Terminal City - Couverture rigide

Fairstein, Linda A.

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 1410466701 ISBN 13 : 9781410466709

Editeur : Thorndike Pr, 2014

A propos du livre

Extrait :

***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof.***

Copyright © 2014 by Linda Fairstein

ONE

“Not a pretty way to die, Alexandra.”

The lieutenant of Manhattan South’s Homicide Squad opened the door to the luxury hotel suite on the forty-fifth floor at the Waldorf Astoria on Park Avenue.

“You know of one, Loo?” I asked, following him through the elegantly appointed living room. “I mean a pretty way.”

Rocco Correlli shrugged his shoulders and shook his head. He had been on the job for almost thirty years and seen more corpses than most guys in the bureau could now lay claim to, as the city’s murder rate continued its dramatic decline.

“Mike Chapman’s got one.” Pug McBride was behind me, practically stepping on my heels in his effort to stay close to Correlli. The short detective, square-bodied with a wrinkled face like the dog for which he was nicknamed, was as annoying as he was good-natured. “Says he’d like to die in bed with Gisele Bundchen’s body double—fourth down, goal to go.”

Correlli stopped short at the open bedroom door. “Shut it, Pug.”

“Yeah, I guess that’s why Mike got jammed up. In the wrong bed at the wrong time.”

I was wedged between Correlli’s back and McBride’s barrel chest. His warm Marlboro-laced breath hit the back of my neck each time he opened his mouth. I trusted that neither man could see the color rise in my face at the mention of Chapman’s name.

“I got the DA here,” Correlli said to someone standing with the body inside the room.

“Better buy him a cocktail first.”

I saw the flash of a camera go off. The speaker was Hal Sherman, one of the great pros in the Crime Scene Unit, whose voice was all too familiar to me.

“She’s already had one, Hal.”

“Was it Scotch?” Hal said. “Does that mean I actually drew the Coopster?”

“Hey, Hal. You going to let me in?”

Sherman framed himself in the archway of the open door. “Good evening, Alex. I’d hoped you had better things to do tonight than come out on this one. You gotta learn to delegate, girl. Can’t always be a control freak.”

“I did delegate, as a matter of fact. Had one of the new kids in the unit on the chart.”

The Special Victims Unit of the District Attorney’s Office, which I had headed for more than a decade, used an on-call system, just like the prosecutors working homicides. That meant we rode investigations 24/7 in partnership with the NYPD—going to crime scenes, running lineups, interviewing suspects on video after the initial police interrogation—all designed to enhance the viability of the legal case that developed from the evidence collected.

“What was the matter? No booties or gloves that fit her?”

I glanced down at my outfit. Rocco made me glove up before I got on the elevator in the lobby. “She’s three months pregnant.”

“Probably throws up enough every day without having to see this crap, too,” Pug said.

I rolled my eyes. “When Mercer called me, he was figuring she’d be on maternity leave by the time we’d need to go to trial.”

Rocco Correlli stepped to the side. He had straight silver-gray hair, a bit too long around the edges, and strong features that complemented his lean, angular build. “That’s assuming we catch the bastard.”

“Alex always assumes that,” Hal said. “It’s why she pushes us so hard.”

Mercer Wallace was the best Special Victims detective in the city and one of my closest friends. He had worked homicide for years—the highest-ranking African American in the squad and one of the few to be promoted to first grade—but requested the transfer to SVU because he preferred working with survivors of violent crime to handling murders. His compassion and gentle nature had helped scores of women and children in their recovery from the trauma of sexual assault.

“Are we waiting for Mercer?” I asked.

“He’s downstairs with hotel security,” the lieutenant said, “setting them up with a team of detectives to watch video surveillance tapes from the last seventy-two hours. No telling when he’ll get back up here. This place is vast.”

“But there are so many cameras in the Waldorf, Loo. We could get lucky in a few hours,” I said.

“From your lips.”

“Now let me see the girl.”

“Take a deep breath, Alex.” Hal waved a licorice sucking candy under my nose. I opened my mouth and accepted it like a communion wafer, even though it was small protection against the powerful odor of death.

I walked behind Hal, careful to avoid the areas of thick beige carpeting that were stained a dark red. The heavy silk drapes, rose-colored with a rich brocade trim, were drawn shut. Lamps on the dresser and night tables were lighted, and Hal’s auxiliary spotlight equipment was directed at the unmade king bed. I skirted the chaise and sofa, then saw the body of the young woman, sprawled on her back on top of the rumpled sheets.

My eyes arrested on her neck. Her head was turned to the side, away from me, but there was a slice deep into her flesh that extended from behind her ear down to the top of her throat and then across her slim neck till it disappeared out of my line of sight. Beneath the far side of her head the blood pooled and had seeped into the bedding. The killer had deposited drops—large globs of the thick dark stain—as he walked away from his victim. Those were the markings on the carpet that led out of this death chamber toward the front door.

