“Isn’t this glorious?” I asked. I swam to him, wrapped my arms around his neck, and we played our mouths against each other as we bobbed in the endless roll of waves.
“I feel like I’m about fifteen years old-and I like it.”
There was nothing quite like the sensation of the brisk salty water against bare skin. Swimming naked in the ocean ranks among the world’s best pastimes. I set myself a course parallel to the beach and swam back and forth until I had done almost fifty laps. The undertow was getting more fierce as the tide started going out, so I reluctantly dove under a big breaker and went up on the sand to join Jake, who thought the water was too cold for a long swim.
“I’m exhausted just watching you.”
“Harrison High School swim team. Hundred-meter crawl and anchor of the relay. Don’t ever try to get away from me by taking a water route.” I stood behind him, steadying myself on his shoulder as I put my shorts back on.
“I’m not going anywhere anytime soon,” he said, grabbing my knee and kissing the still-damp back of my calf. He pulled on his trousers and we walked slowly over to the car, arms entangled, drying in the breeze as the early afternoon wind shifted and kicked up a bit.
Once on the main road again, I was conscious of driving too fast and tried to slow myself down. The outdoor shower was behind the house, its oversized head curtained only by a couple of old lilac bushes. I soaped up and washed off all the sand before going into my bedroom through the sliding door off the rear deck.
Jake did the same, following me in and pulling me toward him, onto the pale blue cotton sheets that covered the bed. “If dreaming counts, then I’ve made love to you over and over again all these last two weeks-in hotel rooms, on airplanes, every time I closed my eyes.”
“It doesn’t count at all,” I said teasingly. “I didn’t feel a thing.” I reached an arm across his chest and he raised my face to his, his tongue reaching in to taste mine. He ran his hands up and down the length of my thighs as I wrapped my leg inside his. We kissed and rolled and laughed and touched for as long as we could both stand to, and then Jake entered me and told me that he loved me.
For the next hour we rested on the cool sheets while I explored the surfaces of his body, which seemed so pale next to my own.
“Aren’t you going to answer your phone?” he asked me when it rang.
“Let the machine get it.”
“Coop? It’s me. Are you okay? Nothing urgent, but I wanted to make sure you got up there without any trouble. I started beeping you an hour ago but-”
It was Chapman’s voice speaking into the recorder, so I grabbed the receiver from beside the bed. “Hi, Mike. Sorry. Yeah, I’m fine.” For some reason that I didn’t understand, it made me feel uneasy to be lying in bed with Jake while I was talking to Mike, with whom I had had such a close and complicated relationship for so long.
“For chrissakes, why didn’t you call us back? Me and Mercer have been worried about you after last night. Whaddaya trying to scare us for?”
I glanced over at Jake. I hadn’t yet told him the story about the week’s events. “I apologize. Actually, I never even heard the beep. I stopped off at the beach for a swim and left the beeper in the car. My fault-I won’t do it again.”
“Don’t tell me, Coop. Your new man’s into that From Here to Eternity crap. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach, waves washing up over them as they make love on the shore. That it? Too much sand in the crotch for me, kid. I’d rather-”
“Grow up,” I snapped into the phone as I slammed it down on the table.
“Friend of yours?” Jake asked jokingly.
“A very good one, actually. One of the detectives on the Denise Caxton case.”
“Remind me not to cross you. Why did you hang up on him?”
“Some other time,” I said, leaning back and caressing Jake as I did.
“Have you made a reservation for dinner? I’d love to grab a nap before we go out.”
“Even better. I thought you might enjoy a good homecooked meal.”
Jake looked over at me and raised an eyebrow. “Now I’m really confused. What time zone am I in? Who are you?”
“While you’re resting I’m going to sneak out for half an hour, and by about eight thirty tonight we’ll have a candlelit dinner for two.” I wasn’t proud of the fact that I couldn’t cook, but it was the truth.
