I lifted my face up to the steaming water that poured out at me and drizzled down the length of my legs. I reached for the bar of soap and stared at my fingernail, noticing the chip of polish at its tip. My eyes closed and all I could see was the bright red on the nails of the dead woman’s hand. I opened my eyes and shook my head, willing myself not to call up other memories of that body on the ladder. There would be all night for such visions, as I knew too well from past experience. I scrubbed the day’s grime off my face and body, then dried and wrapped myself tightly in a warm, thick terry robe.
I toweled my hair as I played Jake’s message once more. I was smiling again, imagining what he might have said in between the snatches of words that were actually recorded and not gobbled up by the satellites. I’d have to phone my best friend, Nina, and tell her about Jake’s call. I could guess what her response would be: “What good is it to have a guy half a world away when you need him to put his arms around you right now?”
Maybe I’d wait and call her tomorrow. She wasn’t wrong about my needing Jake, but I had been dealing with images of victims for more than ten years. Most of the time, my work was with women who survived their assailants and who would triumph in the courtroom. But very little could soften the shock of seeing firsthand the destruction of a human life-a life as young as my own, as full of promise and hope as I dreamed mine would be.
I shook the dampness off my hair and looked at my watch. It would be morning in China. I had no idea where Jake was at the moment and no office number abroad at which to call him back. I wished he were here with me now. This was not a night to be alone.
My head ached and my stomach was making noises, demanding to be fed. I pressed the telephone button to speeddial the deli on the next corner and order a turkey sandwich. I could nourish the body if not the soul.
“Sorry, Alex. It’s almost ten o’clock,” said Clare at P. J. Bernstein’s delicatessen. “We’re just closing up.”
I never cooked at home, so I knew there would be nothing in the refrigerator. I had cans of soup in the cabinet, but it was too warm out to entertain the thought of hot soup. I put some ice cubes in a glass, moving on to the den to fix myself a stiff Dewar’s. A mystery novel waited for me next to my bed, but there was nothing like the sight of a real corpse to alienate me from the genre for a couple of weeks. Jake had left a dog-eared Henry James on my dresser. Perhaps I’d start that instead of trying to go to sleep.
I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights before I sat on the sofa, drink in hand, and gazed out over the city. Soft music from my CD system distracted me until Linda Ronstadt began to sing about the hungry women down on Rue Morgue Avenue. I flashed again to the body on the ladder and visualized the setting where it rested tonight.
The sharp buzz of the phone startled me. I caught it on the third ring.
“You almost sound happy to hear from me for a change.”
“Mike?” I asked, having hoped it would be Jake.
“Wrong voice, huh? Don’t go getting dejected ’cause it’s me. It’s not like I’m the Unabomber or Ted Bundy calling you for a quick squeeze. The lieutenant asked me to get hold of you. Says he’d really like you to be at Compstat in the morning.”
Compstat-comparative computer statistics-the NYPD’s hot new demonstration for leadership accountability. Meetings held at headquarters several times a month, in the War Room, to show off the commissioner’s ability to identify and solve the city’s crime problems.
“What time do I have to be there?”
“Seven o’clock sharp. Seems the brass went berserk over this one tonight-it screws up all the mayor’s statistics for the month. The commish may even call on you if he gets frisky and wants answers for all his questions, or wants to blame your boss for refusing to prosecute some of the quality-of-life cases.”
“Thanks for the warning.”
“You sound really flat, kid. You okay?”
“My head’s still back at Spuyten Duyvil, if you know what I mean. Want to grab a pizza and come on up here for supper?”
“Sorry, Coop. It’s almost eleven o’clock. We’ll be working most of the night, trying to figure out who this broad is and when she got popped in the river. See you at reveille. Better sleep with the night-light on.”
It wasn’t the dark that frightened me. It was the fact that moving around out there, below my window, were creatures capable of splitting open the head of a young woman and throwing her body into the water. I stared out at the lights of Manhattan for the next hour, watching them gradually go off as people went to sleep. And all the time, as I sat awake, I thought about the monsters who walk among us.
3
There were still a few cars parked on Hogan Place near my office, most of which belonged to the lawyers working the midnight shift in night court, when I pulled my Jeep into a reserved slot behind the district attorney’s space at six forty-five on Friday morning. I took the shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities in some third-world country. I stopped at a cart being wheeled into place by one of the regular street vendors and bought two cups of black coffee, remembering that the brew served in the hallway outside the meeting room was too weak to start me up for the day.
