“Mr. Who?” I asked.
The tall man wasn’t talking.
I walked toward him to pat him down before I left him with the cops. He flinched when I made him raise his hands over his head, but he complied. He leaned against the hood of an Acura while I searched him.
“No hardware,” I said. “Give these guys your ID.”
He removed his wallet from his pocket. I looked at the name on the license-Ebon Gander, which meant nothing to me-and handed it to one of the uniformed men. Then I took hold of the wallet.
“Well, well. You are just awash in hundred-dollar bills, dude. Four or five thousand of them.”
I handed him back the money. “Let’s be sure to tell the detectives to look over the Franklins for possible blood, in case these bills just tiptoed out of Wilson’s apartment along with Keesh.”
Ebon Gander twitched.
“Let’s go, Detective Wallace,” I said. I had just diverted enough of my mental energy to keep Coop out of this narrative-to form the thought that maybe this man had been Keesh’s getaway driver, which would account for the bloodstain in the car and the big bills in his wallet.
“We got a condolence call to pay.”
Mercer hesitated, like he didn’t quite know what to do about me.
“Don’t you want to know where?” I asked.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Mercer said to me softly, pleading for some kind of rational thought on my part.
“Time to pay a visit to Fat Hal, pardner. Once we tell him Mr. Gander’s been talking to us-”
“I’m not saying a word to you or anyone else.”
“I don’t see it that way, Mr. Gander. The way I figure, you might as well be talking. I’m pretty certain once the reverend learns you’re up at the homicide squad and the cars are impounded and your wallet has grown pretty damn wide, I’m quite certain your goose will be cooked.”
TWENTY-FOUR
“I’m going to save you from yourself,” Mercer said.
“I want to see Shipley. I want to do it now.”
We were in the car and Mercer was headed south, away from Shipley’s home.
“I had a call from the police commissioner’s office as I walked out of the garage.”
“They’ve got news?”
“No news, Mike. No news. But Scully wants you down there at headquarters.”
“The meeting’s at seven A.M. We got time for-”
“You got no more time to make a fool of yourself, man. Scully wants you in early because he’s also called for someone he wants us to talk to,” Mercer said. “About Alex.”
It was probably just a ploy to distract me.
“You are in no shape to rip Shipley into bite-size pieces at the moment,” Mercer said. “Your head’s somewhere else. You were asking questions like a third grader back there.”
“Did you call Vickee, too?”
“Yeah. All quiet. She’s been sleeping with the phone at her ear. Checks it regularly for e-mails and texts, but nothing’s come in.”
“So who does Scully want us to talk to?” I asked
“Don’t know. The commish tells you to be somewhere and you show up. Probably the guys from Major Case, don’t you think?”
“I’d like to handpick the players. Put together the best of the best. For Coop, I mean.”
“That could happen,” Mercer said, merging onto the drive to go downtown. “She means a lot to a lot of guys in the department. And to Scully.”
I was quiet for most of the drive. So was he.
We parked in the garage at One Police Plaza and took the elevator up to the fourteenth floor, where all the brass were assigned.
The executive officer of the chief of detectives was expecting us. “The chief wants you to go into his office and stretch out for a while. I’ll let you know when he comes in.”
The office had a striking view over New York Harbor, with the bridge lights glittering across to Brooklyn and then over to Staten Island. The chief had a massive desk and a conference table with a dozen chairs. There were also two leather couches against the walls.
“Get yourself half an hour,” Mercer said. “You’ll be no good without it.”
“I’m not much good as it is. I got bad things running through my brain.”
“Your head has to be clear, Mike. You can’t go there,” Mercer said. “Alex is a strong woman. She’s a fighter.”
He sat down and made himself comfortable, his head on the armrest and his feet hanging off the end of the six-foot-long couch.
“In a fair fight, my money’s on her. But what was that with the SUV? An abduction? She doesn’t stand a chance with some animal who means to tear her limb from limb.”
Mercer pretended to be sleeping. I took his lead and laid myself down on the other couch.
My eyes closed and immediately I felt guilty. I opened them wide and rubbed them with my fists. How could I be still for even a minute with so many unknowns to be resolved?
I must have dozed for a couple of hours. Fitfully, I knew, because I had been checking my phone and my e-mails from time to time.
The XO-executive officer-knocked on the door and stuck his head in at 6:25. “Rise and shine, Chapman,” he said. “The doctor’s making a house call for you.”
Mercer was upright before I was. A fiftyish-year-old woman in a dark gray suit came into the room. “Are you Mike Chapman?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, my fingers instantly combing through my hair. Mercer’s head was down as he walked to the door to leave the room.
“I’m Dr. Friedman. Ricky Friedman. I’m a psychiatrist, and I sometimes work with-”
“Whoa, Mercer,” I called out. “You knew about this? You brought me down here so some shrink could try to get inside my brain? You-”
“Scully and Battaglia will be in the big office in half an hour, Mike. Listen up, will you?” Mercer said. “Somebody a helluva lot smarter than you is working on a plan here.”
“It’s not about you,” Friedman said. “It’s about Alex Cooper. Do you understand that?”
“Of course I do,” I said, flailing my arms as I looked out the window at the commuters starting to fill the Brooklyn Bridge roadway. “You going to use a Ouija board, Doc, or a Freudian dream analysis to find her?”
“What I’d like to-”
“You want to know what I was just dreaming? That some sexual predator-some miserable fuck that Coop put away for brutalizing young girls-is holding her hostage, forcing himself on her repeatedly. Will that really be helpful to-”
“That’s quite possible, Detective Chapman. It’s certainly one of the most likely scenarios, just like you say, isn’t it?”
I stopped in my tracks and turned around to look at the doctor. She was carefully coiffed and well dressed-a full-figured woman with an intelligent face, if there is such a thing, who was clearly a straight shooter-willing to confirm that my worst nightmare might be true.
“As long as you don’t tell me I’m nuts,” I said.
“No guarantees, Mike,” she said, seating herself at the conference table. “I’m calling you Mike, okay? I know a lot about you already.”
“From?” I asked, as I pulled out a chair opposite her.
“Lieutenant Peterson. The commissioner directed him to give me a thumbnail sketch a few hours ago.”
“What about you? What do I need to know before I open my mouth?”
“Med school at Columbia. A healthy private practice for twenty-five years,” she said. “I like what I do. I like helping people in desperate situations. The department brings me in from time to time to work with the profilers.”
“That’s utter bullshit, Dr. Friedman. No disrespect, but profilers aren’t detectives,” I said, starting to mimic a typical profiling discussion. “‘The deceased was bound by an electrical cord so you guys should be looking for a killer who has one ear and plays Mahler symphonies on his piano. The petechial hemorrhages in the eyeballs of the corpse suggest a Rorschach pattern, which means the perp is an artist who fancies himself a Jackson Pollock type.’ You think that kind of psychodrivel is going to find Alexandra Cooper?”