the others’ backs from any outside attacks. We came to this alliance from backgrounds so different that sometimes it was inconceivable to me that we understood one another as well as we did.
“How soon till we find out who she is? That’s what I’m thinking about.”
“Somebody’ll miss her, Coop.”
“And who did she cross to come to such a hideous end?”
The counterman walked over to the booth to refill our mugs.
“It’s the setting that gets me,” Mike said. “Does Neboh speak to you, Mercer?”
Mercer had been born in Harlem and worked in Manhattan North Homicide with Mike before transferring to Special Victims. He knew the streets and the people, even though he had been raised in Queens by his father—a mechanic for Delta at LaGuardia Airport—after his mother’s death in childbirth. He was forty-two, five years older than I, and married to another detective, Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a young son.
“I’m not sure. Like Gaskin said, Mount Olivet Baptist, that was built as a synagogue too. It was Temple Israel in 1906. Abandoned with white flight. Baptist since 1926. They took the ark the Torah used to sit in and turned it into a baptismal pool.”
“So?” Mike asked, crunching the bacon while he talked.
“You said that you and Alex were headed to 120th and Lenox because of the fingertips in a garbage pail on the street.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s only one block from Mount Olivet. Gives something to your theory that the dead woman’s religion may be tied up in this. I mean, the best-known Baptist church in Harlem is Abyssinian. Built Baptist, stayed Baptist. Your murderer wants to send a message about Baptists, that’s where he goes. Not to both of these recycled synagogues.”
“Maybe he didn’t know Neboh’s history,” I said. “I certainly didn’t.”
“Too much of a coincidence, then, that he chose both Neboh and Olivet. I think Mike’s onto something.”
Mike’s investigative instincts were probably in his DNA. His father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated cops in the NYPD, proud that his son had excelled in academics and had chosen Fordham University, majoring in history, as a way out of the dangerous street life in which his own career had been forged.
Two days after retiring from the force, while Mike was in his junior year at Fordham, Brian Chapman died of a massive coronary. Mike honored his promise to get his degree but immediately enrolled in the Police Academy to follow his passion, to shadow the steps of the man he most revered. Six months older than I—thirty-eight—Mike’s bachelor existence had only once been threatened by a serious romance, which ended in the accidental death of the young architect to whom he’d been engaged.
“You got a dish of ice cream? Chocolate, two scoops?” Mike called out to the waiter. Then to Mercer, “So how did Abyssinians get involved with New York City Baptists?”
“Goes back two hundred years, right down near the courthouse. Way before we were known as black or African American, seems the Negroes didn’t like being segregated—forced to sit apart—while they were worshipping in God’s house. It was a bunch of rich Ethiopian merchants who broke away from the First Baptist Church, way down on Worth Street, to start this one.”
“Where do you begin to look for a woman’s head?” I asked.
“She’s fixated on that, Mercer.” Mike was starting to soften his frozen dessert by swirling the spoon around and around the dish. “Coop’s not going to be happy until we have all the body parts.”
“Don’t play with your food,” I said.
“They teach you that at Wellesley, Miss Manners?”
I was the most incongruous part of our trio. My parents’ middleclass existence changed radically during my childhood when my father, a cardiologist, and his research partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that was used in almost every open-heart surgical procedure worldwide for nearly two decades thereafter. We moved to Harrison, an upscale suburb in Westchester County, and my parents were able to provide my brothers and me with the best educational opportunities available—for me, at Wellesley, where I majored in English literature before getting my JD degree at the University of Virginia School of Law.
They fostered my interest in public service and were pleased that I found such fulfillment in my work as an advocate for women and children who’d been victims of intimate violence. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was the premier prosecutorial model in the country, and I had thrived there under the leadership of Paul Battaglia and his hand-chosen staff of dedicated