NINETEEN
Shortly after dawn crept over the horizon, Mike somehow steered me over the brick wall and onto the narrow rungs of the ladder, cautioning me not to look down as I stepped one foot below the other. He dropped me off at home at 5:45. The doormen were used to the odd hours of my comings and goings, but I looked terribly bedraggled in my well-worn evening outfit of twelve hours earlier.
I showered and ate breakfast, passing up the temptation to nap in order to get to the office early. It was 7:30 when I got off the elevator and went to unlock my door. I was startled to hear Mercer’s voice call out to me from the far end of the hallway.
“C’mon down to the conference room after you open up,” he said.
“Anything wrong?”
“I got a girl here. I’m hoping she can make an ID.”
I threw down my handbag and tote and hurried down to the conference room, which had become the default headquarters of the Park investigation.
Mercer intercepted me outside the closed door. “You all right, Alex? You look like you haven’t had any sleep.”
“I haven’t. I spent the night with Mike. The whole night.”
“You what now, girl?”
“I don’t mean that way, Mercer. And I am getting such mixed signals about what everyone-including you and Vickee-think I ought to do with my love life. Forget it. We went to the Conservancy dinner, and we found out about the silver miniatures and about their connection to a kidnapped baby who’s never been recovered-dead or alive. I was busy, and it looks like you were, too.”
“Sure enough, St. Michael’s Church is a mainstay for the homeless. It’s on the list that the team is working off-shelters and such-distributing pictures and stopping in for questioning. They just hadn’t reached here yet.”
“So who’ve you got?”
“Calls herself Jo ’cause it could be a guy or girl’s name-she tells me-and she’s gay. Claims she’s nineteen, but I’d guess younger. She’s afraid we’re going to turn on her and send her back home. Jo’s a runaway from somewhere down south. The accent sort of gives up that much.”
“Does she know Angel?” I asked.
“I’m not sure whether or not she’s bluffing. Came into the church soup kitchen for her meal last night, and one of the deacons asked her-like everyone else coming through-to talk to me. She looked at the photos and the sketch and thinks she’s spent time on the streets with Angel. The church took her in for the night, and I had Uniform do a fixer out in front in case she tried to leave. But there she was waiting for me this morning, maybe looking for some meal money and a witness fee. She’s a gamer, Alex. I don’t want her to work us over.”
“Understood,” I said. “Take me in.”
Jo was sitting at an empty space at the conference table. She was eating a bacon-and-egg sandwich that Mercer had bought her, washing it down with a bottle of juice, a large cup of coffee, and soda cans for later on.
I introduced myself and although she glanced up at me, Jo kept on eating. She had an androgynous look, small and very thin, with short-cropped hair clipped in a boyish style and bright dark eyes that darted back and forth between Mercer and me as we talked.
Jo had run away from a family that didn’t accept her sexual identity, and a town in Alabama in which hostility against LGBT youth was a point of pride for many citizens. She had taken money out of her mother’s wallet for the bus fare to New York and left home while both her parents were at work one March morning. She had chosen Manhattan, as thousands of runaways do every year, because of its reputation for open-minded acceptance and a large network of gay youth. There was also a plethora of information available online about underground life and survival techniques for people who come to the big city with no place to stay.
I pushed one of the morgue photos-a picture of Angel after she’d been autopsied and cleaned up-across the table to Jo. “Did you know this girl?”
“Yes, ma’am. At least I think I did.”
I went right to the facts we needed. “Do you know her name?”
I shouldn’t have been disappointed when Jo said she did not. “It was just a hi-and-bye kind of thing. We weren’t friends or anything like that.”
“Do you remember where you saw her the first time?” I asked.
“Uh-huh. I do, because it was the night I got to New York. I had no place to sleep, so a girl I met at the Port Authority told me about Uncle Ace’s house. She taught me how to jump the turnstile and all that.”
Estimates were that about four thousand young people between the ages of thirteen and twenty-five are homeless on the streets of New York every night. The city has, at best, two hundred fifty shelter beds to offer them. “Uncle Ace” is the name for the A, C, and E subway lines-the longest ride in the city-stretching from the northern tip of Inwood to the farthest end of Far Rockaway. It frequently served as a refuge for kids who wanted to get off the mean streets of the city.
Mercer told Jo we’d been calling the dead girl Angel. He asked how they had met on the train that night.
“You know the way it is.”
“Not exactly,” I said.
“I was the new girl. There were four others who were riding with my friend, and one of them was Angel, or whatever you want to call her. When you’ve got no roof over your head, you’ve got to sleep for as long as you can whenever you can. And somebody in the group has to stay awake, making sure no cops come along to bother us. Or no perverts either.”
“So you spent the night together?”
Jo scowled at me. “Not how you think. She wasn’t a lesbian. Your girl was straight.”
Most of the counselors we worked with told us that 40 percent of the country’s homeless youth are LGBT, unable or unwilling to stay at home or in foster care, free to take risks and experiment by moving out into the world, even without a roof over their heads.
“Did you have a chance to talk to Angel?” I asked.
“Lots of chances. She was nice to me. She was a good person. Taught me lots of ways to take care of myself.”
But in the end Angel was unable to keep herself safe.
“Did she ever tell you where she was from?” Mercer asked. “Why she left home?”
“I didn’t care where she was from. Most of us don’t like to talk about that because we don’t ever want to go there again, and you never know when someone is going to snitch on you.”
Jo sat back and gulped some of her coffee. “She didn’t have much of a home. Her mother died when she was ten, and that’s when her father started abusing her. Sexually abusing her.”
Sexual and physical abuse were the next most common reasons for teens to leave their families. Mercer and I saw these kids more regularly than we would have liked.
“You must have spent a lot of time together for Angel to tell you something like that,” I said.
“Not really. No reason not to be open about that stuff. We all need each other to survive is how I look at it. It was two nights on the train, that group of us.”
“Where did you go during the day?”
Jo put down her container of coffee and stared straight ahead. “Not saying.”
“It’s nothing Mercer and I haven’t heard before. I can promise you we’re not looking to get you in trouble.”
There were few decent ways for the homeless population to provide for themselves. The older guys had the can-recycling business pretty well locked up, scouring garbage pails on the street for empties to return to stores. Begging worked for men with no legs and women who panhandled with babies in their arms. Healthy teens were more likely to shoplift than to recycle or to beg.
“I tried to get work,” Jo said. “I left home with a résumé that I kept in a folder with my backpack. I would have waitressed or worked in a grocery store or a Walmart. But it’s hard to find a job when the economy sucks.”