Devil's Bridge (19 page)

I stood under the vaulted Guastavino tile ceiling of the giant rotunda, marked by the same classic arches and design as the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Terminal, and sipped another cup of black coffee from the Boat Basin Café.

The vista was unique. Right off 79th Street, built in 1937 as part of a project to cover the New York Central’s West Side railroad tracks, the marina was still the only place in Manhattan that offered year-round residency on boats. The rotunda was below street level, underneath the circular road that held the heavily trafficked entrance and exit to the West Side Highway.

“Low rent, river view,” Mercer said, joining me to look out at the Hudson. The tidal currents were so strong in this riverway that very few boats dared make it a permanent home.

“This place is in bad need of repair,” I said. The slats in the wooden dock were broken and splintered. “I think I’ll keep my coffin, even without the scenery. How many slips are there?”

“One hundred sixteen. Peterson’s ordered the names of all the owners.”

“And the guy who’s working in the office?”

“He came on at eight this morning,” Mercer said. “The office is closed overnight this time of year. Just a security guy who swings by—when he’s not asleep at the switch. Peterson’s waiting on him now, but on the phone he claims he didn’t see anybody around.”

“Nothing missing? No boats?”

“Not even an oar, Mike.”

“Stealth operation, then, if it happened here.”

“Or they greased the hand of the security guard.”

We stepped out into the sunlight and headed toward one of the wooden docks, to the right of the café exit. We were waiting for the lieutenant to appear with the two witnesses we needed to download.

Mercer followed me onto the dock. The first few vessels were houseboats that looked like they’d been berthed at the marina since it opened. They didn’t appear to be seaworthy or comfortable but seemed attached to the wooden piers like barnacles to the bottom of a skiff.

“That’s a pretty nice sport fish,” Mercer said, pointing at the fourth boat in front of me. It was a forty-three-foot Egg Harbor Express, with a large fighting chair positioned in its stern.

I kept on walking, out to the end of the dock.

“Anything speaking to you here, Mike?” Mercer asked.

“No. Nothing at all.” I glanced around at the different boats—small Grady-Whites and Boston Whalers to a few larger, classier numbers tied up at the end of the largest dock. “Not like the days when Aristotle Onassis and Malcolm Forbes parked their yachts here, I’m afraid.”

“I mean, about Alex. I know how much she loves the water,” he said. “I know you were boating together on the Vineyard last month.”

Coop had been a competitive swimmer in high school and college. She loved the ocean, she enjoyed doing endless laps of crawl in a warm pool, and she treasured day sails and cruises with friends who kept their boats in Menemsha. I didn’t picture her diving into the swirling current of the polluted Hudson River.

“See that beauty?” I said, pointing at a sleek blue-hulled motor sail called the
Leda
, docked behind the last small powerboat. “That fifty-foot Schulte Mariner?”

“Yeah.”

“One of Coop’s friends has that same model. We spent an afternoon sailing with him over to Cuttyhunk and back. He even let me drive it for a while. Pretty special toys, these things.”

The sunlight was stronger that day in September than it was now. It had danced off Coop’s hair, and she had snuggled down on the backseat, her head on my lap, to get out of the wind.

“Has Alex ever mentioned this boat basin to you? Ever mentioned coming here to visit friends?”

“Never. She knows some folks who pass through town on large boats, but they stop at the Chelsea Piers or across the river in the fancier marinas.”

“I never had a case with her here,” Mercer said. I knew he was going through his mental lists of perps who might have come back for revenge of some sort. “Plenty of crimes in Riverside Park—nothing special about Tanner going to that spot—but never at this place. Did you?”

“Nope. We scooped a DOA out of the water three years ago. Pug and me. A drunk who fell in about twenty blocks north of here but got hooked on the tip of a kayak over there, which kept him from getting washed out to sea. Nothing else.”

I looked to my left, at the mighty torch of Lady Liberty, raised high over her head, above the seven points of her crown, and then to my right, back up at the GW Bridge, where the world’s largest free-flying American flag was catching the wind.

“No reason to link this place to Alex, then, is there?” Mercer turned and headed back toward the café.

He knew the answer. I followed him. It was unseasonably warm. I felt clammy and in need of a shower. Every part of me was beginning to ache.

