“Take a step back,” Mercer said. “I’ve had three, maybe four cases with it, and Alex worked on one of them with me.”
“So?”
“It’s easy to get. My perp bought it online from a chemical supply company in Canada. In fact, Vickee, call Catherine and tell her to pull the Juarez case from 2009,” Mercer said. “See if that fool is still locked up.”
Mercer went on. “Suppose there’s someone strong enough to grab Alex by the arm when he opens the car door and calls her name. She leans over and he’s got a grip on her, and before she can open her mouth to scream, the soaked rag has her nose covered.”
“What’s the point?” I asked.
He practically put his face up against mine. “Maybe the point is that it’s good news, if you think about it.”
“You and I must have very different definitions of good.”
“Listen up, Mike. If somebody wanted to kill Alex Cooper-and those threats have been real from time to time-he apparently had the opportunity to do that on Wednesday night,” Mercer said. “She could have been taken out by a bullet walking alone on a side street. She could have been stabbed and left for dead. I’m looking at the fact that she may have been abducted as opposed to killed as a good thing.”
“On East 65th Street? Have you got it confused with the South Side of Chicago? Anacostia or Watts? We don’t get so many drive-bys in the silk-stocking district, do we, dude?” I said, getting up to pace the perimeter of the room. “Now, we get to talking about dump jobs, you’ll have to admit this is prime real estate for that.”
Dr. Friedman inched forward and asked Vickee what kind of job I was talking about.
“That’s what we call it, Doc, when the bad guys pick a vic off the street, drive off to some remote place to do whatever piece of the nasty it is that they want to do, and then dump the body in another location altogether,” I said. “What’s to say Coop hasn’t been killed? What’s to say she’s not-?”
I couldn’t finish the sentence
“Sleeping with the fishes?” Abruzzi said. “Curled up in the weeds alongside the Belt Parkway? Use your head, Chapman. If someone was looking to snuff a prosecutor, he’d want it to be a very public dump. She’d be lying at the feet of the Angel of the Waters in Central Park. She’d be splayed across the information booth in Grand Central. He’d want the city to know she was offed. That’s not what we’ve got.”
“Then, what?”
“The alternative may be almost worse.”
I didn’t think Abruzzi was wrong. The thoughts I couldn’t deal with involved Coop in the hands of a sexual predator.
I needed to get out of headquarters and continue looking for the monster who had her, so I could rip his throat out. The air in the commissioner’s office was stifling.
“Could we get back to chloroform for a minute?” Mercer asked. “It makes sense as a weapon if you’re telling me that Alex was alert and able to send-to try to send-Mike a text after she was forced in the car.”
Several heads around the table were nodding.
“I mean, all it does is provide a short-term knockout, if it works right. Five to ten minutes at best, unless it’s applied to her nose and mouth continuously,” Mercer said. “Suppose Alex was overcome by the chloroform, let’s say. Not hurt. The drug was just used to overwhelm her and get her off the street as quietly as possible.”
Lieutenant Peterson was the first to agree. “Go with it.”
“The driver takes off and Alex is in the backseat with another guy.”
Mercer’s words had me squirming. I must have looked like I was going to fling myself through one of the commissioner’s windows.
“Sit down, Chapman,” Scully said.
“She comes around at some point, not long after the cloth comes off her face.” Mercer turned to me to deliver what he figured was the good news. “That wouldn’t have happened if they wanted her dead, Mike.”
“Unless they were ISIS,” Abruzzi said. “Then they want her wide-awake so they can torture her. You know how they treat their prisoners, don’t you? Burn them to a crisp, behead them-all kinds of medieval torture tactics. I bet they got sex crimes that would make your guts explode. Did she ever prosecute a terrorist? Man, those beasts would have a party with Alexandra Cooper.”
“What is it with you?” Scully asked the captain.
“He’s a dick, boss,” I said. “Always was, always will be.”
“Chapman shouldn’t be in the room,” Abruzzi said. “He doesn’t belong on this task force. He’s thinking with his private parts and not his head.”
“It’s below the belt for both of you,” Peterson said. “Cut it out. Chapman’s in this until he wants off the case. Go on, Mercer.”
“We can get a pretty close guess on the time from the point Alex gets into the SUV till the phone is-what would you say?-tossed? Tossed into the park.”
“So she’s come around,” the district attorney said. “Maybe she had her phone in her hand-”
“No, no,” Mercer said. “She’d have dropped it once she went limp if she’d been holding it.”
I had been party to this kind of brainstorming session dissecting crime strategies more times than I could count. I had offered ideas about the manner of death or the disposal of bodies-ideas that would have distressed the next of kin in any given case if they’d been party to the conversation. I was sick to my stomach with Coop at the center of these hypotheticals.
“She keeps it in her pocket,” I said. “If she was wearing her trench coat, she’d have had the phone in her pocket at some point. Or sticking out of the top of her bag. Not in her hand.”
“So Alex comes around,” Mercer said. “We know that. Obviously, she had the opportunity to get the phone in her hands to write two words-words that make sense-so she was pretty alert. Maybe she was trying to say more than she got off. But she must have been caught in the act and whoever was next to her in the seat grabbed the phone and threw it away.”
“Everybody okay with that as a jumping-off point?” Scully said.
The people at the table looked at one another and murmured assent.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“What is?”
“If she’s alert enough to be trying to signal me, then she’s too smart to be sending me words that the bad guys would make sense of if they caught her. Too obvious, these words. They don’t mean what they say.”
I pushed the two pieces of paper away from me.
“Each of you,” Scully said, “needs to have someone in your respective offices start playing with bar and bed. Use the dictionary, use restaurant guides, use every letter of the alphabet.”
“Mike’s right, Commissioner,” Vickee said, pinning the papers with the two words on them to the table with her forefingers. “Alex is a puzzler. Does the Saturday Times crossword faster than Bill Clinton, and he’s supposed to do it lightning quick. These are clues to something, but you’re wasting your time if you think these six letters are literal.”
“Now we’ve got a regular Bletchley Park going on, don’t we? All these smart broads who are better than computers at figuring things out. Too bad I’ve never met one of them,” Abruzzi said. “Myself, I’m lousy at word games. And the guys in the Nineteenth squad? Could be a few of them can play bingo, but that’s as far as they go. Might save us all some effort if we bring a psychic into the conversation next. Does Ms. Cooper communicate with the spirit world, too?”
“You can lead this part of it, Mike,” the lieutenant said to me, ignoring the captain. “Get a quiet place to work and puzzle out the clue.”
“Barbed,” one of the Major Case guys said, sliding the two pieces of paper together. “Maybe she just meant barbed? Like a place with barbed wire around it.”