another as well as we did.
“How soon till we find out who she is? That’s what I’m thinking about.”
“Somebody’ll miss her, Coop.”
“And who did she cross to come to such a hideous end?”
The counterman walked over to the booth to refill our mugs.
“It’s the setting that gets me,” Mike said. “Does Neboh speak to you, Mercer?”
Mercer had been born in Harlem and worked in Manhattan North Homicide with Mike before transferring to Special Victims. He knew the streets and the people, even though he had been raised in Queens by his father — a mechanic for Delta at LaGuardia Airport — after his mother’s death in childbirth. He was forty-two, five years older than I, and married to another detective, Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a young son.
“I’m not sure. Like Gaskin said, Mount Olivet Baptist, that was built as a synagogue too. It was Temple Israel in 1906. Abandoned with white flight. Baptist since 1926. They took the ark the Torah used to sit in and turned it into a baptismal pool.”
“So?” Mike asked, crunching the bacon while he talked.
“You said that you and Alex were headed to 120th and Lenox because of the fingertips in a garbage pail on the street.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s only one block from Mount Olivet. Gives something to your theory that the dead woman’s religion may be tied up in this. I mean, the best-known Baptist church in Harlem is Abyssinian. Built Baptist, stayed Baptist. Your murderer wants to send a message about Baptists, that’s where he goes. Not to both of these recycled synagogues.”
“Maybe he didn’t know Neboh’s history,” I said. “I certainly didn’t.”
“Too much of a coincidence, then, that he chose both Neboh and Olivet. I think Mike’s onto something.”
Mike’s investigative instincts were probably in his DNA. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD, proud that his son had excelled in academics and had chosen Fordham University, majoring in history, as a way out of the dangerous street life in which his own career had been forged.
Two days after retiring from the force, while Mike was in his junior year at Fordham, Brian Chapman died of a massive coronary. Mike honored his promise to get his degree but immediately enrolled in the Police Academy to follow his passion, to shadow the steps of the man he most revered. Six months older than I — thirty-eight — Mike’s bachelor existence had only once been threatened by a serious romance, which ended in the accidental death of the young architect to whom he’d been engaged.
“You got a dish of ice cream? Chocolate, two scoops?” Mike called out to the waiter. Then to Mercer, “So how did Abyssinians get involved with New York City Baptists?”
“Goes back two hundred years, right down near the courthouse. Way before we were known as black or African American, seems the Negroes didn’t like being segregated — forced to sit apart — while they were worshipping in God’s house. It was a bunch of rich Ethiopian merchants who broke away from the First Baptist Church, way down on Worth Street, to start this one.”
“Where do you begin to look for a woman’s head?” I asked.
“She’s fixated on that, Mercer.” Mike was starting to soften his frozen dessert by swirling the spoon around and around the dish. “Coop’s not going to be happy until we have all the body parts.”
“Don’t play with your food,” I said.
“They teach you that at Wellesley, Miss Manners?”
I was the most incongruous part of our trio. My parents’ middleclass existence changed radically during my childhood when my father, a cardiologist, and his research partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that was used in almost every open-heart surgical procedure worldwide for nearly two decades thereafter. We moved to Harrison, an upscale suburb in Westchester County, and my parents were able to provide my brothers and me with the best educational opportunities available — for me, at Wellesley, where I majored in English literature before getting my JD degree at the University of Virginia School of Law.
They fostered my interest in public service and were pleased that I found such fulfillment in my work as an advocate for women and children who’d been victims of intimate violence. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was the premier prosecutorial model in the country, and I had thrived there under the leadership of Paul Battaglia and his hand-chosen staff of dedicated lawyers.
If my work seemed depressing to some, they had no understanding of how uplifting it was to help this long- underserved population triumph in the courtroom. In just the past thirty years and through the diligence of those who came before me, archaic laws that treated women as chattel were abolished, investigative techniques had been developed to match forensic advances, and the application of DNA technology to law enforcement methods had revolutionized the criminal justice system.
“You know what I learned at Wellesley, Mike?” I smiled at his ability to bring humor to the most dire situations. “If you’ve been out all night with a guy, and he’s about to ask you to pay for his meal, you ought to find someone else to take you home. Ready to go, Mercer?”
“Even when the sucker who’s had you out with him doesn’t even bother to try to jump your bones?” Mike asked. “That’s a sorry situation, kid. What’s today, anyway?”
“Wednesday. Soon as the sun comes up, it’ll be Wednesday.”
“Put it on my tab, Coop. I’ll catch up to you on payday.”
“By my count, you’re about three years of payday overdue, Mike. You’ll be at the autopsy?” Mercer asked.
“Yeah. Late this afternoon.”
“Could you tell anything about the killer from looking at the neck injuries?” I asked.
“Other than that he meant what he was doing, what is it you want to know?” Mike asked.
“The obvious questions. Do you think it was done by a surgeon, or by a butcher? You know, someone skilled anatomically?”
“Don’t go all Jack the Ripper on me, Coop. Somebody whacked off the poor broad’s head. The only thing I’d say about him for sure is that he was powerful. Not artful and no surgical precision. Really strong. Must have used something like an ax or a hatchet. A machete, maybe.”
I leaned back against the cracked vinyl padding on the seat of the booth. “Where do you even begin on this one?”
“It’s got ‘personal’ stamped all over it,” Mike said. “Nothing random about this victim. Nobody goes to all this trouble hacking up a stranger. Get a make on her, it’ll tell us half the story.”
“You know, Alex,” Mercer said, “morning news shows will blast this story everywhere. All the nuts respond to gruesome. Your office, the local precincts, the squad phones — they’ll be ringing off the hook. Every woman who didn’t come home last night will have someone looking for her. Prepare yourself for the onslaught.”
“I’ll be in court. Thoroughly preoccupied.”
“And we’ll be pawing through every Dumpster and incinerator north of the DMZ,” Mike said, referring to 110th Street, where Harlem unofficially began. “Hoping this madman didn’t toss her head or the murder weapon in the river. And the zoo. I’ll send Grayson to the Bronx Zoo. Keep him out of my way. Egg on my face, Coop?”
“Not the usual kind,” I said, reaching over with my napkin to wipe the ice cream from the side of his chin. “I’ll bite. Why the zoo?”
“Could be an orangutan, no?”
“You lost me.”
“Everything you ever taught me about Edgar Allan Poe. ‘Rue Morgue.’ The monstrously fierce killer who defied Parisian police’cause he could scale the sides of buildings and kill women, getting away undetected.”
“Perfect, Mike. The monkey did it. Flew over the gates of Mount Neboh with his headless torso before making his escape. The DA’ll be impressed.”
“Great ape, Coop. Orangutans are apes, not monkeys.” Mike was chewing a toothpick, his dark eyes flashing with the energy his breakfast provided. “How do I start, you want to know? Just like Poe. Ratiocination. Forget the hysterics that are going to surround this case and think rationally. Make sure no orangutans escaped from the zoo.”
We had worked a murder at the home of the great poet and storyteller years earlier, and Mike had devoured his tales of the bizarre and grotesque.
