Fairstein, Linda: Silent Mercy

“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.”

“WHATtime 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 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.”