“I’m not as interested in him as I am in the homicide victim. There are some anomalies in the investigative file, and Mike Chapman thinks it would be useful to look at the physical evidence again. He doesn’t think the police work was kosher-doesn’t like the suspect they were looking at. Wants to check the original ME’s notes and photos-they’re not in the detective’s records.”
“You two are killing me. Agita, that’s going to be the cause of death. Agita by prosecutorial pressure to the gut. What’s Mike after?”
“He found Brendan Quillian’s name in the dead girl’s case folder.”
“Anything else? You know we don’t have the physical evidence here.”
“I understand. Mercer is going out to the NYPD storage facility in Queens to see what he comes up with.” Pearson Place was where all the property from old cases was stored until it was either thrown away or, if it had any independent value, auctioned off to the public. “The case got stalled along the way. The detective settled on a suspect whose admission doesn’t seem to square with the autopsy report.”
“Oh, no. I see where you’re going with this. Is Battaglia pushing you?”
“I haven’t seen him since last week, Jerry. Pushing me where?”
“He called the ME himself. Wanted to know what he needed to allege in order to get permission to exhume a body. That case in Chelsea from a couple of years ago? The cops just caught a killer who said he shot the guy, but the autopsy findings showed knife wounds.”
“You’re way ahead of me here. An exhumation? That never occurred to me.”
“Yeah. Well, it turns out they arrested the right guy anyway. He shot the victim in the chest-then tried to dig the bullet out with a penknife. The mistake was on our end. Missed the bullet hole on autopsy,” Jerry said. “What’s a little piece of lead between friends?”
“All I’m asking is if you can pull the Hassett file for me.”
“That’s the way trouble always starts for me. One of you young Turks is trying to be creative and do the right thing. Then Battaglia gets a whiff and takes it to the next level. Save yourself some paperwork. Does the deceased have any family?”
“She does,” I said.
“Get their permission. The court likes it better if they’re on your side before you go disturbing the peace.”
I don’t think an exhumation was what Phin Baylor had had in mind when he’d told us to tell Trish Quillian to dig for the bones in her own backyard.
“Jerry, are you suggesting this is a road I want to go down?”
“If you’ve got a reason to think something was overlooked when the autopsy was done, that the examination wasn’t thorough, then as much as I hate to do these things, it might be worth another look. Nobody has better instincts about these cases than Mike.”
“Let me talk to him about it, okay? Just call me when you find the file.”
Mike had dropped me off at home last night shortly before nine o’clock. The exhilaration of the wedding, and my Saturday-night encounter with Luc Rouget, had carried me through the events of the day. But I was tired and knew that I was facing another difficult week in the courtroom, so I said good night to Mike and went upstairs to order in a salad from P. J. Bernstein’s deli.
This morning, I spent the next hour on the phone, greasing the wheels to arrange the things that would need to be done in the forensic biology lab and medical examiner’s office if Mercer was successful in finding the long-neglected case evidence. Messages from the end of last week were stacked on my desk, and I returned calls on the less urgent matters that still required attention, trial or no trial.
Rose Malone, Battaglia’s executive assistant, buzzed me on the intercom the minute he arrived in his suite an hour later. “Pat McKinney’s over here with the boss. There’s some kind of emergency meeting with the police commissioner at City Hall and the district attorney wants your input.”
McKinney was my direct supervisor in the Trial Division, a rigid bureaucrat who liked to try to micromanage the several hundred prosecutors in our section of the six-hundred-lawyer office, dealing with every street crime from homicide and sexual assault down to trespass and harassment. McKinney resented my unique relationship with Battaglia, who respected the work of the men and women in the Sex Crimes Unit and allowed me direct access to him without reporting up the chain of command.
I walked across the eighth-floor hallway, and the security guard opened the door to the administrative wing. “Good morning, Rose. Is this any way to start my week?”
