Linda Fairstein - Lethal Legacy

Hal was ready with his camera and flash. He moved in over Tina Barr’s body and focused his lens on her face and neck while Dr. Assif backed out of the way.

“Did the guys in the office check the weather service for you, Mercer?” Mike asked. “What time is sunrise?”

“Six-thirteen.”

“Then tell the lieutenant we need sixty, maybe eighty uniformed guys here at six-eleven this morning to walk a grid,” Mike said. “I don’t care where the commissioner pulls them from. They’re going to have to eyeball every piece of equipment that moves out of here, talk to every single stagehand who set up this gig. Maybe looking in the grass for a knife or blade-anything sharp that could have done the job. Probably a complete waste of time, but it’s got to be done.”

“You think Tina was dumped here before the game?” I asked.

“Hard to know. The outside of the tarp was a mess. Footprints all over it. Could have been dumped here-wheeled over on one of these dollies-while the crew was busy unloading everything. The park must have looked like an anthill on fire, getting stuff in place for the game.”

Mike lifted the edge of Tina Barr’s sweater and reached into her right pants pocket. There was nothing in his gloved hand when he removed it.

I kneeled down beside him.

“Jeez, Coop. What the hell did you do? Put a clove of garlic in your Chanel bottle?”

I covered my mouth with my hand. “Sorry.”

“Something I don’t know? You’re being stalked by a vampire? At least you and Joanie had time for a good dinner,” Mike said, reaching across Tina’s body into her other pocket. “Here’s something.”

He sat back on his heels and held up a small laminated tag on a long chain. “It’s her library ID-the original one,” Mike said. “She must have been dying to get back in there to get a book.”

I stood up and turned away from the body. There was no point in trying to change Mike’s ways, to discourage the black humor that got him through the relentlessly dark territory of his work.

“Maybe she was dying to get out,” I said.

He turned to look at me for the first time since I had arrived at the scene. “Not a bad thought. Wouldn’t have been a long haul to get her here, but where the hell could she have been inside that place that was so isolated? It’s for scholars and students, for Chrissakes. Me, I think there’s just some kind of symbolism in this. Somebody making a statement by dumping her right at the back door of the library.”

Hal snapped close-ups of the tag, front and back, and Mike placed it in a paper bag to send to the lab. He went back into the woman’s pocket, withdrew a folded slip of paper, and opened it to read.

“Hey, Coop. Isn’t this a call slip?”

He lifted the small rectangular piece so that I could see it. “Yes,” I said. “It’s got Tina’s name on it and Tuesday’s date.”

Mike lifted the corner and below it was a pink slip, then a yellow one, both attached at the end to the top paper. “It’s still in triplicate. Looks like she didn’t submit it.”

“What book was she asking for?”

“ Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, an 1866 edition. Mercer, you got a bag for this?” Mike asked. “Maybe she realized her landlady, Minerva Hunt, really is a Mad Hatter.”

“Just a minute, Mike,” Hal Sherman said. “There’s some writing on the back.”

He took a photograph of the front of the slip, then Mike turned it over.

“What does it say?” I asked.

Hal bent over and started to read. “‘The evil that men do…’”

“That’s all?” Mike said.

“Why? There should be more?”

“‘The evil that men do lives after them,’” Mike said, picking up the paper after Hal took a picture of it, and getting to his feet. “Finish it off, Coop.”

“‘The good are oft interred with their bones.’”

Mike winked at Hal. “ Julius Caesar, Detective Sherman.”

“Quite the poet, Mikey,” Hal said, backing away from Tina Barr. “I’m impressed.”

“Coop knows her Shakespeare. I know my Roman generals.”

One of the cops holding up the sheets lowered a corner to tell Mike that the men were ready to put Tina Barr in a body bag and get her into the ambulance.

We all stood still, silent for a moment, saying our own goodbyes to the slain woman. Then Mike nodded at one of the officers, signaling for the morgue attendants to take her away.

As I moved to make room for the men, the quiet within our space was broken by the shrill ring of a cell phone. A second ring, and I realized the sound was coming from somewhere on Tina’s body.

Mike kneeled again and slid his hand beneath her, pulling something from her rear pants pocket. “You answer it, Coop. It’s a woman they’re expecting to hear,” he said, passing me the razorthin phone eerily buzzing for its dead owner.

I flipped it open and muffled my voice with my hand, saying, “Hello.”

The caller waited a few seconds, then disconnected. I could have sworn I heard him laugh before he did.

I was waiting in the lobby of my building when Mike and Mercer pulled in the driveway just after seven a.m. that morning.

“Did you two get any sleep?” I asked, climbing into the back seat.

“Catnap on cots up at the squad,” Mercer said. “How about you?”

“I rested.” No matter how many murder victims I had seen, it never got easier to find a peaceful zone that wasn’t already inhabited by killers and cops.

“No whining, then, Coop,” Mike said. “We got a long day ahead of us.”

“You never heard that girl whine, Mr. Chapman. Mind your mouth.”

I had been comforted to have Luc beside me when I got home several hours ago, holding me and not asking any questions once I told him the bare outline of what had happened. At six, I had gotten out of bed again to call Battaglia with the news, knowing that he would prefer to be awakened with information from me rather than learning it from a newspaper headline on his doorstep.

“What’s first?” I asked.

“How about the New York Pubic Library?” Mike said. “Thanks for giving me Jill Gibson’s number. I phoned her after you left, to tell her about Tina. She agreed to be here early to have security let us in. Said we’d meet her at seven-thirty.”

Mercer opened the lid on a cardboard cup of black coffee and passed it to me as Mike pulled out of the driveway.

“Still no contact for Tina’s mother?”

“The lieutenant is sending someone to the Mexican consulate first thing. See if they can smoke her out that way.”

“My paper hasn’t been delivered yet. Is there a story?”

Mercer held up the Times and tabloids. “Lucky for us, the body was found too late for the morning news. May give us a few hours’ jump on talking to people.”

“I’ve got to get through to legal at the phone company. Let them know that subpoena I sent out covers the call that came in this morning,” I said. Tina Barr was dead, but her cell phone account was still live.

“Freaked me out when that sucker started to ring,” Mike said.

Mike got onto the drive in Central Park, looping around to the West Side and exiting on Central Park South. He cruised down Seventh Avenue, turning east onto Forty-second Street -the Deuce, in police parlance-and parked beside the corner entrance to Bryant Park.

The mild weather was a break for the cops. Plainclothes detectives were lined up along the balustrade on the western border of the park, doing one-on-one interviews with men who appeared to be from the JumboTron construction crew. Huge trucks bordered the avenue, waiting to be loaded with equipment that should have been taken off-site in the early hours of the morning, before Tina Barr’s body was found.