Devil's Bridge (20 page)

“Are you following me because you don’t trust me or because you want to talk?”

“What do you think, dude?” Mercer said.

“You like it, these two sightings?”

“It’s all we’ve got. Work with these facts till something better comes along.”

I was already racing ahead of the facts. Bad images of this trio and their captive were forming in my mind’s eye like clouds colliding in a thunderstorm.

“Sadiq puts Coop on East 65th Street between Second and Third, getting into an SUV, behind the driver, no ruckus. I’m figuring that’s at something like ten fifteen, ten thirty,” I said, shading my eyes from the bright sunlight to look at Mercer. “Officer Stern gets off his bike on East 73rd Street, maybe forty-five minutes later.”

“How about all the time in between?” Mercer asked.

“Maybe they were driving around, looking for a quiet side street to make the switch. Think how smart it is, really. There are surveillance cameras on all the main avenues and intersections that are capable of capturing plate numbers twenty-four/seven to give speeding tickets and violations. So these guys are savvy enough to think of plate changes. Maybe just pause for a while out of sight—make sure their captive is subdued—and that way there’s no straight line of travel if we set out to examine the video footage.”

“Glad you can think like the bad guys, Mike,” Mercer said. “So figure they’ve killed an hour doing like you just hypothesized. Now they pull over. One of them is putting new tags on the car—that would throw off the scent of anyone who saw the abduction and reported the old license numbers.”

“Script matches Coop’s disappearance so far as it goes.”

“But she’s still out cold,” Mercer said.

“You can keep reapplying something like chloroform anytime your vic comes around, long as it doesn’t kill her by causing cardiac arrhythmia.”

“So after Officer Stern heads off to work, maybe Alex comes around.”

“Maybe.”

“At some point,” Mercer said, as we walked away from the massive granite rotunda and turned south, out toward the main dock of the marina, “she hears the three talking about where they’re taking her. That’s when she slips the phone out of her pocket and tries to text you.”

Bar,
I thought. The words
Bar
and
Bed.

“The car goes from 73rd Street off Lex to 85th Street, to the transverse that cuts through to the West Side,” he went on. “We know that because Alex’s phone was thrown into Central Park and landed there. She’d composed a text to you by then—”

“Or part of one,” I said. The two words simply made no sense.

“The perps toss the phone and keep on going. Driving west.”

“And TARU owes us a time for the toss, but it’s got to be between eleven twenty and twelve fifteen.”

“That puts the group on the West Side, in time to steal another set of license plates.”

“And by two
A.M.
,” I said, “the only one left in the SUV is the driver.”

Lieutenant Peterson hadn’t wanted officers Stern and Jaworski talking to each other, comparing notes and observations, until he had gotten all the information from each of them. Now he would be trying to confirm that the man each described as the driver was the same individual.

“So why the 79th Street Boat Basin exit?” Mercer asked.

I turned around to look back at the West Side Highway. “It’s a pretty central point of contact,” I said. “You can go either south or north on the highway from right here. South shoots you straight down to the Battery, so you’re on the way to Queens or Brooklyn in a flash. Even Staten Island. You pass the Lincoln and Holland Tunnel entrances to get to New Jersey.”

“Wrap under the overpass to go north,” Mercer said. “Gives you the George Washington Bridge, the Henry Hudson Parkway north to the Saw Mill, to Westchester and Connecticut.”

“So the vic could have been transferred to another car right there. Another make, another model, another color vehicle, to further complicate things for us,” I said, pointing up at the asphalt roundabout where Jaworski had witnessed the second plate change. “She could be in Georgia by now. And we’ve got an entire department looking for her in a black SUV that’s already been trashed. She could be in North Dakota or Arizona or—or in a landfill on Staten Island.”

“Now, that’s fucked-up, Mike,” Mercer said, gripping my arm at the elbow. “Hold yourself together, man.”

I swiveled around again, breaking loose and heading for the end of the dock.

“Why here?” I said out loud, rolling the two texted words over and over again. “Why are we standing right here, at the boat basin?”

