Devil's Bridge (29 page)

“You want him, Renner?” I said. “Come and get him before he starts gurgling Hudson River water.”

Emmet Renner hardly knew the kid. But it wouldn’t be easy for him, I didn’t think, to face his own sister after returning home and recruiting her son to his murderous ways. That, coming right on top of the death throes of their father.

Cormac was screaming for his uncle now, begging him to save his life. If there was anyone else in earshot, we’d have company soon. It was one of the most sorrowful sounds I’d ever heard.

“People are going to come piling in from the park, Renner,” I said. “Dog walkers out for a stroll, joggers running by. Only a man with no soul could listen to this howling and not come to help.”

I couldn’t see him from where I was standing. I doubted he would leave Coop alone, but the kid made a god-awful noise and if Renner had grown up at all during his years in the desert, he’d have to respond.

“I’ve got a boat,” I said. “That’s how I brought your nephew here. I’ll put you both on it and promise safe passage through the harbor.”

Cormac Lonigan moaned and tried to summon the strength to scream again. But there was no word from Renner.

Then I heard voices shouting, coming from the wooded area in Bennett Park. Then a dog barking. Then two or three dogs.

“Where are you?” one man called out from a point on the heights above me.

“You can’t kill them all, Renner,” I yelled to him.

“I’ll take the boat, Chapman,” he called back to me. “Give me the boat and the kid.”

There suddenly seemed to be noises coming from every direction.

I had opened the floodgates by removing the gag from Lonigan’s mouth. Now the police units surrounding the lighthouse, the park, and the bridge tower would have to reveal themselves to block the well-meaning citizens from rushing to the rocks.

And Emmet Renner still had Alex Cooper.

I didn’t know what to do next. I was overwhelmed by the activity I had put in motion, and now I couldn’t figure which one of us was at greatest risk.

I decided to move forward toward the lighthouse again, hoping to get close before anyone else arrived there or lights went on around us. Emergency Services would have no choice but to move in to protect the oncoming good Samaritans. To protect everyone except Coop.

That was when I heard the sound of the Intrepid’s engine. I had left the keys in the cockpit and someone had just turned on the engine. Had Paddy Duffy freed himself from the hold? Had Emmet Renner’s accomplice circled the lighthouse and found the boat?

I was as close to panicking as I had ever been when I turned away from Renner to find out who was on board.

I heard a man’s voice say my name. “Chapman?”

“Yeah.”

“Scuba. It’s okay.”

I wasn’t shaking as badly as Lonigan, but it was close.

The police diver was in a black dry suit with a full face mask. He’d come to the rocks on a small dark-gray Zodiac that he’d tied up to the Intrepid, then swam ashore.

“Cue me,” I said. “What do they want me to do?”

“Just what you’re doing. Let Renner think you’ll give him the boat before backup arrives. That’s why I turned on the engine,” the cop said. “So he’d hear it.”

“But Coop?”

“We’ll have you covered.”

“How?”

“Better you don’t know, Chapman. You’d unintentionally tip it off.”

“Chapman?” Renner called out to me.

I turned my attention back to him.

“The boat is ready for you. I’m not releasing Cormac until you walk down here and meet me halfway,” I said.

I crossed over the largest boulder, and this time, instead of heading for the shadows of the bridge tower, I stayed close to the shoreline. I was going to the lighthouse.

“I hear the boat, Chapman. Where is it?”

“Just past the rock. Past Cormac.”

The kid was whimpering now, probably out of strength to do anything louder.

“You’d better move fast, Renner. People are coming.”

I almost wanted him to see me. I wanted Coop to hear my voice.

Emmet Renner was really between the rocks and a hard place. His entire plan was crumbling, but he wasn’t quite ready to let go of his prey.

“Uncle Em,” Lonigan screamed one more time. “Come get me.”

For the first time since I had arrived on Jeffrey’s Hook, Emmet Renner walked toward me from the small terrace of the lighthouse.

Now to add to the barking dogs was the sound of police sirens coming from the West Side Highway and the streets in the neighborhood.

He knew time was running out. He clearly thought the water was an actual means of escape, and that the only police presence was coming from the park behind him. I was thankful Mercer had convinced the Harbor Unit to stay out of sight.

Emmet Renner stood at the top of the steps that led from the lighthouse to the rocks. His gun was in his hand. He turned his head to look back at Coop.

“I’m here, Renner,” I called out.

He swiveled around to try to find my position, but I couldn’t see him clearly enough to try to take him out.

“Step down, Renner.” I lifted my gun and pointed it in his general direction. “I didn’t think Westies killed broads.”

