.”
I was snapping at my best friend. The fear that was gnawing at my gut was disrupting a normal interaction with the cop I trusted most in all the world. I should be making professional decisions, but I had a horse in this race and I was losing my focus.
“Mike,” Mercer said. “Let’s go look for Shipley’s SUVs. See if we can find them. You got a legit reason to be snooping around him. You’re still looking for Keesh as Wilson’s likely killer.”
I didn’t answer.
“For a murderer,” he said. “Let these guys get on the ground. Odds are they won’t find anything here, Mike. You know that as well as I do.”
I wanted to say that they didn’t know what they were looking for. But truth was, neither did I.
“You ought to go home and get a few hours’ sleep,” I said.
“When you do, man.”
“It’s different with me,” I said, pulling off my gloves and tossing them in a garbage pail as we walked toward Fifth Avenue. “It’s Coop. I got my heart in this now.”
“Course you do,” Mercer said, almost in a whisper. “That’s good to hear.”
I stood on the sidewalk and watched as the lights perched atop the giant tripods burst on.
“You Chapman?” a young detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“My boss gave us the instructions,” he said. “I’m watching the perimeter while the others search. If paparazzi start showing up because of the activity here, we tell them nothing, right?”
“Why, what do you know?”
“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Missing girl, is all.”
“Then you know too much already,” I said. “Tell them it’s a practice run. Like for a potential terrorist threat. Nothing about a girl.”
“Good idea. They all buy into that terrorist shit.”
Mercer was about to cross the street to get to his car. The senior detective was walking toward us, holding out a clump of plastic bags. “Help me here, Chapman, will you?” he said.
“Sure. What you got?”
“This one has cigarette butts with lipstick on them. Your victim, does she smoke?”
The inside of my cheek was already raw when I bit down on it again. I couldn’t think of Coop and the word victim in the same sentence.
“Not a smoker,” I said. “But keep the butts for possible DNA. We don’t know who she’s with.”
He held up a second bag. “Expired MetroCard.”
“Good. We can track the purchase. Make sure Peterson gets that ASAP.”
“Ten-four,” he said. “And I know this park is like a regular lover’s lane. This here’s a thong. A bright-red lacy thong. Like the last lap dancer who parked herself on me.”
Not a pretty picture.
“I figure we gotta grab all the underwear we come across.” The detective was laughing as he held the thong up in my face. “Any chance this belongs to your missing broad?”
“No way,” I said, turning my back on him. Nausea swept over me as I thought of Coop without clothes, without underwear, in the hands of a psychopath.
“Can’t ever be sure, Chapman. She’s not a nun, is she? Give us a clue.”
I knew her lingerie as well as I knew my own shorts. I just couldn’t say that out loud.
“Trust me on this one,” Mercer said to the detective, slapping me on the back to get me moving toward his car. “We know our vic, dude. Somewhere between a lap dancer and a nun, but it’s definitely not her thong.”