“Leave some bread crumbs so I can follow your trail.”
“You’ll hear me loud and clear.”
I left the search of the pathways for the guys who would follow shortly. There had been twenty-four hours during which passersby might have picked up items of significance-pieces of Coop’s jewelry if it had been discarded, her iPad and phone, any files she might have been carrying. By now, if not kept by the finders, the items would have worked their way to the Central Park Precinct station house, and the lieutenant had promised to follow up on that idea.
I ducked behind a thicket of bushes, hunched over, and used my beam to scan every inch of the ground.
There were piles of leaves almost everywhere. It was October and the trees were shedding.
I got on my knees and tamped them down. Most of the leaves were scattered into small groupings. Other piles were large enough to conceal a body.
I didn’t make much progress in the first fifteen minutes. I was zigzagging from the south end of the grid-the transverse wall-going north for twenty feet, and then reversing my direction. Trees got in my way, and boulders, too. Coop would have been cursing the brilliant landscapers who had put every one of these in place to create what she called this great man-made playground.
The first thing I found was a pair of men’s sneakers. I didn’t know whether they’d have any significance, so I tossed them ten feet over to the paved walkway for Emergency Services to voucher. There was a bong that I slipped into a plastic baggie in case we needed DNA from the saliva on it. I didn’t put gloves on until I clamped my hand onto a dead squirrel.
“Hey, Chapman,” I heard a familiar voice calling. “Get your ass out of the bushes. It’s time for the bright lights.”
I stood up. It was one of the senior Emergency Services detectives. I raised my hands and smiled at him. “Don’t shoot.”
“Got my orders from Abruzzi and Peterson,” he said. “Don’t ask any questions about who you’re looking for, relieve you of this particular assignment, put on my biggest spots, and go over every square foot of-”
“Correction. Square inch. And no relieving me.”
“The CO of the park precinct is sending his anti-crime squad to do the grid with me. Whatever kind of case you got, try and make yourself useful somewhere else.”
He turned his back on me and gave his men the order to set up the floodlights and get to work.
Mercer was on the path. “Why don’t we leave this to ESU and go for a ride?”
“Don’t humor me.”
I was snapping at my best friend. The fear that was gnawing at my gut was disrupting a normal interaction with the cop I trusted most in all the world. I should be making professional decisions, but I had a horse in this race and I was losing my focus.
“Mike,” Mercer said. “Let’s go look for Shipley’s SUVs. See if we can find them. You got a legit reason to be snooping around him. You’re still looking for Keesh as Wilson’s likely killer.”
I didn’t answer.
“For a murderer,” he said. “Let these guys get on the ground. Odds are they won’t find anything here, Mike. You know that as well as I do.”
I wanted to say that they didn’t know what they were looking for. But truth was, neither did I.
“You ought to go home and get a few hours’ sleep,” I said.
“When you do, man.”
“It’s different with me,” I said, pulling off my gloves and tossing them in a garbage pail as we walked toward Fifth Avenue. “It’s Coop. I got my heart in this now.”
“Course you do,” Mercer said, almost in a whisper. “That’s good to hear.”
I stood on the sidewalk and watched as the lights perched atop the giant tripods burst on.
“You Chapman?” a young detective asked.
“Yeah.”
“My boss gave us the instructions,” he said. “I’m watching the perimeter while the others search. If paparazzi start showing up because of the activity here, we tell them nothing, right?”
“Why, what do you know?”
“Nothing. I don’t know nothing. Missing girl, is all.”
“Then you know too much already,” I said. “Tell them it’s a practice run. Like for a potential terrorist threat. Nothing about a girl.”
“Good idea. They all buy into that terrorist shit.”
Mercer was about to cross the street to get to his car. The senior detective was walking toward us, holding out a clump of plastic bags. “Help me here, Chapman, will you?” he said.
“Sure. What you got?”
“This one has cigarette butts with lipstick on them. Your victim, does she smoke?”
The inside of my cheek was already raw when I bit down on it again. I couldn’t think of Coop and the word victim in the same sentence.
“Not a smoker,” I said. “But keep the butts for possible DNA. We don’t know who she’s with.”
He held up a second bag. “Expired MetroCard.”
“Good. We can track the purchase. Make sure Peterson gets that ASAP.”
“Ten-four,” he said. “And I know this park is like a regular lover’s lane. This here’s a thong. A bright-red lacy thong. Like the last lap dancer who parked herself on me.”
Not a pretty picture.
“I figure we gotta grab all the underwear we come across.” The detective was laughing as he held the thong up in my face. “Any chance this belongs to your missing broad?”
“No way,” I said, turning my back on him. Nausea swept over me as I thought of Coop without clothes, without underwear, in the hands of a psychopath.
“Can’t ever be sure, Chapman. She’s not a nun, is she? Give us a clue.”
I knew her lingerie as well as I knew my own shorts. I just couldn’t say that out loud.
“Trust me on this one,” Mercer said to the detective, slapping me on the back to get me moving toward his car. “We know our vic, dude. Somewhere between a lap dancer and a nun, but it’s definitely not her thong.”
TWENTY-THREE
“You know he doesn’t park these expensive pimped-up wheels on the street in the middle of Harlem,” I said.
“Why not? Can you think of anybody who messes with the reverend?” Mercer answered. It was close to two thirty in the morning and we were cruising the streets in the area between the Gotham center and Shipley’s apartment. “Probably the safest cars in the hood.”
“We’ve been around three times,” I said, holding a printout of the cars and plate numbers. “Nada. Absolutely nada. Let’s check out the parking garages.”
The car stopped at a light and I opened the door. Mercer pulled over and parked in front of a fire hydrant.
The first two garages we walked by had closed at one A.M.
Teenagers we passed on a street corner started taunting Mercer with chants of, “Five-oh. We know you five-oh.”
The old TV show-Hawaii Five-O-had long ago provided the nickname for cops on ghetto streets. Even with the stunning gentrification of parts of Harlem, I gave away Mercer’s presence as surely as if I had worn my police badge around my neck.
Three blocks from our car, and half a block from Shipley’s home address, the mouth of a large garage yawned at us. Open twenty-four hours.
I followed Mercer down the ramp. The old black man behind the bulletproof window in what served as an office had fallen asleep. Mercer rapped on the glass.
The startled attendant sat up straight. “What you want?”
“These three cars. Let’s take a look at them,” Mercer said, passing him the plate numbers.
“I can’t help you.”
“Does that mean they’re not here or they’re here?”