Hell Gate

by Linda A. Fairstein

  “Vickee’s on the hunt. One of her pals will turn up.”

  “Forget that. The boy is mine for the night.” I was delighted to be able to offer the comfort of a close friend to stay with Logan while they celebrated with family. Mercer twisted his head and smiled at me. “I hear you right?”

  “I’ve done it before. I haven’t even given him his Christmas presents yet. You tell Vickee that I’ll drive out and take care of everything.”

  “It may get late. Those Eatons can party.”

  “If it gets too late, I’ll sleep over. Let’s see if this domestic tranquillity is all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “Deal.”

  It was almost six o’clock when Mercer parked in front of the entrance to the DA’s office on Hogan Place. The space for Battaglia’s car was empty, and the security officer greeted us and let us pull in.

  Laura was still at her desk when we walked down the quiet corridor to my office.

  “You are the most loyal human being in the world,” I said to her, hanging my jacket and scarf. “Why didn’t you go?”

  “Nan told me it would be a late one. I ordered in a vat of coffee for all of you and some sandwiches. Your phone’s been going off the hook.”

  “Anybody I want to hear from?”

  “Not a one. I’m happy to stay if I can be useful,” Laura said. “Mercer, that guy from Verizon wants you to call him. Some kind of problem with the information I faxed over to him. And nobody touch the chocolate chip cookies—they’re for Mike.”

  Laura had an unabashed crush on Mike and did everything she could to provide his creature comforts in our sterile bureaucratic environment.

  Mercer helped Laura on with her coat while I flipped through the messages. “How’d I get lucky enough to miss the district attorney tonight?”

  “Rose called to ask if you were back yet. Said he was on his way to City Hall.”

  “Again?”

  “No, no. Nothing to do with you.”

  “Really?”

  “You trust anyone more than Rose? She told me that it has something to do with either a fraud case, or a judicial appointment. Maybe both.”

  “Good.” If it was about Tim Spindlis, I didn’t need to take the heat.

  Mercer went inside my office, sat at the desk, and made his call to the phone company. I was saying good-night to Laura when Howard Browner appeared in the doorway.

  “I’d say Happy New Year to you, Alex, but it doesn’t seem to be starting off like a good one.”

  “Thanks, Howard. You must be swamped with everything that’s come into the lab in the last forty-eight hours.”

  Browner was one of my closest friends at the forensic biology lab. With every cutting-edge advance in this scientific field that continued to evolve, Browner and his colleagues educated us and prepared us for the challenges of the courtroom.

  “Can I talk to you about Karim Griffin for a minute?”

  I stepped into the hallway with Howard so Mercer could finish his conversation. “I don’t ever mean to blow you off. I just can’t concentrate on anything but today’s events, Howard. Let me get back to you in a couple of weeks, when things calm down.”

  We were an incongruous pair. Howard was much shorter than I and a lot rounder, with a head of dark, untamed hair and a full beard. But he had helped me through some of the most difficult issues I had ever faced with patience and a wisdom that he was pleased to impart to others.

  “I was here to testify on that murder case in Times Square. I ran into Catherine and she said you’d been meaning to call me about Griffin,” he said. “That’s the only reason I dropped by. I have an idea on the push-in with your eighty-two-year-old victim, but it’ll wait.”

  “Here’s hoping she has time to wait. I shouldn’t have put you off, Howard. What is it?”

  “I’m going to try to get some touch evidence for you. I know it’s the weakest case in the pattern.”

  I was trying to look at Mercer to see what was taking so long yet still pay attention to Howard.

  “Sorry. I thought you’d reviewed everything. I thought all the swabs were negative for seminal fluid,” I said. “There was nothing to analyze for DNA.”

  “That’s the old-fashioned way. I can try for touch DNA now. It’s different—we’re looking for skin cells, for things the perp put his hands on. Instead of swabbing with distilled water, I can actually scrape the items he had to touch to attack her. The cotton undergarments she was wearing, the housecoat he ripped off. You and Mr. Howell were supposed to have a meeting this week. I just wanted to know if I had time to give this a try.”

