"And his sons?" I asked.
"The youngest one is named after him. Sofi, Junior. He's twenty-three. Goes to graduate school at Harvard but he's been home since Christmas, doing an independent study project. Went back up to Cambridge just this past weekend, but Mr. Maswana will make him available for anything we need."
"Timing is everything," I said. "It puts him in the 'hood for the recent series, but he's a bit young for the 'scrip, especially going back to the earliest cases. How about the two older ones?"
"The middle son, David, is the one who's here with the father tonight. Twenty-seven years. He works in a family export business run by an uncle-Dahlakian pearls-on Fifth Avenue, near the diamond district. He's been in and out of town lots of times in the past five years."
"That fits with the subway stop on Fifty-first Street," I said, thinking of the MetroCard and the Forty-seventh Street hub for wholesale jewels that had stretched to the surrounding blocks.
"He's twenty-seven, lives at home with Mom and Pop. He's the spitting image of his old man. I'm not jumping to any conclusions but he looks awfully, awfully good, Ms. Cooper."
"How about his big brother?"
"Comes and goes as well. He'll be thirty on his next birthday. Has a wife back home, with twin daughters. Mr. Maswana says that Hugo's involved in private banking, but he hasn't been in the States since a brief visit last summer."
"Did you check that out with INS?" the lieutenant asked.
"It fits what they've got. All the Maswanas are present and accounted for, except Hugo."
"And he wasn't here when the pattern started up again, even according to the computer records, am I right?" I asked.
Mercer nodded.
"How'd you take the next step? How'd you tell Mr. Maswana you wanted to talk to his son about a criminal case?"
"When we'd come to the end of the general questioning, the INS agent and I stepped out for a minute. I checked with the lieutenant, who already had a team sitting on the town house, in case our subject was inside. So I went back in to the ambassador and told him the truth. I'm sure he wanted to put out my lights, but he was the model of diplomacy. Quiet, dignified, restrained. If the kid's inherited anything of his character, then I'm wrong to suspect him. Maswana said he'd produce his son at the precinct as soon as he could locate the young man, and he kept his word."
"So what's the plan?" I asked.
"Bring David up here. If we get really lucky, he spills his guts," Peterson said. "Otherwise, you try to develop some probable cause. Worst-case scenario, he sucks on a coffee cup, we keep him under surveillance tonight, and this time tomorrow we've got our DNA results."
Mercer Wallace went downstairs to bring David Maswana up to the squad, but the father was not so easily separated from his son. The three of them entered the cramped office in a row.
The lieutenant stepped outside to make room and Mercer introduced me to the two men, who sat opposite me across the captain's messy desk. I explained that I wanted to question David out of Sofi's presence. The father was polite but firm.
"Is my son under arrest for anything?"
"No, sir, he is not."
"Do I need to get him a lawyer?"
"No, he's not in custody. You have my word on that. Of course, if you'd like to have a lawyer present, we can certainly wait here until you've reached one."
Maswana checked his watch for the time. "I'd prefer to get started. We have nothing to hide."
"Then I'm going to ask you to step out of the room. Lieutenant Peterson will give you a comfortable place to-"
"I intend to sit right here, Madam Cooper, beside my son."
It was too early to start butting heads. "That's not going to work, Mr. Ambassador. You're welcome to have a seat down the hall, but I will not conduct the questioning in your presence. I'll be right outside when you two have had a chance to decide what you'd like to do this evening."
No serious interrogation of an adult suspect could be carried on with a parent sitting next to him. If David were psychologically ready to unburden himself about his criminal conduct, the company of his prominent father and the rectitude of his upbringing would put the chill on any chance of a confession. The entire dynamic changed when the target was alone.
I went out to the squad room and gave Peterson some cash to order in a sandwich for David and some coffee for all of us. Like the superstitious ballplayers who left their pitchers alone on the bench between innings, none of the detectives approached me to banter or offer suggestions. Mercer and I huddled in a corner to discuss strategy.
