Terminal City (3 page)

“Like you do?” Rocco said. “Kiss your weekend plans good-bye. No jaunting up to Martha’s Vineyard on Friday.”

“Guess not.” But I had already ditched plans to fly up to my house, even though August was high season and many of the friends I didn’t get to see all year spent part of this month at the beach.

Mike was coming home at the end of this week, and he had asked me to have dinner with him on Saturday night. Our ten-year friendship, marked by an intense professional partnership that had circled around the prospect of personal intimacy for so long, had taken a slight turn on a June night, in the middle of Central Park. Mike’s suspension, and his European travels, had given me far too much time to think about what might be next. My anxiety level was high.

“You got anything from Mercer?”

“Sorry? What did you ask me?”

“Don’t zone out on me, Alex. The night is young.”

I checked for a text. “He’ll be up here within the hour. Before nine o’clock.”

In between that last murder investigation in Central Park and this one, the sweltering summer heat had added to the volatility of feuds. Drug gangs in Brooklyn were responsible for three shootings in July, the usual domestics left six women dead citywide, and an array of road rage, drunk drivers, deranged psych patients for whom there was no place in mental facilities had spiked the murder rate. The Manhattan District Attorney’s aggressive and creative crime strategies had taken the figures to a dramatic new low, but the recent blip in numbers had everyone questioning whether the cycle was trending up again or if the brutal weather patterns had simply ignited violent tempers.

A detective appeared in the doorway. “Excuse me, Loo. The medical examiner’s on his way up, and I just got a call from the housekeeper over in the ER. She’s stable, and they’re sending her home.”

“What’s wrong with her?” I got to my feet and walked toward Rocco.

“Palpitations. Totally freaked out by finding the body,” Rocco said. “Thought she was having a heart attack. Two of the men from the Seventeenth Precinct who got to the scene early took a good statement from her. We did elimination prints and swabbed her mouth for DNA.”

He turned back to the detective. “Tell the housekeeper we might need her to be available for a reinterview tomorrow. See if her memory improves once she calms down.”

“Memory problems?” I asked.

“I’ll show you the notes. Saw nothing, heard nothing. I’m not sure she was so clueless, or that she just doesn’t want to be involved. You can take a run at her when you’re ready.”

I slipped past the detective and let Rocco give the man his next orders. I paced the hallway in front of the elevator bank, waiting for Johnny Mayes to step off. At forty-five, he had established a solid reputation as a brilliant pathologist who worked well with the senior prosecutorial staff. Once he finished his site exam, the young woman’s body would be removed to the chief medical examiner’s office, where Mayes would perform the autopsy, probably tomorrow.

“Johnny,” I said, greeting him as he stepped off the elevator, wheeling his equipment bag behind him.

“Alexandra Cooper,” he said, bowing at the waist. “Did they shoot you out of a cannon? Have I kept you terribly long?”

He was about the same height as I—five feet ten—but his stout build was a distinct contrast to my slim frame. Mayes was a wine enthusiast whose refined tastes and interests seemed to lift him out of the dark world in which he spent an inordinate amount of his time.

“Not at all.” I pointed the way to the suite, and we walked the long corridor together. “I’m waiting for Mercer to come back up here so we can make a plan, and everyone’s terribly curious to hear what you have to say. The manager brought up fresh coffee if you need a jump start.”

“I’ll take it,” he said. “Who’ve we got? Rocco?”

“And Pug.”

Johnny smirked as he turned his head to me. “Seriously? And who’ll do damage control for his mouth?”

“That falls to me, I’d guess.”

“You have thoughts on this yet?”

“Waiting for your observations, Doc.”

Mayes unzipped his bag and reached in for a gown to wear over his long-sleeved shirt. He turned so that I could tie the strips behind his back. He leaned on my shoulder while he covered his brown leather shoes with booties, then fitted himself into a pair of gloves.

“Lots of blood, I understand.”

“Understatement.”

“You game for a forensic adventure, Alex?”

