I looked at the gun again and remembered that Goldman had told me she had been in the Israeli Army—an elite antiterrorist unit. I had no reason to doubt her. The dark pathway in front of the car frightened me as much as she and her weapon did, and I had no intention of following her to a more isolated piece of turf.
“Let’s talk right here, please, Ellen. I’ll tell you whatever information you want to know. Whatever it is.” Where the fuck are the Park Rangers? I asked myself. Don’t leave this car. Nobody’s allowed to park off the roadway—it’s a worse offense to the Rangers than a triple homicide. Keep her in the car and someone will come upon us, I kept thinking. Stay put.
“Get out,” she barked. She was out of her door, gun down at her side, and around the back of the car to me in a matter of seconds. I had thought about trying to climb over the console and into the driver’s seat, but the model was too compact to do it quickly, and she had taken the key out of the ignition.
Ellen had an automatic light beam on the key ring which she held in her left hand, and she pointed it at my lock, which popped up at her command. “I told you to get out of the car and I mean it, Alex, right now.”
“It doesn’t seem to make any difference to me. I’m not moving. Either you shoot me hi your car, which at least creates some problems for you, or you take me down into a park ravine and shoot me, God knows why. But I’ll take my chances here.”
“Stop playing Clarence Darrow with me, Alex. I don’t intend to shoot you, so get your ass out of the car and walk with me. We have things we need to talk about.”
My mind Was trying to move more nimbly to process the words Goldman was peaking, while the rest of my body stayed taut in the presence of her pistol. Why was she holding me at gunpoint, why was she threatening my life, if she didn’t intend to kill me? It made no sense, since I would obviously have to report this abduction to the police. Of course she was going to shoot me, so why give her the location of her choice? At least, my body or my blood in her rented car would link her to my death. A wave of nausea swept through me at the thought of the possibility of those two words: “my death.”
Goldman had seemed so sane and articulate and rational until moments ago, and now, so completely crazy.
“Walk down this trail with me, Alex. We just need to get a bit away from the road for a while, so we can discuss things.”
She had opened the car door and was nudging me with the short barrel of her gun, motioning me toward a narrow footpath leading downhill between a clump of trees and bushes. I stepped out, and let my blazer, which had been draped across my lap, fall to the ground. I didn’t have enough possessions with me to create a track to follow, but surely it would be an identifying piece of clothing that would make someone look for me if I were missing. I fast-forwarded through every kidnapping case I had worked on and every dreadful story of disappearing people I had clipped from the tabloids.
“Pick it up, Alex,” Goldman chided me. “I’ll wear it. It’s chilly, tonight. A little big for me, but it’ll be fine.” She waited until I handed her the jacket and then put it on, one arm at a time, rolling up the sleeves to fit her shorter arms.
I scanned the area for signs of a jogger, a member of the Road Runner club, a homeless guy who’d have some kind of box cutter or object I could use to try to defend myself, but we seemed to occupy this little pocket of the park entirely by ourselves.
Goldman tugged on the sleeve of my shirt and pressed the gun into the small of my back. We started along the tree-lined walk and halfway down I stumbled on a piece of loose rock, falling backward and sliding another four or five feet, pounding my back against the stones and branches, and scraping my hands as I tried to brake my descent. An involuntary screech let out as I fell and Goldman hurried to catch up to me, smacking me across the face with her free hand in punishment for the noise.
“It was an accident. I slipped. I’m not being difficult.”
“I thought you were so graceful,” she sneered, “the ballet dancer. Ha! Get on your feet.”
I pushed myself up, wiping the pebbles from the abrasions that now covered the palms of both hands, but as I tried to stand it was obvious I had turned an ankle and couldn’t put my weight directly on it.
“Keep going. Drag your damn foot if you have to, but move it over this way.” She poked me with the gun barrel to cross the paved sidewalk and moved me farther downhill, near a weeping willow that was bent over, gleaming in the moonlit radiance of the lake. “Under these trees, here. Now sit down. Does this place look familiar to you?”