“A little more exercise, and then you might lose me for a few hours,” Jake said, pulling me over on top of him and starting to arouse me again. “Put every one of those bad guys out of your mind, Alexandra Cooper. This weekend you’re all mine.”
When I finally rested in his arms, half an hour later, we both fell sound asleep. Shortly before six o’clock I showered and dressed and headed down the road. In the little village of Menemsha, less than ten minutes away, I could forage for an entire gourmet meal with no more effort than a few phone calls and a quick ride.
My first stop was the Bite, where I picked up a steaming quart of clam chowder and a side order of the world’s best fried clams. True to form, the Flynn sisters had the most-uptothe-moment island gossip. “Heard you got a real looker with you for the weekend. Is it really that guy on the evening news?” Karen asked.
“He hasn’t even been out of my house yet. Who’s spreading this one?”
She pointed at her sister. “Jackie’s best friend works at the Cape Air counter. She called as soon as you picked him up. Bringing him for lunch tomorrow?”
“What, and lose him to one of you two? See you.”
A quarter of a mile farther, I pulled into the narrow space beside Larsen’s Fish Market. One of the best services on the island was provided by Betsy and Chris. You could call in the morning, place an order for lobsters, and pick them up at the appointed hour-all cooked, split, and cracked-ready to serve and eat. I could place them in the oven to keep warm, and then serve up the two-pounders anytime I wanted. I went next door, to Poole’s, for a few fresh oysters from Tisbury Great Pond. Last stop was the Homeport Restaurant, right on the edge of the harbor, where I stopped at the back door and bought a Key lime pie from Will for dessert.
When I returned home, I shucked the corn and put the water up to boil, poured the chowder into a pot to reheat it later on, and tucked the pie into the refrigerator to keep it chilled.
It was almost eight o’clock when Jake woke up, shaved and showered, and dressed for dinner. The red ball of the sun was setting off to the west as we sat on the deck and sipped our drinks. I listened to the details of the China trip and Jake’s descriptions of the meetings he’d had, the personalities he had met, and the opinions he had formed during his travels. For me it was fascinating to get inside a world so foreign to my own, and to contrast the problems of the witnesses’ lives in a single criminal case to the global problems he studied every day.
I disappeared into the kitchen to stir the pot, lit the candles in the dining room, and opened a bottle of ’ 91 Puligny-Montrachet. “Why don’t you come in and sit down?” I asked, dishing up the thick chowder and carrying it to the table.
With Smokey Robinson singing in the background, we feasted on the delicacies of a Chilmark summer, talking and laughing as we devoured the food. As best as I could I tried to explain the events of the week since Deni Caxton’s death, walking Jake through the steps of the investigation to date. “No more of this tonight or you’ll have bad dreams,” I said, pouring decaf with a serving of the pie.
“Have you made any plans? Outing us to any of your pals this weekend?”
“Everyone, Jake. It’s August on the Vineyard-I don’t have much choice, do I?” The usually tranquil island more than quadrupled in population with summer people, and it was an opportunity for me to be with friends from all over the country-some of whom I rarely saw all winter-when I came for a weekend or vacation.
“What’s the drill?”
“We’re teeing off with Janice and Richard at Farm Neck, eight a.m. Louise Liberman and Maureen White are giv
ing a cocktail party in the evening, and we’re invited to stay on for dinner.” It had amazed me, when Jake and I first met, to discover how many people we knew in common. Those with whom I had social relationships of long standing, he had gotten to know through his position in the media. Somehow it made us seem even more connected than the short months we had known each other would indicate. I looked forward to letting everyone see how happy I was to be with him.
“Will the president and Mrs. Clinton be there tomorrow night?”
“Not sure, but I know they’re invited. I hope so.”
“Let’s clean up this mess and go to sleep.”
I held his face and kissed him on the forehead. “Go inside. This is the part I do really efficiently. I’ll join you in ten minutes.”
