Hell Gate (12 page)

“A search warrant or a judge?”

“Neither, Coop.”

Mercer led him down to the bedroom and nursery, and I watched as they used their gloved fingers to open closet doors, look under the dust ruffle of the undisturbed king-size bed, and pull the handles of dresser drawers.

The master bathroom was perfectly neat. I could see that Salma used the same makeup that I did. The distinctive black-and-gold packaging with the
C
logo stamped in white was everywhere on the countertop and bath shelf.

“Tomorrow I’ll need to get a court order to get the baby’s DNA—and Ethan Leighton’s,” I said, making my checklist out loud while the guys looked for any minor sign of trouble. “I’d love to know who else claims to be the father.”

“You’re so far ahead of yourself with court orders and search warrants. Somebody has to report a crime.”

“Leighton’s up to his eyeballs in trouble, Mike.”

We retraced our steps through the living room to the kitchen.

“You beginning to feel any better?” Mercer asked.

“I’ve got no choice. We’re coming up empty.”

“Nothing out of place,” Mike said. “Plenty of milk in the refrigerator for the kid and food on the shelves for both of them. Not a dish in the sink. She gets triple points for being a neat freak.”

A long corkscrew wine-bottle opener with a carved wooden handle was resting on its side on the counter next to the sink.

Mercer pointed to it. “Maybe she was expecting someone who never showed, Alex. That could explain the wineglasses and the setup.”

The edge of a shiny black object was protruding from beneath the front of the toaster oven. Mercer saw it, too, but couldn’t slide his large fingers under to reach it.

I stuck my forefinger in and pushed out a razor-thin cell phone, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand and slimmer than a compact.

“Now, I don’t know anybody who would leave home at night with all this turmoil going on and not take her cell,” I said, fumbling with my latex gloves to pick up the lid.

“Hers?” Mike asked.

I pressed the button to light up the small screen, which showed the evening’s time and date. “I’ll figure that out next. Right now, all I can tell you is that whoever had it last got as far as punching in three digits, Mike. Nine-one-one. But they’re still in the display box, so it doesn’t look like the caller ever got to hit Send.”

“You may be sneaking up on some probable cause, kid.”

Mercer took the phone from my hand while Mike picked up the corkscrew opener.

“And I don’t think you’re going to like the vintage of the stain on the tip of this lethal weapon,” Mike said. “Here’s your scintilla, Coop. I’m guessing it’ll likely come up human blood.”

“You’re late, Alexandra,” the mayor said on Thursday morning. “You asked for this seven-thirty meeting and here we are.”

“I’m very sorry, of course.”

“It’s the hair thing with Coop,” Mike said, getting up from his seat to close the door behind me. “She doesn’t leave home until it’s perfect. Busy times like this, you never know when you’re going to get caught in a perp walk.”

I knew he was covering for me. Battaglia had refused to come back to City Hall for the emergency meeting I suggested to Tim Spindlis—he didn’t want to take direction from the mayor—but insisted on being briefed before I filled Vin Statler and Keith Scully in on last night’s events. I had lost ten minutes talking to him.

“Sit down, please,” Statler said, pointing to the chair next to Mercer. We were in the Blue Room—the mayor’s public receiving suite on the ground floor, resplendent with its ceiling medallions, rope molding, and wainscoting.

“It was actually my suggestion that we bring you in on this, Vin,” Scully said. The commissioner had been appointed by Bloomberg, but had done such an extraordinary job reducing the city’s violent crime statistics and improving the quality of the police force that Statler had kept him on. “You wanted to know more about Ethan Leighton’s lady friend.”

“Well, in the sense that there have been so many political scandals lately that this kind of nonsense is likely to trump the more important news, like the human trafficking story.”

“Why don’t you tell the mayor what happened after you left here,” Scully said to me.

It was just the five of us in the room, and I told the mayor everything from the autopsy results to our efforts to talk with—and then to locate—Salma Zunega.

Mike had the morning’s additional fact. The substance on the tip of the wine opener was indeed human blood. He’d had one of the precinct cops drop it off at the lab when we left East End Avenue shortly after midnight, and had stopped there to get that report on his way to City Hall.

