“Mr. Wallace is waiting for you upstairs,” Stephane said. “
Comment ça va,
Ms. Cooper? I haven’t seen Mr. Rouget in quite some time.”
I swallowed hard. “You know it’s his busiest time back in France.”
“Bien sur.
I hope you’re managing well without him
.
”
“Fine, thank you.”
The door opened onto the fourth-floor landing. Patroon was one of the only restaurants in the city to boast a rooftop dining area. The fresh air on this late spring night was exhilarating, and the crowd around the bar made it all so cheerful and refreshing.
Ken was sitting at a corner table with Mercer. They both stood up as we approached, and we exchanged kisses.
“You didn’t happen to TiVo
Jeopardy!
for me tonight?” Mike asked Ken.
“Give me a break, Mike.” Ken looked dapper, as always, with his custom-tailored suit, a Turnbull & Asser shirt, and horn-rimmed glasses. “I didn’t know you were coming in until after the show was over. I’ll buy you a drink instead.”
“That’s a good way to start. At least it will cover my wager. Mercer? Did you see it?”
“Yes, I did. And I lost.”
“What was the category?”
“Russian literature.”
“I’m screwed again. Make it a double, Ken.”
“The answer was something about a Russian nobleman and poet whose great-grandfather was African.”
“Who is Doctor Zhivago?” Mike said.
“And he would be a fictional character,” I said. “Like Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose, and Norman Bates.”
“You don’t know either, really?” Mike said. “Two nights running? That’s not possible.”
“Don’t humor him, Alex,” Mercer said. “He can deal with it.”
“Alexander Pushkin. Peter the Great adopted a young Ethiopian boy as a member of the royal family. I guess that was better than enslaving him. Anyway, he was the poet’s ancestor.”
Ken knew our drinks and sent over a round for the table. Mike and Mercer ordered the porterhouse for two, I asked for the grilled sole, and Mike piled on all the sides he could think of—fries, onion rings, crispy brussels sprouts, sautéed spinach, and a salad for each of us.
I sipped the Scotch and leaned my head back, knowing it was hopeless to look for the same stars I had seen over the weekend. The city sky was just a milky gray.
“You’re coming into the case,” Mike said to Mercer.
“I know. Peterson called the office this afternoon. Told me to meet you at the lab in the morning.”
Mike asked him to take the small black statuette from there up to the Columbia archaeology team to see if he could get a provenance on it.
We spent the next hour telling Mercer everything we’d learned about the Park and how unsettling it was not to be able to figure out how the body wound up in the Lake.
“And the girl? What’s her name?” Mercer asked.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“I understand that. I meant Mike’s name for her.”
Mike always gave his victims a name. It was another way for him to humanize them, even when we didn’t know their identities. Sometimes he’d gotten heat for his bad taste, like the time a hooker was found in a cardboard shipping container on the sidewalk in Hell’s Kitchen. Foxy—his sobriquet for the fox in the box—found its way into the
Post
coverage of the case. He’d become gentler in the years since that embarrassment.
“There’s only one thing to call her,” Mike said. “Till someone puts a name to that sorry face, she’s Angel.”
“Is anyone in there with him?” I asked Rose on my way into Battaglia’s office.
“No, he’s alone.”
I had spent the first two hours of the morning returning yesterday’s calls and setting up a case file for all the reports from the squads and foot soldiers taking note of everything that happened in the Park. Then Battaglia arrived at 10:30 and called for me.
“If I scream for you, Rose, come bail me out.”
She continued filing the DA’s massive amount of incoming mail rather than make eye contact with me.
“Good morning, Paul.”
“Morning,” he said, turning away from the computer screen where he’d been checking the stock market’s opening activity. “How long are we going to drag this thing out?”
He reached for a match and lit the cigar that was clenched between his teeth.
“I’d like to think until we solved it, but I imagine the department will give it one week of going through the Park with a fine-tooth comb and then back off.”
“It’s one thing to put all this manpower into a case if it looks like we can make it. It’s quite another to have you all out there spinning wheels and getting nowhere.”
“I wish I could agree with you.”
“What?” He cupped his good ear and turned it to me. “Now, what’s all this crap going on with you and Chapman? Jessica Pell called me at home on Sunday.”
“She’s crazy.”
“She’s not so crazy that she doesn’t know what’s going on before I do. You swore to me a couple of years ago that you and Mike were just buddies. I wouldn’t have let you work cases with him if I thought you two had crossed that line.”
“I told you the truth then and it’s still the truth today. Even though it’s none of your business.”
