“Will do.”
I switched places with Mercer so he could make the calls, while I went to tell Pat McKinney about the case against Flo and the fact that Raymond Tanner was at large.
I walked toward McKinney’s office, but it was still early and he wasn’t in yet. I reversed myself and went into the executive wing to tell Paul Battaglia.
The district attorney had heard about the attempted rape in the Park on news radio while being driven down to work. He was waiting for details from me when Rose announced me.
With great skill, Battaglia cross-examined me through the facts of Flo’s case. I also explained to him that Tanner might be a person of interest in Angel’s case.
“Does Mercer like that idea?”
“It’s too early for anyone to know enough to disagree, Paul, don’t you think?”
“Never too early for some people to disagree with you, Alex,” Battaglia said, striking a match as he clamped a new cigar between his lips and drew on it. “Nice work last night. Now tell Mercer to find the guy before he hurts someone else.”
“He’s on it.”
The morning was a frenetic choreography of phone calls and updates. Lieutenant Peterson put Mercer directly through to Commissioner Scully, Gordon Davis called to ask for the facts of Flo’s case, Mercer spent twenty minutes trying to reassure Flo neither her name nor any statements that could identify her would be made public, and the press had started its feeding frenzy with courthouse reporters sniffing around Laura’s desk for an inside scoop.
To get away from them, Mercer suggested we move down the hall to the conference room adjacent to Pat McKinney’s office. We spread Raymond Tanner’s long criminal history out on one side of the table and covered the other with Angel’s case, including all of Hal Sherman’s photographs of the scene.
I worked the landline and Mercer his cell, with bursts of interruption from Laura as calls continued to pour in.
“I’m switching through the administrator from Fishkill, Alex,” Laura said. “He says you spoke with him this morning. I’ll put him on this line, okay?”
I signed off with Nan, who was on her way from the grand jury with subpoenas, and picked up the prison admin call.
“I owe you an apology, Ms. Cooper. On Raymond Tanner.”
“What is it?”
“I’ll give you any information you want.”
“My subpoenas are ready.”
“Mr. Tanner’s first work release date was April 3rd.”
“That was more than two and a half months ago,” I said.
“He did return regularly for the first six weeks of his release. But it appears he went AWOL in the middle of May.”
My temper was ready to flare. “So you have no idea where Raymond Tanner is as we speak, is that correct?”
“I do not.”
“What’s the name of the nursing home where you placed him?”
“Sunrise Services on Gun Hill Road.” His answers were coming faster now. “But he hasn’t shown up there in a week.”
That fact didn’t surprise me in the least.
“And the residential address?” I asked.
“He stays with his grandmother on the Concourse. The exact number is here on my desk.”
“For your information, sir, both his grandmothers were dead before he was born.”
The chief administrator couldn’t resist one last shot. “I’m not the one who lost the trial, Ms. Cooper.”
“And I didn’t let a prisoner escape,” I said. “We’ll talk again, I’m sure.”
The fact that Tanner was at large, and was undoubtedly Flo’s attacker, would ratchet up the media attention on him and everything we were trying to get done.
Mercer and I were focused on our work when Mike arrived, shortly after eleven. He was carrying four large paper bags, grocery-store size, that appeared damp on the bottom and lower half.
“Good morning, Coop. Morning, Mercer. Peterson told me you had a late night.”
“And a productive one. Alex has the life history of Raymond Tanner laid out along that side of the table. You need to check him out.”
“What’s in your bags?” I asked.
“So that dredging-the-Lake idea of Gordon Davis’s may be the shot we needed.” Mike made himself a space at the end of the table with his back to the door, gloved up, and opened the bags one at a time to display their contents.
The first item was a sweatshirt-a navy-blue hoodie that zipped up the front. “Size medium. Unisex, I’d say.”
Then he removed the second piece of clothing, which was a pale-pink T-shirt, with a fitted body and cap sleeves. “This one’s a small. A ladies’ small,” he said.
Third was a pair of khaki-colored cargo pants, as damp as the first two pieces. “Also small, and nothing in any of the pockets.”
From the last one he extracted a dark-green plastic bag with a red tie-the large size, for lawn and trash.
“Check it out, guys. Tell me what you think I’ve got,” Mike said, tossing each of us a pair of gloves to put on before either of us touched any of the items.
“I’d say it’s the basic uniform of a homeless person.”
“Very good, Coop. Female variety.”
The pink tee was the only nod to feminine dressing. I picked it up to look it over, front and back, for markings. Inside on the seam was a label from Target.
The hoodie and cargo pants were traditional gear for young people living on the streets. Their styles allowed kids and young adults to be gender neutral, and the hoods made it easy to conceal most of the face if they didn’t want to be recognized. Trash bags were the homeless equivalent of sleeping bags-a bit of protection from the wind and weather when one settled into the sack for the night.
“Where did this stuff come from?” Mercer asked.
“The crew started dredging yesterday, from the western side of the pond.”
“Did a lot of things surface?”
“Not so much as you’d think because of how fierce they are about making sure there’s no garbage in or around anyplace. When they picked up again this morning, these things were all clumped together, about fifty yards from the far side of Bow Bridge, snagged on some rocks on the little island in the middle of the Lake.”
Mercer was doing his own check of the pockets of the pants and sweatshirt.
“I thought you’d want some photos now,” Mike said. “Then I’ll take them to the lab to have them dry out. Then to the morgue to see if they look like they’d fit Angel.”
Mike and I both had our backs to the door when Pat McKinney came in. I was leaning on the table, making notes on a legal pad, while Mike was giving me the names and contact information for the men who had found the items.
“Hey, everybody,” McKinney said. “Big score last night, Alex. And good call, Mercer, for bringing her up to the precinct. Maybe this won’t be a lost cause after all.”
I was glad that McKinney had eased up on me lately. The office was such a tremendously collegial place that it had always been jarring to have someone who ranked between the DA and me ready to backstab me for no apparent reason.
I turned my head to talk to him. “You want the details on the attempted rape? And Mike just came in with these clothes that were found pretty close to the body in the Lake.”
McKinney walked toward us and looked over my shoulder. I straightened up to tell him the story about Raymond Tanner, along with the news from Fishkill. Mike filled in the blanks about the search in the Park.
When McKinney stepped back toward the door, Mike and I returned to our conversation and my note-taking.
“If you ever get that three’s-a-crowd feeling, Mercer, my door’s always open to you,” McKinney said.
Neither Mike nor I moved a muscle. I wrote across the bottom of my pad in big letters, all caps: IGNORE HIM.
Mercer shook his head. “There is so much spite in your soul, Pat, I sometimes wonder how you don’t choke on it.”
McKinney gave one of his fake chortles. “It’s not spite, man. Who zings me more than Detective Chapman?”
“Mike’s funny, Pat. You’re just small-minded.”