“I’m sorry, Paul. You weren’t here when I went up to court.” And McKinney was rarely in his office before late morning, either because he couldn’t tear himself away from his harebrained girlfriend or because his shrink appointment ran overtime.
“What does it look like?”
I pulled out a chair at the opposite end of the table and sat down.
“Dump job. The body was found in the Lake, but they don’t think she was killed there. I was only in the Park for half an hour, but the guys haven’t come up with much yet or they would have left me a message.”
“Is she anybody?” Battaglia asked, thinking-no doubt-of which part of his constituency he would have to work. Priest, preacher, rabbi, councilman, community group-someone to whom he would need to express interest and give assurances that his best people would be on the case. “Do we have a name on her?”
Of course she’s somebody. Somebody’s daughter, I wanted to say. She is somebody’s broken and battered child or sister or aunt or girlfriend. There’s most likely a relative who is going about the ordinary business of his or her daily life but will soon get the news that a loved one has been murdered.
“No name. Chapman thinks she’s probably homeless.”
“Raped?”
“We won’t know till after the autopsy. Her skull was bashed in. No clothes on, but that could be for a variety of reasons. She was in the water for a couple of days at least.”
“Do you want to keep it?” McKinney was directly above me in the chain of command. On many occasions he had tried to strip me of cases I wanted to handle. If the homicide victim had been sexually assaulted or killed at the hand of an intimate partner, it fell to my unit and Battaglia usually backed me.
“I’d like to, Pat. Obviously, I don’t know what we’ve got, but chances are once we confirm an ID, a lot of the people we’ll need to talk to-the girl’s friends-are the population we’re good at dealing with.” My colleagues in sex crimes work specialized in vulnerable young women.
“I spoke with Lieutenant Peterson a few minutes ago,” McKinney said. “He’s not thinking this will be a quick fix. Needle-in-a-haystack kind of thing. Catch a lucky break is all they can hope for. You in for the long haul?”
“I’d like to be.”
“Then it’s yours.”
“Thanks.”
Battaglia asked me a dozen more questions to which I had no answers before he dismissed me with a wave of his half-chewed cigar.
The rest of the day flew by with phone calls and staff meetings. Most of the lawyers seemed eager to get out in time for weekend travel, and I was one of them.
I was going to my home on Martha’s Vineyard, catching the last flight out of LaGuardia at nine P.M. with Vickee Eaton, who was Mercer’s wife and a second-grade detective assigned to the Office of the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information at One Police Plaza.
At five, I dialed Vickee’s cell. “Do we have a plan?”
“Our office has been totally swamped with calls about the homicide in Central Park.”
“Does that mean we’re grounded?”
“Not a chance. Scully and the mayor did a stand-up at City Hall an hour ago. Bare bones. Not many facts to go on. And they put out a hastily done sketch of the girl. If anyone recognizes her from this one, I’ll be amazed. No more to be said by my guys till there’s a new development.”
“Does that mean you expected me to make the plan? ’Cause I totally dropped that ball. We can take a cab to LaGuardia.”
“Girl, I just want to be sitting on your deck in Chilmark with an ice-cold glass of your best white wine when that full moon is straight overhead,” Vickee said. “Mercer’s picking me up behind One PP at six sharp. Meet me here. He says a quick dinner at Primola with Mike and they’ll have us both up to speed on the day’s happenings in the Park and get us to the airport in time for the flight. You cool with that?”
“Beyond cool. See you shortly.”
I locked up at a quarter to six, leaving behind all my case folders for a change. I couldn’t remember taking off for a weekend in months without having to grind through a closing argument or prep witnesses without a break to relax.
The lawyers who hadn’t cut out earlier in the day were coming out the doors of both buildings in hordes, like a fire alarm had gone off. Most of the young ones had getaway bags on their shoulders, heading to Hamptons share houses or the Jersey shore. I crossed behind the Federal Courthouse on Worth Street, cutting through the building next to Police Plaza to the parking garage, where Vickee and Mercer were already waiting for me in his SUV.
“Are we good to go?” I asked, climbing into the rear seat.
“Nothing to stop us now,” Vickee said. “One more phone call to Logan before Mercer’s sister wrestles him into bed and I am airborne.”
Vickee and Mercer’s four-year-old, Logan, often came with us on our Vineyard escapes, but this time his mother wanted the chance to sleep late while her husband and son did some male bonding.
“Did you spend the day in the Park?” I asked Mercer as he turned under the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp and nosed onto the uptown FDR Drive.
“Only another hour after you left. Peterson’s been really territorial about this one. He’s calling it a plain and simple homicide-”
“Like there is such a thing.”
“And he didn’t want any other units there with his own guys except for a uniformed detail doing a grid search of the area around the Lake.”
“Around the Lake?” Vickee said. “That’s the whole park. How do you limit how far they go?”
“You don’t. The ring just grows larger every day the men don’t come up with evidence to link to the body.”
I glanced across the river at the enormous glass box that covered the antique carousel that had been restored and opened on the Brooklyn waterfront last year. It was where I had celebrated my thirty-eighth birthday in April, a most bittersweet end to a difficult day.
“You hungry?” Mercer asked.
“I don’t think I’ve ever eaten dinner this early. But I didn’t have much for lunch, and you can bet there won’t be much stocked up in the house, so I’m glad we’re stopping.”
Mercer Wallace was one of the handful of African American detectives to make first grade in the NYPD more than a decade ago. He was five years older than I, and although his solid six-foot-four-inch build made a fierce impression on the bad guys he chased, there was an exceptionally gentle quality about him that won him the trust of the most traumatized crime victims we encountered.
After his mother died in childbirth, Mercer was raised in Queens by his father, who was a mechanic at Delta Air Lines. He had married Vickee ten years back, but she had left him shortly thereafter because she’d been emotionally torn-as the daughter of an NYPD detective-by the toll the job took on most marriages and a terrific fear that it would overwhelm her own. After a shooting that almost cost Mercer his life, she came back to him, and they remarried and started life over again with Logan. To Mike and to me, their relationship offered a model of stability-of trust and of love-that neither of us had been able to imitate.
I listened as they talked to each other, Vickee reciting a checklist of things that were part of Logan’s routine from the time he opened his eyes in the morning till the end of a long day. How much milk in the cereal, who was expected for a playdate, what parts of the house were off-limits to the kids, what she’d prepared for Mercer to heat up for dinner-everything sounded so enviably cozy and normal.
“You with me on this, Alex? I guess my wife thinks she’s been raising this boy by herself the last four years.”
“She’ll get real by the time I return her to you Sunday night.”
Mercer parked illegally on Second Avenue in the 60s, throwing his laminated NYPD plaque on top of the dashboard. Primola was one of my favorites-an upscale Italian restaurant with consistently good food, where the regular customers are showered with attention by an efficient and cheerful staff.