“You keep your eyes peeled for a head,” he said, pointing the toothpick at me and tugging at a few straggling strands of my hair as he stood up. “Or somebody carrying a bag that might weigh — oh, I’d say about nine pounds six ounces.”
The counterman handed me the check and I left cash on the table as we stood up.
“How’d you come up with that number?”
“My last decapitation, Coop. The human head accounts for less than ten percent of the body mass, usually in the eight-to-twelve-pound range.”
I wouldn’t sleep at all now. Facial features were flooding my imagination. The manner of this woman’s death would haunt me. I didn’t know the first thing about her, but I was wildly creating a visual image, a life and a family, and of course a brutal death.
“And you arrive at nine-six by?. .”
“Eyeballing her, kid. Much shorter than you. Maybe five-five. Brunette, from the rest of the hair on her body. And she wasn’t from the streets.”
“How so?”
“Pedicured toes. No track marks. No tats. About your age, I’d say. Breasts were firm. Skin was unwrinkled and smooth. My money’s on midthirties.”
I had turned away from the broken body of the victim on the church portico, while Mike studied it to learn as much about her as he could in just the few minutes spent with her in the dark and cold.
“I’ll drop you at home, Alex,” Mercer said. “Let’s see what the day brings.”
“Expect the usual,” Mike said, gnawing the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “A handful of domestics, child pervs scouring the playgrounds and cyberspace, identity theft up the wazoo. Let’s meet up at the end of the day, guys, okay? See where we stand, what we find out. ’Cause this friggin’ beast will be back before you know it.”
“Why do you—?” I started to ask.
“There’s a bloodlust here you don’t see very often, Coop. He’s not done. That bastard tossed the head so his next vic won’t connect the dots. Whoever she is, unless we find her first, she’ll never see him coming.”
SIX
MERCER dropped me at the entrance to my high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side, and one of the doormen escorted me to the elevator. I rode alone to the twentieth floor, unlocked the door and bolted it behind me, comforted by the familiarity of my well-appointed home. It wasn’t the way most young prosecutors lived, but at moments like this, the security it offered provided a safety net for which I was enormously grateful.
I didn’t disturb the sheets. I pulled back the duvet and slipped in beneath it, knowing that I needed to calm down but aware that I was far too restless to sleep. Daylight would soon flood the large windows, so for an hour, I closed my eyes and tried to transport myself to a more tranquil surround.
Photographs on my night table allowed me a brief escape from the night’s dreadful scene and Mike’s unpleasant prophecy. My parents smiled at me from the porch of the beach home on the Caribbean island to which they had retired, and my brothers’ kids were oblivious to the camera lens as they body-surfed in the Atlantic during a visit to my summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. My lover, Luc Rouget, waved from his red convertible in the tiny village of Mougins, near the Cote d’Azur in the south of France, and thankfully didn’t seem to be an ocean away when I rested the silver picture frame next to me on the pillow.
I must have dozed despite my apprehension of revisiting visions of the body in my nightmares. My alarm sounded at seven, and I allowed myself another hour after listening to the headlines — still vague and devoid of essential facts — on the local all-news station.
At eight, the time I was usually at my desk in the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan, I got up and showered. I dressed for the trial, in a gray, chalk-striped suit with a pleated skirt and a mantailored ivory silk blouse. Lyle Keets, the trial judge, was an old-fashioned gentleman who liked all the niceties of the practice of law as it was done forty years ago — professional attire was almost as important to him as professional conduct. He had once forbidden a colleague of mine to reenter his trial part in slacks after a juror remarked that he had been distracted throughout the proceedings by the tight panty line he could see as she stood behind the lectern.
I had missed rush hour, so I grabbed a yellow cab for the fifteen-minute ride down the FDR to the courthouse.
“Morning, Ms. Cooper,” one of the uniformed cops on security said as I passed through the metal detector at the One Hogan Place entrance to the building. “Half a day, huh?”
It was easier to smile and nod at him than expect him to have linked my night’s activity to the morning news.
My office was on the eighth floor of the massive courthouse structure, just across the hallway from the district attorney’s executive wing. I had enormous respect for Battaglia, whose long tenure and innovative policies as Manhattan’s chief prosecutor had made him a legend in law enforcement. The pioneering Sex Crimes Unit, created three decades earlier, was one of the jewels in his crown. Battaglia was not a micromanager. He left daily details of running investigations in the hands of me and my staff of dedicated lawyers, but he insisted on being kept up to speed on any high-profile matters that would affect his standing in the community or his political base.
“You’re running late.” My secretary of many years, Laura Wilkie, knew when not to waste words. I rounded the corner into my office and she followed with a handful of phone messages.
“Sorry. I thought I told you Keets had a dental emergency to deal with.”
“You did. But I didn’t know you’d be out with my boyfriend half the night.”
Laura had an unrequited crush on Mike Chapman. There were days I think she came to work just in order to talk with him on the phone, or be dazzled by his broad grin when he perched on the edge of her desk to flirt.
“He ratted me out already?” I untied my cashmere scarf and hung it with my coat behind the door.
“Nope. But Mercer did,” Laura said, reading from a list on her steno pad. “Told me to keep Mike’s calls away from you so you could get done what you needed to do in front of Keets.”
“Okay.”
“Nice thought, but I’ve already had to scratch the idea of giving you space. Battaglia skipped his meeting at City Hall to get in early. He wants you to brief him on the murder.”
“He picked up from the news that I was out on that? I didn’t think they made me.”
“No again. Some guy named Wilbur Gaskin called him to complain about how you were all browbeating a bunch of kids at his church. Gaskin’s on some charity board with the boss.”
“The guy was more upset about our questioning trespassers than finding a headless corpse on his doorstep?” I took the messages from her and flipped through them. “Have you Googled Gaskin for me?”
Laura handed me a two-page printout. She’d never let me see Battaglia unprepared, if she could help it. “The profile I found reads a tad self-serving. Doesn’t say what the man eats for breakfast, but gives you the rest.”
“Sound legit?” I brushed my hair and reapplied some lipstick in the small mirror above the coat hook.
“Banker. Family man. Do-gooder. Moved here from Atlanta a few years ago. I’ll run a broader search.”
“I’m looking for an ax murderer, Laura. See if you can find me one before the end of the day.”
“Got it. And Mercer told me to check with the press office. Tell them to let us know about calls coming in through the switchboard on the news reports.”
“Any yet?”
“Minor flood. Not a tsunami, so far.” Laura read from her notes. “Some of these missing girls go back months. Who’s going to vet the callers?”
“I’ll look these over. Can you find Nan Toth?” She was one of the most experienced lawyers in the unit with plenty of homicide experience, as well as one of my closest friends. Nan could be the liaison to the squad for the remainder of the day. “Maybe she’ll have time to take it from here.”
I grabbed a legal pad from my desk to list the things Battaglia would tell me to do. If the pastor of Mount
