“Are you following me because you don’t trust me or because you want to talk?”
“What do you think, dude?” Mercer said.
“You like it, these two sightings?”
“It’s all we’ve got. Work with these facts till something better comes along.”
I was already racing ahead of the facts. Bad images of this trio and their captive were forming in my mind’s eye like clouds colliding in a thunderstorm.
“Sadiq puts Coop on East 65th Street between Second and Third, getting into an SUV, behind the driver, no ruckus. I’m figuring that’s at something like ten fifteen, ten thirty,” I said, shading my eyes from the bright sunlight to look at Mercer. “Officer Stern gets off his bike on East 73rd Street, maybe forty-five minutes later.”
“How about all the time in between?” Mercer asked.
“Maybe they were driving around, looking for a quiet side street to make the switch. Think how smart it is, really. There are surveillance cameras on all the main avenues and intersections that are capable of capturing plate numbers twenty-four/seven to give speeding tickets and violations. So these guys are savvy enough to think of plate changes. Maybe just pause for a while out of sight—make sure their captive is subdued—and that way there’s no straight line of travel if we set out to examine the video footage.”
“Glad you can think like the bad guys, Mike,” Mercer said. “So figure they’ve killed an hour doing like you just hypothesized. Now they pull over. One of them is putting new tags on the car—that would throw off the scent of anyone who saw the abduction and reported the old license numbers.”
“Script matches Coop’s disappearance so far as it goes.”
“But she’s still out cold,” Mercer said.
“You can keep reapplying something like chloroform anytime your vic comes around, long as it doesn’t kill her by causing cardiac arrhythmia.”
“So after Officer Stern heads off to work, maybe Alex comes around.”
“Maybe.”
“At some point,” Mercer said, as we walked away from the massive granite rotunda and turned south, out toward the main dock of the marina, “she hears the three talking about where they’re taking her. That’s when she slips the phone out of her pocket and tries to text you.”
Bar, I thought. The words Bar and Bed.
“The car goes from 73rd Street off Lex to 85th Street, to the transverse that cuts through to the West Side,” he went on. “We know that because Alex’s phone was thrown into Central Park and landed there. She’d composed a text to you by then—”
“Or part of one,” I said. The two words simply made no sense.
“The perps toss the phone and keep on going. Driving west.”
“And TARU owes us a time for the toss, but it’s got to be between eleven twenty and twelve fifteen.”
“That puts the group on the West Side, in time to steal another set of license plates.”
“And by two A.M.,” I said, “the only one left in the SUV is the driver.”
Lieutenant Peterson hadn’t wanted officers Stern and Jaworski talking to each other, comparing notes and observations, until he had gotten all the information from each of them. Now he would be trying to confirm that the man each described as the driver was the same individual.
“So why the 79th Street Boat Basin exit?” Mercer asked.
I turned around to look back at the West Side Highway. “It’s a pretty central point of contact,” I said. “You can go either south or north on the highway from right here. South shoots you straight down to the Battery, so you’re on the way to Queens or Brooklyn in a flash. Even Staten Island. You pass the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel entrances to get to New Jersey.”
“Wrap under the overpass to go north,” Mercer said. “Gives you the George Washington Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway north to the Saw Mill, to Westchester and Connecticut.”
“So the vic could have been transferred to another car right there. Another make, another model, another color vehicle, to further complicate things for us,” I said, pointing up at the asphalt roundabout where Jaworski had witnessed the second plate change. “She could be in Georgia by now. And we’ve got an entire department looking for her in a black SUV that’s already been trashed. She could be in North Dakota or Arizona or—or in a landfill on Staten Island.”
“Now, that’s fucked-up, Mike,” Mercer said, gripping my arm at the elbow. “Hold yourself together, man.”
I swiveled around again, breaking loose and heading for the end of the dock.
“Why here?” I said out loud, rolling the two texted words over and over again. “Why are we standing right here, at the boat basin?”
The gray-green water was calm now. Two men were loading live eels into a pail on their Boston Whaler to serve as bait, heading out for an afternoon on the river.
There seemed to be an unusual amount of activity on the Hudson, maybe because of the warm, sunny day. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, because I had been overcome by inertia and the futility of my efforts to find Coop.
Bar and bed were simply two common syllables, and I was pushing them to give me a meaning they didn’t have.
The Circle Line tour boat was full of passengers taking in the scenic shoreline. Water taxis crisscrossed from New Jersey towns to lower Manhattan, optimistic fishermen were motoring south to Sandy Hook to look for the ever-elusive October stripers, and athletic young men and women were paddling kayaks and canoes against the current.
I walked to the farthest point on the dock, enjoying the breeze that came up from the water.
The quiet—the distance from all the chatter that had surrounded me since before dawn—was also a relief.
Mercer gave me some time alone. He leaned against one of the wooden piers and let me try to clear my head.
I did a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree revolution, fixing on the highway entrance to the boat basin on the land to the east above me, and once again due north to the mammoth engineering feat that was the GW Bridge. I scanned the Jersey coastline to see if it might hold a clue to Coop’s whereabouts, and then stretched out over the end of the dock to look for the colossal arm and torch of the great lady, The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World—as her creator had named her—standing tall on Liberty Island.
Why the boat basin? I asked myself. If not just a traffic stop for the perps to change cars and move their passenger, then there had to be a boat involved. And if a boat was involved, then where was it headed?
I squatted on the broken boards and drew imaginary letters with my finger. What had Coop heard the men in the car say to make her write Bar and Bed?
I looked up again and scanned the Hudson River one more time, as though searching out its source in the little town of Lake Tear in the Cloud and sailing away past its mouth at the head of Upper New York Bay.
What I needed now was an epiphany, a lightning strike to my brain that would make things as clear to me as Coop thought she had done.
I played with proper names like Barton and Barstow and Barbara. I thought of crazy things like bedlam and bedbugs and bargains. I conjured objects that would be on this river, like barges and barrels and bedrock.
I must have spent ten or fifteen minutes fighting with the alphabet, pacing the dock and then squatting down to focus myself.
Coop had meant to send these words to me because she trusted that I would be able to make sense of them. But I was trying to force the six letters to talk to me, and they wouldn’t comply.
I thought it through again. She must have heard the men say they were taking her to an exact location. She must have known by the time she wrote the two words, before they drove through Central Park to the West Side, that their next stop was the boat basin. And then someplace jumping off from right here, maybe someplace we had both been together.
Bar and Bed. I started over again. I babbled all the words that came to me from a mental scan of dictionary and encyclopedia Bs.
I looked upriver and downriver and tried to recover factoids about every landmark on this vast waterfront.
Slowly, I pushed up from the dock. I stretched my legs and nodded.
Bar was short for the name of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who conceived and designed the Statue of Liberty. My wordsmith had given me the help I needed with the shorthand text she never got to send. Bed must have meant Bedloe Island, where the great statue had originally been sited.
I fist-pumped the air over and over again.
“What is it, Mike?” Mercer called out to me.
“I have it, man!” I shouted back at him. “Go get Jimmy North. It’s time for a sea cruise.”