“When the light changed, I started to drive. I pulled up a little beyond where we are right now,” Sadiq said, gesturing with his left hand. “I saw a lady. I saw Miss Alexandra and I began to honk my-”
“How did you know it was her?” I asked. “Did she speak-?”
“Yo, Mike,” Mercer said, pushing me back with his outstretched arm. “I can handle this.”
“Well, I don’t actually know,” Sadiq said. “She seemed to look up like she was expecting me, but then she got into another car. A car parked a few feet in front of me.”
“You called her ‘impatient,’” Mercer said. “Why’s that?”
“Because I was only a minute or so late, and she wasn’t polite enough to cancel the job. So I had to charge her for it. That’s the only reason I said it.”
“Could you see if there was anyone in the vehicle ahead of you?” Mercer asked.
“Not really, Mr. Detective. Not at all. The windows were tinted, actually.”
“This woman you saw, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “Can you describe her?”
“Not really.”
“Anything. Anything at all?”
Sadiq looked from Mercer’s face to mine. “You talk to me like I did something bad.”
“Not yet, you didn’t,” Mercer said. “What did she look like?”
The driver seemed almost fearful to admit that he could give a description of Coop, like that would implicate him in some inappropriate conduct.
“Even your turban is sweating, Sadiq,” I said, watching the rain fall from it. “What do you know? What are you so worried about?”
The young man looked as shocked as Mercer.
“Excuse my partner, sir,” Mercer said. “You haven’t met the real incarnation of ‘impatience’ till he chimes in. And on top of that he’s just rude.”
“I believe the woman I saw had light-colored hair. Blond. And she was wearing a raincoat, even though it was dry.”
“Young? Old?”
“About my own age, sir,” Sadiq said. “I’m thirty-four.”
“What did you do when she got in the other car?”
“I waited in this very spot. I actually waited ten minutes, perhaps twelve, just to be sure that my passenger wasn’t someone else. Someone who’d been delayed.”
“Did you try to contact her?” Mercer asked.
“I did. I texted two more times that I was on location before I canceled the job. That was when I left.”
“Where did you go next?” Mercer asked.
Sadiq’s hands were going in circles again. “Nowhere.”
“What does that mean? How could you go nowhere?”
“I stayed right here, Mr. Detective. There’s usually a lot of business on the Upper East Side in the late evening. People coming out of bars, movies, going home late.”
“What was your next job?” Mercer asked.
“I-uh-I didn’t have a next job, sir,” Sadiq said, staring at a crack in the pavement. “I had only planned to work until midnight. The next order that came in from an address on 79th Street had a destination in New Jersey.”
Mercer didn’t seem to like the fact that Sadiq had shut his operation down shortly after the time Coop disappeared. “What don’t you like about Jersey?”
“Nothing in particular, Mr. Detective. It’s just that I live on Long Island, and if I had accepted the job, I wouldn’t have gotten home till after two A.M.,” Sadiq said. “My wife wouldn’t have been pleased.”
“Was your wife awake when you got home?” Mercer asked.
“Not exactly. I mean, she never is when I work that late.”
I liked that Mercer was putting the screws to the nervous cabbie, who’d been the last person we knew to see Coop.
“Did you see anyone between the time you arrived at this corner and the time your wife-well, woke up?”
Sadiq clasped his hands together and thought. “No, sir. Not that I remember.”
“Think hard, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “You want to tell me anything else you can think of about the woman you saw? Anyone else you can describe on the street?”
I couldn’t help myself from butting in. “You didn’t happen to get a plate number of the car that took your fare away from you? Even a partial plate? Some letters or numbers?”
“Excuse me for correcting you, sir.” The young man couldn’t even look at me when he spoke to me. “You are mistaken.”
“What about?”
“I wasn’t mad at the lady or at the other driver. I still charged my fare,” he said. “And it wasn’t a car she got into. You’re wrong about that. I didn’t look at the license plate so I cannot tell you that. But it wasn’t a car. It was an SUV.”
Mercer jumped in over me. “What kind of SUV? You know the make, Sadiq? Do you know what an Escalade is?”
Mercer was on high alert. He was thinking of Antonio Estevez and his Slade.
“I don’t know all the models. But it for sure wasn’t an Escalade,” Sadiq said. “All I know is definitely it was an SUV.”
Mercer was ready to go after Estevez-the man who wanted to bring Coop down.
I was hell-bent on pinning the Reverend Hal Shipley against a wall to get the whereabouts of his SUV fleet and posse of pallbearers.
TWENTY-ONE
“We got a mess on our hands,” Lieutenant Peterson said to the captain in charge of the Nineteenth Precinct, sitting in the squad room on the second floor.
It was eleven o’clock at night and guys were getting ready for the shift change. The midnight tour would be understaffed, like it was all over the city. Those who were ready to knock off were looking at us like we’d walked into their offices with the Ebola virus, staying far enough away to avoid contagion but curious about what we’d brought into their tight little village.
“And you’ve decided now was the right time to lay it on me?” Captain Abruzzi said. He looked like a man who had someplace to go. Well-cut double-breasted suit, designer tie too expensive for a cop’s salary, carefully styled comb-over-he should have learned to cope with the bald bit years ago-and way too much cologne at this hour. “The commissioner knows?”
“Scully wants Mike, Mercer, and me at One PP at seven hundred. The district attorney, too,” Ray Peterson said. “He’s expecting a call from you tonight. He insisted that we make a formal report so you can have one of your men get started on the basics.”
Peterson had a slender, bony frame-like a skeleton with some clothes thrown over it. He was tall, and he leaned his elbow on top of a file cabinet while he ran down the story for Abruzzi.
“Why’d you sit on this, Chapman?” the captain asked. “Too busy with your Jeopardy! bullshit to know you had a ‘gone girl’ on your hands?”
“I didn’t-”
“He didn’t sit on it,” Peterson said. “The people in the DA’s office as well as the guys in the department-and Vickee Eaton from DCPI-thought they knew what they were dealing with.”
I probably hadn’t missed a Final Jeopardy question in a few months. I couldn’t focus on anything after Vickee put this in my lap.
“Scully knows I’m using a Jane Doe to take the report?” Abruzzi asked. “Not Alex Cooper’s name anywhere on paper?”
“That’s his decision,” Peterson said. “The media would be all over the fact that a prosecutor has disappeared, and it’s not what any of us want until we make a plan tomorrow morning.”
“I got only two men working.”
“That’s all you need,” I said. “Mercer and I will fill them in. TARU’s trying to pull up her phone now. We got some ideas already that he and I are going to follow up on.”
I didn’t need any hairbag detective with good manners supervising my late-night interface with Hal Shipley.
Peterson pointed the two fingers holding his cigarette at me. “Forget your ideas, Chapman. The captain’s gonna run this tonight.”
“Yeah,” Abruzzi said, not seeming to be very interested in Coop’s status. “We’ve had lots of security details on her apartment over the years. Dances to her own drummer, that one. Jet-sets around. Wouldn’t surprise me if she’s on a jaunt somewhere.”