“Had anything like this, Alex?”

Rocco had given me time to take in the scene. The well-toned body of the woman was exposed to all of us, memorialized in photographs that would be studied in a courtroom if I overcame an adversary’s cry of prejudice, and soon to be dissected by a first-rate medical examiner in the grimmest room in New York City.

My first instinct—anything but prosecutorial—was to restore some of her dignity and lift the sheet over her torso. Instead, I bit my lip and studied the position of the lower body—legs splayed to reveal a patch of dark, curly pubic hair.

“No,” I said. “Nothing.”

The lieutenant wanted to know whether I had encountered any victims who had survived a similar assault—raped and left for dead with a deep knife wound to the neck. Rocco Correlli would not have received reports of survivors from the Special Victims Unit, but my team would have known of anyone operating with a similar modus operandi.

I folded my arms and stared at the body again, from the tips of her manicured toes to the lines that appeared to have been sliced by a sharp instrument into her upper thighs, past the gaping wound that killed her, to the top of her matted brunette hair. “I’m sure you’ve checked with North.”

Rocco’s superb team of homicide detectives covered the southern half of the island of Manhattan, responding to all the unnatural deaths that occurred from the lower border of Central Park on 59th Street to the tip of the Battery. Manhattan North had the rest of the real estate—the park itself, the Upper East and Upper West Sides, Harlem and Spanish Harlem, to the border created by Spuyten Duyvil Creek, looking across to the Bronx. It was Detective Mike Chapman’s turf, run by a veteran lieutenant named Ray Peterson, with whom I’d worked dozens of cases.

“Nada. It’s like a monster that emerged from the deep and decided to commit a very professional job of slaughtering a broad smack in the middle of town, at one of the most prestigious addresses in Manhattan. No priors like it, nothing to suggest escalating from a pattern of serial rapes. It’s like he came out of nowhere.”

“Nobody comes out of nowhere, boss,” Pug said.

“And disappeared back into nowhere,” Rocco said, ignoring Pug McBride.

“Who is she?” I said.

“No ID yet. You’ve asked me that three times. Impatience isn’t your best feature.”

“How about the suite? Who’s it registered to?”

“Nobody. That’s the thing. It’s been empty for four days. Housekeeper came in around five p.m. to ready it for an arrival tomorrow.”

“You thinking inside job? Hotel employee?”

“Start there. Management made an effort to shut down the place—well, slow it down anyway—as soon as the 911 call went in.”

“How is it possible to function if they do that? How many rooms have they got?”

“One thousand five hundred and seven, including these suites in the Towers.”

The Waldorf Astoria occupied an entire square block, with a grand entrance fronting on Park Avenue, and rear doors—several of them—facing Lexington. Over time it had been home to Cole Porter, Bugsy Siegel, Marilyn Monroe, and General Douglas MacArthur. Its large ballroom was nightly the site of black-tie dinners for every New York City charity, national political fund-raiser, and rubber-chicken corporate event.

“So it’s impossible to close the place off, Loo.”

“They’ve been extremely cooperative. The night manager has called in all his supervisory staff and they’re trying to account for everyone’s whereabouts the last three days. The entire employee list is online, so we’ll be doing background checks throughout the night.”

“How long has she been dead?”

It wouldn’t matter how intently I stared at the body. I couldn’t help the woman, nor did I have Rocco’s expertise in estimating things like time of death.

“I’m thinking day and a half, maybe more.”

“No medical examiner?”

“Johnny Mayes. I thought he’d beat you here.”

“Mercer caught me on my way home. I wasn’t far from the hotel.” The District Attorney’s Office was in Lower Manhattan, just north of city hall. My apartment was in a high-rise only twenty blocks north of the Waldorf. Most days I drove downtown to work, parking on the street with the laminated plaque that identified me as a prosecutor. I was only five minutes from the hotel when Mercer reached me at 7:20 this evening. “I’ll wait for him.”

Mayes was one of the best forensic pathologists in the country. I learned something every time he examined a body, explaining the damage each weapon had caused or the kind of force necessary to result in death. It was extremely comfortable to work with him, to know the deceased was in his capable hands, to witness how he teased so much information from a silent, often reluctant corpse.

“Take your last look, Alex.” The lieutenant was fidgety, anxious to get me out of the way.

“The marks on her thighs, you make anything of them?”

“Leave it to the doc. They seem sort of superficial to me.”

“I get that. I mean the cuts, you think they form any kind of design?”

“Hal made photos,” Rocco said, taking his gloved hands out of his pockets to lean in, his head directly over the girl’s flat abdomen, peering down at her scarred legs. “Two parallel lines, kind of even, inch and a half long. With short strips going crosswise, like the rungs of a ladder.”

“I mean they’re really even. They look so deliberately drawn.”

“Carved, not drawn. You’ve seen that before?”

