Terminal City (10 page)

“What kind of ramp?”

“For vehicles. Cars and such,” White said. “Has a special ceiling in it. A real pretty place.”

“Ceiling?”

“You two ever been to the Oyster Bar?”

White was talking about the famed seafood restaurant, one hundred years old, which still anchored the lower level—once the hub of all commuter traffic—of Grand Central.

“Sure we have. You never met the oyster Ms. Cooper here didn’t like.”

“Then you know the ceiling? The beautiful tiles?”

“Guastavino tiles,” I said. The terra-cotta free-span timbrel vaults, the invention of a Spanish architect named Rafael Guasta- vino, were landmarked in the famed restaurant as well as in sophisticated building designs throughout the city. “Fancy tiles on a ramp? Ramp to what?”

“Used to be that ramp led to the basement of the Biltmore Hotel, miss. That’s how come it was all spiffed up back in the day. I spent a lot of time going in and out there,” White said. “But it doesn’t go anywhere anymore. It’s just a parking garage under there now.”

NINE

By one fifteen, Mercer and I were standing under the spectacular tiled ceiling of the Acme Garage on East 44th, almost kitty-corner from the Yale Club. The Catalan vaulting, as it was known, had once been a gateway to a luxurious hotel but was now as dirty and grim as any underground commercial parking space in the city.

The young man in charge was as surly as befit someone spending all his hours below the street, inhaling gas fumes and jockeying cars to get them as close together as possible without scratching fenders or sides.

“A guy with a trunk? Nothing unusual about luggage.”

“A big old leather trunk. You might notice,” Mercer said. “Maybe think it wouldn’t fit in a car.”

“We got vans, we got SUVs, we got pickups and panel trucks. I park ’em, I don’t pack ’em.”

“How about surveillance cameras? You must have them in here for security.”

Garages were easy targets for armed robbers because they did so much business in cash.

“We got ’em. They’re just on a loop, though. They record over themselves after twenty-four hours. No reason to save tapes if nothing happened,” the garage attendant said, pausing to spit on the floor. “And nothing happened.”

“We’d like to go through receipts with you. See if anyone charged their parking fee or one of you jotted down plate numbers.”

“You told me you don’t have a date. How you gonna do that?”

“We’ve figured it within a day or two,” I said. “Will you let us into your office to check them out?”

“I don’t keep ’em here, lady. The owner has eight garages. All the stuff gets forwarded next day to Queens, where he operates. Go there if you want, or call my manager. I’ve only worked here two months.”

A car nosed down the ramp and squealed to a stop a few feet away from us. The attendant walked over to the machine on the wall that dated and timed the receipts and handed a ticket to the woman who got out of the car.

“How long you gonna be, lady?”

She told him she planned to retrieve the car at five. As she turned to walk away, he gave her sculptured body a thorough top-to-bottom once-over, then spit again.

“What’s in here besides a garage?” I asked. I was wondering if there was a place for someone to conceal himself—or a large trunk—for any period of time. Whoever stole the piece of luggage could not have been certain the opportunity to grab the object would present itself on a busy Manhattan street in the middle of the day.

“My cage,” he said.

I looked over at the glass-enclosed booth, which had a stool for the attendant, a small desk, and a cash register, and space for little else.

“Restrooms around the corner. Help yourself to a look.”

I walked thirty feet away and found the doors to two unisex bathrooms. The narrow stalls held a toilet and sink. With an occupant, there would be no room for a steamer trunk.

“Any other way out?” Mercer asked, as I was on my way back.

“Used to be this was connected to a hotel that was demolished,” the man said. “Long before my time or yours. The ramp swings around to a lower level. Holds a load of cars down there.”

He turned away from us to take the receipt and payment from a man in a business suit who had come for his car.

Mercer had been excited to follow this lead. Now it appeared to be as much a dead end as the garage with a once-elegant history. “I’ll get uniform to come over and sweep the place. Check out the basement, too.”

“Look, it’s possible the man who swiped the luggage just came down the ramp from the street to get out of sight for a while,” I said.