“That time I heard you, Alexandra,” Battaglia said, removing the cigar from his mouth to articulate more clearly. “Everything that happens in this courthouse is my business.”
“But—”
“I won’t have you trying murder cases with your main witness on the stand, and some high-powered, high-priced mouthpiece cross-examining him, asking whether he held a gun to the suspect’s head because his demanding girlfriend won’t let him back in bed if he doesn’t come home with a confession.” Battaglia stabbed at his desktop with his forefinger. “Are you or aren’t you?”
“Am I what?” I was standing in front of the DA, flushed with anger and defiance.
“Are you in bed with Mike Chapman?”
“I was stupid enough to answer you once. Now you’ll have to decide for yourself whether it matters because I’m declaring that subject off-limits for discussion between us. You’ve got five hundred lawyers in this office. Are you policing all of their bedrooms, Paul? ’Cause that is one monstrous job, if you’re up to it.”
“I’m not policing anything. You’ve got the high-profile cases, Alex. You live in the glare of the lights, if you can.”
“You put me in that position years ago, Paul. I can live with that, and with whatever I choose to do.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to work.”
“Consider yourself lucky that I did this one-on-one. I left McKinney out of it. I’m not trying to hurt you, Alex. There are things I just need to know.”
“How fortunate can I be? There’s your man McKinney, who left his wife and kids for one of your least-talented lawyers—the laughingstock of the trial division, really—whom you only hired because her mother, at the time, was a major television news reporter. See what that got you, Paul? The mother lost her job because of some on-air tirade, and you’re stuck with the harebrained kid, who sits in the chief’s office all day drinking tea and mooning at him. Shall I move on to the next bedroom?”
“Don’t walk out on me,” Battaglia shouted as I headed for the door.
“I’ll be back as soon as I have case news to report. If it’s gossip you want, I’m pretty much up to speed on that, too. My sources are even more reliable than yours.”
I swept past Rose’s desk and back to my own. Laura was in my office, helping Mike unwrap the two metal miniatures of Park landmarks.
“Hey, Mike. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Mercer’s on his way to Columbia, and the lab cleaned up these little beauties for me.”
The castle and obelisk had both been given a bath. Mike handed me Cleopatra’s Needle, and I turned it upside down. Engraved on the bottom was the name of the silversmith who had designed the objects and the year in which they were made: Gorham and Frost. 1910.
“Laura, have you tried to call information?”
“The company doesn’t exist anymore, Alex. I’ve called and checked online.”
“Surely these must be part of a larger set.”
“Could be any of the structures in the Park that existed by that time,” Mike said.
“And they must be extremely rare. I can’t imagine they were lying around the Park very long or they would have been picked up. By a groundskeeper or a thief. They’re really quite beautiful.”
“I’ve called the Conservancy,” Mike said. “They’re going to check records to see whether they can connect them to any exhibits they’ve ever had. Our best bet may be the Schneider woman, when we see her tomorrow night. Gordon Davis says she’s a walking history of the Park.”
“Shall we take them up to be photographed?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour, Laura. Hold the needy at bay for me, please.”
Mike and I had enough case-related things to discuss to keep away from the personal. I didn’t tell him about Battaglia’s comments, or about my answers.
After we left the photo unit, I said good-bye to Mike at the elevators.
Back at my desk, I went through the list of parolees that Laura had assembled, but none matched the description of the man in the Ramble yesterday morning. I busied myself with the flood of anonymous tips that accompanied this kind of case, and with catching up on the cases of the other lawyers in the unit.
My posse of close friends—Nan, Catherine, Marisa—made a point of coming by at lunchtime with salads, to see if they could take any assignments over for me.
At the end of the day, having heard nothing else from Mercer or Mike, I went home and ignored the television, ordering in from my local deli. I drew a deliciously scented hot bath and relaxed for the evening.
This was the rhythm of many major cases I’d worked. Things started off with a frenetic unfolding of evidence and information and, if not solved immediately, settled into peaks and valleys of developments. I was glad to have this night alone to myself.
The first time the phone rang it was close to 10:30. I was in my den, in a bathrobe, enjoying my drink.
The incoming number was Mercer’s. I was hoping he had information about Seneca Village.
“Hey. Good to hear from you.”
“Not so good as you think, Alex.”
I sat up straight and dropped the book I’d been reading onto the floor.
“What is it?”
“An attempted rape.”
“Damn. How’s the victim?”
“She’s going to be okay. I’m with her at the hospital now.”
