Chapter 1
It was after eight o'clock, and all I could see of the sun
was its gleaming crown as it slipped behind the row of
steep cliffs, giving off an iridescent pink haze that
signaled the end of a long August day. Brackish gray water
swirled and broke against the large rocks that edged the
mound of dirt on which I stood, spitting up at my ankles
as I stared out to the west at the Palisades. The pleats
of my white linen skirt, which had seemed so cool and
weightless as I moved about the air-conditioned courtroom
all afternoon, were plastered against my thighs by the
humidity, and I swatted off the mosquitoes as they
searched for a place to land on my forearms.
I turned away from the striking vista across the Hudson
River and glanced down at the body of the woman that had
snagged on the boulders less than an hour earlier.
The detective from the Crime Scene Unit reloaded his
camera and took another dozen shots. "Want a couple of
Polaroids to work from till I get you a full set of
blowups?" I nodded to him as he changed equipment, leaned
in above the head of his partially clothed subject, and
set off the flash attachment.
The old guy with the fishing rod who had made the grim
discovery was twitching nervously while he answered
questions hurled at him in Spanish by a young uniformed
cop from the Thirty-fourth Precinct. The officer pointed
at something bulging in the man's pocket, and the
fisherman's free hand shook uncontrollably as he pulled
out a small flask of red wine.
"Tell him to relax, Carrera," Detective Mike Chapman
called over to the rookie. "Tell him this one's a keeper.
Catch of the day. Haven't seen anything this clean pulled
out of these waters since Rip Van Winkle used it as a
bathtub."
Chapman and his good friend Mercer Wallace had been
talking with each other from the time Mercer and I reached
the site ten minutes earlier. They had walked away from me
so that Lieutenant Peterson could fill Mercer in on what
he and Mike had learned since being called to the scene,
while I stood at the woman's feet, staring down at her
from time to time, half hoping she would open her eyes and
speak to us. We were all waiting for one of the medical
examiners to arrive and take a look at the body so it
could be bagged and removed from this desolate strip of
earth on Manhattan's northernmost tip before onlookers
began to gather.
Hal Sherman rested his camera on top of the evidence
collection bag and wiped the rivulets of sweat off his
neck. "How'd you get here so fast?" he asked me.
"Mike was reaching out for Mercer to help him on this one
and got me in the deal. Mercer was down in court with me
for pretrial hearings in an old case when Mike beeped him.
Said he had a floater with a possible sexual assault, and
he wanted Mercer to look at her."
"Tell the truth, kid. You couldn't resist a night on the
town with the big guys, could you, blondie?" Chapman
asked, after coming over to check whether Sherman had
finished the photography. "Hey, Hal, who's the guy seems
like he's about to lose his lunch over there?"
We all turned to look at the man, not more than twenty-
five years old, who was leaning against a large boulder,
taking in deep breaths of air and cupping one hand over
his mouth. "Reporter for the Times, fresh out of
journalism school. This is his third assignment, tailing
me around to see how we process a crime scene. Two
burglaries in the diamond district, one arson in a high
school, and now -- Ophelia."
Chapman went into a squat next to the right side of the
woman's head, impatient with the presence of amateurs as
he set to work on what was clearly the start of a homicide
investigation. "Tell him he ought to look into getting the
gig for restaurant reviews, Hal. Much easier on the gut."
I stepped closer to watch Chapman go over the corpse
again, this time as he concentrated on details that he had
observed before our arrival and explained them to Mercer
Wallace. The two had been partners for several years in
Manhattan North's Homicide Squad, where Chapman still
worked, until Mercer had transferred over to Special
Victims to handle rape cases. Despite the differences in
their backgrounds and manner, they came together
seamlessly to work at a crime scene or on a murder
investigation.
Mercer, at forty, was five years older than Mike and I. He
was one of a handful of African American detectives who
had made first grade in the department, a detail man whom
every senior prosecutor liked to count on, in the field
and on the witness stand, to build a meticulous case. He
was as solid as a linebacker but had passed up a football
scholarship at Michigan to join the NYPD. Slower to smile
than Mike Chapman, Mercer was intense and steady, with a
sweetness of disposition that was, for those shattered
victims who encountered him, their first lifeline back to
a world of normalcy.
Mike Chapman was just over six feet tall, a bit shorter
than Mercer. His jet black hair framed his lean face,
momentarily somber as he reviewed the dead woman in front
of him. A graduate of Fordham College, where he worked his
way through school as a waiter and bartender, Mike had
never wavered in his determination to follow the career
path of his adored father, who had been a cop for more
than a quarter of a century. He had a grin that could coax
me out of almost any mood, and an encyclopedic knowledge
of American history and military affairs, which had been
his major concentration while in school.
