“Start with the girl,” I said.
I was on my feet. Peterson had turned the questioning over to me while he lit up another cigarette, leaning against the edge of one of the vaulted arches open to the river.
“She was the least of it, man,” Stern said. “She never opened her mouth.”
The officer was regretting the collar for larceny that he had missed. I was hell-bent on finding Coop.
“What did she look like?”
He twisted his mouth to the side. “Caucasian,” he said. “They were all white guys. I’d say she was my age. Early thirties. Light-colored hair. That’s all I could see.”
“Did you ever make an arrest for a sex crime?” I asked. “Take a perp down to the DA’s office?”
“Lots of felonies, but never rape.”
“Ever meet an assistant district attorney named Alex Cooper?”
Officer Stern shook his head in the negative.
“Were you talking to the men in the car? Is that what you said?”
“Yeah. The one in the passenger seat got out to help his buddy when I walked back to my bike to call the sergeant. By hindsight, he may have been getting ready to take me out if I’d come back with bad news,” Stern said. “I told him to get in the car.”
“Did you get his ID?”
“No reason to, Detective.”
“I guess.” I was short on understanding and long on Monday morning quarterbacking.
“When he opened the car door to get in, that’s when the lights went on and I could see another guy in the backseat.”
“Awake or asleep like the girl?” I asked.
“Totally awake. He asked me how long they’d be held up.”
“Anything distinctive about the men? About their looks? Scars, marks, tats—anything at all?”
“Not that I can think of. The driver and his pal, they both had real dark hair,” Stern said to me. “Kind of black, like yours. The guy in the backseat was sort of red. He may have had a slight brogue, too.”
“May have? Or did he?”
“He said all of one sentence to me, Detective. Maybe he did.”
Irish? I’m sure in Coop’s rows of file cabinets there were mutts she’d prosecuted who were as Irish as me and my ancestors, but I couldn’t pull any up in the moment.
“Anything else about her? About any of them?”
“Yeah,” Stern said. “She smelled something awful.”
“Smelled?”
“Too much perfume, I figure. Just when the door was opened I got a touch of it. Sickly sweet.”
Mercer and I exchanged glances.
Peterson had let the cigarette burn down to his lips. He heard Stern’s comment and walked over to continue giving us the details.
Harold Harrison was an investment banker from Connecticut, in the city drinking with friends to celebrate his recent divorce. They were in a crowded sports bar in the East Eighties, sometime after nine P.M. on Wednesday, and he didn’t know that his pocket had been picked until he went to pay the tab. His friends covered the bill, but when Harrison went outside to see whether he’d left his wallet in his car, the vehicle was still parked there but the license plates were gone.
“Professionals,” Mercer said. “Total pros. They undoubtedly scouted their mark—or they had a couple of potential marks—going into the bar, already a bit tipsy. One of them stayed with Harrison’s car. The minute his wallet was pinched, off with the plates.”
“Maybe it took longer than they thought,” Peterson said. “So they scoop Alex up, then pull over to put the clean plates on in case they’re stopped, in case one of her friends had happened to follow and got a partial.”
“Damn it,” I said, turning to the unhappy young police officer. “Didn’t you get the VIN off the SUV?”
“What for? The plates, the license—they checked out clean.”
“We’d know who owns the car, now, wouldn’t we?”
“Lay off him, Chapman,” Peterson said, thanking Stern for his follow-up and asking him to wait on a bench outside the café till he was cleared to go. “There’s another piece of the puzzle to give you.”
He walked out the other side of the café—toward the paths to the east, which led into Riverside Park or up the enormous winding staircases to the asphalt roadway—and returned with a middle-aged cop in uniform.
“Hey,” he said, taking his hand off his frayed belt and extending it to Mercer first. “Seen you around. I’m Jaworski.”
“Mercer Wallace. And this here is Mike Chapman.”
“Jaworski does steady midnights in the two-four,” Peterson says. “He was working Thursday morning.”
“Tell me,” I said.
The Twenty-Fourth Precinct included the boat basin, a lot of Riverside Park, and the Upper West Side.
“I didn’t think much of it until my boss called me about the blast from the commissioner’s office this morning, with the alert about a missing woman in a black SUV,” Jaworski said. “My partner and I were patrolling in an RMP early Thursday morning, not that we ever saw a woman in the vehicle.”