“She’s not a broad, Chapman. She’s a prosecutor.”

“Get moving before the dogs come. And the cops,” I said. “You’ve got about a minute to go. The key’s in the ignition. Walk on by me and I’ll cut Lonigan loose.”

Emmet Renner took his first step. “I don’t want the boy, Chapman. I want the boat.”

Bloodless after all. Not even his own family made a difference in the end. Emmet Renner just wanted to save his own skin.

I threw my Glock onto the rock and watched it skid down toward the water.

Renner heard it, must have guessed what had happened, and started to run down the remaining steps and in the direction of the Intrepid.

Before I was able to race across the rock, two more scuba rescue cops in black dry suits hoisted themselves out of the water and onto the boulder.

The first one out tore off his flippers and ran to the lighthouse. He practically threw himself on top of Coop, shielding her from whatever unknown harm still lurked around us.

I was there within seconds, after he ripped the gag from her mouth and as he was cutting the plastic cuffs off her wrists.

I lifted her limp body in my arms, carried her inside the lighthouse, and sat on the floor with her in my lap, cradling her head against my chest as I whispered my apologies to her over and over again.

“Nobody died?” Coop asked.

“Nobody,” I said.

“The Lonigan kid?”

“Severe hypothermia. He’ll be fine. He’s in another wing.”

We were in a private room at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital, just ten blocks from Bennett Park. Coop had been examined in the ER and admitted for observation. It was three o’clock in the morning.

“Emmet Renner?”

“No shots fired,” I said. “He might need his nose fixed again, but in the meantime he’s reacquainting himself with the New York City jail system.”

Coop was in a hospital gown, in bed, with extra blankets to cover her. An intravenous tube was dripping fluids into her arm to rehydrate her. I was sitting on the other bed, dressed in surgical scrubs. Our clothing, damp and dirty, had been vouchered as evidence. I stood up and she reached for my arm. “Please don’t leave me alone.”

“Hey, now. I’m not going far. I just need to borrow something from the cops in the hallway.”

There was a police detail outside Coop’s room and would be for as long as she was hospitalized. Probably for a good period of time after her release. I asked two of the guys for their handcuffs.

She was sitting on the edge of her bed when I came back in. Her eyes were moist again and she was dabbing at them with tissue.

I’d never seen her quite this way—so skittish and clinging to me. But she’d never been through an ordeal like the past forty-eight hours.

“Handcuffs?” She seemed startled to see me holding two pairs. I should have been more sensitive to the visual of them after her own experience, but I was out of gas, too.

“I got a problem with hospitals, Coop. There’s no king-size beds.”

I unlocked the wheels of my bed and pulled it right beside hers. I reached under the mattress and cuffed the metal frames to each other in two places so they didn’t split apart.

It was one of the first times that night I had seen her smile.

She got back under the covers and I put an extra pillow behind her head.

“How about something to eat?” I asked. “There’s room service, you know.”

Renner had given her only a couple of oranges and a few bottles of water in the forty-eight hours she’d been held.

“I can’t think about food yet. I’m still kind of nauseated.”

“They’ve added something for that to your IV, Coop,” I said, stroking her hair.

She turned away from me, onto her side.

“You want to talk?” I asked.

She shook her head in the negative.

“You did a good job filling in a lot of the blanks for the commissioner,” I said.

Coop had confirmed things that we had tried to piece together, like the original abduction. There were parts too hazy for her to have remembered, including the stops to change the license plates on the SUV. She was conscious when they first carried her onto a small motorboat that had been waiting for them at the boat basin after midnight on Wednesday, piloted by a friend of Paddy Duffy’s who drove it across the river from a small marina near Edgewater. It was the same boat that delivered Renner and Coop from Liberty Island to the lighthouse. Police were looking for it now.

She didn’t acknowledge my comment.

“Dr. Friedman says you’ve got to talk to me.”

“Maybe tomorrow,” Coop said.

“You didn’t let the docs do a rape evidence kit.”

“I keep telling you, Mike. They didn’t touch me. Not sexually.”

“You’d never believe a woman who was held for two days and nights by a gang of men and then told you that. You’d make her submit to an exam and figure she’d give it up eventually.”

I moved onto her bed, sitting on top of the covers, face-to-face with her.

“Nobody touched me like that,” she said. “He just wanted to kill me. Renner wanted you to watch them kill me, and then he’d have killed you, too.”

“Dr. Friedman says I have to give you more time to deal with it.”

“That’s not what I need, Mike. I’m done with thinking about that.”

“What do you need, babe?”

