Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  I held up my forefinger to my lips. I had dialed information in Illinois to find a number for Lucy’s aunt.

  “Don’t try to shush me up by lifting your finger,” he said. “That’s rude.”

  “You’re really steaming, aren’t you?” I said, waiting for the directory assistance robot to connect me.

  “Nothing like a rush to judgment, is there?”

  “Hey, it’s you who brought Lucy Jenner over here to me. So that I could help her, the way I remember it.”

  The ringing was interrupted by an outgoing message on an answering machine, asking me to leave the reason for my call. “Hello? Hello. My name is Alexandra Cooper, and I’m trying to reach Hannah Dart. I’m an assistant district attorney in New York City. There’s nothing wrong—nothing at all—but we’re just trying to help find residential placement for your niece, Lucy Jenner.”

  Mike had turned his back to me and was shaking his head.

  I paused. “Lucy gave me your name as next of kin, and if you could get back to me as soon as possible, and let us know that she is welcome to stay with you for a while, it would allow us to—to—well, to get her on her way.”

  I ended the call with a thank-you and left both my office number and my cell.

  “What if the aunt says no?” Mike asked.

  “Then I get to plead with whoever the judge is about tossing the warrant and letting her out anyway. I think the circumstances of her original victimization will trump some nonsensical petty thefts,” I said. “Are you making that call to Brooklyn for me?”

  “You get the facts first.”

  “You’ve suddenly got a dog in this fight, Detective Chapman?” I asked, pushing back from my desk. “You have a thing for this white supremacist?” I asked. “Welly’s your man?”

  “Don’t be a jerk, Coop. I brought Lucy here to you because I agreed with the lieutenant that you might be able to help her. You’re the one who’s dreaming up some story about a cop—or maybe some cop—when you haven’t done anything to verify where Lucy is going with this story.”

  “I know that she’s alone in this world, so far as I can tell, and she was trustworthy enough for the feds to make a case stand up with her help when she was just a kid.”

  “Let me go down the hall and get her,” he said. “If she makes sense, I’ll do whatever is right.”

  “Let her sleep for now,” I said, throwing my hands up in the air. “Truce, Detective. I’ll give the aunt two hours to return the call. It’ll take that long for the Trial Division assistant to draw up the papers on the warrant. The aunt sounds responsible enough, according to Lucy, to give me some background and perspective.”

  “See you in two, then,” Mike said, checking his watch before he opened the door.

  “Where are you going?”

  “My job is to catch murderers, Coop, or don’t you remember that?”

  FOUR

  “Where are you?” I asked, just after the door slammed. I had dialed the cell phone of Mercer Wallace, an SVU detective who was Mike’s best friend as well as one of mine. “I mean right this minute?”

  “In Catherine’s office, just across the street. Prepping for next week’s trial.”

  “How fast can you get over to me?”

  “Hang up and you’ll see.”

  I opened my desk drawer and took out the NYPD’s phone directory. It listed every precinct and specialty squad, as well as the names of the commanding officers.

  I dialed Brooklyn South Homicide and waited for the number to ring ten times, before the call was picked up by the desk officer in the local precinct two flights downstairs.

  “This is Alexandra Cooper, Manhattan DA—Sex Crimes Unit,” I said. “No one’s answering in Lieutenant Creavey’s office. Have you got a uniformed officer you can send upstairs to get a message to the sergeant or any of the guys? There’s some urgency to it.”

  “No, ma’am. I’m afraid the best you can do is leave word with me.”

  “But—”

  “We had a male jogger down in Prospect Park this morning. No head. I’m talking really down, Ms. Cooter.”

  “Cooper.”

  “The entire squad is out on the case—looking for suspects as well as for the head,” he said, chuckling in the way that only old hairbags do who’ve been on the job for so long that they’ve lost the ability to filter their black humor from their conversations with civilians. “Most of my uniforms are crawling around the park, too. Good day to rob a bank.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks anyway,” I said, hanging up the phone.

  Laura had returned from her shopping trip with a sandwich for me, which I nibbled at while I waited for Mercer.

  I walked to her desk in the anteroom outside my door. “What’s up with Lucy and Max?”

  “I’ve never seen anyone so happy to have showered and put on clean clothes,” Laura said. “Lucy told me she was up most of the night. So she was devouring her turkey sandwich between yawns, and anxious to put her head down for a while.”

  “Could you find someone to give Max a break every now and then? Line up a few of the other paralegals.”

