And harder when you don’t have a place to shower or clean clothes to wear to work.
“What else did Angel help you with?” I asked, hoping for more connections to get us into her world.
Jo took a minute to answer, perhaps wondering whether to give up the information. “She’s the one who took me to the museum.”
“What museum?”
“Natural History. The one with the dinosaurs and all the dead animals behind glass.”
Another link to Central Park. The great American Museum of Natural History was merely five blocks north of the Dakota, facing the Park.
“What did you see at the museum?”
Jo looked at me as though I was clueless. “We didn’t go there to see anything. We went there to sleep.”
“To sleep? But where?”
I thought of the huge hallways in the museum, filled during weekdays with schoolkids on field trips and on weekends with families and tourists enjoying the treasures housed there.
“After two nights on the train, I spent a week on the streets. I couldn’t hardly sleep ’cause it’s pretty dangerous to do that. Angel? I ran into her again in Port Authority, and she took me to the museum. The bathrooms there are gigantic, but the stalls are really narrow. So once you lock the door of the stall, you can lean your head against the side of it and sleep till the end of the day when the janitor comes in to mop. Everybody on the street knows about the history museum.”
Desperation, like necessity, was the mother of invention.
“Didn’t you ever try to get into a shelter?” I asked.
“Not at first. I knew there weren’t a lot of beds available, and I was mostly afraid they’d try to send me back home, all those social workers and stuff.”
“Covenant House? Did you ever go there?”
“No, ma’am,” Jo said. “Y’all got any cigarettes?”
“We’ll get you some as soon as we’re done,” I said. “Why not?”
Again the look that caught her frustration with me. Covenant House had been in business rescuing teens for forty years and had 70 percent of the beds for them in the city.
“It’s run by the church, Ms. Cooper. The Catholic Church. I’m not real comfortable with that, any more than they are with me.”
“Did Angel ever talk about Covenant House?”
Jo thought about it and answered in the negative. I knew the detectives had started their search to identify Angel at the revered institution that had long ago weathered its own sex abuse scandal, but was hoping that Jo could make a link to a different point in time, several months back, when she first met the dead girl.
“Did she ever mention any other shelter?” Mercer asked.
“She took me to a church once. I think it was way downtown. But there were no beds. And it might have been Angel who told me about Streetwork.”
“You know Streetwork?” I said. “Was she ever there?”
It was a brilliant program run by Safe Horizon, the country’s largest and best victim advocacy organization. The nonprofit had done groundbreaking work with survivors of domestic violence and established cutting-edge centers for child advocacy. The DA’s office worked closely with the well-trained staff, and Streetwork was their latest initiative to reach out to the city’s disenfranchised and homeless youth-making contact with twenty thousand of them a year.
“I don’t know the answer to that, ma’am,” Jo said. “I wasn’t ever there when she was.”
“Did you use any of their facilities?”
“Yes, I did. I went for meals sometimes, and to take a shower. And once when I got all depressed and tried to cut myself, it was that girl-that Angel-who told me to go to Streetwork for, like, psych services.”
I could see Mercer scribbling a note to double-check with the team to see whether they had checked out both of the shelter locations Safe Horizon operated, as well as the drop-in centers for counseling.
“Did you ever have a phone or a laptop since you left home?” I asked. “Do you have either one of those now?”
“I sure don’t, ma’am.” Jo smiled for the first time. “Besides, I wouldn’t have anyplace to plug them in, would I?”
Walk into any of the Apple stores in New York and look for the section of the store with the older devices, not the trendiest new stuff. Any hour of the day or night there was bound to be a gaggle of homeless kids-obvious by the condition of their clothing and the beat-up backpacks-just hanging out to charge their cell phones and get back on the street.
“So how many times would you say you saw Angel between March and now?” I asked. “How did you keep in touch with her?”
Jo reached for a package of strawberry Twizzlers from the bag of snacks that Mercer had bought for her and ripped it open. I didn’t think of them as breakfast food, but she was still hungry. “I didn’t say I kept in touch with her. If I ran into her-which I did maybe ten times in all-she’d be kind to me, like I said.”
“Apart from the train, Jo, where did you see her?”
“The Park. Me and my girlfriend spent a couple of nights with her in Central Park.”
I tried not to show my excitement.
“Do you know that Angel-that this girl in the photograph-was killed there?”
“No, ma’am. There’s a story going ’round that someone drowned in the Park, in one of the lakes, but I didn’t know it was her.”
“We don’t have a real name for her, as you know, and we don’t know how to find her family.”
“That would be a waste of time anyway,” Jo said. “Her dad is all there was, and frankly I don’t think he’d care.”
“There must have been someone in her life-a teacher, a friend back home, the people she hung out with here.”
“She didn’t really hang out that much. She didn’t really trust most people she met.”
“Sounds like she trusted you,” Mercer said.
“My girlfriend says Angel-whatever you’re calling her-got along best with people who were wounded, just like she was.”
“Wounded?” I asked.
“Not like bloody and all,” Jo said. “Folks who’d been hurt hard along the way, sort of like I had. People who had handicaps-physical ones and mental, too. She had a kindness for them, likely grew out of her own pain.”
“Is she the one who took you to the Park?”
“No, ma’am. Nobody needs to take a homeless person to Central Park. Everybody knows how to work it there.”
“Work it?”
“If you’ve got nowhere else to sleep, you go to a park. Small ones, big ones. There’s parks everywhere, in any city. Me? I like Central Park best. So many places to be where nobody bothers you.”
“Don’t the police-?” I started to ask.
Jo blew me off. “Old guys, they sleep on benches out in the open, but most of the kids I hang with go deep in the woods. Hard to find us, and cops never give us a hard time.”
“Isn’t it dangerous?”
“So was being at home for me, and for-well, Angel. This is much easier,” Jo said, reaching out to pat the filthy blue bag beside her. “Me and my girl, we have a favorite tree we like to sleep under. And I got everything I need in my backpack. Did you find her-Angel’s-pack?”
“No,” I said. “Something special in it you can tell us about?”
“No, ma’am. Just we all keep everything we own in these. At night, it’s my pillow. Nobody could get to it without waking me up.”
“Can you describe her backpack?”
“Nope. I had no reason to notice. She just had one, like we all do.”
“What else did she have?” Mercer asked. “Do you remember anything else, anything about her clothing?”
Jo thought for several seconds. “A dark hoodie, last time I saw her. Cargo pants. Maybe a month ago or so is when I remember being with her, she had two shirts. Real pretty ones with ruffles and such.”
“Where did she get them?” I asked. “Did she have any money? Did she have a job?”