“Which one deals?”
No answer this time.
“Must be Shaquille or you wouldn’t have been so anxious to invite him to join you.”
Luther had nowhere else in the room left to look but at Mercer.
“Go talk to him, Alex. I’ll get Luther here up to speed.” Mercer handed me the phone. “What else did you hear besides church bells last night?”
“She gonna ask Shaquille. I don’t know nuthin’ else.”
As I turned the corner into the sanctuary, I noticed another kid was gone. The remaining one was still cuffed to the end seat of a pew. His knee was bouncing up and down, nervously, at a furious pace, and when Mike stepped away from him, I could see that tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“What happened?” I asked. “Where’s—”
“Scotty took the tall one back down to the basement for a once-over.”
“What’d you do to make this guy cry?”
“He’s fifteen, Coop. Wants his mama, I think.”
“Which one’s Shaquille?” I asked.
The knee jerked and the kid shook his head.
I held up Luther’s cell and texted a few words. I could hear the noise of the vibrating phone in his pocket over the insistent tapping of his foot.
“I guess you’re Shaquille,” Mike said. “That solves that piece of the puzzle. Now, why don’t you tell Ms. Cooper what you saw last night? And remember, she doesn’t believe in ghosts.”
“I was waiting for Luther to call me.” The kid wiped his eyes with the filthy sleeve of his sweatshirt. “I was around the corner, on 114th.”
“You know what time it was?” Mike asked.
Shaquille shook his head.
I looked at Luther’s outgoing messages. “A little bit before twelve forty-five.”
“All three of you there?”
“Nope. I was alone.”
The bounce in his leg was like a lie detector. It sped up whenever the topic got more sensitive. He didn’t seem to care about the time of night, or his companions.
“What’d you see?” Mike asked.
The knee was rocking now. “I told you, I don’t know. It was like a man, but then it didn’t move like any man I ever seen.”
“How’s that, Shaquille?”
“It was almost like he could fly. Like a cartoon character, you know?”
“I don’t know. You tell us,” Mike said. “What’d he look like?”
“Too dark to tell,” the kid said, sniffling back his tears.
“Black? White? Big? Small?”
“He was a big guy, that’s the thing. Big but he moved real quick and light. Couldn’t see his skin ’cause he had a hoodie on. Black hoodie and sweatpants. Just figured he black ’cause — I don’t know—’ cause it’s, ’cause. .”
“’Cause it’s the middle of Harlem in the middle of the night?”
“Why some white guy be breaking into Mount Neboh?” Shaquille asked.
“Breaking in?” I said. “Is that what he tried to do?”
“I didn’t stay to see that. I just know if he was any friend of Luther’s, he’d be goin’ by the back door.”
“Tell her what you saw. Tell her where he came from.”
“Don’t know where he came from. He was already near the gate when I got to the corner. He had a sack with him. Big sack, like a duffel. I mean, really big. First thing he did when the street got quiet, he reached up and dropped the bag over the gate.”
“Were you smoking yet, Shaquille?” Mike asked.
“Let him tell his story,” I said. “Stop interrupting.”
“I just want you to understand he wasn’t high. Okay, Coop? What’d he do?”
“He got himself up that fence. Like he hung on to the railing from the side, and then he kind of flew himself over.”
“Threw himself?” I asked.
“Flew, ma’am. He, like, flew.”
“Don’t roll your eyes at me, Coop. That gate is tall,” Mike said.
“We’ve tried lots of times to get over that fence, ma’am. You can’t do it. It’s really tall. Must be like ten feet, and there’s no crosspieces to climb on.”
“Did you watch him after that?” I asked.
“Yeah. I wanted to see what was in that bag.”
“The man opened the bag?” I asked, wondering how this kid — how anyone — could have watched somebody be set afire on the church steps and walk away from it.
“Yeah. He took it up the steps and unzippered it.”
“Anyone else around besides you?” Mike asked.
“Nope. There were cars on the boulevard, but it was too dark for people driving by to notice much.”
I positioned myself directly in front of Shaquille. “What did you see when the man opened the sack?”
The kid’s knee was going wild.
“I thought it was, like, a person. Like, I thought I saw legs coming out, you know? Then I figured out it couldn’t be a real person, like a body or anything. That it must have been some other thing he got flopping around. It was real creepy-like, so I just left, is what I did.”
“Why did you think it wasn’t a person? That it wasn’t a body?”
“’Cause there couldn’t be a body, ma’am, without no head.”
FIVE
“WHAT time do you have to be in court?” Mercer asked.
“Not until eleven. The judge has to take care of an abscessed tooth first. Don’t worry, I’ll get to put my head down for a couple of hours.”
It was four a.m. and we were sitting in an all-night coffee shop on 125th Street. Luther Audley and his pals had been released after Mike’s Homicide Squad partners took statements from them. Sergeant Grayson had two teams looking for the fourth kid, who fled — with information from Shaquille, a willing snitch — in the unlikely event that he had any useful tidbits to offer. The Crime Scene Unit had started its painstaking work on the church steps and inside the sanctuary. And Amos Audley was left with the sad task of cleaning up behind them and his wayward grandson.
We left as the tabloid newshounds and photographers had clustered in front of Mount Neboh, grumbling to Grayson that they had missed their most salacious shots.
Murder never got in the way of Mike Chapman’s appetite or conscience. While Mercer and I sipped coffee, Mike was working his way through an order of scrambled eggs with onions and a slab of crisp bacon, using cornbread to mop up the grease on his plate.
“I know, I know,” Mike said. “You’re wondering how I can eat like this after what we saw this morning, and I’m wondering why you’re drinking black java when you’re already so wired you could tap dance in the well of the courtroom while you’re cross-examining your worst enemy and not even come up for a breath of air.”
The three of us had worked together on some of the city’s most horrific cases for more than ten years. We knew our respective foibles and strengths, considered ourselves family, could shoot barbs directly to the heart of either of the others without a second thought, but covered the others’ backs from any outside attacks. We came to this alliance from backgrounds so different that sometimes it was inconceivable to me that we understood one