By the time I cleared the table, loaded the dishwasher, and straightened up the kitchen, Jake was spread-eagled, face down on the bed. I folded my clothes and placed them in my armoire, slipping in beside him and raising the comforter over us against the soft night wind that always makes my hilltop such an easy place for sleeping. I don’t remember any tossing and turning after my head came to rest on the pillow.
I was startled by the sharp ring of the telephone. Light was just appearing on the horizon as I picked it up and spoke softly into it. It could not have been much later than 6 a.m. “Hello?” I asked somewhat disoriented, perhaps by the hour, perhaps because of too much wine with my dinner.
“Alex, it’s Mercer. The lieutenant insisted on me calling you. Said you raised a stink last time you read it in the newspaper without a heads-up from us.”
“Don’t worry, he’s right. What is it?” I sat up as Jake raised his head and rested it on his elbow, massaging his eyelids with his thumb and middle finger.
“West Side-Eighty-sixth Street. Our man just hit again early this morning, about an hour after midnight. Got a twenty-year-old kid going into her building. Raped her, beat her up pretty bad when she tried to resist. I hate to do this, but can you come on back into town?”
19
I got out of bed, made the coffee, dressed in jeans and a blazer, and sat on the deck while Jake unpacked his golf clothes from his duffel and got ready to leave the house.
“You sure you don’t want me to go back with you?”
“Of course not. It’s a sin to leave anything as beautiful as all this unless you have to. You’ve got a lot of friends on the Vineyard,” I said, “and tonight, when I finally crawl into my bed at home, it will give me enormous pleasure to close my eyes and think of you being right here, wrapped in my sheets and looking out at this view.
“I’m the one who feels guilty, promising you a weekend together and then flying off-island to go to work.” I was worried that the unpredictability of my job and its all-consuming nature when I was working a big case or a complex trial would put Jacob Tyler off, as it had done other men.
“Hey, if a guy with my schedule and lifestyle can’t relate to this, then you’d have something to worry about.”
The airport was on the way to the golf course, so he dropped me at the terminal, kissed me good-bye, and I promised to be careful and stay in touch. There was no direct service to New York on Saturday morning, so I took the next Cape Air flight to Boston and called the Special Victims office to tell Mercer that I’d be on the ten-thirty shuttle.
With runway delays and air traffic, it was after eleven thirty when I got through the gate at the Marine Air Terminal.
“Sorry, Alex. Sounds like you were planning a nice couple of days. Hate like hell to pull you away from it.”
“You know that’s never a problem. How’s she doing?”
“She’ll be okay. She’s got a lot of guts. Tried her damndest to fight him off. She saw the gun but didn’t think it was real, so-”
“That’s some chance to take,” I said.
“You’re not kidding. She grew up in Florida, around handguns. So she felt pretty comfortable with her guess. Maybe she was right. The guy stuck it back in his waistband and started to pummel her with his fists.”
“Completed rape?”
“Legally, yes. He penetrated but he didn’t ejaculate. So there’ll be no DNA on this one.”
The elements of the crime required penetration of the victim’s vagina, however slight, for the charge to be rape. Most victims had no reason to be aware of this technicality, so many would tell us that the assailant “tried” to rape them but hadn’t completed the assault. In fact, the insertion of the defendant’s penis, whether or not he completed an act of intercourse, was all that was needed, by law, to accomplish the act.
“Where are we going?”
“She’s down at headquarters now, working on a sketch. The lieutenant figured you’d want to get as detailed an interview as soon as possible, so that’s where we’ll do it.”
“What time did she leave the hospital?”
“I got called at home and went over to Roosevelt Hospital at three. Treated and released. Had a head-to-toe exam, and one of the advocates stayed with her the whole time.” The Rape Crisis Intervention Program run by the hospital was one of the best in the city. Like most others, it was underfunded and staffed by volunteers, but the quality of the care and service was superb.
“I took her home so she could clean up and rest for a while, then picked her up at nine this morning to take her to One Police Plaza.”
