Liberty Falling-pigeon 7 (31 page)

The garden was too soft, too choked with plant life for an accident of this type to have occurred within its walls. The concrete steps and the brick side of the ward were the two exceptions. A wound of this magnitude could hardly have been engendered by any casual slip of the foot. Tremendous force was indicated. Either a fall from a considerable height, or a blow delivered with power. Two choices presented themselves: Corinne had fallen elsewhere and, in confusion, staggered into the garden. Or she had been struck down, either in the garden or elsewhere, and then tossed into the garden to die. Anna favored the latter. If not for the groans, the corpse might never have been found. The smell of rotting flesh might even go unnoticed. Stray cats, gulls, unlucky pigeons and careless squirrels frequently added their postmortem perfume to the atmosphere. Who would fight through brush and poison ivy to view that? Here, on a small island visited by thousands of people, were some of the most isolated places Anna had ever found.

Though probably too late to save any little gray cells, Anna intubated Corinne and put her on full-flow oxygen for the head injury. For the dehydration, she started her on an
IV drip of normal saline. She had no luck propping the six-cell anywhere that worked, and reverted to her tiny flash when both hands were required. Given Corinne's advanced state of dehydration, finding a vein took a while. Anna added a number of punctures to the crosshatching of scratches on the actress's left arm. By the time the needle was taped in place, Anna's chin and the end of the flashlight were covered in drool.
The glamour never stops,
she thought, and put the used needle in the sharps box. Because a blow as forceful as the one Corinne had sustained could have cracked or broken vertebrae, Anna stabilized her neck.

Joshua arrived with lights and noise and a promise of more help on the way. He'd found gardening tools and he'd brought a backboard. Between the two of them they cut enough space in the brush so they could get the board near Corinne. Before they finished packaging her--less than seventeen minutes by Anna's watch--the sound of rotor blades was heard and Joshua left them to guide the helicopter down and lead the paramedics to Corinne's secret garden.

Anna finished strapping Corinne to the backboard and immobilizing her head and neck between orange foam cubes designed for the purpose. A perfectionist when it came to emergency care, she hefted the big flashlight and methodically checked Corinne's packaging: oxygen, backboard straps snug but not too tight, neck stable,
IV
in place. In the powerful beam of the Park Policeman's flashlight the scratches on Corinne's arm, though smudged with dirt, ceased being a meaningless crisscross of accidental injuries. Gently, Anna rolled her patient's arm till the wrist and inner elbow were fully exposed. Corinne's assailant had carved her up. Not deep enough to bleed much or scar, but clear and intentional marks made by a knife tip, a pin or needle, something small and sharp. The scratches were almost bloodless, as fit with the depleted fluid level of the woman's body. Remembering that under certain conditions fingerprints could be lifted from human skin, Anna resisted the urge to clean away the dirt. Painstakingly, she pieced together the pattern of the scratches. Words. A message had been scraped into the flesh.

STOPMUDP4J

"Well, that sure as hell clears things up," Anna muttered.

19

Joshua and three uniformed paramedics appeared with a clatter. The backboard, with its featherweight occupant, was whisked away. Start to finish, white spider to gone, had been less than an hour.

Walking back to the registry building beside Joshua, in the now unnatural silence of early morning, Anna was left with only a whirling impression of greenery, white skin and the efficiency of New York's emergency medical response personnel.

Joshua gallantly shared his sandwiches with her, bologna and Kraft American cheese on white bread with lots of mayonnaise. Because it echoed box lunches from childhood, Anna found the meal comforting. She devoured even the bologna. Over the years her vegetarian ethic had softened--or weakened, depending on how one chose to view it--like many other staunchly held rules she'd embraced in her younger years. If she was hungry and somebody offered her meat, she ate it. Otherwise she preferred not to eat her little friends.

After the welcome repast, this being a civilized park, Anna showered. As hot water poured over tired muscles, she tried to remember whether heat and soap spread or removed the oil from poison ivy.

