The air was chilly and the sky still dark when Pat Reilly awoke at 5 A.M. She turned off the alarm, then sank back beneath the bedclothes, thinking she just might stay where she was and skip exercising this morning. But after a few minutes she got out of bed, ate a hurried breakfast, and went downstairs, where she straddled her streamlined racing bike. She worked such long hours at her job—she was a mutual funds trader—that if she didn’t exercise now she wouldn’t be able to do it all day.
It was still too dim to ride safely in the park, so she pedaled downtown along Fifth Avenue. But a few minutes past six, when the sun began to rise, she turned the bike, headed uptown, and entered the park.
She was moving fast when, right near the boathouse at 72nd Street, a brown car came hurtling toward her, traveling in the wrong direction on the one-way road. Who is this lunatic? she wondered, and tried to peer into the car. But the windows were tinted and she couldn’t make out the driver.
She kept a wary eye out for danger after that. You couldn’t be too cautious in the park. Not if you were a biker. Because it wasn’t just traffic you had to worry about. It was predators who accosted you for your equipment. Pedaling, she kept glancing to either side of the roadway to make certain no one was lurking in wait for her.
She was just passing Cleopatra’s Needle, behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art, when something caught her eye in the trees to her left. There was someone there. Someone sprawled on the ground. Just a bag lady asleep, she told herself, and kept on going. Then she did a double take. It wasn’t a bag lady. It was something else. She braked the bike, got off, and began walking timorously toward the spot that had captured her attention.
When she was about forty feet away from a tall elm tree, she saw clearly what she’d glimpsed from the road. It was the body of a young woman, naked except for a few clothes bunched up around her neck and waist and a jean jacket tossed across one of her arms. Her limbs were contorted, and she was lying motionless beneath an overhanging branch. Pat stopped walking. She didn’t want to get any closer. If the woman was still alive, she wouldn’t know how to help her. And if she was dead, she didn’t want to see what it was that had happened to her.
She ran to her bicycle, leaped onto it, and rode frantically back to the boathouse. There were telephones there. She’d call the police.
She tried one. It didn’t work. She tried a second. It didn’t work either. Someone had pulled out the wires. She tried a third. Broken, too.
Frustrated, Pat jumped back on her bike, raced it out of the park, and found a phone on a street corner.
It was around 6:15 A.M. She dialed 911 and reported to an operator what she’d seen. But she couldn’t describe the exact location. She’d help direct the police toward it, she promised the operator; she’d wait on the side of the road near the elm tree.
At 6:21 A.M. Sergeant Anthony Michelak and Police Officer James McCreary, whose job it was to provide security for the park’s early morning athletes, were parked in a patrol car alongside the reservoir when a voice penetrated the static of their radio. “Woman down,” the voice sputtered. “Woman down at Eighty-first and East Drive.” It was police lingo for a woman in need of assistance.
“Let’s go!” said Michelak, who was a certified emergency medical services technician. “Let’s see what’s happening.” Seconds later he and McCreary were careening along the bridle path. Then they turned onto the joggers’ road and began heading south.
Before they reached 81st Street, they passed Pat Reilly sitting along the roadway. She saw them and gestured toward the trees. McCreary, who was driving, swerved in a U-turn. As he started the turn, he noticed several people clustered at a stone wall behind the Museum. They were standing, except for one young man who was sitting down. McCreary paid no attention to the spectators. He finished his turn and parked the car.
Michelak jumped out. In the distance he could make out a figure lying under a tree. He hurried toward it, determined to provide the required assistance. But when he reached the figure, he hesitated, wondering if the woman could be assisted. Her neck was covered with a welter of garish red bruises and she appeared to have been strangled. Maybe she wasn’t dead. Maybe some shred of life still lingered within her. Deciding to check, he reached to take her pulse. But although he’d been trained to take it at the carotid artery, he knew better than to touch the woman’s bruised neck. Instead, he placed his hand beneath her heart. It was completely still.
Michelak went to the car and told his supervisors that this wasn’t an assistance site. It was a crime scene. He asked for detectives and an ambulance. By then more spectators had gathered. He opened the car’s trunk, took out a long sheet of brown wrapping paper, and gave the dead woman some semblance of privacy from the rubberneckers across the road.
Susan Bird, a lawyer in her forties, was one of the rubberneckers. She’d been running near the Museum with a friend when she’d heard sirens and noticed the police car pull over onto the grass. She stopped moving in order to take in the activity across the way. A young man was also watching, sitting on a low stone wall and staring intently at the police. “What’s going on?” Susan asked him.