"Four-point restraint," Chapman began, focusing his pen
like a pointer in a college classroom. The slender body
was resting on a wooden ladder about eight feet long. The
victim's ankles and wrists were bound to narrow rungs
above her head and below her feet. The cord used to hold
the woman in place was firmly knotted and secured. Longer
pieces of a thicker rope dangled from parts of the frame,
and two of them still had rocks attached to their tips.
Mercer was bending over now, looking at the extremities
from every angle. "Somebody went to an awful lot of
trouble to make sure this body didn't come to the surface
anytime before Christmas, wouldn't you say?"
He tugged at one of the loose lengths of rope, holding up
the ragged end, from which it appeared a weight -- perhaps
another rock -- had torn free.
Over the top of his head I could see Craig Fleisher, the
on-call medical examiner, walking toward us. He waved a
greeting and added, "Better move quickly, the vultures are
gathering." Next to his parked car the satellite dish
sitting above a Fox 5 television truck was suddenly
visible. The first field reporter had already picked up
word of the unusual find from a police scanner, and it
would take only minutes before other camera crews joined
him to try to get the most salacious shot of the corpse.
"What have you got, Mike? A drowning?" Fleisher asked.
"No way, Doc. Throwing her overboard was just a means of
disposing of the body." We all leaned in closer as Chapman
placed his hand on the crown of the woman's head and moved
it slightly to the side. He slipped his pen beneath her
matted black hair, which was still wet and splayed against
the wooden crosspieces of the ladder, then lifted it
gently to expose the scalp. "Skull was bashed in back
here, maybe with a gun butt or hammer. I'd bet you'll find
a fracture or two when you get in there tomorrow."
Fleisher studied the gaping wound. He was stone-faced and
calm, running his fingers over the rest of the rear of the
head. "Well, she wasn't in the water very long. Only a day
or two at best."
He repeated what Chapman had told us when Mercer and I
arrived. There was no putrefaction or decomposition, and
the bruises he noted on her body were probably
antemortem. "Fish and crabs usually get to work on the
soft tissue pretty quickly," he explained, "but the face
is completely intact here. Seems like they didn't have
much of a chance."
Fleisher had trained in San Diego, so although he was a
recent hire in New York, he was quite familiar with marine
deaths.
"Could be our lucky break, Doc," Chapman said. "The
killer -- or killers -- couldn't have picked a worse place
to dump a body if they expected to keep it from surfacing."
The doctor straightened up and scanned the area -- a
barren headland, just thirty feet long, that sat at the
end of a city street, nestled between Columbia
University's Baker Field and below the toll bridge leading
north out of Manhattan, to the Bronx. "That water sure
looks angry, doesn't it?"
"Spuyten Duyvil," said Chapman. "Welcome to the
neighborhood. It's an old Dutch name for this tidal strait
that connects the Harlem and Hudson Rivers, separates us
from the mainland."
Mike knew the background as well as I did. Settlers in New
Amsterdam had called it that in the early 1600s. In spite
of the devil, they said, because the waters were so very
rough, rocked by the tides in both directions. Passage
through it had been impossible for centuries, until the
government cut a canal almost one hundred years ago.
"Not that you'll see any Dutchmen around here now, Doc.
Rice and beans replaced Heineken's a few years back, if
you know what I mean. But they named it well."
The kid reporter had gotten to his feet and come up behind
me, out of direct view of the body but close enough to
listen to the conversation and jot down what we were
saying.
"You mind not putting anything on paper for the time
being?" Chapman asked, in a voice that was more of an
order than a question. "You'd be required to give your
scribbled musings to Miss Cooper here. It would become
discovery material for the trial and she'd have to turn
your notes over to the defense, once we catch the prick
who did this."
"But, but I'm -- uh -- there's a privil -- "
"You want to wait in the car while we do this, or you want
to stand here quietly like a good scout and count on your
memory to get this right? The local history you can find
in a book, the current events are off the record. Start
with the fact that she's got a crater the size of a teacup
in the back of her head and that nobody planned on her
doing any laps once she hit the water. Now keep out of my
way. Understood?"
Chapman turned back to our small group, which was huddled
around the body. Only the police divers, dressed in their
scuba gear and holding for directions, stood off to the
side as the rest of us waited for Fleisher to finish his
inspection. Wallace had sent Officer Carrera up to his
radio car to get a blanket, and he and another cop were
holding it open as a shield between the dead woman and the
curious busybodies who were gathering on 207th Street. He
opened his cell phone and called the local precinct for
crowd control backup as the news crew moved up within feet
of our operation.
"Who's the blonde?" I heard the Fox 5 news reporter ask
his cameraman.
"Alexandra Cooper. District Attorney's Office. Runs the
Sex Crimes Unit for the D.A., Paul Battaglia. Probably
means the cops think the deceased was raped. They always
bring her in on those cases."