Ten minutes later, Mr. Maswana emerged from behind the opaque glass door.
"I shall accept your rules, Madam Cooper. But I would ask you to suspend what you're doing anytime David requests that you do."
"Of course."
Mercer and I returned to the room, and while we were explaining the purpose of our questioning, a uniformed cop brought in the package from the local deli.
I placed the sandwich in front of Maswana along with a cup of coffee. Once he drank from the container and left it on the desk, it would be abandoned property that I could submit for DNA analysis before the end of the evening, without the need for a search warrant or confession.
I opened the lid of my coffee and sipped at it. "How do you take yours, David?"
He pushed the food and drink away. "Nothing for me, thanks. I'm not hungry."
Mercer began by asking some basic pedigree questions. The young man was nervous-he avoided making eye contact, his voice had a slight quiver from time to time, and he kept his hands clasped in his lap-but I would expect anyone to be frightened in this situation.
When he talked about his education, David made no mention of any schooling in England. "When were you at Harvard?"
I wanted him to answer with the year of his class, so that I could see if that slight accent that Annika heard would surface in the same three letters as the word "ass." He not only said that word, but the word "pass" as well, and there was no hint of a British pronunciation.
Mercer worked David on dates and times of year. He was vague about much of it, but then we were talking about events that were quite remote in time. Statutes of limitation had been written into our laws because people couldn't be expected to account for their whereabouts five or six years after the fact.
While Mercer did the heavy lifting, I tried to measure the guy's responses. At times he seemed earnest and as candid as he could be, and at moments when his facial expressions seemed identical to the police artist's sketch, I was ready to lock the door on the cell and throw away the key. The brilliance of DNA meant that science would resolve any of our uncertainty within twenty-four hours.
Forty-five minutes into questions and denials, Peterson knocked on the door and smiled at me, offering a pack of cigarettes, his lighter, and an ashtray. "I forgot the captain got rid of his illegal paraphernalia a year ago, at the mayor's request. We'll bend the rules for you a bit."
He had remembered the cigarette butt recovered from the stoop in front of one of the crime scenes. The perp was a smoker, and the remains he left on the desk would be another easy source of DNA analysis, from saliva.
Mercer and I each took a cigarette from the pack to make the activity inviting to our target. David Maswana wrinkled his nose at the smell of the match lighting. "Thanks. I don't smoke."
Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was smart enough not to make the process of evidence collection any easier for us.
At the end of an hour, Mercer was ready to play hardball. The vague answers about recent dates and times-those that would key into the January assaults-were unacceptable. Mercer pressed for firm answers, for information undoubtedly recorded in this generation's ubiquitous PalmPilots and desktop calendars.
He asked David to voluntarily give a DNA sample, to allow us to swab the inside of his mouth with a Q-tips. The young man welled up with tears before refusing the request, saying that he would ask his father about that before leaving the precinct later on.<
br />
Then Mercer removed a slip of paper from the folder. He turned it face-up and placed the composite of the Silk Stocking Rapist's face under the nose of our prime suspect.
David recoiled automatically and started breathing heavily. "It's-it's like me a lot, but then, who made this? White women? A lot of the characteristics would, well-look like any, um-"
Mercer's dark brown skin was almost the same shade as David's. He leaned in and pointed at the kid. "Don't let me hear any we-all-look-alike-to-them bullshit, okay? This sketch looks more like you than the photo on your driver's license."
Another knock on the door and Peterson cracked it enough to motion me out. I thought Mercer had David on the ropes for the first time, making progress and softening him up. My annoyance at the interruption was visible.
"Sorry, Alex. I assumed you'd want the call. Darren Waxon, the chief of protocol says he has to talk to you."
I took the receiver and spoke brusquely into the phone. "Yes, Mr. Waxon?"