“I don’t know,” he said. “It looks like they found something.” Susan thought him odd. His face had strange vertical scratches on it, and he seemed almost indifferent to her presence. “Like what?” she said, forcing herself on his consciousness. “What could it be?”
“I think they found a body,” he murmured.
A body? Susan’s mind immediately filled in a scenario. A runner had died. Had a stroke. That’s what happens when you get to be forty and exercise too vigorously. You fall down in the park and die, and nobody finds you till morning. “Have you gone to check?” she asked the young man worriedly. “I mean, have you done anything?”
“Well, no,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because if I did, the cops would chase me away.”
A strange thing to say, Susan thought. Police in the Midwest, where she was raised, didn’t chase away concerned citizens. Still, she didn’t go across the road to ask what had happened. The policemen over there were busy removing a length of brown paper from something lying on the ground and replacing it with a sheet. She saw a leg. Whatever had happened, it was all under control now. Susan, no longer keen to linger, walked away.
The friend she’d been running with left at the same time. As they headed out of the park, he said to Susan, “Did you see the scratches on that guy on the wall? How deep and regular they were?”
“Yeah,” Susan said. “Like he got scratched by a machine. What kind of industrial accident would you have to be in to get those kinds of scratches?”
Where’s Jennifer?
Alexandra LaGatta asked herself that when her alarm clock woke her at 6:30 A.M. But she wasn’t particularly worried about Jennifer. Jennifer probably figured I’d forget to leave the keys under the mat, she thought. So she went home. Or maybe to Robert’s. Whatever, I don’t have time to think about Jennifer now. Because the boy I left Dorrian’s with last night is in my bedroom. I’d better get him out before my father finds out. I ought to get myself out, too. Go down to the Motor Vehicles Bureau, like I was planning to do, and get my learner’s permit.
Moving quickly, Alexandra dressed, rushed the boy who had spent the night with her out of the apartment, and headed downtown for her permit.
At 7:45 A.M. Detective Mickey McEntee, wearing running clothes, sneakers, and a glittering diamond in his ear, parked his Starion Turbo in the parking lot of the police precinct in Central Park, the Two-Two. McEntee had been with the Central Park Precinct only nine months. Before that he’d been with Bronx Narcotics, where he’d worked undercover, funky dark glasses on his eyes and fake needle tracks on his arms. He made the marks each morning with red ink and a splash of a coagulant that caused skin to shrivel, and he would never forget the way his adrenaline had surged when one of the dealers with whom he was hanging out reached toward his fake scar and started fingering it. He’d reared back, put on his ugliest expression, and shouted, “Get your hands off me, man! That hurts!”
McEntee missed the action he’d had in the Bronx. Compared to those days, the park precinct was Toys “R” Us. Despite the way the public looked at it. They saw the park as some kind of terror zone. But in fact it had fewer major crimes than any precinct in the city. Which was why he didn’t like it. Yeah, he’d helped look for a guy who’d murdered a homeless man up near the Lasker Pool, and for another who’d killed a homosexual outside the Ramble, and he’d helped catch a weirdo who’d stabbed a hooker forty-three times and left her body, if you could call what he saw a body, in a garbage bag at the northernmost tip of the park. But mostly nothing happened. The guys he worked with in the detective squad almost never needed to put on their homicide suits, the two- or three-piece outfits they wore when they went out to face the public. Their homicide suits, and their homicide hats as well, got so dusty that whenever the guys did need to wear them they had to go over them first with a clothes brush.
Still, being bored wasn’t what McEntee minded most about the park precinct. What he minded most was that on the rare occasions when something did happen, the boss wouldn’t let him catch the case. Even though it had been his turn up for months. The boss gave the assignments to his partner, Joe Kennedy, because Kennedy had been around a long time and had experience. He just got to watch and do whatever Kennedy told him to do. How was he supposed to get enough experience to catch a case if they wouldn’t give you one because you didn’t have the experience? Catch 22. Catch Two-Two. The only bright side of the park precinct was that it put him in the Great Outdoors, which meant he could barbecue steak in the parking lot for dinner and run around the reservoir before starting work.
He’d have his run this morning, McEntee planned. Then after the run he’d shower and shave and get into the jeans he used for work clothes. He locked up the car and ambled into the precinct house. He was just inside the door when Kennedy saw him and shouted, “Homicide!”
