Death Dance (34 page)

"I asked you to throw the damn cup away. Why do you risk
getting good evidence by being a cowboy?" I asked Mike.

"Hey, the first time we were in Berk's apartment, you were
hoping to pick up some white hairs, weren't you?"

"I didn't do it then, did I?"

"Garbage. I took the cup because it was garbage. Argue that to
the stiffs who sit on the appellate court bench and wouldn't know a
crime scene from a cocktail party. Let's go—out of the car."

"I'll wait for you down here."

"Battaglia said to keep an eye on you. I got this far so
there's no point in letting you be a sitting target on a street corner.
Don't pout about Joe Berk's DNA. I got what we need, didn't I?"

I followed Mike up the narrow staircase that led to his
fifth-floor apartment. It was a studio that he had long ago christened
"the coffin" because of its small size and dark interior. Since Val's
death, that nickname must have made each homecoming a reminder of his
loss.

"Just throw those things on the floor and have a seat," he
said, pointing to a chair in the corner of the room. He grabbed clean
clothes from the closet and dresser and went into the bathroom to
shower.

The disarray in the apartment was startling. While his
department car was usually littered with empty coffee containers and
food wrappers, Mike's personal appearance—most often a
blazer, button-down-collar shirt, and neatly pressed slacks or
jeans—was ordinarily reflected in his home surroundings. I
started to hang up a wind-breaker that had fallen to the floor and
stuff socks and underwear in his laundry bag.

But more disturbing than the messiness was that this intimate
space had been transformed into a shrine to Valerie. There were
photographs of her on every surface, and her belongings were crowded
onto shelves—architectural design books stacked on top of
Mike's collection of historical biographies, and the exotic shells she
brought back from her tropical vacations. I didn't know whether Val had
moved all these things into Mike's apartment, or he had retrieved them
from her place and set them up here after her death.

I bent over to study a photograph of Val I had never seen
before. It was a close-up of her face, beaming back at the
photographer— Mike, no doubt—from beneath the brim
of an NYPD baseball cap. I was ashamed to catch myself making
superficial comparisons—how much more even Val's features
were than my own, what a fine beauty she possessed. I straightened up
and dusted off the picture with any sleeve.

And then there were the clothes—several
pastel-colored crewneck sweaters stacked on a closet shelf beside
Mike's darker ones, strappy sandals lined up next to his loafers, and a
diaphanous robe in Val's favorite lavender hues that was still draped
across the back of the wooden chair that he had offered me to sit on.

I was smoothing the covers on the bed that had been unmade,
probably for days, when Mike came out of the bathroom. "What are you
doing?"

"We can come back later on and I can help you straighten
things up."

"It's not Buckingham Palace, Coop. It's the way I live, okay?"

"It didn't used to be."

"A lot of things didn't used to be. C'mon. Twelve-minute
turnaround. Not bad, huh?"

"Would you like me to—well, to sort of go through
some of Val's things with you?"

He looked at me as though I had said something crazy,
something unthinkable. "Can you just leave it alone? I'm not ready. Can
you make a goddamn effort to understand that? Can you get it?"

I opened the door and started down the steps. I don't think
Mike would have said anything to hurt me intentionally, but the shot
was painful. "Better than you think."

I scanned the Sengor story in the newspaper as Mike drove the
short distance to 56th Street and Park Avenue, near the town house to
which Elsa's salon had moved. We picked up enough coffee for ourselves
and the early-morning staff from a deli at the end of the block.

Elsa buzzed us in through security and we took the elevator
upstairs. She groaned when she saw my hair, before either of us could
greet her, and we walked to the rear of the sleek salon where the
col-orists worked. We had been friends for years, and I relied on that
relationship as much as on her talent and eye.

"You gotta be a magician for this job," Mike said. "But she's
unbearable if she isn't blond enough, so give those charred ends a go."

Elsa went into the supply room to mix a formula and came back
with my stylist, Nana.

