“Hold that thought. I’ve been dreaming about fried clams at the Bite and a steamed lobster courtesy of Larsen’s.”
I’d been dreaming about a bottle of cabernet in front of my fireplace on an early fall night. But all that would have to wait.
We were back in our video cubicle, trying again to examine footage from the hotel entrance closest to the Northeast Passage. After leaving Correlli and Branson, I had been drafted to help interview two of the housekeeping employees who had become hysterical during questioning, fearful that they were being targeted as subjects of the investigation.
Mercer was talking to a police inspector in the Dominican Republic about looking for the family of Corinne Thatcher’s ex-boyfriend, and reporters were texting me furiously because David Drusin had given his spin on the Gerry Dominguez arrest-and now my “cannibal cop” phrase was gaining tabloid traction.
“We should have some word on Paco and his whereabouts by tonight,” Mercer said. “What’s next on your list for me?”
“I’d say we got thirty-two hundred employees upstairs waiting to be interviewed,” Mike said.
“Sounds like a job for some rookie looking for a gold shield. Get me out of this dungeon.”
“It’s almost four o’clock,” I said. “We need to find a link between Thatcher and Carl Condon.”
“The Real Time Crime guys have run them six ways to Sunday and come up cold,” Mike said. “That one’s going to take detective work. Pounding the pavement.”
“Starting now?”
“I’m good to go,” Mercer said. “Get a jump on the morning.”
We told Rocco we were leaving. Two of his men, he told us, were working with Corinne Thatcher’s brother. No one had come up with her laptop and cell phone, and the brother was trying to reconstruct contacts of both friends and professional associations for the detectives.
“Where are you off to?” I asked.
“I want to eyeball some of the garage workers,” Mike said.
The Waldorf’s parking garage was on the 49th Street side of the building. If Branson and the feds were correct, that was closest to the Northeast Passage, which they assumed had been the killer’s point of entry.
“It’s been done,” Rocco said. “Every shift has been interviewed.”
“Not by me,” Mike said.
“Like you know something my squad doesn’t. Get real, Chapman.”
“Crack how the girl got in and we’re halfway home,” Mike said, looking over at me. “You and Mercer with me?”
“I’m in,” I said. “Beats facing the music with Battaglia.”
The three of us made our way upstairs and found a cushy trio of armchairs in the main lobby in which we sat to make our calls. Mike checked in at Manhattan North with his lieutenant Mercer called the SVU to report on the day and learn whether there was any news, and I avoided Laura-and the stack of messages she had undoubtedly been collecting from a district attorney who didn’t like to be ignored-by calling Nan Toth.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“Still at the Waldorf. Nothing’s coming together the way we need it to.”
“Same on this end.”
“Raymond Tanner?” I asked. “Any sign of him?”
“Zero,” Nan said. “There must have been a plan. Evan and I went up to talk to Judge Aikens. He’s peeved, to say the least. You can’t micromanage this one, Alex. You can trust Evan to keep his eye on the case and on the players.”
“Thanks. And if you don’t mind calling Laura, please tell her I’m keeping her honest. She can say to Battaglia she hasn’t heard from me since I left the office.”
I waited for Mike and Mercer to finish their calls. When I looked up after checking my texts, I saw Rocco Correlli sprinting from the basement stairwell toward the exit door that led to the garage.
“Rocco! What’s the rush?”
“I was chasing after you guys,” he said, stopping to catch his breath. “I figured you were outside in the garage.”
The three of us were on our feet, phones off, as we walked to meet him.
“Something clicked?” I asked. “Progress?”
“Only if you think bad things happen in threes.”
“Another?”
“Corpse. Yeah. Another dead girl.”
“Where is she, Rocco?” Mike asked.
“On a train.”
“Subway or commuter train?” Mike said. “You talking homicide?”
“I’m talking a broad with a slit throat, naked and apparently sexually abused. Train tracks marked on her thighs and tail. She’s in a railroad car, Chapman. Some kind of private railroad car, sitting on an abandoned set of tracks right the fuck next to Grand Central.”
TWENTY-ONE
“The feds found her,” Rocco Correlli said. “They were doing a sweep in advance of the president’s trip.”
The four of us were on Park Avenue, walking to the glass-sided entrance of the MetLife Building on 45th Street, headed for the tall escalators that led down to the main concourse of Grand Central.
“I didn’t know there was any such thing as a private railroad car,” I said, waiting for the traffic light to change.
“That way of travel is mostly a thing of the past,” Mercer said, “but there are still scores of old cars-antiques-that are in private hands.”
“And they just sit in the tunnels?”
“No, no. Amtrak actually lets the owners-or renters-travel on certain routes, for a hefty fee. There are some real beauties, and as long as you’ve got a siding-a short piece of track that connects to the main rail-you can pretty much travel around the country in one of these.”
“What do you know about the girl?” I asked Rocco.
“Pretty much like Corinne Thatcher’s situation. No clothes, no phone, no computer, no personal belongings. Her ID is the first mystery we have to solve.”
“Do they know who owns the railroad car?”
“Not yet. They only found the body fifteen minutes before I got the call,” Rocco said, holding out his arm to the angry taxi driver as we crossed against the light.
“Fresh kill?”
“At least a day old,” Rocco said, turning to address Mike. “How come you didn’t sniff this out during your early-morning tour of the tunnels, bright eyes? Were you looking to be stiffed by the feds?”
“It’s a big hole in the ground, Loo. I didn’t see any private cars.”
“There weren’t any in the direction we walked,” Mercer said. “I know what they look like.”
We had practically run the four blocks from the Waldorf entrance into MetLife, through the revolving doors, and down the moving staircase. Rush hour had begun, so we were jostled and crowded by end-of-day workers determined to make their return commute.
Two NYPD officers were waiting for us at the foot of the escalator. Passengers were streaking down staircases, crossing the concourse, and making their way to their designated departure gates. They were oblivious to our arrival.
The cops escorted us down the western staircase to the lower level. Instead of turning left, as we had in our morning excursion, we made a right and walked out onto another long platform. Trains rumbled in the distance, flashes of headlights occasionally penetrating the concrete archways in the darkened space.
Rocco and Mike were directly behind the uniformed officers. I tried to keep pace with them as Mercer brought up the rear.
Someone had turned on a row of overhead lights ahead of us. I could see an elongated railroad car against the black background of the interior space. It looked as though we were traveling back in time. The single coach was from a much earlier era, painted a bright red with black and yellow trim. It had to be more than one hundred years old but was restored to a high gloss.
“That’s what they call private varnish,” Mercer said, expressing his admiration for the great-looking machine up ahead.
“What does that mean?”
He kept one hand on the small of my back, nudging me forward when he talked. “Late eighteen hundreds, before rich Americans had cars, they used to travel around in private trains, like this one. They were made of wood, so it was extremely difficult to maintain the exterior condition of them because of weather issues. Most owners varnished them so they really gleamed riding along those rails. Poor folk in small towns? They got to know pretty quick that the shiny varnished trains were the private ones.”