“So this text addressed to Mike,” Commissioner Scully said, “is the last thing Alex tried to get off from her phone Wednesday night.”
I looked across at Dr. Friedman and just stared her down. I was the person Coop reached out for—not rejected—when something went bad.
“Where’s the phone now?” Scully said.
The text had succeeded in keeping everyone in the room.
“Crime Scene’s going over it for touch DNA and prints,” Mercer said. “Then they’ll rush it down to TARU.”
The tech guys would work their magic. If it were possible to pinpoint the exact time and location that the phone landed in the park, it could be a help. And they would dump her device for any incoming calls—something that might have diverted her Wednesday night—as well as outgoing messages Coop may have sent.
There would certainly be some of her DNA on the phone, and perhaps partial prints of someone else. If she had in fact been abducted, there was the chance that her captor’s DNA was in the data bank and his prints in the system.
I tore two sheets of paper out of my memo book. On one of them I printed the word BAR in all caps. On the other I wrote BED.
Peterson saw me do it, then walked to the commissioner’s desk. He grabbed a stack of paper and passed it around so everyone could follow suit. Ricky Friedman just watched.
“Does any of this speak to any of you?” Scully asked.
Captain Abruzzi wasn’t writing. “Yeah, she was on her way to a bar—which we already knew—and then she was going to bed with whoever she was off to meet at the bar. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, what are you jumping through hoops for?”
“I doubt she’d be texting me about the going-to-bed part, Cap. Not with another guy,” I said. “Unless it was you.”
“Maybe she was trying to tell you it was over, Chapman,” Scully said. “Meant to be cryptic till she could get the entire message to you.”
“She’s not a cryptic woman,” I said. “The English lit major in her, Commissioner. She writes—she overwrites every thought she’s ever had. Two-word texts? That’s not the way she communicates.”
“What are the options?” Lieutenant Peterson asked. “First call is whether Alex got into the SUV voluntarily. What’s his name—Sadiq? He didn’t see any signs of force, did he?”
“Coop knows the first rule of kidnapping. Never get into the car. Never. Once you do it’s too late.” I had heard her give that lecture dozens of times, backed up by every FBI statistic in the country. Kick, scream, bite, fight. Just don’t get into the car or your chances of being found alive ever again are significantly diminished. “Sadiq wasn’t in a position to see into the SUV—tinted windows and all.”
“But he doesn’t describe a struggle?”
“No.”
“So did Alex get in because someone she knew pulled up and offered her a ride?” Peterson asked. “What do you think?”
I reversed the order of the words by shifting the papers in front of me. BED and BAR. It didn’t matter. Maybe they were meant to be as obvious as Abruzzi thought.
“You can’t rule it out,” Vickee said. “But who? And that would be just way too coincidental to be credible. There’d be something on her phone to confirm it, don’t you think? A communication with somebody, even it if wasn’t Mike.”
“You can say it out loud,” I said. “If Coop was in a friendly situation—if she had been secure, in the company of a person she knew, she probably would have texted Jake Tyler to apologize for being late and to ask if he was still waiting for her.”
“If she did,” the TARU sergeant said, “it will all be on her phone when we get it. Are they rushing it downtown to Bobby Bowman?”
“On the way,” Mercer said.
Lieutenant Peterson was back to how Coop got into the car. “So let’s assume it wasn’t a friendly encounter, okay? Assume the worst. How’d they get her off the street? And I’m saying ‘they’ because there was a driver, and Sadiq says she got into the side of the SUV behind the driver, so if there was force used, it’s coming from at least one more person in the backseat.”
“Could have been she was smacked on the head with a billy club or a jack,” one of the Major Case guys offered. “Sorry, Mike. I’m just being real. I don’t mean like gray matter all over the interior of the SUV—I mean just stunned is all. Stunned enough to pull her into the car.”
“Look, Chapman,” the commissioner said, “if this is too raw for you to listen to, we can pull back and you can work with Peterson out of the squad office. It’s understandable. In fact, it’s probably the smartest way to go.”
“Did I say anything? I’m thinking just the way the rest of you are.”
Except that every now and then the idea of a physical blow to Coop hit me like a tire iron in my chest.
“I wouldn’t imagine it was anything that split her skull in pieces like a cracked egg,” another detective said. “This text was written—what—maybe ten minutes to half an hour after she was grabbed, right? TARU will nail that timeline down, but it had to be written after she got into the vehicle.”
“I just said ‘stunned,’ didn’t I? We’re not talking permanent brain injury,” his colleague responded. “Still together enough to write the words. Bar—that’s Patroon. Bed—it’s whoever she was cheating with.”