"Well, if it isn't Nana-from-Ghana," Mike said, getting up to
embrace her. "This is like the hair ICU this morning, no? All hands on
deck for Coop's toasted tendrils."

Nana fixed her broad smile at Mike and looked at the nape of
his neck. "While you're waiting for Alex, I think I'd better shape you
up, detective," she said in her distinctive West African patois. "Come
with me."

"I was hoping you'd say that."

They walked to the front together and I told Elsa what had
happened yesterday while she wrapped my ends in tinfoil to set the
bleach.

After the color processing, Nana tried to even the damage that
I had compounded after the explosion with my amateur clipping. It was
almost nine when Mike and I left the salon to continue on
down—town to my office.

Laura was waiting for me at the door when we came in,
apologizing for having left the deadly letter on my desk.

"You couldn't have known any better than I did. There's no
reason for you to blame yourself. Thank God it didn't get
you—
I'm
helpless without you," I said, trying to lighten the atmosphere.

"Battaglia wants to see you. He told me it's got to be right
away, 'cause he's going down to Washington to testify at a Senate
hearing on gun control. Don't even sit down, Alex. He means
immediately."

"You coming?" I asked Mike.

He sat at my desk and spread out a napkin beneath the powdered
jelly doughnut he was dissecting. "The man didn't ask for me. I'm
dining now."

Battaglia was packing his briefcase with papers, ready to
leave for the airport.

"How do you feel?"

"Fine, thanks. It was a good scare."

"You getting anywhere on the Met?"

"Not much further than I told you yesterday. Only development
is that a man's glove found near the scene of Talya's attack has Joe
Berk's DNA inside it."

Battaglia's cigar wiggled at the news. "Interesting."

"Don't get too excited about that fact, Paul. I don't want to
keep it from you, but there may be an issue about the admissibility.
We'll find a way to get a clean sample. Chapman may have jumped the gun
getting this one."

"That's why I like him. Take him a cigar for me, but forget
you ever told me this little factoid. I only want to know about the
clean one. I'll pretend this one's just a product of my wishful
thinking."

"Mike and I are going back to see Berk this afternoon. Hear
what he has to say. I know I promised you something before Saturday,
but—"

"That isn't why I was asking. Why don't you get out of town
for a few days, if nothing's cooking on the case? Sarah can handle the
Carido arrest if they find the guy," Battaglia said, referring to my
deputy. "Your Turkish doctor's taken himself out of range and you've
got Chapman to run the investigation at the Met. Stay out of harm's way
for a few days. Relax."

He was looking at my unusual hairstyle as he talked.

"I was planning to go to the Vineyard tomorrow night, to open
the house for the season. I just hate leaving with all this going on."

"Go tonight, okay? Then I don't have to worry about somebody
watching your tail. If we need you before Monday, you can always fly
in."

We walked out of his office together and I thanked him for the
time off, well aware that he was banishing me in hopes that the bad
press would evaporate if I wasn't around to fuel the reporters with
leaks and updates on the three high-profile cases that were hogging the
headlines.

Mike had his feet up on my desk, reading the sports news while
waiting for me to return from the executive wing. "D'you show him your
burn?"

"He didn't ask, so I didn't tell. He encouraged me to fly up
to the country today, but that depends on what you think we've got
going." I tossed him the Cuban cigar.

"I'm with Battaglia on that," Mike said, sniffing it through
the wrapper and sticking it in his jacket pocket. "We can surprise Joe
Berk with a visit, and I can get back to helping out at the Met. I'll
take you to the shuttle this afternoon." There were no direct Vineyard
flights this early in the year, so I'd have to travel through Boston
and take the nine-seater Cessna twin engine from Logan Airport.

"Excuse me, Alex," Laura said, standing in the doorway,
"there's a young woman at the security desk in the lobby. She read the
story in the paper about Sengor and she wants to talk to an assistant
DA about something that happened to her last month. She thinks she was
drugged at a club."

"By him?"

"No, no. She just decided to come forward because of your
case."