The NYPD had a unit of detectives whose specialty was the artistic re-creation of likenesses of defendants, the police sketches that were made into Wanted posters and distributed throughout the neighborhood at risk or the city at large. Some preferred to work freehand, and others used computergenerated programs that assigned a particular feature from a description provided by a witness or victim. Every nuance, each subtle distinction, led to a thickening of facial hair or a change in shape of an eyelid. The results in many cases eventually proved to be almost photographic reproductions of the attacker’s face.
In this instance, with a serial rapist, the artists had already produced several composites. And although each one resembled the others, there were variations that were reflective of the circumstances under which each woman saw the man who committed the crime. This witness would add her own detail to the pictures that had already been circulated.
“You think it’s too much for her if I go back over everything with her today? Can she handle it now?” I asked Mercer, trusting his judgment and knowing the sensitivity that he brought to this work.
“I didn’t push her. Thought if you and I did the questioning together at once, we’d get whatever we need, and she’d have to explain it all one less time. She’s game, Alex. Determined to get this guy and put him behind bars forever.” He had pulled away from the curb and we were headed for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the bridge to Manhattan. “I promised her I’d find him and that you’d make sure he never sees daylight again. She’s really eager to talk to you.”
So much had changed in this business, just in my professional lifetime. Women, who had traditionally been reluctant to report cases of sexual violence, were now far more likely to come forward, as society lifted the age-old stigma on victims who cried rape, and began placing the blame where it belonged: on the offender. Still, those who were attacked by strangers and not acquaintances were believed more readily and were far more likely to be victorious in the courtroom. Paul Battaglia, who was passionate about this issue, had devoted resources to prosecuting these cases that no other office in the country could match. Whether the assailant was a date, a relative, a spouse, or a professional colleague of the victim, we had a mandate to vigorously investigate and take to trial the case of any credible witness who deserved her day in court.
“Guess you didn’t get much rest last night,” I said. Mercer looked exhausted. He had worked all week on the Caxton case, which relieved him of other duties at the Special Victims Squad. So he had not caught new cases, but he was still the one they beeped when the West Side rapist struck. He had been assigned to that task force from
the outset, and the lieutenant counted on his skill in relating to victims, as well as his ability to remember the similarity in modus operandi-language, actions, order of the sexual acts-that would help coordinate all the cases in the pattern.
He laughed. “First night in weeks I had some companionship in the form of a warm body, other than Chapman. I don’t think I’d been home an hour when I got the call.” He took his eye off the road for a moment to look over at me. “This job can’t do much for your love life either, can it?”
“I’m in no position to complain after you gave me the day off yesterday.” I spent the rest of the ride telling Mercer about my evening with Jake and how relaxing a single day away from the city had been.
“Did anything important develop on Caxton?” I asked, as we parked behind headquarters and walked up the long sets of steps from Park Row to the front of the building.
“Bits and pieces. The manufacturer of the ladder found the lot number of the one that was attached to the deceased. Sold last spring to a hardware store on lower Broadway. We got them checking receipts now. Not going to be any kind of surprise if it came from her own gallery. Wouldn’t have been unusual for Omar to have one accessible to him. You’d need to use them to install all the art and exhibits.
“And we located Preston Mattox, the architect boyfriend of Deni’s. He was abroad on business all week. Gets back here today. Said he’d give me a call so we could speak to him about her this weekend.”
“What did Crime Scene come up with on Varelli?”
“The studio was clean as a whistle. Someone got in and out without leaving a print, or else they polished the place up before they left. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Only thing that looked out of place was a pair of sunglasses.”
“Prescription?” I asked optimistically.
“Not so lucky. Could belong to anybody, but they’re just a bit too mod for the old man. And there is a young apprentice who worked for Varelli. He’s been home in California all month, visiting his family. He wasn’t due back here until after Labor Day. But he’s apparently distraught, so he’s coming in tonight to see the widow. We can interview him on Monday.
Cold Hit Page 20