“Did they get the guy?”
“Not yet. And it was after dark, so she’s not sure she can make an ID.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Mercer.” He was good to call me so I could arrange for someone to handle the new matter first thing in the morning. Even though there was no arrest, someone in the unit could get started working with the victim. “It’s more than that,” Mercer said. “The attack was in Central Park.”
“What the hell—? What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“But the Park is flooded with cops.”
“Not the north end. Most of the police presence has been south of 80th Street since Friday.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Up north. At the foot of the Ravine, at about 106th Street. Just under Huddlestone Arch.”
And yesterday Gordon Davis had remarked on how spooky the arches get after dark.
“So because it’s only an attempt, I take it there’s no seminal fluid. No DNA.”
“Very little to go on, Alex. Medium-complexion black man. Average height, average weight. The only thing our vic is sure of is that the guy had a tattoo on his hand. Two words—not pictures—but she couldn’t make them out.”
Kill,
I said to myself. I didn’t want to speak the whole expression out loud. A rapist on the loose with
KILL COOP
inked into his skin.
“I’m Alexandra Cooper. I work with Mercer,” I said to the woman who was sitting in a small office near the Emergency Room at Mount Sinai Hospital. “I’m with the DA’s Office Special Victims Unit.”
By the time I was off the phone with Mercer, the police car he’d sent to pick me up was in front of my building.
“Look, I just want to go home, okay? I don’t have anything else to say.”
“I know it’s late and I know you’ve been through an ordeal, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer a few more questions for me.”
Flo Lamont was still in a hospital gown, waiting while the advocate who was part of SAVI—the hospital’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention program—brought her a clean T-shirt with which to leave the hospital. Her legs were jiggling nervously as she listened to me.
“I want to go over what happened to you one more time, in a little more detail.”
The uniformed cops had gotten all of Flo’s pedigree information. The nineteen-year-old African American woman lived with her mother in Schomburg Plaza, a high-rise complex just across 110th Street from the Park. She worked in the shipping department at Macy’s.
“You’re not gonna find this dude, you know? I don’t see why it matters.”
“Mercer’s really good at what he does,” I said. “He might surprise you.”
Flo looked up at her detective and then looked him over, up and down. “But the guy didn’t do anything to me.”
“That’s not exactly how I’d describe things,” Mercer said, although that’s the way many victims described an uncompleted attempt to commit this brutal crime. “And it’s only because you fought him off that he didn’t finish what he set out to do.”
The 61—the complaint report that the first uniformed responder scratched out—was only two sentences long: “At the T/P/O—time and place of occurrence—an unknown M/B threatened Flo Lamont with a lead pipe and attempted to have intercourse with her. Lamont resisted and attacker fled.”
Those few words were enough to send someone to state prison for fifteen years if he was apprehended. But it was the detail missing from the summary of the elements of the crime that might determine if we would ever connect this assailant to Flo’s case.
The rookies who’d encountered Flo, after a young couple looking for a secluded place to hang out heard her screams, asked her hardly any questions at all. She was sobbing and shaking, so they put her in their patrol car and made the short trip down to Madison Avenue and 100th Street, to the Sinai ER.
Those cops were required to turn the case over to Special Victims detectives, who had the expertise to do more in-depth questioning in a compassionate manner, which is part of what made them qualified for such sensitive work. Although Mercer wasn’t catching new cases because of his assignment to Angel’s homicide, his boss wanted him to go out on this one in case there was any connection between the two.
“You gonna tell my mother about this?” Flo asked, massaging her left shoulder with her right hand.
“You’re nineteen,” Mercer said. “We don’t need to tell your mother anything.”
“Them cops kept asking me why I was in the Park after dark. Like I was doing something wrong.”
“We know you weren’t doing anything wrong,” Mercer said. He pulled up a second chair and sat opposite Flo, so he could talk to her eye-to-eye. “I’m going to ask you why you were in the Park, also. But only because that’s where this crime happened. I have to know why you were there and what you were doing—just like I’d ask if this had happened in a school or in an office building. I’m not accusing you of anything.”
“The Park is like my backyard. I been going in it to play since I was a kid.”
“I grew up in Queens, right near a big park. Not as nice as this one, though nothing is. I spent half my life in that park.”
Flo picked her head up again and looked at Mercer. She was trying to use her street sense to see whether he was someone she could trust or not. I needed him to get her to lose her attitude so I could jump in and retrieve some more facts.
When the cops had asked her what she was doing in the Park at 9:30 at night, Flo’s answer to them had been “Nothing.”
