Final Jeopardy

by Linda Fairstein

  I brought Angela back in, reassured her that this particular postman would not ring a third time, and told her that I would assign a female detective to work with her on the case. After she left, I made the necessary calls to arrange a temporary suspension of Lanier while we investigated the matter. It was almost five o’clock by the time I finished those details and attended to the rest of the paperwork on my desk.

  Mark Acciano called to say that the judge would keep his jury only until ten this evening, and if there was no verdict by that time, he’d declare a mistrial. I tried to shore up his spirits, and told him I’d stick it out with him as long as there were no developments on the Montvale case.

  Laura asked if she could leave a bit early to go to the dentist, and I told her I would get the phones myself. I sat at my desk, going through the pile of mail that had come with the afternoon delivery. Two demands for letters advising the Parole Board what position our office would take on cases coming before them next month, one request to lecture to a women’s group at a college in Pennsylvania, and several offers to test software programs designed to expedite the preparation of lawyer’s briefs were on the top of the stack.

  Wedged in between the legal-sized envelopes that I had been opening was a small letter that appeared to be a personal note. It was stamped but had no postmark, and I guessed that it had been delivered by hand. I slit it open with the narrow point of a pair of desk scissors and unfolded the page of single-spaced typed correspondence.

  It began with the salutation “My dearest Alexandra,” and my eye flipped immediately to the bottom of the paper to see the closing that was identical to the one on the papers Isabella had received: “Best ever, Cordelia Jeffers, Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine.”

  My thoughts scattered in a dozen directions. I was mad at myself for touching the letter and envelope, which may have yielded fingerprints if I had not smudged them; I wanted to have Mike or David or anyone else who knew the case sitting beside me as I read through the text; I wondered whether to march directly into Battaglia’s office and tell him I was in over my head; and yet I couldn’t stop myself from reading on.

  My dearest Alexandra, I debated about sending this to you at your office or your fancy apartment, but I didn’t know if you’d notice it at home among the dozens of yellow roses that our mutual friend continues to waste his money on.

  Sometimes, my clever girl, your actions do surprise me. Didn’t you find it degrading, and I do mean thoroughly humiliating, to have him leaping into bed with that vacant slut, that Cleopatra-like whore you were stupid enough to befriend? And yet, thereafter you remained so desperate for his companionship that you accept rides in his limousine and let him try to wheedle his way back into your good graces. Deny him the help he seeks, he needs it not.

  Like her before you, you will be shocked to find that the woman he truly loves is not your equal not in physical appearance, not social status or material wealth, not even in professional recognition in her chosen field.

  As you know, women do crazy things in the name of love, and crazier still when they sense the beloved slipping away, becoming ambivalent. orne Wasn’t it the immortal Bard who said “One may crt on smile and smile and be a villain?” Keep that in mind estic and yield not to temptation. es as Best ever, ogge Cordelia Jeffers;r the Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine lies h her I read it three times to try to make it make sense. How did this woman, this person, know the things she talked about in the letter? The yellow roses, my short ride across town in Jed’s limo, his pleas for help these last few days, his betrayal of me with Isabella. I surely didn’t believe in psychics, but could I have been unaware that someone was actually following me wherever I went? Not possible.

  Then that paragraph that mirrors one in Isabella’s letter, referring to the woman Jed really loves. Again, I was completely puzzled by its meaning.

  Who was the beloved that Jed was slipping away from?

  Who was he becoming ambivalent about? Could this possibly be his ex-wife, now bitter about their estrangement?

  I had never even suggested that to Chapman. All I knew about her was that like many other women, she was unhappy in marriage and unhappier still in divorce. Why hadn’t I asked more questions about her? I called the guard at the security desk to see if he remembered anyone leaving an envelope with him earlier in the day. He reminded me that the shifts had changed at four o’clock, when he had come on duty, and nothing except deliveries from Police Headquarters had been dropped at his station. I’d have to check with the day shift tomorrow morning.

