Entombed (20 page)

He pointed about
fifteen feet out into the water, where two enormous rock formations
guarded an eddy of frothy water.

"How'd they get him
out?" Mike asked.

"They used a grappling
hook," Phelps said.

Hal whispered in my
ear, "I don't care who does the autopsy. Going over the falls and
landing on these rocks would have pummeled the daylights out of
anybody. Then these two guys stick a pitchfork in him? Ichiko's a
bloody mess and I don't know how the best medical examiner on earth is
gonna figure this one out."

Chapman turned back to
the area where we had parked our cars. "Ask them why they moved him
before they called the police," he said to Phelps.

"They didn't actually.
I can answer that. They raised me on the intercom and I raced over," he
said, pointing at a golf cart he obviously used to get around the
grounds. "That couldn't have taken more than three or four minutes. I
called nine-one-one at the same time I ordered them to pull the man
out."

"Why'd you do that? I
mean, tell them to move the body before we got here?"

Phelps seemed taken
aback by the question. "Well, Detective, just suppose he was alive.
Unconscious or, or… Well, it seemed to be taking an awful chance to
leave him there if he was still breathing. I'm sorry if I did the wrong
thing."

His two workers hung
their heads, seeming to understand that Phelps was being blamed for
something they did.

"Hey, Hal, you look
above for any signs of where the guy went in?"

"Yep. There's a car
parked on top, near the head of the falls. It's Ichiko's."

"Tracks? Any tracks in
the snow?"

"Yeah. It looks like
Roseland up there. Like people were dancing all over the place. Not to
mention the wildlife. You go up there, Mr. Phelps?" Hal asked him.

"No, sir. Trun? Hang?"
The groundskeeper questioned his men, pointing up at the heights of the
gorge.

Both men nodded in the
affirmative. "I go there look for help," Hang said.

Mike turned to Hal.
"Charlie Chan he's not. What's in the car?"

"Dr. Ichiko's wallet.
ID, cash, credit cards. None of that touched. We dusted for latents,
just in case."

"Any note? Anything to
suggest he was going to end it all?"

"Nope."

"Signs of a struggle?"

"Nothing like that
either."

"Gentlemen," Mike
said, addressing Trun and Hang, "you were taking trash out of the river
when you saw the body?"

Both men nodded
eagerly.

"Where is it now?"

Each pointed at a row
of three dark green plastic bags.

"Not much to speak of
this time of year," Phelps said. "It's the other three seasons we're
overloaded with bottles and cans, picnic remains-"

"Get a tarp, Hal,"
Mike said.

Sherman walked the few
steps to his station wagon and came back with a large canvas that he
dropped on the hard ground.

"Dump 'em out."

"Right here? This is
going to be messy," Phelps said, helping his two workers untie and
empty the bags. Food wrappings, wads of paper, empty coffee containers,
and several small bird carcasses were spread out on the tarp. Mike ran
his flashlight over the day's take, kicking larger items out of his way
with his foot.

Something small and
silver gleamed amid the rubble. Mike reached for it and threw it back-a
crumpled aluminum soda can.

Another shiny object
caught the light. I bent over and picked up a small cell phone.

"Way to go, Coop. You
guys get this out of the water?"

Hang spoke. "No," he
said, pointing up at the top of the gorge. "Snow."

I flipped it open to
see if it was still working and hit the recall button.

"Don't touch it. Let
the tech guys figure out what's on it."

"Sorry. I just wanted
to see if it's connected to Ichiko and who the last call went to," I
said, holding the phone to my ear as Mike started to circle around the
tarp to take it from me.

It rang four times
before rolling over into voice mail and I signaled to Mike to wait a
minute.

A deep voice with a
heavily accented Southern drawl spoke to me. "You have reached the
office of the Raven Society. Please be so good as to leave a message
after the tone."

20

"You gonna tell
McKinney you just came from viewing Dr. Ichiko?"

"Of course I am," I
said.

"And you're going to
tell him about the Raven Society phone call, too?"

"Not until I know what
the society is." By morning, Mike would be able to check the reverse
telephone directory and get a name and address for the number that had
been displayed in the lighted dial of the cell phone.