“We got a homicide?” he asked incredulously. There hadn’t been one since spring.
“None of this ‘we’ stuff,” Kennedy said. “‘We’ is a French word. You got a homicide. I’m gonna let you have this one.”
Yeah, sure, McEntee thought. If the boss don’t volunteer you.
The thought of the boss brought him up short. The guy wasn’t necessarily there every day, but he’d be in today for sure. He always showed up at homicides. And here he was in his running clothes and without a shave. Racing to his locker, he got out his razor and scraped it hastily across his stubble, bloodying his face in three places before he got himself clean. Then he searched in the locker for some homicide clothes. He didn’t have a homicide suit like Kennedy and the rest of the guys had. He hadn’t gotten around to buying one yet. All he had were his Bronx Narcotics outfits. Dark pants, skinny leather ties, pastel-colored shirts, and a pearl-gray linen jacket. He slipped on black pants, a mauve shirt, and a black leather tie, then pulled the jacket over his shoulders. The outfit would just have to do. Anyway, it wasn’t so bad. It just looked more like Miami Vice than the Central Park detective squad.
Moments later the boss arrived, and he and Kennedy and their boss jumped into a car and sped to the back of the Museum.
At a few minutes before 8 A.M., John Cotter, New York Newsday’s new metropolitan editor, reported to the paper’s offices. It was his first day on the job, and when he walked in he had in mind spending the morning taking it easy, getting to know the staff and how the place operated. But even before he reached his desk, a guy at the teletype machine beckoned him over and said, “Looks like a pretty good one at Central Park.”
Cotter glanced at the release from the police department that was coming over the teletype and knew the guy who’d called it to his attention was right. Yeah, this was a good story. The dead girl was white. The death of a white girl always sells papers. By eight, he was assigning a reporter and a photographer to the story. “Let’s dance with it,” he told them.
Standing behind The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the grove of trees where the girl’s body had been found, McEntee told himself that no matter how unlikely the prospects of his catching this case were, he was going to make a try for it as soon as the right time came. That wasn’t yet. Right now Nightwatch, which handled the start of all crimes reported between midnight and 8 A.M., was still in charge. Their head, Detective Sergeant Wallace Ziens, was briefing a group of the Central Park detectives. “What we got here,” Ziens was saying, “is a girl. Young. White. We also got tire tracks.” He gestured at an area where the grass was matted down and explained that the biker who had found the body had moments earlier nearly been run down by a brown car traveling against traffic. “It looks as if,” Ziens went on, “whoever this girl is, she was killed by whoever was driving the brown car and then dumped here.”
To break his tension, McEntee turned to Kennedy and ribbed him. “Naw, some of our own guys were probably sleeping here in a radio car,” he said. “Someone killed the girl. Then our guys woke up and saw the body. And they said, Jeez, it’s a crime. Let’s drive the other way fast.”
Kennedy laughed, and McEntee felt more relaxed. When the briefing was over, he talked to some of the Nightwatch detectives who’d been on the scene for an hour already, then went to have a look at the body. Detectives from the Crime Scene Unit were working on it, taking photographs and looking for evidence. Hairs. Fluids. Fingerprints. They always got first crack on a case, recording and collecting whatever traces of the killer they could find on the body, and any traces of his or the victim’s presence at the scene of the crime. It was painstaking and time-consuming work, McEntee knew, so they would take a while to finish. He and the other detectives couldn’t examine the corpse until they were done. But in the meantime he could make a few observations. Eager to get going, McEntee stood over the body, which was no longer covered, and tried to figure out what had happened to the girl.
She’d been strangled. That much was obvious. But she’d probably been assaulted, too. Her face was dirty, as if it had been pushed into the ground, her left eye was swollen, and around her nipples were gouges that looked like bite marks. Most likely she tried to resist her attacker. That’s how she got so marked up. And most likely she was raped. That’s how come her clothes were all shoved up, and her breasts and pubic area exposed.
He was touched by the girl’s body. She looked so young. And so well groomed. Somehow, cops were always affected when a dead woman looked well groomed. It made them think about their wives or girlfriends. And except for the dirt and marks on her, this girl looked unusually tidy. Her hair was lustrous, and she had a deep tan, one she’d clearly worked hard at getting. It showed the traces of the straps of several different bathing suits. One of the Nightwatch detectives McEntee had talked to had said the girl was probably a hooker, but McEntee didn’t think so now that he’d seen her.