  I put both hands on his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. “Go for it. You can’t imagine how happy Wilma would be to get a chance to be on the witness stand.”

  “I’ll let you get back to what you’re doing. We’ll probably have lots to talk about in the next few days anyway.”

  “For sure. Thanks for sticking your head in.”

  Howard left and Mercer motioned me back to my office as he finished the conversation and hung up.

  “It’s not good news, Alex.”

  “Won’t they give you the phone records?”

  “I can pick them up in the morning,” Mercer said. “Problem is, it turns out that flurry of calls to nine-one-one yesterday that we thought were from Salma Zunega’s landline?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She was telling the truth. She never made those calls.”

  “I don’t understand. I thought everyone was so certain they originated from her apartment.”

  “That’s what showed up as the incoming line on the caller ID,” he said. “That’s what it looked like till they did the actual computer search today. She was spoofed.”

  “What?”

  “Spoofed. Somebody wanted us to think she was crazy. Somebody wanted to make sure that cops wouldn’t respond if she called again.”

  Phone “phreaks,” as they were known in the trade, had mastered dozens of ways to alter the caller ID information on the telephones of individuals whose numbers they knew. Web sites had developed as commercial enterprises to sell the software to anyone interesting in spoofing, either as a prank or as a criminal enterprise, and law enforcement agencies had been slow to shut the programs down.

  “Can’t we get the real number?” I asked. “Can’t we get to the number of the person who made the calls?”

  “It’s laborious, Alex. These guys use Internet services with all kinds of blind lines and different providers that link to the real number.” Mercer rarely displayed any sign of a temper, but he was angry now. “They even come with scramblers to disguise the voice of the caller. Damn it, it’s going to take days to find the real person behind all this.”

  “No wonder Salma was so hostile to all of you last night.”

  “Shame on me for not even thinking she was telling the truth.”

  “There’s nothing different you could have done, Mercer,” I said. “Why would any of us think it was a death spoof?”

  TWENTY

  “Did you call the commissioner yet?” Mike asked.

  He was the last one to arrive in the conference room, where Mercer and I had taken our place with Nan and Catherine, and a large chalkboard to map out the links between the various crime scenes.

  “Scully, Battaglia, the mayor,” Mercer said. “They’re all tied up at City Hall. Coop’s been assured by Rose Malone that it doesn’t involve us.”

  “He’s going to be ripped that his department got spoofed,” Mike said. “He’ll be loaded for bear.”

  “It’s not a first,” Nan said. “There was a major incident in a Carolina town last year. Someone spoof-called a hostage situation and the entire SWAT team responded. The lady inside had a heart attack.”

  “Bet that lawsuit set the department up for a pretty settlement. Remind me not to tell that one to Scully.”

  “I’ll get you some better examples.”

  Mike reached up and turned on the television set that
was mounted over the long conference table. “Might as well see what’s got their blood boiling at City Hall.”

  He was flipping to the local all-news channel when he stopped on the Jeopardy! game board.

  “I know better than to say it’s inappropriate, don’t I?” Nan asked.

  “I’ve already got a mother. Two, if you count Coop’s more-than-occasional nagging,” Mike said, reaching for half of a ham-and-cheese sandwich. “A few minutes too early for the big prize. Let’s check the Blue Room.”

  There were a handful of reporters standing on the steps at City Hall. They were the young men and women assigned to the local political beat, not the raucous tabloid crowd that I presumed was still keeping vigil outside the Zunega apartment.

  We picked up the sound as the NY1 correspondent was talking. “. . . don’t know why this flurry of activity escalated inside the mayor’s office, but he was joined this evening by District Attorney Paul Battaglia and Commissioner Keith Scully. Those names put crime on everyone’s mind, as we wait out these unexpected appearances.”

  “I think it’s all a ruse so the mayor doesn’t have to show up at Gracie Mansion and face that music,” Mike said.