"Miss Cooper, I'm wondering how much later you're going to keep the ambassador and his son in the police station. It's after eight-thirty and if you're planning to take any kind of action, I'll need to know about it as soon as possible."
I hesitated, afraid there had been a leak from someone in the department who saw the two men waiting downstairs earlier in the evening. "Who told you Mr. Maswana was here?"
"He called me himself, to thank me and let me know what was going on."
"Thank you? For what?"
"For telling him why the district attorney subpoenaed the personal-residence information in the first place and what the investigation concerned."
My annoyance was fast turning to anger. "Exactly when did you tell him that?"
"Miss Cooper, I gave each of the missions the courtesy of informing them that we had no choice but to respond to the proper legal process. Protocol requires-"
"But what time? At what hour did you tell that to Mr. Maswana?"
"This afternoon, shortly before I gave Detective Wallace the list of addresses."
The whole time that Mercer thought that he had pulled a fast one on Maswana with the ruse of getting information from him via the INS agent, the ambassador knew we were looking at one of his sons as a possible serial rapist.
"You had absolutely no business revealing that-"
"Miss Cooper," Waxon said, meeting my ire with his own, "I wasn't about to cause an international incident over a-a handful of hysterical women."
Mike Chapman would have called him a frigging idiot, would have threatened to lock him up for obstructing governmental administration.
"Hysterical women? What kind of misogynist are you? Well, if you've disturbed the domestic tranquillity by giving one of the other Maswana sons the time to get out of the country this evening before we could get our hands on him, I'll bring a few of those victims by your office so you can explain the concept of diplomatic immunity to them face-to-face."
I told Peterson to carry on the interrogation and to ask the wily Mr. Maswana for his permission to swab David, in order to exclude him as a suspect. "Keep someone with him all the time. He's likely to be talking to his son Hugo by cell phone. And let him think we got called out to the scene of a new rape. Stall them here as long as you can."
I opened the door and asked Mercer to step out. "You and I are headed back to the airport tonight. Tell the ambassador anything you want-anything but that. Tell him we've been called out on another case. We've got a flight to catch."
39
Shortly before 9P.M. we were in Mercer's car, at the intersection of Sixty-seventh and Park Avenue.
"Which way, Alex? JFK or Newark?" he asked.
I had called my travel agent's office in hopes she was working late, but got her voice mail. "Just go south. If our best bet is Kennedy, we can take the Thirty-fourth Street tunnel, and if it's Newark, we get the Lincoln at Thirty-ninth Street."
I dialed Information for American Airlines. We had crossed Fifty-seventh Street by the time I got through the recorded menu prompts and was put on hold for a live human being.
"The night we went to the airport to get Annika Jelt's parents into the country," I said to Mercer, "there was that guy at Kennedy who finally helped us work it out. Did you keep his name?"
He pulled the leather case that held his gold shield out of his pocket. "The newer business cards I've picked up are behind the badge."
I found the one for the Port Authority supervisor and tried his cell phone. He answered on the second ring and I gave Mercer a thumbs-up.
After I reminded him who I was and the urgency of our purpose, I asked him to find out what airlines had late-night European flights to cities that would connect to something that flew near Dahlakia, like the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.
Mercer steered up the ramp that encircled Grand Central Terminal and pulled over while we waited for an answer.
"Most of your European flights departed between six and eight o'clock. We've only got a few going out between now and midnight."
"Where to?"
"London, Paris, Rome with American. Stockholm on SAS. Moscow via Aeroflot. And it looks like Rome has been canceled because of a mechanical problem."
"Newark. Can you get us a fix on Newark?"
"London and Paris. Both on Continental. They go out around eleven, too."
"This is a police emergency. There's a felon-possibly a murderer-that we have to stop before he leaves the country. If I give you his name, can you check the manifests?"
The supervisor was silent. "Will you cover me in writing? You know it's forbidden for us to give out passenger information."