How closely she had done her research was even more apparent now. We weren’t more than thirty feet from the site of Harold McCoy’s last rape, diagrammed on the front pages of each of the city papers when he struck the last time before his arrest eleven months ago. McCoy had brought his victim in from the other direction after he dragged her off her bicycle late one night, coming to this area from the north, near the Loeb Boathouse.
I couldn’t tell which was throbbing more violently now, my head or my ankle. The former was urging me not to obey the command to sit, and the latter was eager to be relieved of my dead weight.
Goldman leaned over and seemed to be placing her gun in a holster on her ankle, hidden beneath the leg of her slacks. I lightened for a moment, thinking she had meant her statement not to shoot me, but closed my eyes in terror at the sight of the knife with the six-inch blade which she unsheathed and withdrew in the next gesture.
From her pants pocket she unrolled a small length of cord. “Give me your hands. In front,” she demanded as she kneeled and wound the rope around my wrists, securing it with a knot that looked like some professional job—the kind that might have been taught to an army Special Forces recruit.
Talk, I kept telling myself. You’ve heard of victims who have talked themselves out of their situations. Offenders who can be reached and reasoned with, who walk away from the ultimate crime and leave their prey unharmed.
“Ellen, I won’t run away, you don’t have to tie me up. Please tell me what it is you want to know.” I tried to be forceful without letting the degree of desperation that I felt spill over into my voice.
“This is how Harold McCoy would do it, isn’t it? This is his ‘signature,’ you were quoted as saying. Get them into the park, off the roadway, always near one of the bodies of water, trussed up like the pigs they are, and then cut them up.”
There was no place for me to recoil as she took the knife and slit a line across my jeans, right at the crease where the top of the thigh meets the hip. The thick denim material yielded like butter to the fine-bladed, sharp knife, and like a paper cut, I didn’t even feel it pierce my skin until the stinging sensation began to smart and I looked down to see the oozing ripple of blood.
Ellen Goldman was laughing now as she saw the red stain creep onto the faded denim of my pants. “I didn’t even mean to cut you yet. I have plenty of time for that.”
Talk to her, I thought to myself again. But words didn’t come, and I didn’t want her to enjoy the fact that I was in pain.
She went on. “Don’t you see how easily I could make it look like Harold McCoy did this to you? That he waited outside the precinct when he heard on the radio that you were there, then he forced you into the park. People would buy that, you know. The press would love that story.”
Was that her plan? To make it look like a copycat crime? Goldman had studied my cases and knew that Harold McCoy was out of jail. She could make it look like he had stalked me—his prosecutor, his nemesis—and taken me to his special place in the park and killed me there.
“No one would believe that, Ellen. People saw me get in the car with you.” I prayed that was true, as I said it aloud, although I had no more reason to believe it than she did.
“No one saw that—no one who knows me,” she snapped back at me.
“Yeah, but guys who know me saw us. That would destroy your game—someone would put it together.”
“But at least this time they
wouldn’t blame led. I never meant for that to happen, but you’ve got him in so much trouble—he’s likely to be charged for a murder he didn’t commit.” Ellen Goldman was raging now, and suddenly things were coming into focus for me.
“Isabella Lascar?” I asked her. I was incredulous. “This is about Isabella?”
“No, no, no. Not at all. She was nothing. This is about led Segal.”
Crystal clear. The Final Jeopardy answer tonight is erotomania, and now I knew the question: “What killed Isabella Lascar?”
Sitting before me was the person who had shot Iz through the center of that magnificent head, and she did it because of an obsession with a man who barely knew her: Jed Segal. This must be the woman who had stalked Jed in California, a woman whose delusion had already driven her to kill. I was about to become Ellen Goldman’s next victim, and I was struggling to call up the things I had read about her mental disorder—erotomania—before I fell asleep last night, hoping that something would trigger how to deal with this otherwise intelligent, functional human being.
