Terminal City

by Linda Fairstein

  “Where do they meet?” I asked.

  Mercer laughed. “It’s a resistance group, Alex. Leaderless. Very sixties radical. They wouldn’t meet anywhere you could find them. All underground.”

  Pug wanted a piece of the action. “Like the tunnel people? That kind of underground? That would link right in with that Carl kid’s murder.”

  Mike waved him off. “That’s not what it means, Pug. You just stick to the Waldorf.”

  “But Jean said Lydia was totally into nonviolence. Does that fit with this group?” I asked Mercer.

  “I just scanned that article I printed out for you. No violence against people or animals, but ALF is very much into property damage. Started in the US with the Silver Spring monkeys.”

  “What?”

  “Some ALF members broke into a lab in Maryland where university scientists were using animals for medical experimentation. Freed the monkeys, put them in safe houses, then blew up the lab to the tune of a million dollars. End of the experiments.”

  “Is there a zoo in Grand Central we don’t know about?” Pug asked.

  “Everything but,” Mike said.

  “The feds have targeted ALF as a terrorist group.”

  “Terrorist?” I asked, shocked at the appellation.

  “Yeah. Domestic ecoterrorism.”

  “Don Ledger’s been worried about terrorist groups that have targeted Grand Central before,” I said, looking over at Mike. “And so have you.”

  “Mike’s got terrorists on the brain,” Pug said.

  “Sit on it, Pug.”

  “Just sayin’ . . .”

  “To use Alex’s word,” Mercer said, “it’s not a ‘fit’ for these crimes. No question this killer is moving from the outskirts right into the terminal, but if you’ve got this place targeted—I mean the building itself—you can’t do that without hurting lots of people.”

  “The commish says the feds have got that angle covered,” Rocco said. “Agents were sent in overseas after the international train bombings. That’s why they’re coming here in force today. Scully’s orders are to keep our focus on the three murders. Leave the terrorist theories to the feds.”

  “Are there any similarities between those bombings and our investigations?” I asked.

  “Madrid was 2004,” Mercer said. “Ten bombs in gym bags all set to go off on commuter trains in the morning. One hundred ninety-one people dead, thousands injured.”

  I should have known the transportation guru would remember those details. “Basque separatists?”

  “That was the first theory, Alex, but it turned out to be a branch of Al-Qaeda. And nothing like our cases, although the supposed target of the blasts was the train station itself.”

  “Of course,” I said, thinking of our terminal, around which all these crimes had occurred. “The Atocha.”

  Madrid’s magnificent steel and glass rail station was also a work of art, refitted with a glorious tropical garden on its main concourse. I had visited the shrine to the bombing victims—an olive or cypress tree planted for each of them—on a trip through the city.

  “Then came London in 2005,” Mercer went on. “Four suicide bombers, all homegrown. Three bombs carried on the Underground in rucksacks and the last one went off on a double-decker bus. Fifty-two dead.”

  “Homegrown what?” Pug asked.

  “Islamic sympathizers. Blew themselves up,” Mercer said. “Moscow in 2010. Two rebels from the Caucasus—women suicide bombers, which is a far less common phenomenon.”

  “So two dead women here,” I said. “Maybe our killer was trying to enlist them, and they refused?”

  “I get that,” Pug said. “Once he told them his plan and they wouldn’t go along with it, he had to kill them.”

  “What was that horrible thing in the Tokyo subway?” Rocco asked.

  “The sarin attack,” Mike said. “Nerve gas.”

  “Terrorists?” I asked.

  “A religious cult, Coop. You just can’t pigeonhole these things,” Mike said, skimming the article on the ALF that Mercer had printed out. “More people were killed in South Korea when a taxi driver went on a rampage in the subway and set fire to a morning train, trapping and burning almost two hundred people.”

  I shuddered. “What was his cause?”

  “No cause at all. Mental illness,” Mike said, dropping the paper and throwing his hands up in the air. “The guy suffered from severe depression.”

  “All right. That gets me back to what Jean Jansen said about Lydia’s strange visitor. The guy hears voices.”

