The next hour and a half continued to be frustrating. There was a woman who had seen a commotion-a couple fighting-and placed them near the beloved statue of Balto, the Alaskan husky who helped save the people of Nome during a diphtheria epidemic in 1925. She babbled for twenty minutes before recalling that the argument she witnessed had been on Saturday and not earlier in the week.
An elderly man with a canteen slung over his shoulder had stopped midpath to remove from harm’s way three young red-eared sliders-a turtle species that lived in the Ramble-and carry them deeper into the woods. He remarked to two cops that he had heard screams on his morning walk almost exactly one week ago. He engaged them for more than ten minutes before they realized he was also obsessed with a meteor headed for earth and the shrieking noises that it emitted.
By nine A.M., everyone with purpose-people with day jobs-had finished their Park jaunts, and now there were the more casual visitors.
Manny and I were poking among leaves along the banks of the gorge when his radio crackled again.
“Sarge? I’m Officer Resnick, from your detail.” I could hear a woman’s voice. “I got a birder with something interesting.”
“Where are you? Can you make me?”
“Yup. I’m at 7322.”
“73? That’s way south of us. You must be almost at the Point.”
I picked up my head. That’s where Mike had started his morning.
“Just about the tip of it. I got a great shot of the Lake from where we are.”
“Will your witness stay?”
“She says yes. We’re waiting for her sister, who took a picture with her camera. There’s a detective here who’s giving me a hand.”
Manny Chirico turned off the radio and wagged a finger at me. “We’d better hustle. But promise me, Alex, you’ll stay out of Mike’s way. Let’s not add to the problem.”
“Well, apparently I am the problem. I don’t intend to stir it up, you can be sure.”
Although we were only the equivalent distance of three city blocks from where the message had originated, the complex series of twisted trails and narrow bridges made it almost a fifteen-minute walk.
Mike’s back was to us as we approached. The young police officer lifted her arm when she spotted us coming, and beside her was a gray-haired woman dressed in sensible clothes with low hiking boots, whom I guessed to be about seventy-five years old.
“Hey, Mike,” I said, following in single file behind Manny Chirico.
“Coop. Sarge.” He acknowledged both of us but didn’t make eye contact. “Meet Helen Austin.”
“How d’you do?” Austin said, stretching her arm out to shake hands with us. There was an old-fashioned manner to her speech, as well as her dress.
“Ms. Austin studies birds here. She was just showing us a great horned owl until your gentle tread scared him off.”
“What is it, Mike?” The sergeant’s annoyance was palpable.
“Helen?” Mike said to her. “Would you tell my boss what you saw?”
She held her head high but shook it from side to side. “I’d prefer you repeat it.”
“Ms. Austin was out here last Wednesday morning. She hikes here every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. She leaves her house on West 76th Street at nine, and her sister meets her right at the tip of the Point at 10:15.”
“Like clockwork,” Helen Austin said. “You can set your watch by us.”
“Last Wednesday, the sisters had just joined up when a man came toward them from between this stand of trees. Am I right so far?”
“Indeed.”
“He startled them.”
“That was clearly his plan, Sergeant,” the woman said. “To startle us.”
“He stood in front of them on the path and exposed himself, and-”
“He didn’t expose himself, Detective,” Helen Austin said. “He was already exposed. Fully dressed, in a long-sleeved black T-shirt and dirty blue jeans. With his privates already hanging out for all the world to see. And then he began pleasuring himself just inches away from us.”
“Pleasuring…?” the sergeant asked.
“Masturbating, Sergeant. Hoping to shock the two of us, I’m sure.”
“Were you able to do anything?” I said.
“Of course, young lady. My sister needs a walking stick. She’s older than I,” Helen Austin said-pausing for effect, I thought. “She lifted the stick and smacked the fellow right between his legs. Not bad for a couple of old spinsters, don’t you think?”
“You know what they say about a bird in the hand,” Mike replied. Helen Austin was as taken with his warm grin and sparkling eyes as the rest of us usually were.
“Well, it wasn’t in his hand very much longer, I can tell you that.”
“Can you describe him?” the sergeant asked.
“Better than that. My sister snapped a photograph,” Austin said. “She’ll be here any minute.”
Not every pervert went on to become a homicidal maniac, but the canvass had already yielded a potential offender in the Ramble.
“Might as well tell them,” Mike said to her.
“He was an African American gentleman-well, ‘fellow’ is more correct than ‘gentleman.’ In his midthirties, I’d say. Light skinned. Close-cropped hair, a mustache, about six feet tall.”
“Would you be able to recognize him, do you think?” I asked.
“Take it easy, Coop. She just told you they’ve got a photograph,” Mike said. “You interrupted the most important thing. Helen?”
“Not that I wanted to be looking at his private parts, but there was a tattoo on his right hand, with which he was holding his penis. That’s the most disturbing part of this. I’ve seen plenty of impolite young men before. But there were two words tattooed, just below his knuckles.”
Helen Austin drew a line across her own hand, suggesting the position of the inked letters. “The words printed were KILL COPS.”
Manny Chirico and I exchanged glances. The harmless masturbator who liked to shock unsuspecting birders might have much deeper felony roots.
“Jailhouse art,” the sergeant said. “That tattoo information and a photo will be a huge help to us, Ms. Austin.”
She was peering over our shoulders, and I turned my head to see whom or what she had spotted. It must have been her sister who was approaching.
“Come quickly,” she called out. “These police people are asking questions about our interloper last week. I told them you managed two photographs of him.”
The sister took her time on the rocky path and approached us with an enthusiastic greeting. She asked me to hold her stick while she removed her camera from her cross-body bag and handed it to Manny Chirico.
“They should be the last two images, sir. I haven’t touched them. We tried to tell one of the rangers about the incident on our way out of the Park, but he wasn’t much interested.”
And that of course was Wednesday, two days before the body was found in the Lake.
The sergeant opened the viewfinder and was trying to bring the images up. “I’m sorry, Ms. Austin, but there’s no photograph of the man’s face, is there? I can’t find it.”
“I’m not sure I got much of his face,” she said. “I was so rattled I was lucky to get the bottom of his chin, down to his knees.”
Chirico rolled his eyes and passed the camera to Mike.
“Be patient, Sarge,” Mike said, laughing at Manny’s short fuse. “Let me zoom in and see what’s here.”
I stood closer to Mike and watched as the image enlarged. But Helen’s sister must have been moving when she hit the button to take the photo because it was too fuzzy to see clearly.
Mike’s smile vanished when he brought the second shot into view and framed it on the camera’s small screen. “You were close about the tattoo, Helen. Just a few letters off, but they make a hell of a lot of difference.”
“What is it?” Chirico asked.
Mike passed the camera over my head. “What the jailhouse tat says, Sarge, is KILL COOP.”