Food and cleanliness should have relaxed her into sleep, but both she and Joshua needed to talk, to debrief, to process what had gone by. Rejoining him in his office, she shared his coffee and they rehashed the night.

There was no sense checking the crime scene until sunrise. They would only muddy the evidence--if the rescue efforts hadn't already obliterated any signs of what had happened. Frustrated with the present, they wandered back to the past, to the day Corinne failed to show up for work. By the nightgown she wore, they assumed the incident had occurred after sundown. She must have been lying in that garden for about forty-eight hours.

How she had come to be on Ellis after sunset, barefoot, in her night-clothes was a question Joshua speculated on far more than Anna. She was pretty sure she knew, and hoped, with daylight, to prove her theory before sharing it. Much time was spent speculating upon who might have assaulted the young actress. Anna told the snippets she had overheard Corinne's co-workers drop regarding someone they called "Macho Bozo." Anna surmised he was a boyfriend-gone-bad of the little blonde. Joshua was convinced he was the culprit until he remembered a story no one had yet related to Anna.

The night policemen--the one on Liberty and the one on Ellis--being boatless, couldn't back each other up, but they could and did talk on the phone nearly every night, exchanging news or just passing the time. The previous night Andrew had told Joshua of his own adventure. Around ten p.m.--half an hour, if Anna remembered correctly, before Mandy stumbled home looking like something the cat dragged in--a chunk of flotsam in the person of one Michael Underwood had washed ashore in a small motorboat. Andrew found him in the plaza in a torn undershirt, shrieking for his beloved. Since there were no auditions for
A Streetcar Named Desire
being held on Liberty Island, Andrew promptly arrested him and charged him with drunk and disorderly, entering a park after hours and assault on a federal officer. An assault that left Mr. Underwood the worse for wear and Andrew--according to Andrew--without a mark on him.

Undermining Anna's theory that Macho Bozo had attacked the actress was the fact that Mr. Underwood had been alternately screaming threats at or weeping piteously for "Corinne." His storming the island had been the result of a good deal of Jack Daniel's and the mistaken belief that Corinne was hiding or being held against her will on Liberty--Mr. Underwood was unclear on this point.

If Anna and Joshua's math was correct, when Michael Underwood landed on Liberty crying for his lady love, the lady herself had already been in the garden for twenty-four hours.

Loath to let go of such an obvious suspect, Anna suggested he might merely have been establishing an elaborate alibi.

"Pretty fancy for a guy nicknamed Macho Bozo," Joshua pointed out. "Not to mention one that landed him in jail with what's going to amount to a shitload of fines to pay and, since he swung at Andrew, maybe some time."

Anna had to give up at that. Taking her leave, she crept into Patsy's office, saluted the woman as a Girl Scout when she found a blanket and pillow in the coat closet, and snuggled down on the carpet for a catnap.

The sun was just stretching over the roof of Manhattan when Anna returned to the abandoned garden on Island III. Joshua was already there, waist-deep in ravaged greenery, a pad and pen in hand, 35mm camera slung around his neck.

"Anything left?" Anna asked. She sat on the top of the steps leading into the enclosure.

"Not much," he admitted. "Tracks all over, yours, mine and ours. The leaf litter makes it impossible to sort it out. The stuff is half a foot deep." Anna remembered it curling up in front of her knees like fecund sea-foam as she'd crawled through it. "There's a dab of what will probably turn out to be Corinne's blood where her head was. I found this seven feet, six inches from the body. The woman," he corrected himself. She hadn't officially become a body yet. "Nearly at the wall." He pointed to the ward that formed the west side of the garden. Not much brick showed, as it had been transformed into a living monument to the tenacious power of vines. He held up a neatly bagged and tagged pewter candlestick with a handle. Of old-fashioned design, it reminded Anna of the one Wee Willie Winkie carried on his nightly rounds. A candle stub, not more than an inch or so high, was firmly waxed in place.

"It's not like flashlights haven't been invented. You couldn't see diddly with this. What in the heck was she doing out here with a candle?"