  “How does she know?”

  “Because that’s what she heard him telling Lydia.”

  “She heard the words herself?” Mercer asked.

  “Yes. This guy was yelling at Lydia, and I guess that’s when Jean started listening. He told Lydia there were voices in his head, talking to him, telling him what to do.”

  “Schizophrenic,” Mike said.

  “Someone trying to control his thoughts.”

  “Way to go, Coop. Another guy, another notch on your belt.”

  “What?” I snapped at him.

  “I thought that’s the defense in the cannibal cop case. You’re trying to exercise mind control over Dominguez and half the male population. Telling him what he should think and who he should eat. Maybe you’ve taken hold of our perp, too,” Mike said, grinning at me. “Remind me, Rocco, when I start hearing voices, if one of them is Coop’s, I’m gonna have to get monster-strength earplugs.”

  “She could drive you to drink if you weren’t already there,” Pug said to Mike. “No offense, Alex, but you give enough orders and directions to keep me going for a month.”

  I held my hands up, palms out. “Okay, guys. Pick it up from here yourselves. Next time you need a search warrant for a pair of soiled underwear from a homicidal maniac, call Battaglia. He’ll find you some well-meaning rookie who’ll get it right on the third try.”

  “Calm down, Alex,” Mercer said.

  I looked at my watch. “Still time for me to catch a flight to the Vineyard. Somehow, the way I remember it, you guys—the lieutenant, actually—asked me to go in and talk to Lydia’s roommate.”

  “And you come out with a boyfriend who beats her,” Pug said, “and—”

  “Yeah, and he hated Lydia. Tried to force himself on her very recently,” I said. “I got you a terrorist connection to the vic, and the fact that she’s had a grounding in radical movements as far back as her childhood in Russia. And a known schizoid who’s been pressuring her to do something with him. Did I come up short, Loo?”

  “Sounds like you forgot to ask Jean the last time she saw Lydia,” Mike said. “Last time she heard from her. You’re slipping, kid.”

  “That answer, Detective, would be Tuesday evening.”

  “The night Corinne Thatcher’s body was found in the Waldorf,” Mercer said.

  “Yes, but remember it had been there for twenty-four hours,” I said. “Jean isn’t sure, but she doesn’t think Lydia came home Tuesday night.”

  “Was that unusual?” Rocco asked.

  “Jean didn’t really keep tabs on her. Says she sometimes stayed overnight—Jean has no idea with whom—when she had late meetings on the north campus and the buses stopped running. But they had no reason to sync up with each other. They weren’t close.”

  “Did Lydia call Jean?” Mercer said. “Try to reach her?”

  “Not once,” I said. “So the first night, and even the second one, weren’t unusual. Jean thought it was strange that she hadn’t come home by last evening—when we know she was found dead. Then she saw the photograph online this morning and called in.”

  “My dog’s got better friends than that,” Pug said.

  “They weren’t tight, is all. Different lives, different lifestyles. The shared apartment was simply a matter of financial convenience.”

  My phone had been vibrating in my pocket throughout my conversation with Jean Jansen. It started again, and I removed it
to see who was calling.

  “It’s Battaglia, guys. Let me take this.”

  I put the phone to my ear and plugged the other one with my forefinger so Rocco and the team could go on talking.

  “I guess your desk can be recycled to another member of my staff, Alex.” The tone in the district attorney’s voice was clipped and curt, not the syrupy one he used at political fund-raisers. “You seem to have taken up residence at the Waldorf.”

  “I thought you’d be pleased that I freed myself up to be on top of these murders twenty-four/seven.”

  “Pleased, perhaps, if I knew what was going on up there.”

  “What don’t you know?” I asked. “We’re actually working out of Grand Central now, because of the third homicide yesterday.”

  “I had to find out from the papers that she was only a college student. Tragic.”

  “Paul, we didn’t get the call identifying her till this morning. You had everything I did by the time I went to sleep.”

  “So that’s the bad news. Give me something good.”