“I’m struggling with whether to go public with this,” Scully said. “It’s going to bring more heat on Leighton and—”

“What’s wrong with that?” the mayor asked, tossing his head back so that we might not see his smirk.

“I don’t need an all-out manhunt if this woman just slipped away for a few days to catch her breath, but like Alex says, it’s unusual to leave home without a cell phone these days.”

“And it’s unlikely she was giving herself a manicure with the corkscrew,” Mike added.

“I’ve got Crime Scene going over her apartment now, Vin. I’d like to be ready to ramp up full bore on this if we get a break on where she is and what her condition is.”

“That’s fine with me.”

“What I’d like, actually, is to borrow the mansion,” the commissioner said.

“What? Gracie Mansion?” Statler raised himself out of the chair, striking a pose almost identical to the Charles Jarvis portrait of Thomas Jefferson behind him. “Impossible.”

“I just need it for a couple of days, Vin. Think about it. The girl’s apartment is right across the street. Once word gets out, the press will be camped on your doorstep anyway.”

Statler was angry now. “It’s not my doorstep. I don’t live there.”

“That’s my point. Let us use it to get started. Except for your occasional breakfasts or teas, the house sits empty most of the time. And I’ve got an entire police detail already in place there.” That was routine, since the mansion was the mayor’s ceremonial home. “What’s the harm? This whole thing may blow over if the woman just went back to Mexico for a week.”

“I don’t want any part of this run from the mayor’s office or Gracie Mansion. Do you understand that? It’ll just look like I’m out to get Leighton. And you—you, young lady. Haven’t you got your hands full with all those women from the ship?”

“I do, Mr. Mayor. I certainly do. But it will be days until most of them are settled in and physically examined and ready to be interrogated. I’m truly concerned about the disappearance of Salma Zunega.”

“This isn’t about Alex or the district attorney, Vin. I want a handful of my men operating out of the mansion. Are you saying no to that?”

“This woman will turn up soon enough. Thank you, Ms. Cooper. Why don’t the rest of you step out while the commissioner and I finish this conversation?”

“Thanks for your hospitality, Mr. Mayor,” Mike said, pulling back my chair as the three of us accepted the abrupt end to the meeting. “Till next time.”

We were leaving as many of the City Hall employees were coming in through the metal detectors in the lobby of the building.

“Pittsburgh Paint. Bohemian blue,” Mike said.

“What?”

“In case you wanted to know the color of the paint on the wall. It’s historic, Coop.”

“I didn’t give it any thought.”

“It used to be green. Back in the day, I mean. But it had to be made more telegenic, so now it’s Bohemian blue,” Mike said. “I’ve spent so much time in that room waiting for press conferences on homicide cases, I can tell you every detail of the décor. It was a real pleasure to be in and evicted so fast today.”

“Well, I’ll go on up to my office and get to work organizing my unit for our interviews. Hizzoner was a bit testy with Scully, don’t you think?”

“Guess it’s his mansion whether he’s there or not,” Mike said.

“Will you be at your desk all day?” Mercer asked.

“I expect to.”

I walked out the front door and was buffeted by the fierce wind.

“Hold on to that railing,” Mercer said. “The steps look icy.”

There had been a light dusting of snow during the night that covered over patches of ice from the most recent storm.

“I was stupid not to wear boots today. I was running late and just hopped in a cab.”

There was construction on the east side of City Hall Park between the front steps and Centre Street, the wide thoroughfare that started right there, at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge. One of the guards asked us to stay on the walkway that led toward Chambers Street, behind the building in the direction of my office.

“I’ll peel off here,” Mike said. “I’m back at the morgue for the autopsies of more of the bodies from the ship. You good?”

“My car’s up by the courthouse,” Mercer said. “I need to spend some time with Alex.”

“Talk later.” Mike waved good-bye to us and turned south to exit the park.

The badly rutted concrete path hugged the side of City Hall, then wound through the northeast corner of the park under the brittle arms of the bare trees that dotted the landscape. Tall mesh fences stood to the right, protecting dark green tarps that were spread over large sections of the ground.