The gray-green water was calm now. Two men were loading live eels into a pail on their Boston Whaler to serve as bait, heading out for an afternoon on the river.

There seemed to be an unusual amount of activity on the Hudson, maybe because of the warm, sunny day. Or maybe it just seemed that way to me, because I had been overcome by inertia and the futility of my efforts to find Coop.

Bar
and
bed
were simply two common syllables, and I was pushing them to give me a meaning they didn’t have.

The Circle Line tour boat was full of passengers taking in the scenic shoreline. Water taxis crisscrossed from New Jersey towns to lower Manhattan, optimistic fishermen were motoring south to Sandy Hook to look for the ever-elusive October stripers, and athletic young men and women were paddling kayaks and canoes against the current.

I walked to the farthest point on the dock, enjoying the breeze that came up from the water.

The quiet—the distance from all the chatter that had surrounded me since before dawn—was also a relief.

Mercer gave me some time alone. He leaned against one of the wooden piers and let me try to clear my head.

I did a complete three-hundred-and-sixty-degree revolution, fixing on the highway entrance to the boat basin on the land to the east above me, and once again due north to the mammoth engineering feat that was the GW Bridge. I scanned the Jersey coastline to see if it might hold a clue to Coop’s whereabouts, and then stretched out over the end of the dock to look for the colossal arm and torch of the great lady,
The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World
—as her creator had named her—standing tall on Liberty Island.

Why the boat basin?
I asked myself. If not just a traffic stop for the perps to change cars and move their passenger, then there had to be a boat involved. And if a boat was involved, then where was it headed?

I squatted on the broken boards and drew imaginary letters with my finger. What had Coop heard the men in the car say to make her write
Bar
and
Bed
?

I looked up again and scanned the Hudson River one more time, as though searching out its source in the little town of Lake Tear in the Cloud and sailing away past its mouth at the head of Upper New York Bay.

What I needed now was an epiphany, a lightning strike to my brain that would make things as clear to me as Coop thought she had done.

I played with proper names like Barton and Barstow and Barbara. I thought of crazy things like bedlam and bedbugs and bargains. I conjured objects that would be on this river, like barges and barrels and bedrock.

I must have spent ten or fifteen minutes fighting with the alphabet, pacing the dock and then squatting down to focus myself.

Coop had meant to send these words to me because she trusted that I would be able to make sense of them. But I was trying to force the six letters to talk to me, and they wouldn’t comply.

I thought it through again. She must have heard the men say they were taking her to an exact location. She must have known by the time she wrote the two words, before they drove through Central Park to the West Side, that their next stop was the boat basin. And then someplace jumping off from right here, maybe someplace we had both been together.

Bar
and
Bed.
I started over again. I babbled all the words that came to me from a mental scan of dictionary and encyclopedia
B
s.

I looked upriver and downriver and tried to recover factoids about every landmark on this vast waterfront.

Slowly, I pushed up from the dock. I stretched my legs and nodded.

Bar
was short for the name of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the French sculptor who conceived and designed the Statue of Liberty. My wordsmith had given me the help I needed with the shorthand text she never got to send.
Bed
must have meant Bedloe Island, where the great statue had originally been sited.

I fist-pumped the air over and over again.

“What is it, Mike?” Mercer called out to me.

“I have it, man!” I shouted back at him. “Go get Jimmy North. It’s time for a sea cruise.”

“Slow it down, Mike,” Mercer said. “Talk me through it.”

We stood on the end of the dock and looked downriver.

“It makes sense from every angle. Who knows how many clues Coop would have tried to give me if she’d had time. The words she wrote were never going to be obvious as place names,” I said. “These clues wouldn’t have been clear to her kidnappers unless they knew as much about New York City history as she does.”

“And you do,” Mercer says. “So what makes those two ordinary words so highly charged, in your view?”

“First of all, it’s a place Coop and I have been to together—with you, too—so of course she knows the names.”

“Of course. The night she wound up on Shooter’s Island. The Kills. You took her inside Fort Wood till the chopper came to get us.”

“One of the shorter visits, but she knows everything about Lady Liberty that I do.”