“What else would just temporarily knock her out?” Peterson asked.
“A knife to her throat or a gun to her temple would keep her quiet,” Abruzzi said. “Might gain her compliance without leaving a mark.”
“I’d be in at the show of a weapon,” Peterson said. “Nothing more than that necessary to get me into a car.”
“How about something toxic over her face?” the TARU sergeant added. “What are the current drugs of choice?”
“I doubt anything was delivered by syringe,” Mercer said. “She’d have to have been pretty still already, with a vein exposed, to ensure a hit. Discard that idea.”
“No, I meant the old-fashioned way. A rag over her nose. Chloroform.”
“You’ve seen too many bad movies,” I said. “Chloroform isn’t any kind of guarantee. You’d have to get it smack over the vic’s nose and hold it there. You picturing a tough guy in the back of an SUV coming on to Coop with an ‘Excuse me, miss, would you stick your head into this rag and tell me if you think it’s chloroform?’ Nah, not happening.”
“Take a step back,” Mercer said. “I’ve had three, maybe four cases with it, and Alex worked on one of them with me.”
“So?”
“It’s easy to get. My perp bought it online from a chemical supply company in Canada. In fact, Vickee, call Catherine and tell her to pull the Juarez case from 2009,” Mercer said. “See if that fool is still locked up.”
Mercer went on. “Suppose there’s someone strong enough to grab Alex by the arm when he opens the car door and calls her name. She leans over and he’s got a grip on her, and before she can open her mouth to scream, the soaked rag has her nose covered.”
“What’s the point?” I asked.
He practically put his face up against mine. “Maybe the point is that it’s good news, if you think about it.”
“You and I must have very different definitions of good.”
“Listen up, Mike. If somebody wanted to kill Alex Cooper—and those threats have been real from time to time—he apparently had the opportunity to do that on Wednesday night,” Mercer said. “She could have been taken out by a bullet walking alone on a side street. She could have been stabbed and left for dead. I’m looking at the fact that she may have been abducted as opposed to killed as a good thing.”
“On East 65th Street? Have you got it confused with the South Side of Chicago? Anacostia or Watts? We don’t get so many drive-bys in the silk-stocking district, do we, dude?” I said, getting up to pace the perimeter of the room. “Now, we get to talking about dump jobs, you’ll have to admit this is prime real estate for that.”
Dr. Friedman inched forward and asked Vickee what kind of job I was talking about.
“That’s what we call it, Doc, when the bad guys pick a vic off the street, drive off to some remote place to do whatever piece of the nasty it is that they want to do, and then dump the body in another location altogether,” I said. “What’s to say Coop hasn’t been killed? What’s to say she’s not—?”
I couldn’t finish the sentence
“Sleeping with the fishes?” Abruzzi said. “Curled up in the weeds alongside the Belt Parkway? Use your head, Chapman. If someone was looking to snuff a prosecutor, he’d want it to be a very public dump. She’d be lying at the feet of the Angel of the Waters in Central Park. She’d be splayed across the information booth in Grand Central. He’d want the city to know she was offed. That’s not what we’ve got.”
“Then, what?”
“The alternative may be almost worse.”
I didn’t think Abruzzi was wrong. The thoughts I couldn’t deal with involved Coop in the hands of a sexual predator.
I needed to get out of headquarters and continue looking for the monster who had her, so I could rip his throat out. The air in the commissioner’s office was stifling.
“Could we get back to chloroform for a minute?” Mercer asked. “It makes sense as a weapon if you’re telling me that Alex was alert and able to send—to try to send—Mike a text after she was forced in the car.”
Several heads around the table were nodding.
“I mean, all it does is provide a short-term knockout, if it works right. Five to ten minutes at best, unless it’s applied to her nose and mouth continuously,” Mercer said. “Suppose Alex was overcome by the chloroform, let’s say. Not hurt. The drug was just used to overwhelm her and get her off the street as quietly as possible.”
Lieutenant Peterson was the first to agree. “Go with it.”
“The driver takes off and Alex is in the backseat with another guy.”
Mercer’s words had me squirming. I must have looked like I was going to fling myself through one of the commissioner’s windows.
“Sit down, Chapman,” Scully said.
“She comes around at some point, not long after the cloth comes off her face.” Mercer turned to me to deliver what he figured was the good news. “That wouldn’t have happened if they wanted her dead, Mike.”
