How many of the women hoping to hook up with guys tonight knew that a dangerous rapist had this very neighborhood in his scope? I thought, as the cab cruised under the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge overpass. How many of them would walk out alone after four or five drinks-intoxicated and oblivious to their vulnerability- and make their way down the side streets in the early hours of the morning?
I unlocked my door at eight-thirty and dropped my files and pocketbook in the entryway. Next to my bed, the answering machine flashed that there were three messages, and I played them back as I undressed.
"Alex? You there? It's Lesley. How about a movie and late supper? Give a shout." Girlfriends were stepping in to try to fill the void left by my breakup with Jake.
That one was followed by a call from Nina Baum, my college roommate and best friend, who lives in Los Angeles. "No feeling sorry for yourself this weekend. If you get lonely, I'm around all weekend. You did the right thing." Nina had been the most out-spoken about how wrong Jake was for me and tried to keep my spirits up after the split.
"It's Mercer, Alexandra. We're on for tomorrow night. Greg Karras is coming in from the coast. Let me know if you're riding with us." The geographic profiler was ready to start the hunt for John Doe, and I was game to go.
I returned all three calls-gave Mercer a yes, chatted with Nina about my week, and left Lesley a message telling her I had gotten home too late to accept her offer. I soaked in the bathtub with a stack of magazines beside me, wrapped myself in a warm robe, and settled into the den with a Dewar's, an English muffin, and a Faulkner novel that Jake had left behind.
When I awakened at 7A.M. I was relieved that I had slept through the night without a call from anyone at Special Victims. My Silk Stocking nemesis had taken another night off.
I opened the door to pick up the newspapers. The Times had the latest on Middle East peace talks and presidential gaffes. The tabloids were beneath it and I bent to retrieve them. There on the front page of the Post was a photograph of the doomed building on Third Street with a cartoonlike skeleton dangling below a three-inch banner headline:POE'S CRYPT?
10
"Did you see the damn article on the cover of that rag this morning?" Paul Battaglia shouted into the phone about five minutes later.
"Yes, boss. I haven't had a chance to read it yet-"
He was quoting from its opening. "'Police sources are puzzling out whether the skeleton found in the basement of an NYU building is just a sad postscript to another age, or actually Edgar Allan Poe's crypt.' What the hell is this, Alex?"
"You want to give me a chance to look at it before-"
"Pat McKinney just called me. Says you know all about it. Says you gave this story to Diamond."
McKinney was deputy chief of the trial division, a wretchedly petty supervisor who seemed to take great pleasure in undermining my work. The week before Christmas his wife had thrown him out, embarrassed by his long-term affair with a coworker, and McKinney was flailing out in all directions as though making other people miserable would ease his own suffering.
"I do know all about it and I should have come in to tell you. I know how Diamond got the tip but it wasn't from me. I'm sorry- I was just so busy in the grand jury yesterday and I never imagined this would be of any press interest. Certainly not before the police figured out who she was and how she died."
Falling on one's sword often helped with Battaglia, but sometimes you had to do it repeatedly before he'd back off.
"What's the deal on these bones? Tell me everything."
I gave him the scant information I knew and he asked another dozen questions for which I had no answers.
The rest of my day was planned to be relaxing. I dressed for my Saturday morning ballet class, and covered my tights with warm-up pants and fleece-lined boots to trek through Central Park to the dance studio. I stayed for two hours of lessons, stretching and bending before taking my place at the barre for the exercise routine that helped relieve the week's tension.
Then I hiked back across town to the salon where Elsa and Nana would pamper me, highlighting my blonde hair and cutting it for a midwinter lift.
On the way home I stopped at Grace's Marketplace for some takeout, a lemon chicken breast and steamed broccoli that I could nuke at dinnertime. Mercer would pick me up at midnight and we would remain on our patrol until 4A.M., so I decided to nap in the early evening and eat dinner before going out on our profiling expedition.
When the doorman called up to tell me Mercer was waiting, I pulled on a black ski jacket over my jeans and went down to the car.
Mercer opened the rear door to let me in a beat-up old Chevy Malibu with chipped paint that had once been a deep navy blue. "Whose wheels?"
"My next door neighbor's kid. Won't stand out quite as much as a department car or medallion cab. Alex, this is Greg Karras."
I reached over the seat back and we shook hands. "Good to meet you. Thanks for flying in. How do we do this?"
"You've got your hands full with this guy. I've studied the old reports and Mercer confirms this is about the time of night he starts to strike, right?"
"Nothing earlier."
"I'd like to visit each of the locations to get a sense of what his approach has been, what the egress opportunities are."
Mercer and I had graphed out the crimes for Karras. We decided to start at the northern end of the map and drove to the quiet street where one of the earliest attacks had occurred. Mercer stopped the car in the middle of the block and pointed to a stoop thirty feet farther on. "Left-hand side, the steps with the wrought-iron handrail."
Karras got out of the car and walked from our position midblock to the corner of the avenue. A couple sauntered down the street with their arms around each other's waist, stopping to kiss under a street-light, the guy looking back over his shoulder at Karras. There were no trees anywhere near the victim's building and no place for an assailant to hide in waiting.
"Look at this, Mercer," I said, pointing at someone approaching the rear of our parked car. "She's likely to be in my office on Monday if she isn't careful."
The heavyset young woman was unsteady on her feet. She looked as though she was intoxicated, talking to herself and fishing in her purse for her keys. She stood between two buildings with her back to me, trying to decide which one was her destination.
"I almost want to get out and help her," Mercer said, "but she'd probably start screaming bloody murder."
She pulled herself up the six steps by leaning on the handrail and then fumbled for the right key on the ring to open the door. She would have been an easy target for any thug.
Karras got back into the car and asked us to go to the next location. He was quiet as he made notes on a PalmPilot. Mercer circled down to York Avenue and back to Seventy-eighth Street. Scene after scene, we watched the profiler walk each block and check the intersecting cross streets. He measured distances between street-lamps by walking between them, counting the steps as he put one booted foot in front of the next, and made notations of fire hydrants and the occasional tree.
After the round of visits, we went to an all-night coffee shop on Second Avenue. I was ready to put toothpicks in my eyelids to hold them open.
"What ideas did the task force work on last time?" Karras asked.
"Our first thoughts were businesses in the area. The fact that nothing started until after midnight made us think the guy worked here, got off a duty shift at midnight or oneA.M. Victims told us he was clean and that he smelled good. We were thinking restaurants or bodegas. Someone who washed up when he left work," Mercer said.