“Go on, Mike.”

“We’re looking for a location, right, where kidnappers might keep a prize prisoner. Liberty Island could be the place, don’t you think? I mean, I’m not saying the worst is over or that’s where Coop is now, but it’s worth a look.”

“Give me more.”

“Start with the fact that it’s an island,” I said. “That makes it hard to reach, hard for people to get to. Nobody’s just going to drop in on the group, are they?”

“You’d be wrong about that, man. You know it’s a draw for tourists.”

“Pay attention to your local news, Mercer. The island was closed to visitors as of Labor Day, for the next six months. They’re replacing all the rivets in the statue—like, twelve thousand of them, repairing the Lady’s nostril and some of her missing hair curls, and pressure washing the whole damn thing to get rid of ten years of bird droppings.”

“And you think they’d be hiding, like, what, inside the torch?”

“Don’t blow me off, okay? When’s the last time you were out there?”

“Like most New Yorkers, never, except that night on business.”

“Then hear me out, Mercer. She’s massive, the statue. Yeah, you could get lost inside her. Hitchcock did it. Robert Cummings.
Saboteur
,” I said. I was jumpy and agitated, talking at a staccato clip, like a hyperactive kid. “But she stands on top of an old army fort.”

I had just pointed out the eleven-point star-shaped structure to Jimmy North an hour earlier.

“Fort Wood was built for the War of 1812 and eventually used as a garrison after the Civil War. It actually forms the foundation of the statue, the base of it.”

“So there are still military structures on the island?” Mercer asked.

“I don’t know what’s inside the pedestal of the statue or the remains of the fort itself, but it’s one of the great restored ruins of the city. The island is twelve acres, so there’s also a small park and a bunch of outbuildings, even a caretaker’s home,” I said. “And it’s one of the few places around Manhattan that you can only reach by boat. Only by boat.”

“And the trail of bread crumbs brought us right here to a boat basin. That’s useful.”

“Coop likes all things French, and I’m into military history. That’s why the clues work.”

“Tell me that again,” Mercer said.

“All right. The sculptor who had the idea to build this great statue is a Frenchman. His name is Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.”

“How are you even sure that Alex knows his name?”

“Coop’s been there plenty of times, by ferry. It’s one of the first places she takes out-of-town guests. She thinks the Lady is a glorious creature.”

“Why does she figure
you
know the Frenchman’s name, well enough for her to have you catch on to the word
Bar
in her text?”

“The whole point of the statue, Mercer, is to commemorate the Declaration of Independence and French aid to the Revolutionary War,” I said. “It was a gift from the French Republic because of the longtime alliance of the two nations in achieving America’s freedom. That’s why Liberty is holding a tablet inscribed with the year 1776.”

“Of course. There’s a military aspect to the island.”

“Who do you think picked the site for the statue? Who took Bartholdi to the little island in the bay?”

“I’ve got no idea.”

“Ever hear of a dude named William Tecumseh Sherman, the Civil War general?”

“Sure. Scorched earth,” Mercer said. “Man refused to employ black troops in his army.”

“One and the same. He was considered to be the first modern general—well, except for his views on race. I’ve read his memoirs, so that’s how come I know about Bartholdi,” I said. “When Bartholdi came to this country for the second time, President Rutherford Hayes assigned General Sherman to meet him in order to choose the location for the statue.”

Mercer pursed his lips. He was thinking about it all.

“So you want any more on Bartholdi? That he fought in the Franco-Prussian War? That he first wanted to build this statue for Ismail the Magnificent, the pasha of Egypt, to mark the opening of the Suez Canal? Give me a war zone and I’ll give you the answers.”

“I’m just trying to be your devil’s advocate, Mike.”

“I got Captain Abruzzi, Dr. Friedman, and half the Major Case squad playing that role. Save your energy.” I was walking along the dock, inspecting the small motor launches that were tucked into their moorings.

“So what is Bedloe?
Bed.
How did that one hit you?”

