Linda Fairstein - Cold Hit

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 1600 s. 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 207 th 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.