I wanted to hear what else the cameraman was going to say
about our work, but Fleisher was talking again and I
focused back on his remarks.
"You've got a female Caucasian who I'd guess to be in her
late thirties." I had recently turned thirty-five, and I
peered down at the frozen gaze of the woman, wondering
what had brought her to this violent end, so
prematurely. "I'm not going to turn her over or do any
more work here, gentlemen. Too many eyes. But I'm certain
the cause will be blunt force trauma -- that blow to the
head which Chapman located for us. I don't think we'll
find any signs at autopsy that she was alive when she was
submerged."
Fleisher went on. "Possible sexual assault. We'll be
checking the vaginal vault for abrasions. I would doubt
there'll be seminal fluid of value, once the seawater
invaded. Hard to tell whether the missing clothes suggest
rape or the rough current ripping them out of place."
The well-toned body of the young woman still had a beige
silk shell covering her bra, and a skirt of the same
material. Both had tears and rips in the fine fabric. But
there were no underpants, and I noticed what appeared to
be finger marks embedded in the skin of her inner thighs.
"Doesn't look like a local girl, does she, Mercer?"
Chapman remarked. The Thirty-fourth Precinct still housed
some elegant old apartment buildings, but it was not one
of the tonier neighborhoods of the city. "Check out the
fingernails and pedicure. From the shape she's in, I'd bet
she spent a lot of time on the StairMaster."
The vermilion polish on her toes and nails had been
slightly chipped by her struggle with her assailant or by
the tides. It was clear that she had taken good care of
herself, until this week.
The Eyewitness News truck had joined the posse. "Hey,
Mike," I heard a voice call out from the far side of the
blanket Carrera was holding, "got anything for us?"
"Gimme a break, Pablo. Have a little respect for the dead.
C'mon, Doc. Can we get her out of here now?"
Fleisher told him to cover the body, move the waiting
ambulance in, and load up the ladder as it was, its cargo
still lashed to the wood. "Need anything else from me?"
Chapman shook his head and said he'd be at the morgue for
the autopsy proceeding the next day. He bent over and
noted the name of the manufacturer on the underside of the
ladder before an attendant loaded it onto the van.
"Summer backlog," Fleisher said. "I won't get to this one
until two P.M., and that's with jumping her over a few
unclaimed souls I've got in the cooler."
Four new arrivals from the precinct formed a human chain
to separate the growing crowd from the diminishing group
of us who were standing where the lady on the ladder had
been.
Chapman walked over to talk with the lieutenant, who was
watching the scuba team members tether themselves to huge
pieces of equipment that Emergency Services had ferried to
the scene. They were going to attempt to crawl around the
border of the whirling passage in the unlikely possibility
that they could feel for any evidence or weapon. It was
obvious that there would be nothing to see along the silt-
lined sides and bottom of the treacherous waterway gap.
"Don't waste their time or energy, Loo," Chapman urged
Peterson, using the informal nickname that rank evoked
from all detectives. "She didn't go into the drink
anywhere near here. Could have been Yonkers, could have
been the Bronx. It's just my good fortune that she stubbed
her toe and washed up on a little piece of Manhattan
North. I haven't picked up anything except drug shoot-outs
in weeks."
Only Mike Chapman would consider this discovery to be his
good fortune. I looked around the neglected plot that had
become this woman's temporary graveyard, its surface
littered with broken beer bottles, empty crack vials,
scores of spots of pigeon droppings, and a few dozen used
condoms.
Mercer Wallace came up beside me, grasping my elbow in his
enormous black hand and guiding me out to the street,
running interference for me through the rows of news teams
and the neighborhood cronies who were looking for
excitement now that darkness had fallen. He unlocked the
passenger door of his car and I ducked into the seat.
People moved back to the sidewalk as Mercer made a U-turn
on the narrow road, and we drove off. He turned in and out
of a maze of one-way streets, accelerating when he reached
Broadway, taking me downtown and across Central Park to my
apartment, on the Upper East Side. I was silent for blocks.
"Where are you, Alex? Talk to me. I can't let you go
upstairs alone just thinking about that body. She'll be
with you all night. You'll never close your eyes."
I knew that without being told. But I was deeply
distressed and much too wired to sleep after what we had
just seen, despite my exhaustion from a couple of weeks of
hard-fought courtroom battle in front of a demanding
judge. "Thanks, Mercer. Just wondering about the obvious,
knowing that there aren't any logical answers. I'll be
fine."
"We'll get him, Alex. It doesn't seem very likely tonight.
But Chapman and me, we'll get him. In spite of the devil,
Miss Cooper. In spite of the devil."
Copyright © 1999 by Linda Fairstein