by Adam Mitzner
The question is directed at me because I know what’s currently on the docket of the Special Vics Bureau. “No, not that I’m aware of,” I say. “I’ll need to review all of our case files as well as any e-mails or voice mails that Lauren received. But we met once a week to discuss open matters, so I’d know if there was anything of particular concern. There wasn’t.”
Gabriel chimes in. “Lauren did say something about a guy who just got out. Raped his family.”
This is not something Lauren shared with me. “Do you remember his name?”
“I don’t, but Ella probably will.”
That ends the general discussion, and no one says anything for a good ten seconds. It’s the Police Commissioner who finally breaks the silence.
“At the risk of stating the obvious, this is our top priority. Blank check for overtime . . . manpower, you name it.”
“Nobody kills an Assistant District Attorney,” McKenney adds. “Nobody.”
9.
ELLA BRODEN
An unseasonably cold November morning does nothing to lighten the foot traffic in the West Village. The streets are teeming with people when I emerge from Allison’s townhouse. As I sometimes do during the day, I wonder where they’re all going. I think about the fact that I have nothing on my schedule today. In fact, aside from Lava next Tuesday and my appointment tomorrow with Allison, I have nothing to do for the rest of the week.
I haven’t gotten any farther away than the corner of Jane and Greenwich Streets when my phone rings. It’s Gabriel. As he complains I often do, I start talking first, even though he called me.
“I just left Allison’s. I was thinking about heading downtown later and watching my father argue my favorite case.”
Gabriel knows I’m being sarcastic. The case in question is the money-laundering trial of Nicolai Garkov, a matter that has consumed my father for nearly a decade. Gabriel, however, doesn’t respond to my comment. That’s the first inkling I have that something is wrong.
“What?” I say to break the now-ominous silence.
“I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone, Ella, but I can’t leave here. I wanted you to hear it from me before it’s all over the media. Lauren Wright was murdered last night.”
The news literally knocks me off my feet. As soon as Gabriel says the words, I sink to the sidewalk.
This can’t be happening. Not again, I tell myself. And then those same words leave my mouth.
I don’t hear anything Gabriel says back, because now I’m crying hysterically. Sitting on the curb, bawling my eyes out. A young man asks if I’m okay. I nod that I am, even as it’s obvious to him that I’m not.
Not Lauren. Not now.
I learned that Charlotte was missing in stages. Her boyfriend called me before dawn saying she hadn’t come home the night before and he was worried, but I assumed they’d had a fight and she was teaching him a lesson by staying out all night. Or I figured that she’d had a little too much to drink and decided to crash at a friend’s place. The idea she might be in trouble, or dead, didn’t occur to me until a few hours later, when she still hadn’t returned my calls and I could no longer comfort myself with the thought she was sleeping it off somewhere.
And whom had I called for help? Lauren.
She put me in touch with Gabriel, who took over the investigation. By the time Charlotte’s body was found washed up on the bank of the East River, she’d been gone for several days. Although the confirmation that my sister was dead was a jolt to my system, I had already assumed as much, so the reality only ended my prayers for a miracle.
This time, however, I haven’t had any prior suspicions to soften the blow.
Lauren was alive last night, and now she’s dead.
“What . . . happened?” I ask.
“All I know so far is that it was two gunshots to the head. Her body was found a few blocks from her apartment, in Central Park. They put me in charge of the investigation, so I can’t leave the office right now. But come down to One PP. As soon as I get free, we can talk.”
Who would want to kill Lauren?
The most likely murderer is always a lover. As the old expression goes, when you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras. When you see a murdered wife, think husband, not anyone else.
“Was it Richard?”
Part of me is hoping that Gabriel will say yes and then all this will be over. The other part of me knows that if Richard did kill Lauren, he’d never admit it. Worse still, he’d commit the crime in a way that would never in a million years link back to him.
