“Unless they were ISIS,” Abruzzi said. “Then they want her wide-awake so they can torture her. You know how they treat their prisoners, don’t you? Burn them to a crisp, behead them—all kinds of medieval torture tactics. I bet they got sex crimes that would make your guts explode. Did she ever prosecute a terrorist? Man, those beasts would have a party with Alexandra Cooper.”
“What is it with you?” Scully asked the captain.
“He’s a dick, boss,” I said. “Always was, always will be.”
“Chapman shouldn’t be in the room,” Abruzzi said. “He doesn’t belong on this task force. He’s thinking with his private parts and not his head.”
“It’s below the belt for both of you,” Peterson said. “Cut it out. Chapman’s in this until he wants off the case. Go on, Mercer.”
“We can get a pretty close guess on the time from the point Alex gets into the SUV till the phone is—what would you say?—tossed? Tossed into the park.”
“So she’s come around,” the district attorney said. “Maybe she had her phone in her hand—”
“No, no,” Mercer said. “She’d have dropped it once she went limp if she’d been holding it.”
I had been party to this kind of brainstorming session dissecting crime strategies more times than I could count. I had offered ideas about the manner of death or the disposal of bodies—ideas that would have distressed the next of kin in any given case if they’d been party to the conversation. I was sick to my stomach with Coop at the center of these hypotheticals.
“She keeps it in her pocket,” I said. “If she was wearing her trench coat, she’d have had the phone in her pocket at some point. Or sticking out of the top of her bag. Not in her hand.”
“So Alex comes around,” Mercer said. “We know that. Obviously, she had the opportunity to get the phone in her hands to write two words—words that make sense—so she was pretty alert. Maybe she was trying to say more than she got off. But she must have been caught in the act and whoever was next to her in the seat grabbed the phone and threw it away.”
“Everybody okay with that as a jumping-off point?” Scully said.
The people at the table looked at one another and murmured assent.
“It’s more complicated than that,” I said.
“What is?”
“If she’s alert enough to be trying to signal me, then she’s too smart to be sending me words that the bad guys would make sense of if they caught her. Too obvious, these words. They don’t mean what they say.”
I pushed the two pieces of paper away from me.
“Each of you,” Scully said, “needs to have someone in your respective offices start playing with bar and bed. Use the dictionary, use restaurant guides, use every letter of the alphabet.”
“Mike’s right, Commissioner,” Vickee said, pinning the papers with the two words on them to the table with her forefingers. “Alex is a puzzler. Does the Saturday Times crossword faster than Bill Clinton, and he’s supposed to do it lightning quick. These are clues to something, but you’re wasting your time if you think these six letters are literal.”
“Now we’ve got a regular Bletchley Park going on, don’t we? All these smart broads who are better than computers at figuring things out. Too bad I’ve never met one of them,” Abruzzi said. “Myself, I’m lousy at word games. And the guys in the Nineteenth squad? Could be a few of them can play bingo, but that’s as far as they go. Might save us all some effort if we bring a psychic into the conversation next. Does Ms. Cooper communicate with the spirit world, too?”
“You can lead this part of it, Mike,” the lieutenant said to me, ignoring the captain. “Get a quiet place to work and puzzle out the clue.”
“Barbed,” one of the Major Case guys said, sliding the two pieces of paper together. “Maybe she just meant barbed? Like a place with barbed wire around it.”
“That’s a big help. Narrows the search down to about a million locations citywide,” his partner piped up next. “Maybe it’s a pirate who has her. I look at these and I see blue beard.”
“What?” Peterson asked.
“Scramble the letters and I get the word beard, with an extra B. So it’s Bluebeard or Blackbeard.” The old-timer threw his hands up in exasperation. “Let me know, Chapman, when you come up with what was going on in Ms. Cooper’s personal think tank.”
“We ready to get to work?” Peterson asked Scully.