"You have my word, you'll get whatever you need."
"Just the flights that haven't left yet?"
"Start with those," I said. "Then you can work backwards."
There was always the possibility that if the older Maswana son was actually our man, and was warned by his father in midafternoon to get out of town, he had done it by train to another city or by shuttle to other airports that also serviced Europe. I crossed my fingers that the array of available flights was so much broader from New York than any other Northeastern port that he would have taken his chances by staying local.
"Who am I looking for?"
"The surname is Maswana. Hugo Maswana."
Mercer corrected me. "What if he's been using his younger brothers' passports? What if he's taken off as one of them to screw up the computer records? Tell your guy to check for all three names-Hugo, David, and Sofi."
For five more minutes we idled at the top of the ramp until our contact got back on the line. "Skip Newark. How fast can you make it out here?"
"Half an hour," I said, turning to Mercer. "It's JFK. You got a bubble?"
He reached under the front seat of the department car and pulled out a red plastic dome. He opened his window and extended his arm to stick the magnetized light on the roof of the car, accelerating to high speed and whelping his siren to move cars out of our way.
"Miss Cooper? Give me your phone number. Your party's been playing games with us. He first booked on the tenP.M. Paris, then switched to Rome, and when that canceled he put himself back on the midnight to Paris. He's not ticketed yet. London leaves at eleven and it's wide open. He hasn't checked in anywhere as of this moment. I'll get the Port Authority police on the gates and security checkpoints. He may be waiting to make a last-minute dash for the flight so he doesn't raise a flag once he's formally ticketed and checked in."
The tunnel was practically empty and Mercer sailed out on the Belt Parkway, making time I wouldn't have dreamed possible if I had to make a plane on a tight schedule.
"No wonder the ambassador came into the station house like such a lamb," I said. "He must have had Hugo banned from the household for a few years, thinking he'd outgrow his penchant for raping women. Wife and children back home in Dahlakia would settle him down."
"I'm sure you're right. That's why the cases went cold four years ago. Masw
ana probably called Hugo at his office today and told him not to pass Go, not to collect his two hundred dollars, but hightail it to the airport and head for home."
"And the father was smart enough to bring us a decoy-the middle son, who looks enough like Hugo-and the sketch-to make us salivate. It whet our appetite, it stalled us from looking anywhere else, and Maswana knew there'd be no risk because even if we held David overnight, the DNA results would exclude him tomorrow."
By nine-forty, Mercer parked the car in a no-standing zone in front of the sprawling American Airlines buildings. I called my Port Authority contact, who told us he was inside Terminal A. The flights to London and Paris both departed from Concourse C, at gates only fifty yards apart.
We walked inside slowly and separately, in case Hugo Maswana was looking for a pair of investigators that his father may have described to him.
I walked past Mercer and whispered under my breath, "I'll check the Admirals Club to see if he's waiting up there."
Mercer turned off to the concourse, in the direction of the security screening.
I took the staircase to the club, and smiled at the hostess who tried to stop me to show my identification. I scanned both sides of the room and saw only a handful of bedraggled business passengers waiting for their late-night departures.
My phone rang at the same time I heard the PA system: "Announcing the last boarding call for American flight 605, nonstop to Paris Charles de Gaulle. Final boarding, please."
I flipped open the cell and it was our Port Authority contact, telling us Maswana just bought an e-ticket at a kiosk in the terminal and was confirmed on AA 605.
I ran back down the steps and up the incline to the security gate.
As I approached, I could see Hugo Maswana seated in a plastic chair just beyond the screening machine. He was dressed in a suit, but had removed his shoes to put them through the system. He reached into the basket to lift out a brogue and replace it on his foot.
At that very moment, Mercer got the attention of one of the Transportation Safety Administration screeners. He must have been trying to explain that he was a cop and had a gun that would set off the metal detector when I saw the man put the palm of his outstretched hand against Mercer's chest.
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