“Most of the time, when I went to the park to do sports,” Mercer said, “it was daytime. When I went there at night, it was usually to meet up with friends. How about you?”
“Sometimes I go there to get away from people. Just like to be by myself.”
“Was tonight one of those nights? You wanted to be alone?”
Flo nodded her head up and down.
“I have plenty of times like that. Who were you getting away from?”
“A guy.”
“Your boyfriend?”
Flo sneered and suppressed a laugh. “Sometimes.”
“You want to tell me his name?”
“No chance. He have nothing to do with this.”
“Fair enough.”
She checked Mercer’s face again to see if he was sincere about that.
“Were you with him before you went into the Park, or were you coming from home?”
“With him. Hanging out on 110th.”
“Till he said something stupid to you, and you got mad and crossed the street.”
Flo tilted her head. “Now, how you know that?”
Mercer smiled at her. “’Cause he’s a guy. That’s what guys do half the time. Hanging out on a beautiful night with a nice girl, and we blow it. Say something, do something stupid. Am I right? Then you headed off to—I don’t know—someplace that’s special to you two. Someplace you go to be together ’cause you knew he’d follow you eventually. Try to make it right.”
Flo stopped bouncing her legs. She was completely fixed on Mercer.
“I don’t know about making it right,” she said, leaning forward to play with Mercer a bit, “but I know he’d want to get him some before he went home for the night.”
“His loss,” Mercer said. “Totally his loss. So where were you headed?”
“You know the waterfall?”
“All three of them.”
“The big one. The one closest to where I came in.”
Among the most beautiful creations in the Park were the three waterfalls in the Ravine, north of 102nd Street. They looked as natural as any country scene or wilderness preserve but were completely man-made. They were so carefully engineered more than 150 years ago that each was designed to be entirely different from the others. The rocks were set at different distances so the sound of the water cascading was unique to each site, depending on the height of the drop and the size of the boulders below.
“I know it. Is that your spot?”
“Yes,” Flo said. “Leastways it was until tonight.”
“You were just going to hang out by the waterfall?”
“There’s actually a little ledge inside it. You know, behind the fall?”
“I didn’t know that. Did you, Alex?”
Mercer would draw me in now, getting ready to turn his witness over to me.
“I had no idea.”
Flo was happy to show off her knowledge. “You just get like a little wet passing in, but then you can sit and look out. Kind of a cool thing. It’s like a little cave, almost.”
“A cave?” My interest was as piqued as Mercer’s. “You can go inside it?”
“Not really. It’s sort of a dug-out space behind the waterfall. I used to hide out there with my friends when we were kids. Me and my boyfriend—like two of us could just fit there for a while. You know, like sitting and talking is all.”
I wondered how many cave-like places there could be in this massive Park, with all the rock outcroppings and formations that had been styled to build up the ground surface.
“Did you tell the cops that you were on your way to the waterfall?”
Flo frowned at me. “They was so not interested in me once I told them I went in there alone. They didn’t need to know nothing else.”
“We want it all,” Mercer said.
There was a knock on the door, and one of the young advocates introduced herself and handed me a clean T-shirt and a pair of hospital pajama bottoms for Flo.
“Why don’t Mercer and I step out so you can get dressed? I’m sure you’ll be more comfortable out of that gown.”
“I want my own shirt. I wanna go home in my own clothes.”
“We need your clothes,” Mercer said, trying to calm the reagitated young woman. “They’re evidence.”
Mercer had showed me the three items he had collected from the RN who’d done the forensic exam. The yellow cotton halter top had been ripped off Flo by its thin strap. Her shorts were torn as well and covered in dirt, just like her underpants.
“It’s after eleven o’clock, Flo. Will your mother be waiting up for you?” Mercer asked.
“No. She don’t wait up.”
“I’ll drive you home. She won’t see you this way.”
“What do my clothes prove?”
“For one thing, the tears in the fabric show the force this man used. And the fact that you were on your back, rolling in the dirt—”
“But you ain’t never gonna find this guy, so what’s the difference what I say?” Flo stood up and started to take off the gown. The cuts and scratches on her back, from where she had rolled on the ground on stones and twigs, were deepening in color. They were more intense than the digital shots that had been taken in the ER, so we would need to get another set, showing the progression of the bruising, within the next twenty-four hours.
I followed Mercer out of the room. Within seconds Flo called out to us that it was okay to come in.