Peterson had the first cop waiting for us at one of the large round tables, inside the café—out of the bright daylight. “This is Officer Stern,” the lieutenant said. “Central Park.”

We greeted each other and sat down. A few preliminaries and he cut to the chase.

“I was coming in for a midnight on Wednesday, running a little late, heading for the station house to sign in.”

Built in the nineteenth century as a row of horse stables and gardening sheds, the rambling series of Gothic cottages on the 86th Street Transverse had been restored and reopened as a high-tech police operation in 2013.

“I was on my Harley, heading uptown on Third Avenue. There was some Con Ed construction jamming up the flow, so I cut over, aiming to go uptown on Park or Madison. I was on East 73rd, just off Lexington.”

“What time was it?” I asked.

“It was after eleven fifteen, I know. I was gunning it so I wouldn’t be late for roll call,” Stern said. “Turned out I was. Especially because I stopped.”

“Stopped for what?”

“There was a vehicle—a black SUV, actually—parked on the right side of 73rd Street. The driver opened the door kind of suddenly and I had to swerve to avoid hitting him when he got out of the car.”

So far the time of night was right and the location was between the spot on East 65th Street where Sadiq saw a woman get into a black SUV and the place in the park where Coop’s phone was picked up by the search team.

“I pulled the bike over and looked back to make sure I hadn’t rattled the guy or knocked him over,” Stern said, his tone measured and calm. “That’s when I saw there was no plate on the front of the car.”

“No license plate?”

“Nope. So I parked the Harley and took out my shield, since I didn’t look much like a cop, and started to approach him.”

Laconic worked well as a delivery style for Gary Cooper, but Stern was making me crazy.

“The guy was already on his knees in front of the SUV, screwing on the plate.”

“Did you talk to him?” I said. “What about the rear plate?”

“Yeah. I asked if he was all right. I asked if he needed any help.”

“You didn’t get his ID or the tag number?”

“I got everything I was supposed to, man.”

“Was he alone?”

Ray Peterson held up his hand and signaled me to back down.

“So he stood up. I could see the second plate on the ground next to him. I asked for his driver’s license and—”

Ray Peterson cut in. “This is Officer Stern’s memo book, okay? The driver was Harold Harrison. DOB makes him forty-four. Ran him. No criminal history.”

“Harrison told me he’d just bought the car from a friend in the city. They all had dinner together and he should have put the plates on outside the man’s apartment as soon as he left, but he forgot to do it till he started on his way across town,” Stern said. “But he knew he couldn’t chance driving home to New Jersey without the plates, so he stopped to put them on. That’s right where I came along.”

“Anything else?” Mercer asked.

“Well, not at the time,” Stern said. “I called the info in to the desk sergeant ’cause I obviously didn’t have access to a police computer on my personal bike, like I told the lieutenant.”

“You got a call back?”

The officer nodded at Mercer. “All clean. The driver as well as his plates,” Stern said. “But it bothered me. Three guys, the woman asleep in the—”

“What woman?” I broke in. “Tell me about the woman.”

“Just weird how she slept through the whole thing, me talking to the men in the car and all.”

“She was sleeping? I mean, you’re sure she was alive?”

“Don’t go jumping to conclusions that it’s Alex,” Mercer said. “Let’s get the whole story.”

“That or she was drunk,” Stern said. “Passed out, maybe. I didn’t stop to take her pulse.”

He seemed bothered when I pressed him. I had to hold my tongue.

“So at the end of my tour Thursday morning I ran the plate again, ’cause I just didn’t like the way the whole thing went down, you know? This time it came up stolen, reported about an hour after I first called it in. There I was, standing in the street, worrying about the guy because I thought I clipped him with my bike, and he’s a total scumbag after all,” Stern said. “Stolen driver’s license that he picked right out of the vic’s pocket and stolen tags from the schmuck’s car.”

“Start with the girl,” I said.

I was on my feet. Peterson had turned the questioning over to me while he lit up another cigarette, leaning against the edge of one of the vaulted arches open to the river.

“She was the least of it, man,” Stern said. “She never opened her mouth.”

The officer was regretting the collar for larceny that he had missed. I was hell-bent on finding Coop.

“What did she look like?”

