Now the father was trying to apologize to Kiernan.
Mike was having none of it. "I treat your son with kid gloves, Dylan. Don't put him in cuffs, don't stick him in the holding pen behind bars, feed him, and make him comfortable. I hear one question from the judge about whether the hole in his head is a result of police brutality, you'll all be sorry we've ever met."
"Save it for later, Mr. Dylan," Frankie said. "I'm a witness, Chapman. Let it go."
"If I were you, Mr. D.," Mike said, "I'd be calling that legal hotline so you can give me someone to talk to on your behalf. 1-800-SHYSTER. That's one of your rights, too, pal. Spend as much money as you'd like for the tackiest lawyer you can find. Be sure and tell him you took a whack at your own flesh and blood."
Mercer steered Dylan out the door, while Frankie Shea made an effort at cleaning up his client's head wound and getting him to his feet.
When Mercer came back upstairs, he told me that two of the cops were standing by to drive me home.
"What about you?"
"Mike's got the collar to deal with. And I'll sleep here on one of the cots. I've got to cover that muster on Governors Island in a few hours. It's Sunday, remember?"
"I feel awful that you have to work today. There's nothing I'm up to doing except going to sleep."
"Rest up, Alex. The papers will be full of stories about the murders. This may be the only day off you'll have for a while. The pressure will really be on to solve this."
He walked me downstairs to the front desk, where one of the officers was waiting for me. I got in the backseat of the car and leaned my head against the window, telling the driver where I lived. The night with Luc had been so full of tender exchanges that it was hard to absorb the brutal events of the last few hours.
It was after six thirty in the morning, and although the sky was lightening, there was still a gray mist falling across the city. We followed Broadway downtown under the elevated tracks from 133rd Street and turned east on Ninety-sixth Street, crossing through Central Park.
At the entrance to my apartment, Vinny opened the car door for me and I thanked the cops for the ride.
"Don't you get a night off this weekend?"
"Nah. Covering for Oscar. He's got a cold. How about you, Ms. Cooper? You almost beat the newspaper delivery."
"The papers go upstairs yet?"
"Yeah. Yours is in front of your door. I got a Post, if you want to see it," Vinny said, heading for his marble-topped stand in the middle of the lobby. "Here I thought you were out having a good time the other night, and instead you're chasing a serial killer."
He handed the paper to me-a thick Sunday edition, full of extra ads and inserts. The large graphic was a map, with red arrows pointing to the locations at which each of the three bodies had been found.
I didn't know whether Commissioner Scully had come up with a compelling name for his task force, but the tabloids were starting a frenzy about the mysterious military connection of this sexual sadist: SEARCH FOR SERIAL KILLER: SON OF UNCLE SAM?
THIRTY-ONE
Ifell asleep the minute I got into bed. I didn't awaken until three thirty in the afternoon, when Luc called from his home in Mougins, anxious to know why he hadn't been able to reach me the night before.
Now I regretted telling him so little about the case when we were together on Friday evening. I'd never imagined the developments would be so dramatic in the short time since we said good-bye in front of the Plaza Athénée. He renewed his offer for me to come to visit him at the end of the investigation, and I accepted, feeling an easing of the tension that had gripped me all weekend.
I showered and dressed and spent the last hours of the afternoon doing ordinary chores, routine things that would ground me after the intensity of the previous day. I rinsed out some lingerie in the bathroom sink, paid a stack of bills that had mounted on my desk, toasted an English muffin to snack on, and called my parents to let them know I was fine.
At six o'clock, Mercer called. He had finished the day at Governors Island, watching the reenactment rehearsal of the Civil War muster.
"All quiet on the military buff front."
"Many people show up?"
"More than seven hundred."
"I had no idea they'd draw that size. Any way to keep track of them?"
"This time, everyone had to sign in and show ID getting on the ferries to come over. There was a bit of a stampede getting folks off between four and five, but it looks like all the sightseers signed out."
"You hear anything from Mike?"
"I'm stopping by the squad now, on my way home. Peterson's setting up a daily briefing meeting, starting tonight at seven. I can stop for you on my way uptown."
"I'd like to be there." The door might not be open to me long. I worked well with the lieutenant and his team, but once the other borough commanders and trooper supervisors stepped into bigger roles during the coming weeks, I was likely to be shut out of daily police meetings. It was commonplace for many prosecutors in other offices to be a step behind the investigators, but Battaglia counted on our senior staff to partner with the NYPD as closely as possible.
On the ride uptown, Mercer told me about his day. He described the dozens of men, young and old, who dressed in antique military garb, armed with weapons from the Civil War period, and staged mock battles all over the historic grounds of the island.
"Any structure to it?" I asked.
"It's run by an arts foundation, so they know who the players are and what they're up to. But it's very chaotic, and no one has a clue about the spectators. They're just people who see ads in the paper or read about it online."
"And the costumes?"
"Everybody brings their own. Not my idea of a hobby, but it clearly drives a lot of these buffs. They were skirmishing everywhere, with bugle brigades and drum corps."
"No women?"
"Plenty of them. I'm not sure if General Hooker's followers were onboard, but there were some ladies in uniform and others doing quilting bees, handing out rations," Mercer said, shaking his head at the odd experience. "Just glad that nobody went AWOL."
The homicide squad room was a much busier place than when I had left it twelve hours earlier. There had been two murders in northern Manhattan during the night. A man who had slit his wife's throat with a machete because, he told the cops, she had burned his chicken wings was sleeping like a baby on the narrow wooden bench in the cell. Another guy, who had shot a rival drug dealer, was handcuffed to the handle of a desk drawer over against the window, fidgeting jumpily as though his last hit of crack cocaine was still coursing through his body.
Peterson waved us into his office when he saw Mercer and me. Mike was there, along with two of the best detectives from the Special Victims Unit, Ned Tacchi and Alan Vandomir, who had been added to the task force because of their expertise on serial rapists.
We greeted one another and took seats in the cramped room.
Mercer handed a sheaf of papers to Peterson. "Maybe you can have some copies made. You got a junior man on this, let him go through and do record checks on some of the names. It's the list of people who came over on the water taxis and ferries this morning."
Peterson laid the pile to the side of his desk and checked his watch. "I'll get somebody on it tomorrow, so long as nothing of interest happened today. Could you tell if the feds were paying any attention to a search of Governors Island? They say anything?"
"The feds were on to it big time. Must have had fifty guys-excuse me, Alex-men and women. They started as a grid up at the highest point, Fort Jay, at daybreak. Then they spread out and claimed to be searching every building. Had all they could do to keep the civil warriors from storming each of the structures they opened up. There was still a crew of them there when I left."
"Talk about the blind leading the blind-and the inept. If the feds found anything useful, they'd have to wait till a memo went up to the attorney general and back before they could get clearance to show it to us. They should have let us stay," Mike said. "And, Loo, Dickie Draper should be here any minute."