“You missed the commissioner’s news, Alex,” Mercer said.

“What?” I asked, turning my head to better hear him. We were walking single file on the narrow strip of pavement.

“Careful,” he said, as he watched me balance on the slippery surface. “Two more bodies came ashore this morning. A couple of miles farther out in Nassau County.”

“Oh my God. Do you know anything about them?”

“Both young men. Both seem to have drowned.”

“How many people from the ship are still unaccounted for?” I asked.

“What’s that?”

“Doesn’t anyone have a manifest for the damn thing?”

“It’s a slave ship, Alex. When we find our Simon Legree, I expect we’ll find the documentation too.”

There was definitely black ice underfoot on the unshoveled walk. I paused and grabbed on to the mesh fence so that I could take Mercer’s arm when he caught up with me.

As I swiveled to face him, my shoulder hit the mesh and ripped the two stakes closest to me out of the ground. I fell onto my side, taking the fence with me as I landed on the tarp. I heard it rip open as my back slammed against the ground through the hole I had made in the old, weather-beaten material. My bag flew from my shoulder and emptied onto the dirt around me.

“Alex!” Mercer shouted as he bent over to reach for me. “Are you okay?”

My neck ached and the cold, damp earth was caked against both my legs and head. I was in a ditch, flat on my back.

“Shaken, Mercer. Not stirred. And I don’t think anything’s broken. Just badly shaken. If you want to talk omens, I think I’m on a killer course.”

“What is it, girl?”

My head rested on a pile of dirt and I was staring at the jawbone of a human skull.

“What do you mean it’s been here a couple of hundred years?” I asked, standing a few feet back from the large hole in the ground. “Where’d you get that idea?”

Nan Toth had gone to my office and retrieved the gym clothes and sneakers I kept there for the occasional times we were able to get away at lunchtime to work out. The officers had let me back into the restroom at City Hall to change clothes, and I had thrown out the black pencil skirt that had been torn almost in half along a sharp rock, just like my pantyhose.

Alton Brady, the park supervisor, was on his knees next to Mercer, while his men had already started the task of reinforcing the structure surrounding the twenty-foot-square site where someone had been digging.

“It’s the anthropologists says how old the stuff is,” Brady said. “Besides, you wasn’t supposed to be in here, miss.”

“Nothing I planned. I can promise you that.”

“What’s that museum in Washington? The Smithsonian?” Brady asked. “That’s where they’re sending the bones. Supposed to be all hush-hush.”

Mercer stepped down into the ditch. The ancient roots of rotting trees dangled on the edges, and protruding from the dirt were pieces of bone that looked like fragments of skulls and other skeletal remains.

“Is this part of the African Burial Ground?” Nan asked.

Mercer knew the answer to that. “No, that’s two blocks north of here. I wasn’t even a detective yet when we handled those protests.”

Digging to build a parking garage for an office complex on Lower Broadway in 1991, construction workers unearthed the remains of almost five hundred bodies.

“Who protested?” Nan asked.

Mercer scratched at the soil just six inches below the street level and the remains of a human hand—long, thin ivory fingers—stretched out toward his own.

“My people,” Mercer said, winking at Nan. “Bones and bureaucrats don’t mix too well, as you may already know. Politicians don’t like to remind folks that their cities were built on the backs of the disenfranchised. African American New Yorkers—those who didn’t already know it—learned that outside of Charleston, South Carolina, we had the greatest slave population in the colonies. So the city fathers weren’t any too anxious to deal with the remains.”

Alton Brady reached out to pick up a fragment of bone.

“Don’t touch that, please,” Mercer said, as he flipped open his phone and hit a number. “Mike? You at the morgue yet? We’re still in City Hall Park—I’ll explain later. Well, as soon as you’re done with breakfast, tell the ME to send his bone doc down here to the park, behind the building. I’ll meet him at the gate. Alex stumbled onto something.”

The ME’s office had a forensic anthropologist, Andy Dorfman, who helped in the difficult analysis of old skeletal discoveries.