It was then that Grale had proposed his deal with Karp, who now looked north up Sixth Avenue. It’s in your hands now, David, he thought just as two police officers led a struggling man dressed in a brown monk’s robe up to the float.
“Let go of me … piss crap balls whoop whoop oh boy … you pissants, I’m working with the DA!” the man shouted.
An amused smile crossed Karp’s face. “David Grale, I presume,” he said.
One of the police officers pulled back the hood from the robe, and Dirty Warren Bennett grinned up at Karp, his face twitching. “Hey, Butch, I got a … oh boy oh boy … good one for you,” the news vendor said. “What are the two things the Gypsy woman says to Lon Chaney Jr. in The Wolf Man?”
Karp laughed. “Let’s see, ‘Even a man who is pure in heart and says his prayers by night may become a wolf when the wolfbane blooms and the autumn moon is bright.’”
“Yeah, yeah, that’s the … tits ass whoop … one everybody knows,” Bennett said with a grin. “What’s the other one?”
“Boy, that’s a tough one,” Karp replied.
“Woo-hooo!” Bennett cackled. “Tonight I’m going to … son of a bitch oh boy … win for once!”
Karp grinned. “Sorry to disappoint you, my friend, but how’s this? ‘The way you walked was thorny, through no fault of your own, but as the rain enters the soil, the river enters the sea, so tears run to a predestined end.’”
“Aw, I knew you’d get it … oh boy whoop whoop,” Bennett said. He pointed down at the sewer cover he was standing on. “It just seemed appropriate … crap nuts … it being Halloween and the predestined end and all. You know what I mean?”
“Yes, Warren, I know exactly what you mean.”
36
The little man crept like the rat he was through the sewers and pathways beneath the city until he came to the dimly lit junction of tunnels where he knew he would be challenged. “I’m looking for the entrance to the kingdom of heaven,” he called out.
“And how do you gain entrance?” a voice shouted back from the dark outside the circle of light.
“The love of Christ,” the man answered, praying that the password had not changed.
A moment later, another man stepped out of the shadows with his rifle pointed. “James? What are you doing here? You know David exiled you on pain of death!”
“I have important news for him, Brother Harvey,” James said.
“And what might that be?” Harvey replied before a fit of coughing took him.
“That his reign is over,” James snarled. “And so is your life.”
Harvey looked up just as a red beam intersected his chest. The bullet that followed knocked him to the ground, so that he ended up sitting in a puddle of dirty water with his back against the tunnel wall. “Judas,” he whispered.
“How’s it feel, Harvey?” James asked, squatting so that he could peer in the dying man’s eyes with a penlight. “What does it feel like to die?”
“Like freedom,” Harvey replied, and died with a smile on his lips.
The traitor James stood up, confused. He’d thought there would be more satisfaction; Harvey had been the one to escort him from Grale’s kingdom and kick him out onto the streets. But there wasn’t more time to think about it as two more men walked up behind him and stood looking down at the dead man.
“Now what?” James asked.
“We wait for Malovo and Rolles,” one of the men said, and looked at his watch. “They should be here any minute.”
James nodded. He’d been the third man at the meeting with Malovo in Bedford-Stuyvesant and felt important because of the role he’d been given. After being kicked out of the kingdom, he’d brooded over his exile, thinking of ways to get even. Then he remembered a conversation Grale had had with Harvey regarding Boris Kazanov and the Russian gangster’s ties to Malovo. So he went to Little Odessa in Brooklyn and let the word get out that he wanted to speak to Kazanov about “something worth a lot of money to Nadya Malovo.”
The gangster had found him shortly after and listened to his story about the man Grale kept captive in his lair, Andrew Kane. He convinced Kazanov that Malovo would be willing to pay millions for the information and assistance. The brutal Russian had taken it from there.
James found Malovo extremely attractive and fantasized about what sex would be like with the blond goddess. He was surprised and delighted when she started flirting with him, suggesting that one of his rewards would be an intimate one.
Waiting with the two NIDSA agents for word of the explosions from lower Manhattan, James imagined how grateful Malovo would be when he delivered her prize. When they heard the signals, he practically ran through the sewers and tunnels to reach the junction where they were to take out the guard and wait for the others.
The moment he was waiting for soon arrived when Malovo ran up. But there was no sign of Rolles.
“He’s dead,” Malovo answered truthfully when the agents asked why he was not with her. “That son of a bitch Jaxon shot him at the Fourteenth Street subway station. I barely escaped. But I heard the explosions; that part of the mission is complete.”
The two agents exchanged puzzled looks. “I don’t believe you,” one said, and raised his silenced submachine gun. But he never had a chance to pull the trigger before a bullet caught him in the mouth, killing him before he even fell to the ground.
The second agent was also too slow to react. He turned in the direction the bullet had come from but in doing so left himself exposed to Malovo, who thrust her knife up through the base of his skull and into his brain. His body spasmed and jerked before he, too, crumpled to the ground.
James watched the deaths of the two agents in terror. He backed up against the tunnel wall next to Harvey as two more men appeared out of the dark wearing night-vision goggles. “Please don’t kill me,” he squealed as Malovo turned toward him, blood dripping from her knife. “I helped you.”
