“I thought you and Vickee were in favor of our-uh, flirtation.”
“I’m in favor of minding my own business. It’s my wife who’s in the advice-to-the-lovelorn business. Don’t put me in the cross fire between you and Mike.”
Mercer had been a rock throughout many of my most difficult moments in the last ten years, and I understood completely that he did not want to be caught in the middle of this complicated relationship that Mike and I were attempting to work out.
We found a salad and sandwich place off Park on 47th Street and stopped to pick up some lunch. We had almost reached the Waldorf when Mercer’s cell phone rang.
“Hey, Rocco. We’re two blocks away.” Mercer listened to the lieutenant for more than a minute, looking at me as he responded. “Alex and I will do that. We’ll be ready to go.”
“News?”
Mercer pocketed his phone. “The ME gave out a photo of our vic two hours ago and it went viral immediately. She’s been identified.”
I pushed my sunglasses on top of my head, squinting at Mercer. “A name? It’s reliable?”
“Her father called it in. Saw the photo in a news bulletin on TV. Doesn’t get more reliable than that.”
“Or more devastating.”
“Corinne Thatcher. Twenty-eight years old.”
I didn’t know which was worse. A corpse that lay in the morgue unidentified for more than a week-like my last case-or the instant a loved one put a name to the body that was still on the steel table in the autopsy room.
“What does Rocco want us to do?” I asked. The girl who had died such an unthinkable death was exactly ten years younger than I.
Mercer put his long arm around my shoulder. “He’s got cops bringing the parents into town from their home on the North Fork. He wants us to talk to them.”
I bit my lip and nodded.
“Rocco wants us to figure out,” Mercer said, “why somebody wanted to torture this girl to death.”
TEN
Mercer and I entered the lobby of the morgue in the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. It was not the ideal setting for an interview of the victim’s family, but I couldn’t imagine asking them to sit in the hotel suite in which their daughter died.
The sign that greeted us was probably the first thing the Thatchers saw when they arrived half an hour earlier, at 4:00 P.M.: LET CONVERSATION CEASE, LET LAUGHTER FLEE. THIS IS THE PLACE WHERE DEATH DELIGHTS IN HELPING THE LIVING.
There was a faint, bitter odor of formaldehyde, which seemed to have seeped into every crevice of the building, an unnecessary reminder of the work that went on here.
The head of the Identification Unit had offered us a private room in which to meet. We were pacing the small space until I heard the wails from a woman approaching in the corridor.
Mercer opened the door and started to introduce himself. Bill Thatcher held out his hand, but his wife was inconsolable. She turned away from us and collapsed in her husband’s arms. I followed Mercer out of the room and closed the door.
Fifteen minutes passed before Mr. Thatcher opened the door to start the introductions again.
“I’m Alexandra Cooper. Please call me Alex. I’m the assistant district attorney who’ll be working on Corinne’s case. Mercer and I have partnered together for more than a decade.”
Bill Thatcher appeared to be as puzzled as he was pained. His eyes were bloodshot. He had no doubt been crying since he saw his daughter’s photograph several hours ago. His wife was unable to compose herself, with good reason. She was trying to stifle her sobs with a wad of Kleenex tissue.
“We’re going to try to answer all the questions you have,” I said, after I expressed my condolences. “And while I know this is an impossible moment to impose on you, there are things we are hoping you can tell us about Corinne. We need to catch the person who killed her.”
I didn’t believe in euphemisms. The harsh reality was that their daughter was dead, and as difficult as it was for them to absorb that, they would have to deal with the fact that she was murdered-not just “hurt” or “harmed”-and do it at warp speed.
“You have a job to do, Ms. Cooper. But I’m not sure we’re ready for that.”
Readiness wasn’t a choice Mercer or I could give them.
“The lieutenant has a detective waiting to take you to your home. But we do need to start with a bit of information about Corinne.”
“No offense, Ms. Cooper-Alex. You don’t look old enough to be responsible for my daughter’s life,” Thatcher said. “And you seem to be very nervous.”
“I am nervous, Mr. Thatcher,” I said. I’d been brushing my hair away from my face and twisting my pen in my hands. “I don’t like this part of my job.”
Telling family members about the brutality of a loved one’s death never got easier, nor did probing their lives to sniff out any undercurrents of darkness.
“I’d like to talk with the district attorney. Get someone more able to do this.”
Most prosecutors’ offices were, as Mike liked to say, a children’s crusade. Idealistic graduates just out of law school vied for the handful of jobs available with the Manhattan DA, the best training ground for litigators in the country. Before moving on to private practice or other careers in public service, they were tested with the most serious crimes in the city. I had prosecuted dozens of felonies to verdict, handling major cases by my third year in the office.
“We’ll get you in to meet Mr. Battaglia whenever you are up to it, sir,” Mercer said. “You have to trust me that Alex has more experience handling these crimes than most lawyers twice her age.”
“What crimes? What crimes do you mean,” Bill Thatcher said, backing up and sitting down, placing his head in his hands. “I don’t understand what happened to Corinne.”
I wanted to tell him that no one understood what happened. It was obvious to me that the family had not yet been informed about the details of the attack.
Mercer took the lead in describing the manner of death, omitting the fact that she was likely drugged and tortured before she was cut. Thelma Thatcher’s body slumped against her husband’s. I would have to make sure her physician was notified before she left the ME’s office. She was not likely to get through the coming weeks without medical care and perhaps sedation.
“Was she-was she violated?” Corinne’s father asked.
“It appears that she was,” Mercer said. “We’ll get more facts from Dr. Mayes when his tests are done.”
“What kind of a man-?” Bill Thatcher couldn’t finish his sentence.
“There’s no good answer for that question, sir.”
“Corinne wouldn’t know anyone like that,” he said. “It must have been a stranger. Some kind of psychopath.”
“That may well be. That’s why we need you to tell us about her.”
The Thatchers were both retired schoolteachers. They were in their late sixties, and Corinne was the youngest of their three children.
Corinne Thatcher had grown up in a small community in Suffolk County. Like her older brother and sister, she attended college at Hofstra University. We let her father talk about her most special traits, the goodness and generosity of spirit that had won her so many friends along the way. She had struggled with career choices, deciding not to follow in her parents’ footsteps, nor to apply to nursing school as she had originally planned. But she had spent most of the last three years working on disaster relief with the American Red Cross before becoming overwhelmed-and perhaps disillusioned-by the emotionally charged work.
“Was Corinne an employee of the Red Cross?” I asked.
“Not anymore. She spent six months as a volunteer, when one of those tornadoes hit Oklahoma a few years back. Most of the workers are volunteers. But after her training and the time she spent on the job, they hired her to lead some of the major projects.”