“So why the meltdown?”
“Jeannie didn’t know who would be more unhappy-Battaglia or Kitts. I couldn’t offer any advice about Rowdy, but I calmed her down about the front office. No need to shove it under Battaglia’s nose unless the feds made something stick against Kitts.”
“You didn’t rat her out to the DA? That’s my girl, Coop. She must have been grateful.”
I stopped to tighten my scarf around my neck and brushed a branch of seaweed out of Mike’s hair. “If she was, she forgot to tell me,” I said, smiling. “Jeannie quit the next week.”
“Over that?”
“I don’t know the reason. She seemed spooked about Rowdy. Worried that he’d do something to get back at her.”
“Why?” Mike asked. “Did he get rough?”
“Jeannie never said anything like that. I think she was concerned that if he was dirty-if the feds made any charges stick-she’d be toast in our office anyway.” I wiped the grit off my mouth with the back of my glove. “Ten days later, I called to buy her lunch to check on her, but she was gone. Gave notice and told her friends she got a great job offer in the fashion biz.”
“Sounds like a good career move. Can’t expect everyone to be a lifer like you.”
“Lifer? I’m thirty-seven years old. I’ve got endless possibilities for my next-”
“Face it,” Mike said, gesturing at the forlorn castaways. “You’re beginning to think the world’s flotsam and jetsam have been heaven-sent to the Criminal Court Building so you have a purpose on this earth. You gotta move on, Coop. Trying to restore all these broken souls is going to tear the guts out of you before too long.”
“Hey, Chapman.” Mercer’s voice boomed across the open space from the flapped tent door of the morgue. “The medical examiner wants you over here.”
“They’re human beings, Mike,” I called after him as he walked away through the narrow path that led to the parking lot. “It’s a sad fact that you have more interest in dead ones than the living.”
“I got no problem with the dead.” He faced me so that I could hear him speak but continued walking backward toward Mercer. “They can’t talk back, they don’t bullshit me all day like half your witnesses do, they rarely disappoint me, and they never, ever, ever tell lies.”
“Are you looking for victims or a date, Mr. Chapman? You want something with a pulse or no pulse?”
“Chill out, Coop,” Mike said, laughing at me as he started to turn. “When I need your help finding a live one, I’ll let you know.”
Cyril began to speak to Emilia. He was excited about something, quite suddenly, and pulled her to her feet. He seemed to have recognized someone in a small boat that was bobbing close to shore, amid the whitecaps.
There was no point trying to stop the couple as he grabbed her hand and ran to the water’s edge, part of the crowd that was growing more difficult for the cops to control.
I watched Stu Carella plunge back into the surf, followed by a scuba team. This time they seemed to be after items they could see floating on the surface, being drawn away from land. I knew there would not be a great concern for personal effects of the travelers at this point, but investigators wanted evidence that linked this human cargo to conspirators in New York, perhaps things jettisoned by a nervous crew.
A uniformed sergeant began barking orders at the victims, and I skirted the restless groups of men to join the officers in the makeshift morgue past the path that bordered the bird sanctuary.
I saw Donovan Baynes exit the tent and headed over to talk to him.
“Can we strike a deal, Donny?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Alex. It’s not the time.” He was dialing a number on his cell phone as he tried to blow me off.
“The women. That’s all I want you to give me. No detention centers, no custodial settings after all they’ve been through. Let me work with Safe Horizon,” I said, talking about the city’s leading victim advocacy organization. “They’ve got shelters we can put these young girls in to protect them. If we make them feel safe, they’ll cooperate with us. If we don’t, we’ll never gain their trust. I realize to you feds they’re not legal, but I just can’t see treating them like prisoners.”
Baynes spoke into the phone, asking to be patched through to Commissioner Scully. He answered me while he waited.
“We’ve got a new set of circumstances, Alex. You don’t even know what you’re dealing with. Want to give me a minute?”
I ducked my head and stepped into the morgue. There were ten gurneys lined up in a row, with just inches between them. Seven had bodies on them, and six of those were covered with sheets.
Willis Pomeroy, the deputy chief medical examiner, was standing at the head of the fifth body, explaining something to Mercer, Rowdy, and Mike, who were closer to me, at the feet of the deceased.
The sheet was only partially draping the young woman, whose lifeless eyes were fixed on a point above her head. Her auburn hair was snarled and tangled, and the skin of her malnourished body was almost gray in hue. Everything about her looked so youthful, even the nails that had been bitten to the quick. All except the rough surfaces of her hands.
“In water this cold,” Pomeroy said, “that wrinkled appearance-that washerwoman look on her fingers-sets in pretty quickly.”
“Does it matter whether she was dead or alive when she went in the water?” Mike asked.
Pomeroy shook his head. “No difference. Her palms, the soles of her feet. They get that way no matter whether she went overboard breathing or not.”
Was this the changed circumstance Donovan Baynes had mentioned? “What am I missing, Doc? Didn’t these people all drown?”
“It looked like that at first, Alex. Only the full autopsy will tell,” Pomeroy said, pulling the sheet back a few inches to show me a wound on the left side of her chest. “But this girl was probably dead when she hit the waves. See that bruise?”
Mercer stepped aside and let me edge in near the gurney.
“I see lots of marks.”
“All the bodies got tossed around on the ocean floor, Coop,” Mike said. “Scrapes from rocks and shells. Bloodless, postmortem wounds.”
Pomeroy’s gloved hand pointed to the middle of the girl’s rib cage.
“That’s bloodless too,” I said.
“Yes, but that’s because immersion in the water probably leached out the blood. The ocean does that to antemortem wounds. I’m pretty sure that’s a hole in her chest. It wouldn’t surprise me if this girl was stabbed to death-maybe even shot-before someone threw her in the drink.”
“C’mon outside, Alex,” Rowdy Kitts said to me. “You look like you need some air.”
I focused on the young woman’s face but I was reeling as I tried to think of the implications of this medical finding.