“May I continue, Your Honor?”
“Yes, Ms. Cooper.”
“The apartment I’m referring to has been completely soundproofed.”
“Loud music? Parties?”
“Not much of either, Judge. It’s mostly to muffle the screaming.”
“That should have been obvious to me. I must be slipping. You’ve got a rape charge in here?” she said, referring to the indictment.
“In almost every instance, Estevez starts with a sexual assault on the victim. No grooming period, no adjustment. They’re brought to the apartment one at a time, and he makes each one have sex with him.”
“What’s the force? Or is that what you mentioned in the voir dire?”
“No, the trafficking aspect starts later. There are at least two rape charges per victim. One is statutory because they’re all under the age of consent. The other is first-degree. Estevez uses physical force. Smacks them around when they resist, uses neckties and socks to secure them to the headboard, then has intercourse.”
“These girls have injuries? They’ve been examined—?”
“No injuries,” Moretti said. “Not a single one. Not a scratch.”
Fleming looked me. “Is that true?”
“Estevez and his crew don’t let the girls go, Judge. That’s the whole point. First he takes a shot at them, one girl at a time. One sexual assault at a time. Then he and one of his alums from the program—an older woman, like, maybe nineteen—spend a few weeks softening the kid up. The vic’s made to think she’s Estevez’s girlfriend. Clothes, video games, music, a gradual introduction to drugs and alcohol. But they never get to leave the apartment. Not once.”
“Stockholm syndrome,” Fleming said. “The girls form a traumatic bond with the hostage taker. That’s how they protect themselves emotionally.”
“Of course Ms. Cooper will have to prove that.”
“Apparently she thinks she can, Mr. Moretti. Go on.”
“That’s why there’s no medical evidence,” I said. “Nothing contemporaneous to the initial assaults. The second series of events begins after the bonding. It’s the period of coercing the young women to work for him. To be trafficked.”
“A machete and a full-face mask?”
“Accompanied by some powerful verbal threats, and the backup of the posse just waiting to have at them. Then Estevez has them branded and off they—”
“Branded?”
“The tattoo, Judge,” I said. “When they’re ready to turn tricks, he brings in a tattoo artist, to make sure they’re each marked as his property.”
“Is that part of the torture?”
“Most of them view it that way.”
“Oh, please, Ms. Cooper,” Moretti said. “These kids leave home with more tats and piercings than most carnies have by the time they’re forty. What’s one more?”
I reached into my file for some photographs. “The Antonio Estevez logo, Judge.”
I handed one of them to the court officer to pass to Judge Fleming.
She turned it upside down. “What am I looking at? What body part?”
“That’s the inner thigh, about an inch below where Ms. Glover’s left leg meets her torso.”
“And the image?” Fleming said, squinting at the inked area.
“It’s supposed to be a woman in the center, with a man on each side of her.”
“The men are both aroused, it seems to me.”
“That’s the plan.”
“And the words? Do I see lettering?” Fleming said, putting on her glasses.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “It’s all about power and control for Estevez. It spells out, I SHARE MY BITCH. They seem to be the words he lives by.”
“A sentiment that will serve him well in state prison, I’m sure,” the judge said, looking up when she heard the courtroom door open, “where he’s probably hoping that he’s not the one who becomes the bitch.”
It was one of the detectives from the squad, Drew Poser, walking toward counsel table.
“Bring Ms. Aponte right in, Officer. She’s not Ms. Cooper’s witness; she’s mine.”
“I don’t have her, Judge,” Poser said, holding his arms out to his sides. “That’s what I’m here to tell you.”
“Did she give you a hard time, Detective?”
“I mean she’s history. No hard time. No time at all.”
“But she works on the eighth floor,” I said. “She whispered something to the defendant and then she went back downstairs to the office.”
“Maybe what she whispered was ‘sayonara,’ Alex, ’cause she never swiped her ID to get back into our offices from the elevator bank. And there’s nothing personal at her work space. No pocketbook, no cell phone—nothing but an empty desk.”
“So Josie Aponte just quit?”
“I don’t think she worried about giving the traditional two weeks’ notice, Alex. Not once she got exactly what she apparently came here for.”
“I know,” I said, taking my seat at the table and massaging my aching head with both hands. “The entire case file of Antonio Estevez.”
“I’d say she’s got a copy of pretty much everything that’s on your computer. Maybe that’s what she wanted to communicate to your perp,” Poser said. “All I can tell you, Alex, is you’ve got no secrets now.”
FOUR
It was four fifteen when Drew Poser and three of the court officers from Part 53 walked me down the quiet corridor to the private elevator, tucked in the southeast corner of the courthouse and accessed by a key distributed only to judges, security staff, and the district attorney himself.
“I’ll take her from here,” Poser said.
“What was the adjourned date?” I asked, unable to concentrate on anything but the information on my computer that now made so many people vulnerable to the Estevez crew.
“You got a month, Ms. Cooper,” one of the officers said. “Judge Torres, November twentieth.”
“Can you believe this, Drew?” I said as the doors closed. “You know how much work we’ve got in front of us now? Victims to call, detectives to warn. God knows what’s on there.”