  Mike Chapman and David Mitchell needed to know about this letter at once. I called David’s office and got the answering machine. I left a message, expecting that he would pick it up soon, since he was supposed to be there to meet Jed sometime within the next two hours, and I told him I would fax a copy of the letter to him before I left the office.

  I tried Mike but he wasn’t at the squad yet, so I hung up and walked down the hall to use the fax machine outside of Rod’s conference room. As I walked back to my desk, I could hear the phone ringing and I ran to pick it up.

  “We popped the motherfucker, Coop. We’re in business.”

  “Mercer? How’d you do it?”

  “Seems like the last thing he did before he left prison was get himself an ATM card. A Metro Bank cash card. I got that info from the prison this morning. I called the bank and told them to stop the card, figuring he had to get cash if he was gonna be on the run. He tried three machines, got a ”Card not valid“ printout. Picked up the courtesy phone and called the bank hot line. The branch manager told him to come in at four-thirty, after the regular banking was closed at our direction that there must have been a defect in the card.

  Manager called me back, and a few of us from the squad kept that appointment with him. It gives new meaning to the word “surprise.”

  “That is fantastic. Where are you now?”

  “Still at the bank. Listen, take your time. We’ll take him back over to my office and process him.” Photographs, fingerprints, palm prints, background information.

  “The boss’ll start assigning guys to call the victims and pick ‘em up for the line-ups. I’ll chat him up, nice and easy, see if he wants to talk to my favorite prosecutor, tell her why he likes to do this shit to women. You go home, get comfortable they it’s gonna be a long evening and get yourself over to the t on office by seven, seven-thirty. Sound okay?” “Perfect. I’ll just go home and change, then be right there.; as Let me know if there’s anything you need.” rger “You got somebody who can work on a search warrant the for his mother’s place while you’re up with us? See if any est of his clothing, any of the women’s jewelry’s there?” her “No problem. I can phone it in when I’m over with you.

  It’s all on the word processor in ECAB, our early case assessment bureau, where whoever was on duty could help me through the evening’s paperwork.

  “And, Mercer? One more thing. Can you control your boss on this? No perp walk. Please, beg him for me. Not before the victims have a chance to see the line-up. Take him into the station house with a jacket over his head, will you?”

  “You bet. See you later.”

  Publicity on these cases could get out of control. Too often, police brass staged a scene taking a suspect in or out of the patrol car, resulting in the defendant’s face being plastered all over the local TV and newspapers. For those victims who saw the ‘perp walk’ before they got to view a formal line-up, it often meant that defense attorneys challenged the propriety of the identification process, and the victim was barred from pointing out her attacker at the trial.

  We were too close to a great result to screw it up now.

  I packed up all the supplies I would need to run the investigation from Mercer’s office, left Laura a note telling her I might be late in the morning depending on how long I had to be at the precinct throughout the night and called Rose Malone.

  “Is Battaglia in?”

  “He’s in a meeting, A
lex. He’s got the governor’s Criminal Justice Coordinator in there. Do you want me to interrupt?”

  “Nope. Just wanted him to be the first to know that we think we’ve got the Con Ed rapist. Tell him I’m going out on the case myself to do the line-ups and try to take a statement. He’ll get a complete briefing in the morning.”

  “Congratulations, Alex. He’ll be really pleased. I’ll put you in his book for lunch. I’m sure he’ll want to hear all the details.”

  “Thanks, Rose.” I hope I’m here in time for lunch. This kind of case could be an allnighter, by the time we round up the witnesses and get the video team up to the squad.

  My last call was to the video technicians. For most of the history of police work, statements or admissions made by suspects in criminal cases were recorded by officers in their notepads. Then for several decades, our office used stenographers who accompanied us on call and took down, verbatim, the questions and answers of an interrogation, to read back to a jury at trial. For almost twenty years in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we had developed a sophisticated unit of trained video professionals, who taped these critical sessions always with the knowledge and consent of the accused whenever a defendant was willing to participate.

