“Hal got a scrip from the doorman. Baby’s Caucasian, like her mother. Hispanic, very white skin. Wavy dark brown hair. Brown eyes. Says she left yesterday with a woman who resembles Salma and seemed perfectly happy.”

“Brown hair, brown eyes, and no photograph. You can’t send out an AMBER Alert like that.”

“Start with Battaglia.”

“Would you please tell Rose I’m on the way over?” I said to Laura.

I walked across the hall slowly, sliding past Tim Spindlis’s office. It was just after noon and I would be lucky to catch him before he left for lunch. Rose motioned me right in, and I was pleased that he was alone.

“What now?”

“There’s been a terrible development in the Zunega matter, Paul. Lem Howell did one of his drop-ins this morning. He’s blaming me for making Salma vanish. I didn’t want to tell him what we discovered at her apartment last night before Scully’s ready to go public with something, but he-”

“Did he mention Tim?”

“Actually, no. Tim’s name never came up in the conversation.”

Battaglia looked up from whatever memo he was reading and squinted at me. “You’re sure? How about mine?”

“Nothing, Boss. It’s about the child. We’ve got a bigger problem than Tim’s appointment.”

His nose was back in the memo. “Bigger than my reputation, Alex? Keep your eye on that ball.”

“Ethan Leighton’s girlfriend doesn’t have a sister, according to Lem. We don’t know who the woman is who took the child from her apartment yesterday. Scully’s going to have to issue an AMBER Alert before anyone’s ready to answer all the questions about the case that the press will ask.”

He picked his head up again. “Find the damn woman, then, will you? Get them cracking on getting the kid back.”

I walked the quiet corridor that led away from Battaglia’s office. It was lined with photographs of the grave and distinguished elected district attorneys-all men-who had held the position throughout the last two centuries. Until the 1970s, only six women had served on the staff of several hundred lawyers who labored for the political powerhouse. There were days like this when I wondered what was so desirable about butting up against the glass ceiling that traditionally capped the criminal court.

Laura was standing at the door to her cubicle as I crossed the hallway. “You’ve got Mike on line one.”

“Give him to Mercer,” I said. “I’m whipped.”

“Mercer ducked out to pick up sandwiches for you, and Nan’s back at her desk.”

I took the receiver from Laura’s hand. “I’ve had a miserable morning, Mike. I think I’d rather be at the morgue.”

“I haven’t exactly been picnicking, either, Coop. Listen, I’ve got-”

“Battaglia’s all over me. He wants to know why you can’t find Salma.”

“Be careful what you wish for, kid. She’s not missing anymore,” Mike said. “And she’s very dead.”

I sat in Laura’s chair and rubbed my eyes with my free hand. “Where is she?”

“At the bottom of a well, twelve feet down. Headfirst.”

“And the baby?”

“No, no, Coop. No sign of the little girl.”

“Thank God,” I said, beginning to process what he had just told me about Salma. “Hey, Mike? How far out of town did they find her? I mean, where’s the well?”

“Right here. Right close to home.”

“We’ve got wells in Manhattan?”

“It’s the first one I’ve seen. All dried up now, but it’s a well.”

My mind was racing visually up the streets and avenues of the city, lined cheek-to-jowl with brownstones, tenements, high-rise buildings, and housing projects.

“You’ve lost me, Mike. What kind of house had a well?”

“I guess if you owned a mansion, you had a well, Ms. Cooper. This one just happens to be at the mayor’s house,” Mike said. “I’d like to see Battaglia’s face when you tell him the body was found at Gracie Mansion.”

SIXTEEN

“Nice diversionary tactic you worked for us,” Mike said, as he opened the passenger door of Mercer’s car to help me out. “Keep your head down and walk as fast as you can on the paved path around the side of the house.”

“What tactic? What’s all the action on East End Avenue?”

East End was one of the shortest avenues in Manhattan, a mix of small, elegant town houses, two of the city’s finest private schools for girls, a quiet park, and some fancy apartments. It started at Seventy-ninth Street and ran just twelve blocks north. Mercer had driven as close as he could to the entrance-the rear door, actually-of Gracie Mansion, past the small guardhouse on Eighty-eighth Street that was a fixed post for an NYPD cop. It was just after three in the afternoon.

“Your pal Lem Howell let out the news that Salma went missing from her apartment last night and how worried the congressman is about her. The press hounds have staked out her building, which required Scully to send a few uniformed teams for crowd control.”

“Nobody’s noticed yet that right across the street we’re in the process of recovering her body.”

“You mean-?”

“She’s still in the well.”

There were dark clouds overhead and a raw chill in the air.

“But you’re sure it’s Salma?”

“Yeah.”

“How?”

I was trying to keep up with Mike as he walked off the path to the north of the handsome old building on the lawn that sloped away toward a long wrought-iron fence.

“We lowered Katie Cion down to take some photos. That’s one tough broad,” Mike said. “Good thing the department bought out all the Polaroid film on the market when they stopped producing it. I don’t know what CSU will do when they run out of it. The super across the street made the ID from one of those.”

Katie Cion was one of the few women assigned to the Homicide Squad. She had earned the gold shield with some clever and courageous detective work on a gang initiation slaying in the Bronx a year ago. Petite and agile-maybe five three when she drew herself full up to salute Scully at her promotion-she was as fearless as she was smart.

I stepped between a stand of trees and around some neatly trimmed hedges. I was just ten feet from the wide esplanade that formed a sinuous border along the water’s edge, staring at the churning gray river.

“Welcome to Hell Gate,” Mike said.

I had been to the mansion before, for receptions and ceremonies, but had never been out on the lawn to see the dramatic vista.

“Seems like the right name for it today.”

Mike pointed straight out across the river. “It’s been the right name for it for four centuries. That’s what the Dutch called this narrow strait in the sixteen hundreds. Treacherous tides and a watery grave for more ships than we’ll ever know.”

He pulled aside more branches and I could see the setup for the recovery operation. Most of the blue-and-white police vehicles had been left on East End Avenue, where they would be presumed to be part of the security detail. Four green Parks Department vans ringed a small area of the drive, and one NYPD Emergency Services truck was wedged against the fence on top of a flower bed that had been put to sleep for the winter.

Mike led me between the vans, into the circle of police officers and park employees who were gathered around the gaping hole in the ground. The chief medical examiner himself-Chet Kirschner-was overseeing the procedure.

“Hello, Alex,” he said, greeting me with a handshake and an explanation. He was a quiet man, well-respected for his medical brilliance and his dignity with the dead. “We’re about to bring the woman up now. I want to do this without causing any more postmortem artifacts than are inevitable in this kind of situation.”

Kirschner would need to establish a cause of death, complicated by the disposal of the body in such an unusual location and the injuries that might have been sustained in the dumping.

“Who found her?” I asked.