“I got some snitches who might be helpful with the Estevez angle of this. I’ll get right on it,” the Bluebeard aficionado said to the commissioner. “If you can take a little more heat, Chapman, I gotta say I never worked a case with Ms. Cooper, but I think you’re giving more credit than she’s due with this breaking-the-code crap.”
“Why’s—?”
“She always seemed like an Afghan to me—the dog, not the tribesmen. Long and lean, a fine, shiny coat of hair. Nice to walk out with, show dog and all that, but not so much brainpower as she’s cracked up to have. I’m with the captain on the bar and bed thing. I’ll buy the first few rounds if I come up wrong on this.”
“Start saving your dimes,” Mercer said. “I’ll be drinking big.”
The group began to break up as the executive officer on the desk outside came into the room and took the commissioner aside.
“Get me out of here, Detective Wallace,” I said. “You and I need a plan.”
The commissioner held up his hand and we all stood still. He finished his conversation with the XO and turned back to us.
“I’d like to have some volunteers, gentlemen,” Scully said. “The commanding officer of the Central Park Precinct just called in. One of his men who worked midnights just told him about some unusual activity he saw near the park on his way in on Wednesday.”
“A damsel in distress?” the old-timer asked. “The iPhone toss? Something real, or just make-believe?”
“Everything’s real until proven otherwise, okay? It’s nothing as dramatic as the sighting of a kidnap victim or as specific as a cell phone coming from an identified vehicle. But it’s an SUV incident worth a follow-up, so they tell us. You want this one, Mike?” the commissioner asked.
“I’ll pass.” Homicides spoiled you for working the grunt jobs and minor incidents.
“What else you got?” the lieutenant asked.
“Hal Shipley’s on his way to the pound to try to liberate his three vehicles.”
“That’s rich,” I said. “Yeah, Mercer and Jimmy and I would much rather go to Queens and do a face-off with the reverend.”
“Exactly the scene we don’t want, Commissioner,” Lieutenant Peterson said. “I’ll get a man on that immediately. What else?”
“What is this? You gonna transfer me to the rubber-gun squad before this operation even gets started?” I asked, eager to have a confrontation with almost anyone who crossed my path. “Take my weapon away ’cause you think I’m a danger to myself?”
“Or others,” Dr. Friedman said. “Yourself or others. That would be my standard.”
“Nobody’s taking your gun, Chapman. Just keep quiet,” the commissioner said. “The third call probably has nothing to do with this matter, but the notification just came in and we have to think of every possibility.”
“What is it?” Battaglia asked.
Keith Scully grimaced and looked away from me. “There was a jumper on the George Washington Bridge this morning. Roughly four A.M. A woman who climbed over the railing from the walkway, poised to go into the river, but thought better of it and went on her way before the cops could get to her.”
“Mary, Mother of God. I’m taking that one. We’ll go to the bridge, the Port Authority Police,” I said. “No way that was Coop.”
The GW Bridge was one of the most popular sites in the metro area for suicides. Fifty million dollars had been set aside by the legislature to build a nine-foot fence above the walkway to prevent the jumps, which averaged almost twenty a year, but construction hadn’t even started.
“There are surveillance cameras twenty-four/seven that sweep the bridge,” Scully said. “I’m told there are grainy images of the woman. Not great close-ups but should be good enough to ID.”
“What makes you so damn sure it wasn’t Alex?” Peterson said.
I was walking to the door of Scully’s office. “Because she’s terrified of heights, Loo. Because she’s so damn scared of heights I doubt you could get her to walk over the Hudson River if I tethered her to my waist, much less climb on a railing and look down.”
“So you’re not saying she wouldn’t have reached that point,” Dr. Friedman said, “because she wasn’t so depressed, are you? The woman on that bridge—who might just be Alex, if she had made the decision to end her life—has apparently reached the depths of her despair. You’re not addressing the issue of Ms. Cooper’s possible depression.”
“I’d address your front teeth with my right fist, if you were a guy.”
“Chapman!” Peterson roared at me.