She had been a loyal friend to me for years and was the most discreet person on the planet. She organized Battaglia’s professional life with skill and precision-not a moment of his day wasted with nonessential meetings or visitors-and she quietly did what she could to protect me from Pat McKinney’s frequent attempts at backstabbing.
Rose was leaning over a file drawer with a sheaf of papers in her arms. Always perfectly coiffed and dressed in slim skirts and high heels that showed off her great figure, she added a note of style to the grim decor of the front office. She picked up her head and nodded in the direction of Battaglia’s office. “Pat was waiting for him when he got here. It’s something to do with the water tunnel explosion, so I told the boss you ought to be in on this.”
“Thanks, Rose. Let’s have lunch when my trial ends.” I turned the corner and smelled the smoke from Battaglia’s Cohiba, probably his third of the morning by this hour, before I reached his room.
The district attorney was sitting at the far end of the long conference table, his hand on the receiver of the multiline phone that served as his mini-command center when he moved away from his oversize desk. McKinney sat next to him in one of the red leather chairs, both of them surrounded by dozens of Battaglia’s framed awards and citations, which were hung around the office on the faux-wood-paneled walls, tributes to him from every legal organization and law enforcement agency in the country. For most New Yorkers, he was the only person in recent memory to have held this elected position, now serving in his fifth four-year term.
Battaglia replaced the phone in its cradle when I walked in the room. The thick cigar was planted in the middle of his mouth, like a cork in a bottle. He clasped his hands as he talked, the words emerging from around the Cohiba as he smiled broadly.
“The least you could have done was bring a soufflé with you, Alex.”
“Sorry? Did I forget something?”
“A croissant. Some escargots. I had to go to a meeting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this morning. Your friend Mrs. Stafford’s on the board,” Battaglia said, referring to Joan’s mother. “She told me all about the wedding this weekend. Said there was a very determined French chef stirring the pot.”
McKinney was staring at me as I blushed and tried to make light of Battaglia’s joke.
Whatever incredible array of sources the district attorney had worldwide to give him breaking news on international business intrigue, banking scandals, terrorist financing funds, and crime cartels, they were light-years slower than word that came through his endless local pipelines. The man just liked to know everything, and he liked to know it first.
“I didn’t think that was a felony, Paul. Am I wrong?”
McKinney’s head was going back and forth as if he were at a Ping-Pong match. He didn’t know what to make of the conversation nor why it embarrassed me, and I knew that Battaglia liked that angle, too.
“Shows how little you understand about arson, Alex. A fire could be a good thing, if the flames don’t get out of control.”
“Obviously, you’ll probably know before I do. Rose said you wanted me here.”
Battaglia rested the cigar in an ashtray. “Pat’s going to represent me over at the mayor’s office. There’s a meeting on updating emergency evacuation plans for the city. Worst-case-scenario kind of thing.”
“Because of the explosion in Water Tunnel Number Three?”
“That’s the catalyst. Whatever turns out to be the cause of the blast, and I was just gettin
g the latest from the commissioner, it reminded everybody that the entire city will have to be evacuated if any of our tunnels experience an actual breach-whether from metal fatigue or terrorism or any kind of criminal action.”
“Don’t look so skeptical,” McKinney said to me. “Think about the last few years and all the megadisasters. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans. There wasn’t a government official who didn’t know a monster storm was going to hit, but no one had a plan in place.”
“I know the terrorist task force is still working an aspect of the explosion, Paul, and I realize those two Saudi guys are in custody in Westchester, but Mike and I are certain the event on Thirtieth has something to do with the sandhogs,” I said.
McKinney leaned over in an aside to Battaglia. “‘Mike and I think.’ If Mike Chapman told her to jump off the Brooklyn Bridge, she’d probably-”
“I’d check the homicide roster first before I went up on the bridge, just to make sure neither you nor your idiot girlfriend were on call,” I said to McKinney. He had annoyed Battaglia-a devoted family man-by recently leaving his wife for a woman in the office with whom he’d been having an affair for years. “Nothing personal, Pat. I’d just prefer a careful investigation from a sensitive prosecutor if I were to meet an untimely end.”
