“Battaglia threw me out of the trial I was handling,” I said, confused by the tender tone of Mike’s voice. The sentiment was familiar, but he was softer and calm, not baiting me as he always did in front of the cops. “I told you that.”
“Then sit behind your desk and write a brief, for Chrissakes. Analyze the latest Court of Appeals decisions. Break some defense attorney’s chops.”
“What is it you don’t want me to see today?”
“It’s gonna get to you, kid. It gets to every one of us sooner or later. The street has a way of settling in your gut like a malignancy, small at first, then spreading till it infiltrates every pore in your body. It’s not just about today. Not just this case.”
He let go and I thought for a second that he was going to touch my face, cup my chin between his fingers. “I understand that, Mike. I’ve seen my friends, our friends—”
“But you think you’re different, is that it?”
“Not for a minute. There’s nobody here but us, you know? You don’t have to make me the butt of your jokes. Take out your frustration on something else.”
“Trust me, Coop. I’m not frustrated. You’d be the last to know about that.” He turned away from me and opened the faucet, splashing some cold water on his face. The moment had passed and now the edge was back in his voice. “You’ve got some kryptonite coating that protects all this shit from creeping into your soul and your brain and that underutilized thing you call your heart? You think you’re immune from it?”
“Not in the least. You asked for my help last night. I started out with you because you thought I had something to give you.”
“My mistake,” he said, wiping his face with a piece of paper towel. “I didn’t guess I’d be dragging you into what came next.”
I wanted to reach up and straighten the lock of hair that had lodged itself below his shirt collar at the nape of his neck, but when he stood, it fell into place. The line between my annoyance at his sniping and the affection that had grown for years was pencil-thin. “I might surprise you, Mike. Maybe I can help with the bigger picture.”
“Then saddle up, Coop. Let’s see if you can cross-examine a severed head.”
FOURTEEN
MIKE’S estimate of how long it would take us to get uptown was off by half an hour. The circuitous route from the narrow one-way streets of lower Manhattan, up the FDR Drive, and across the width of the island to West 112th Street and Amsterdam Avenue seemed to take an eternity in traffic that was snarled and tangled despite the lone siren of our unimpressive Crown Vic.
The area around the Church of St. John the Divine — the largest cathedral in the world, set on thirteen acres of land — was already cordoned off with police tape and a phalanx of uniformed cops who had established a perimeter. This time, reporters and photographers had beaten us to the scene and were angling for a gruesome money shot, the sort they had missed at Mount Neboh less than sixteen hours earlier.
Mike double-parked the car on Amsterdam, and in an uncharacteristic display of patience, waited for me to catch up with him before approaching the barricade of wooden horses and yellow police tape. It wasn’t chivalry — he usually threw himself headlong into the mix with no concern for my whereabouts — but rather the fact that I’d explained my connection to the cathedral as we crawled through the late-afternoon traffic.
“Which way?”
I pointed to the right, and he shoved the stanchion aside to make room for both of us to pass through. “The sculpture garden,” I said. “The Fountain of Peace.”
My mother, Maude, raised on a dairy farm in Massachusetts by her Scandinavian parents, was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, and had been bused with her teenage classmates to this grand hybrid of Romanesque and French Gothic design for that ceremony. She had never forgotten the elegance of its architecture, so we came often in my youth to admire the 601-foot nave, the Great Rose Window made of ten thousand pieces of colored glass, and the stunning procession of thirty-two limestone matriarchs and patriarchs — Abraham and Sarah, Isaiah and Jeremiah, Ishmael and Hagar — who now appeared to be frowning down at Mike and me as we jogged beneath the Portal of Paradise to circle the massive building.
The cloistered park, usually swarming with children and their mothers and nannies, was a sea of NYPD blue. It looked as though all the civilians had been chased from the area.
A sharp voice yelled “Chapman,” and off to the side I could see Ray Peterson, standing on a bench to oversee the operation and waving us to approach.
“Sorry it took so long, Loo,” Mike said. “What’d I miss?”
Mike extended a hand and Peterson stepped down, crushing the end of the burning butt that he tossed from his mouth as he did. Then he picked it up and pocketed it so his team didn’t mistake it for something the killer left behind. “There’s gonna be a couple of toddlers with nightmares for months to come.”
“Who found the head? You’re saying kids?”
The lieutenant extracted another cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “Put something in a bright yellow backpack with cartoon characters and smiley faces all over it and what child wouldn’t glom onto it?”
“Who’s got it now?”
“ESU. Katie Cion wedged through the fencing to retrieve the bag. She’s hangin’ here for dear life to see you, Chapman. Won’t give it up to Crime Scene or the medical examiner. You got some motley harem is all I can say.” Peterson inhaled and started marching us toward the center of the circle of cops. He was pushing sixty-two, grizzled and slightly stooped, with the smell of tobacco well saturated into every piece of clothing he owned, especially the polyester suits that were standard for cops of his generation. “Like to know your secret.”
“If I told you I’d have to kill you, Loo. Katie Cion’s a sucker for my sensitivity. That a fact, Coop?”
The Emergency Services Unit was as exclusive a group of cops as you could find anywhere in the world. They pulled despondent jumpers off the cables of the city’s tallest bridges, rescued infants from abandoned elevator shafts, dragged crazies from precarious window ledges, managed the most dangerous hostage situations, and in Katie’s case, once safely maneuvered a corpse from the bottom of an antique city well while dangling upside down, supported by the partners she trusted daily with her life. She was courageous, cool, and clever, all packed in a pint-size police uniform.
“Sounds right to me. She’s only human.” I let Peterson lead because he was known to everyone at the scene. The men and women who were working the small park in a grid formation, scouring the ground and bushes and paved pathways for any traces of evidence, briskly stepped aside for the lieutenant. He was universally respected for his decades of experience and vast knowledge of the workings of the most complex homicide investigations in the city.
“Mike says you know this place fairly well.”
“Social visits and a few funerals.” The cornerstone was laid in 1892, but even to this day the construction of the great building was barely two-thirds completed. Its design was the customary cathedral shape of a cross, crowned at the crossing by a towering spire, with a main altar surrounded by seven Chapels of the Tongues to represent the growing immigrant masses in nineteenth-century New York. Despite early financing by wealthy trustees like J. P. Morgan, the ambitious project ran out of funding somewhere along the way. “Saint John the Unfinished is what my mother calls it.”
“I’d laugh, Alex, but the scaffolding around the base of the church serves too well to conceal anybody who wants to lurk around here at night. It’s dark and massive, and it’s sheltering in ways that I don’t think the Good Lord had in mind.”