“Richard is here, but I haven’t spoken to him yet,” Gabriel says. “I just heard about this and wanted to tell you right away. I’m told, though, that he claims he had no idea Lauren wasn’t sleeping beside him when the bad-news call woke him.”
Another Good Samaritan, an elderly woman, stoops over me. “Can I help you, dear?”
“Thank you, but no,” I whisper. “I’m fine.”
A chilling thought hits me like a smack to the head.
Donald Chesterman.
Like a Pavlovian reaction to the mere thought of the man, I feel a knot form in my stomach. If he killed Lauren, I doubt he’ll stop with her. It’s me he really hated. I was the one who did the stand-up work in court.
Donald Chesterman has been invading my subconscious from time to time ever since we put him away. Thoughts of him were like a squirrel that claws its way into the attic, wreaks havoc, and quickly leaves.
I sometimes wonder whether Donald Chesterman would have had such a lasting impact on me if he hadn’t been my first major case. Lauren had already seen it all by then, though, and even she said she’d never had a case like his. Perhaps there are some crimes so horrible that it doesn’t matter how grizzled you are, you simply can’t imagine that type of evil. When you’re confronted with its existence, it leaves an indelible mark on your soul.
Everything about the case seemed incongruent, starting with the man at its center. Donald Chesterman was a well-respected partner in a midtown real-estate firm. He lived in a prewar, three-bedroom apartment on Riverside Drive. He sent his children to private school. His wife, Donna, had a law degree from Fordham, although she didn’t practice; she spent much of her time volunteering at the assisted-living community a few blocks from their home. I must have spoken to a hundred neighbors, business colleagues, and friends. To a person, each described a mild-mannered man and a family that was out of a Norman Rockwell painting. In other words, Donald Chesterman was the very last person who you’d think was terrorizing his family.
But terrorize his family he did. Over and over again. Beatings and rape—all three of them. Donna took the brunt of it, a conclusion I reached not based on anything she said but from the abject fear in her eyes. She steadfastly refused to testify against her husband. It might have ended there, or more accurately, the trial might never have even begun, if Chesterman’s son, Donald Jr., who went by his middle name of Raymond, hadn’t been so courageous. He was twelve, and adamant that he needed to do something to protect his sister, Jennifer, who was eight. That’s why he called the cops.
Although in most ways that mattered the father and son could not have been more different, Raymond was also a bag of contradictions. He was a strong student, nearly all As, but had difficulty making eye contact. He was always looking down at his hands, which he more often than not kept in his lap, fingers interlocked. Taller than most twelve-year-old boys, he was still a stranger to puberty at an inch shorter than me, and so skinny that I was worried he might have an eating disorder. He was unfailingly polite, with lots of “Yes, ma’ams” that you don’t normally hear from city kids. Our shrink said that Raymond was suffering from one of the worst cases of PTSD he’d ever seen—and that included soldiers who’d returned from Afghanistan.
Lauren and I met with Raymond for weeks before the trial, going over the questions and answers for his direct examination as if it were a play. When it came time for him to take the stand, he was sp
ot-on.
“First it was just touching,” Raymond said when I asked him to recount his sexual contact with his father. “I don’t remember when that began, because it always seemed to have been that way. I was six or seven when he began putting his penis in my mouth. Ten when he started having sex with me.”
During prep, Raymond’s voice often quavered. Sometimes he cried. But on the stand, he was resolute. He even held eye contact with the jury, which was no mean feat for him—and something we’d practiced for hours.
The last question and answer still ring in my ears.
“Raymond, tell us why you agreed to testify against your father.”
“Because my father is also raping my mother and my little sister. Jennifer is only eight, and I need to make it stop.”
I had expected his father’s lawyer, Michele Sutton, to rely on the standard playbook for crossing children—come across as a sympathetic friend so that you build trust with the witness and appear like a decent person to the jury, then point out all the ways that children are prone to manipulation by prosecutors and other authority figures.
