Devil's Bridge (13 page)

“You look like shit, man,” Mercer said to me when I opened the door of Coop’s apartment to let him in.

It was about an hour after I left Jake at his hotel. Mercer had been working an evening tour but took off early when I told him Coop was gone.

“That’s better than how I feel. I didn’t take this seriously till—”

“Nobody did. Vickee’s been tearing her hair out,” he said, tossing his iPad on the sofa. “Where do we start?”

“Call in every chit we’ve got,” I said. “Get TARU working on her phone and e-mail. Use a contact at the Taxi and Limo Commission to track the car services to see if anyone picked her up. Check whether traffic has video cameras on Second Avenue that might have caught her leaving Primola.”

“We do all those things ourselves starting right now,” Mercer said. “But who do we tell?”

I looked at him like he was crazy. “Tell? How do you mean? There’s nobody to tell till we figure out what’s going on.”

“Wait a minute, Mike. Let’s get on the same page here. Alex walks out of a restaurant to meet a guy for a drink and she gets, what, vaporized?”

“You said it right. She gets
what
? Where’d she go? We’re all starting from the idea that she’s in the wind ’cause she wants to be. There’s no suggestion of any kind of foul play. We’re not even twenty-four hours out yet.”

“It’s not aliens that swept her away from here, okay?” Mercer said. “That’s the only thing I’ll give you.”

“Good. One group of suspects eliminated,” I said, pacing back and forth. The bright city lights from the living room windows illuminated the dark night sky like search beacons, but we had no ideas about where to look.

Mercer sat down, opening his device to start his compulsive list making. “You know Alex better than anybody.”

“Don’t make that assumption. She doesn’t let people in. Not the parts of her she doesn’t want to expose. Not even to me.”

“Yeah, well, maybe you waited too long to try.”

“Take your best shot, pal.” I turned my back to Mercer and stared out at the slice of Central Park visible between the tall buildings.

“You’ve got to tell someone, Mike.”

“I called you, didn’t I?”

“I mean her parents, for example.”

Coop’s mother and father had retired to the Caribbean. “They’re not in the country. And what do I tell them that doesn’t have them going berserk before we know anything’s wrong?”

“I’d want to know. I’d want to know the second there was a suspicion that something was off-kilter,” Mercer said. “And now there is.”

“Then you call them. I’ve got better things to do.” I flipped my steno pad onto the dining room table and started dialing my phone.

“Battaglia will go ballistic if you leave him out of this.”

“I don’t work for him.”

“How about the lieutenant? You’ve got no secrets from him,” Mercer asked. “And the commissioner? Scully’s been great to you.”

“When’s the last time you looked at the patrol guide?”

Mercer grumbled. He went to the refrigerator, pulled out two cans of Diet Coke, and handed me one. I snapped the ring and took a drink.

“What’s that got to do with anything?” he asked.

“Okay, Detective Wallace. What’s the crime we’re reporting, exactly?”

“I’m hoping to God there isn’t one.”

“Good. What do you expect the police commissioner to do, in that case?”

“We sure as hell have a missing person.”

“Not according to the NYPD patrol guide,” I said. “A missing person can be a lot of things. She can be under the age of eighteen or over the age of sixty-five. Not Coop. She can be mentally or physically impaired. Not the broad I saw yesterday. Possible victim of drowning. Not on the sidewalk on Second Avenue on a clear night in October. A person who indicated an intention of committing suicide. Not one of Coop’s problems. She just invited me to slip away to the Vineyard with her this weekend. Broiled lobster, chilled wine, warm fire, and hot lips, if I can make light of this. Last category in the guide is absent under circumstances indicating involuntary disappearance. Maybe we’ll develop that—you and I. But as of this moment, we don’t have a single one of the categories for the commissioner himself to declare Alexandra Cooper a missing person.”

Mercer picked up a silver-framed photograph of Coop from the sideboard in the dining room. It was taken at Logan’s christening, and she was holding the baby in her arms.

“You’re not wrong,” he said. “We’ll get pushback from the top.”

“Damn right we will. That last category—involuntary disappearance? If you remember this crap half as well as I do, that little group of complaints gets lodged in the local precinct. They don’t go to Major Case; they don’t go to some elite unit. They just sit and rot for an entire week on some squad commander’s desk in the Nineteenth because there isn’t a damn thing to investigate. It’s not even twenty-four hours since one of us has heard from the diva of the DA’s office, Mercer. We’d be laughed out of the station house.”

“Major exception here, Mike,” he said.

“What’s that?”

