Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  “No.”

  “Were you aware of the traffic going by on Fifth Avenue?”

  “No.”

  “What color was the car?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Think harder,” Prescott said. “You must have noticed it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But you saw an arm extend out of the window?”

  “I think so,” I said. “I mean, I assume that’s what it was. It was all so dark.”

  “There are streetlights on Fifth Avenue, Alexandra,” Prescott said. “And the steps of the Met are illuminated too.”

  “Then I was just tired, okay? I had no reason to be on the lookout for anything.”

  They were dizzying rounds of questions, but my answers didn’t offer any more clarity—to James Prescott or to me.

  “Let’s move on to some of the cases you’ve been handling,” he said.

  “They were reassigned during my leave.”

  “Start before your kidnapping. That was only a few weeks ago,” Prescott said. “We may find something relevant there.”

  “Do you mind if we take a break?” I asked.

  “Certainly,” Prescott said. “I’ll get my secretary to walk you to the restroom.”

  “I don’t have a phone, James. Remember? I don’t have a Dick Tracy watch with a walkie-talkie radio built into the wristband so I can send out a rescue signal,” I said. “Or is it my escape you’re worried about?”

  Prescott had perfected the art of ignoring my jabs in the short time we’d been together. “Bart, you want to get Ella to escort Alexandra to the ladies’ room?”

  “Will do,” Agent Fisher said, stepping out of the room.

  James and I were silent at first.

  “Look,” I said, “if it’s not online already, the Post will have every fact I need to know by the time you and I have finished this standoff.”

  He looked to the open door, walked over, and shut it.

  “Between you and me?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “That obviously means Mike Chapman, too, doesn’t it?”

  “It does,” I said.

  “Okay, Alexandra. So, the car was stolen, as you’ve probably figured.”

  “Yeah. You’ve found it?”

  “You bet,” Prescott said. “They abandoned it six blocks away. Stole it in Harlem, on a side street without a camera. They probably weren’t inside the car for more than ten minutes.”

  “Wiped clean?”

  “These are professionals, Alexandra.”

  “I don’t know what their experience is as car thieves,” I said, “but the guy with his arm out the window was clearly a sharpshooter.”

  “The Fifth Avenue camera closest to the Met got an image. Both men wore ski masks and gloves. The photos are being enlarged but they’re pretty worthless.”

  “What do you know about the gun?” I asked.

  “Start with the bullets,” he said. “Twenty-two caliber. We’ll know more about the weapon once the photo is enhanced. Stern thinks it’s a Ruger, a really reliable gun. With a suppressor.”

  There must have been a silencer, but the shots had sounded like cannon fire to me.

  “His bodyguard, James. Who was driving him last night?” I asked. The DA had an NYPD detective assigned 24/7. “Where was he when Battaglia was coming up the steps?”

  “Parked opposite the museum, just off Fifth Avenue,” Prescott said. “The car was pointed eastbound. The DA had told the guy to wait there, that he just needed five minutes with you.”

  “But the shots?”

  “He heard them. Jumped out of the car and ran up to do what he could for your boss,” he said. “Don’t you remember seeing him?”

  “Actually,” I said, “I don’t.”

  I didn’t remember much beyond the fact of the dead man pinning me against the museum steps.

  Bart Fisher knocked on the door before he opened it. “Ms. Cooper, this is Ella.”

  I stood up and walked over to her. “Hi, I’m Alex Cooper. We’ve spoken on the phone several times.”

  “Yes,” she said. She flashed the first genuine smile I’d seen in hours.

  “You’re my keeper?” I asked.

  “Well, I—” she said, looking at Prescott.

  “That’s okay. I just need to freshen up,” I said.

  We walked down the hall together and Ella let me go into the bathroom by myself. Once done, I ran cold water into the sink and splashed it on my face, two or three times.

  Then I spread my legs and stood back from the tiled wall, pressing my arms against it to brace myself, as though stretching before a run. Everything ached—my limbs and my back and my eyes and most of all my brain. But this was only the beginning, and I knew that.

  Ella walked me back to the conference room and I took my seat.

  “Have you talked to Amy Battaglia?” I asked, as Prescott and Fisher sat back down.

  “Briefly,” he said.

  “Mike said she’s got it in for me.”

  Prescott didn’t respond.

  “You’re not swayed by that nonsense, are you?” I asked.

  He grimaced.

  “I noticed Paul wasn’t wearing his wedding ring,” I said.

  “Noticed when?”

  “In the morgue. Before Amy got there,” I said. “You better check into what was going on between them.”

  “Please, Alexandra, that doesn’t become you.”

  “Paul liked me. He didn’t like or trust that many people, but he used to like me a lot,” I said. “You want to talk about friction? There were days he hated you. We all knew that.”

  “You’re in the gutter with this kind of talk,” he said, blowing me off with a wave of his hand. “There’s always tension between a federal prosecutor and the DA.”