My office had pioneered the courtroom introduction of some of the most advanced scientific techniques since we first attempted to use DNA technology—unsuccessfully—in a 1986 homicide. Paul Battaglia, the longtime district attorney, had thrown his support behind unconventional approaches to solving crime. Biologists at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner’s lab gave us groundbreaking tools, from familial searches of genetic matches via blood relatives of a suspect to my recent Frye hearing on the use of an FST—Forensic Statistical Tool—to evaluate evidentiary material with low mixtures, rather than complete profiles, determining the probability the substance contained the perp’s DNA.

“I’d like to try a homicide with just a straightforward cause of death for a change. And a blood-soaked perp fleeing the scene who’s in custody before he hits the pavement.”

“Come ahead then, girl. I might be able to give you the former.”

“What’s the adventure?” I asked as he tapped on the door of the victim’s suite.

“A hyperspectral imaging device that can date blood samples, perhaps to within an hour of the time they were deposited,” Mayes said, as Rocco opened the door. “The holy grail of forensic technology.”

“Hey, Johnny,” Rocco said, “how’ve you been?”

Hal Sherman and Pug McBride came out of the bedroom.

“Hot. How about you, Lieutenant?”

“Just got orders to cancel my vacation. Hot and bothered is how I am. The dead girl’s in the other room.”

“Anybody move her? Turn her over?” Mayes pointed a gloved finger at Rocco Correlli, then Pug and Hal.

“You crazy? Of course not,” Pug said. “Scout’s honor.”

“I know how it is when you’re looking to identify a body, gentlemen. Objects have a tendency to shift in flight.”

An impetuous detective had screwed up a homicide of mine by rolling the body over before the medical examiner arrived, hoping to find a driver’s license or wallet in her jeans pocket, making it impossible for the pathologists to know the exact pattern of the bloodstains.

“I didn’t think she’d be lying naked on top of her library card, Doc. No problem waiting for you.”

“May I—?”

“Stay out here, Alexandra, will you?” Mayes said. “Let me do this with Pug. I expect Dr. Azeem will be here shortly. He can explain to Rocco and you what our experiment will be.”

“Don’t be experimenting on my scorecard, Johnny,” the lieutenant said.

Dr. Mayes walked to the threshold and peered into the room. “I’m going to guess that someone sliced this young woman’s jugular vein. I will trust your most excellent men,” he said, with the formality of speech that characterized his style, “to find the executioner as quickly as possible. The more difficult issue will be figuring how this victim was led to slaughter, and precisely when it happened.”

“Azeem?”

“I heard him lecture in England in the spring. Teesside University. He happens to be here this week presenting his findings at Columbia. He offered the opportunity to give me a firsthand sampling of the prototype.”

“What does the device do, exactly?” I asked.

“She means what’s so frigging holy about it,” Rocco said.

“The imaging scans for the visible spectrum of hemoglobin with extraordinary levels of laboratory accuracy. The only effective way of dating blood currently is centuries old, my friends,” Mayes said, his gloved hands clasped together on the bulge above his waist. “Dr. Azeem may be able to tell us, right here in this room—within the hour—what the time of death was. I assume if we pinpoint that, it might save your men a huge amount of time.”

Rocco whistled. “And spare them endless hours of looking at videotapes of revolving doors and cement staircases.”

“Let me get to work. And you might tell the manager that when I’m done, I would prefer a fine glass of Montepulciano to chase down this lukewarm coffee on his hospitality cart.” Johnny Mayes disappeared into the bedroom.

“Go figure,” Rocco said, leading me back to the suite across the hall. “Come out of there and drink a glass of bloodred wine? I’ll stick to my vodka, and it can’t come soon enough.”

I walked to the window and stared out at the dusky sky, at the last bit of light from behind the tall buildings to the west. I looked down at the tiny figures on the sidewalk so far below—pedestrians, making their way to trains or subways or restaurants nearby. Even though the rush hour traffic had abated, the strip fronting the Waldorf, Park Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets, was one of the busiest crossroads in Manhattan.

“Missing Persons have anything to say?”

“Give it a break, Alex. She might not be missing all that long yet. Dr. Shazam—”

“Azeem.”

“Whatever. He and his amazing machine are supposed to solve that piece of the puzzle, aren’t they?”

I sat back down on the couch and put my feet up on the coffee table, checking my BlackBerry for e-mails and texts.

Blood expert on the way,
I texted to Mercer.
You might want to be here.

