“What is it about the river for you?” Mercer asked.
“You don’t want to know.”
“Is it Renner? Something to do with him or the Westies?”
“Renner just picked up where Coonan and Featherstone left off,” I said. “Their whole thing was kidnapping.”
“Kidnapping?” Mercer asked. “I thought the rackets was it.”
“Yeah, but when their vics didn’t pay up, they got their revenge by kidnapping,” I said. “They took relatives, they took local businessmen and their families-it was known as the snatch-and held them for ransom.”
Mercer was quiet for a minute. “But there’s no ransom here.”
“Not yet,” I said. “Coonan had a guy who worked for him. A butcher. The neighborhood butcher. His name was Eddie Cummiskey. Eddie the Butcher they called him.”
“So?”
“Coonan used Eddie to kill his victims if nobody paid up. Dismember them.”
“You serious?”
Mercer came up beside me on the end of the dock.
“Stop asking me that. Of course I’m serious. I used to have nightmares, after my dad shot Charlie, that Eddie would take him apart one day, piece by piece.”
“That must have been jive, man. Not for real.”
“You think so? Check the Westies’ files, Mercer. Coonan used to keep some of the dismembered fingers from the victims’ bodies in a freezer in his office, so he could use them to plant fingerprints on guns his crew used in hits.”
“No wonder you had nightmares,” Mercer said. “What did they do with the other body parts?”
“Coonan made Eddie the Butcher take them down to the Hudson,” I said, staring out at the darkening ripples in the water. “Throw them in the water. Right there in Midtown, the West Forties and Fifties. One time Eddie forgot to puncture the lungs in a guy’s torso and it bobbed to the surface a week later. Floated right into a sailboat out for a ride off the Battery, or he’d never have been found. But usually the fish got the flesh and bones that sunk to the bottom.”
“I can’t begin to imagine what those men were like,” Mercer said.
“The Westies made me ashamed to be Irish,” I said, looking from the Verrazano Bridge to my right back up to the GW on my left. “They were murderous thugs, Mercer. And they used the Hudson River as their personal morgue.”
FORTY-THREE
Mercer’s phone rang. “Wallace,” he said, then walked ten feet away from me to take the call.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Catherine Dashfer,” he said to me. “You want it?”
We met halfway and I grabbed his phone.
“You got something good?”
“This call didn’t happen, Mike.”
“Shoot.”
“Battaglia’s playing games with the police commissioner,” Catherine said. “I’m not quite sure why.”
“I’ll give you that piece of it. Scully thinks the district attorney is beholden to the Reverend Hal Shipley. It’s been going on for a while, but it came to a boil this morning during our meeting,” I said. “You have something about Coop?”
“I wish I did.”
“What, then?”
“Keep this to yourself, Mike, okay? Just you and Mercer.”
“To the grave.”
“Battaglia took the DA’s squad off the search for Josie Aponte,” Catherine said. “He put his civilian investigators on it instead of detectives and they found her around noon today.”
“That’s great!” I shouted.
“Nobody knows. They’re still questioning her pretty hard.”
“Where is she?”
“With family. It’s pretty clear that she went from the courthouse to Penn Station and jumped on a train, down to South Philly where her sister lives. Josie’s real name is Rosita Quinones. They picked her up at her sister’s apartment.”
“What’s she got to say?”
“Not exactly all you’re hoping for, Mike,” Catherine said. “Rosita’s not talking yet. We’ve got all the senior people in the unit working on this, believe me. Once she realizes Estevez is unlikely to step forward to bail her out, we’re hoping she rolls over on him. But there’s no sign of any connection between Alex and the newlyweds-Rosita Quinones and Antonio Estevez-after the moment that she got out of the criminal court building.”
“But you’re still digging? You’re not giving up?”
“We’ll keep digging, of course. It’s just that a first dump of her cell phone and texts doesn’t suggest anything going on that remotely involves a kidnapping.”
I hadn’t thought for long that Estevez was behind Coop’s disappearance. I didn’t believe he could have orchestrated an abduction as sophisticated and clean as this one seemed to be. Rosita’s skill was in tech work, and she had done all that was expected of her by breaking into the DA’s office computer system.
“What was it Drew Poser said on Wednesday afternoon?” I asked. “That Estevez was trying to bring Coop down, right?”
“Yes.”
“Seems to me he was on the way to getting that done by causing her enough embarrassment that all of us thought she might actually take some time off to chill,” I said. “Nobody thought he was out to-to hurt her.”
“Battaglia’s clearly aiming to undermine the commissioner by taking over the Rosita Quinones matter. He’s hoping to see egg on Scully’s face because the NYPD didn’t make the arrest before she skipped town,” Catherine said. “That’s why you’ve got to protect me on this. I just wanted you to know that Quinones and Estevez are unlikely suspects in Alex’s disappearance.”
“I get it, and I appreciate it. One suggestion for you?”
“Okay.”
“Keep your team as far away from this one as possible,” I said. “There’s some kind of link between Reverend Hal and Estevez, and the DA’s a fool to try to take control of anything that involves Shipley. It will come back to bite him in the ass by the time all of this unravels.”
“Point well taken, Mike. I’m just a foot soldier here. I like to stay out of the line of fire,” Catherine said. “But I was with Alex on Wednesday afternoon just after she left Battaglia’s office. I got my first hint of how deep this trouble may go.”
I didn’t offer anything I knew. I didn’t want to compromise Catherine’s position on Battaglia’s staff. But it was beginning to dawn on a few of us that the DA’s behind-the-scenes manipulations to retain political power might become transparent in the weeks ahead.
“You mean with Shipley?” I asked.
“Yes,” Catherine said. “I hadn’t known what a tough spot Battaglia put Alex in during her investigation of the complaint against Shipley, but then he tried to cover his tail with a file memo. And there is also the letter Estevez made Rosita upload on the computer. It’s a real hornet’s nest.”
“I hear you.”
“More importantly, Mike, how are you holding up?”
I didn’t have an answer that made sense.
“Is there anything we can do to help you? We’re all itching to be more useful,” Catherine said. “Alex will be furious with us when she finds out we’ve left you hanging out in the cold.”
“Mercer’s with me. We’re… working through-” I couldn’t finish the sentence. I couldn’t hold a thought for more than a few seconds.
I passed the phone back to Mercer. I had never felt as lost as I did now.
“Keep the faith, Catherine,” he said, ending the call.
Then Mercer turned to me. “Now I have a better understanding of why you want to stay near this river, Mike, after what you said about the Westies. But we’re taking this boat back right now.”
He stalked off the dock with Jimmy North, toward Pete Fitzgerald. I stepped on the gunwale of the Intrepid and lowered myself down. I lifted the bench and took a look at Cormac Lonigan. His discomfort level was high-bent over the toilet in the cramped, foul-smelling space with his hands cuffed behind him-but he wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of looking at me or asking for mercy.