Mercer held the chair out so she would sit down again. “Alex and I have worked these cases together for a very long time. The men who do this? For the most part, Flo, they’re pretty damn stupid. They get away with it once or twice, but not for long.”
“And what really makes them extra stupid,” I said, “is that once they attack one or two women, they get really comfortable doing it the same way. They think that if it worked for them once, it will work that way every time. I know you didn’t tell those two cops much—”
“Why should I? They acted like I was some kind of whore.”
“This will be the last time they do anything like that,” I said. “I promise you.”
“So it’s the detail we want to get from you, Flo,” Mercer said. “Sometimes, just the way a guy does things, the words he uses—we can maybe tie him to another case like yours, one where a girl wasn’t as smart as you were or as brave.”
“Talked crazy is what he did. Grabbed me and threw me down. Total crazy badass guy.”
“Start from where you walked into the Park on the corner of 110 and Fifth,” Mercer said. “Were you alone?”
“I was by myself, if that’s what you mean. But there were lots of people around at nine o’clock, inside the Park and out.”
Flo walked us from the entrance to her route on the pathway that took her halfway around the Harlem Meer, the latter word being Dutch for “lake.” She told us that she hadn’t encountered anyone she knew, and that she wasn’t alone until she turned off the wide walk to head for the Ravine.
“Do you know where Huddlestone Arch is?” Mercer asked.
“Yeah. That’s where this guy was waiting for me, when I came out of Huddlestone.”
“Did you see him up ahead?”
“Nah. It’s like a little tunnel, you know. All dark inside till you come out the other end. I was looking back over my shoulder half the time.”
“For that fool who let you walk away?” Mercer said.
Flo laughed nervously. “Yeah. For him.”
“Did you hear anything?”
“Not at first. I mean, just the sound of the water kind of whooshing through.”
“Then what happened?”
“I heard him before I saw him. I heard him, like he was talking to his dog. Nothing strange about that. He was calling to his dog, like, ‘Here, Buster. Come back to me.’”
Who did I know with a dog named Buster? It sounded familiar to me, which was a minor distraction from Flo’s story.
“Then he was like blocking the end of the tunnel, asking me if I saw his dog.”
“Did you?” I asked. “Did you see the dog?”
Flo looked at me as though I was off base. “Dog? That boy didn’t have no dog.”
Both Mercer and I knew what was coming next.
“But I turned to look behind me and that’s when he grabbed me.”
“Grabbed you how?” I asked.
“Yoked me,” she said, hooking her right arm across her neck. “Yoked me and bent me over backward so my knees gave out and I fell on the ground, all the time him pulling me off the walkway in between the trees.”
“And—?”
“That’s when he started yelling crazy stuff at me. Calling me ‘bitch.’ Telling me I was gonna burn in hell for what I done. Telling me my sister was a devil,” Flo said, shaking her head and rubbing her shoulder.
“Your sister?” Mercer asked.
“I don’t have a sister. That’s what I’m saying ’bout crazy. Then I see his penis.”
“Did he let go of you to unzip his pants?” I said.
“Nope. He never let go of me. His pants was already unzipped. He was hard by the time he threw me down.”
Perhaps he’d been masturbating in the bushes, like he’d done when he approached the Austin sisters.
“What did he do then, Flo?”
“More crazy talking. He was mad at me for fighting him. That’s when he ripped my halter. Tore the thing clear off.”
“What kind of crazy talk?” I asked.
Flo kept stroking her shoulder and upper arm, which clearly bothered her. “All about the devil and stuff. But then he wanted
me
to say things. But I didn’t want to say ’em. He was all like sitting on top of me, so I couldn’t move, and my back was aching from rolling on all those rocks and branches.”
“Tell us the words, Flo. Tell us, please, what the man wanted you to say.”
“Don’t put this in your report, okay?” She was almost squirming in her chair now.
Mercer coaxed her just to repeat what had happened. We knew it wasn’t her choice of words; it was her assailant’s.
In a voice not much louder than a whisper, Flo said, “‘I’m a ho.’ He wanted to hear that. Two, three times maybe. He wanted me to tell him how big he was and how much I wanted him inside me.”
Tears started to streak down her cheeks as she spoke, and at that moment the whole image began to come together for me.
“He made me use the F-word, saying I needed him to do that to me. But I wasn’t saying it loud enough for him,” Flo went on. Then she paused and looked at Mercer. “It was almost funny, what crossed my mind. I was so scared my boyfriend would be coming along and he’d see me half naked, saying that to another man, and he’d think I’d gone off and done that to spite him.”