“The woman is not depressed, Loo. She had nothing to be depressed about.”
“C’mon, Chapman,” Battaglia said. “She had the rug pulled out from underneath her in the courtroom and—”
“That’s happened to her before. She fights back from it every time, with the best team in the world to back her up.”
“And someone hacked into all her secrets. Who knows what the hell is going to hit Page Six, and when?”
“If I’m the biggest secret you thought she has, Mr. Battaglia, then the gossip columnists are in for a major disappointment. There’s no other personal dirt on Coop’s hard drive,” I said. “You, on the other hand, sir—you’ve been playing pin the tail on the reverend with Hal Shipley and some of your other constituents for years, rumors have it. It seems to me that it’s your secret deals that are about to unravel.”
I opened the door and motioned to Mercer and Jimmy to follow me.
“Don’t go anywhere, Chapman,” Peterson cautioned me.
“Holding tight, Loo.” Although my left leg was jiggling like I’d been bitten by a tarantula. “But I think we need to get a move on.”
Commissioner Scully told one of the Major Case guys to deal with the Central Park debrief, agreed to let Peterson intercept Shipley at the auto pound, and confirmed that I should look at the GW Bridge video to prove—or disprove—that the distraught woman was Coop.
“And, Doc,” I said, halfway through the door, reminded of the language in the campaign poster that was framed and hung behind Battaglia’s desk, “if you’re worried about anyone jumping, keep your eye on the district attorney. It’s not nice to play politics with people’s lives.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
“This is a fool’s errand,” I said to Mercer and Jimmy as the three of us took the elevator up to the Port Authority Police office on the Manhattan end of the spectacular double-decked suspension bridge that had spanned the Hudson River since 1931.
“Then I’m happy to be one of the fools,” Mercer said. “We can make quick work of this.”
“Scully’s trying to keep me at arm’s length from this investigation.”
“He hasn’t put you in a straitjacket yet, Mike. Let’s keep on.”
We were met at the top by one of the patrol officers from the PAPD’s Emergency Services Unit, who led us into a small room, like a watchtower, perched above the great river that separated New York State from New Jersey at this point.
It was ten thirty on a brilliantly clear fall day. I could see north to the Tappan Zee Bridge and south past the new Freedom Tower and beyond the majestic Statue of Liberty, which stood at the mouth of the Hudson in New York Harbor.
“Are you the man with the video?” I asked after our introductions were complete.
“Yes, sir.”
“Were you actually working at four A.M.?”
“Yeah.”
“Emergency Services—you’ve got the toughest assignment in the book,” Mercer said, “and on a bridge hung hundreds of feet over the water.”
In all police departments, these were the cops who handled every imaginable hazardous task, from structural collapses to car and rail accidents to victim rescue from every kind of life-threatening situation. The GW was the world’s busiest motor vehicle bridge, and I had seen Emergency Services officers climbing towering cables to rescue workmen whose gear had broken, truck drivers whose trailers had jackknifed perilously close to the edge of the span, and dying patients stuck in ambulances when a political stunt resulted in the intentional jamming of the bridge during rush hour not long ago.
“Hey, I asked for this work,” the officer responded. “It’s pretty exhilarating.”
“The woman last night,” I said, as he went about turning the monitor around to show us the footage, “did you actually get to see her? I mean, close up? In person?”
“Nah. The bridge is more than half a mile across. Almost forty-eight hundred feet to be exact. By the time we got the call and I was dispatched—I was handling a car accident on the far side of the river, where the Palisades Parkway merges with the bridge entrance—she was already hoofing it back to this side.”
“You followed?”
“Yes, but she disappeared into thin air,” he said. “That’s pretty common, once these suicides change their minds. I’ve talked my share of jumpers down off the ledge when they’re right at the tipping point, but if they’ve backed off before we get to them, they don’t stick around for me to give them a parking ticket or a recommendation for counseling.”
“How about rolling the tape?” I asked.