Instead, she went for the jugular with the very first question: “Isn’t it a fact that you, and not your father, are raping your little sister?”
Raymond looked at me from the witness stand, confused. I turned to Lauren, but she shook her head no. We couldn’t help him. He was on his own up there.
“No, that’s not true,” Raymond said. “My father did that to Jennifer. Not me.”
“So you say, but Jennifer hasn’t accused him of raping her. Only you’ve said that in this trial. Same thing with your mother. You say your father raped her, but she doesn’t say that. In fact, your mother is going to testify that you’re lying. Your own mother, Raymond, is going to take this stand and swear an oath to God, punishable by the crime of perjury if she lies, and say that you—you, Raymond, not your father, but you—raped your baby sister. And the only evidence we have that you’re not a rapist—in fact, the only evidence we have about anything you’ve said here today—is your say-so. The word of a person whose own mother says he is a liar.”
I objected, telling the judge that there wasn’t a question being posed. Before the judge could rule, Sutton said, “Here’s my question, Raymond. Are you calling your mother a liar?”
“She’s really scared,” Raymond said.
“Why would she be scared?” Sutton said, as if the idea of a battered woman being so frightened that she would lie to protect her abuser was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever heard. “If what you say is true—that your father is a sexual predator who abuses his own family—she should be doing everything she can to send him to jail. But she’s not, is she, Raymond? No. And you’re right about one thing. She is scared. She’s scared that your father is going to go to jail and then there won’t be anyone to stop you from raping Jennifer. That’s what terrifies her.”
When his cross-examination was over and Raymond and I were in the hallway, he broke down. As he sobbed, I told him that I blamed myself for failing to see that line of attack coming. He didn’t care about what had just occurred on the stand, however. Something much worse than being accused of rape brought him to tears.
“My father is going to come home with us,” he said. “Isn’t he?”
Later that evening, Lauren suggested that we offer Chesterman a plea deal.
“No,” I said, almost instinctively.
“It’s not that close a call,” Lauren replied. “We’re going to lose. The wife is going to testify that she was never raped and that Raymond was never raped, but that Jennifer was. She’ll say Raymond is her abuser. For us to rebut that, we have to put Jennifer on the stand. And you know as well as I do that she won’t hold up under cross.”
That part was true. Our shrink had told me more than once that making Jennifer Chesterman testify would be like abusing her all over again. Besides, even if I could convince myself that the ends of putting Chesterman away justified the trauma to his daughter, Lauren was right: we’d most likely still fail. Jennifer would be sufficiently eviscerated by Michele Sutton on cross to ensure that the jury wouldn’t believe her.
Still, I thought that anything less than a lifetime prison term for Donald Chesterman was giving up. “Then let’s go to the jury without Jennifer,” I said. “I’d rather lose at trial than live with the fact that I was responsible for allowing Chesterman ever to be free again.”
I remember almost verbatim what Lauren said next, because it has guided me as a prosecutor ever since.
“This job should not be in any way, shape, or form about how you feel, Ella. It’s about your clients, the people of the state of New York. And given that this is a family situation, I’m not all that concerned about the citizenry at large. But I am deeply worried about what happens to those children. How will they feel if Donald Chesterman goes free? Letting him plead to anything other than the max might not seem like justice for what he’s done—and believe me, I agree with you, it’s not—but with any luck, he’ll be locked away long enough for them to become adults and be able to stay away from him when he gets out. In that context, we’re giving these children their lives. Isn’t that more important than taking away Donald Chesterman’s?”
Chesterman took the deal. Maximum sentence of fifteen years, although he could get out sooner with good behavior, which is apparently what happened.
Shortly after he became a long-time guest of the New York Department of Corrections, Lauren received a letter. Typed, no return address, no name even, but we both knew it was from Chesterman. He must have had someone smuggle it out of prison, because prison mail is reviewed before it goes out. It was only one line, all caps, centered in the middle of the page:
THE MOMENT I GET OUT, I’M GOING TO KILL YOU.