Anyway, it probably wasn’t the girl’s identity that he’d have to worry about if he caught the case. That would get straightened out when the Crime Scene Unit finished its work and let the rest of the guys search her pockets. There was a jean jacket draped over her arm. Probably there’d be ID in there. The killer was another story. Who could he be? Looking at his handiwork, McEntee figured he already knew a bit about him. The guy was a callous sonofabitch. He had to be. Otherwise he’d have covered the girl up when he was done with her. And he was cruel. He had to be in order to strangle her. Take me, McEntee said to himself. I could shoot someone, but if I had to go hand to hand and choke a person to death, I’m not sure I could do it. To choke someone, you had to stand right up close to them and actually squeeze out your victim’s life.
The clues he was getting made him feel better, even though he knew they weren’t much. But he went on regarding the body, hoping he’d find more. And then something odd struck him. The girl had a pierced ear, but no earring. That in itself wasn’t strange. He didn’t wear his earring all the time. But when he didn’t wear it for a while, the tiny hole in his lobe seemed to tighten up and grow almost imperceptible, whereas when he wore the earring and then removed it, the hole looked slightly stretched for quite a while afterward. The hole in the girl’s lobe had that stretched look he’d seen in his own. “Hey!” he shouted suddenly to the Crime Scene Unit detectives. “You guys remove an earring?”
They hadn’t.
After that McEntee decided to search for earrings. He didn’t know why he decided that. Maybe it was because when he turned away from the Crime Scene guys, he noticed a group of news photographers stampeding onto the roadway and said to himself that the last thing the Police Department wants to have are camera crews photographing guys standing around with their hands in their pockets. Whatever the reason, he said to Joe Kennedy, “Hey, she was wearing earrings. I’m sure of it. Let’s look for them.” Kennedy agreed, and the two of them began shuffling around the elm tree, peering into the thick layer of twigs and leaves that covered the ground like a rug.
They saw nothing, so they kept on looking, moving their search to other trees in the area. They were checking beneath a crab-apple tree about forty-five feet north of the body when they saw something white on the ground. A dirty handkerchief, McEntee thought, and bent toward it. But it wasn’t a handkerchief. It was a pair of soiled panties. He studied the area. A few feet away from the panties, the ground looked peculiar. The twigs and leaves covering it had been scattered, leaving bits of earth visible. Maybe the girl struggled with her killer here, McEntee said to himself, maybe she tussled with him under the crab-apple tree and then ran away, only to be caught and killed under the elm. Or maybe she was even killed here and then dragged to the elm. “C’mere,” he called to the guys from Crime Scene. “Take a picture of this! Looks like there was a struggle here.”
They refused to come over. “Naw, this was a dump job,” one of them called back. “The girl was dumped from the car that made the tracks.”
“Her panties are here,” McEntee said. Behind him, cameramen were being kept back by park police and reporters were craning their necks. “How’d her panties get over here if she was dumped where the tracks are?”
“Those aren’t her panties, that’s how.”
“Whaddya mean?”
“We looked at them. Too soiled. Those panties have probably been here for days. Anyway, we already got panties. A blue pair. From over near the tire tracks.”
Two pair of panties so close to the scene? The park was really something! No matter. The panties he’d found were the right ones, McEntee was sure. What did the Crime Scene Unit know? They were a bunch of old hairbags. A bunch of guys who’d been on the job so long, they’d forgotten how to think. The girl had to have been over here, under the crab-apple tree. Not far from the panties were other signs. A lipstick case and a little black hairbow. “This wasn’t no dump job,” he grumbled to Kennedy, and Kennedy agreed.
A few minutes later they discussed their theory with some Night-watch detectives. A couple of them agreed; they, too, had noticed the lipstick, the bow, and the ground disturbance. One of them had even gotten the Crime Scene Unit to dust the lipstick case and the bow for fingerprints. But when none had been found, Crime Scene had refused to collect the items. Still, the Nightwatch detective continued, there were now two factions in Nightwatch, a bunch of guys who believed the body had been dumped dead from the car and another who were seriously considering the idea that dumping wasn’t involved, that the victim had reached the park alive and struggled with someone under the crab-apple tree.