“Aponte won’t get far. Special Victims is pulling all their guys off the street to concentrate on finding her before she can spread the word.”
The doors opened onto the anteroom at the rear of District Attorney Paul Battaglia’s office. He had been the elected prosecutor of New York County for so many terms that the physical space had been overrun by awards from every civic group in the city, hanging on walls and leaning against bookcases. The strong odor of the Cohibas that he smoked from the crack of dawn till he closed his eyes at night infused every inch of territory he occupied.
“Laura said to tell you that Battaglia wants you,” Poser said, steering me away from the exit door to the hallway and toward the DA’s inner sanctum. He knocked and I heard Battaglia call for me to come in. Drew Poser opened the door but backed off and was gone.
“You ought to be beaming about Raymond Tanner’s arrest,” the DA said as I crossed the enormous room to get to his desk, “but instead you look like the bottom fell out.”
“It did. We had to adjourn my trial just now. Antonio Estevez.”
“Damn. I’ve got that human-trafficking keynote for the White House conference in three weeks. I wanted to go in with a hot verdict. What did you do that for?” Battaglia’s annoyance was palpable. He bit into the half-smoked cigar as he talked to me.
“It wasn’t entirely my doing.”
Why wasn’t I surprised that none of my colleagues had come in to the district attorney to tell him that there had been a serious breach of security? No one liked delivering bad news to him. He was the kind of recipient who delighted in shooting the messenger.
“What happened to Fleming?”
“Not her fault, either,” I said, telling him an abbreviated version of the story.
“Who’s responsible for hiring the Aponte girl? How did she pass a background investigation?” He reac
hed for his phone to ensure that heads would start to roll.
“The squad is on it, Paul. The story isn’t even an hour old. Let me get facts for you.”
“Get me names. That’s the surest way to get facts.” Battaglia was a man who held a grudge. There were political enemies he was proud of telling me he had despised for decades, though he often couldn’t recall what had occasioned the hatred.
“I’ve got to go see what else was cherry-picked off my computer,” I said.
“The Tanner arrest is good news, Alex. I had the local reporters in here a little while ago. They want a couple of lines from you, but I told them I’m not letting you talk. Any problem with that?”
“None, thanks. That’s just the way it should be. And I’ll give you all the news on Estevez as the cops work it through.”
“Your computer files—did she get everything?”
“I’m about to find out. I was under the impression that each case entered into my system has its own security code. I’m praying that she only got into Estevez’s file. It’s bad enough with the number of victims in his case—finding them, relocating them, making them safe,” I said. “Keeping them under our wing so they’ll show up for trial. If she got anything else off my machine, I might as well disappear for a month.”
Battaglia removed the cigar from his mouth and blew smoke rings in my direction. “There have actually been times I’d have liked to make that happen to you. Right now isn’t one of them.”
I made my way to the front door to let myself out.
“That memo I gave you during my last campaign, Alex,” Battaglia said, slowing me down.
“Which one?” I asked. The legal staff tried to keep a Chinese wall between the DA’s politics and office business. I thought it safest to take the route of short-term memory loss. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Reverend Hal. And you know exactly what I mean. Reverend Hal and his Church of the Perpetual Scam.”
The ill-tempered Harlem pastor had courted Battaglia and volunteered to support him in the most recent election, in exchange for this office looking the other way on a financial transaction with money stolen from tithed sums of parishioners.
I had been led to believe Battaglia had refused the offer, especially since it had been made shortly after an underage worshipper had come forward to my unit to report inappropriate sexual advances by Reverend Hal.
“I had no case against Shipley, Paul.” It was my practice to keep every file my unit had ever created, because of the recidivist nature of the crime. I’d even had victims who’d come back a second time. But I didn’t want the wrath of Paul Battaglia on my back just yet. “I’m sure Laura wiped the slate clean on your memo.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what the personal transaction between Shipley and Battaglia had actually been. I assumed, at worst, that the DA had planted his memo with me as a form of future insurance of his good intentions.
“Let me know what you find. You put me in any kind of embarrassing situation publicly, Alex, and you can be sure I’ll hang you out to dry. You’ll wish you had disappeared before I had the chance to get back to you.”
FIVE
“Who died?” I asked, walking past Laura’s empty desk into my office.
Three prosecutors were standing behind the chair in which the head of our Cybercrimes Division, Aaron Byrne was seated. Drew Poser and another detective were in front of the desk, stacking case folders in piles. They each looked like there was a corpse on display in the middle of the table.
“We’re gathered here trying to save your ass,” Ryan Blackmer said. He was standing between Nan Toth and Catherine Dashfer, all three senior prosecutors from my unit. “But if it takes mouth-to-mouth to get your career back on track, I’ve got other plans for the night.”
“The mere thought of that image inspires me to breathe deeply on my own, Ryan,” I said. “How does it look?”
“Not as bad as I feared originally,” Aaron Byrne said. He was more skilled with computer navigation than any lawyer I knew.
“What did Aponte get?”