“It wouldn’t have leaped out at me without Bartholdi, but the combination did it. The island wasn’t renamed Liberty until the 1950s,” I said. “Isaac Bedloe was a Dutch colonist. He actually owned the entire little island. Named for him. Bedloe Island, it was, for more than a hundred years.”

“Owned it? Why is that?”

“A few of the islands in New York Harbor, including Ellis and Liberty, were called the Oyster Islands by the Dutch, because they were so rich in oyster beds. Bedloe was a well-to-do merchant in the seventeenth century who bought the place. He imported tobacco from Virginia and exported pickled oysters.”

I saw the boat I wanted to use to motor down to Liberty Island. It was fairly new and appeared to be in great condition, with a pair of three-hundred-horsepower Mercury Verado outboard engines strapped on the stern.

“It’s because of Fort Wood that I know about Bedloe,” I said. “I’ve always been fascinated by the forts that were built to guard New York. Wood had eleven bastions and thirty guns protecting the western entrance to the harbor. I doubt they were ever used.”

I picked up the pace and started walking to the marina office, back at the entrance to the dock area. Jimmy North was standing under the first arch, watching Mercer and me. I waved at him to come out on the pier.

“You’re serious about taking a look around the island?” Mercer asked.

Jimmy approached and I asked him what Peterson was doing. “Wrapping up with the two officers. I think he’s about to go uptown to his office.”

“Dead serious, Mercer,” I said, turning to look at him but walking backward toward the rotunda. Then I whipped around and talked to Jimmy. “You stay here. Let me tell Peterson we’ll do some more snooping around the marina. No need for full disclosure quite yet.”

“Sometimes, Mike, I really wonder about you,” Mercer said.

I backed him off with my hand.

“I was just coming out to get you,” Peterson said.

“Tell you what, Loo,” I said. “The three of us will check out the boat basin parking garage for missing plates and stuff. I’m about to go talk to the marina manager to see whether he can suggest some locals to interview. Why don’t you call me when you get a list of names of all the owners, and Mercer, Jimmy, and I can put our heads together? We’ll see if any of this relates to Coop.”

Peterson reached out and put his hand on my shoulder. “I like how you’ve pulled yourself together, son. Back there in Scully’s office I was afraid you’d get all hotheaded and go off script.”

“You know I’m a team player. But I gotta tell you, Loo, it’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. You’ve got to give me some space.”

“We’ll pull out all the stops, Chapman,” he said, the cigarette dangling from his lips as he moved them. “I’ll call you as soon as we get the list of boat owner names from the real estate office that controls the rentals.”

I thanked him for everything he was doing to find Coop.

Then, when Peterson disappeared into the shadows under the roadway, I hustled back to the dock. Mercer and Jimmy were on their phones, checking for updates and messages.

“Excuse me,” I said to the crusty old guy who was sitting in the tiny marina office. His radio was tuned to the VHF emergency channel and his TV muted, but with the local all-news channel playing. “I’m Detective Chapman. Mike Chapman.”

I showed him the blue and gold. He wasn’t impressed.

“I’d like to rent a small boat for a couple of hours this afternoon.”

“We don’t usually rent boats. We rent slips. Gotta have your own boat.” He didn’t look up from his copy of the
New York Post,
which featured a cover shot of the mayor tripping and falling on top of a protestor on the steps of City Hall. He had landed upside down, looking cockeyed and disoriented. The
DAZED AND CONFUSED
headline made me smile.

“I’m not interested in what you usually do. I’m interested in what I need right now.”

“You got a captain’s license?”

“It expired.”

“Which boat are you looking at?”

“There’s a thirty-two-foot Intrepid out on the first dock.”

“You got good taste.” The man looked up at me for the first time.

“Three hours, maybe four,” I said, reaching into my wallet. “In exchange for my driver’s license.”

He stood up and walked over to a long metal box, unlocked it, and lifted one of the keys. “Have it back by April 1, Mr. Chapman. No nicks, no scratches. I assume this is official police business?”

“It is.”

“Then no nicks, no scratches, and no blood. The owner don’t even fish with this gem. She can’t stand the sight of blood.”