“Don’t confuse the Lake with the Reservoir. I’m telling you it can be done.”
“You think I don’t know that, Coop?” Mike said. “One of my vics was found when the Central Park Conservancy restored this hole ten years back, when all the DA would let you handle were petty thefts.”
The Reservoir, above 86th Street in the Park, was originally built to hold the city’s entire supply of drinking water, piped in by a complicated system from upstate New York and distributed throughout the boroughs via massive underground tunnels. The Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir was now more than one hundred acres of exquisite scenery-no longer used to relieve New Yorkers’ thirst-forty feet deep, holding a billion gallons of water.
The picturesque Lake, on the other hand, was only eighteen acres in area and just a few feet deep-also manmade by the Park’s designers to replace the great untamed swamp that sat on the current site in the nineteenth century.
“Alex is right,” Mercer said. “If the commissioner asks the mayor to do it, it’ll happen.”
Keith Scully had been commissioner for most of the mayor’s tenure in office, and they enjoyed a strong respect for each other.
“I’ve got Scuba on its way here,” Mike said. “Let’s see what they come up with. You’re over the top, Coop.”
“Not if you believe this case is linked to your two old ones. About time you solved them, don’t you think?”
“That wasn’t my point. I was just saying the angel is falling down on her job.”
“Missing persons?” Mercer asked.
“Figueroa’s going down to look through files. We can’t put up a photo or sketch of the girl until the ME cleans her up,” Mike said. “And we’re going to need a detail, Loo, to canvass the area around the Terrace and perimeter of the Lake.”
“Yeah. Every morning for at least a week,” the lieutenant agreed with Mike. “I’ll start them at four A.M. and run it till ten at night. Creatures of habit, these Park people.”
“Say it, Coop. Stop biting your lip and speak up,” Mike said. “You look like you have that burning need to throw another rope out to rescue us.”
“I’m not correcting the lieutenant. But today’s Friday. A business day. You’ll get an entirely different rhythm with any canvass you do over the weekend. Mercer and I had the same experience with our rapist who was targeting bikers up near the Reservoir.”
Mercer nodded in agreement.
“Tomorrow and Sunday you’ll have all the gawkers who hear this story on the news,” I said. “But most of the working people who jog before going to the office have a different weekend schedule. People sleep in, dogs get walked later, businessmen who ran today at six are pushing a stroller at ten on Saturday. Your heavy days, the ones likely to yield value, will start on Monday.”
“I guess I was right about your crystal ball.”
“Who’s going to be on top of the homeless parkies?” Mercer asked.
“I left that mess to Sergeant Chirico,” Peterson said. “Problem with springtime is that they’re all back out on the street. This place is so damn big you can find them anywhere, from the Sheep Meadow to the Blockhouse. Harmless and homeless, or toothless and ruthless. Takes all kinds to survive on the streets of this city.”
“Detective Sherman!” one of the cops at the top of the steps yelled out to Hal. “You want me to send these guys down?”
Hal gave him a thumbs-up. “That’s my Panoscan team, Mike. We’ll do a couple of setups on each side of the Bow Bridge from this bank, and then a few from the foot of the fountain.”
Just a few years in operation, the Panoscan was a vast improvement in crime scene technology. It would take only minutes to assemble a kit with a fish-eye lens to create high-resolution, 360-degree images. Things that may not have seemed obvious to first responders-clues possibly overlooked at a scene-would be available to Mike and Mercer by pointing and clicking on the panoramic image from their desktops.
“Great. Let’s get out of the way, guys,” Mike said, herding the rest of us back across the bridge to the footpath.
I waited until Peterson was a few steps ahead of us. “How come I don’t know anything about your two cold cases, Mike?”
“There’s a lot you don’t know, kid.”
“But you usually come to me with-”
“Bags of bones, Coop. Partial remains. That’s what I’ve got. From back in the day, before you hitched yourself to my star. No way to know who they are or how they died. No way to prove they were sexually assaulted.”
“Throw in that woman from Brazil who was killed in the Ravine in ’95,” Mercer said, referring to a remote area in the northern end of the Park, “and the body in the Harlem Meer. Both cases colder than the iceberg that sunk the Titanic.”
“So what are you two telling me?” I asked, although the picture was coming together for me without any more narrative. “Is this like those unsolved murders of young women out on Long Island, near Gilgo Beach? Some deranged killer sets up shop in the heart of the city’s most populated public space and operates season after season?”
Mike and Mercer exchanged glances over my head.
“We don’t know what it is yet. But we do know that it’s been real stable here for the last couple of years,” Mike said. “So nobody’s going public with the bigger story, do you understand that? Not the district attorney or any of his flacks, or Scully has me walking a foot post in Bed-Stuy.”
Mike stared at me until I nodded.
“Maybe there’s nothing to connect any of these victims with one another. Maybe this poor broken body is a one-off. That’s the approach we’re taking for now.”
“And so it’s your idea just to make believe the Park is a safe place to be?” I asked.
“Safest precinct per square foot of any property in the city,” Mike said. “I think the mayor’s got the last word on what’s a threat to his voters, Coop, and when he decides to tell them about that. There’s a primary in three months and he’s hoping it’s a mandate for another term. You just figure out who this dead girl is, and I’ll stay on top of the cold cases.”
THREE
Judge Marvin Heller took his place on the bench at exactly 9:45 Friday morning. He ran his courtroom with an efficiency unique to the inhabitants of the Depression-era Criminal Court building that towered over Centre Street, shadowing the companion quarters that had been acquired fifty years ago to handle Manhattan’s ever-growing docket of cases-now more than one hundred thousand a year.
I slipped into one of the seats in the last row of benches shortly after ten A.M., knowing that Heller had at least ten cases on the calendar he would call before mine.
I opened the Redweld and studied the notes I had made last night on a legal pad. I’d left the homicide team in Central Park to get on with their work and taken the subway downtown from 59th Street, at the south end of the Park, to Canal Street.
The morning train ride to Canal was, for me, like sitting in the middle of the biggest lineup any cops could stage. If I managed to grab a seat-and I much preferred that to the chance of being pressed against by a familiar frotteur, for whom New York’s subway system was such a natural playground-it was easy to observe that most of the riders headed for the same stop were either lawyers or perps. The latter outweighed the former in number, and many of the recidivists who were frequent fliers in the system were as recognizable to me as my colleagues from the DA’s office or defense bar.
I was far more comfortable in any criminal courtroom than on public transportation. The captain in charge of Judge Heller’s court part bellowed out the name of the next defendant to appear: “Francisco Pintaro. People against Francisco Pintaro. Step into the well, please.”
The young prosecutor made her way to the front of the room as her adversary walked with his client to the counsel table.