Battaglia ignored the quibbling. “I understand there’s no court today because of the Quillian funeral. Have you got half an hour to bring Pat up to speed on what you’ve learned about the tunnel system vulnerability?”
“Sure.”
“Sit down.” Battaglia motioned to the chair on his other side. He didn’t need to waste the time going to City Hall himself, but he clearly wanted to be in on any important developments. The cigar was back in his teeth, and he was already shuffling through the mounds of correspondence that Rose had stacked in front of him, more able to do four things at once than anyone else I’d ever met. “You do any homework on this, Pat?”
“I got the basics from the Office of Emergency Management. It’s entirely different for a Category Four hurricane than a catastrophic event.”
“Is that what you hear?” Battaglia asked, angling his head to me.
“Nobody’s talked about this much in my quarters, boss. These guys are just trying to solve a crime.”
McKinney’s expression of disgust wasn’t lost on Battaglia. “Apparently, the perfect storm could hit the financial district-and Kennedy Airport and half of Staten Island-with twenty-five-foot surges of water. The city’s been divided into more than a hundred zones-trying to move people out of harm’s way will make what happened in the Gulf Coast area seem like a picnic. We’re talking more than two million evacuees.”
Battaglia’s crooked nose was hovering above a memo from someone in the office, his eyeglasses raised on his forehead. “I’m not asking about a flood, Pat. I want to know what happens if there’s no damn water to be had. You’re going to have federal and state hotshots at this meeting today. Look smart, will you?”
Objection, I thought to myself. Beyond the scope of the possible.
McKinney fidgeted in his chair. “We’ve obviously got the advantage over New Orleans and southern Mississippi of mass transit opportunities to move people out of the metropolitan area.”
“Get some specifics about how those systems operate before you open your mouth. What about moving patients in hospitals on ventilators, people in nursing homes? What do the police and fire departments plan to do about looting and all the things that we’ll be responsible for dealing with? Who’s going to ride shotgun on water and gas deliveries so desperadoes don’t hijack them? It’s a strategic-planning meeting.”
McKinney started making a list of Battaglia’s concerns.
“Alex,” the district attorney said, putting down the memo and eyeballing me. “What’s got you and Mike thinking the way you do about the tunnel?”
I made my case presentation with the facts as I knew them, including my Sunday-afternoon excursion with Mike Chapman. McKinney was restless, too out of the loop to enjoy listening about an investigation in which he played no role.
Battaglia devoured detail as if it were essential to his diet, but then usually left his top aides alone to get the work done themselves, occasionally offering direction from his long prosecutorial experience. He listened intently to my description of the tunnel interior and dismissed the story of the tire iron that had narrowly missed my head-which he’d heard from the commissioner-with barely a question about my own fears.
“So Jerry Genco just told you about the exhumation order?” he asked. “I had to push you on that, didn’t I, Pat?”
“Good idea, boss. It really was.”
“Take Alex through it,” Battaglia said, ready to get us out of his hair now, and hoping, as he always did, that we would work through our personal differences. “You ought to think about asking Fred Gertz to do the same thing in this Hassett murder.”
I fingered the edge of the volume of criminal procedure law that sat on the table next to the phone. “I know it rarely stops you, but there’s a little concept known as jurisdiction. Bex Hassett was killed in another county.”
“Be creative, Alex. Maybe Quillian made the cell call from Manhattan. Get your toe in the door and make some noise here. I can always kick it over to the Bronx DA.”
McKinney could barely suppress his smile as he watched me struggle to handle the boss diplomatically. He knew as well as I did that Battaglia hated to be told no when he came up with an idea he thought was a winner.
“It’s a bit premature, Paul. Let’s see what condition the evidence is in when Mercer gets back from the property clerk. I’d have to have some basis in fact to even raise the issue.”