We had just reached
the Nineteenth Precinct squad room, shortly after nine-thirty Tuesday
evening. When Mike had called Scotty Taren earlier to tell him about
the scene at the gorge, the cold case detective had a new development
to report, too.

Pat McKinney had been
contacted late in the day by a man who claimed to have information
about the skeleton in the West Third Street basement. He had directed
Scotty to set up a meeting with the man, himself, and Scotty at 9
P.M.
in the Nineteenth
Precinct station
house.

Mike knocked on the
frosted glass pane of the captain's office. Through it, I could see the
outline of McKinney's figure, standing in front of the desk. He walked
to the door and opened it, stepping out into the squad room to greet
Mike.

"Hey, Chapman. Scotty
tells me you've been to the river to-" McKinney said, stopping short
when he spotted me over Mike's shoulder. "I suppose you had to stick
your nose in the middle of this, too? Maybe if you concentrated your
energy on the Silk Stocking Rapist you could solve that one, Alex."

A man was seated
inside the room with his back to me. I was more curious about the pair
of legs sticking out from a chair behind the door-a woman's legs,
crossed at the knees, displaying thick ankles planted in cheap black
pumps.

Mike saw them, too,
and recognized them. McKinney's long-time lover, Ellen Gunsher, was
also a prosecutor, but her fear of the courtroom and her lack of any
creative investigative ability had landed her a succession of
administrative jobs that were nestled under McKinney's protective eye.

"Are those the
stumps-I mean stems-of my favorite yellow rose?" Mike asked, pushing
back the door and exposing a bit more of Ellen, who played her big-city
helplessness against her homespun Texas roots.

She waved at Mike and
offered a wan smile.

"Are we interrupting
anything personal, Pat?" I asked.

"Ellen and I were
working on turning an informant down at the office when I got this
call. That's why she's here."

"Who's the suit? Is
that the guy who called with information?"

Pat reached for the
doorknob to close it behind him to answer me.

"Just a minute, pal.
Don't be leaving any witness on something I'm involved in alone in a
room with Ellen," Mike said, motioning her out of the room while the
dark-haired man in the chair turned his head to examine the four of us.
"C'mon, Tex."

Mike closed the door,
leaving the man inside.

Pat was trying to get
between Mike and the door. "Last I knew this was Scotty Taren's
investigation, not yours. The skeleton's a Cold Case Squad matter, and
Ichiko goes with that."

"Yeah, well,
Lieutenant Peterson changed the rules. He wants all hands on deck-I
just got off the phone with him-until we know if any of these things
are connected. You heard Ms. Cooper. Who's the suit?"

Scotty Taren spoke
while McKinney glared at Mike, and Ellen stood frozen like a deer
caught in the headlights. "His name is Gino Guidi. Fifty-six years old.
He's an investment banker with an operation called Providence Partners."

"Stop right there. I
know why four of us are here, but I think it's time for Ellen to hit
the road," Mike said. "She's got no business with me, and either she
packs it in or I make a call to the chief of d's and we go to the mat
on this."

McKinney usually
bullied detectives into getting his way, but Mike wouldn't brook it. An
assistant who had never handled homicides would not be cutting her
teeth on one of his investigations.

Ellen raised a hand at
Pat to stop whatever feeble protest he was about to make and put on her
coat. As she said good night and walked to the staircase, Mike sang out
after her: "Oh, I've got spurs that jingle, jangle, jingle."

McKinney was close to
a boiling point.

"You want me to
continue?" Scotty asked Mike.

McKinney slapped his
hand against the wall. "I'm the senior man here. We'll do this the way
I say."

"Look, Pat. I think
Mike and I have more information than you do at this point," I said.
"You can run the show. Just grow up and realize that we're all in it
for the same result. I'll take the backseat but you're not doing this
without us. Go on, Scotty."

