“Yes, sir.”
“Were you actually working at four A.M.?”
“Yeah.”
“Emergency Services-you’ve got the toughest assignment in the book,” Mercer said, “and on a bridge hung hundreds of feet over the water.”
In all police departments, these were the cops who handled every imaginable hazardous task, from structural collapses to car and rail accidents to victim rescue from every kind of life-threatening situation. The GW was the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge, and I had seen Emergency Services officers climbing towering cables to rescue workmen whose gear had broken, truck drivers whose trailers had jackknifed perilously close to the edge of the span, and dying patients stuck in ambulances when a political stunt resulted in the intentional jamming of the bridge during rush hour not long ago.
“Hey, I asked for this work,” the officer responded. “It’s pretty exhilarating.”
“The woman last night,” I said, as he went about turning the monitor around to show us the footage, “did you actually get to see her? I mean, close up? In person?”
“Nah. The bridge is more than half a mile across. Almost forty-eight hundred feet to be exact. By the time we got the call and I was dispatched-I was handling a car accident on the far side of the river, where the Palisades Parkway merges with the bridge entrance-she was already hoofing it back to this side.”
“You followed?”
“Yes, but she disappeared into thin air,” he said. “That’s pretty common, once these suicides change their minds. I’ve talked my share of jumpers down off the ledge when they’re right at the tipping point, but if they’ve backed off before we get to them, they don’t stick around for me to give them a parking ticket or a recommendation for counseling.”
“How about rolling the tape?” I asked.
Mercer and I sat in front of the large screen, with Jimmy North behind me. The officer stood beside Mercer so he could point out the figures.
“There was a lot of fog at that hour of the morning, so you won’t see much at first,” he said. “I’ll freeze-frame it when she comes into view.”
The screen lit up when the video started to run. Between the blackness of the water and the hazy sky, all I could see were the endless vertical cables and the striking gray aluminum color of the steel tower on the Jersey side, obscured in places by the wisps of fog.
“Four A.M. and there’s all that traffic?” Mercer said.
“There’s always traffic, man,” the officer said. “This is when the early-morning commute begins. Firemen, cops, nurses-all the essentials whose tours start in an hour or so. They get into town to avoid traffic, park, eat breakfast, and go to work.”
I was focused on the walkway on the south side of the bridge, but the fast-moving cars created a blur. “Hard to see,” I said.
“Fourteen lanes of traffic. Over a hundred million vehicles a year. You can understand why we don’t get to everyone in time.”
“Now that I watch this, sure.”
“You’ll see a guy going westbound on a bicycle on the upper level. Then she comes out of the night murk.”
I adjusted my seating and stared at the walkway. The cyclist lit up the path with his neon-yellow windbreaker, reflectors on his sneakers and the rear of the bike, and a bright-white helmet.
It wasn’t quite the final airport scene in Casablanca, but a woman emerged from the fog just seconds later.
“It’s not Coop,” I said. Then I watched her walk, holding my breath as I did, and looked again. “Maybe. Maybe so. Freeze it right there. How high is that railing?”
“Just three feet above the concrete,” the officer said. “No barriers, no nets. It’s why we’re such a magnet for jumpers.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out her height against a known marker.”
All we could see at this point was the back of the woman’s head. She was tall and thin, and her hair was medium length and blond, like Coop’s.
“Let it run, Mike,” Mercer said. “Run it through once before you keep stopping it. I don’t think this one moves-you know-like Alex.”
The officer hit the PLAY button and the woman continued walking, briskly, away from us. She was dressed in a short jacket and dark slacks. I cursed the slacks. If I could have seen the shape of her legs-the slender calves down to perfect ankles-I’d have known Coop anywhere.
She took ten or twelve steps and I knew Mercer was right. “Not Coop,” I said. “The walk is off. I was looking at the height and general build, but you nailed it.”
“How do you mean?” Jimmy asked.
“She’s bouncing on the balls of her feet,” Mercer said. “It’s a little thing, but it’s just not the way Alex carries herself.”
The fog had cut into our line of sight. Then the woman reemerged, stopping abruptly just past a phone mounted on the railing with a sign that read LIFE IS WORTH LIVING: CALL LIFE-NET and an 800 number.
She grabbed the railing, looked down at the water, and swung her leg over the side. “So not Coop.” I was practically shouting. “What was I thinking, for even a minute?”
The woman’s profile was all wrong. Her nose was prominent and hooked, not straight and patrician. She had bangs on her forehead that reached her eyebrows, and a double chin, not Coop’s chiseled bones and angular lines.
“Definitely not.” Mercer let out a sigh, too. Relief, I assumed. “Definitely not Alex. And Alex could never swing her leg out over that iron rail after looking straight down from that height-she would have passed right out.”
“Big-time,” I said, pushing back to stand up and look down at the land below us.
Mercer hit the PLAY button again and leaned in to watch, two or three more times. He was careful that way. I didn’t need any more convincing.
“What do you guys want me to do about this person?” the officer asked. “She’ll be back, sooner or later.”
“Your usual follow-up,” Mercer said.
My moment of euphoria had passed. The woman who’d been ready to jump just hours earlier was, to the best of our knowledge, still alive. I didn’t have the emotional energy to worry about her. Coop’s fate was still a mystery, which I seemed powerless to solve.
TWENTY-NINE
“Here’s the elevator, Mike,” Mercer said.
“I’m walking down.”
“It’s like nine hundred steps, twenty flights of stairs or more.”
“C’mon, Jimmy. Let the old dude with the football player’s knees ride to the bottom,” I said. “I’m taking the scenic route. What do you know about Fort Washington?”
“This neighborhood? Washington Heights? I hear it’s coming back.”
“The hood was lost to Dominican drug gangs in the 1980s. The Red Top Gang, the Wild Cowboys-real urban marauders,” I said, slowly starting down the staircase, which was enclosed in steel mesh, offering the same great views as the walkway above. “It’s back all right. But I’m talking about the fort itself.”
“I’m not as good on my military history as you, Mike.”
I stopped on the first landing and looked to the north, pointing out the spot to Jimmy. “Not even fifty yards from here is where the remains of the walls of the fort are, inside Bennett Park. I used to come here to play as a kid.”
“I’ve never even heard of Bennett Park.”
We wound down to the next level. I kept taking deep breaths of the morning air, happy for the brief distraction. “Well, the fort was built in 1776 so that George Washington could defend New York during the Revolution.”
I pressed against the steel caging and looked across the Hudson. “Fort Lee was built on the other side, to prevent the British from going upriver and to provide the troops with an escape route to the west-to Jersey and Pennsylvania-in case they did.”
“So Fort Lee is named for an actual fort?” Jimmy laughed. “I thought it was just a bunch of condo livers hanging off the Palisades, waiting for Governor Christie to screw up the traffic patterns in some kind of political vendetta.”