“She’d been working, Detective.”

“In this shithole of a precinct? Rough trade up here. A girl could get hurt.”

“Anita got in over her head is what it is. Salma said she took too many risks.”

“On her back? She got in over her head while she was on her back?”

I could hear crying from the far corner of the room. The baby had awakened and was beginning to wail as the policewoman picked her up. She was talking softly to Ana, going to the refrigerator to take out a bottle of milk that had been put inside, I guessed, when Leighton had been brought upstairs.

The congressman looked helplessly across the room.

“Don’t even think about it,” Mike said.

“It’s some kind of private club, Chapman. All I know is that Anita was supposed to have dinner with a gentleman who belonged to some kind of club. He paid her a lot of money, just to spend the evening with him. That’s what she told Luci when she left the hotel.”

It was Mike’s turn to raise his voice. “You know what kind of clubs they got up here, Mr. Leighton? You serious? They got clubs you can buy every kind of street junk ever cooked up by a dealer. Clubs you can find every kind of whore except a clean one. Clubs you can drink and snort and smoke in till you’re blind and crazy. They’ve got no book clubs. They’ve got no supper clubs. And they sure as hell have got no gentlemen’s clubs.”

“I’m telling you what I know.”

“Sounds a little bit too much like your own club. Like your father’s tontine, with your two-faced buddies like Donny Baynes.”

“What’s Donny got to do with this?” Leighton rubbed his eyes with both hands. “If he told you about the Tontine Association, he also told you it was disbanded years ago.”

I thought for a moment that Mike had hoisted Ethan Leighton on his own petard, that the slick politician had dangled a piece of misinformation in front of us, not realizing that Baynes had tied himself in knots too. I’d hoped Mike connected tonight’s events to Moses and Ethan Leighton, Donovan Baynes, and perhaps Mayor Statler himself.

“Did Anita tell Luci anything else about this man she was meeting-or about the kind of club it was?”

“Only that she said she felt safe when she went out tonight, because the guy who asked her to do it was an old friend,” Leighton said, pausing before he remembered another fact. “Yes. Yes, there is a name. The club is called Sub Rosa. It’s all very discreet like that. That’s what she told Luci.”

“Sub Rosa,” Mike said. “I get it. Secret, confidential, private.”

“You don’t get it at all. Go for the literal translation, Mike,” I said. I thought of the small tattoo-the property stamp of the snakehead, the trafficker-that was on the bodies of our Jane Doe #1 and on Salma Zunega. That might have been part of Salma’s bond with Anita. “Doesn’t that expression mean ‘under the rose’?”

FORTY-THREE

“ ‘Under the rose’ it is,” Mike said. “The nuns who taught me would have been proud of you. I didn’t think your Latin was that good.”

“Just the basics. I don’t know why it means what it does.”

“It’s a practice from the Middle Ages.” Mike’s parochial school education had served him well. “In medieval days, a rose was hung over council chambers if the proceedings were to be kept secret. Sub rosa. You should come to church with me more often. A lot of times you’ll see roses carved into the confessionals, for exactly that reason.”

“That’s my point,” I said. “Find Anita, find the friend who set her up tonight, and we’ll have the bastard behind all this misery. We’ll learn why these girls are the property of the rose.”

“Where did you locate her?” Mike asked Leighton.

“On Edgecombe Avenue. I really don’t know this area. It was just before two A.M.”

“Edgecombe and what? You want to see her alive, or don’t you care?”

There was an urgency in Mike’s voice now that Leighton caught too.

“Yes, I care. A Hundred and fifty-sixth Street, maybe a Hundred and fifty-seventh. I’m not certain. As I drove along, Anita ran out into the roadway. There was a park on the right. I remember that.”

“High Bridge Park. I hope to God she isn’t in there.”

I’d handled scores of cases that had occurred in the long strip that stretched north from 155th to Dyckman Street, with rugged topography and a treacherous slope that ran down from Edgecombe to the Harlem River Drive below it.

“She was waiting for me, sort of hiding behind a tree until she recognized the car.”

“Was she okay? She wasn’t hurt when you got there?” I asked.

“No, no she wasn’t. Just scared.”

“Did she get in the car with you?”

Leighton hesitated.

“There’s no time for you to even blink right now, man, so don’t start with censoring your answers,” Mike said. “Did she get in the car?”

“That’s what we were fighting about. She refused to get in. She wanted to take Ana with her.”

“Take her and go where?”

“I don’t know. Don’t raise your voice to me, Chapman.”

“Make sense, then. Why didn’t Anita get in your car? Where was she planning to go in that neighborhood with the baby, in the freezing cold?”

“That’s what we were fighting about. She told me her friend was waiting for her. That he’d take care of her.”

“The guy who did the dinner fix-up?”

“I guess. I wouldn’t give her the child, and she wouldn’t come with me.”

“Why do you think that is?”

“Because she’s still all mixed up about Salma’s death.”

“While she was standing in the road, arguing with you, was Anita yelling?”

“Yes, yes, she was. Then she saw the patrol car coming. She accused me of calling the cops on her. That’s when she flipped out and started to run.”

“Into the park?”

“No, no. The other way. She ran west, but I don’t know those streets.”

“And she left this child with you?”

“Yes.” Leighton practically whispered the word.

The baby had stopped crying and seemed to be drinking her bottle, so Mercer came back to join us. “Where are the clubs around here, say, west of a Hundred and fifty-sixth?” Mike asked.

“Amsterdam Avenue, mostly,” Mercer said. “A few on St. Nick.”

“What’s she wearing, Leighton? What does she look like?”

“Medium height. Long dark hair.”

“Skin color?”

“White. Brown eyes. She had on black slacks and a jacket-it looked like fake fur, almost iridescent. A short fur jacket.”

“I hope to God it glows in the dark. Give me your car keys.”

“What?”

“The Jag. Let me have the keys,” Mike said, holding out his hand. “Every mope in this part of town can make a department Crown Vic. At least I’ll look like we’re hustling for drugs in your father’s wheels.”

Ethan Leighton reluctantly handed over the keys.

“You want to ride with me, Coop?” Mike asked, walking away from the morose congressman to discuss our plans. “Mercer, why don’t you take your car, and we can tag-team to see who’s walking the streets. Back us up.”

“You start going into clubs in this neck of the woods, we’d better ask for a detail to hang out in case there’s trouble,” Mercer said.

“I got a different idea. Let’s take a gander at Jumel Terrace.”

Mercer’s scowl disappeared. He slapped Mike on the back and reached for his jacket. “Just a ways up from a Hundred and fifty-sixth, and a block in from Edgecombe. I like it.”

“What’s Jumel Terrace?” I asked. “What’s there?”

“The oldest Federal house still standing in Manhattan. The Morris-Jumel House. It’s a mansion, Coop. It’s a fine-looking old mansion, with a well.”