I swept past Rose’s desk and back to my own. Laura was in my office, helping Mike unwrap the two metal miniatures of Park landmarks.
“Hey, Mike. Everything okay?”
“Yeah. Mercer’s on his way to Columbia, and the lab cleaned up these little beauties for me.”
The castle and obelisk had both been given a bath. Mike handed me Cleopatra’s Needle, and I turned it upside down. Engraved on the bottom was the name of the silversmith who had designed the objects and the year in which they were made: Gorham and Frost. 1910.
“Laura, have you tried to call information?”
“The company doesn’t exist anymore, Alex. I’ve called and checked online.”
“Surely these must be part of a larger set.”
“Could be any of the structures in the Park that existed by that time,” Mike said.
“And they must be extremely rare. I can’t imagine they were lying around the Park very long or they would have been picked up. By a groundskeeper or a thief. They’re really quite beautiful.”
“I’ve called the Conservancy,” Mike said. “They’re going to check records to see whether they can connect them to any exhibits they’ve ever had. Our best bet may be the Schneider woman, when we see her tomorrow night. Gordon Davis says she’s a walking history of the Park.”
“Shall we take them up to be photographed?”
“Yeah.”
“We’ll be back in half an hour, Laura. Hold the needy at bay for me, please.”
Mike and I had enough case-related things to discuss to keep away from the personal. I didn’t tell him about Battaglia’s comments, or about my answers.
After we left the photo unit, I said good-bye to Mike at the elevators.
Back at my desk, I went through the list of parolees that Laura had assembled, but none matched the description of the man in the Ramble yesterday morning. I busied myself with the flood of anonymous tips that accompanied this kind of case, and with catching up on the cases of the other lawyers in the unit.
My posse of close friends-Nan, Catherine, Marisa-made a point of coming by at lunchtime with salads, to see if they could take any assignments over for me.
At the end of the day, having heard nothing else from Mercer or Mike, I went home and ignored the television, ordering in from my local deli. I drew a deliciously scented hot bath and relaxed for the evening.
This was the rhythm of many major cases I’d worked. Things started off with a frenetic unfolding of evidence and information and, if not solved immediately, settled into peaks and valleys of developments. I was glad to have this night alone to myself.
The first time the phone rang it was close to 10:30. I was in my den, in a bathrobe, enjoying my drink.
The incoming number was Mercer’s. I was hoping he had information about Seneca Village.
“Hey. Good to hear from you.”
“Not so good as you think, Alex.”
I sat up straight and dropped the book I’d been reading onto the floor.
“What is it?”
“An attempted rape.”
“Damn. How’s the victim?”
“She’s going to be okay. I’m with her at the hospital now.”
“Did they get the guy?”
“Not yet. And it was after dark, so she’s not sure she can make an ID.”
“Thanks for the heads-up, Mercer.” He was good to call me so I could arrange for someone to handle the new matter first thing in the morning. Even though there was no arrest, someone in the unit could get started working with the victim. “It’s more than that,” Mercer said. “The attack was in Central Park.”
“What the hell-? What’s going on?”
“Don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“But the Park is flooded with cops.”
“Not the north end. Most of the police presence has been south of 80th Street since Friday.”
“Where did this happen?”
“Up north. At the foot of the Ravine, at about 106th Street. Just under Huddlestone Arch.”
And yesterday Gordon Davis had remarked on how spooky the arches get after dark.
“So because it’s only an attempt, I take it there’s no seminal fluid. No DNA.”
“Very little to go on, Alex. Medium-complexion black man. Average height, average weight. The only thing our vic is sure of is that the guy had a tattoo on his hand. Two words-not pictures-but she couldn’t make them out.”
Kill, I said to myself. I didn’t want to speak the whole expression out loud. A rapist on the loose with KILL COOP inked into his skin.
FOURTEEN
“I’m Alexandra Cooper. I work with Mercer,” I said to the woman who was sitting in a small office near the Emergency Room at Mount Sinai Hospital. “I’m with the DA’s Office Special Victims Unit.”
By the time I was off the phone with Mercer, the police car he’d sent to pick me up was in front of my building.
“Look, I just want to go home, okay? I don’t have anything else to say.”
“I know it’s late and I know you’ve been through an ordeal, but I’d appreciate it if you could answer a few more questions for me.”
Flo Lamont was still in a hospital gown, waiting while the advocate who was part of SAVI-the hospital’s Sexual Assault and Violence Intervention program-brought her a clean T-shirt with which to leave the hospital. Her legs were jiggling nervously as she listened to me.
“I want to go over what happened to you one more time, in a little more detail.”
The uniformed cops had gotten all of Flo’s pedigree information. The nineteen-year-old African American woman lived with her mother in Schomburg Plaza, a high-rise complex just across 110th Street from the Park. She worked in the shipping department at Macy’s.
“You’re not gonna find this dude, you know? I don’t see why it matters.”
“Mercer’s really good at what he does,” I said. “He might surprise you.”
Flo looked up at her detective and then looked him over, up and down. “But the guy didn’t do anything to me.”
“That’s not exactly how I’d describe things,” Mercer said, although that’s the way many victims described an uncompleted attempt to commit this brutal crime. “And it’s only because you fought him off that he didn’t finish what he set out to do.”
The 61-the complaint report that the first uniformed responder scratched out-was only two sentences long: “At the T/P/O-time and place of occurrence-an unknown M/B threatened Flo Lamont with a lead pipe and attempted to have intercourse with her. Lamont resisted and attacker fled.”
Those few words were enough to send someone to state prison for fifteen years if he was apprehended. But it was the detail missing from the summary of the elements of the crime that might determine if we would ever connect this assailant to Flo’s case.
The rookies who’d encountered Flo, after a young couple looking for a secluded place to hang out heard her screams, asked her hardly any questions at all. She was sobbing and shaking, so they put her in their patrol car and made the short trip down to Madison Avenue and 100th Street, to the Sinai ER.
Those cops were required to turn the case over to Special Victims detectives, who had the expertise to do more in-depth questioning in a compassionate manner, which is part of what made them qualified for such sensitive work. Although Mercer wasn’t catching new cases because of his assignment to Angel’s homicide, his boss wanted him to go out on this one in case there was any connection between the two.
“You gonna tell my mother about this?” Flo asked, massaging her left shoulder with her right hand.
“You’re nineteen,” Mercer said. “We don’t need to tell your mother anything.”
“Them cops kept asking me why I was in the Park after dark. Like I was doing something wrong.”
“We know you weren’t doing anything wrong,” Mercer said. He pulled up a second chair and sat opposite Flo, so he could talk to her eye-to-eye. “I’m going to ask you why you were in the Park, also. But only because that’s where this crime happened. I have to know why you were there and what you were doing-just like I’d ask if this had happened in a school or in an office building. I’m not accusing you of anything.”