Within minutes, Katie called to the men to pull her out. The sergeant and another man dropped to the ground beside the opening and the two larger detectives steadily worked the ropes, handover-hand.
The bare feet of the dead woman came into view before the top of Katie’s head, as she twisted herself to stay centered.
“Got it!” the sergeant shouted. “Hang on, Katie. Great job.”
Chet Kirschner stepped forward to put his gloved hands on the legs of Salma Zunega. “Gently, men.”
The crumpled and broken body of the woman came into full view. Her mouth was wide-open and it appeared her skull had split practically in half. Stones and small rocks were embedded in her face and on her shoulders, and when her head swung around in my direction, I could see a hole in the front of her neck that was caked with dried blood.
She was clad only in a teddy-a pale yellow piece of lingerie that was encrusted with snow. Her upper back and places on her legs and arms were imprinted with even lines that formed rectangles on her skin, as though she had been pressed against the bars of a cage.
I didn’t move. I was fixated on the face of the young mother who had died so violently. Why had she denied her earlier calls to 911, and then failed to make the last one in time to save her life? And after the odd back-and-forth about those calls, would anyone have responded if she had managed to press Send?
The ESU men followed Kirschner’s directions, while Mike and Mercer held on to Katie Cion until the body was removed from her grasp and lowered onto the gurney.
“It looks like she was tortured,” I said softly. It would be Kirschner’s job to sort out which of the injuries had been fatal. “Why is her skin so pink?”
“It’s the lividity, Alex,” Kirschner said.
I knew that the blood settled into the skin’s capillaries as they dilated after circulation ceased-usually causing a purple discoloration in the dependent parts of the body.
“It’s often this light pink,” he went on, “when a body has been recovered in icy conditions.”
“Let’s get her out of here before the vultures across the street smell blood,” Mike said. “Can we transport her in the EMS vehicle so we don’t have to bring a marked morgue bus in here?”
“That’s fine,” Kirschner said.
Two of the ESU guys raised the gurney up from the ground and I heard it lock into place. Katie Cion had already gotten into the rear of the truck to put on her jacket and boots. The men draped a sheet over the twisted form of Salma Zunega.
The four ESU men surrounded the gurney and started to wheel it down the slight incline. The ground was uneven, and as they moved ahead Salma’s body shifted on its temporary bed and her leg dropped over the side of the gurney.
“Hold it a minute,” I said, from a step or two behind the group. “Could you just stop while I take a quick look? I think I saw something on her leg.”
The sergeant who was trying to bring this difficult operation to a successful close rolled his eyes at Mike as I moved in next to the body.
Chet Kirschner was there before me. With his latex glove, he moved the left leg of the mangled corpse a bit farther apart from the right and brushed some dirt away from the exposed skin. On the upper left thigh was a familiar marking.
“It’s a rose, Alex. There’s a tattoo here of a small rose.”
SEVENTEEN
“Salma Zunega must have been trafficked into this country,” I said.
Visions of what that meant for her, what her first years in New York must have been like, flashed through my head. Like the Ukrainians who had just survived their journey, I knew only too well what that life was like, I had met scores of women like Salma throughout my career. And far too many of them had shared her ultimate fate.
“It would have been years ago, no doubt. Property of the same scumbag snakehead who was running the Golden Voyage,” Mercer said. “Property of the rose.”
We were standing on the front steps of Gracie Mansion, facing the river from a higher vantage point than the slope on which the well sat.
“Good to know the American dream still works, Coop. Somebody in the family spends his life savings to smuggle his kid over the border, and she winds up being the best-looking one so she makes a living on her back instead of picking grapes.”
“Can we at least wait inside, Mike? It’s freezing.”
The mayor had directed us to stay at the scene until he could get here. He didn’t want any news released until he had a clear understanding of how this discovery had unfolded.
The door had been opened for us by the housekeeper, a short dark-skinned woman with a generous smile who had worked there, she said, since the earliest days of the Koch administration.
I followed her inside, through the large reception space with its distinctive black-and-white diamond-shaped flooring. “I think you’ll be most comfortable here in the library,” she said, depositing us in the handsome room with floor-to-ceiling windows, denticulated cornices, and furniture that looked original to the building.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Mike said. “Not on this scale.”
“Neither do I.”
“So go back to the night before last. You’ve got a shipload of immigrants desperate to get ashore, who panic when they can see the land, smell it, practically touch it, but nobody shows up to take them ashore.”
“Except what looks like a government boat coming to intercept them,” Mercer said.
“And right up the street from the mayor’s house, a congressman goes nuts about something. Was it a baby who wasn’t really sick by the time she got to the hospital?”
“And if it wasn’t Leighton’s baby, why would he care so much?” I asked.
“We know for sure he was drunk and flying downtown on the highway,” Mercer said, “which is when he got into an accident.”
“One girl with a rose tattoo, probably Ukrainian, washes up in Queens. Her Mexican comadre starts playing phone tag with emergency operators, then someone shows up to visit her last night and sticks a corkscrew in her throat before he takes her out for a stroll,” Mike said, fingering one of the old cannonballs that sat on the mantel over the fireplace. “And deposits her here, in a well at Gracie Mansion.”
“Where, for some reason, the mayor most definitely did not want Scully to post his men this morning,” I said.
“We need to get back to the squad and chart this all out,” Mike said. “It’s part of one big pie, and we just got to figure out who the baker is. What’s holding Hizzoner up?”
Mercer was staring out the window, then abruptly walked out of the library without saying a word.
“Maybe we can get the housekeeper to show us around before Statler gets here,” I said. “You think it would help your noncoincidental theory to see any other parts of the house?”
“Better to do it without telling her. Where did Mercer go?”