Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  “What happened to the days when he and I trusted each other implicitly?”

  “You—his fair-haired golden girl? Long gone, those days,” Mike said, taking the glass of Scotch from my hand. “And drinking too much of this embalming fluid won’t help, either.”

  I grabbed his wrist to hold the glass in place and breathed in one more shot of Scotch. “I wasn’t drinking, Mike. I was sipping. Sniffing and sipping.”

  “No games, girl. This is all unfolding live, in prime time.”

  “Take me home, then,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at Battaglia. “Just take me home.”

  “That’s a trick not even Houdini could pull off,” Mike said. “No disappearing acts, according to Commissioner Scully.”

  I stepped forward to press myself against Mike’s chest and feel his arms around me. He pulled back faster than I could get to him. “But—”

  “Let’s have you photographed in this getup before we hand over your clothing to the detectives.”

  “You saw everything I did, Mike,” I said. “You talk to the guys tonight. They can interview me tomorrow.”

  “Any witness ever said that to you, Madame Prosecutor, and you’d start waterboarding her on the spot.”

  “I’m so tired, Mike. I’m so sick to my gut and frightened and confused,” I said. Then I swiveled in place to take another look at the late Paul Battaglia. “And there’s a part of me that feels really guilty about this.”

  The rookie cop turned to look at me.

  “You didn’t hear that, kid,” Mike said, shaking his finger at the young officer. “She’s not talking guilt as a matter of law.”

  “I feel—”

  “No more running off at the mouth, Coop. You didn’t fire the gun, okay, did you? That’s guilt with a capital G. We don’t know what the fuck was going on with the district attorney.”

  “Nothing good, Mike. You know that for sure. Whatever it is, it got him killed.”

  “C’mon. Crime Scene needs photos of you in your Halloween costume. Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”

  “Who’s handling the investigation?” I asked, walking slowly toward the door.

  “The mayor’s putting a task force together with Scully,” Mike said. “A new guy from Brooklyn South Homicide—”

  “New? He’s cutting his teeth on the murder of the Manhattan DA?”

  “New because it can’t be anyone who knows either one of us, Coop. Also, some broad just assigned to Major Case a couple of weeks back. And a task force designation because they have to throw in a few feds for the white-collar cases Battaglia was working with the US attorney.”

  “That means I’ve got to relive my tortured history with the man,” I said, thinking about the details that would be gathered in the detective division reports, known as DD5s. “Every DD5 and interview will be public record when his killer goes to trial.”

  “You’re always looking at the dark clouds, Alexandra Cooper,” Mike said, holding the door open for me.

  “I’m in a morgue, Mike, in the middle of the night, next to the body of the man who trained me to be what I am today.”

  “He sniped at you pretty good too. He had you in his sights these last few months and he nipped at your heels whenever he could,” Mike said. “Mortui non mordant.”

  “Save your parochial school Latin for the funeral mass. It’s lost on me.”

  “That’s not from the nuns, Coop. Think Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island,” Mike said. He cocked his finger and thumb and fired an imaginary bullet at the corpse. “It’s your chance to get back on your feet.”

  I repeated the three Latin words. “Mortui non mordant?”

  “Could be your lucky day, Coop,” Mike said. “It means ‘Dead men don’t bite.’”

  TWO

  I stood against a plain white wall in one of the conference rooms while Hal Sherman took a set of photographs for the case detectives. The first few were full frontal of me in the bloody sweatshirt and leggings. Then I was directed to hold both arms out at shoulder height, so the full pattern of spatter and stains was visible. Next there were close-ups of my face from every angle, which must have resembled mug shots of a felonious homeless woman. I turned to each side, as Hal asked me to do, before I posed with my back to the camera.

  “Good to go, Alex,” Hal said, leaning over the long table to make notes. “Give me a scrip of the items, please. Manufacturer and size.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They’re not mine.”

  “Whose, then?” he asked.