Battaglia’s lips pulled back around the cigar in the mischievous grin that characterized his relentless prosecutorial drive. “Rattle your boy Brendan’s cage, Alex. Use your imagination. Get under Lem Howell’s skin if you can. Even if Gertz can’t entertain the motion for an exhumation, the press hounds will love you for bringing it up.”
“With all due respect, Paul, I don’t think-”
“McKinney, go up to court with Alex this afternoon. Help her float this one past the judge.”
“Will do,” he said, sporting his smug attitude like a new suit. “Gertz practically eats out of my hand when I feed him enough law. I play him like a violin.”
I followed Pat McKinney down the corridor, which was lined with the stern-faced black-and-white portraits of Manhattan’s district attorneys going back more than a century. Dewey, Hogan, Banton, and the others seemed to gaze down at me, investing me with a sense of mission and duty.
Pat held open the door. As I stepped out past the security guard, I could hear a woman’s screams coming from halfway down the wide eighth-floor hallway.
I broke into a trot as I saw Joe Roman, the squad detective, pushing open the door of the ladies’ bathroom. I ran in behind him.
He reached the figure, collapsed on the floor, before I dropped to my knees at her side.
It was Carol Goodwin, the stalking victim I’d assigned him to watch. The razor she had used to cut her wrist was beside her hand, blood pooling next to her on the cold gray tile.
25
The EMTs responded within minutes from nearby Beekman Downtown Hospital. They had stemmed the bleeding and bandaged the hysterical young woman, who had attracted the attention of dozens of staff members within earshot, before taking her out to the ambulance.
I had stood by the elevator doors as they closed, having tried for half an hour in the restroom to calm Carol Goodwin, to talk her down from her frenzied ranting while the EMTs worked on her. She took that last opportunity to yell out her accusation.
“This is your fault, Miss Cooper! You’re supposed to help people like me. You’re supposed to believe in me. If I die, it’s going to be all your fault.”
I rested my head against the wall, eyes closed and arms crossed, waiting for the gathering of lawyers, secretaries, witnesses, cops, and student interns to disp
erse.
Joe ordered everybody to get back to work.
“I’m not moving until they all go away,” I whispered to him. “Whatever fumes I was running on to start this week, I’m out of emotional gas. I don’t want to talk to any of them, I don’t want to explain things to anyone. I’ve got a murder trial that I’ve got to focus on, but life-such as it is-seems to be going on for everyone else in all the old familiar ways.”
“Chapman’s right. You do attract a lot of whack jobs, don’t you?”
“It’s my specialty, Joe. What set this one off?”
“Carol Goodwin’s on me. I did just what you told me to do. I followed her when she got on the train after work on Thursday, picked her up at her house the next morning, and tailed her all the way to her office. Reversed it again on Friday, both directions. I knew by the time we got to her subway stop that she was making the whole thing up.”
“How?” I asked, starting back to my office.
“Alex, she claims she’s been stalked for months, right?” Joe was taller than I, with straight brown hair and an irrepressible smile. He was always animated, talking with both hands to underscore his points. “Terrified by some guy for a reason she can’t fathom, but nobody’s been able to flush him out. She complains about the police and everybody not doing enough for her.”
“That’s Carol.”
“The girl gets on the subway with her book, sits down, and starts to read.” Joe was imitating her now, opening a book with the palms of his hands. “The train stops ten times between her office and her home. She never looked up once-not a single time-to see who got on at any of the stops. Wasn’t worried about who was sitting near her or who got off at her station. Kept right on reading, not jumpy and nervous like somebody who’s truly in fear, waiting for the stalker to show up again. She doesn’t have any way to know who I am, so that wasn’t the reason. She had no way to make me. The girl is just a complete phony.”
Laura had a hot cup of coffee waiting for me as we turned into my office.
“And I take it you chose this morning, on my doorstep, to break that news to her?”
Bad blood Page 20
