“Whew, Manny,” Mike said. “We’re into tough love now, I guess.”
“Don’t let it ruin your appetite, Mike. I’ve been thinking about how we deal with Pell and-”
I tipped my chair back and shook my head so the sergeant could see me. I didn’t want him blaming-or crediting me-with his strategy.
“I just think we’re smarter to draw her out. That’s why I think it’s a good idea to send Alex with Mike to the Park on Wednesday night. To let them keep working together. If that smokes Pell out into the open, all the better for us. Any other way, she wins.”
I munched on a corner of my turkey wrap.
“And if this gets to Scully?” the lieutenant asked. “It’s the mayor who appointed Pell.”
“For all the wrong reasons,” I said. “And it’s the same mayor who appointed Scully, too. That’s the good news.”
“So far I’m in charge of dealing with Pell,” Chirico said. “We’ll try it my way. What’s the rest of the day?”
“I’m heading back out to see how the canvass is going,” Mike said.
“Me, too. I mean, not the same place you’ll be, but that’s what I’m going to do,” I said.
“Tomorrow morning I’ll pick up the statues and bring them down to the office. Your photography unit can document them, and you can set someone on tracing them.”
“I’ll be free as soon as Battaglia finishes with me.”
“What does he want?” Mike asked.
“I can only guess, but I think it has to do with a pound of my flesh.”
Peterson and Chirico were finishing their lunch and ready to leave. “I’ve had two teams working since yesterday morning on circulating the girl’s photo to some of the homeless shelters. I’d better get a buzz on that,” Peterson said. “And I’m calling SVU. We might as well bring Mercer back in on this, along with some of their other senior people.”
Mercer had been in Homicide for years before asking for the transfer to Special Victims. He liked the rapport he developed with survivors of sexual assault, helping them triumph in the courtroom and restoring their dignity. Mike preferred work that did not involve hand-holding the victim. He saved his compassion for the dead.
Mike and I walked out behind them. “Are you going back to the Point?” I asked him.
“Nah. I’ve had my excitement for the day. I’m going to try the other side of Bow Bridge. See what the shoreline looks like over there. You?”
“Bethesda Terrace.” It was where all the gathered information was being centrally reported to one of the sergeants from Intel. “Best place for me to keep up to speed.”
We fell back behind the bosses as we walked out of the Arsenal. “How late are you staying?”
“Don’t know. It’s getting close to the longest day of the year. Till it gets dark, I guess.”
Many of the Park regulars had evening rituals-jogging, biking, blading, dog walking, in the hours after work. If there had been any kind of confrontation between our victim and her assailant that started at dusk or in early darkness, these would be the people who might have snippets of information.
“So how about if I pick you up at Bethesda at nine tonight? We knock off and have dinner?”
I turned to look at Mike, puzzled by his offer. He was running so hot and cold, frazzled by Pell’s threats and frustrated by the lack of progress in the case, that I still didn’t know how read him. “Me?”
“Is there anyone else in earshot?”
“You must have started at five A.M. today. You know they won’t pay you OT for this?”
“Like I’m in it for the big bucks, blondie? It’s my case, remember? And it’s Mercer’s idea to have dinner.”
“Then I’ll see you at nine,” I said. “Thanks for including me.”
Mike called out to the lieutenant and caught up with his two supervisors. I walked behind the building and headed north again, cutting across paths until I got to the foot of the Promenade on the Mall, walking that single straight line right to Bethesda Terrace.
The rest of the afternoon and evening was uneventful. Tourists were curious about the massive police presence, so it seemed as though as many people were stopping to ask us questions as there were to answer them.
Most of the Park regulars were willing to be helpful, pausing to express concern, ask who the dead girl was, and offer advice of every kind. Police noted descriptions of men who had shouted obscene comments to women joggers, men who had come on to college students in bikinis spread out on blankets on the Great Lawn, and men who had been rowboating on the Lake.
The cops had me spend an hour with an NYU professor who encouraged me to study Dreiser’s An American Tragedy to see if there were any clues in that classic about the drowning of a poor working girl-knocked out of a rowboat in a lake-by the boyfriend who’d found a richer prospect he wanted to marry.
By the end of the day, we had thousands of generic descriptions of unpleasant men who frequented the Park. We had nothing that remotely pointed to a killer.
Shortly after nine, Mike pulled up in his car on the roadway adjacent to the Terrace.
“How do you do this grueling legwork day after day?” I asked him. “I’m beat.”
“Beat is good,” he said. “As long as you’re hungry, too.”
“Thirsty.”
“Even better. Mercer’s holding a table for us at Patroon.”
“Now I’m hungry and thirsty. Nothing could make me happier.”
We headed east, down to 46th Street between Lexington and Third Avenues, where my friends Ken and Di Aretsky owned one of the classiest restaurants in the city. Patroon featured the best steaks in town, and a grilled Dover sole that was off the charts. Ken was as nice as anyone in the business, providing a clubby atmosphere that ensured relaxation as much as it did fine dining. And he had been a great resource for Luc Rouget when my Frenchman had tried to open a fancy restaurant in New York earlier this year. Mercer and Mike were taking me to one of the places that I was most comfortable, most pampered.
Mike was moving swiftly down Fifth Avenue. There was no traffic, and we had the lights with us. “You know why those two dudes-Mr. Olmsted and your buddy Vaux-you know why those guys beat out all the other landscapers who entered the contest to design the Park?”
“I just assumed they had the most experience.”
“What experience? This was the very first landscaped urban park in America.”
“So what then?”
“There were thirty-three official entries,” Mike said. “But your guys were the only ones who insisted that the Park-to work as an artistic pastoral landscape-had to be completely separated from the city streets. No coal wagons or fire engines or dust carts wandering through it.”
“That makes sense.”
“It was their plan-Olmsted and Vaux-to sink all the transverse roads, the ones that cut east to west from Fifth Avenue to Central Park West, below the road surface.”
Of course Mike was right.
“Four huge transverse roads and they’re all below the surface of the Park grounds,” he said. “That’s ingenious. No commercial vehicles at all on Park drives, and nothing that even obstructed any of the views. Pretty damn clever.”
“It is. But you’re thinking about something. About the case.”
“Yeah.”
“That most dump jobs would involve a car, right?”
“Yeah. That if our girl was killed somewhere else-’cause there’s no sign of a struggle near the Lake, and no drag marks around it-then she’s likely to have been killed somewhere else in Manhattan and then dumped from a car.”
“And since there are no transverse roads anywhere near the Lake, the closest place a car could have stopped is where you just picked me up, on top of the grand staircase at Bethesda Terrace.”
“And the Park is closed to traffic from seven P.M. to seven A.M., so that pretty much means if the killer came by car, he would have been hauling the body in broad daylight, at the height of tourist season.”