McEntee was glad to hear about the factions. He felt certain the girl had run, or been dragged, from the crab-apple tree, and he felt absolutely certain the white panties, not the blue ones, were hers. Being something of a dude himself, he knew a bit about how people put their outfits together. The skirt that was pulled up around the girl’s waist was pink and white and made of a knit fabric. She’d never have worn dark blue panties under it. They’d have shown through. If Crime Scene won’t collect the panties, he decided, I’ll just have to do it myself. He bent down and, not wanting to touch them, lifted them up with the eraser end of a pencil. Then he shoved them into an envelope and put it into his pocket.
By then, the Crime Scene Unit had finished processing the body. It was time to find out who she was. A couple of Nightwatch detectives lifted up the jean jacket draped across the arm and started looking through the pockets. They found a Pierre Cardin wallet with no money except, oddly, half of a dollar bill. But there were free passes to stylish clubs, a check stub from Fluties, and several pieces of identification. One listed the girl’s name and address. She was Jennifer Dawn Levin and she lived in SoHo.
Once the information was recorded, the contents of the wallet were passed around. McEntee stared at a learner’s permit and a miniature diploma. Both permit and diploma had birthdates on them, but they weren’t the same. The learner’s permit said 1968, which would have made the girl eighteen. The diploma said 1964, which would have made her twenty-two. The diploma was a phony, McEntee thought, made so she could buy drinks. Then he noticed the day of her birth, May 21. “Unbelievable! Whata coincidence,” he said to Kennedy. “Same as my wife’s.”
“You sure it’s not your wife?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Oh, yeah? Where was your wife last night?”
Joking about dead people was SOP. McEntee laughed. But he was only listening to Kennedy with half his mind. He was thinking that Nightwatch would be leaving any minute, and Ziens would be turning the case over to the Central Park Precinct. He had to keep his wits about him for that. Had to be ready to reach out for the case the moment Ziens passed it.
Seconds later, it was time. Ziens called his men over, instructed them to return to headquarters, and told a couple of detectives from the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, a special detective unit assigned to help local precinct detectives do their work, to notify the girl’s family. Nightwatch was pulling out, he said. Then he looked over at McEntee’s boss and shouted, “Whose is this?”
“Mine,” McEntee yelled. Kennedy looked surprised, but he didn’t say anything. Neither did the boss.
“Spell your name,” Ziens said.
McEntee called the letters out loudly. And then he was smiling. His first homicide! The thing had gone down like baseball. Finally it was his turn up.
Carrying a bag stuffed with rubber gloves, aprons, specimen bottles, death certificates, and an automatic camera, Maria Alandy arrived in the park a little before ten o’clock. She had been with the medical examiner’s office for just two months, but was already well versed in the science of determining the causes of unexpected death. After leaving the Philippines, where she had attended medical school, she’d taken a residency in pathology at New York’s Metropolitan Hospital, and while there she had studied forensic pathology at the ME’s office. When her residency was over in June, the office had given her a fellowship to work downtown with them.
Virtually every day since her fellowship had begun, she’d had autopsies to conduct or crime scenes to visit, even though summer wasn’t the ME office’s busy season. That was around Christmastime, when there was a rash of traffic accidents and suicides. Or in the spring, when the ice melted and floaters turned up in the rivers. There were lots of floaters. The Hudson alone washed up about a hundred or so bodies every year. It was New York’s Ganges, the watery resting place of numerous dead, many of them victims of stabbings, shootings, and strangulations that had taken place elsewhere. Central Park was like the rivers in that respect, a place where the dead weren’t actually killed so much as deposited afterward.
The dead girl in the park was Dr. Alandy’s first body of the day. After introducing herself to the police officers at the scene, she got out her camera and took photographs. Then she examined the body, making notes as she did so. The skin was cool. She saw abrasions on the chin and neck, the cheeks, forehead, nose, and right upper thigh. She saw a contusion above the left eye. She lifted the eyelids and saw pinpoint hemorrhages in their linings. The tiny hemorrhages, she knew, indicated that the neck had been compressed, causing an interruption in the blood flow to the brain. Strangulation, she wrote. Then she went on to the next body. She had lots of them on her assignment sheet today.
Steve Levin was in his office on Lafayette Street, a spacious suite of rooms with an unobstructed, panoramic view of lower Manhattan, when two detectives entered the reception area and asked an assistant, “Can we speak with the boss?” He came out and invited them into the conference room.
“Better sit down,” they told him.
He did. Then slow and deliberate, one of them said, “Do you have a daughter named Jennifer?”
“What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Steve asked.
“She may be hurt.”