Taren shook his head.
"You guys ready? Guidi's married with four kids. Lives in Kings Point.
The reason he called is that he was treated by Dr. Ichiko a long time
ago. He was in that same rehab group as Emily Upshaw-SABA. He was an
alcoholic who moved into other drugs. He was in business school at the
time. Guidi thinks he knows the name of the skeleton-well, the girl
whose bones you found."

"Who is she?" Mike
asked.

Scotty looked at his
notes. "Aurora Tait."

"He's got the initials
right," I said, referring to the ring that we'd found inside her brick
coffin. "Why'd he come forward today?"

"That's what he was
telling us when you two interrupted," Pat said.

"He seems pretty
freaked out about Dr. Ichiko going on television to name his former
patient. He's willing to give us information if we can stop Ichiko,"
Scotty said.

"Apparently someone
else shared that sentiment. Shall we continue?" Mike opened the door
and introduced the two of us, apologizing to Guidi for the commotion
and reconfiguring the chairs so that we could all fit in the small
office.

Pat McKinney took the
captain's seat and picked up his questioning. I was against the back
wall, listening to the conversation and looking over Gino Guidi.

The banker was dressed
in a well-tailored charcoal gray suit- Brioni, if I had to guess. His
shirt was a white-on-white herring-bone, with his initials on the
barrel cuff. The subtle circular weave on his necktie was perfectly
matched to the lavender pocket square, and his fingernails had been
recently buffed to a high sheen. His black hair looked like a good dye
job, and the only sign of a bump in the road of Gino Guidi's life was a
raw scar that ran from the middle of his right cheek down below his
shirt collar.

"You were going to
give us some background, Mr. Guidi," Pat said.

"I trust this is still
confidential?" Guidi said, gesturing at Mike and me.

"My colleagues
understand that. You were telling us about Ms. Tait. About why you
think she's the woman who was found last week."

"Aurora was what
people used to call a free spirit. I was at the B-school when I first
met her," he said, resuming his story.

"Was she an NYU
student, too?" Pat asked.

"No. She lived in the
Village, so she was always hanging around Washington Square. I think a
lot of people assumed she was a student, which gave her entrée
to all the kids, but in fact she was just a hanger-on."

"How did you meet her?"

"At a party. Nothing
memorable about the event except Aurora."

"What about her?"

"She was the sexiest
woman I'd ever seen, I think. Tall and willowy, moved like a cat, had
lots of dark hair that kind of framed her face and made her smile seem
even more electric. And mean," Guidi said, smiling. "She had a really
mean streak."

"How'd she show that?"

"She had a pretty
vicious tongue, Mr. McKinney. I guess she'd heard every pickup line in
the book so her comebacks were designed to cut through all the crap,
separate the men from the boys. She kept me on a tight wire for the
first couple of weeks, threatening to destroy anything in my life I
cared about."

"Did you date her?"
Pat asked. I knew that Mike was as ready to hijack the questioning and
let Guidi tell his story as I was, but Pat plugged ahead.

"Aurora didn't date.
She conquered. Took me home with her that night and-"

"Where did she live?
On Third Street?"

Let him finish his
goddamn sentences, I thought to myself.

"No. No, not where the
bones were found. I don't know anything about that place. We went to a
pad on Bleecker Street. I thought it was where she lived, but it turned
out to be just a place she flopped for the night. Anyway, Aurora showed
me some tricks," Guidi said, looking over his shoulder at me, as though
to make sure he wasn't offending me. "Some experiences that were new to
me. And then, of course, there were the drugs."

"What drugs?"

"Aurora introduced me
to crack, Mr. McKinney. I was a big drinker at the time. Both my
parents were alcoholics, so whatever genetic predisposition there was
kind of doubled up in me. But I was in denial, like most alcoholics. I
thought everyone in college drank like I did. Then I had my first job
on Wall Street and got into the two-martini lunches of the eighties, to
get me through the afternoon until I could start drinking in earnest.
Went on to business school, where I mixed my liquor with the occasional
line of coke."

"Why crack?"

Guidi leaned in and
lighted a cigarette, throwing the match into a half-empty coffee cup.
"Because Aurora Tait lit the pipe and put it in my mouth while she was
lying naked next to me in bed. It seemed like a fine idea at the time."