He twisted his mouth to the side. “Caucasian,” he said. “They were all white guys. I’d say she was my age. Early thirties. Light-colored hair. That’s all I could see.”

“Did you ever make an arrest for a sex crime?” I asked. “Take a perp down to the DA’s office?”

“Lots of felonies, but never rape.”

“Ever meet an assistant district attorney named Alex Cooper?”

Officer Stern shook his head in the negative.

“Were you talking to the men in the car? Is that what you said?”

“Yeah. The one in the passenger seat got out to help his buddy when I walked back to my bike to call the sergeant. By hindsight, he may have been getting ready to take me out if I’d come back with bad news,” Stern said. “I told him to get in the car.”

“Did you get his ID?”

“No reason to, Detective.”

“I guess.” I was short on understanding and long on Monday morning quarterbacking.

“When he opened the car door to get in, that’s when the lights went on and I could see another guy in the backseat.”

“Awake or asleep like the girl?” I asked.

“Totally awake. He asked me how long they’d be held up.”

“Anything distinctive about the men? About their looks? Scars, marks, tats—anything at all?”

“Not that I can think of. The driver and his pal, they both had real dark hair,” Stern said to me. “Kind of black, like yours. The guy in the backseat was sort of red. He may have had a slight brogue, too.”

“May have? Or did he?”

“He said all of one sentence to me, Detective. Maybe he did.”

Irish? I’m sure in Coop’s rows of file cabinets there were mutts she’d prosecuted who were as Irish as me and my ancestors, but I couldn’t pull any up in the moment.

“Anything else about her? About any of them?”

“Yeah,” Stern said. “She smelled something awful.”

“Smelled?”

“Too much perfume, I figure. Just when the door was opened I got a touch of it. Sickly sweet.”

Mercer and I exchanged glances.

Peterson had let the cigarette burn down to his lips. He heard Stern’s comment and walked over to continue giving us the details.

Harold Harrison was an investment banker from Connecticut, in the city drinking with friends to celebrate his recent divorce. They were in a crowded sports bar in the East Eighties, sometime after nine
P.M.
on Wednesday, and he didn’t know that his pocket had been picked until he went to pay the tab. His friends covered the bill, but when Harrison went outside to see whether he’d left his wallet in his car, the vehicle was still parked there but the license plates were gone.

“Professionals,” Mercer said. “Total pros. They undoubtedly scouted their mark—or they had a couple of potential marks—going into the bar, already a bit tipsy. One of them stayed with Harrison’s car. The minute his wallet was pinched, off with the plates.”

“Maybe it took longer than they thought,” Peterson said. “So they scoop Alex up, then pull over to put the clean plates on in case they’re stopped, in case one of her friends had happened to follow and got a partial.”

“Damn it,” I said, turning to the unhappy young police officer. “Didn’t you get the VIN off the SUV?”

“What for? The plates, the license—they checked out clean.”

“We’d know who owns the car, now, wouldn’t we?”

“Lay off him, Chapman,” Peterson said, thanking Stern for his follow-up and asking him to wait on a bench outside the café till he was cleared to go. “There’s another piece of the puzzle to give you.”

He walked out the other side of the café—toward the paths to the east, which led into Riverside Park or up the enormous winding staircases to the asphalt roadway—and returned with a middle-aged cop in uniform.

“Hey,” he said, taking his hand off his frayed belt and extending it to Mercer first. “Seen you around. I’m Jaworski.”

“Mercer Wallace. And this here is Mike Chapman.”

“Jaworski does steady midnights in the two-four,” Peterson says. “He was working Thursday morning.”

“Tell me,” I said.

The Twenty-Fourth Precinct included the boat basin, a lot of Riverside Park, and the Upper West Side.

“I didn’t think much of it until my boss called me about the blast from the commissioner’s office this morning, with the alert about a missing woman in a black SUV,” Jaworski said. “My partner and I were patrolling in an RMP early Thursday morning, not that we ever saw a woman in the vehicle.”

“What vehicle?” Radio motor patrol cars were the familiar blue-and-whites of the NYPD. What the hell did he think was so important if he never had his eyes on Coop?

