“And if anything breaks on your murder case?”
“The detectives know how to find me. Sorry to be so disrespectful.”
We were setting up our work space at my dining room table by 11:15, air-conditioning at full blast and summer sunlight flooding the cheerful apartment.
There was a knock at my front door half an hour later. The doormen never let anyone except Mike or Mercer up to my floor without calling first. “Did you-?”
“Yeah. I buzzed Mike when I was looking for a parking space. Told him to spend some time here before he heads to the Park. And hush, I didn’t say a word about Pell, okay?”
I walked to the front door and opened it. “C’mon in, Mike.”
“How’s her mood, Mercer?” he said, practically tiptoeing past me, not even venturing a greeting.
“Better since I apologized for both of us last night.”
“I get it. It was the right thing to do, and the cops were perfectly nice,” I said.
“How nice?” Mike asked. “You get lucky?”
“Very. I actually got to sleep for a change,” I said. “You’ve heard about Tanner in Prospect Park?”
“Yeah. SVU and Homicide are jumping all over the place.” Mike was carrying a cardboard banker’s box, which he rested on the mahogany table.
“What’s that?”
“The Cold Case Unit pulled the Baby Lucy kidnapping papers for me. What’s left of them.”
The paperwork from cases that lingered for years-or decades-was often picked apart, unintentionally destroying the integrity of the investigation, while on the dusty shelves where it was stored. Cops would go back to them to review witness statements, or characters would reappear in a later investigation so their earlier questioning became relevant. Police reports sometimes vanished, and cases like the disappearance of Lucy Dalton would have generated mounds of documents and media reports, many of which wouldn’t survive long stretches of inattention.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“Six more like it. I just picked the first one up at 7:30 this morning. Sat in the squad room reading till you called, Mercer. I think I’m still on day two of the investigation. What a manhunt this was,” Mike said. “Why are you guys here and not downtown?”
“I’m exhausted, and it was kind of quiet at the office. Everybody ready to take off for the weekend. I just figured we’d be more comfortable at my house, and I’d be all set up to keep working over the weekend.”
Mercer gave me a thumbs-up.
“Is this what you’re doing today?” I asked Mike. “Reading ancient history?”
“That was the original plan. Peterson wanted to keep me on a leash, in the office. They were expecting fireworks from Judge Pell right around now.”
I busied myself labeling folders with colored tabs.
“Don’t go to the bank on this,” Mike said, “but Manny Chirico called right after Mercer did. He thinks she’s going to back off. He must have worked his charm on her is all I can say.”
“Must have. He’s got loads more of it than you do, and he’s too smart to misuse it,” I said. “So now what?”
“Fair game, kid. So I called Mia Schneider. Someone at the Conservancy is pulling out the original renderings of the Park from the 1850s so we can see if there are really any caves in it. That could set me up for tomorrow.”
“I’m with you,” Mercer said.
“Don’t you guys want a day off?”
“Maybe Sunday. I hate that the Park presence will already be so reduced by the end of the day,” Mercer said.
“And my next stop is the Dakota,” Mike said. “See what I can wheedle out of Ms. Sorenson.”
There was a manila folder on the top of the box, crisp and clean and new. Mike slid some photographs out of it and put them on the table. “Courtesy of Hal Sherman and his Panoscan man.”
This was my second photo exhibit of the day. I was hoping that it would be half as productive as the first.
The digital camera had captured its characteristic fish-eye images, a full 360-degree photo record shot from Bow Bridge just hours after Angel’s body had been pulled out of the Lake.
I started with the shots in order, scouring the ground around the Lake, spreading farther into the trees and bushes till it was too dense to see, hoping to find some jarring scene, something totally out of place, a clue that hadn’t been visible to the Crime Scene crew as they worked within short range of the victim’s corpse.
“Stumped?” Mike asked.
“I give up. Where’s Waldo?”
Mike reached among the photos for the blow-up of the Dakota apartments. “Count up from the ground floor, Coop. Lavinia Dalton’s got the entire eighth floor.”
“Of course. You told me you saw a shadowy figure on nine, in one of the eyelid windows.”
I went to my coffee table to take hold of a decorative antique magnifying glass and looked again.
I slid the horn-handled magnifier up to the tiny rectangular windows, which sat a flight above the grand long ones of the eighth floor but below the eaves of the roof.
“The servants’ quarters,” Mercer said, standing over my shoulder.
Directly above the living room windows of Lavinia Dalton was one of the openings. With my naked eye, I could see the outline of a tall object, maybe even a figure, framed in the narrow pane of glass.
I pushed the magnifier up and tried to focus the image more clearly.
“It’s a person,” I said, recalling the crush of cops and passersby who had huddled around Bethesda Terrace while the Crime Scene Unit was taking the pictures. “It’s a man, I think, his palms pressed against the window, looking down at the homicide detectives doing their work.”
Mike grabbed the photograph from my hand. “And I’m going to find out who he is.”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Are you expected, sir?” the young housekeeper asked when she opened the door to Mike, Mercer, and me.
“No, ma’am. I’d like to see Ms. Sorenson,” Mike said.
“She’s not in at the moment.”
“We’ll wait,” he said, trying to charge past the petite woman.
“I’m afraid I can’t admit you until she returns.”
“How is Miss Dalton doing today?” I asked.
“Very well, thank you.”
“Perhaps I could just talk with her for a few minutes? The gentlemen can wait in the living room.”
The housekeeper didn’t know how to respond.
“She invited us to stop back,” I said. “She really did.”
“But you’re police, aren’t you? You’re not going to agitate her with talk about Lucy?”
“I won’t do that. I promise.”
Reluctantly, she pulled back the heavy door and let us in. I motioned to Mike and Mercer to stay put and let the housekeeper lead me through to the dayroom. This time, Lavinia Dalton was sitting in a wing chair, wearing a long-sleeved dress with a chenille sweater around her shoulders. Her cheeks were rouged, her hair had been curled, and the sapphire suite of jewels had been replaced by pink stones on her fingers and earlobes. She looked as though she might have been expecting the Duchess of Cambridge.
Again there were two nurses attending the elderly woman, one of whom had been working on our earlier visit. I introduced myself, and they offered me the chair opposite Lavinia’s sunny window seat.
“Hello, Miss Dalton. I’m Alexandra Cooper.” Although her eyes looked bright, it was obvious she had no recollection of seeing me just a day before.
“Pleasure, my dear. Is Archer keeping you waiting?”
“No, ma’am,” I said, returning her warm smile with one of my own. “I just came to talk with you.”
“How lovely.”
One of the nurses spoke over my head. “Miss Lavinia’s very happy today. After lunch, we’re going to take a walk in the Park,” she said, pointing to the wheelchair. “It’s her very favorite thing to do.”
“It’s one of my favorite things, too.”