  This process eliminated the age-old complaint about police interrogations: that the cops coerced or beat the confessions out of the suspects. Instead, the video camera captured the entire scene. The defendant sitting calmly at a table in a detective’s office, unshackled and unharmed, often munching on a doughnut and drinking a Sprite while the prosecutor repeated the Miranda warnings and got his informed consent to go ahead without a lawyer present.

  I can remember the first time I went out on call with irne a cameraman, incredulous that any criminal would agree to film a confession to a crime and have it permanently.stic recorded for use against him in the case. I read the guy his.5 as rights, showed him the camera, and explained its purpose. gger Instead of refusing to go forward, he sat up straight, r the combed his hair and reset his baseball cap neatly on his head for the movies, and spoke into the microphone as if her it was his finest moment in the spotlight. I think that jury finished its deliberations in about twenty minutes. Guilty.

  Bob Bannion answered the phone in the tech office.

  “Great, I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to get you tonight,” I said when he picked up. Bannion had started the system for us and he was superb at his work. He was a pro, with a keen, dry sense of humor, which helped get you through a long night in a squad room. Bob was also on call for any homicides or major cases that occurred in the next twelve hours, so I was delighted to try and wrap him up first. I explained a bit about the job we would be working on so he knew what to expect.

  “Anything else cooking, or can I ask you to meet me at Special Victims by nine tonight?”

  “I’m just on my way to film a crime scene. Multiple homicide in Alphabet City,” the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the streets were named avenues A, B, and C. “Looks like a couple of teens in a wild shoot-out. I No arrests yet and nothing even close for tonight, but Rod I asked me to do some interior shots of the apartment.” One of the valuable techniques Bob had developed was making videos of crime scenes as soon as they were discovered, so that there would be a permanent record of every detail in its place. The importance of objects or clues near a murder victim often did not become obvious until much later in the investigation, when detectives could refer back to their original relationship to the bodies or the evidence by looking at the video.

  “When you’re done there, will you come on up to Eighty-second Street? They’ll be starting with the line-ups, so there’s no need to rush. I’ll beep you to call it off if he’s not talking. The guy’s a predicate, so maybe he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Give me a call if you get anything hotter than this, okay?” Predicate felons criminals with records of convictions for serious offenses often were savvy enough not to make admissions that would help sink them before a jury.

  I ran out the door and had jumped into a taxi by the time I got to the corner of Worth Street, prepared to creep along the Drive uptown at the height of rush hour to get to my apartment. I brushed past the doorman, skipped the mailbox, waited with several of the neighbors to get on the elevator, and was inside my bedroom and stripping off my work clothes in seconds. I changed into a pair of jeans, a tailored shirt, and a blazer for the long evening of sitting on coffee-littered desktops and making notes while propped against dusty file cabinets. No need for a pocketbook I clipped my beeper onto my belt and stuffed cash into my jacket so I could send out for food and soda for the crew working on the case throughout the course of the evening.

  My turn-around time was less than twenty minutes. I thought about calling David’s office to see if he had studied the faxed version of Cordelia Jeffers’s letter, but when I looked at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes after seven o’clock, I didn’t want to risk calling just as Jed arrived to meet with him. Instead, I left a message on David’s home machine, explaining where I would be for most of the evening and that I would try to reach him orne if I had any free time at the station house.

  I went back downstairs and out onto the street, grabbed a yellow cab and directed the driver across the Eighty-fifth Street transverse to Columbus Avenue, and got out at the corner of Eighty-second to walk the short distance to the Twentieth Precinct. The uniformed cop at the front desk stopped me as I entered the building, so I identified myself to him and walked up the two flights to the Special Victims Squad, which had come to feel like my second home during the past few years.

  Every felony sexual assault that occurred on the island of Manhattan was referred to this little outpost of seasoned professionals.

