changed at all since I had first seen him several hours ago.
“Hey, Mercer,” Mike said, “Coop’s back.” Now addressing me, “Where you been, blondie?”
I told him about the interrogation. “These dicks must’ve worked her over pretty good, Mercer. She looks like shit. I just wish you could open your eyes right now and take a look at her. I oughta borrow one of your intravenous tubes, man-run a little Dewar’s through it and give her some juice. Who’s the team?”
“Iverson and Bellman.”
“Dammit, Mercer. Get your ass outta that bed. I wouldn’t let those two lightweights handle a bad check. They treat you okay, Coop?”
I shook my head up and down.
At about midnight, a policewoman from the Sixth Precinct came up to the nurses’ station with a few containers of hot soup for Mike and me.
I walked it back over to Mercer’s room. Mike was standing now, and I could hear him saying something about an administration.
“What are you talking about now?” I asked. “Can I spell you for a while?”
“Know how they say people in a coma can hear you? Well, if that’s true and he’s only sleeping off some gas, I’ll be getting through to him before too long. I just want mine to be the first voice he hears. Remember my dictionary? I’m going through it with him now. Used to make Mercer so mad-especially if all the other guys were laughing when I did it-he’d be ready to punch me in the face.”
Chapman always joked that he was going to sell a reference book to compete with the
He took his seat by Mercer’s side. “I’m only halfway through the
“ ‘Athaletic.’ Used interchangeably with the word ‘ epileptic.’ ‘Officer Chapman, you can’t go arresting my brother. He be having an athaletic fit right now.’
“ ‘Ax.’ What you do uptown with a question. ‘Officer, let me ax you this…’ You ever know anybody Irish or Jewish or Italian who axes questions, do you?”
“Alex, are you in here?”
Mercer’s frail voice came at us from the other side of the bed, his eyes still closed, his head still facing toward the wall, and his words barely audible. Mike bounced up from his chair, grabbed Mercer’s left ankle-which seemed to be the only part of him not hooked to any kind of medical device-and started kissing the sole of his foot. I answered “Yes,” and we both bent over to get close enough to hear Mercer speak.
His lips pulled together to form a smile. “Will you get that racist son of a bitch out of this room?”
“Cold hit, Coop.” I had just stepped out of the shower a few minutes after seven o’clock on Monday morning, and Jake handed me the telephone to take Mike Chapman’s call.
“On what?”
“Bob Thaler just called. He said they got a match on the semen found on the canvas tarp that was in the back of Omar Sheffield’s station wagon-the one that Denise Caxton’s body had been wrapped in. Did it through the data bank.”
“Cold hit” was the slang term that scientists used to describe what occurred when a computer made a successful comparison between DNA samples, linking a piece of forensic evidence to an actual human being.
The detectives did not have to submit names, latent prints, mug shots, or vouchers for hours of overtime legwork in order for this technology to work. The computer’s ability to make a cold hit took only an instant.
Thaler was the chief serologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office and had helped to pioneer this technology. The data bank had been established by the New York State legislature, and there were data banks in almost every state by the late 1990 s. New York’s was slowly being filled with the genetic fingerprints-DNA developed from a single vial of blood- taken from every prisoner in the state convicted of sexual assault or homicide. Like their latent print counterparts, these unique codes were becoming an invaluable tool in the solution of cases of rape and murder.
“Who’s the match?” I asked.
“Anton Bailey. Convicted of larceny three years ago up in Buffalo. Did half of a four-year sentence and was released to parole eight months back.”
“Then why was he in the data bank?” His blood would not have been taken for a crime like larceny, a nonviolent theft.
“That’s just it. He wasn’t in the New York base. Thaler had the Feds run it interstate and, sure enough, got a hit in the Florida data bank.” The Sunshine State had passed the legislation before most other parts of the country. “Seems like Mr. Bailey had gone by a different name down South-Anthony Bailor. And Mr. Bailor did some hard time back in Gainesville. Put away at eighteen, for almost twenty years. Rape in the first degree.
“So it looks like Anton Bailey is the man who sexually assaulted Denise Caxton.”
“And killed her.”
“Talk about cold hits,” Mike said. “If this isn’t a straightout sexual assault gone bad, then someone must have hired old Anton to do Deni in. That could be the coldest hit of all.”
“Now all we need to do is figure how and where he came into this picture.”
“Thaler’s the only government guy whose office opens up at seven a.m. I’ll get on the horn to State Correction after nine. Just thought you’d like to know first thing.”
“How’s your patient?”
“Restless night. He was in a lot of pain. But they’re taking some of the tubes out today and hope to get him moved into a private room.”
“Battaglia arranged a full security crew for me until this thing is over. I told him I already feel like I have a human straitjacket wrapped around me. They’re driving me down to the office. Are you doing any interviews today?”
“If they have Mercer set up by the early afternoon, I’ll call you so you can come up to the office with me. I’m beginning to think it’s safer to let our interviewees drop by our place.”
“What did you do about sleeping?”
“Not as cozy as you. Nurses let me curl up on a gurney in the hallway.”
“Anybody I.D. the girl yet?” I asked, assuming the receptionist who opened the door for Mercer and me yesterday, whom I had first seen at Deni’s gallery, could be a link to the killer.
“Yeah. Name was Cynthia Greeley. Twenty-three years old, from Saint Louis. Bryan Daughtry claims that most of the time she freelanced. He insists that it was Deni who hired the kid, not him. And that Deni met her when she was working for Lowell, on Fifty-seventh Street. Lowell thought Cynthia had too many pierced body parts to be working the uptown scene, so he was glad to let her go.”
One more twisted path to unravel. “I’ll get down to work and wait to hear from you. Give Mercer’s hand a squeeze for me. Tell him I’ll come over with you tonight. Need a place to clean up this morning?”
“Nah. I can shower at the squad. Change of clothes in my locker. See you later.”
Battaglia had assigned two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad to accompany me from place to place for the duration of the investigation. I didn’t like the restrictions it imposed or the waste of taxpayers’ money. But he had given me no choice and had sent them to the hospital last evening. They had driven me to my apartment so I could pack a suitcase of belongings that would get me through the week, and then on to Jake’s home, not too far from my own. Front-door-tofrontdoor service.
I had reached there in time to find Jake watching the news on CNN. It was after one o’clock in the morning. “Turn it off and I promise not to tell anyone at NBC that you were checking out the competition,” I said to him