“It’s hard for a human being to have more enemies than a career prosecutor,” Mercer said, taking his time to speak. “Alex has to be up top on a lot of hit lists.”

“She knows that. Knows that her specialty attracts some mean motherfuckers. Rapists, child molesters, wife-beaters.”

“She’s been threatened before. Big-time.”

“Comes with the territory. Most of her colleagues have also.”

“She’s in the middle of a huge screw-up right now,” Mercer said. “Antonio Estevez. And what did Drew Poser tell Alex when they discovered the computer hacking? That somebody was trying to bring her down.”

I kicked the base of a huge terra-cotta planter that held some kind of tall, exotic plant. “Makes no sense, Mercer. If they were out to kill her,” I said, not meaning the words to be as cold as they sounded, “she’d have been dead on the street. And if it was a kidnapping, there would already be signs of it—someone claiming credit or demanding ransom.”

Mercer took a minute to think about those points. I had gone from unconcerned throughout the day, to pissed off when I learned about her date with Jake, to beginning to lose my mind at the thought of Coop in the hands of the bad guys.

“Unless,” Mercer said, “it was a kidnapping gone wrong.”

I lowered myself onto a chair, put my elbows on the table and my head in my hands.

“Look at the time I’ve wasted, Mercer.”

“We’ve got to stay cool, Mike. Not going to help her if we don’t think it through. I was just throwing out a far-fetched idea, a reason why no one has claimed to have her yet.”

I picked up my phone again and continued dialing.

“TARU,” the voice on the other end said after three rings. “Detective Bowman.”

“Bowman? It’s Mike Chapman here,” I said, giving Mercer a thumbs-up. “I need a favor.”

“Again? Dude, you are like deep into me over here. We’re swamped this week. Haven’t you honchos at homicide ever heard of terrorists?”

“Can’t stand those guys. Wish they’d just stick to blowing each other to bits,” I said. “But I’ve got something more urgent. I need you to find a cell phone for me. Stat.”

“Like a where’s Waldo situation?” Bowman said. “Who’s Waldo and where’s his phone, right? Like, whatever happened to good old pounding-the-pavement detective work?”

“Love to chew the fat with you, Bowman, but this time Waldo’s a prosecutor who hasn’t been heard from in almost twenty-four.”

“Didn’t hear it on the nightly news.”

“Still under wraps.”

“Like he’s pranking you, maybe?” Bowman asked. “A pranking situation?”

“Like she’s taking a breather.”

He whistled into the phone. “She? Is it your main squeeze, buddy?”

“Good news travels fast,” I said.

“I just did a ton of work on that today for Drew Poser. DA’s squad. Alex Cooper’s computer. You know it got hacked?”

“Yeah. Heard that. I want to talk to you about what’s on it—at least, I’m sure she’ll want to—but she took the day off and we can’t raise her now.”

“Difficult broad, Chapman. Always has been,” Bowman said. “Hope nobody snatches her, because he’ll live to regret it. ‘Ransom of Red Chief’ situation. They’ll be wanting to give her back to you faster than you can say Alex Rodriguez.”

“Here’s the phone number,” I said, reciting the ten digits of Coop’s phone. “How fast can you get me a location?”

“Depends. The DA puts all kinds of blocks on their phones. And it depends how far she’s traveled. These e-mails I downloaded today from her account talk about her place on Martha’s Vineyard, and that can take longer because it’s out of range, so—”

“Forget about reading those personal e-mails, Bowman,” I said.

“How’s life in the fast lane, Chapman? Didn’t know you could write poetry like Shakespeare.”

“Lose it, man. I don’t send her e-mails. Just lose your plan to play with me,” I said. “When will you have an answer?”

“Consider it done. Cover me with a subpoena tomorrow, okay?” Bowman said. “I’ll call you back.”

I hung up and waited until Mercer finished his conversation.

“I got Bowman at TARU. He’ll do a GPS search on Coop’s phone,” I said. “What did you get?”

“That was the main business office at Uber—the night manager,” Mercer said. “I gave Alex’s name and the fact it was charged to her American Express account. Date, time, location of pickup, and supposed drop at 46th Street at Patroon.”

“He’ll do a search for you?”

“Yeah. He may or may not give me the info depending on whether I can back it up with a subpoena.”

“Of course we can. Call Catherine. She’ll cut them tonight.”

“Look, Mike,” Mercer said. “I’ll stick with you until midnight. I’ll give you four more hours before we make this an official report. I’ll call anyone you say and poke my nose in any place you tell me if you think it will lead us to Alex. But don’t go dragging anyone else into this phony operation and put their jobs at risk.”

