I didn’t think the commissioner brooked fools or comics, so I thought he wouldn’t take that question seriously. He turned to Peterson and asked if there had been any progress in identifying the victim.
“No, sir. We had a possible lead this morning-a man who thought the girl might have gone to Brearley with his daughter. But we have the yearbook now and we’ve made contact with the young lady in the picture and she’s alive and well.”
“Are you still thinking your victim might have been homeless?”
“That’s our best guess, so far.”
So although it first seemed the commissioner was ducking the question about where might be a good place to kill someone, he was instead building to an answer in a most logical way.
“Since this Park was created, it has always been a magnet for the homeless. In the 1860s they were called ‘tramps’ and ‘bums,’ and they migrated to the new Park in droves. In the Great Depression, the poor pitched tents and made shanties around the Reservoir and on the margins of the parks. In every period of economic downturn, the disenfranchised find their way into the Park. So it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s why your victim found solace here.”
But there are so many different reasons for why people are homeless, so many kinds of psychological and emotional distress, and not all of them have to do with financial needs. Until we knew why she was here-if homelessness was the reason-we’d have no idea with whom she might have come in contact, if her killer was not a total stranger.
“Places to kill someone,” Davis said to himself, turning to the map behind him, his hands tucked in his pants pocket. “Starting from the south, one could get lost in the nature sanctuary just off the 59th Street entrance, which is pretty dense and has no formal paths. I’ve always thought the arches get a bit spooky after dark-Greengap or Driprock or Willowdell-but, hell, they’ve been used in a thousand movies and crime shows. Way too obvious.”
The Davis deadpan made it impossible to tell whether he was serious or joking around, but most of the men were furiously writing down the names of Park sites-obscure to most of us but clearly Davis’s home territory-in their memo pads.
“The polar bear den at the zoo is a natural-but then, this girl wasn’t mauled, was she? Literary Walk is one of my favorite places. Your victim would have to be a writer, though, if put to death somewhere between the statues of Sir Walter Scott and William Shakespeare.”
“How many statues you got in here anyway?” McAvoy asked.
“Thirty-six. But they don’t make good places to hide.” Davis’s long slender fingers moved deftly over the map. “Simon Bolivar, Hans Christian Andersen, Alexander Hamilton…”
“How many of the statues are women?” I said, smiling at the commissioner.
“Two, young lady. Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose.”
As a kid, I had always wondered why there weren’t any women important enough to be commemorated in the City’s great park. “I could nominate a few real ones.”
“I’d appreciate that,” Davis said. “Back to crime scenes. Strawberry Fields-makes me sad to think that the guy who killed John Lennon spent the whole afternoon before the shooting enjoying himself in our Park. The Ramble? That’s as good as it gets for being remote. Like a world apart, but it’s hiding in plain sight. You’ve got glacial erratics…”
“Erotic what?” Same guy, Major Case squad.
“Erratic. Something like yourself. Glacial rock deposited thousands of years ago on top of bedrock that’s entirely different in composition. One of my recurrent nightmares is a tourist being crushed by one of those glacials toppling off its base. We wouldn’t find him-or her-for years. The Great Lawn, if you don’t mind an audience. The Loch, the Ravine, the North Woods, the Harlem Meer. What do you think, gentlemen? This Park is probably the size of four or five of your precincts-and yet there’s only a fraction of the crime in here. I can think of dozens of places to kill someone, although I can’t imagine depositing the deceased in the Lake, as this guy did.”
“I’ll bite,” Manny Chirico said. “Why not?”
“Because it’s clear she’s going to be found. A few of the spots I’ve mentioned, it could be forever before somebody came upon her. In any of the grottoes, under one of the waterfalls in the Ravine-hell, if you’re dumping her in a body of water, she’s a lot more likely to bottom out in the Reservoir, which is enormous.”
“So the killer wants to be caught,” I said.
“No killer wants to be caught, Coop. Did you drop out of Psych 101 in favor of English lit?” Mike’s friends laughed with him. “If they wanted to be caught, we’d be out of business and schmucks would just be lining up at the courthouse to throw themselves at you. Norman Bates had his mother up in the bedroom for how many years? You didn’t have to look far, but he didn’t want to be caught. Bonnie and Clyde? They left bodies in every bank from Louisiana to New Mexico, in plain sight. No desire to be riddled with bullets in a police ambush. Son of Sam? Murder after murder, they’re all strangers to him, and he’s nailed by a parking ticket. Psychobabble at its best, Madame Prosecutor. If he wanted to be caught, where the hell is he? And Commissioner Davis didn’t say anything about what the killer wanted for himself; he said the killer wanted his victim to be found. He left her in the heart of Central Park, in the heart of this city.”
“A man who listens to me,” Davis said, cocking his head and turning on his most electric smile. “A rare and wonderful thing. I’m guessing you two are married, the way you talk to each other.”
Mike blushed while he protested, and half the guys in the room guffawed.
“Just lovers,” I said to the commissioner. “Not married yet.”
The room went instantly quiet. McAvoy scoped his team-some bemused and others smirking, homicide detectives looked from one another to the lieutenant-and I was paranoid to read into all of the glances that each of them knew about Jessica Pell’s threat to bring Mike down. Manny Chirico acted like he was ready to gag me.
“May I ask you something about Seneca Village, Commissioner?”
“Sure, Ms. Cooper. What would you like to know?”
“You may have heard about some objects that were recovered near the Lake on Friday.”
“Actually, I don’t know anything about them.”
“Well, one was a figure of an angel. It appears to be quite old-I can show you a photo after the meeting-and she’s black. A detective told me about Seneca Village, and I was wondering if this artifact might have come from there.”
Davis put his finger to his lips, and his brow wrinkled as he thought. He took a few minutes to describe the short history of Seneca to the group.
“I wouldn’t have any idea about the source of your object, but there’s no access to the area of the village right now,” he said. “The last excavation was in 2011, by the archaeologists from Columbia.”
“Digs?” I asked. “They opened the area?”
“Very carefully executed and supervised, Ms. Cooper. They used ground-penetrating radar to study the village, using it to detect what was a rich trove of artifacts.”
“What did they find?” Peterson asked.
“Most significantly, the walls of the home of the sexton of one of the churches in the village. All Angels’ Church.”
I slipped my phone out of my pocket and tried to avoid distracting the others by holding it in my lap to pull up the photo of the ebony angel.
“They found remnants of clothing, some ceramics, butchered animal bones-really a fascinating record of the kind of life these people led. Most of the dig is preserved on video. Radar allowed the scholars to keep it very narrowly confined so they neither destroyed any remaining structures nor disturbed the five cemeteries that remain under the Park.”
“Cemeteries under here?” someone murmured. “That’s creepy.”