  That fact was true. Battaglia hated the jurisdictional confines of his territory—the island of Manhattan. He had overreached his hand to pull in fraud cases involving foreign banks that had branches in the city or corporate tax evaders who shipped million-dollar paintings from an address in New York to a second home, only to return the art to their apartments. He had feuded publicly with every United States attorney, fighting for the same high-profile cases, since Rudy Giuliani had grandstanded by locking up Wall Street executives on the courthouse steps.

  “He hated your political ambition,” I said to Prescott. “Hated it.”

  Agent Fisher seemed to be twitching as I took the US attorney on.

  “C’mon, Alexandra. Let it alone.”

  “He’s probably rolling over in his refrigerated box right now to think that you’re the one who is going to be handling his murder investigation,” I said, getting myself more wound up by the minute. “He wanted to be a US senator more than he wanted to breathe fresh air, and here you are, positioning yourself for the big run in two years.”

  “Are you done?” Prescott asked.

  “He hated you for that, too. For stepping on his prosecutorial toes with your pre-indictment press conferences and for thinking you could elbow your way into Congress.”

  Prescott stood up again. “Anytime you’re ready to go forward, Alexandra, though I have to compliment you on deflecting the subject so handily,” he said. “It was you Paul was hustling to confront on the steps of the Met, not I.”

  “Who said anything about a confrontation?” I asked.

  “Detective Stern said your last conversation with Paul didn’t go all that well.”

  “There’s a light-year between that fact and the idea that I lured the man to his death.”

  “So talk to me about what cases he was interested in, Alexandra,” James said, leaning in toward me as he took his seat again. “Calm yourself down. Give me some direction here.”

  My stomach was ro
iling. No matter where my thoughts headed, there was nothing calming on any front.

  “I can’t think of anything helpful right now,” I said. “Nothing comes to mind.”

  “You’ve sent a lot of scum to prison,” he said. “You and Paul both made enemies easily.”

  “Most of my offenders are lone wolves. They’re rapists, James. They usually operate solo.”

  “But they still hold grudges.”

  “Yes, and the office has just been through a thorough search of everyone I’ve convicted or busted or even annoyed in the last decade,” I said. “My—my kidnapping had the DA, my SVU legal team, the whole detective division, and the commissioner himself going over my entire body of work.”

  “What did you learn?” he asked, with that earnest look on his face.

  “Me? I’m the one who was out of the loop. Five days with my captors,” I said. “Ask Catherine Dashfer, who took over for me. Ask Pat McKinney, the chief of the trial division. I was missing in action.”

  “Ultimately, the abduction wasn’t about you, Alex,” Prescott said. “Am I right?”

  I swallowed hard. “Dead right. Not about me and not about Paul Battaglia.”

  “So, this case that just—well, just unraveled at the Met last night, is the suspect on the loose a problem?” Prescott was making his list on a legal pad.

  “Most fugitives are, don’t you think?”

  “I meant for Paul,” Prescott said. “There was an international angle to the murder, wasn’t there?”

  “Global,” I said. “The dead man’s company was trying to get into every fashion market in the world.”

  “And you knew about that case, even though you were officially on leave?” he asked.

  “Yes, and Battaglia was peeved about my involvement,” I said. “But I can’t think of anything in the entire matter that put him at risk.”

  “Then we should talk about the Reverend Shipley,” Prescott said, after twenty minutes of pounding me about the Wolf Savage murder.

  “Hal Shipley?” I said. “He’s a total fraud.”

  “What kind of relationship did he have with the district attorney?”

  “A very complicated one.”

  “Detective Stern said you worked on a murder case recently that involved a vic who used to work for Shipley’s community action network.”

  “What about it?” I asked.

  “I need to know more.”

  “You tell me why you never prosecuted Reverend Hal for federal tax evasion, and maybe it will jog my memory.”

  James Prescott rubbed his hands together. “So this is the way it’s going to be, Alexandra?”

  “I don’t know who to trust in this—or don’t you get that yet?” I said, trying to keep my voice from wavering. I had been as wimpy and spineless as a jellyfish in the days following the release from my captors. Now I felt as though some of my vertebrae were regenerating.

  “I don’t know who has my back in all this.”

  “Give me the tools I need—the information I need—to get there,” he said.

  “I promise to work on that,” I said. “Can we call it a day? I’ve got to get to the store to buy a new cell phone, unless you let me—”

  “You’ll need a new phone,” Prescott said. “No question about that.”

  “I hear you. And I’d like to get some rest before I go to the wake tonight.”

  “Wake?”

  “I know you’re a 24/7 kind of guy, James,” I said, “but I’d like to put in an appearance at Paul’s wake.”

  Prescott shook his head. “There’s not going to be a wake, Alexandra. And the funeral service is going to be private, with a memorial several months from now.”

  “I can’t believe Amy isn’t having a service,” I said, half laughing at the thought that Paul Battaglia would be deprived of the public expressions of his importance by the famous and well-to-do. “I’d bet he’s written his own eulogy, and it’s just short of Caesar’s in lavishing praise.”

  “Amy can’t have a service now,” James Prescott said. “Not even by invitation only. Imagine what an embarrassment it would be down the line if the killer turned out to have been seated in the front row.”

