East Harlem
November 28, 3.00 p.m.
‘Here’s your guy,’ Eddie said as he tossed a folder into Harper’s lap. ‘This drawing is based on the description given by Lucy James’s boyfriend.’ The police drawing was a close enough fit to the man they’d seen at the store. The big guy with the red turtleneck. They had an ID but no name.
The next part was harder — finding someone in a city of eight million. Mo was likely to be on foot. As far as they knew he didn’t have a vehicle so he was likely to be only a short distance from the 7-Eleven and Washington House. All they had to do was get a team together and start asking the streetwalkers and searching the areas in the radius.
Eddie had done a job on this one too. He hadn’t told Tom a thing. They pulled into the car park of North General Hospital in East Harlem and there in front of them were six detectives from the NYPD. Cops who had not taken to the mayor’s bureaucratic reforms. They wanted to help out a cop with good instincts. They also wanted to shake the hand of the man who’d floored Lieutenant Jarvis, twice.
A detective called MacGyver spoke for the group.
‘We understand you need help on this. Help of the unofficial kind. We’re happy to do charity work, we’re that kind of people.’
Harper smiled. He outlined the case against Redtop. He was the last person to see Lottie Bixley alive and he was spotted moments before Lucy James’s disappearance. And the bonus was that this kidnapper might have some connection to the serial killer called the American Devil. All the team had to do was to spread out and get the low-down from every wino, lowlife and prostitute in the area and then see if they couldn’t track Redtop down.
They worked in pairs. Harper teamed up with a rookie cop by the name of Shane Dell. He was a clean-cut redhead with a clear sense of justice.
They walked the area non-stop for a couple of hours. They must’ve stopped and talked to over a hundred people. Some just ignored them, others tried to help but had nothing. There were a couple of near misses — people thought they recognized the picture but then changed their minds. They had one thing that was helping them, though: solidarity. This was a man who might have murdered a prostitute, so they found the hookers happy to talk for once.
At the western side of Marcus Garvey Memorial Park, they got their first positive identification. Shane Dell approached a group of prostitutes sitting on a low wall next to a basketball court. He talked to them for five minutes and then called Harper across.
‘This is Tom Harper. He believes someone took the woman we were talking about.’ They looked up and nodded. ‘Tell him what you told me.’
A black woman in her late twenties moved her head back and forth and looked around her suspiciously.
‘I’m only saying we’ve seen that guy. Don’t know who he is. He’s one of the roaming-lonely you see around. Always carrying a heavy bag. Lost his mind.’
‘Where have you seen him?’
‘Around. Nowhere in particular. He sits in the parks. I seen him sitting in the parks.’
They couldn’t help any more so the two policemen thanked them and moved on. At six, the unofficial search team all met up at a restaurant.
Bridges and Swanson had the same experience. Plenty of interest, not a lot of positives, but two who’d definitely seen him around. MacGyver and Lacey had nothing. Eddie and his partner had had better luck.
‘We got a positive who identified him as “Redtop”,’ he said.
‘Anything we can go on?’ asked Harper.
‘They’ve seen him twice around East 126th Street. We could put a couple of guys on the street corner and see what comes up. How about it?’
Harper agreed and they sent Bridges and Swanson to watch East 126th Street. The rest of them drank their coffee and went back to the search.