The stillness of the night was cut by the shrill squeal of my beeper, ringing out high-pitched tones from its perch on my waistband. Ellen stood and reached down to rip the small black device from me, clicked it to the off position, and pressed the lever on the illuminated dial to see the caller’s number.
“Who’s looking for you? It’s a nine one seven number—who is it?”
“It must be someone from my office. This happens all the time, Ellen. There must be a new case.” I tried to urge her to take me to a phone booth, sure that I could signal some kind of distress if I could get on the phone with Mike or Mercer or Sarah. “They’ll look for me if I don’t get back to them soon. Please let us call in, and then we can walk away from this rationally, Ellen. Please? I’m through with Jed, we can—”
“Well, he’s not through with you. Nor am I. Who is this trying to reach you now?” She repeated the nine one seven area code and began to recite the rest of the number to me.
It was Chapman’s cell phone. He was somewhere in the field, roaming, probably in some joint having a beer and getting ready to hit on a girl at the next table, with no idea that I was sitting under a tree in Central Park with a lunatic. I lied to Goldman: “I don’t recognize the number. It could be from any squad. I’m on call tonight, all night. Let’s just go on up to the street, we’ll phone them back and you can listen to the conversation.”
Chapman had tried to reach me at the Special Victims office during the line-ups tonight and I had put off the calls. Maybe that was Mike trying to contact me as I was about to get in Goldman’s car, when the cop was yelling to me from the steps of the station house. Of course, he must have spoken with David Mitchell after David’s appointment with Jed at seven-thirty this evening. They had probably put some of this together tonight and wanted to tell me about it. Had they figured out that perhaps there was another connection between Jed and Isabella—that both of them were being stalked by the same person—one whom she wanted desperately, and one whom she desperately wanted out of the way? Maybe they had figured it out, but never dreamed she would be waiting for me as I emerged from the station house at the end of my long evening.
Goldman took the silenced beeper and stuck it in the pocket of the jacket.
“You’re the woman who met Jed in California, aren’t you?” I asked her as she loomed over me, looking around at the grounds above us, as though to see whether the loud “beeps” had attracted any attention on the road or pathways.
Engage her. Do it gently. She’s not crazy, the book says, in any other way. She just has this delusion about Jed. Apart from that, she’s not odd or bizarre. I hope these fucking shrinks know what they’re talking about. “Didn’t you meet him when he was running for the Senate, in California? You were in graduate school out there.”
Goldman cocked her head and looked back down at me. “Why, did Jed talk to you about me?”
“Yes, yes he did.”
“Did he say I was crazy? Did he tell you he didn’t want anything to do with me?”
Keep lying. They all do it to you. “No, Ellen, he never said that.” Flatter her, tell her what she wanted to hear. Tell her that the unfaithful bastard really wanted her. “I never had the idea he got to know you very well, but he used to tell me you came to all his speeches, his events—said you were very smart.”
She was thinking now, thinking about what I was feeding her, and whether there was any kernel of truth in it. It had to at least intrigue her, I told myself, that Jed had spent any time talking about her when he moved East. At least it kept her on her feet, with that blade away from me, as I sat in place, my body aching and my mind trying to give her some thread back to life.
“Jed was in love with me, you know. There was a time when we first met that he wanted to go out with me,” Goldman told me.
“I didn’t know that.” Let her talk. Let her tell me any bizarre imagining that popped into her twisted brain.
“I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you that. That’s what got him in trouble with his wife.”
That and the thirty-six other women he had probably screwed behind her back.
“I know he felt terrible when the police arrested you in L.A.,” I said. Find out why that didn’t make her turn against him. It’s hard to believe anybody sane wouldn’t give up after that.