“So you did,” Malovo said, “and for that reason, I am going to grant your wish and leave you here alive.”
Hope crept into James’s eyes. “Thank you, thank you,” he cried. “I’ll go now. I don’t need any other reward.”
“That’s very generous of you,” Malovo said with a harsh laugh. “But you weren’t listening. I said I would leave you here alive. I’m sure Grale will appreciate the gesture when he returns and finds his home and his people destroyed.” She turned to the other two men. “Tie him to the man he betrayed and let’s go.”
“But why?” James wailed.
“Because no one likes a traitor, James,” Malovo said, patting him on the cheek. “Not even the people he works for.”
James was still crying and pleading when Malovo and her two men left him. She’d needed him as the conduit to the other traitor who still lived with Grale to make sure that Kane hadn’t been moved. And he’d been handy for luring the guard from his secret spot; a man with a rifle in the dark could have held her team off indefinitely. She’d originally used two of her men posing as graffiti artists to probe the defenses of the underground community and had decided that she needed to use James to set the guard up. But she didn’t need him anymore.
The reason she didn’t was because she now knew the way to the inner sanctum of Grale’s lair courtesy of the new super hi-tech GPS chip in the cell phone that Bruce Knight had been given by his old boss. One of her men now led the way, holding a dim screen in front of his face that mapped their path in from those coordinates.
They traveled fast with their night-vision goggles and didn’t encounter anyone along the way. As they approached the cavern where Grale held court and where, according to James, the madman kept Kane chained to a bolt in the ground next to his throne, she and her men slowed down and then stopped at the entrance. All was dark inside; their goggles didn’t pick up a single living thing or any movement.
Malovo listened but there were no sounds other than the dripping of water on stone and the far-off rumble of a subway train. Cautiously
she crept in, with her men following. She turned to the right, where, she’d been told, Grale kept his prisoner. That’s when she saw the tall robed figure rise from a chair, and the cowering creature next to him.
She raised the submachine gun she’d taken from Rolles’s man. But just as she was about to shoot, a blinding painful blast of light seared into her brain, stunning her.
Instantly, she knew what had happened. Someone had turned on a very bright light, overwhelming the night-vision goggles. She and her men tore the devices from their heads, but it did no good. They were essentially blind.
All three started shooting wildly in the direction they believed Grale had been standing, and then randomly about the cavern. It was of little use.
Malovo felt a net drop over her that quickly tightened, pinning her arms at her sides, while strong, rough hands grabbed her. As her vision returned, she looked down at the ground and saw her two accomplices lying in pools of blood, their throats slit.
Stunned, she looked up at the platform and saw three men who made her blood run cold. The first was her attorney Bruce Knight, who said, “I’m afraid I have to resign as your counsel.”
The second was Andrew Kane, who laughed insanely before blurting out, “Welcome to my nightmare!”
And the last was David Grale, who held up a collar and a leash. He pointed to the ground next to his overstuffed chair. “Make yourself at home; you’re going to be here for a while.”
Far above the cavern, Halloween trick-or-treaters and partygoers stopped in their tracks as a woman’s scream rose from the sewers and echoed down the subway tunnels. Many years later on Halloween nights, they would still be telling the tale of how their blood had curdled at that cry of sheer terror.
37
The morning after Halloween there was no rest for the wicked or the just in Judge Temple’s courtroom. The day began in the judge’s chambers, where Rottingham objected to Karp’s plan to call Nonie Ellis to the stand, accusing Karp of “sandbagging” him.
As Karp listened to his counterpart complain vociferously, he thought about the whole turn of events since court adjourned the day before. As soon as the jury was out of the courtroom, Ellis had been taken into custody; read her rights, which she waived; and then escorted to the District Attorney’s Office.
Just to play it safe, Karp called defense attorney Belinda Morrow King, who had been retained to represent David Ellis on the morning of his murder, to come in and talk to Nonie before proceeding. In the meantime, he got the lowdown from Marlene on how the fugitive just happened to show up in court and take a seat next to his wife.
Marlene explained that after he left for court that morning, she’d received a text from an unknown number asking to meet her at the Housing Works Bookstore. “I had no idea who it was from,” she said. “I’ve met lots of people there, including David Grale. But it was Nonie.”
Ellis said she’d been staying at an East Village shelter under an alias and following the trial in the newspapers. When she saw that LaFontaine might testify, she told Marlene, she decided that she wanted to attend the trial. However, she wasn’t sure she was ready to turn herself in, and so she was hesitating.
“I was pretty sure that if she came and listened to that liar, she would come around,” Marlene told him. “So I suggested she wear a disguise and that if she was afraid, she could sit next to me. I was as surprised as anyone when she popped up and revealed her identity.”
King had met with Nonie in one of the DAO interview rooms. When the defense attorney came out, she shook her head and said, “It’s your lucky day, Karp. She wants to plead guilty to reckless manslaughter and is willing to testify against LaFontaine. She’ll give you a statement now.”
