Of course Emma Palmer had a shower. How else to get the day’s distinctive odor and debris off? It was behind another door in the bathroom. I went inside and turned it on, opening cabinets and drawers to find a clean towel and shampoo.
I waited for steam to form in the shower, then stepped in. I lathered my hair and held my face up to the showerhead, rubbing my skin so hard that I thought the top layer might come off in my hands.
After I toweled off and combed out my hair, I put on the one-size-fits-all underpants, courtesy of the Bellevue ER. There was room for at least one more woman inside the cheap, stretchy panties with me. Palmer hadn’t thought of giving me a bra, but no one would even notice that since I didn’t do much to come close to filling a B-cup.
I was thirty-eight years old and five feet ten inches tall. Dr. Palmer was in her midfifties, also tall and lean. Her zippered jogging jacket fit me fine, and the pants were a size six too, so I was all set to meet my interrogators.
I padded out of the bathroom in crime scene booties, which Palmer had also left for me.
When I reached her office, the door was open. Mike was inside, talking to Mercer Wallace. They were alone together.
Mercer dwarfed both of us in sheer physical size. He didn’t say a word to me, but grabbed me by my shoulders and pulled me close to him.
He was a Special Victims detective—with as much empathy and warmth as he had intelligence and skill. Like me, he appreciated the need to handhold his victims and get them through the cold criminal justice system intact. Mike, on the other hand, worked homicide as much because it spared him dealing with living victims as because he did the job so well.
“What’s going on?” I said to him. “Wake me up from this nightmare, will you?”
“No need to talk, Alex,” Mercer said. “Plenty of time for that. You need to take a few minutes to gather your thoughts and get yourself together. Just hold tight.”
I took a few deep breaths, cushioned against Mercer’s powerful chest.
“Just get through the next few hours,” Mercer said. “This will be over before you know it.”
“Did you see anything, Mercer?” I asked, twisting my head around to look up at him.
“I was still inside the museum,” he said. “But it wouldn’t matter if I did. They need to talk to you first.”
“Will you wait for me?”
“Of course we will,” Mike said. “You’re going to like Kate Tinsley.”
“Major Case?” Mercer asked.
“Yeah. I worked a serial killer with her two years ago. A couple of years older than you, Coop. Totally stand-up broad.”
“I hear the homicide cop is—” I started to repeat Hal Sherman’s description, but stopped in my tracks when Mike held his hand up in my face.
“All depends who you heard it from,” the man in the doorway said. “I’m Stern. Detective Jaxon Stern. Brooklyn South.”
Mike held out a hand to shake, taking the detective’s business card with his left hand. “Mike Chapman. Manhattan North.”
“Mercer Wallace,” my friend said, letting go of me to make the proper introduction. “Manhattan Special Victims Unit.”
“Wallace? I’m Stern,” the detective said.
He was shorter than all three of us—a stocky five foot eight, and lighter-skinned than Mercer. If he owned a smile, we hadn’t seen it yet.
“I’m Alexandra Cooper,” I said.
“Somebody give you permission to shower?” Stern asked.
“I—I—uh . . . I had to get myself—I—I—I had to clean myself up,” I said.
“The medical examiner went over her from head to toe when we got here,” Mike said. “She swabbed some samples from stuff that landed on Coop’s skin and in her hair, and Hal Sherman has a complete set of photographs.”
“I expect that will be the last question you answer for her, Chapman,” Stern said. “She’ll get over her stammering, I promise you.”
Mike was biting the inside of his cheek as he stared at the detective’s card. “Jaxon. J-A-X-O-N?” Mike asked, a bit too snidely. “Your mother didn’t have spell-check on her laptop when she went into labor?”
“Spare me the ‘yo mama’ jokes, Chapman. It’s an old family name.”
“Okay, Jaxon,” Mike said, “what’s your plan?”
“I said it’s Stern, man. Detective Stern. No need to get so cozy on our first date.”
“Break it up, both of you. This sounds like kindergarten, guys,” Mercer said. “It’s been a long night for the three of us, Stern. You want Ms. Cooper?”
“Yeah, I do.”
“Here?”
“Dr. Palmer said we could use her office,” Stern said, looking around and eyeing the chair behind Palmer’s desk. “This is good. Tinsley’s just signing in at the front door. You know about her, Ms. Cooper—she’s the officer you’re going to like.”
“Okay if I get her a Diet Coke from the machine before you start talking to her?” Mike asked Stern.
“If it helps sober her up.”
“Who the hell do you think you are, Detective?” I said, too loud for my own good, slamming my hand down on the desk. “Where’s the lieutenant? Where’s the commissioner? I don’t have to take any flak from you.”
“See that, Chapman? She’s got no stutter at all,” Stern said. He threw his memo book on Palmer’s desk and walked around it to stand behind her high-backed chair. “Word on the street says you’ve got yourself a bit of an alcohol problem, Ms. Cooper.”
“The only problem I have at the moment is you, Detective Stern.”
I had done the surname thing myself, more times than I could count. The formality kept the witness at arm’s length and made her—in this case, me—doubly aware that we weren’t buddies while in this hunt, even if I thought we were working for the same purpose.
“Have you been drinking tonight, Ms. Cooper?” Stern asked.
The physical dynamic in the room was disconcerting. No question Stern had put himself in the driver’s seat, behind Palmer’s enormous metal desk. Mike had moved toward the door to go to the vending machine, and now the only thing keeping him from taking a jab at Stern was Mercer’s long left arm, holding him back.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Alcohol. I think you know exactly what I mean.”
“I was kidnapped a month ago, Detective. I—I’ve been struggling with some PTSD issues for a few weeks, but I’m beating it now, okay?”
“Dewar’s. Rocks. No twist,” Stern said to me. “Have a familiar ring?”
“You’re a quick study, Detective,” Mike said. “I hope you know half as much about the cases she’s tried and the assholes she’s sent up the river and the pedophiles she’s put away and the team of prosecutors she leads and—”
“Get the soda for her, Chapman,” Stern said. “I asked you if you’ve been drinking tonight, Ms. Cooper.”
I looked at Mercer, but he was stone-faced. I knew Stern was giving me the most basic test questions, as irrelevant as they were to Battaglia’s murder. He would later ask Mercer and Mike the same things about me, trying to assess the credibility of each one of us—checking to see if any of us would lie for the other.