“That wasn’t his fault, Alex. Didn’t he tell you that? His wife was insanely jealous. Every time he saw me at a rally or a cocktail party, the minute he wanted to make his way across a room to me, his miserable wife would get one of his aides to stop him. You were much luckier—he finally got smart enough to get rid of her before he moved to New York. She was the reason I was in jail until the end of the summer. They arrested me because she complained that I was harassing her.”
That explains a lot. No wonder Jed never mentioned anybody bothering him here, in New York, when we started dating in June. There was no interference from Goldman, that I was aware of, as of the last week. But obviously, her approach to me—which started before Isabella’s death—was a pivotal part of it. I had never even asked Jed the name of the California stalker. It hadn’t seemed relevant.
Goldman kneeled in front of me again. “What else did Jed tell you about me, anything?”
Maybe this is part of my lifeline. Enough about you, Goldman must be thinking, now let’s hear what Jed thinks about me. Use your imagination, Cooper. Fill her with whatever will fuel her fantasies of life with Segal. Keep talking to her.
“Well, yes, Ellen. You must know that what we had is over, ended. Maybe that’s why he was talking about you so—”
“Don’t lie to me, Alex, you know it wasn’t over.”
“But for me it is, I swear to you. I can talk to him about you, I can arrange for you to be with him.” You two creeps really deserve each other, I thought. I’ll even spring for the hotel room—just let me out of this deathtrap alive, please.
Why did Ellen Goldman think it wasn’t over with me and Segal? She knew about Jed and Isabella. She must have thought I would break up with him once I found out about it, too. Didn’t she kill Isabella because that temptress, that irresistible goddess, stood in the way of her reunion with Jed? I wanted to remind her of that, to give my breakup with Jed more credence. And yet I didn’t want to make her think of Iz—the rational part of her must have some consciousness of guilt for shooting another human being to death.
I tried it out on her gently. “I—I broke up with Jed this week, Ellen. I’m not going to see him anymore.”
“That’s what you say tonight, but I’ve heard him talk to you, I’ve heard him beg you,” she sneered at me.
Where? I thought. What could she have heard?
She went on. “You still got in his car, didn’t you? Accepted his flowers?”
The same observations that “Doctor” Cordelia Jeffers made in the letter that arrived today. Were those letters also a device of Goldman’s?
“No, Ellen—I’ve
ended the whole goddamn thing. It was much too painful for me. I don’t want to be with Jed Segal and he isn’t begging me to come back to him, I swear to you.”
“I’m the one who knows exactly what he’s up to, and you’ll fall for it sooner or later. You’ll take him back, too, now that your competition—Isabella Lascar—is out of the way. I know you won’t throw away everything he offers you. I’m sick of his pleading with you.”
“Don’t believe him, Ellen,” if she’s really spoken with Jed, I thought. Maybe he’s told her, like he’s told Joan andMike, that he has tried to reach me. “He’s telling peoplehe’s begging me, but I swear to you that he hasn’t said aword to me.”
“That’s because I’ve been picking up those messages, Alex. I know how he feels about you, and you’ll give in eventually.”
“You’ve been picking up my messages?” My face distorted itself in puzzlement, as I looked over at Ellen, not believing what she had just said. “You couldn’t possibly have—”
She interrupted and seemed pleased to carry forward this part of the dialogue—an opportunity, it was dawning on me, to tell me how much smarter she was than I. My hands twisted and turned against the cord on my wrists as she showed off her superior intelligence, but it didn’t feel as though I was making any progress.
She fixed her gaze on me. “Did you know Lascar had a Filofax, you know, a date book and address directory?”
“Yes, I did.” Iz’s bible.
“Well, I guess the stupid cops never knew it. At least, I never read that it was stolen, in any of the newspaper accounts of her death,” Goldman said.
That’s because one of the smart things we do is to keep a few critical details away from reporters so we know when we’re talking to the real culprit, Ellen. I knew about its disappearance before anyone else did, but it certainly hadn’t been in the papers. “No, I never read about that either. Was it with her, in my house?”
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 31