  EIGHT

  “How are you feeling now, Alexandra?” Prescott said as he reentered the room.

  It was after five o’clock in the afternoon. The United States attorney for the Southern District of New York had tried to play me like I was an unwitting witness he could break simply by isolating me from my world, my friends, and my family for half a day.

  “You do this well, James,” I said. “You do this so much better than I do.”

  I knew the drill. I had practiced it on lying perps and predators many times. First an hour of questions about the facts. Then expand the picture to motives and opportunities. That had been the piece about Savage and Shipley and public enemies. After that, leave the poor slob in an empty room with no phone, no iPad, no way to communicate with anyone. A cup of vanilla yogurt and a bottle of water. Station a cop or agent at the door to heighten the feeling that the next stop might be an empty cell.

  I was beyond exhaustion. My head was resting on my folded arms on the long table. I picked it up at the sound of Prescott’s voice.

  “Ready for waterboarding, if that’s what’s next,” I said.

  “Diana,” Prescott said, sitting next to me, so close I could smell his bad breath.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Talk to me about Diana,” he said. “Tell me who she is.”

  He had my attention now. I put my hand on my hip and arched my back in a late-afternoon stretch. I repeated the woman’s name out loud, three or four times.

  “Diana who?” I asked.

  “No, no, no, Alexandra,” Prescott said, wagging his finger at me like it was the tail of a dog. “You’re supposed to tell me.”

  “There’s a woman named Diana in Special Narcotics,” I said. “There’s a paralegal in the hiring office, too.”

  Prescott was writing on his pad. “Last names?”

  I told him.

  “What’s your connection to each of them?”

  “None. Zero. Zilch,” I said. “We’ve got five hundred lawyers and a support staff twice that size.”

  “But you don’t know these two?”

  “No. I mean only to say hello to. And I didn’t know the Princess of Wales, either.”

  “Who, then?” he asked, frowning at me.

  “Who, then, what?”

  “Stop playing games with me, Alexandra,” he said. “Have you had a victim named Diana?”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever or lately. Take your pick.”

  “I can’t think of a single one,” I said, putting my elbows on the table and my head in my hands. “Call Catherine, like I told you. She’ll put the name in the computer system and all the Dianas who’ve been to our office or made a police report will pop right up.”

  “Think harder,” Prescott said, blasting his foul breath at me. “I’m giving you a chance to help yourself, Alexandra. I’m throwing you a lifeline here.”

  “Screw your lifeline,” I said. “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “You’ve got five minutes alone with me to rattle this around in your brain.”

  “Then what? Off to Guantánamo?”

  “Why do you insist on making a joke about this?” Prescott asked.

  “Because that’s what I do when I get scared,” I said, as much as I hated to admit to him that his isolation technique was working on me. “I suppose Diana has something to do with the district attorney.”

  “Keep going.”

  “I’m supposed to know about their relationship?”

  “Do you?” he asked.

  “Does it have to do with the fact that he wasn’t wearing his weddi
ng ring?” I asked. “Diana’s the mistress, right?”

  Prescott threw his pen on the table. “Are you telling me or asking me?”

  “I don’t know, James. I’m in the dark.”

  “A few hours ago you said you were his confidante.”

  “I was. Used to be. Past tense.”

  He stood up and grabbed his pad. “I’ll be back shortly. If you think of something you’d like to tell me—without the cops or agents in here—just alert the guy outside the door.”

  I walked over to the window and looked out at the dusky sky. I didn’t know a headache could hurt so much, be so blinding.

  I sat on the foot-wide windowsill and wrapped my arms around my knees. It was at least ten minutes before Prescott returned, this time with Jaxon Stern and Kate Tinsley.

  “Back to the table, please,” Prescott said.

  I went to my hard wooden chair and seated myself.

  “We’ve got something we’d like you to listen to,” he said.

  Detective Stern had a small digital recorder. He placed it on the table.

  “I got your phone from your buddy Vinny,” Stern said. “You might want to increase your tip come Christmas, Ms. Cooper. He gave it right up.”

  “I’ll double down on him, but with a reminder about not being so trusting next time someone comes along and wants my belongings.”

  “TARU has the phone,” Stern said to Prescott, “but they downloaded the voice messages for you.”

  I pulled my chair in. TARU detectives had edited in the times of the calls.

  “Eight oh two p.m.,” the NYPD tech guru said. Then the DA’s voice. “Alex? It’s Paul. Sorry to disturb you at dinnertime but there’s some urgency to this. Call me on my cell as soon as you pick this up.”

  “Eight twenty-two p.m.” A new voice. “Alex, it’s me.” It was my friend Joan Stafford. “I can’t believe my mother loaned you her pearls. She really does like you more than she likes me. Have fun at Dendur.”

  “Nine thirty-six p.m.” Paul Battaglia again. “Where the hell are you? You’ve picked a bad time to play hard to get, Alex. You have exactly what I need and you know it. You want me to come to you? I may just do that.”

  If you were buying into the deadfall theory, then you would think I had heard this message during the course of the evening. You’d think I was a siren, luring the district attorney toward the rocks.