“It was just coming up on two
A.M.
,” Jaworski said. “We’ve got Sector Charlie, which includes the marina, so we usually swing by a few times during the night. There’s not very much action on the water this time of year, but we always check it out in case someone goes all Natalie Wood on us. The sergeant had us patrolling the park extra heavy this week because of the big arrest Wednesday morning. You know about that?”

“Yeah,” Mercer said. “Raymond Tanner.”

“Okay. So it’s one of those make-the-public-feel-safe programs,” Jaworski said, resting both hands on his paunch, which hung out over the belt. “Lots of visibility and police presence. Step up the patrols.”

“Got it.”

“My partner was the driver. We just finished checking out the park. Decided to take the underpass and come out on the roundabout up above here,” he said, pointing up and circling his arm to indicate the road overhead. “I spotted an SUV, a black one, pulled over out of the traffic flow, like at the very top of the staircase down to the marina. The driver was on his knees behind the car, so I thought maybe he had a flat or something.”

“You stopped,” I said.

“Sure. Got out and walked over to him. He was working in the dark, so I beamed my flashlight at him to give him a hand.”

“Was it the tire?”

“Nope. He had a screwdriver,” Jaworski said. “Told me one of the bolts had come out of his rear plate and it was flapping like crazy when he drove.”

“Connecticut plates,” I said matter-of-factly.

“No. New Jersey, actually. I gave your lieutenant the plate number.”

“Did you call it in?”

“What for?” Jaworski said. “The tag on the front of the car was fastened on tight. The man’s story made sense. He didn’t do nothing.”

“And in the car?”

“Nobody there. I shined my light in before I left, when he got back in the driver’s seat. Then he thanked me and took off.”

“You know who Alex Cooper is?” I leaned in and asked.

“Should I?”

“She’s a prosecutor. DA’s office. You ever take a sexual assault arrest down to Centre Street?”

“I don’t do arrests,” Jaworski said, smiling at me. “The city don’t pay me enough.”

There were plenty of guys in the department who thought like he did, especially as the time to collect a pension grew closer. They didn’t want to mess up their steady tours, risk injury, deal with erratic court appearance dates, and be required to testify under oath to anything.

“Why are you here?” I asked, throwing up my hands in Peterson’s direction.

“My sergeant called me at home this morning, after that message from the commissioner was sent out. I guess ’cause we’re not that far from the transverse crossing, and me and my partner saw this SUV with a guy screwing on a plate in the middle of the night.”

“It gets better,” Peterson said.

“Yeah, he brought me in for a day tour. Overtime,” Jaworski said. “The guys in the squad ran the Jersey plate this morning, just ’cause it’s a black SUV in the general location from late Wednesday night, Thursday morning.”

“They were stolen,” I said. “Right? Like it’s a big surprise at this point, Loo, right?”

“MD plates,” Peterson said. “Taken from a doc’s car while he was supposedly paying a house call to a lady friend on West 80th Street, sometime after he parked at midnight and before Jaworski spotted them at two
A.M.
Pretty bold to lift them—two separate times and places—from a city street.”

“Mercer’s right. We’re clearly dealing with professionals. Three of them, at least.” I was trying to think like the bad guys. “Two sets of plates if not more. Fresh. A well-conceived plan to keep the common-looking black SUV moving to their destination, maybe stopping to kidnap someone along the way. Even if the license number is captured on a traffic video or made by a cop on the beat, we’d never be able to prove after the fact that it was the same car.”

“Exactly,” Peterson said.

“You start checking all the TWOCed tags?” Plates that were taken without the owner’s consent were TWOCed.

“Of course.”

“Any ideas to find the SUV? Anything about it that was distinctive?”

“We’ve got the car, Chapman,” the lieutenant said. “Abandoned sometime in the last twenty-four hours. Right outside a chop shop in Queens.”

“VIN?”

“Completely disfigured. It will take a day or two to run all the possible configurations of the digits to see if we can pull up an owner.”

“Prints? DNA? There must be some way to tell if Coop was in that car,” I said, sailing my empty coffee cup across the room, missing the garbage pail by several feet. “How about that sickly sweet odor? Maybe there’s still a rag on the floor of the car?”

“There’s a familiar odor all right,” Peterson said. “That car’s been wiped so clean you could perform heart surgery on the backseat with no risk of infection. The whole thing reeks of Clorox.”