  “Mike and I were at the Met. I was dressed up for that fashion show at the start of the evening,” I said, “till I got into a bit of a wrestling match.”

  “Oh, yeah. Our other team covered that mess,” Hal said. “You lose your ball gown there, Cinderella?”

  “Traded it in for a hairdresser’s sweatshirt and these leggings from a model. I think there’s blood on my sandals, too, Hal.”

  “We’ll take it all, Alex. Dr. Palmer left some of her jogging clothes in the bathroom for you. I’ll bag what you’re wearing and you can get on with the business at hand.”

  I headed for the door—the restroom was between Palmer’s office and the conference room—then turned back to Hal. “This guy from Brooklyn South who’s the lead dog, do you know him?” I asked.

  “Jaxon Stern? Fresh out of Internal Affairs,” Hal said. “Yeah, I know him. Homicide is his reward for squealing on cops for three years in IAB.”

  “What’s he like, other than that? I mean, is he up to a case as big as this?”

  “Smart enough. Good detail man, which sometimes causes him to lose the larger picture,” Hal said. “Dogged. Bit of an attitude. Humorless.”

  “That won’t last long around Mike,” I said. “We’ll be okay in this, I guess. I’m so used to working with teams of guys I know and trust.”

  “You’ll get to know him pretty fast, Coop,” Hal said. “He’s a full-on prick. Don’t let anything come out of your mouth that you’ll regret saying later on.”

  I closed the restroom door behind me. What had I done to draw a full-on prick when I found myself dead center in an NYPD investigation?

  I took off the sweatshirt and leggings, careful to keep them separate from each other so there was no cross-contamination of evidence. Palmer had been thoughtful enough to give me a new pair of underwear—the kind kept in emergency rooms so that rape victims who had to give up their clothing for testing could go home with clean panties. I folded my own so that Crime Scene could voucher them, in case any blood had seeped through the outer garments.

  When I stepped over to the sink and checked myself out in the mirror, I saw that my face was worse than an image from a horror movie.

  My skin was ghostly pale, smudged with dirt and blood and in all likelihood a bit of Battaglia’s gray matter. My hair was so disheveled it looked like a circus clown’s fright wig. It was matted and snarled, and some kind of foreign residue had nested there.

  My eyes were bloodshot, and although I had teared up in the autopsy room, I didn’t remember until now that I had cried all the way downtown in Mike’s car. My thoughts were running out of sequence, and I knew too well how trauma could make that happen.

  I squeezed the container and filled my hands with liquid soap, running the water to get it hot at the same time. Then I dipped my head down and scrubbed my face for at least two minutes.

  I looked up, noted a slight improvement, but didn’t feel any cleaner than when I started.

  Of course Emma Palmer had a shower. How else to get the day’s distinctive odor and debris off? It was behind another door in the bathroom. I went inside and turned it on, opening cabinets and drawers to find a clean towel and shampoo.

  I waited for steam to form in the shower, then stepped in. I lathered my hair and held my face up to the showerhea
d, rubbing my skin so hard that I thought the top layer might come off in my hands.

  After I toweled off and combed out my hair, I put on the one-size-fits-all underpants, courtesy of the Bellevue ER. There was room for at least one more woman inside the cheap, stretchy panties with me. Palmer hadn’t thought of giving me a bra, but no one would even notice that since I didn’t do much to come close to filling a B-cup.

  I was thirty-eight years old and five feet ten inches tall. Dr. Palmer was in her midfifties, also tall and lean. Her zippered jogging jacket fit me fine, and the pants were a size six too, so I was all set to meet my interrogators.

  I padded out of the bathroom in crime scene booties, which Palmer had also left for me.

  When I reached her office, the door was open. Mike was inside, talking to Mercer Wallace. They were alone together.

  Mercer dwarfed both of us in sheer physical size. He didn’t say a word to me, but grabbed me by my shoulders and pulled me close to him.