“With a steamer trunk? Somebody in here would have noticed that.”

“So there are a bunch of other employees the guys will have to talk to. I mean he may have just waited till he thought the coast was clear. Put the trunk in a corner at the rear of the garage. Tucked it next to a van in the basement and waited a few hours.”

We walked up the ramp and back out into the sweltering afternoon sun, a sliver of which seemed to find us in between the tall buildings.

“You want lunch?” Mercer asked.

“A bucket of water and something light.”

“We’ll pass a takeout place on our way back to the Waldorf.”

We squared the block and started walking north on Park Avenue. The wide boulevard carried traffic north- and southbound, three lanes each divided by a median that was maintained as a garden throughout the year. The begonias were a great touch of color in August, the only plants seemingly able to withstand the intense heat and direct sunlight.

“So nothing from Mike this morning?” I was unable to suppress my curiosity and anxious to confront him about his deception.

“I’d tell you to chill, but it’s too hot for that word to have any meaning.”

“You want to know what happened this—”

“I most distinctly do not. Got that, Ms. Cooper?”

I stared ahead at the sidewalks filled with pedestrians for as far ahead as I could see. Boxy glass office buildings lined both sides of the broad avenue, eventually giving way to some of the priciest residential real estate in Manhattan.

“I thought you and Vickee were in favor of our—uh, flirtation.”

“I’m in favor of minding my own business. It’s my wife who’s in the advice-to-the-lovelorn business. Don’t put me in the cross fire between you and Mike.”

Mercer had been a rock throughout many of my most difficult moments in the last ten years, and I understood completely that he did not want to be caught in the middle of this complicated relationship that Mike and I were attempting to work out.

We found a salad and sandwich place off Park on 47th Street and stopped to pick up some lunch. We had almost reached the Waldorf when Mercer’s cell phone rang.

“Hey, Rocco. We’re two blocks away.” Mercer listened to the lieutenant for more than a minute, looking at me as he responded. “Alex and I will do that. We’ll be ready to go.”

“News?”

Mercer pocketed his phone. “The ME gave out a photo of our vic two hours ago and it went viral immediately. She’s been identified.”

I pushed my sunglasses on top of my head, squinting at Mercer. “A name? It’s reliable?”

“Her father called it in. Saw the photo in a news bulletin on TV. Doesn’t get more reliable than that.”

“Or more devastating.”

“Corinne Thatcher. Twenty-eight years old.”

I didn’t know which was worse. A corpse that lay in the morgue unidentified for more than a week—like my last case—or the instant a loved one put a name to the body that was still on the steel table in the autopsy room.

“What does Rocco want us to do?” I asked. The girl who had died such an unthinkable death was exactly ten years younger than I.

Mercer put his long arm around my shoulder. “He’s got cops bringing the parents into town from their home on the North Fork. He wants us to talk to them.”

I bit my lip and nodded.

“Rocco wants us to figure out,” Mercer said, “why somebody wanted to torture this girl to death.”

TEN

Mercer and I entered the lobby of the morgue in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was not the ideal setting for an interview of the victim’s family, but I couldn’t imagine asking them to sit in the hotel suite in which their daughter died.

The sign that greeted us was probably the first thing the Thatchers saw when they arrived half an hour earlier, at 4:00
P.M.:
LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING
.

There was a faint, bitter odor of formaldehyde, which seemed to have seeped into every crevice of the building, an unnecessary reminder of the work that went on here.

The head of the Identification Unit had offered us a private room in which to meet. We were pacing the small space until I heard the wails from a woman approaching in the corridor.

Mercer opened the door and started to introduce himself. Bill Thatcher held out his hand, but his wife was inconsolable. She turned away from us and collapsed in her husband’s arms. I followed Mercer out of the room and closed the door.

Fifteen minutes passed before Mr. Thatcher opened the door to start the introductions again.

“I’m Alexandra Cooper. Please call me Alex. I’m the assistant district attorney who’ll be working on Corinne’s case. Mercer and I have partnered together for more than a decade.”