“Unless they were ISIS,” Abruzzi said. “Then they want her wide-awake so they can torture her. You know how they treat their prisoners, don’t you? Burn them to a crisp, behead them—all kinds of medieval torture tactics. I bet they got sex crimes that would make your guts explode. Did she ever prosecute a terrorist? Man, those beasts would have a party with Alexandra Cooper.”
“What is it with you?” Scully asked the captain.
“He’s a dick, boss,” I said. “Always was, always will be.”
“Chapman shouldn’t be in the room,” Abruzzi said. “He doesn’t belong on this task force. He’s thinking with his private parts and not his head.”
“It’s below the belt for both of you,” Peterson said. “Cut it out. Chapman’s in this until he wants off the case. Go on, Mercer.”
“We can get a pretty close guess on the time from the point Alex gets into the SUV till the phone is—what would you say?—tossed? Tossed into the park.”
“So she’s come around,” the district attorney said. “Maybe she had her phone in her hand—”
“No, no,” Mercer said. “She’d have dropped it once she went limp if she’d been holding it.”
I had been party to this kind of brainstorming session dissecting crime strategies more times than I could count. I had offered ideas about the manner of death or the disposal of bodies—ideas that would have distressed the next of kin in any given case if they’d been party to the conversation. I was sick to my stomach with Coop at the center of these hypotheticals.
“She keeps it in her pocket,” I said. “If she was wearing her trench coat, she’d have had the phone in her pocket at some point. Or sticking out of the top of her bag. Not in her hand.”
“So Alex comes around,” Mercer said. “We know that. Obviously, she had the opportunity to get the phone in her hands to write two words—words that make sense—so she was pretty alert. Maybe she was trying to say more than she got off. But she must have been caught in the act and whoever was next to her in the seat grabbed the phone and threw it away.”
“Everybody okay with that as a jumping-off point?” Scully said.
The people at the table looked at one another and murmured assent.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“What is?”
“If she’s alert enough to be trying to signal me, then she’s too smart to be sending me words that the bad guys would make sense of if they caught her. Too obvious, these words. They don’t mean what they say.”
I pushed the two pieces of paper away from me.
“Each of you,” Scully said, “needs to have someone in your respective offices start playing with bar and bed. Use the dictionary, use restaurant guides, use every letter of the alphabet.”
“Mike’s right, Commissioner,” Vickee said, pinning the papers with the two words on them to the table with her forefingers. “Alex is a puzzler. Does the Saturday Times crossword faster than Bill Clinton, and he’s supposed to do it lightning quick. These are clues to something, but you’re wasting your time if you think these six letters are literal.”
“Now we’ve got a regular Bletchley Park going on, don’t we? All these smart broads who are better than computers at figuring things out. Too bad I’ve never met one of them,” Abruzzi said. “Myself, I’m lousy at word games. And the guys in the Nineteenth squad? Could be a few of them can play bingo, but that’s as far as they go. Might save us all some effort if we bring a psychic into the conversation next. Does Ms. Cooper communicate with the spirit world, too?”
“You can lead this part of it, Mike,” the lieutenant said to me, ignoring the captain. “Get a quiet place to work and puzzle out the clue.”
“Barbed,” one of the Major Case guys said, sliding the two pieces of paper together. “Maybe she just meant barbed? Like a place with barbed wire around it.”
“That’s a big help. Narrows the search down to about a million locations citywide,” his partner piped up next. “Maybe it’s a pirate who has her. I look at these and I see blue beard.”
“What?” Peterson asked.
“Scramble the letters and I get the word beard, with an extra B. So it’s Bluebeard or Blackbeard.” The old-timer threw his hands up in exasperation. “Let me know, Chapman, when you come up with what was going on in Ms. Cooper’s personal think tank.”
“We ready to get to work?” Peterson asked Scully.
“I got some snitches who might be helpful with the Estevez angle of this. I’ll get right on it,” the Bluebeard aficionado said to the commissioner. “If you can take a little more heat, Chapman, I gotta say I never worked a case with Ms. Cooper, but I think you’re giving more credit than she’s due with this breaking-the-code crap.”
“Why’s—?”
“She always seemed like an Afghan to me—the dog, not the tribesmen. Long and lean, a fine, shiny coat of hair. Nice to walk out with, show dog and all that, but not so much brainpower as she’s cracked up to have. I’m with the captain on the bar and bed thing. I’ll buy the first few rounds if I come up wrong on this.”
“Start saving your dimes,” Mercer said. “I’ll be drinking big.”
The group began to break up as the executive officer on the desk outside came into the room and took the commissioner aside.
“Get me out of here, Detective Wallace,” I said. “You and I need a plan.”
