“Bar, it says. And then there’s a space, and it says, Bed.”
Mercer was talking to someone, one finger plugged in his ear to keep out the noise in the room. When he hung up the phone after ninety seconds he looked dejected.
“One of the rookies found the phone fifteen minutes ago, caught in the branches of a bush in Central Park, just west of the roadway overpass,” he said. “The team bagged it and took it into the station house. Alex must have typed the message Wednesday night but apparently didn’t have the opportunity to hit SEND.”
“Then how-?” I asked. I had set my phone down on the long table and planted my hands firmly on either side of it.
“The cops immediately charged it up to see if anything that might help us had come in or out, before they sent it downtown,” Mercer said. “One of them noticed the draft on the screen and tapped SEND.”
“She must have written the words Wednesday night,” I mumbled. “Maybe she got caught doing it and her abductor tossed the phone into the park.”
Keith Scully slammed his hand on the table to restore order. “Give me the text again, Chapman. What does it say?”
The two words that Coop had texted to me before her phone was discarded gave no clue to her location. I spoke them aloud three times for the commissioner and his task force, and then read them silently again. Bar… Bed.
She hadn’t told me anything at all.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“So this text addressed to Mike,” Commissioner Scully said, “is the last thing Alex tried to get off from her phone Wednesday night.”
I looked across at Dr. Friedman and just stared her down. I was the person Coop reached out for-not rejected-when something went bad.
“Where’s the phone now?” Scully said.
The text had succeeded in keeping everyone in the room.
“Crime Scene’s going over it for touch DNA and prints,” Mercer said. “Then they’ll rush it down to TARU.”
The tech guys would work their magic. If it were possible to pinpoint the exact time and location that the phone landed in the park, it could be a help. And they would dump her device for any incoming calls-something that might have diverted her Wednesday night-as well as outgoing messages Coop may have sent.
There would certainly be some of her DNA on the phone, and perhaps partial prints of someone else. If she had in fact been abducted, there was the chance that her captor’s DNA was in the data bank and his prints in the system.
I tore two sheets of paper out of my memo book. On one of them I printed the word BAR in all caps. On the other I wrote BED.
Peterson saw me do it, then walked to the commissioner’s desk. He grabbed a stack of paper and passed it around so everyone could follow suit. Ricky Friedman just watched.
“Does any of this speak to any of you?” Scully asked.
Captain Abruzzi wasn’t writing. “Yeah, she was on her way to a bar-which we already knew-and then she was going to bed with whoever she was off to meet at the bar. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, what are you jumping through hoops for?”
“I doubt she’d be texting me about the going-to-bed part, Cap. Not with another guy,” I said. “Unless it was you.”
“Maybe she was trying to tell you it was over, Chapman,” Scully said. “Meant to be cryptic till she could get the entire message to you.”
“She’s not a cryptic woman,” I said. “The English lit major in her, Commissioner. She writes-she overwrites every thought she’s ever had. Two-word texts? That’s not the way she communicates.”
“What are the options?” Lieutenant Peterson asked. “First call is whether Alex got into the SUV voluntarily. What’s his name-Sadiq? He didn’t see any signs of force, did he?”
“Coop knows the first rule of kidnapping. Never get into the car. Never. Once you do it’s too late.” I had heard her give that lecture dozens of times, backed up by every FBI statistic in the country. Kick, scream, bite, fight. Just don’t get into the car or your chances of being found alive ever again are significantly diminished. “Sadiq wasn’t in a position to see into the SUV-tinted windows and all.”
“But he doesn’t describe a struggle?”
“No.”
“So did Alex get in because someone she knew pulled up and offered her a ride?” Peterson asked. “What do you think?”
I reversed the order of the words by shifting the papers in front of me. BED and BAR. It didn’t matter. Maybe they were meant to be as obvious as Abruzzi thought.
“You can’t rule it out,” Vickee said. “But who? And that would be just way too coincidental to be credible. There’d be something on her phone to confirm it, don’t you think? A communication with somebody, even it if wasn’t Mike.”
“You can say it out loud,” I said. “If Coop was in a friendly situation-if she had been secure, in the company of a person she knew, she probably would have texted Jake Tyler to apologize for being late and to ask if he was still waiting for her.”
“If she did,” the TARU sergeant said, “it will all be on her phone when we get it. Are they rushing it downtown to Bobby Bowman?”
“On the way,” Mercer said.
Lieutenant Peterson was back to how Coop got into the car. “So let’s assume it wasn’t a friendly encounter, okay? Assume the worst. How’d they get her off the street? And I’m saying ‘they’ because there was a driver, and Sadiq says she got into the side of the SUV behind the driver, so if there was force used, it’s coming from at least one more person in the backseat.”
“Could have been she was smacked on the head with a billy club or a jack,” one of the Major Case guys offered. “Sorry, Mike. I’m just being real. I don’t mean like gray matter all over the interior of the SUV-I mean just stunned is all. Stunned enough to pull her into the car.”
“Look, Chapman,” the commissioner said, “if this is too raw for you to listen to, we can pull back and you can work with Peterson out of the squad office. It’s understandable. In fact, it’s probably the smartest way to go.”
“Did I say anything? I’m thinking just the way the rest of you are.”
Except that every now and then the idea of a physical blow to Coop hit me like a tire iron in my chest.
“I wouldn’t imagine it was anything that split her skull in pieces like a cracked egg,” another detective said. “This text was written-what-maybe ten minutes to half an hour after she was grabbed, right? TARU will nail that timeline down, but it had to be written after she got into the vehicle.”
“I just said ‘stunned,’ didn’t I? We’re not talking permanent brain injury,” his colleague responded. “Still together enough to write the words. Bar-that’s Patroon. Bed-it’s whoever she was cheating with.”
“What else would just temporarily knock her out?” Peterson asked.
“A knife to her throat or a gun to her temple would keep her quiet,” Abruzzi said. “Might gain her compliance without leaving a mark.”
“I’d be in at the show of a weapon,” Peterson said. “Nothing more than that necessary to get me into a car.”
“How about something toxic over her face?” the TARU sergeant added. “What are the current drugs of choice?”
“I doubt anything was delivered by syringe,” Mercer said. “She’d have to have been pretty still already, with a vein exposed, to ensure a hit. Discard that idea.”
“No, I meant the old-fashioned way. A rag over her nose. Chloroform.”
“You’ve seen too many bad movies,” I said. “Chloroform isn’t any kind of guarantee. You’d have to get it smack over the vic’s nose and hold it there. You picturing a tough guy in the back of an SUV coming on to Coop with an ‘Excuse me, miss, would you stick your head into this rag and tell me if you think it’s chloroform?’ Nah, not happening.”