Cold Hit Read Free Page A

the soul.
    “Sorry, Alex. It’s almost ten o’clock,” said Clare at P. J. Bernstein’s delicatessen. “We’re just closing up.”
    I never cooked at home, so I knew there would be nothing in the refrigerator. I had cans of soup in the cabinet, but it was too warm out to entertain the thought of hot soup. I put some ice cubes in a glass, moving on to the den to fix myself a stiff Dewar’s. A mystery novel waited for me next to my bed, but there was nothing like the sight of a real corpse to alienate me from the genre for a couple of weeks. Jake had left a dog-eared Henry James on my dresser. Perhaps I’d start that instead of trying to go to sleep.
    I hadn’t bothered to turn on the lights before I sat on the sofa, drink in hand, and gazed out over the city. Soft music from my CD system distracted me until Linda Ronstadt began to sing about the hungry women down on Rue Morgue Avenue. I flashed again to the body on the ladder and visualized the setting where it rested tonight.
    The sharp buzz of the phone startled me. I caught it on the third ring.
    “You almost sound happy to hear from me for a change.”
    “Mike?” I asked, having hoped it would be Jake.
    “Wrong voice, huh? Don’t go getting dejected ’cause it’s me. It’s not like I’m the Unabomber or Ted Bundy calling you for a quick squeeze. The lieutenant asked me to get hold of you. Says he’d really like you to be at Compstat in the morning.”
    Compstat — comparative computer statistics — the NYPD’s hot new demonstration for leadership accountability. Meetings held at headquarters several times a month, in the War Room, to show off the commissioner’s ability to identify and solve the city’s crime problems.
    “What time do I have to be there?”
    “Seven o’clock sharp. Seems the brass went berserk over this one tonight — it screws up all the mayor’s statistics for the month. The commish may even call on you if he gets frisky and wants answers for all his questions, or wants to blame your boss for refusing to prosecute some of the quality-of-life cases.”
    “Thanks for the warning.”
    “You sound really flat, kid. You okay?”
    “My head’s still back at Spuyten Duyvil, if you know what I mean. Want to grab a pizza and come on up here for supper?”
    “Sorry, Coop. It’s almost eleven o’clock. We’ll be working most of the night, trying to figure out who this broad is and when she got popped in the river. See you at reveille. Better sleep with the night-light on.”
    It wasn’t the dark that frightened me. It was the fact that moving around out there, below my window, were creatures capable of splitting open the head of a young woman and throwing her body into the water. I stared out at the lights of Manhattan for the next hour, watching them gradually go off as people went to sleep. And all the time, as I sat awake, I thought about the monsters who walk among us.
     
3
     
    There were still a few cars parked on Hogan Place near my office, most of which belonged to the lawyers working the midnight shift in night court, when I pulled my Jeep into a reserved slot behind the district attorney’s space at six forty-five on Friday morning. I took the shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities in some third-world country. I stopped at a cart being wheeled into place by one of the regular street vendors and bought two cups of black coffee, remembering that the brew served in the hallway outside the meeting room was too weak to start me up for the day.
    One by one, black Crown Vics with red flashers mounted on each dashboard pulled into the tightly secured parking garage beneath Police Headquarters, marking the arrival of bosses from all the commands in Manhattan North, the upper half of the