As a prosecutor, you get a lot of death threats. Defendants live with a level of desperation unknown to most people. They’re on the verge of being branded and caged. Even though they only have themselves to blame, they often look to foist it onto someone else. Who better than the person asking the judge to impose biblical punishment?
I scan the street. There are a dozen or so people in my line of sight, most making their way to the subway. Is one of them Donald Chesterman, preparing to complete his revenge? Or a man he hired to do his bidding?
Gabriel is saying something about the investigation, but I’m only half listening. Not even half. I tell him that I’ll see him shortly, and then I break the connection.
10.
DANA GOODWIN
I settle into Gabriel Velasquez’s guest chair and look around his office, trying to figure out what I can about my new partner by his surroundings. The room doesn’t reflect my first impressions of the man at all. It’s a mess. Papers are strewn about, and the mismatched furnishings seem to have been collected from different offices. He’s very polished, with his monochromatic clothing and badge affixed to a chain around his neck. And he’s handsome, almost painfully so, with large brown eyes and a smile that would be hard to deny.
“Sorry I made you wait,” he says. “But as you heard in there, I’ve been dating Ella Broden for the last six months, and she and Lauren were very close. I just called her to break the news. Ella’s sister was murdered six months ago, and, well, this is a lot to absorb in and of itself, but coupled with that . . . she’s taking it very hard.” He looks up and catches my pained expression. “I’m sorry. This must be terrible for you too. How are you holding up?”
I smile weakly. “It doesn’t feel real yet, to be honest. I’m sure Ella has told you how wonderful Lauren . . . was. I mean, everyone loved her.”
“Apparently not everyone,” he says solemnly.
I wonder what he sees, looking across at me. My guess is that I’m five years older than Gabriel, which makes us contemporaries, but I’d wager he thinks of me as “older.” Based on his involvement with Ella, I assume he’s not intimidated by a smart woman, which isn’t the norm among the men in the NYPD. At the same time, I suspect he’s
not happy to be teamed up with an ADA in the investigative stage. From past experience, I’ve learned that cops like to have a free hand in sifting through the evidence. Besides, whenever you have one of these interdepartmental matchups, the issue of hierarchy inevitably arises. Does Gabriel work for me because I’m the one who is eventually going to have to prove guilt in court? Or do I work for him because investigating crime is a police function?
I decide it’s never too early to curry favor with a work colleague. It’s been my experience that it’s easiest to do that with men by sucking up to them.
“Full disclosure,” I say. “I’m not at all experienced with what happens this early in an investigation. You guys normally do your thing, and then I’m handed a suspect and told to get a conviction. So you tell me. What’s the first step?”
“We talk to her husband,” Gabriel says.
Interrogation Room Two is not a place that anyone would feel comfortable, even if it weren’t used exclusively for questioning criminal suspects. It’s neutral in the worst way—gray paint, a small metal table pushed up against the wall, one metal chair on each of the three exposed sides. The fluorescent lighting is harsh, and there’s an overhead camera with a blinking red light.
“Richard,” Gabriel says upon entering, as if they’re old friends. He reaches out to shake Richard Trofino’s hand, which causes Richard to rise from the metal chair to grasp it. “I’m so very sorry for your loss.”
If the story we heard is correct, the uniform cops woke him with a phone call. They must have given Richard some time to change before transporting him down to One PP. He looks like he just stepped out of a GQ ad for business-casual attire. He’s clad in gray wool slacks, a well-starched white button-down shirt, and suede Gucci loafers.
Richard nods. In barely more than a whisper, he says, “Thank you.”
I would not have thought it possible for a man’s appearance to change so much in so little time. Less than twenty-four hours ago, Richard had stood in my office with his usual swagger, but now he has the look Jacob sometimes wears when he’s frightened.