  He was a Special Victims detective—with as much empathy and warmth as he had intelligence and skill. Like me, he appreciated the need to handhold his victims and get them through the cold criminal justice system intact. Mike, on the other hand, worked homicide as much because it spared him dealing with living victims as because he did the job so well.

  “What’s going on?” I said to him. “Wake me up from this nightmare, will you?”

  “No need to talk, Alex,” Mercer said. “Plenty of time for that. You need to take a few minutes to gather your thoughts and get yourself together. Just hold tight.”

  I took a few deep breaths, cushioned against Mercer’s powerful chest.

  “Just get through the next few hours,” Mercer said. “This will be over before you know it.”

  “Did you see anything, Mercer?” I asked, twisting my head around to look up at him.

  “I was still inside the museum,” he said. “But it wouldn’t matter if I did. They need to talk to you first.”

  “Will you wait for me?”

  “Of course we will,” Mike said. “You’re going to like Kate Tinsley.”

  “Major Case?” Mercer asked.

  “Yeah. I worked a serial killer with her two years ago. A couple of years older than you, Coop. Totally stand-up broad.”

  “I hear the homicide cop is—” I started to repeat Hal Sherman’s description, but stopped in my tracks when Mike held his hand up in my face.

  “All depends who you heard it from,” the man in the doorway said. “I’m Stern. Detective Jaxon Stern. Brooklyn South.”

  Mike held out a hand to shake, taking the detective’s business card with his left hand. “Mike Chapman. Manhattan North.”

  “Mercer Wallace,” my friend said, letting go of me to make the proper introduction. “Manhattan Special Victims Unit.”

  “Wallace? I’m Stern,” the detective said.

  He was shorter than all three of us—a stocky five foot eight, and lighter-skinned than Mercer. If he owned a smile, we hadn’t seen it yet.

  “I’m Alexandra Cooper,” I said.

  “Somebody give you permission to shower?” Stern asked.

  “I—I—uh . . . I had to get myself—I—I—I had to clean myself up,” I said.

  “The medical examiner went over her from head to toe when we got here,” Mike said. “She swabbed some samples from stuff that landed on Coop’s skin and in her hair, and Hal Sherman has a complete set of photographs.”

  “I expect that will be the last question you answer for her, Chapman,” Stern said. “She’ll get over her stammering, I promise you.”

  Mike was biting the inside of his cheek as he stared at the detective’s card. “Jaxon. J-A-X-O-N?” Mike asked, a bit too snidely. “Your mother didn’t have spell-check on her laptop when she went into labor?”

  “Spare me the ‘yo mama’ jokes, Chapman. It’s an old family name.”

  “Okay, Jaxon,” Mike said, “what’s your plan?”

  “I said it’s Stern, man. Detective Stern. No need to get so cozy on our first date.”

  “Break it up, both of you. This sounds like kindergarten, guys,” Mercer said. “It’s been a long night for the three of us, Stern. You want Ms. Cooper?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “Here?”

  “Dr. Palmer said we could use her office,” Stern said, looking around and eyeing the chair behind Palmer’s desk. “This is good. Tinsley’s just signing in at the front door. You know about her, Ms. Cooper—she’s the officer you’re going to like.”

  “Okay if I get her a Diet Coke from the machine before you start talking to her?” Mike asked Stern.

  “If it helps sober her up.”

  “Who the hell do you think you are, Detective?” I said, too loud for my own good, slamming my hand down on the desk. “Where’s the lieutenant? Where’s the commissioner? I don’t have to take any flak from you.”

  “See that, Chapman? She’s got no stutter at all,” Stern said. He threw his memo book on Palmer’s desk and walked around it to stand behind her high-backed chair. “Word on the street says you’ve got yourself a bit of an alcohol problem, Ms. Cooper.”

  “The only problem I have at the moment is you, Detective Stern.”

  I had done the surname thing myself, more times than I could count. The formality kept the witness at arm’s length and made her—in this case, me—doubly aware that we weren’t buddies while in this hunt, even if I thought we were working for the same purpose.