  I was tempted to say that fortunately, for him, she was foreign. He had not lost a voter. But I suppressed the temptation. “Nothing yet. The roommate just gave us a bunch of leads.”

  “How fast can you get here?”

  “Here?”

  “I’m at City Hall, Alexandra. Or are you just waiting at the terminal for the next body to drop? The mayor’s asking me questions I can’t quite answer.”

  “I can be—”

  “Tell Chapman to shoot you out of a cannon, for all I care. Lights and sirens, whatever it takes.”

  “I’m on the way.”

  “You’re already too late. Scully and his team—the lot of you—should have had this wrapped up already. Now the feds are looking to divert the president’s train on Sunday.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “The mayor wants you to come in, Alexandra,” the district attorney said to me, faking a smile as he held the door open for me.

  “I thought we were going to wait for Commissioner Scully,” I said, smoothing my wrinkled shirt and concerned about the impression jeans would make in this formal setting.

  “He wants to talk to you first, as long as you’re here. I told you he’s got his priorities all screwed up.”

  Paul Battaglia couldn’t hide his contempt for the new mayor. During my entire twelve-year tenure as a prosecutor, a brilliant, creative, if not somewhat idiosyncratic chief executive ran City Hall. He had been respectful of the DA and our staff and had a truly collaborative relationship with his much-admired police commissioner.

  The new regime was proving to be a crapshoot. Too many campaign promises that made no sense except to curry favor with voting blocs, and meddling into a pending civil lawsuit that undermined long-standing police procedures—setting off a frenzy of picketing against the new mayor by the detective union.

  “C’mon in, Alexandra.” He motioned to me to sit opposite him, in a chair beside Battaglia. He held out his hand and reintroduced himself to me. I’d met him after the resolution of the murders in Central Park two months earlier. “Scully will be here any minute. I just wanted your take on something before we get started on these horrific crimes.”

  “Certainly, sir. I’d like to apologize for my appearance. The cops and I have taken on the somewhat dusty veneer of the terminal regulars.”

  “Dress-down Friday. No worries,” he said. “Look, Alex—may I call you Alex? I wanted to ask about a case you’ve been handling. Nothing inappropriate, nothing off the record. I’d just like a better understanding of what makes it a crime.”

  I looked at Battaglia, who seemed to have caught the same vibe I did. Someone to whom he owed a political favor was pushing for the mayor to intervene on the Gerardo Dominguez case.

  “Oh, Christ. Don’t play with me, Mr. Mayor,” Battaglia said. “You’ve got us here for a much more important reason. It’s almost five o’clock. First day in four without a murder and we’ve only got seven hours till midnight. Don’t sandbag me with this bullshit.”

  The mayor feigned surprise. “Sandbag you? You’re a lawyer, Paul. I’m not.”

  “Then what business did you have stepping in the middle of a ten-year-old lawsuit? You’re lucky you still have a police officer willing to walk a beat for you.” Battaglia stood up and walked to one of the tall windows overlooking City Hall Park. “Whose dirty work are you doing now?”

  “Not fair, Paul. You know better than that. I don’t have a pony in this race. I’m just asking questions. What’s the basis for your case, Alex?”

  “It’s not my case anymore. I don’t think I should be speaking about it.”

  “Really? I’d just like to know when it’s against the law for me to be thinking about something really evil, and then getting arrested for it. What’s the tipping point?”

  The mayor looked like a goofy, overgrown kid. He couldn’t have been more disingenuous, but then, he’d apparently formed his judgments about the workings of the city’s criminal justice system by watching bad movies and TV shows.

  “You can tell him, Alexandra,” Battaglia said.

  Someday I wouldn’t be working for a bureaucrat—even one I admired as much as Battaglia on most days—for whom I’d have to toady up from time to time. Someday I’d be free to tell the mayor that I thought he was a total asshole.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “I think you have a teenage daughter, Mr. Mayor. Don’t you?”

  “I do.”

  “Suppose this—this man who has a different set of values than you do—”

  “He’s entitled to those, isn’t he?”