Mercer and I sat in front of the large screen, with Jimmy North behind me. The officer stood beside Mercer so he could point out the figures.
“There was a lot of fog at that hour of the morning, so you won’t see much at first,” he said. “I’ll freeze-frame it when she comes into view.”
The screen lit up when the video started to run. Between the blackness of the water and the hazy sky, all I could see were the endless vertical cables and the striking gray aluminum color of the steel tower on the Jersey side, obscured in places by the wisps of fog.
“Four A.M. and there’s all that traffic?” Mercer said.
“There’s always traffic, man,” the officer said. “This is when the early-morning commute begins. Firemen, cops, nurses—all the essentials whose tours start in an hour or so. They get into town to avoid traffic, park, eat breakfast, and go to work.”
I was focused on the walkway on the south side of the bridge, but the fast-moving cars created a blur. “Hard to see,” I said.
“Fourteen lanes of traffic. Over a hundred million vehicles a year. You can understand why we don’t get to everyone in time.”
“Now that I watch this, sure.”
“You’ll see a guy going westbound on a bicycle on the upper level. Then she comes out of the night murk.”
I adjusted my seating and stared at the walkway. The cyclist lit up the path with his neon-yellow windbreaker, reflectors on his sneakers and the rear of the bike, and a bright-white helmet.
It wasn’t quite the final airport scene in Casablanca, but a woman emerged from the fog just seconds later.
“It’s not Coop,” I said. Then I watched her walk, holding my breath as I did, and looked again. “Maybe. Maybe so. Freeze it right there. How high is that railing?”
“Just three feet above the concrete,” the officer said. “No barriers, no nets. It’s why we’re such a magnet for jumpers.”
“I didn’t mean that,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out her height against a known marker.”
All we could see at this point was the back of the woman’s head. She was tall and thin, and her hair was medium length and blond, like Coop’s.
“Let it run, Mike,” Mercer said. “Run it through once before you keep stopping it. I don’t think this one moves—you know—like Alex.”
The officer hit the PLAY button and the woman continued walking, briskly, away from us. She was dressed in a short jack
et and dark slacks. I cursed the slacks. If I could have seen the shape of her legs—the slender calves down to perfect ankles—I’d have known Coop anywhere.
She took ten or twelve steps and I knew Mercer was right. “Not Coop,” I said. “The walk is off. I was looking at the height and general build, but you nailed it.”
“How do you mean?” Jimmy asked.
“She’s bouncing on the balls of her feet,” Mercer said. “It’s a little thing, but it’s just not the way Alex carries herself.”
The fog had cut into our line of sight. Then the woman reemerged, stopping abruptly just past a phone mounted on the railing with a sign that read LIFE IS WORTH LIVING: CALL LIFE-NET and an 800 number.
She grabbed the railing, looked down at the water, and swung her leg over the side. “So not Coop.” I was practically shouting. “What was I thinking, for even a minute?”
The woman’s profile was all wrong. Her nose was prominent and hooked, not straight and patrician. She had bangs on her forehead that reached her eyebrows, and a double chin, not Coop’s chiseled bones and angular lines.
“Definitely not.” Mercer let out a sigh, too. Relief, I assumed. “Definitely not Alex. And Alex could never swing her leg out over that iron rail after looking straight down from that height—she would have passed right out.”
“Big-time,” I said, pushing back to stand up and look down at the land below us.
Mercer hit the PLAY button again and leaned in to watch, two or three more times. He was careful that way. I didn’t need any more convincing.
“What do you guys want me to do about this person?” the officer asked. “She’ll be back, sooner or later.”
“Your usual follow-up,” Mercer said.
My moment of euphoria had passed. The woman who’d been ready to jump just hours earlier was, to the best of our knowledge, still alive. I didn’t have the emotional energy to worry about her. Coop’s fate was still a mystery, which I seemed powerless to solve.
TWENTY-NINE
“Here’s the elevator, Mike,” Mercer said.
Devil's Bridge Page 19