I looked at the time on my phone. “Fair enough,” I said. “Four hours it is.”

I searched for the number of the Midtown Manhattan Security Initiative and hit
CALL
when I found it. The networked surveillance project—a joint venture of private businesses and public agencies—was staffed by NYPD officers 24/7.

I didn’t know the guy who answered the phone. “I’m Mike Chapman. Manhattan North Homicide.”

“How can I help you?”

Teams of these cops sat in front of banks of monitors that streamed video of streets and avenues all throughout the day and night. It seemed like a thankless job to me, but it had become a popular counterterrorism tool and in the meantime captured crimes in progress and countless traffic violations.

“I’d like you to check video for a particular location last night.”

“Okay. If we’ve got it covered on camera, I can get a guy to do it. You say it’s about a homicide?”

I was chewing on the inside of my cheek. “A possible lead. Just that.”

“What location?”

“Second Avenue. Start at 63rd and go up to about 68th. I know you’ve got Second ’cause of the bridge. Seven
P.M.
till midnight.”

There was nothing out of the ordinary about this request. And since bridges and tunnels were such vulnerable locations for terrorist activity, I knew there would be cameras all along the busy avenue leading downtown to the 59th Street entrance.

“What am I looking for?”

“Anything unusual. A car parked too long, with someone waiting in it. Thugs on the sidewalk, maybe with weapons they draw on a pedestrian. Scene that looks like an abduction,” I said. “Person being yanked off the street.”

“Man? Woman? Kid?”

“Woman,” I said, pausing for a deep breath. “Tall blonde in her late thirties, maybe in a trench coat. Possibly on the east side of Second, heading north.”

“Alone?”

“You tell me,” I said, giving the cop my name and number. “How about those side streets? Have you got cameras on them?”

“Mostly no. Sixty-Sixth and 67th are the streets with crosstown buses. They’re covered, but the others aren’t.”

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t like the answer. “I need this as fast as you can do it.”

“On it, Detective Chapman. Call you back.”

I turned to Mercer. “You’ve got to be patient,” he said. “Now you’ve set some things in motion, we wait for the responses.”

“We wait for nothing,” I said, grabbing my steno pad. “Let’s hoof it down to the restaurant. Retrace Coop’s steps. Maybe we can scare up a witness or two.”

A light drizzle had begun to fall. Mercer and I were on Second Avenue, just outside of Primola restaurant.

Giuliano told us Coop had slipped out after saying good night. He hadn’t seen which way she went.

“Home is to the north,” I said. “That’s the logical direction.”

“She wasn’t going home, Mike. Get that through your brain,” Mercer said. His phone rang as he was talking to me. “Wallace here.”

Coop hates teeming rain in the dark of night,
I thought while Mercer fielded the call. I couldn’t think of where she might be and how she would feel if the weather continued to grow more foul.

Mercer listened to the caller and then spoke, leaning against a lamppost to write something down. “I understand. Give me his name and phone number, please.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“That was the night manager from Uber. Everything’s computerized and since it’s charged to the customer’s account immediately, the information is easy to retrieve.”

“Shoot.”

“Alexandra Cooper ordered the car. Pickup in front of 240 East 65th Street.” Mercer pointed across the avenue, into the block that ran between Second and Third. The destination she punched in was 160 East 46th Street.”

We both knew that was Ken Aretsky’s Patroon. We both knew she’d intended to keep her date with Jake.

“The job got entered into the system as incomplete,” Mercer said.

“Meaning what?”

“Alex got charged for the ride she never took. She didn’t cancel the car, and the driver waited ten minutes at the site before the base cleared him to leave. Incomplete.”

“Call the guy,” I said.

Mercer glanced at his pad and dialed. His message went to voice mail.

“Sixty-Fifth Street doesn’t have NYPD surveillance cameras,” I said. “Let’s cross to the north and see if we get lucky.”

We walked past a bagel joint, a dry cleaner, and the old-fashioned diner on the corner. I jogged across the street.

“Bingo!” I turned to wave Mercer on. “Just what we needed. Sunshine Deli.”

Korean delis were consistently the site of more armed robberies than any other kind of business in the city. Almost every one of them had installed security cameras over the register and outside the entrance to the store. I looked above the door, at a corner of the awning, and saw the small black device.

“Police,” I said to the young woman behind the counter. She looked terrified, even after she saw the gold shield. “The video camera—how much tape is on it?”

“What?”

“The camera? How many hours at a time does it record?”

Her English was lousy. I understood it, though, when she said, “Twenty-four.”

“We need to look at it,” I said. “Right now.”