Hurt? “Where is she?” Steve demanded.
The second detective drew a breath and said, “Jennifer may not be with us any longer.”
The detectives showed Steve Polaroid pictures of Jennifer taken in the park. He was stunned when he saw her face staring out at him from the shiny prints. He’d spoken to her less than twenty-four hours ago, told her he loved her, and that he’d see her tonight. For a moment he couldn’t believe that the pictures were really of Jennifer. Then his face crumpled. Beneath his tan, he went deathly pale.
A few minutes later the detectives led him, a man grown suddenly old, out of his office and over to the loft on Mercer Street. If he’d be so kind, they told him, they’d like to look through Jennifer’s room on the chance her possessions might provide some leads to her killer.
At about 10 A.M., Alexandra LaGatta, returning home from getting her learner’s permit at the Motor Vehicles Bureau, stooped in front of her doormat and checked beneath it. The key she’d left for Jennifer was still there. Hey, wait a minute, where is Jen? she thought. Inside her apartment, she dialed Jennifer’s number.
Mr. Levin answered, and at once Alexandra sensed something was wrong. Jennifer’s phone number was different from her family’s, and her phone was in her bedroom. What was her father doing on the line? But even as she was thinking that it was strange, Mr. Levin started firing questions at her. “What happened to Jennifer?” he said. “When did you see her last?” He sounded distraught.
“Last night,” Alexandra said. She wanted to ask Mr. Levin why he was so upset, but before she could do so, a detective got on the phone. “We’d like to come up and ask you a few questions,” he announced.
He didn’t say why, but she told him all right. Then, What’s going on? she wondered. What’s happened to Jennifer? Did she get busted for being drunk?
A few moments later she decided to see if Betsy Shankin had any idea of what was happening. She called her, awakening her out of a deep sleep. When Betsy said she didn’t know anything, Alexandra said, “I’ve got to get hold of Jennifer. Where can I find her? Who was she with last night?”
“She was with Robert,” Betsy, still drowsy, murmured.
“Thanks.”
She’d call Robert, Alexandra decided next. But she didn’t know his number. Was it in Jennifer’s diary? Jennifer had left the little black spiral book in her bedroom last night, and now Alexandra got it out, leafed through the pages, found Robert’s number, and dialed.
A woman answered. She said she was Robert’s mother and that Robert was taking a shower.
“Ask him to please call me back,” Alexandra said.
A few minutes later he did. “Is Jen there?” she asked him.
“No.”
“Do you know where she is?”
“No.”
“Well, I’ve got to find her. Her father is worried about her. He’s really upset. And there are detectives coming up here.”
Robert was no help. “I was with her at Dorrian’s,” he said. “But she left me to go see Brock.” Then he said, “She’s with Brock.”
Alexandra felt relieved. “Thanks,” she said and hung up. But right afterward it dawned on her that Brock was still out on Long Island. There was no way Jen could be with him.
She was getting worried all over again when the doorbell rang and the detectives arrived. They’d made it uptown from SoHo in just fifteen minutes or so.
She told them what she knew. She said she’d been with Jennifer at Dorrian’s, but that she’d left before her. She said she’d called Robert, who’d reported that Jen might be with Brock. And she gave them Jennifer’s diary so that they could get the phone numbers of her friends.
But although she helped the police all she could, they wouldn’t tell her anything. Not even why they were asking questions about Jen. “Please tell me,” she begged. “Please tell me what’s happened to Jen.”
“Her father has to be the one to tell you,” one of the detectives said. “And by the way, don’t call any more of her friends. We’ll call them. We want to judge their reactions.”
Then they were gone.
Alone, Alexandra grew increasingly worried. Maybe Jen got hit by a car, she thought. Or raped. Whatever, it was something awful. Picking up the phone, she called Betsy again, just to tell her what she was thinking. “Something really horrible has happened to Jen,” she said when she got her.
Betsy, who wasn’t alarmed, told her she was going to go shopping. But Alexandra went on worrying. And after a while she dialed her father at his office, told him about the detectives, and said that something must have happened to Jennifer but she didn’t know what.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” her father said.
Ten minutes later he called her back. “A girl was killed in the park,” he said. He gave her a description of the girl—and then she knew what had happened to Jennifer.
Her father came home right afterward, but she didn’t want to talk to him. She wanted to talk to her friends. To the people who had loved Jennifer the way she had, the people whom Jennifer had always made smile and laugh and feel happy. But she couldn’t talk to them. The police had warned her not to. She went into her room and just sat there.
