Terminal City (Alex Cooper)

by Linda Fairstein

  “You must have picked up part of it, didn’t you?”

  She shook her head back and forth, strongly indicating she didn’t.

  “But you just called him a nut. You said he switched off like he was crazy.”

  “I swear I’m not making this part up, Ms. Cooper. Okay? I’m going to say this to you, and you’re going to have to believe me,” Jean Jansen said. “The only part I heard after that was him saying he knew he was right because he heard voices.”

  “Voices? I’m confused. There were other people in the room?”

  “No, no. This guy was telling Lydia that she had to do what he told her because he was hearing voices inside his head. That someone was taking control of his mind, and he needed her to do whatever he ordered.”

  Whether or not this visitor to the apartment was the killer, there had been a man with serious mental illness in Lydia Tsarlev’s life.

  “Now I understand you, Jean. Of course I believe you,” I said. “Did you hear how Lydia responded to him?”

  “Can we keep this between us, Ms. Cooper. Just this part?”

  “I’d like to tell you yes, Jean. But that wouldn’t be very smart of me. It depends on what you say.”

  Jean Jansen took a deep breath, then exhaled before she answered. “I never heard Lydia talking to him at all.”

  “Even though the walls were so thin? C’mon, Jean.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. She wasn’t speaking by the time he finished screeching at her. She was just crying. That’s exactly what I heard, Lydia crying.”

  I gave Jean a few seconds to finish her description, but she seemed to be done.

  “Did you—did you do anything then?”

  “Yeah. I mean, my boyfriend listened to the whole thing, too,” Jean said sheepishly. “This is the part I don’t want everybody to know, ’cause like my boyfriend gets wild when he’s angry.”

  “Let me hear it.”

  Jean looked at me for reassurance but I could give her none. “Okay. He got up from the sofa and he went into Lydia’s bedroom. I mean, it wasn’t locked or anything. He just opened the door and went in.”

  “So far so good, Jean. I don’t blame him.”

  “I was right behind him, like trying to stop him. I could see Lydia all balled up on her bed, just sobbing like a baby.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “The guy kind of freaked out when he saw my boyfriend. He’s like six feet tall, much bigger than Lydia’s friend.”

  “What did your boyfriend do?”

  “He—um—he told the guy to get out. Told him to stop screaming at Lyd. The trouble started when the other guy said he never yelled at her. That it wasn’t him we’d heard.”

  “Was that possible?”

  “Oh, no. He was the one, all right. He told us—I was in the room trying to help Lydia get out of there and into the bathroom, so we could lock the door—he told us that there was another person inside him who was doing the yelling. I mean, how freaky is that?”

  “Did he leave then?”

  “Nope. He didn’t want to leave until he saw Lydia again, till he made sure she wasn’t going to bad-mouth him to us. That’s when it got physical.”

  “How?”

  “My boyfriend started pushing him out of the room. I could hear the commotion from inside the bathroom. They’re kind of scuffling, although the guy was too wiry, too small to put up much of a fight. He was almost out the door, I think, when my boyfriend told him that if he ever comes anywhere near my apartment again, he’d be a dead man.”

  “That’s when he left?” I asked. “That’s the line you didn’t want me to tell anyone?”

  “Part of it. I mean, it doesn’t look good now that Lydia’s been killed.”

  “Did the guy ever come back?”

  “Not that I know of. And she never mentioned him again.”

  I smiled at Jean Jansen. “Then maybe your boyfriend did a good thing. Maybe that encounter has nothing to do with her murder.”

  “But you can’t talk to my boyfriend about it, Ms. Cooper. You absolutely can’t.”

  “Why not? He might know the name of Lydia’s friend or have some other detail.”

  Jean looked me in the eye. “Because he’s already on probation.”

  “For—?”

  “You can’t draw him into a criminal investigation. The judge will have him violated.”

  “What did he do, Jean?”

  She didn’t answer me.

  “Please tell me what your boyfriend did.” I said it more firmly this time.

  “He assaulted me, Ms. Cooper. Three months ago, he got mad at me one night and beat me so bad my jaw had to be wired.”

  I reached across the table to take her hand, but she pulled away. “I’m so sorry, Jean.”

  “He’s got a criminal record longer than your arm. I’m not the first woman he’s attacked, either,” Jean said. “And he had a real thing about Lydia.”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “He came on to her one night, just a few weeks ago, before I got home. She told me about it the next day, which I thought was a bitchy thing for her to do. After that, he really was furious at her—for what she said to me. He had it in for her, that’s one thing I’m sure of. My boyfriend had no use for Lydia Tsarlev.”

  THIRTY-TWO

  “Get a policewoman in there to sit with her as soon as possible,” I said. Now it was my turn to pace in the confined area of Don Ledger’s office. I was talking to Rocco, Pug, Mike, and Mercer. “Find someone who’s had some DV experience and let her or him talk to Jean.”

  There were officers in the SVU and in every precinct who’d been trained on the issues that make domestic violence such a sensitive category of crime. There was no sense in sending Jean home to face the fury of her dangerous boyfriend.

  “And they need to monitor her calls. Mercer, maybe you can go back in and get the boyfriend’s name and run a rap sheet. She keeps checking her phone, expecting a call from him. I doubt he wanted her to open her mouth about this, but she took the leap. I don’t want him to get to her till we figure this out.”

  “I can’t let her go home?” Rocco asked. “The guys promised her a ride back before they brought her in.”

  “Call Safe Horizon,” I said, referring to the city’s best victim advocacy group. “They can put her up in Parrish House for a few nights. I don’t think it will take much doing to convince her she’ll be safer there than at home.”

  The DV shelters the organization ran were state-of-the-art, meant to be actual apartments with civilized living space and amenities, and their locations were never disclosed.

  “You get any sense from her he could have hurt Lydia?” Mike asked.

  “I can’t rule it out, but there’s no thread to the other cases—to Corinne and to the mole. We’ll know more after we’ve eyeballed his sheet,” I said. “Who’s left to send to the Peekskill campus, Rocco? We’re more likely to find people there who knew her, had classes with her.”

  “Checking on it, Alex. I assume more calls have come in since her photograph was in this morning’s papers. Somebody back at the office is on it.”

  Mercer stood up from Ledger’s desk, where he’d gone online as soon as I came back into the room spouting commands. “The group you’re looking for is ALF—the Animal Liberation Front.”

  “Never heard of it,” I said. “Anyone?”

  No one had. He handed me a printout of a news story.

  “It’s been around since the sixties. And it is international. Operates in more than forty countries abroad,” Mercer said. “So it makes sense that Lydia’s mother got involved in Russia.”

  “Where do they meet?” I asked.

  Mercer laughed. “It’s a resistance group, Alex. Leaderless. Very sixties radical. They wouldn’t meet anywhere yo
u 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 w
ho 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.”