Corinne was an actress. It all fit together quite satisfactorily. Except for the attack.

"One other thing is a little odd. Maybe. Come down and take a look," Joshua invited. Anna scooched down the steps to look at the place he was indicating. To the left, where the undergrowth was thickest, in the corner between steps and wall, Joshua parted the leafy branches of a young tree. Underneath were imprints in the litter where heavy round objects had been.

"Ah," Anna said. "That explains it. She was struck down by a rogue elephant."

"They are the right size for elephant tracks, aren't they? Do you remember any of us setting anything down here?"

Anna didn't. Nothing they'd carried was that shape or that hard-edged. "Whatever it was, it was here recently," she observed. "In this climate and litter it wouldn't take too long for the impression to fade. Maybe a day, a couple days at most."

"What do you make of it?"

"Nothing," she admitted. "You?"

He shook his head. "I'm taking its picture and measuring it and recording. That's as good as it gets for now." He did all he said he'd do. Watching, Anna recalled seeing a cache of something under the stairs before they'd collapsed, recalled Trey insisting there was no cache there and taking the time to visit the wreck of the stairs on Island III to prove to her it wasn't there. He was right, but there had been marks, round, like elephant tracks. A number of pointed thoughts jabbed at her: Why was Trey Claypool so anxious she see there wasn't anything under the stairs? Had he put something there, heard her story of seeing it, moved it, then dragged her back to Island III to convince her she was nuts? Suspicion sharpened her memory. Just before the stairs fell she had heard a loud, solid
crack.
At the time, she'd been thinking of other things--like how not to get skewered in the dark--and had written the sound off to wood breaking. Why, of a sudden, would an oak beam give way? That
crack
could easily have been the sound of a sturdy boot smashing into the timber supporting the top of the stairs. If that was true, someone meant her harm. If someone meant her harm, maybe the incident in the subway was not an accident either.

"Are we about done here?" she asked, too restless to sit by and do nothing. Joshua finished up in short order, and she said, "Let's go. I think I have something to show you."

"What?" he asked, falling in beside her to walk through the grassy field between Islands III and II.

"Maybe nothing."

Joshua asked another couple of questions, but Anna was intent on retaining her mystery. Possibly because she was so sure she was right, it was going to be hard to cover her disappointment if she wasn't.

At the easternmost building on Island II, she led the way up the stairs she'd located the night before when darkness forbade her the quick and dirty climb she was accustomed to when seeking the solace of her balcony.

Full-bore, the rising sun poured through every window and crevice. Even deep within the fourth-floor hallway it was easy to see. "Take it slow," Anna said. "I've only been here in the dark since I noticed them."

"Them? Aliens? Grizzlies? What are we looking for?" Impatience didn't hone his words. Joshua exhibited a rare and wonderful patience, the ability to let a story unfold to a timetable other than his own. Rare in a man, even rarer in a policeman. Anna wondered if it had anything to do with being Hmong or, perhaps, Minnesotan. Whatever caused it, she admired it and took time to stop and smile at him.

"Footprints," she said. "Little bare footprints about a woman's size six."

"Or a boy's size five," he added, and it gave her a jolt. She hadn't considered a child. A little boy, brought here by one of the employees when day care failed them, and let loose to play where he oughtn't to play, was more likely than the scenario she'd dreamed up.

"Could be," she had to admit. But it wasn't. She was sure. Mostly sure.

The only new, obvious tracks were her own, easily identifiable. Minnetonka driving moccasins, an addiction she'd picked up when she worked on Isle Royale, were soled in hard rubber pegs that made tracking a cinch. She made a mental note to keep that in mind next time she wanted to keep her travels to herself.

Anna could not match Joshua's patience. "The hell with this," she said, after peering through murky light at the uneven floor for less than a minute. "Let's just search every room. It'll be quicker. You take the right. I'll take the left." It would be on the left, overlooking the meadow between II and III--that's where Anna would have put it.