“I’m not long on empathy, Vick,” I said, keeping a grip on my emotions. “Coop’s been aware of that as long as she’s known me, and it’s never going to change.”
Dr. Friedman was waiting for me to crack open in front of her eyes, a pleasure I was determined to deny her.
“Mercer and Coop-they deal in the living,” I said. “They hold hands with survivors, they offer compassion, they coax them back to life and get them beyond their ordeals. Me? I like working homicide exactly because that kind of shit isn’t for me. I could stroke Wynan Wilson till I’m blue in the face, Detective Eaton, and at the end of the day he’s still dead. I don’t do empathy, okay?”
“Alex had been close to coming unglued that night, during that deadly storm,” Vickee said. “Even if you didn’t mean to disappoint her, Mike, that’s how she felt. She wanted to get away from you for a while to clear out her head. She wanted to get as far away from you as she could.”
TWENTY-SIX
“We didn’t disagree about anything,” I said to Scully. “She was clear as a bell when I left her. We were supposed to spend this weekend together on Martha’s Vineyard. We’re good on all fronts, if anybody’s interested.”
He had called a short break and took me into the hallway when the coffee and sandwiches were delivered to pin me down on what my last exchanges with Coop had been.
“She can make a fool of you, Chapman, if that’s her goal-but not the rest of us,” he said as we reentered the room. “You think of anything else, let me be the first to know.”
I made sure Dr. Friedman saw me pick up two egg sandwiches and a large black cup of joe. I lifted the hot cardboard cup in her direction and mouthed, Cheers.
The commissioner was ready to open the plan up for discussion.
“I say we hold the disappearance back at least one more day-maybe two-before we put it on the news,” the district attorney said. “Let her family absorb it tonight, when they get to town.”
“You’ve got to weigh that,” Abruzzi said, “against the likelihood of getting useful tips from the public if we give the information out. See something, say something. People love to call in all kinds of sightings.”
“Total waste of time,” one of the Major Case guys said. “No disrespect, Captain, but you end up chasing down a whole bunch of bullshit. Someone saw a tall skinny blonde in a Costco in Queens; someone watched one shooting up at Hunts Point; someone tailed a brunette who looks an awful lot like the missing lady except for her height and hair color. We’re more likely to find Judge Crater with those call-ins than Alex Cooper. Let’s leave it to the pros for forty-eight hours.”
Most of us were in agreement about that.
“Who’s meeting her parents at the airport?” Battaglia asked.
“I can do that,” I said.
“I told them I would,” Vickee said. “You want to come-?”
“All yours.”
This experience was the kind of explosive event that could rip friendships apart. I had seen it happen over and over again as people subconsciously ascribed blame to others. Most of the time, when the dust cleared, it was impossible to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
“Okay,” the commissioner said, “where were we? Tell me about the SUVs in Shipley’s fleet, Mercer. What’s happening there?”
“Three of them have been impounded, sir. Just waiting on manpower to drive them in,” Mercer said. “I called the lab a minute ago. Got a confirm that the stain on the seat is human blood.”
“My lawyers don’t even have the search warrant signed yet,” Battaglia said. “How’d you get to the stain?”
“I cut a piece of the seat leather before Mercer and I left the garage,” I said.
“Without a warrant?” Battaglia asked.
“Exigent circumstances.”
Keith Scully grinned. He liked the boldness of my move and the fact that I could meet Battaglia’s incredulous smirk with a legal term of art.
“Wilson’s murder? Exigent? I wouldn’t think so.”
“The blood is either Wilson’s,” Mercer said, stepping in because he sensed I would choke on the thought he was about to express, “or it’s Alex Cooper’s.”
Battaglia closed his mouth.
“She was seen getting into an SUV, if the Uber driver is to be credited. The lab will have a blood type any minute, which will eliminate one of the two-they have different types. And DNA,” Mercer said, “by noon.”
“I had Shipley’s man-Ebon Gander-being questioned in the squad at four A.M.,” Peterson said to Scully. “He had thirty-seven hundred in big bills. Talked pretty good until my guys took that away from him to voucher. Then he ponied up with a lawyer.”
“He’s under arrest?” the commissioner asked.
“Waiting on the blood results. If it’s Wilson’s blood, we’ll hold Gander as an accessory. He admits to being the driver of the car. One of the drivers, anyway.”
Scully’s orders were clipped and comprehensive. Everyone in the room was assigned a list of things to do or to oversee. Aviation was ready for choppers to go airborne if leads took us over bridges and through tunnels. Contacts with other agencies were to be cleared through the chief of Ds on a need-to-know basis.
“So this task force is official as of 8:37 A.M.,” Scully said.
He’d give it a name. He always did.
“I’m calling it Operation Portia.”
“That sucks, Commissioner,” I said.
“Watch your mouth, Chapman,” Peterson said.
“Sorry, Loo,” I said. “I apologize, Commissioner. It’s just that you told me to think like Coop. That’s what I’m doing.”
“Portia’s a Shakespearean character in The Merchant of Venice,” Battaglia said, giving new meaning to the word pompous. “She’s a lawyer-a smart and beautiful lady lawyer, and-”
“She’s a cross-dressing heiress who pretends to be a lawyer,” I said. I had the advantage of having seen the play with Coop and knew her feelings about the character. “A rich girl who was anti-Semitic and a bit of a racist, and all the guys in town are after her for her money. Don’t do it to Coop.”
“Operation Portia.” Scully stood up and pushed back his chair. “No detail is too unimportant to pass along to me. Nothing.”
He paused to get everyone’s commitment on that.
“A communication goes out to every command and patrol car in the force at nine hundred hours. ‘Operation looking for unnamed woman of Alex Cooper’s physical description, last seen on Wednesday evening in a black SUV going westbound on East 65th Street. Possibly across 85th Street Transverse road in Central Park. Anything else?”
“You want to mention chance of injury or may not be conscious?” Abruzzi asked.
“Not on this first salvo,” Scully said. “I just want every man and woman looking for her, and if anyone saw anything suspicious on Wednesday evening, maybe this will wake them up.”
No one disagreed.
“The chief of detectives will be coordinating everything from right here in One PP. Questions? Or are you ready to-?”
My phone began to vibrate on top of the conference table.
“I hope it’s important, Chapman,” the commissioner said to me, annoyed by the interruption. He turned back to the team. “So are all you guys ready to go ahead and find Alexandra Cooper?”
“It’s a text,” I said, my hand trembling as I picked it up and saw it was coming from Coop’s phone. “From her.”
“Real time? She just wrote it now?” Mercer pushed back from the table and got on his phone as he leaned in toward me.
Everyone in the room started buzzing about the text. I hoped they were all so stunned they wouldn’t notice I had the shakes.
I opened the message and stared at the two words before I said them out loud. I was trying to make sense of them, trying to be the hero-Coop’s hero-and cut the operation short. But it was just two ordinary words.