“I told you no, Rocco. I’m just thinking that here comes this killer who gets into the hotel, maybe he encounters his victim here—in the hallway or even the bar—entirely by chance.”

The Bull and Bear was a fixture in the New York scene, regularly crowded with businessmen and lawyers, conventioneers and tourists, highbrows and hookers.

“Maybe she works here,” Pug said.

“They’re scoping that out. There are thousands of staffers here. Must be ten at the front desk alone,” Rocco said. The check-in area was so large it took up half the length of the lobby. “You got house-keeping, kitchen and room service, engineering, reservations, maintenance, security, administration, a beauty parlor, a barber shop, a jewelry store that sells diamonds as big as the Ritz. Who’d even miss one girl?”

“I tell you what,” Pug said, with a sideways glance at the bed. “That particular one I’d be missing.”

“What I was saying is that somehow the killer gets in. Like he just walks in off the street. He meets the girl, Rocco.”

“Or he comes in off Park Avenue with her,” Pug said, interrupting again.

“That should show on the surveillance tapes. But it’s a crime of impulse, don’t you think?”

“Why’s that?” Rocco said, pointing the way back to the living room.

“Because he didn’t stop to take a room, did he? He never checked in.”

“Nope. But how would he have known this suite was empty?”

“Easy to get that information if he works here.” I said. “Or maybe he just got lucky trying doors. Could be he’s a scam artist, burglarizing rooms with a master key card. My point is that if this was a rape—an impulsive act—and the girl resisted, the perp might have gone berserk and slit her throat to shut her up.”

I turned back to look at the body again, but Rocco made it clear he wanted me out. “If you’re waiting for her to wake up, Alex, you’re out of luck. Move on now.”

“But what doesn’t fit with that kind of crime of opportunity are the marks he etched on her thighs,” I said. “Too neat. Way too carefully drawn.”

“You can’t have it both ways, Alex,” Pug said.

“I’m just saying it’s odd. The fatal wounds are inconsistent with the careful markings on her thighs. Disorganized killer versus very meticulous artist.”

“Maybe he did the legs first,” Rocco said. “Maybe he tortured her.”

You couldn’t look at the young woman’s body and not think torture.

I crossed the threshold into the living room. Rocco directed me through the door and across the hallway, into another suite that management had given him to use as a mini command center. Several uniformed cops nodded at me when I entered. Before too long it would be swarming with detectives from the local precinct and Major Case.

“Want some coffee?” Rocco said.

“Sure.”

He poured us each a cup, then proceeded to tell me what his men would spend the night doing.

“Have you put out a photo of her yet?”

“No way, Alex. Her clothes are gone, there’s no form of ID around, and I can’t release a picture until Johnny Mayes cleans her up.”

“Are they doing a vertical search of the hotel?”

“Waiting on Commissioner Scully to give me a platoon of guys to do that. There must be thirty elevator banks, staircases everywhere, and all those thousands of doors to knock on.”

“It’s Pug’s case?”

Rocco Correlli took a sip of the hot coffee, scowling as he put it to his lips. “Scully wants someone with more polish as the front man. Pug’s too likely to step on his own dick when the first reporter goes after some off-the-record lead. Mercer’s on loan till we come up with a better idea.”

“That makes it easy for me.” Mercer and I had partnered more times than I could count.

“The word easy isn’t in the mix, Alex. I’ve got to put a face and name to the body, quell the public hysteria about a murder in a Midtown landmark, and figure out who this madman is and where he came from.”

“Not to mention where he went.” I thought of the images of the two ladderlike designs on the victim’s long legs. “And who’s at risk going forward.”

“I’ve got less than a week to deliver.”

“Scully understands what a massive job this will be. It will take that long to study the hotel’s surveillance tapes, top to bottom of the building. He can’t be serious about a deadline.”

Rocco Correlli rested his mug on...

Présentation de l'éditeur :

With her newest Alexandra Cooper novel, Terminal City, New York Times bestselling author Linda Fairstein delivers another breakneck thriller that captures the essence of New York City—its glamour, its possibilities, and its endless capacity for darkness.

Linda Fairstein is well-known for illuminating the dark histories in many of New York’s forgotten corners—and sometimes in the city’s most popular landmarks. In Terminal City, Fairstein turns her attention to one of New York's most iconic structures—Grand Central Terminal.

Grand Central Terminal is the very center of the city. It’s also the sixth most visited tourist attraction in the world. From the world’s largest Tiffany clock decorating the Forty-Second Street entrance to using electric trains since the early 1900s, Grand Central has been a symbol of beauty and innovation in New York City for more than one hundred years.

But “the world’s loveliest station” is hiding more than just an underground train system, and in Terminal City Alex Cooper and Mike Chapman must contend with Grand Central’s dark secrets as well as their own changing relationship.

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Thorndike Pr
• Date d'édition: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1410466701
• ISBN 13: 9781410466709
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 597