  “Have you been drinking tonight, Ms. Cooper?” Stern asked.

  The physical dynamic in the room was disconcerting. No question Stern had put himself in the driver’s seat, behind Palmer’s enormous metal desk. Mike had moved toward the door to go to the vending machine, and now the only thing keeping him from taking a jab at Stern was Mercer’s long left arm, holding him back.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Alcohol. I think you know exactly what I mean.”

  “I was kidnapped a month ago, Detective. I—I’ve been struggling with some PTSD issues for a few weeks, but I’m beating it now, okay?”

  “Dewar’s. Rocks. No twist,” Stern said to me. “Have a familiar ring?”

  “You’re a quick study, Detective,” Mike said. “I hope you know half as much about the cases she’s tried and the assholes she’s sent up the river and the pedophiles she’s put away and the team of prosecutors she leads and—”

  “Get the soda for her, Chapman,” Stern said. “I asked you if you’ve been drinking tonight, Ms. Cooper.”

  I looked at Mercer, but he was stone-faced. I knew Stern was giving me the most basic test questions, as irrelevant as they were to Battaglia’s murder. He would later ask Mercer and Mike the same things about me, trying to assess the credibility of each one of us—checking to see if any of us would lie for the other.

  “I—uh—I was at a party at the museum. At least it started as a party,” I said. “I might have had a glass of champagne before all the trouble broke out.”

  I knew my own rules for witnesses who’d been partying or barhopping. For each drink they admitted to me, I usually multiplied the number by three. Most people tried to make themselves look better in the eyes of the person who was judging the factual recall, and one way to do that was to minimize the amount of liquor consumed.

  “Oh,” I said, “I just remembered that at the very end of the night, the three of us were in the Temple of Dendur and—”

  “Don’t speak for these guys,” Stern said. “Just tell me about your own actions.”

  “Well, Mercer brought me a glass of Scotch, but I wanted to get out of there and go home. I really didn’t drink much.” No more than half the large glass, anyway, and a homicide at point-blank range has a sobering effect.

  “How about here, at the morgue?” Stern asked.

 
“Here?” I said. I was stalling for time, as witnesses always did when they repeated a simple question before answering it. “You mean tonight?”

  I was doing a double stall, breaking it down into two questions, two repeats.

  “Jeremy Mayers’s private stock. You have any of that?”

  Great. Even Jeremy was a snitch.

  “She wasn’t drinking, Stern,” Mike said. “She was sniffing. I’m the one who told her to sniff a glassful to keep that wretched odor of death out of her nose. The glass is still in the room with the dead body. If Coop was into drinking, it would have been an empty vessel.”

  “You’re out of here, Chapman,” Stern said. “Stick around down the hall, ’cause you’ll be next.”

  “Mike,” I said, reaching out to him, “Can I just—?”

  “You’ll be fine, Coop. Answer the man’s questions,” Mike said. “Don’t waste any time trying to charm him. He clearly got his merit badge in policing from the Gestapo.”

  “Hey, Mike,” a woman said, turning the corner and entering the room just as Mike was backing out. “Bad night in Black Rock. Back off my partner, okay? We’ve got work to do.”

  “Kate. Go on in,” Mike said, patting her on the shoulder. “Meet Detective Stern.”

  Kate Tinsley stepped in the doorway and raised her hand to greet all of us. “Kate Tinsley, Major Case.”

  I nodded in her direction.

  “Sorry to be running late, Stern,” she said. It was obvious that she already knew him or had met him once she’d arrived here at Palmer’s office. Whether they had just been teamed up or had worked cases earlier on, she was smart to present a united front with him to the three of us.

  “You must be Alexandra Cooper.”

  “I am,” I said, pushing against the arms of the chair to stand up.

  “No need,” Tinsley said. “Just be as comfortable as you can. What a rough night you’ve had.”

  I nodded again, taking in the woman I guessed to be five or six years older than me, heavyset, with a round face ringed with curly black hair.