A customer came in for juice and a quart of ice cream. The woman made his change and then looked back at me.

“My boss not here. Come back tomorrow.”

“No way, lady,” I said, hoisting myself up onto the counter and reaching for the camera, which was mounted on the wall. If I didn’t look now, there would be little chance of getting what I needed tomorrow morning. “You know how this works, Mercer?”

“Is it digital or is there tape in there?”

I was pulling at the camera and its small black case. “Looks like tape.”

The woman had picked up the landline and was jabbering into the phone in Korean.

“Then it will just loop over itself,” Mercer said. “It will rerecord every twenty-four hours, replacing the old images.”

I pulled the entire unit out of the wall while the woman let out a yelp. I handed it to Mercer, who took the case apart.

“An empty spool,” he said. “Just meant so that if anyone thinks about doing a stickup in here, there appears to be a video.”

“Nothing there,” the woman said. She had started to cry.

“Cheaper this way,” I said, telling her to stay calm. “How about the one on the outside of the building? Any film in that?”

“No, sir. We never been robbed. Very safe neighborhood,” she said. “Not like last place in Queens. Many robberies.”

I threw the useless camera on the counter after I jumped down, handing her a twenty-dollar bill. “Sorry for the trouble, ma’am.”

We walked out and I followed Mercer up and down the block on both sides of the avenue. We didn’t see any cameras and most of the businesses were shut down for the night.

Mercer’s phone rang again. “Wallace here.”

He turned his back to me.

“Southwest corner of 65th and Second,” he said. “There’s two of us. I’m a really tall black guy, and my partner is about six foot one, dark hair. Seven minutes? Thanks very much.”

I put my face up into the falling rain, then lowered my head and shook it off. “Who’s coming?”

“That was my Uber friend. The driver who was supposed to pick Alex up is working again tonight. He just dropped a passenger off at New York University Medical Center. He’ll come up First and be here as fast as he can.”

We ducked into the diner to get out of the rain while we waited. I called the cop at the Midtown Security Initiative.

“I know you’ve got a lot of images to go through. We can narrow it down for you,” I said. I gave him the time of the incomplete Uber pickup. “Fast-forward to the top of that hour. The woman will be coming out of a restaurant midblock on the east side of Second, walking north. She should cross at the first light. Get as much of 65th Street as you can capture. There’s a black sedan—an Uber, if you can make out the sign in the driver’s side window—that pulls into the block either shortly before or after the woman does. I’ll have more for you in fifteen minutes.”

Five minutes later, a black Mercedes E500 came across 65th Street from First Avenue and stopped in front of the fire hydrant near the entrance to 230 East 65th.

“C’mon,” Mercer said, pushing open the door and crossing the avenue. I was just a few steps behind him.

We introduced ourselves to the nervous man who had stepped out of his car.

“I’m Sadiq,” he said. “My boss says there’s a problem.”

“No problem,” Mercer said, holding his arm out to keep me back. “We need your help, okay? It’s about last night.”

“I didn’t do nothing. Nothing at all,” he said, talking with his hands, which were trembling as he made circles in the air. “The lady didn’t wait for me.”

“What lady?”

“Miss Alexandra. That was the name on the order.”

Since Uber drivers didn’t know their fares personally—as many car service regular accounts do—it was common for them to ask for the passenger by first name when they pulled up to a location.

“Were you late?” Mercer asked.

“The request came in,” Sadiq said. “I was only about twenty blocks away. I gave a response time of six minutes.”

“Did you make your estimate?”

“I ran into a Con Edison crew, which slowed me down,” he said, rain dripping off the folds of his turban and streaking his face like tears. “Maybe one minute late. Maybe two.”

“Did you actually see the lady when you reached here?” Mercer asked.

“Well, how do I know? How do I know her?” Sadiq asked. “Very impatient lady.”

“What do you mean impatient?” I asked. “How do you know that?”

“He’s mine, Mike, okay?” Mercer didn’t want me flipping out on Sadiq.

How would this driver have known about Coop’s quick temper unless he’d had her in his car and she snapped at him?

“Slow it down,” Mercer said. “No need for you to be shaking, my friend. Just tell us what you saw when you pulled up last night.”

Sadiq shook his head up and down. “Well, I knew I was running a bit late. I was at the light on the far corner. It turned red just when I reached it.”

The driver pointed across the avenue.

“It wasn’t very cold. There were people—many people—crossing the street in front of my car. I couldn’t really see into the block ahead, where I was supposed to make the pickup,” he said. “But I was trying to look for Miss Alexandra.”