Before leaving for the parade, Karp had called Judge Temple at his home and asked for the hearing in the morning, expecting resistance from Rottingham. King had agreed to come, too, and backed up Karp’s story that her client had indeed been a fugitive and only in that eleventh hour agreed to turn herself in. The judge then ruled that Ellis could be called by the People as a rebuttal witness.
Her appearance on the stand had been devastating to LaFontaine’s defense. She not only supported the testimony of Monique Hale, clearly demonstrating how the defendant operated to gain the trust of his victims and then control them with threats of losing the “miracles he promised,” but also added to it. “He said that Micah’s death was because my husband, David, had lost faith and wanted to go back to the doctors,” she testified tearfully.
When she was finished, Karp asked, “Mrs. Ellis, will you walk out of this courtroom today a free woman?”
Nonie shook her head. “No. I pled guilty to reckless manslaughter. I’ll be going to prison.”
“Were you offered any sort of deal or other consideration in exchange for your testimony?”
“Only that you would tell the judge at my sentencing if I told the truth.”
As Nonie, visibly shaking with tears streaming down her face, stepped down from the witness box, LaFontaine suddenly shouted, “It is a mortal sin to bear false witness!”
The comment brought Nonie up short. But instead of letting it tear her down more, she seemed to gain strength from it. “Lying is not the sin I will answer for,” she replied so that the jurors heard her clearly. “Lying and murdering children are your sins, and I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes when you are brought before God.”
Nonie Ellis was the last witness, and they broke early for lunch. “When we return,” Judge Temple instructed the jurors, “the attorneys, beginning with Mr. Rottingham and ending with Mr. Karp, will deliver their final summations, after which I will charge you on the law and you will then begin your deliberations.”
During the lunch break, Karp retreated to his office, where he found Espey Jaxon and Jen Capers waiting. New Yorkers had woken up to the news that once again, they and their iconic city had been the target of terrorists. The newspapers and television stations fell over themselves to describe what they knew, and some of what they didn’t, about the attack on the Halloween parade, which they reported had specifically been aimed at District Attorney Roger Karp.
Six men dressed in wolf costumes and wearing suicide vests had been apprehended; another six had been arrested in a nearby apartment building before they could join in. The thwarting of the attack had been lauded by government press secretaries as a prime example of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies.
In another loosely related incident, the press reported that a man at first believed to be the wanted killer David Grale had been taken into custody near Karp’s float but had been released shortly after when his true identity was learned. “I don’t know where they got that … whoop whoop … Grale stuff, never met the man. I was just having fun, minding my own … [expletive deleted] … business when the cops grabbed me,” the Times quoted Warren Bennett as saying.
The police were still trying to determine if the murder of a man, whose identity was not being released pending notification of kin, on the parade route at Sixth Avenue and 8th Street was related to the terrorist act, according to the Post. Some witnesses claimed that the man’s assailant was a tall blond woman wearing a Little Red Riding Hood costume, who had last been seen running north.
The media had not found out about the bodies of four men found in the East River. They’d been a topic of conversation in Karp’s office that morning before the hearing in the judge’s chambers. Two of the bodies were the two agents with the National Inter-Departmental Security Administration who had worked with Rolles on the Liberty Ferry mission; the other two were Russians with long criminal histories.
“I would guess they’re some of Grale’s work,” Jaxon said. He’d looked over at Jen Capers, who’d been quiet since arriving in the office. The pair had essentially agreed to look the other way and allow Malovo to escape, which rankled Capers maybe more than Jaxon, as the U.S. Marshals service prided itself on never losing prisoners. But they both knew that if not for the dea
l Karp told them he made with Grale, Malovo would have gone into the WITSEC program and there would have been no chance to keep her from walking away and continuing her murderous endeavors.
“Do you think Grale will live up to his part of the bargain?” Capers said at last.
Karp thought about it for a moment and then nodded. “David Grale is many things, including a serial killer,” he said. “But he is also a man of his word. I think he will. When, I don’t know.”
The lunch hour passed too quickly and it was time to head back to court, where Rottingham first tried to convince the jurors that the prosecution had failed to prove its case. His client was being persecuted, he said, for his religious beliefs.
“He believes that God, not doctors, heals and is the ultimate arbiter of who lives and dies,” the defense attorney argued. “He expressed that belief to other people, such as the Hales and the Ellises, and then gave of himself to pray alongside their sick children. And for this, the district attorney wants to put him in prison for murder.”
Rottingham shook his head as if he could not believe this travesty of justice. “And because some of his congregation were so pleased with his efforts-and I’d point out that they included the Hales and Ellises-they rewarded him with gifts and donations. But the district attorney says that somehow that makes him a murderer.”
Pacing slowly across the jury box, Rottingham suddenly stopped. “But did Reverend LaFontaine stop these people from going to doctors? Did he tie them up? Did he threaten them with a gun? Or was it their choice? Their decision. Who is guilty of not providing proper care for their children, the parents or a man who asked God to help them?”
Rottingham had gone on along the same tangent for a half hour before making his final argument that if anyone had committed a crime-“and I put it to you that the district attorney would be hard-pressed to prove this case, too”-it was Holstein and Bernsen.
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