  “He certainly is. No problem for me there,” I said. “Suppose in between doing a Web search for recipes that involve the use of chloroform and then buying a Taser online, suppose his next search is for the name of your sixteen-year-old daughter—”

  “Let’s leave my daughter out of this, shall we?”

  “Sure, sir. Let’s make it somebody else’s daughter. It’s always somebody else’s daughter when you don’t want the reality to seem quite so immediate,” I said. “So Keith Scully has a teenager, too. And she might be harder to find than a girl who lives in Gracie Mansion. Everyone knows where to find that one.”

  The mayor wasn’t amused. But it wasn’t my purpose to amuse him.

  “So the guy with the odd thoughts searches out the name of the police commissioner’s daughter. Then he goes one further, trying to find out her address and which high school she attends. All pretty easy stuff to do.”

  “It is.”

  “Then his next e-mail to one of his fetish-friends talks specifically about what the best way is to kill a teenage girl.”

  The mayor appeared to be uncomfortable. “Still not a crime, is it?”

  “No, sir. I just think it’s a bit reckless, a bit out of control. But I’m still with you. No prosecution,” I said. “Now, may I ask what your favorite restaurant is?”

  “I’m a Brooklyn kid. Why?”

  “So pick one of those chic Park Slope places.”

  “Got it.” He was twiddling his thumbs now, moving them around faster than a wheel in a gerbil cage.

  “Suppose one of the waiters told you that the chef had a powerful fantasy about poisoning his customers. That he’d been saying that one evening it was going to come to that.”

  The mayor laughed. It was the same inappropriate kind of giggle that had come out of him late one night at a press conference about the sixth snowstorm of the season this past February, when he announced the city was just plain out of salt and rich folk on the Upper East Side should think about sledding to work the following day.

  “Then, every few days your chef would engage in conversations with other people about his desire to poison his customers—especially the regulars—and that he had gone online and was pleasantly surprised to find how many recipes for hard-to-trace poisons were actually posted on the Internet.”

  Battaglia had his hand on the edge of the dark-blue c
urtains, smirking at the mayor while he listened to me.

  “Now one of the guys in his chat room came to see him in the kitchen a few times a week. The chef shows him the list of names he wants to target. Elected officials at the top. ‘Hates those whores,’ he says.”

  “My chef wouldn’t talk like that.”

  “In my version, the chef has you in his sights. Says to his cyber buddy, ‘I just can’t wait to watch the top dog drop dead. The mayor of New York City. Know those french fries he loves? Just a tablespoon of cyanide—it looks so much like salt crystals—he’ll be drooling in his plate in fifteen minutes.’”

  “Got me on the fries, Alex.”

  “You going back to that restaurant, Mr. Mayor? You just going to play Russian roulette till the chef decides it’s your night to die? Actually, I think not. I think you might want to come with me to Rao’s or to Fresco for dinner. Much safer bets.”

  “Give him the rest of it, Alex. Give him the facts.”

  “She’s making her point, Paul. She’s—”

  There was a sharp rap on the door, and Keith Scully walked in without waiting for an invitation.

  “Mr. Mayor, Paul,” he said. “Sorry to keep you. I’m sure Alex has been filling you in.”

  He patted me on the back before taking the seat on my other side.

  “Actually no, Keith,” I said. “The mayor doesn’t like my take on Gerry Dominguez.”

  “I told you he’s a sick puppy, sir. You’ve got to stay out of that one. And you’ve got bigger issues on your plate. Way bigger.”

  “I know that.”

  “I was held up at Federal Plaza,” the commissioner said. “My team was over meeting with the head of the Secret Service in New York. You won’t like this, Mr. Mayor, but the feds are closing down Grand Central Terminal for the weekend. They called me in to tell me the plan. My men are working with theirs right now.”

  “They’re doing what? That’s impossible.”

  “A little inclement weather and your constituents can all sled to wherever they’ve got to go, even in the summer. That line worked for you once,” Battaglia said.

  Scully talked over Battaglia. “The terminal closes at two A.M.”