One by one, black Crown Vics with red flashers mounted on each dashboard pulled into the tightly secured parking garage beneath Police Headquarters, marking the arrival of bosses from all the commands in Manhattan North, the upper half of the island. I continued past that underground entrance and jogged up the two tiers of granite steps, walking around in front of the building to display my identification to the cop at the door and run my shoulder bag through the metal detector.
“Eighth floor,” the guard said. “Elevator’s behind the wall to the back.”
I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now and then-under this administration’s budget-driven oversight-I walked over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.
Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several times a month, at seven o’clock in the morning, bosses from one of the city’s geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza, to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public Information deputy.
When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.
Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. “Hey, Coop! Meet Lenny McNab. Just been transferred over to clean up the Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I doubt he’ll be able to sit down for a week.”
McNab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in McNab’s territory. If he couldn’t account for progress in the investigation by this morning, he’d be made to look like a fool by the three grand in
quisitors.
Lunetta’s voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. “Let’s get it going, guys. We’ve got a lot to cover this morning.” His entourage brushed past us and we dutifully followed.
Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths-to hold the crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more benign occasions-while the other wall was decorated with police shields and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies. Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear, around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that had attracted media attention.
Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to display over their heads on the three screens-usually starting with a map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month’s crime statistics, and a graph plotting the most recent week’s violent crime activity, with robberies flagged in red, rapes in blue, and burglaries in green.
Lunetta and his superchiefs sat in the rear at a table perpendicular to the array of well-decorated men spread down the center of the room. He was tall and lean, with angled features and black hair that was drawn sleekly back and trimmed at the neck in military fashion. He looked great in the dark navy blue uniform, and knew it.
My seat was in one of the three rows of folding chairs behind the chief’s position, which were reserved for non-NYPD spectators. Each chair was labeled with a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Excusing myself, I tried to slither into place, passing over two lawyers from the United States Attorney’s Office and four guys from upstate police departments, before sitting down next to a woman who introduced herself as a trend researcher from the Department of Justice. I opened the lid of my coffee cup and took a slug as Lunetta called the first group of officers to the podium.
Frank Guffey moved forward to the mike, flanked by his supervising staff. He was smart and well liked by police and prosecutors, a tough boss who had been moved from the East Harlem area a year earlier down to the cushy confines of Wall Street, and now back to the high-crime neighborhood of the Twenty-eighth Precinct.
“G’morning, Chief. I’m reporting on the period that closed July thirty-first.” Guffey smiled and paused briefly, weighing whether to add a personal pleasantry. “Nice to be here again in the North, after a brief visit to Manhattan South, sir.”
Lunetta shot back, “I hope you can say as much after the meeting.”
“First of all, the decrease in overall crime continues.” Clearly, Guffey knew the drill. That’s what these guys wanted to hear, right out of the box. “Now, we do show an increase in robberies, but-”
Forget the “buts,” buddy. I watched as Lunetta turned his head ninety degrees and gave a command to the computer programmer sitting at his right shoulder. Seconds later, the three overhead graphics changed. A map of the Twenty-eighth Precinct’s territory dominated the middle screen.
Lunetta barked, “Break them down for me, Inspector. I want them by day of the week, and then by the time of day of the tour.”
Before Guffey could lift his papers and find the correct answers, we could all see the numbers in the projections that the chief’s team had prepared for this attack.
“I want to get right into these spikes, Guffey. Take us through them. Give me reasons.”
I could see the color rise in Frank’s cheeks, as most of the bosses around the tables seemed to squirm in sympathy.
Guffey started to respond. “Several of them seem to be the work of the same team, Chief. The numbers started to spike when a pair of male Hispanics began to hit a couple of apartments on Broadway, just north of McDonald’s. Same M.O. Gain entry with a ruse-female knocking on the door for the perps and asking for her sister. Then she disappears while the guys tie up everyone inside with speaker wire-”
“Drug related?”
“Probably. Only, the one last week, on the twenty-ninth-”
“You mean the restaurant manager they burned with an iron?” Lunetta thrived on displaying to the crowd how well he could learn the detail of hundreds of these cases, outlined for him in his briefing books, and talk about them as familiarly as if he were working on them himself.