  “Ssssh,” I said. “You want to know what’s happening or not?”

  I was at the board, drawing a map of the location of the shipwreck in Queens and the various sites in Manhattan that seemed to be in play.

  “And over my left shoulder,” the reporter continued, “you can see that the lights are still on in the City Council, where some kind of special session seems to be in progress.

  “In the meantime, at the bottom of the steps here, the security detail made an interesting discovery this morning.”

  “Coop made one too,” Mike said. “That her formerly skinny ass was taking on so much fromage—am I right? How’s that for a cheesy Frenchman?—that she crashed right through the tarp and went jawbone-to-jawbone with a colonial corpse.”

  “That’s not where I fell, Inspector Clouseau.”

  “No, Alex,” Mercer said, moving closer to the screen. “But this guy’s talking about the other burial pit right below the front steps. See?”

  The reporter was standing with a Parks Department employee who had removed a section of fence to expose another piece of green tarp like the one I had fallen through behind the building.

  “A minor accident here today refocused attention on the abandoned project that involved determining the occupants of these centuries-old graves that predated the construction of City Hall. Budget cuts put a halt to the excavations years ago, and a previous mayor’s protocol mandated that intact remains were not to be excavated.

  “Uncovering the tarp today, which is riddled with large tears and damage from foul weather, we learned that these burial grounds have become a resting place for a wide assortment of objects that probably wouldn’t make it past the metal detectors at the top of the staircase, in the lobby of City Hall.”

  “Nice take,” Mike said, swigging his soda.

  “Mixed among the human remains, park crews found four switchblade knives, two box cutters, a whole bunch of sharp tools and instruments that were made long after the Half Moon sailed through these waters. You’d be surprised at the number of papers and identification cards that were just discarded like junk, here at the very entrance to the controls of our city government.”

  “No different than the courthouse,” I said.

  Every morning, perps and their entourages approached our building, often forgetting until they walked in the doorway that the metal detectors would reveal any weapons they were carrying. The first shift of court officers searched the two-foot-wide dirt perimeter daily, looking for discarded weapons.

  “This is creepier than doing it in front of our building,” Nan said. “Imagine tossing all this stuff into someone’s grave? They really need to solve that problem.”

  Mike had turned back to Alex Trebek, just as he announced the Final Jeopardy! category. “That’s right, I said DEATH VALLEY LIFE. You’ve got sixty seconds to figure out how much you’d like to wager.”

  “Mercer and I have this one. He’s big on wildlife. We’ll take on you three girls. Twenty bucks.”

  “Fine, guys.” I was drawing the links between Salma’s apartment and the well on the Gracie Mansion lawn that overlooked Hell Gate, and the place on the FDR Drive where Ethan Leighton crashed his car. I circled the Leighton home and wrote Claire’s name, with a big question mark beside it. “Then we get to work.”

  Each of us was nibbling on halves of the large sandwiches that Laura had ordered when Trebek revealed the answer and repeated it twice. “Devil’s Hole denizen facing extinction.”

  The three contestants each seemed to be struggling to write a question.

  “You think California condors live in a hole, or the hole name is just to throw us off?” Mike said to Mercer as he started on his second bag of chips. “Gotta be some kind of prairie dog or burrowing owl. You call it, Mercer. You give it the what-is that’s about to become a what-was.”

  The theme music was playing in the background. I started to chalk a list of local political figures recently tainted by possible links to scandal. Congressman Ethan Leighton, former governor Eliot Spitzer, Lieutenant Governor Rod Ralevic, former police commissioner Bernard Kerik.

  “What’s the Devil’s Hole pupfish?” Catherine said, surprising me as she took the chalk from my hand. “Humor me, Alex. Let’s just put Tim Spindlis here to round out the list.”

  “He didn’t do anything bad,” I said. “And he’s not a politician.”

  “But I so enjoy seeing him in such lousy company, even if you erase him later. Exonerate him whenever you’d like.”