I hated that he called her by name. It sounded more like they had actually met.

“When the light changed, I started to drive. I pulled up a little beyond where we are right now,” Sadiq said, gesturing with his left hand. “I saw a lady. I saw Miss Alexandra and I began to honk my—”

“How did you know it was her?” I asked. “Did she speak—?”

“Yo, Mike,” Mercer said, pushing me back with his outstretched arm. “I can handle this.”

“Well, I don’t actually know,” Sadiq said. “She seemed to look up like she was expecting me, but then she got into another car. A car parked a few feet in front of me.”

“You called her ‘impatient,’” Mercer said. “Why’s that?”

“Because I was only a minute or so late, and she wasn’t polite enough to cancel the job. So I had to charge her for it. That’s the only reason I said it.”

“Could you see if there was anyone in the vehicle ahead of you?” Mercer asked.

“Not really, Mr. Detective. Not at all. The windows were tinted, actually.”

“This woman you saw, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “Can you describe her?”

“Not really.”

“Anything. Anything at all?”

Sadiq looked from Mercer’s face to mine. “You talk to me like I did something bad.”

“Not yet, you didn’t,” Mercer said. “What did she look like?”

The driver seemed almost fearful to admit that he could give a description of Coop, like that would implicate him in some inappropriate conduct.

“Even your turban is sweating, Sadiq,” I said, watching the rain fall from it. “What do you know? What are you so worried about?”

The young man looked as shocked as Mercer.

“Excuse my partner, sir,” Mercer said. “You haven’t met the real incarnation of ‘impatience’ till he chimes in. And on top of that he’s just rude.”

“I believe the woman I saw had light-colored hair. Blond. And she was wearing a raincoat, even though it was dry.”

“Young? Old?”

“About my own age, sir,” Sadiq said. “I’m thirty-four.”

“What did you do when she got in the other car?”

“I waited in this very spot. I actually waited ten minutes, perhaps twelve, just to be sure that my passenger wasn’t someone else. Someone who’d been delayed.”

“Did you try to contact her?” Mercer asked.

“I did. I texted two more times that I was on location before I canceled the job. That was when I left.”

“Where did you go next?” Mercer asked.

Sadiq’s hands were going in circles again. “Nowhere.”

“What does that mean? How could you go nowhere?”

“I stayed right here, Mr. Detective. There’s usually a lot of business on the Upper East Side in the late evening. People coming out of bars, movies, going home late.”

“What was your next job?” Mercer asked.

“I—uh—I didn’t have a next job, sir,” Sadiq said, staring at a crack in the pavement. “I had only planned to work until midnight. The next order that came in from an address on 79th Street had a destination in New Jersey.”

Mercer didn’t seem to like the fact that Sadiq had shut his operation down shortly after the time Coop disappeared. “What don’t you like about Jersey?”

“Nothing in particular, Mr. Detective. It’s just that I live on Long Island, and if I had accepted the job, I wouldn’t have gotten home till after two
A.M
.,” Sadiq said. “My wife wouldn’t have been pleased.”

“Was your wife awake when you got home?” Mercer asked.

“Not exactly. I mean, she never is when I work that late.”

I liked that Mercer was putting the screws to the nervous cabbie, who’d been the last person we knew to see Coop.

“Did you see anyone between the time you arrived at this corner and the time your wife—well, woke up?”

Sadiq clasped his hands together and thought. “No, sir. Not that I remember.”

“Think hard, Sadiq,” Mercer said. “You want to tell me anything else you can think of about the woman you saw? Anyone else you can describe on the street?”

I couldn’t help myself from butting in. “You didn’t happen to get a plate number of the car that took your fare away from you? Even a partial plate? Some letters or numbers?”

“Excuse me for correcting you, sir.” The young man couldn’t even look at me when he spoke to me. “You are mistaken.”

“What about?”

“I wasn’t mad at the lady or at the other driver. I still charged my fare,” he said. “And it wasn’t a car she got into. You’re wrong about that. I didn’t look at the license plate so I cannot tell you that. But it wasn’t a car. It was an SUV.”

Mercer jumped in over me. “What kind of SUV? You know the make, Sadiq? Do you know what an Escalade is?”

Mercer was on high alert. He was thinking of Antonio Estevez and his Slade.

“I don’t know all the models. But it for sure wasn’t an Escalade,” Sadiq said. “All I know is definitely it was an SUV.”

Mercer was ready to go after Estevez—the man who wanted to bring Coop down.

I was hell-bent on pinning the Reverend Hal Shipley against a wall to get the whereabouts of his SUV fleet and posse of pallbearers.