Bill Thatcher appeared to be as puzzled as he was pained. His eyes were bloodshot. He had no doubt been crying since he saw his daughter’s photograph several hours ago. His wife was unable to compose herself, with good reason. She was trying to stifle her sobs with a wad of Kleenex tissue.

“We’re going to try to answer all the questions you have,” I said, after I expressed my condolences. “And while I know this is an impossible moment to impose on you, there are things we are hoping you can tell us about Corinne. We need to catch the person who killed her.”

I didn’t believe in euphemisms. The harsh reality was that their daughter was dead, and as difficult as it was for them to absorb that, they would have to deal with the fact that she was murdered—not just “hurt” or “harmed”—and do it at warp speed.

“You have a job to do, Ms. Cooper. But I’m not sure we’re ready for that.”

Readiness wasn’t a choice Mercer or I could give them.

“The lieutenant has a detective waiting to take you to your home. But we do need to start with a bit of information about Corinne.”

“No offense, Ms. Cooper—Alex. You don’t look old enough to be responsible for my daughter’s life,” Thatcher said. “And you seem to be very nervous.”

“I
am
nervous, Mr. Thatcher,” I said. I’d been brushing my hair away from my face and twisting my pen in my hands. “I don’t like this part of my job.”

Telling family members about the brutality of a loved one’s death never got easier, nor did probing their lives to sniff out any undercurrents of darkness.

“I’d like to talk with the district attorney. Get someone more able to do this.”

Most prosecutors’ offices were, as Mike liked to say, a children’s crusade. Idealistic graduates just out of law school vied for the handful of jobs available with the Manhattan DA, the best training ground for litigators in the country. Before moving on to private practice or other careers in public service, they were tested with the most serious crimes in the city. I had prosecuted dozens of felonies to verdict, handling major cases by my third year in the office.

“We’ll get you in to meet Mr. Battaglia whenever you are up to it, sir,” Mercer said. “You have to trust me that Alex has more experience handling these crimes than most lawyers twice her age.”

“What crimes? What crimes do you mean,” Bill Thatcher said, backing up and sitting down, placing his head in his hands. “I don’t understand what happened to Corinne.”

I wanted to tell him that no one understood what happened. It was obvious to me that the family had not yet been informed about the details of the attack.

Mercer took the lead in describing the manner of death, omitting the fact that she was likely drugged and tortured before she was cut. Thelma Thatcher’s body slumped against her husband’s. I would have to make sure her physician was notified before she left the ME’s office. She was not likely to get through the coming weeks without medical care and perhaps sedation.

“Was she—was she violated?” Corinne’s father asked.

“It appears that she was,” Mercer said. “We’ll get more facts from Dr. Mayes when his tests are done.”

“What kind of a man—?” Bill Thatcher couldn’t finish his sentence.

“There’s no good answer for that question, sir.”

“Corinne wouldn’t know anyone like that,” he said. “It must have been a stranger. Some kind of psychopath.”

“That may well be. That’s why we need you to tell us about her.”

The Thatchers were both retired schoolteachers. They were in their late sixties, and Corinne was the youngest of their three children.

Corinne Thatcher had grown up in a small community in Suffolk County. Like her older brother and sister, she attended college at Hofstra University. We let her father talk about her most special traits, the goodness and generosity of spirit that had won her so many friends along the way. She had struggled with career choices, deciding not to follow in her parents’ footsteps, nor to apply to nursing school as she had originally planned. But she had spent most of the last three years working on disaster relief with the American Red Cross before becoming overwhelmed—and perhaps disillusioned—by the emotionally charged work.

“Was Corinne an employee of the Red Cross?” I asked.

“Not anymore. She spent six months as a volunteer, when one of those tornadoes hit Oklahoma a few years back. Most of the workers are volunteers. But after her training and the time she spent on the job, they hired her to lead some of the major projects.”

“What wonderful work to do.”

Bill Thatcher continued to talk as his tears flowed. “My cousin was from Enid, so when he lost his home in the storm, she flew out. Didn’t know the first thing about saving lives, but they taught her everything from CPR to getting blood to people who needed it.”