“Yeah. We figure that was a mistake. They went to the wrong apartment. I got Louis Robertson here. They’re his cases, if you’d like to hear from him.”
“Not unless he’s got answers for me, Guffey. Excuses I got plenty of. It’s answers I want. You guys doing the obvious? Running fingerprints through Safis?” The new, automated fingerprint-matching system was solving scores of cases that used to require tedious hand searches. “Checking with surrounding precincts to see if they got anything like this going? Parole-probation-informants? I assume you’ll study these charts and decide how to redeploy your manpower to address the situation more aggressively.”
Guffey said his men had been doing all of the above and that he would certainly make use of the time charts. He got through the other crime categories fairly gracefully and back to his seat without a great deal of damage.
Inspector Jaffer was next up. A real breath of fresh air for the department. As I ran my eyes around the table, Joanne Jaffer and Jane Pearl were the only two women inspectors I noted in the room. They were both young, bright, and attractive, and were changing a lot of opinions about female bosses in the department, held by too many of the hairbags, those dyed-inthe-wool old-timers who were petrified in their traditions.
Jaffer’s numbers in the Twentieth Precinct were excellent. The Upper West Side had always been one of the safest residential areas in Manhattan. Robberies, burglaries, and car thefts continued to be lower than ever. No homicides in over six months. Her only problem was a serial rapist who had been operating for more than two years-hitting sporadically, and not even linked to a pattern until DNA tests on the rape kits had confirmed that the most recent attack was committed by the same assailant as the first one, which had occurred more than twenty months ago. Battaglia had been asked to address a community meeting about the case in a few days and would be pleased if I could come back to him after this morning with a sense about the chief’s role in the investigation.
Jaffer gave her report and began to answer Lunetta’s questions about the rapist.
“How many cases you up to now, Inspector?”
Jaffer answered sharply. “Eight, sir. That we know of. Eight with an identical M.O., and two of those have been linked to each other by DNA. Serology is working on two others this week.”
“What took you so long to put this pattern together? Somebody asleep in the station house?”
She started to answer, as a hand went up on the right side of the room. Sergeant Pridgen, who was assigned to Special Victims, was responsible for the task force handling the investigation. He had been running the cases long before Jaffer became involved and was trying to jump in to take some of the heat.
Lunetta ignored Pridgen’s waving arm. I knew he’d like to see Jaffer sweat, and I kept my fingers crossed that he would fail to make it happen.
“Serology finally came up with a cold hit, Chief. That’s what broke it for us.”
Her answers were clipped, to the point, and good. The investigation had floundered until the Medical Examiner’s Office made a computer match-known in the still-evolving language of genetic fingerprinting as a “cold hit”-between DNA samples left by the rapist in his victims’ bodies more than two years ago and those found in the most recent case. Cops who had argued about whether or not the older attacks bore any connection to t
he current crimes were silenced by the stunning ability of the database to definitively link an assailant’s targets to one another.
“Why can’t serology match it to a perp in their data bank?” Lunetta asked.
“Because the bank is just up and running in New York. It’s only been in operation since last year, and they’ve got fewer than a hundred samples from convicted rapists and murderers.”
Legislation created genetic data banks in most states across the country during the late nineties, but few of their labs were equipped to process the information collected from inmates and create the pools from which to search for repeat offenders, until quite recently. It would be unlikely to get a hit on this serial rapist, who had been operating on the streets of Manhattan since the days before the law enabled the collection of blood samples from incarcerated prisoners.
Jaffer continued to describe the team’s approach. Last week the department sketch artist, working with several of the victims, had completed a composite that was being distributed to stores and residences throughout the precinct-the “generic male black,” as Mercer liked to describe the suspect. Medium complexion, average height, average build, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, possible mustache, close-cropped hair, no distinguishing features, scars, or marks. Before too long, every African American adult male who set foot north of Sixtieth Street and south of Eighty-sixth Street, between Central Park West and Riverside Drive, would be stopped and questioned. Neighbors would be turning in their deliverymen or elevator operators, and good citizens would be frisked by anxious and weary cops, each one hoping to get a lucky break and catch the compulsive rapist.
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