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other people in his SABA group?"
Kittredge looked at Mike while he talked to me. "Hard to do. By the time
Emily got to me, school was out for the summer. The rehab meetings had been
confidential-you know the law, drug treatment stuff is privileged-so the
college didn't have any record of who attended."
"All you had was a half-assed confession, fueled by cocaine," Mike said.
"With no body, no crime scene, and not even a suspect I could put my hands
on. I kicked it around for a few months," Kittredge said.
Probably, I thought, for as long as Emily was putting out for him.
"Then my boss took me off it. He figured that she was just squealing on a guy
who had dumped her and we couldn't go digging up ground all over Manhattan
unless we had a report of somebody missing."
"You keep a file on it?" Mike asked.
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"There was the usual paperwork I did in the squad, back before we had
computers."
"Take any of your case folders with you? Something that might have names on-"
"For what? My memoirs?" Kittredge laughed as he walked to the front door and
put his hand on the knob.
"You mind if we come back to you when we have more information?" Mike said,
realizing the opportunity for conversation was about to be over.
"Try not to waste my time. Emily wasn't known for her taste in men. She
probably picked up one too many barflys with a rough edge. She just couldn't
keep off the juice, I guess."
We were back out on the stoop, headed for the car, when Mike's cell phone
rang. He opened it to say hello, and I could see the condensation of his
breath in the air. It made him look as though he was as fired up inside as I
figured him to be.
"Where? Does Scotty Taren know?" Mike asked, getting answers that he liked.
"Thanks, Hal. I owe you big-time."
I waited for him to unlock the car and let me inside. He slammed the door and
pursed his lips. "That was Hal Sherman. Looks like all the pressure of going
public with a patient's history may have been too much for Dr. Ichiko. He
killed himself today. They just found his body up in the Bronx."
19
"Why did Hal call you?" I asked. "It's Scotty's case now."
"'Cause Scotty's a stand-up guy. When Hal reached out to him, Scotty said to
play dumb and give me the first heads-up. After all, I was in the basement
after the skeleton was discovered and Hal took the photos. So it would make
sense for him to have to call me in order to find out that Taren's got the
case now. And why should I know McKinney forbade him to talk to you about it?"
"Don't think you're leaving me behind on this one."
"McKinney'll go nuts if you show up at the scene, Coop."
"That fact alone is enough to make me want to go twice as badly. You're
always telling me how much I'd love the Bronx. So far I've limited most of my
experience to Yankee Stadium. Now's your chance to show me the borough's
charms."
Mike had gone to college at Fordham and loved the rich history of the
borough, once the seventeenth-century farmland of Swedish-born Jonas Bronck,
the first European settler to live on the mainland northeast of Manhattan.
"Yeah, but a death scene wasn't my vision of an introduction."
"I guessCrime Factorwill have to go with a rerun for tonight's show. Dr.
Ichiko won't be revealing the identity of our skeleton on this episode. C'mon,
let's see what happened to this greedy shrink. Where to?"
Mike shifted into gear and pulled out into the traffic. "The gorge."
"What?"
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"The Bronx River Gorge."
"Never heard of it," I said, as he took advantage of the early evening lull
in traffic to race across town to the Triborough Bridge, and up the Major
Deegan Expressway to wind through what to me was the unfamiliar territory of
the Bronx.
"You've never been to the Botanical Gardens?"
"Not since I was a kid." I had grown up in the suburbs north of the city and
remembered visits to the gardens with my mother, who took me there for the
brilliant spring displays of roses and the seasonal show of dozens of orchid
varieties that she so loved.
"That's where we're headed. The gorge is inside the grounds of the Botanical
Gardens. The Fordham campus is right across the street."
"I know the hothouses and the-"
"No flowerpots, Coop. This is part of the Bronx River. You know that's the
only freshwater river in New York City?"
"What about the Hudson, or the East River?"
"They're tidal estuaries, Coop. You got to pay more attention to your
surroundings."
For much of the ride, Mike gave me the early history of the area. After its
discovery by Henry Hudson and its control by the Dutch West India Company as
New Netherland, there were frequent and violent clashes with the local Indian
tribes.
"You would have had your little prosecutorial hands full here, even in the
1640s."
"Doing what?"
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