“The toxicology results,” she said. “I’m pretty sure they used chloroform to get me into the car, but the next day they gave me shots of something that put me in the twilight zone. Everything was spacey and vague.”

“Some kind of tranquilizer, Dr. Friedman thinks,” I said. “Just to keep you subdued.”

There were red marks and abrasions on her wrists, where she had been restrained. But she didn’t want to get into that yet, either.

“Who is this Dr. Friedman you keep talking about?” Coop asked, resting her head back against the pillow. “I’m out of your sight just forty-eight hours and you’re taking advice from someone I don’t even know.”

“There’s a good sign,” I said, leaning forward to kiss her on the forehead. “The control freak in you is coming back fast.”

“Who is she?”

“The shrink the commissioner hooked me up with yesterday morning. She’s the woman I was talking to in the ER while you were being treated,” I said. “Anyway, she was using me to try to get inside your head. Figure out whether you took yourself out of the action because I’d been mean to you or—”

“That’s crazy, Mike.”

“She’s smart. It was Dr. Friedman who had the idea that the abduction was all about me.”

“About
you
? I’m the one who was kidnapped.”

“Because of me,” I said, taking both her hands in mine. “You were kidnapped because of me. Because I love you.”

I didn’t expect Coop to start to cry when I said that. But she did. I was dealing with some sort of post-traumatic stress situation. Coop knew more about that kind of thing than I did.

I grabbed the long string behind the bed and pulled on it to turn out the overhead light.

“Please don’t cry, babe,” I said. “I don’t know what to do for you.”

It was some kind of release, I guess. She just cried and cried and cried.

“I was all over the map, Alex. I was ready to lock up the Reverend Shipley ’cause I thought he was messed up in this.”

She wiped her nose and looked at me. “Really? Shipley and me?”

“Yeah. That crap with Estevez the day you disappeared. How he was tied into Shipley,” I said. “Has anybody told you that they grabbed that Josie Aponte broad?”

“No.”

“Her real name is Rosita Quinones. She took off for Philly right after she did her computer magic. Left the groom all by himself.”

Coop put the tissues down and started asking questions. That was another good sign.

“Who’s going to handle the case?”

“I’ll get that answer for you by daybreak,” I said. “Is that good enough?”

She forced another smile.

“Next one to nab is Shipley’s pal Takeesha Falls, right, Coop?”

“Who’s Takeesha Falls?”

“Whoa, it’s been a long couple of days. I forgot you were gone before I even heard her name. Seems like forever ago,” I said. “Do you remember, when I left Primola Wednesday night, I’d just gotten called on a homicide case? A male victim in a domestic?”

Coop nodded. I was glad of any conversation to take her out of herself.

“It’s the girlfriend we’re looking for. The dead man’s girlfriend, Takeesha Falls. She runs with the Reverend Shipley, too.”

“Oh.” She sounded as though she was getting drowsy.

“Just so you know, I think the commissioner has it in for your boss.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not alone in thinking that Battaglia has an unholy alliance with Hal Shipley. It all started to come to a head in the meeting we had in Scully’s office yesterday.”

Coop’s eyelids fluttered. “Tell me more.”

“In the morning. I’m just saying that when the next election rolls around, District Attorney Paul Battaglia may not be the man on the ballot.”

“That’s okay with me, Mike.”

She was rolling from side to side, unable to find a comfortable position.

“The docs gave you medication to make you sleep, Alex,” I said. “Don’t fight it.”

She looked at me and took hold of my hand. “I’m afraid to go to sleep, Mike. I’m afraid of what I see when I close my eyes.”

I pulled back the covers and climbed in beside her—careful of the IV tube—slipping my arm beneath her neck.

“You know to expect that, Alex. You tell your victims that all the time,” I said. “Flashbacks, nightmares. Dr. Friedman said it’s only natural that you’re—”

“I don’t want to hear another thing about what she thinks, Mike, okay? I’m not all that interested in your Dr. Friedman,” Coop said, sounding much more like herself. “I can’t get warm. What do I do about that?”

I held her closer to my side and stroked her arm, bringing the blanket over both of us.

“What’s with the Alex stuff?” she asked. “Why are you suddenly calling me ‘Alex’?”

She turned on her side and settled into place with me.

“I can’t tell you,” I said.

“What do you mean? Why not?”

“Because it’s about Dr. Friedman,” I said. “She thinks it’s a bad thing that I use your surname. That I’m your lover and I can’t even manage to call you by your first name. She thinks it’s another one of my failings.”

“But I
am
Coop,” she said, smiling up at me. “That’s who I am.”