  When I reached the landing, I pushed open the heavy fire doors that separated the ugly brown-tiled stairwells from the dilapidated office space of the thirty-year-old squad.

  The place was electric with the activity that accompanies a break in a major case. Detectives in every shape, size, and color had been pulled in from days off and borrowed from other details to help round up victims, witnesses, and the stand-ins or fillers needed to be the ringers in the line-up array with the defendant. Every shirtsleeve was rolled up, every collar was open, and the handful of ties I could see were unknotted and worn in the loose crisscross fashion on of the detective world. esti “Hey, Wallace, Cooper’s here,” I heard a guy I didn’t es as recognize call out in the direction of the sergeant’s office. 3gger Mercer appeared in the door frame and waved me;r the in. I started to offer my congratulations, but he talked best over me.

  “The captain is really pissed off. Stay out of h her his way.”

  “At me? What did I do? I just got here.”

  “He did not like your order about the perp walk. Thinks you’re just doing that so that Battaglia can get the press release instead of the PD. He’s mad at me for letting you know about it so early didn’t want me to call you till we’d wrapped everything up tonight.”

  “What a fucking baby he is. I can’t believe you gave me up on that.

  When is he going to learn that it’s just the wrong thing to do at this point in the case? That’ll be like the last pattern he messed up. Didn’t want to call us for a search warrant so he gets the suspect to sign a consent. The judge threw out the whole thing all the evidence said once he was cuffed and asked for a lawyer, he couldn’t consent to anything. C’mon, what’s been going on since you called me?”

  “First I had to accompany Mr. Mont va leto the men’s room so he could relieve himself. There’s a fuzzy birthmark on his thigh all right, just to the southeast of his penis, the way Katherine Fryer had described it.”

  “Great. Get a photo of it before he gets to Riker’s and somebody tells him to paint it green.”

  “Already done. Now, we’ve also got most of the people we need. The couple from the attempt this morning, they’re here. We reached Miss Fryer. Detective Manzi just left to pick up the first victim, and
the third one’s on her way in from Westchester with her daughter. She moved out of town after the rape. I think we’re only missing one. No answer at her house, so we may have to do her down at your office next week.”

  “Everybody in separate cubbyholes?”

  “Yeah. We’re using the juvenile room and the detective squad on the second floor. None of the witnesses will see any of the others before the line-up. I’m telling you, you’ve got us all pussy-whipped, Cooper. We’re doing this exactly the way you want us to,” Mercer laughed.

  It was important that the victims who were going to view the array were separated before the identification process. In the old days, I had watched many of them cross-examined about the police procedures. When brought to the station house in the same patrol car or kept in the same waiting area, the conversation invariably turned to the only thing the women had in common: their assailant.

  “What did your guy look like?”

  “The man who raped me had a mustache.”

  “My attacker had an accent.”

  “No, I think mine was taller than that.” The defense could argue to the jury that the witnesses recollections were enhanced by each other’s descriptions, and it became difficult to tell what each woman remembered before she talked with the others. It took three times the manpower to escort each one in individually, and every empty closet in the building became a holding place for a nervous witness before the procedure got underway. But it would all hold up in court.

  “How do the stand-ins look?”

  “See for yourself. You can take a peek in the viewing room. Glad it was such a beautiful evening not like last night’s rain. Lots of mopes hanging out on street t on corners who’re happy to help out for ten dollars from the stic captain.” Most of the time the cops scoured parks and playgrounds?ge to find reasonable facsimiles of the suspects similar size, the weight, skin color, hairstyle. Drug treatment centers and homeless shelters were also good places for fillers, eager her to get the ten spot for a guarantee that they wouldn’t be arrested for a crime, even if they were picked out by the victim. A couple of hours’ work, standing in the room with the perp and holding a number in front of their chests, and then walking out with the funds for a bottle of Thunderbird or a couple of vials of crack.