“First of all, her name isn’t Josie Aponte, okay? A heavy dose of identity theft from a criminal justice student at John Jay College got her in the door of our hiring office.” Byrne was studying my computer screen and typing as fast as his fingers could go.
“So who is she?”
Catherine raised a finger to her lips. “Shh. Let Aaron work.”
“Laura gave you my password?”
“A monkey could have gotten through that,” Aaron said. “Nothing more creative than your law school initials and the year you graduated occurred to you?”
The University of Virginia—UVA—had been easy to remember after a dozen other changes over the years. I had gone through the initials of my fiancé, Adam Nyman, who’d been killed in a car crash the night before our Vineyard wedding, and an assortment of significant dates in my life but had recently returned to the initials of my alma mater as the key to unlock my data.
“In fact, Alex has been looking for a monkey on Match.com,” Ryan said. “Gave up her ‘prosecutes perps’ nickname for ‘lonely lady lawyer.’ Once she knocks off Estevez she can go with ‘my pimp’s a chimp.’”
“Well, I’ve changed all the password info for you,” Aaron said, taking one hand off the keyboard to hand me a Post-it note with a series of hieroglyphics scribbled on it. “Secure it. Learn it. Eyes only for you and Laura.”
“In fact, Chapman says Alex sometimes confuses that long prehensile monkey tail with another organ that—”
“Who cares what Chapman says, Ryan?” I snapped. “What’s Aponte’s real name and how much of my case information is compromised?”
“We don’t know who she is yet,” Drew said.
“She had to be fingerprinted to get this job,” I said.
“You don’t think Estevez would try to embed a mole who’d be roadblocked before she got her toe in the door, do you? His mole has no criminal record. He’s smart.”
“Smarter than I am; that’s for sure.”
“Amen to that,” Ryan said. “Your Wellesley degree with a major in English lit is taking a backseat to Antonio Estevez and his street cred.”
“So this girl—whoever she is,” I said, “has no rap sheet, but she has the balls to take on this assignment. What’d she get?”
Aaron Byrne leaned into my screen. “You’re screwed on Estevez. She copied everything in that folder.”
“Damn. Damn it.” I was walking in circles, furious at myself for enabling this breach because of the obvious password I’d chosen. “It’s on my head now if anything happens to Tiffany and those other young women.”
Nan raised a hand at me. “Calm down. Tiffany’s under control and we’ll find everyone else before his posse does. It’s more important that you work with Aaron to identify the cases that might have been in the same portal.”
“Go through these folders with me, Alex,” Drew said, passing the top three to me.
“I thought the FBI claimed this setup was foolproof,” I said, taking them from him.
“Technically it is,” Catherine said. “Except for human error.”
The feds’ cyberteam had devised a special computer system for our office, in recognition of the fact that hundreds of thousands of case files had to be managed independently of one another. Too many people had access to computer stations—legal and support staff, civilian investigators and cops—that were spread out in both of the large city buildings we inhabited. The sheer volume of DANY employees put a lot of information at risk.
People of the State of New York v. Andrew Kreston.
I focused on the name on the manila folder, first in a tall stack of cases awaiting trial or reassignment to another unit member. Each of the files contained at least one count of sexual assault. Some had top charges of murder in the first degree, while others referenced surviving victims who had been subjected to just about every kind of abuse one might imagine.
>
“Kreston,” I said, trying to think of the way I had structured my virtual storage cabinet. “Sodomy first degree. Male victim. Drugged and assaulted. No connection to Estevez.”
“Legal issues,” Aaron said. “Any overlap?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Looks like you’ve got it firewalled. Should be fine.”
“Second one is Harry Wiggins. Serial rapist. Four victims, all strangers. Housing projects on the Lower East Side. Nothing to do with trafficking.”
I put that folder to the side and looked at the third one. “Jamil Jenners. Attempted murder, attempted rape. Choked a woman till she lost consciousness. She was coming out of the restroom in a Chelsea club.”
“Clean and clear,” Aaron said.
I reached over for the Wiggins case.
“Go back a step,” I said, unhooking the red string from the back of the folder and pulling out the papers.
Aaron Byrne stopped typing and looked up at me. “I thought you said not related.”
“The cases have nothing to do with each other. But both of them involved a motion to consolidate the counts in order to try the defendant for all his victims at once. Gino Moretti opposed it successfully, and the lawyer for Wiggins tried the same tactic, too, without a shot.”
“You mean you used the identical motion papers in both instances?”
“I’m trying to think,” I said, pulling on strands of my hair. “It was three months ago.”
Everyone was staring at me.
“I’m just not sure, but it’s possible.”
Catherine picked up my phone. “Is there a speed dial to Special Victims?”
“The second button.”
“Is your travel agent on speed dial, too?” Ryan asked. “One way to Afghanistan. Leaving tonight.”
“Take it.” I handed the folder to Ryan. “You’ve always wanted this one. The Post will give you front-page ink if you nail this guy. I’m nauseous even thinking about the possibility that someone like Estevez knows where to find these good people.”
I could hear the clacking keys of the computer as Aaron Byrne tried to figure if the case had been stolen by the Aponte impostor.
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