The commissioner held up his hand and we all stood still. He finished his conversation with the XO and turned back to us.
“I’d like to have some volunteers, gentlemen,” Scully said. “The commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct just called in. One of his men who worked midnights just told him about some unusual activity he saw near the park on his way in on Wednesday.”
“A damsel in distress?” the old-timer asked. “The iPhone toss? Something real, or just make-believe?”
“Everything’s real until proven otherwise, okay? It’s nothing as dramatic as the sighting of a kidnap victim or as specific as a cell phone coming from an identified vehicle. But it’s an SUV incident worth a follow-up, so they tell us. You want this one, Mike?” the commissioner asked.
“I’ll pass.” Homicides spoiled you for working the grunt jobs and minor incidents.
“What else you got?” the lieutenant asked.
“Hal Shipley’s on his way to the pound to try to liberate his three vehicles.”
“That’s rich,” I said. “Yeah, Mercer and Jimmy and I would much rather go to Queens and do a face-off with the reverend.”
“Exactly the scene we don’t want, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “I’ll get a man on that immediately. What else?”
“What is this? You gonna transfer me to the rubber-gun squad before this operation even gets started?” I asked, eager to have a confrontation with almost anyone who crossed my path. “Take my weapon away ’cause you think I’m a danger to myself?”
“Or others,” Dr. Friedman said. “Yourself or others. That would be my standard.”
“Nobody’s taking your gun, Chapman. Just keep quiet,” the commissioner said. “The third call probably has nothing to do with this matter, but the notification just came in and we have to think of every possibility.”
“What is it?” Battaglia asked.
Keith Scully grimaced and looked away from me. “There was a jumper on the George Washington Bridge this morning. Roughly four A.M. A woman who climbed over the railing from the walkway, poised to go into the river, but thought better of it and went on her way before the cops could get to her.”
“Mary, Mother of God. I’m taking that one. We’ll go to the bridge, the Port Authority Police,” I said. “No way that was Coop.”
The GW Bridge was one of the most popular sites in the metro area for suicides. Fifty million dollars had been set aside by the legislature to build a nine-foot fence above the walkway to prevent the jumps, which averaged almost twenty a year, but construction hadn’t even started.
“There are surveillance cameras twenty-four/seven that sweep the bridge,” Scully said. “I’m told there are grainy images of the woman. Not great close-ups but should be good enough to ID.”
“What makes you so damn sure it wasn’t Alex?” Peterson said.
I was walking to the door of Scully’s office. “Because she’s terrified of heights, Loo. Because she’s so damn scared of heights I doubt you could get her to walk over the Hudson River if I tethered her to my waist, much less climb on a railing and look down.”
“So you’re not saying she wouldn’t have reached that point,” Dr. Friedman said, “because she wasn’t so depressed, are you? The woman on that bridge—who might just be Alex, if she had made the decision to end her life—has apparently reached the depths of her despair. You’re not addressing the issue of Ms. Cooper’s possible depression.”
“I’d address your front teeth with my right fist, if you were a guy.”
“Chapman!” Peterson roared at me.
“The woman is not depressed, Loo. She had nothing to be depressed about.”
“C’mon, Chapman,” Battaglia said. “She had the rug pulled out from underneath her in the courtroom and—”
“That’s happened to her before. She fights back from it every time, with the best team in the world to back her up.”
“And someone hacked into all her secrets. Who knows what the hell is going to hit Page Six, and when?”
“If I’m the biggest secret you thought she has, Mr. Battaglia, then the gossip columnists are in for a major disappointment. There’s no other personal dirt on Coop’s hard drive,” I said. “You, on the other hand, sir—you’ve been playing pin the tail on the reverend with Hal Shipley and some of your other constituents for years, rumors have it. It seems to me that it’s your secret deals that are about to unravel.”
I opened the door and motioned to Mercer and Jimmy to follow me.
“Don’t go anywhere, Chapman,” Peterson cautioned me.
“Holding tight, Loo.” Although my left leg was jiggling like I’d been bitten by a tarantula. “But I think we need to get a move on.”
Commissioner Scully told one of the Major Case guys to deal with the Central Park debrief, agreed to let Peterson intercept Shipley at the auto pound, and confirmed that I should look at the GW Bridge video to prove—or disprove—that the distraught woman was Coop.
“And, Doc,” I said, halfway through the door, reminded of the language in the campaign poster that was framed and hung behind Battaglia’s desk, “if you’re worried about anyone jumping, keep your eye on the district attorney. It’s not nice to play politics with people’s lives.”