“What vehicle?” Radio motor patrol cars were the familiar blue-and-whites of the NYPD. What the hell did he think was so important if he never had his eyes on Coop?
“It was just coming up on two A.M.,” Jaworski said. “We’ve got Sector Charlie, which includes the marina, so we usually swing by a few times during the night. There’s not very much action on the water this time of year, but we always check it out in case someone goes all Natalie Wood on us. The sergeant had us patrolling the park extra heavy this week because of the big arrest Wednesday morning. You know about that?”
“Yeah,” Mercer said. “Raymond Tanner.”
“Okay. So it’s one of those make-the-public-feel-safe programs,” Jaworski said, resting both hands on his paunch, which hung out over the belt. “Lots of visibility and police presence. Step up the patrols.”
“Got it.”
“My partner was the driver. We just finished checking out the park. Decided to take the underpass and come out on the roundabout up above here,” he said, pointing up and circling his arm to indicate the road overhead. “I spotted an SUV, a black one, pulled over out of the traffic flow, like at the very top of the staircase down to the marina. The driver was on his knees behind the car, so I thought maybe he had a flat or something.”
“You stopped,” I said.
“Sure. Got out and walked over to him. He was working in the dark, so I beamed my flashlight at him to give him a hand.”
“Was it the tire?”
“Nope. He had a screwdriver,” Jaworski said. “Told me one of the bolts had come out of his rear plate and it was flapping like crazy when he drove.”
“Connecticut plates,” I said matter-of-factly.
“No. New Jersey, actually. I gave your lieutenant the plate number.”
“Did you call it in?”
“What for?” Jaworski said. “The tag on the front of the car was fastened on tight. The man’s story made sense. He didn’t do nothing.”
“And in the car?”
“Nobody there. I shined my light in before I left, when he got back in the driver’s seat. Then he thanked me and took off.”
“You know who Alex Cooper is?” I leaned in and asked.
“Should I?”
“She’s a prosecutor. DA’s office. You ever take a sexual assault arrest down to Centre Street?”
“I don’t do arrests,” Jaworski said, smiling at me. “The city don’t pay me enough.”
There were plenty of guys in the department who thought like he did, especially as the time to collect a pension grew closer. They didn’t want to mess up their steady tours, risk injury, deal with erratic court appearance dates, and be required to testify under oath to anything.
“Why are you here?” I asked, throwing up my hands in Peterson’s direction.
“My sergeant called me at home this morning, after that message from the commissioner was sent out. I guess ’cause we’re not that far from the transverse crossing, and me and my partner saw this SUV with a guy screwing on a plate in the middle of the night.”
“It gets better,” Peterson said.
“Yeah, he brought me in for a day tour. Overtime,” Jaworski said. “The guys in the squad ran the Jersey plate this morning, just ’cause it’s a black SUV in the general location from late Wednesday night, Thursday morning.”
“They were stolen,” I said. “Right? Like it’s a big surprise at this point, Loo, right?”
“MD plates,” Peterson said. “Taken from a doc’s car while he was supposedly paying a house call to a lady friend on West 80th Street, sometime after he parked at midnight and before Jaworski spotted them at two A.M. Pretty bold to lift them—two separate times and places—from a city street.”
“Mercer’s right. We’re clearly dealing with professionals. Three of them, at least.” I was trying to think like the bad guys. “Two sets of plates if not more. Fresh. A well-conceived plan to keep the common-looking black SUV moving to their destination, maybe stopping to kidnap someone along the way. Even if the license number is captured on a traffic video or made by a cop on the beat, we’d never be able to prove after the fact that it was the same car.”
“Exactly,” Peterson said.
“You start checking all the TWOCed tags?” Plates that were taken without the owner’s consent were TWOCed.
“Of course.”
“Any ideas to find the SUV? Anything about it that was distinctive?”
“We’ve got the car, Chapman,” the lieutenant said. “Abandoned sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Right outside a chop shop in Queens.”
“VIN?”
“Completely disfigured. It will take a day or two to run all the possible configurations of the digits to see if we can pull up an owner.”
“Prints? DNA? There must be some way to tell if Coop was in that car,” I said, sailing my empty coffee cup across the room, missing the garbage pail by several feet. “How about that sickly sweet odor? Maybe there’s still a rag on the floor of the car?”
“There’s a familiar odor all right,” Peterson said. “That car’s been wiped so clean you could perform heart surgery on the backseat with no risk of infection. The whole thing reeks of Clorox.”