"Do me a favor. Find someone in the unit to talk to her, will
you?"

Whenever an unusual MO became public, women who'd been
reluctant to tell their stories to detectives or prosecutors often came
out of the woodwork, eager to see if their claims would support
criminal charges. In the case of drug-facilitated rapes, the failure to
get prompt medical attention and testing most often proved fatal to the
case. It didn't surprise me that the Sengor indictment would result in
a rash of new complaints that would keep busy many of the forty senior
assistants in the unit.

Five minutes later Laura buzzed me on the intercom. "Your
phones are wild today, Alex. This one's a Dr. Thorp—from the
New York Botanical Garden. You want it?"

"Absolutely." I picked up the phone and introduced myself to
the caller.

"I've been told to talk with you about my analysis of the leaf
particles that the NYPD submitted to me the other day."

"Would you mind if I put you on speakerphone? I've got the
case detective with me."

"That's fine, unless you'd rather come up here to my office to
meet with me."

There were very few places in the city as magnificent as the
vast acreage of gardens and conservatories, but my most recent visits
there had sated my curiosity for the time being. "Perhaps we can start
this with just a call, if you don't mind."

"I've had a look at your leaf, and frankly, you don't see many
of these."

"Why is that, Dr. Thorp?" I asked, as Mike got out his pad and
flipped to a new page to take notes.

"
Pycnanthemum torrei
, Ms. Cooper."

"Sorry?"

"
Pycnanthemum torrei
. This plant is quite
rare. In fact, it's G.I."

I was shaking my head at Mike, who leaned in to speak. "Look,
doc. We gotta go through this in Pig Latin or what?
Ixnay
on the scientific lingo. I'm a cop."

"That's just the way we do things in botany.
G.I.—that means it's a globally imperiled plant. It's known
as Torrey's mountain mint."

Just the name of the leaf explained the distinctive odor that
we had smelled at the scene. "So, in Manhattan, would it be hard to
find?" I asked.

"Not hard, Ms. Cooper. Impossible. It doesn't grow on your
island."

"Where then?"

"There are only ten places in the world where Torrey's
mountain mint survives, so far as we know. There's a site on Staten
Island called Clay Pit Ponds State Park. You can check with the city's
Department of Environmental Preservation. There was a big brouhaha last
year over a large shopping plaza that was planned for the location.
Pickets and protesters and green-lovers. This sweet little endangered
plant held up construction of a hundred-million-dollar mall project."

Mike was writing down the names. "Where else?"

"High mountain, detective. The mint thrives for some reason in
the Preakness Range of the Watchung Mountains. Do you know where that
is?"

I said, "No," while Mike answered at the same time, "Yeah,
doc. Across the river in New Jersey, right? I'll explain it to her.
Anywhere else in the Northeast?"

"No. No. Just these two patches. We're keeping a close watch.
We'd obviously love to find more of it."

"Thanks a lot for your help," Mike said, ending the
conversation.

"So what don't I know about the Watchung Mountains that I
should?"

"It's a nature preserve with some of the most magnificent
vistas of the city. Now, if you'd paid a little more attention in your
history class, you'd know that it's got some of the highest ridges
anywhere along the Hudson, and that Revolutionary soldiers used those
points for signaling stations against the British troops."

"Nice to know, but—"

"And in World War Two, the army mounted mobile antiaircraft
guns on top of High Mountain in case the Nazis made it over the ocean.
They should have kept the frigging things there to welcome those Al
Qaeda bastards in 2001. A lot of people I care about might still be
alive."

"Where in New Jersey is it, Mike?"

"I was serious, Coop. Right across the Hudson. I'll tell you
what else is there. Rock shelters—caves that were used by the
Indians for hundreds of years."

"So?"

"So how about that it's not very far from where your spelunker
friend lives."

"My what?"

"Chet Dobbis. Artistic director of the Metropolitan Opera.
Rock climber, wig collector, former lover of Natalya Galinova. Maybe he
tracked in a little mint on his cleats."