  “Now, how’d you know that about pupfish?” Mike asked, offering her some chips as Trebek consoled the three men who had guessed wrong.

  “Studied the case in law school. It’s a little blue minnow that’s lived only in that hole, in a spring-fed pool in that hellishly hot desert, for tens of thousands of years,” Catherine said. “One of the original fish protected in a landmark water rights case before the Supreme Court.”

  Nan and I looked at each other and laughed.

  “You two girls must have been too busy partying to do your homework, I guess. Used to be five hundred of those fish. Probably aren’t even fifty today. The court curtailed groundwater pumping meant to develop irrigation in the Mojave to save these guys. They had to put up a chain-link fence to keep all the law students from peering down into the little pupfish pool.”

  “Probably wouldn’t let Coop anywhere near the hole for fear she’d crash through that fence too,” Mike said. “Crush all those little minnows to death.”

  “Okay, kids, recess is over,” I said, sitting down at the table. “Somebody want to take a stab at suggestions about Salma and where all this leads?”

  Mike muted the volume but turned the set back to NY1 so that we could keep an eye on developing events at City Hall.

  “First we got to figure out who she was,” Mercer said. “I’m assuming you’re right, because of the tattoo, that she was trafficked in. When did she get to the States? Did the snakehead pick her out to breed her for high-end customers, and bring her to New York?”

  “Who introduced her to Ethan Leighton and how often were they together?” Nan asked. “Was there any paper in her apartment? Passports, bank records.”

  “Not that Hal and Jack had come up with by the time we’d left.”

  “That’s really unusual. Most of the time, if these women make the transition and become legal, they cling to that documentation like a life jacket.”

  “Maybe Salma thought she had a better form of protection,” I said. “Maybe her local congressman offered all the coverage she needed.”

  “I’ll call Hal in the morning. If he took any paper out of there, I’ll let him bring it here to voucher and I’ll go through every piece of it,” Catherine said.

  “So we’ve got to talk to Ethan Leighton,” Mercer said. “That�
��s clear.”

  “Which means I have to offer Lem Howell everything under the sun to bring his man in to sit down with us.” Maybe I shouldn’t have hustled out of the limo so quickly.

  “Look,” Mike said, leaning on the table, “Battaglia’ll toss the drunk-driving case to get a leg up on the murder investigation, don’t you think?”

  “He tosses that, and what’s to prevent Leighton from keeping his seat in Congress?” I asked. “Not so fast. Battaglia may have a horse in that race. I have no control over offering to drop the charges.”

  “Who’s handling the vehicular?” Catherine asked.

  “Ryan Blackmer. But he’s cool with it. The front office has told him it gets folded into whatever direction we take with Salma,” I said.

  “So we probably have to work with Ethan’s father too,” Mercer said.

  “Moses Leighton? He’s tougher than nails. And not above trying to bribe his kid’s way out of any situation.”

  Catherine walked to the board and added Moses Leighton’s name. “Let him give it his best shot. I’ve always wanted to wear a wire.”

  “Well, then, how about Claire?”

  “I don’t think I could look Claire Leighton in the eye,” Nan said. “She must be crushed.”

  “Not half as crushed as she’s going to be unless she comes up with a decent alibi,” Mike said.

  “Let me try to get Claire in,” I said. “We’ve got a number of mutual friends.”

  “Don’t go there unless you’ve got Mercer or me with you. She’s got a shitload of proverbial beans she might be looking to spill, Coop.”

  “Yes, but I think the source of all our trouble—all of Salma’s trouble—comes back to the spoofing. Who would have done that to her—and why?”

  “Five days, at best, is how much time the phone company is telling me it’s going to take to see if they can source the calls,” Mercer said. “The software to do the scam and even the voice scrambler is available all over the Internet. Really tough to trace.”

  Catherine hadn’t left the blackboard. Off to the left of the main list, she drew an arrow from Claire’s name and made a subgroup, including Moses Leighton and Lem Howell.