TWENTY

“Did you call the commissioner yet?” Mike asked.

He was the last one to arrive in the conference room, where Mercer and I had taken our place with Nan and Catherine, and a large chalkboard to map out the links between the various crime scenes.

“Scully, Battaglia, the mayor,” Mercer said. “They’re all tied up at City Hall. Coop’s been assured by Rose Malone that it doesn’t involve us.”

“He’s going to be ripped that his department got spoofed,” Mike said. “He’ll be loaded for bear.”

“It’s not a first,” Nan said. “There was a major incident in a Carolina town last year. Someone spoof-called a hostage situation and the entire SWAT team responded. The lady inside had a heart attack.”

“Bet that lawsuit set the department up for a pretty settlement. Remind me not to tell that one to Scully.”

“I’ll get you some better examples.”

Mike reached up and turned on the television set that was mounted over the long conference table. “Might as well see what’s got their blood boiling at City Hall.”

He was flipping to the local all-news channel when he stopped on the Jeopardy! game board.

“I know better than to say it’s inappropriate, don’t I?” Nan asked.

“I’ve already got a mother. Two, if you count Coop’s more-than-occasional nagging,” Mike said, reaching for half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “A few minutes too early for the big prize. Let’s check the Blue Room.”

There were a handful of reporters standing on the steps at City Hall. They were the young men and women assigned to the local political beat, not the raucous tabloid crowd that I presumed was still keeping vigil outside the Zunega apartment.

We picked up the sound as the NY1 correspondent was talking. “… don’t know why this flurry of activity escalated inside the mayor’s office, but he was joined this evening by District Attorney Paul Battaglia and Commissioner Keith Scully. Those names put crime on everyone’s mind, as we wait out these unexpected appearances.”

“I think it’s all a ruse so the mayor doesn’t have to show up at Gracie Mansion and face that music,” Mike said.

“Ssssh,” I said. “You want to know what’s happening or not?”

I was at the board, drawing a map of the location of the shipwreck in Queens and the various sites in Manhattan that seemed to be in play.

“And over my left shoulder,” the reporter continued, “you can see that the lights are still on in the City Council, where some kind of special session seems to be in progress.

“In the meantime, at the bottom of the steps here, the security detail made an interesting discovery this morning.”

“Coop made one too,” Mike said. “That her formerly skinny ass was taking on so much fromage-am I right? How’s that for a cheesy Frenchman?-that she crashed right through the tarp and went jawbone-to-jawbone with a colonial corpse.”

“That’s not where I fell, Inspector Clouseau.”

“No, Alex,” Mercer said, moving closer to the screen. “But this guy’s talking about the other burial pit right below the front steps. See?”

The reporter was standing with a Parks Department employee who had removed a section of fence to expose another piece of green tarp like the one I had fallen through behind the building.

“A minor accident here today refocused attention on the abandoned project that involved determining the occupants of these centuries-old graves that predated the construction of City Hall. Budget cuts put a halt to the excavations years ago, and a previous mayor’s protocol mandated that intact remains were not to be excavated.

“Uncovering the tarp today, which is riddled with large tears and damage from foul weather, we learned that these burial grounds have become a resting place for a wide assortment of objects that probably wouldn’t make it past the metal detectors at the top of the staircase, in the lobby of City Hall.”

“Nice take,” Mike said, swigging his soda.

“Mixed among the human remains, park crews found four switchblade knives, two box cutters, a whole bunch of sharp tools and instruments that were made long after the Half Moon sailed through these waters. You’d be surprised at the number of papers and identification cards that were just discarded like junk, here at the very entrance to the controls of our city government.”

“No different than the courthouse,” I said.

Every morning, perps and their entourages approached our building, often forgetting until they walked in the doorway that the metal detectors would reveal any weapons they were carrying. The first shift of court officers searched the two-foot-wide dirt perimeter daily, looking for discarded weapons.

“This is creepier than doing it in front of our building,” Nan said. “Imagine tossing all this stuff into someone’s grave? They really need to solve that problem.”

Mike had turned back to Alex Trebek, just as he announced the Final Jeopardy! category. “That’s right, I said DEATH VALLEY LIFE. You’ve got sixty seconds to figure out how much you’d like to wager.”

“Mercer and I have this one. He’s big on wildlife. We’ll take on you three girls. Twenty bucks.”

“Fine, guys.” I was drawing the links between Salma’s apartment and the well on the Gracie Mansion lawn that overlooked Hell Gate, and the place on the FDR Drive where Ethan Leighton crashed his car. I circled the Leighton home and wrote Claire’s name, with a big question mark beside it. “Then we get to work.”

Each of us was nibbling on halves of the large sandwiches that Laura had ordered when Trebek revealed the answer and repeated it twice. “Devil’s Hole denizen facing extinction.”

The three contestants each seemed to be struggling to write a question.

“You think California condors live in a hole, or the hole name is just to throw us off?” Mike said to Mercer as he started on his second bag of chips. “Gotta be some kind of prairie dog or burrowing owl. You call it, Mercer. You give it the what-is that’s about to become a what-was.”

The theme music was playing in the background. I started to chalk a list of local political figures recently tainted by possible links to scandal. Congressman Ethan Leighton, former governor Eliot Spitzer, Lieutenant Governor Rod Ralevic, former police commissioner Bernard Kerik.

“What’s the Devil’s Hole pupfish?” Catherine said, surprising me as she took the chalk from my hand. “Humor me, Alex. Let’s just put Tim Spindlis here to round out the list.”

“He didn’t do anything bad,” I said. “And he’s not a politician.”

“But I so enjoy seeing him in such lousy company, even if you erase him later. Exonerate him whenever you’d like.”

“Now, how’d you know that about pupfish?” Mike asked, offering her some chips as Trebek consoled the three men who had guessed wrong.

“Studied the case in law school. It’s a little blue minnow that’s lived only in that hole, in a spring-fed pool in that hellishly hot desert, for tens of thousands of years,” Catherine said. “One of the original fish protected in a landmark water rights case before the Supreme Court.”

Nan and I looked at each other and laughed.

“You two girls must have been too busy partying to do your homework, I guess. Used to be five hundred of those fish. Probably aren’t even fifty today. The court curtailed groundwater pumping meant to develop irrigation in the Mojave to save these guys. They had to put up a chain-link fence to keep all the law students from peering down into the little pupfish pool.”

“Probably wouldn’t let Coop anywhere near the hole for fear she’d crash through that fence too,” Mike said. “Crush all those little minnows to death.”

“Okay, kids, recess is over,” I said, sitting down at the table. “Somebody want to take a stab at suggestions about Salma and where all this leads?”

Mike muted the volume but turned the set back to NY1 so that we could keep an eye on developing events at City Hall.