“That’s a big help. Narrows the search down to about a million locations citywide,” his partner piped up next. “Maybe it’s a pirate who has her. I look at these and I see blue beard.”
“What?” Peterson asked.
“Scramble the letters and I get the word beard, with an extra B. So it’s Bluebeard or Blackbeard.” The old-timer threw his hands up in exasperation. “Let me know, Chapman, when you come up with what was going on in Ms. Cooper’s personal think tank.”
“We ready to get to work?” Peterson asked Scully.
“I got some snitches who might be helpful with the Estevez angle of this. I’ll get right on it,” the Bluebeard aficionado said to the commissioner. “If you can take a little more heat, Chapman, I gotta say I never worked a case with Ms. Cooper, but I think you’re giving more credit than she’s due with this breaking-the-code crap.”
“Why’s-?”
“She always seemed like an Afghan to me-the dog, not the tribesmen. Long and lean, a fine, shiny coat of hair. Nice to walk out with, show dog and all that, but not so much brainpower as she’s cracked up to have. I’m with the captain on the bar and bed thing. I’ll buy the first few rounds if I come up wrong on this.”
“Start saving your dimes,” Mercer said. “I’ll be drinking big.”
The group began to break up as the executive officer on the desk outside came into the room and took the commissioner aside.
“Get me out of here, Detective Wallace,” I said. “You and I need a plan.”
The commissioner held up his hand and we all stood still. He finished his conversation with the XO and turned back to us.
“I’d like to have some volunteers, gentlemen,” Scully said. “The commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct just called in. One of his men who worked midnights just told him about some unusual activity he saw near the park on his way in on Wednesday.”
“A damsel in distress?” the old-timer asked. “The iPhone toss? Something real, or just make-believe?”
“Everything’s real until proven otherwise, okay? It’s nothing as dramatic as the sighting of a kidnap victim or as specific as a cell phone coming from an identified vehicle. But it’s an SUV incident worth a follow-up, so they tell us. You want this one, Mike?” the commissioner asked.
“I’ll pass.” Homicides spoiled you for working the grunt jobs and minor incidents.
“What else you got?” the lieutenant asked.
“Hal Shipley’s on his way to the pound to try to liberate his three vehicles.”
“That’s rich,” I said. “Yeah, Mercer and Jimmy and I would much rather go to Queens and do a face-off with the reverend.”
“Exactly the scene we don’t want, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “I’ll get a man on that immediately. What else?”
“What is this? You gonna transfer me to the rubber-gun squad before this operation even gets started?” I asked, eager to have a confrontation with almost anyone who crossed my path. “Take my weapon away ’cause you think I’m a danger to myself?”
“Or others,” Dr. Friedman said. “Yourself or others. That would be my standard.”
“Nobody’s taking your gun, Chapman. Just keep quiet,” the commissioner said. “The third call probably has nothing to do with this matter, but the notification just came in and we have to think of every possibility.”
“What is it?” Battaglia asked.
Keith Scully grimaced and looked away from me. “There was a jumper on the George Washington Bridge this morning. Roughly four A.M. A woman who climbed over the railing from the walkway, poised to go into the river, but thought better of it and went on her way before the cops could get to her.”
“Mary, Mother of God. I’m taking that one. We’ll go to the bridge, the Port Authority Police,” I said. “No way that was Coop.”
The GW Bridge was one of the most popular sites in the metro area for suicides. Fifty million dollars had been set aside by the legislature to build a nine-foot fence above the walkway to prevent the jumps, which averaged almost twenty a year, but construction hadn’t even started.
“There are surveillance cameras twenty-four/seven that sweep the bridge,” Scully said. “I’m told there are grainy images of the woman. Not great close-ups but should be good enough to ID.”
“What makes you so damn sure it wasn’t Alex?” Peterson said.
I was walking to the door of Scully’s office. “Because she’s terrified of heights, Loo. Because she’s so damn scared of heights I doubt you could get her to walk over the Hudson River if I tethered her to my waist, much less climb on a railing and look down.”
“So you’re not saying she wouldn’t have reached that point,” Dr. Friedman said, “because she wasn’t so depressed, are you? The woman on that bridge-who might just be Alex, if she had made the decision to end her life-has apparently reached the depths of her despair. You’re not addressing the issue of Ms. Cooper’s possible depression.”
“I’d address your front teeth with my right fist, if you were a guy.”
“Chapman!” Peterson roared at me.
“The woman is not depressed, Loo. She had nothing to be depressed about.”
“C’mon, Chapman,” Battaglia said. “She had the rug pulled out from underneath her in the courtroom and-”
“That’s happened to her before. She fights back from it every time, with the best team in the world to back her up.”
“And someone hacked into all her secrets. Who knows what the hell is going to hit Page Six, and when?”
“If I’m the biggest secret you thought she has, Mr. Battaglia, then the gossip columnists are in for a major disappointment. There’s no other personal dirt on Coop’s hard drive,” I said. “You, on the other hand, sir-you’ve been playing pin the tail on the reverend with Hal Shipley and some of your other constituents for years, rumors have it. It seems to me that it’s your secret deals that are about to unravel.”
I opened the door and motioned to Mercer and Jimmy to follow me.
“Don’t go anywhere, Chapman,” Peterson cautioned me.
“Holding tight, Loo.” Although my left leg was jiggling like I’d been bitten by a tarantula. “But I think we need to get a move on.”
Commissioner Scully told one of the Major Case guys to deal with the Central Park debrief, agreed to let Peterson intercept Shipley at the auto pound, and confirmed that I should look at the GW Bridge video to prove-or disprove-that the distraught woman was Coop.
“And, Doc,” I said, halfway through the door, reminded of the language in the campaign poster that was framed and hung behind Battaglia’s desk, “if you’re worried about anyone jumping, keep your eye on the district attorney. It’s not nice to play politics with people’s lives.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“This is a fool’s errand,” I said to Mercer and Jimmy as the three of us took the elevator up to the Port Authority Police office on the Manhattan end of the spectacular double-decked suspension bridge that had spanned the Hudson River since 1931.
“Then I’m happy to be one of the fools,” Mercer said. “We can make quick work of this.”
“Scully’s trying to keep me at arm’s length from this investigation.”
“He hasn’t put you in a straitjacket yet, Mike. Let’s keep on.”
We were met at the top by one of the patrol officers from the PAPD’s Emergency Services Unit, who led us into a small room, like a watchtower, perched above the great river that separated New York State from New Jersey at this point.
It was ten thirty on a brilliantly clear fall day. I could see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south past the new Freedom Tower and beyond the majestic Statue of Liberty, which stood at the mouth of the Hudson in New York Harbor.
“Are you the man with the video?” I asked after our introductions were complete.