Mike Chapman had come on the job shortly before I graduated from law school and joined the DA’s office. He and Mercer had partnered together on many of the worst cases imaginable, remaining close friends after Mercer transferred to SVU, preferring to work with victims who survived their attacks.
The three of us started across the span, a familiar image in countless Park photographs featuring boaters and ice skaters. I couldn’t help but look down at the water, as though some clue was about to float by just in time for me to spot it.
Mike ducked out and stepped back to talk to the other guys from the squad. I could see him shaking his head. He hadn’t noticed our approach.
“Anything, Mike?” Peterson called out.
“Nothing, Loo,” Mike shouted over his shoulder.
“Here’s your minder, Chapman,” Freddie Figueroa said, laughing as he pointed at me. My relationship with Mike was a source of great amusement to many of our colleagues, who couldn’t figure how I tolerated his constant needling yet knew he’d covered my back in more situations than I could count. “You’d better come up with something fast.”
“Hey, Coop,” Mike said, flashing all one hundred megawatts of his best grin. “Hope you brought a crystal ball. This one will take more than your brains.”
I started to walk to the end of the bridge, but he called me off.
“Stay there. Last thing we need is another pair of footprints in the mud. Did you see my girl?”
I shook my head. “Jack was ready to roll. The locals were about to surround him, so he took off.”
“Hal’s got plenty of close-ups if you want to take a look.”
Hal Sherman, one of the masters of crime scene investigations, came up behind me. He’d been photographing each of the approaches to the Lake, on the theory that no one would know what angles were important until we had a sense of what had happened to this victim and where.
“Hey, Alex. Too quiet too long, huh?” Hal said, patting me on the back before he reached for his notepad. “That statue on top of the fountain, any idea what she’s called?”
I looked across at the colossal bronze figure of a woman, raised high above the plaza and held aloft by four cherubs, with wings outstretched as she delivered her blessing over the Lake below.
“Sure, Hal,” I said as he scratched the answer on a notepad. “She’s the most iconic statue in the Park. She’s called the Angel of the Waters.”
Mike Chapman joined us on the bridge, pulling off his gloves and stuffing them in his rear pants pocket. “That name worked for her once upon a time, Coop. Now she stands up there with the best vantage point of all, sees everything that goes on here, but gives us nothing. I’d like to know everything that she knows.”
“It’s not even eight o’clock, and you’re loaded for bear. Why take it out on an angel?”
“It’s not the first body I’ve had in this Lake, Coop. We’ve got two cold cases-young women who have never been identified whose files are collecting dust in the squad room.”
“How old are those runs that I don’t even know about them?” I asked. “Are you figuring this one falls into some kind of pattern with the others?”
“I’m just thinking that statue may be an attractive nuisance. Maybe she blessed the waters a century ago, but now she’s a magnet for murder. She’s an angel, all right,” Mike said, staring at the beautiful sunlit figure that towered over us. “A death angel.”
TWO
Mike led Hal, Mercer, the lieutenant, and me along the path to the first pavilion on the north shore of the Lake. The large boathouse itself, where rowboats could be rented by the hour, was to our east. Four covered wooden sheds were scattered about the edges of the water as landing docks for rowers, a throwback to their Victorian origins.
We set ourselves up out of the direct sun, and Mike asked Hal to show me the digital photos he had taken when he first arrived.
“So the initial call to 911 came in at 5:49 this morning,” Mike said. “Two guys out for a run on the pathway approaching Bethesda Terrace from below, to the west. One of them saw what he thought was the head and upper torso of a woman under the bridge, against the foundation, and stopped his friend.”
“What time was sunrise?” Mercer asked.
“5:24. Plenty of light to see across.”
“They touch anything?” I asked.
“Too spooked to get closer.”
“What if she’d been alive and needed help?”
“Decomposition was evident, Coop, even from a distance,” Mike said. “Hal, you got those shots?”
He cupped his hand over the viewer as Mercer and I leaned in.
The girl’s face was mostly intact, but her skin was a ghastly shade of gray. Her head was to the side, one cheek hugging the concrete structure. The only eye we could see was closed and her mouth was agape, with stringy dark-brown hair plastered across her face. The area below her shoulder blade was discolored, and it looked like her bones were protruding through what once had been skin.
“Late teens is Johnny Mayes’s estimate,” Mike said. “No tats, no track marks. No surgical scars. Badly malnourished, lousy dentition, filthy nails all bitten down and cracked. I’m going with homeless.”
“How long has she been dead?” I asked.
“Mayes figures it’s been at least a month, but she was only left in the water for a day or two.”
Mercer studied the photographs of the full body taken after the victim had been pulled from the water. “So, a dump job?”
Killed somewhere else and deposited in the Lake. Dumped here, by the murderer.
“Likely. But who knows where she’s been all this time? That’s a big problem.”
“How’d she die?” I asked.
“Blunt force trauma. Check the photos of the back of her head.”
Hal advanced the shots. Some object had crushed the skull with a couple of blows. Two different angles of injury suggested repeated applications of the weapon.
“Does Johnny know what might have caused this?”
“Lead pipe, maybe. Or a baseball bat. I’m hoping Derek Jeter has an alibi ’cause we’re only two months into the season and he’s hitting four hundred. Whoever did this has a pretty perfect swing.”
“A tree branch?” I said.
“They got redwoods here I don’t know about, Coop? I mean, why do you ask me a question and then take your own guess at an answer?”
“I’d like to stop by the morgue later,” I said. I was fidgety and knew that I was annoying Mike before we’d even gotten out of the blocks. “I had a good chance to see what immersion in water did to a body when I helped with that girl who was murdered in France this spring.”
“Save me, Jesus.” Mike closed his eyes and shook his head. “Give me a break for a change, will you? Whose idea was it to call Coop in on this so early?”
The lieutenant looked at Mike, puzzled by his outburst at me. “What-?”
“I wanted her here,” Mercer said. “It’s going to be her case.”
“We don’t know that this is a sexual assault yet. Coop spent ten minutes with a lady in a lake on one of her holiday jaunts and-”
“It was a pond, not a lake, but go ahead, Mike. I made some observations that the French police found useful, so I thought maybe you would, too.”
“Well, tell them to the medical examiner because he knows how long my vic’s been dead and what killed her. You got any wild guesses on figuring out the ‘who,’ then stick around.”
“Drain the Lake,” I said.
“What?”
“Drain the Lake. That might give you her clothing, some form of ID, possibly the weapon. Maybe even other victims. If this fits together with your cold cases, maybe you get a bit closer to solving the whole thing.”
Ray Peterson angled his head and looked at me.
“It’s been done before. Draining the Lake, I mean.”
“Who’s going to sign off on that one?” Peterson asked.