Pug crossed over to stand in the doorway. “Confirmation on the seminal fluid in the pubic area, Alex. Mayes asked me to tell you.”

The doctor had used a blue LED to fluoresce the dried fluid on the victim’s skin and matted in her hair.

District Attorney Battaglia wasn’t into electronic communication. He wanted to hear the news the old-fashioned way—catching hesitation in his lawyers’ answers if they were uncertain of facts, picking up on the tonality of the voice of the reporter, allowing him to cross-examine before you had time to think of a response that could be abbreviated by a few keystrokes.

I called Paul Battaglia to tell him that I was at the Waldorf and that initial observations supported the view that this was a rape-homicide of an unidentified woman, probably in her late twenties, whose jugular vein had been severed by the sharp blade of a knife.

He had the usual concerns. Not the condition of the woman’s body or the quality of our investigative work, but how this murder would impact his political standing. He’d want to know what church her mother attended so he could plan to be at Sunday’s service, and whether there would be any victims’ group rallies that might disrupt his schedule, requiring his attendance at a candlelight vigil, or something that might deprive him of a chance to golf with his son-in-law on Sunday morning.

Hal Sherman joined Pug McBride in the corridor. His voice boomed and I whipped around, ending my phone call as Hal shouted, “Look who’s back from the dead.”

I knew he wasn’t talking about the body on the bed.

“Who is?” I asked.

Hal backed up and a short gentleman with dark skin, straight black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses entered the room.

As he stepped toward me with an extended hand, introducing himself as Fareed Azeem, Mike Chapman came into view, slapping Hal’s back as his old friend embraced him.

Then Mike led the others into the suite where Rocco and I were working. “Hey, Loo. Here’s the magician Johnny Mayes has been talking about.”

Azeem smiled and greeted Rocco Correlli.

“Nobody said Chapman was dead,” Rocco said as he shook hands with Dr. Azeem. “He just needed an attitude adjustment. And a lock for the zipper on his private parts.”

There was no mistaking my full-on blush for the warmth of the August night now.

“What about you, Coop?” Mike asked, running his fingers through his thick black hair, flashing his best grin. “Miss me?”

“Once a week at least, Mike. Maybe twice. Whenever I thought it had been too long since anyone had taken a jab at me. I—uh—I hadn’t realized you’d come home.”

I didn’t want to squirm in front of this crew of professionals, but I was steaming because Mike hadn’t called me to say he had returned a few days earlier than expected.

“Need-to-know basis only. I told you that, kid. Taking it slow.”

That last phrase was Mike’s, the one he had used when he kissed me on the rooftop of the Arsenal on a pitch-perfect June night.

“Taking what slow?” Rocco asked.

I reached for a legal pad in my tote bag. Anything to avoid playing out this stilted reunion in front of the Manhattan South Homicide Squad.

“Am I interrupting something here, Alex?” the lieutenant asked. “Or is this just the usual Chapman foreplay?”

“Sorry, Rocco. I’ve been waiting for Mike to get home so we could tie up some loose ends on a pending case.”

“She hates to be the last to know, Loo. Bad habit of hers.”

I turned to Fareed Azeem. “I understand you’re going to help Dr. Mayes establish our victim’s time of death, Doctor.”

“I don’t want to get in the way, Ms. Cooper,” he said, nodding his head in my direction. “But I believe I can assist with that.”

“It could be critical in this case, if we can limit the window in which the perp committed the crime and escaped from this—this fortress. It would save the detectives days of wasted hours canvassing or sitting in front of video screens.”

“Yes, ma’am. It’s rather a mammoth hotel.”

“Dr. Mayes is across the hallway. Let me take you over to him,” Hal said.

He motioned to Azeem to follow as Rocco Correlli charged ahead. Mike moved back to let them through, while I tried to stay close on the heels of the highly touted forensic guru. I didn’t see any point in being alone with Mike.

“So really, Coop, did you miss me?” he said, playfully poking me in the side as I passed him.

“Any day now I might have started to.”

“You look skinny, kid. How much weight did you lose pining away for me?” Mike grabbed my arm to try to hold me in place.

“Neither weight nor sleep.” I broke loose and kept walking.

“Hey, Coop. Turn around a minute.”

“What is it, Detective?” I worried my annoyance—and hurt—were palpable.