She stayed in the room for hours, not speaking to anyone and not doing anything, and the whole time she stayed there she kept thinking that if only she hadn’t left Dorrian’s early, if only she’d waited till Jennifer was ready to leave, the whole thing wouldn’t have happened. Jennifer would have come home with her.
Marilei, arriving at the Chamberses’ to have lunch with Phyllis, said hello to Robert, and noticed that his face was scratched.
“What happened to Hrobert?” she asked Phyllis.
“The cat scratched him,” Phyllis said. “He was playing with it last night, and it dug its claws into him.”
“Poor Hrobert. He could get an infection.”
“He’ll be all right. I put peroxide on the scratches.”
In a few minutes, she and Phyllis strolled over to a coffee shop for hamburgers. Phyllis was chatty. “Robert’s decided to go to Columbia in the fall,” she said.
“To university?” Marilei’s thin face broke into a wide smile. “Just you wait and see. He’ll make good yet.”
“Umm,” Phyllis murmured and nodded cheerfully.
“Detectives,” a gruff voice coming over the house phone shattered Phyllis’s daydreams right after she and Marilei returned from lunch. “Is Robert Chambers at home?”
“Which Robert Chambers?” she said.
“Robert Chambers Senior,” she thought she heard. Robert Chambers Senior? He hadn’t lived at the apartment for years. Still, she buzzed the detectives in.
A few seconds later they were stepping off the elevator. And then she realized it wasn’t Robert Senior they were asking about but Robert Junior. “We’d like to talk with him privately,” they said.
She didn’t go to get him immediately. She stood stock-still. And then she demanded to know what business they had with Robert.
“We’re investigating a missing girl,” one of the detectives, Al Genova, said evenly. He didn’t say “dead.” When you said dead, people got hysterical. “We believe she was an acquaintance of Robert’s and that he may have been with her and some other people last night.”
Phyllis said she’d fetch her son and showed Genova and his partner into her living room. The two men parked their haunches on a soft couch and waited for the man they’d come to see to appear.
A few minutes later, he did. But he wasn’t a man. Not really. He was a teenager. A hulking one. About six feet four and two hundred pounds. He had on sneakers, sweat pants, and a T-shirt. And his face was emblazoned with scratches.
Genova, seventeen years with the Police Department, didn’t blink an eye. “We’re investigating a girl who is missing,” he said, repeating the words he’d used with the youth’s mother. “Her name is Jennifer Levin. Do you know her?”
“Yes, I know her,” Chambers said.
“We’re trying to identify as many people as possible who were with her last night,” Genova went on. “So we can find out what her movements were.” Then he asked Chambers if he’d mind coming with him to the precinct house to help investigate Jennifer’s disappearance.
Chambers said he’d come.
“Do you have the phone numbers of any of her friends?” Genova asked.
“Yes, in my phone book,” Chambers said. “I’ll go get it.”
In his room, Robert got out his black spiral phone book with the numbers of his and Jennifer’s friends. He knew now that what had happened between him and Jennifer was real. He hadn’t when he’d first awakened. Nothing had hurt him. Not the scratches Jennifer had given him, not his fingers, where she’d bitten him, not his right hand, which was beginning to ache him now. No wonder everything that had happened in the park had seemed like a dream. But he was sure now that it wasn’t a dream.
He didn’t hurry out to where the police were waiting. Instead he dialed Jo Perry, as if he were thinking that if only he’d been nicer to her none of what was happening now would have come to pass.
“It’s been a bad day,” he said when he got her on the phone. “And it’s going to get a lot worse.”
“You want to get together?”
“Yeah. Wait for me at your apartment. I’ll be there in a couple of hours.”
When he hung up, he reached for a silver rosary he kept hanging in his room and fingered the beads. Just then Marilei barged in. “What’s happening?” she said. “Why are the police here?”
“A girl I know is missing,” he said.
“Oh,” Marilei said. “Oh, that’s sad.” Her eyes went to the rosary, which was delicate and small, a woman’s rosary.
“Take it.” Robert was extending his hand. “I want you to have it.”
“Oh, no. No. I couldn’t. It’s too beautiful.” But he wanted her to have it. He thrust it at her, picked up his phone book, and started out the door.
“Where are you going?” Marilei asked.
“With the police,” he said. “I’m going to help them try to find the missing girl.”