  “Not a problem,” Laura said. “What time are you expecting to go to court on Lucy’s warrant?”

  “Whenever the clerk calls and tells me our papers have been docketed. I doubt it will be before six or seven this evening,” I said. “I’m expecting Lucy’s aunt to return my call, and TARU to get back to me once they have all the texts off Helen’s phone.”

  “Got it,” Laura said. “Have you thought about assigning someone else to do Lucy’s arraignment?”

  “I’m going to handle it. Of course, I need someone to represent the other side, since Lucy was technically brought in as a defendant. So I’m about to call the Legal Aid supervisor to ask her to stand up on the case to represent Lucy when I offer to drop charges,” I said. “The time it would take me to explain the reason we’re moving to dismiss to anyone else, well—it’s just easier for me to do all the talking.”

  “I understand,” Laura said.

  “Why did you ask? Did Mike tell you to back me off away from Lucy Jenner’s arraignment?”

  Laura Wilkie liked to think of herself as Miss Moneypenny to Mike’s James Bond. They flirted with each other constantly and I think she secretly harbored a wish to take on some dangerous foreign mission with him. This afternoon I was in the mood to send them off together to someplace far away from me.

  “Not a word from Mike. Cross my heart,” Laura said with a smile. “It would just be a favor to me.”

  “A favor? You don’t want me to spend twenty minutes at an arraignment?” I said, patting her on the back as I stepped away. “Stop mothering me.”

  “Well, this could go into night court, and I just don’t think you need that your first day back.”

  “Get a grip, Laura. I’m here and I’m firing on all cylinders.”

  I heard footsteps and smiled at Mercer as he stepped into the doorway. “Who are you firing at? Anybody I know?”

  “That could happen,” I said. “Was Catherine through with you?”

  “I’m as prepped as I can be.”

  “Great,” I said. “I’d like to pull you into a new matter. Come on in.”

  I called out to Laura as we breezed past her. “Velvet gloves with Lucy when she wakes up. Get her whatever she needs or wants and tell her I hope to have it all wrapped up for her by evening.”

  “Fine by me.”

  I didn’t have to say any more to Mercer than the name Welly Baynes. Mercer had grown up in Queens, where his father had worked as an airline mechanic for Delta. He was one of the first African American detectives to make first grade, and had married a colleague named Vickee Eaton, who had risen through the ranks to a high-profile position in the department’s office of public information.

  “Well
y Baynes,” he said. “That man is evil incarnate. I thought he just liked to kill. I never heard any rape allegations.”

  “No. Not that. For all the hate he dumped into this world, he didn’t do any of that, I don’t think.”

  I explained how Lucy had come to be in my office earlier in the day, and what I had been told about her reaction to a photograph in the Brooklyn squad room.

  “Mike can’t get you what you need?” Mercer asked.

  “He wants me to get the facts straight, get the allegations from Lucy before I start trolling old photos for a rogue cop,” I said. “He didn’t want to rile up Lieutenant Creavey unless we have a viable witness, but Lucy is reluctant to tell me the story before I keep my promise to dump her warrant.”

  “Can’t be hard to pull up who was on the Hate Crime Squad back then,” Mercer said. “I can help do that.”

  “I want the photographs, or at least I want good copies of them, so I’m ready to get specific when I talk to Lucy later. I want all the investigative tools available to try to make her case.”

  Mercer picked up my landline phone and dialed the squad number. When a cop answered, Mercer identified himself and asked him to transfer the call upstairs.

  “It’s ringing,” he said to me.

  “Be prepared for the headless jogger excuse.”

  “Yeah, it’s already on the news. Full-on machete job,” Mercer said. “Very rough justice.”

  Someone picked up the phone on the other end.

  “Mercer Wallace. Manhattan Special Victims. I’m looking for Creavey.”

  Whoever was in the Brooklyn office recognized Mercer and they exchanged greetings.

  Mercer covered the mouthpiece with his hand and told me that Creavey was on his way from the park to a presser at city hall. “Tell Detective Walsh—Jerry—what you want.”

  He passed the phone and I asked if he could take snapshots of the photographs on the squad room wall. Maybe in Creavey’s office, too.

  “Which ones do you want? He’s got the president of the United States and the police commissioner hanging over his desk.”

  “Not those,” I said, curbing my annoyance. “Those team shots with cops and agents in them. You know the ones.”

  “Whoa,” Walsh said. “You don’t know Creavey very well, do you? He’s got this whole feng shui thing going on. Moves his photos around whenever he gets bored looking at the same old shit. I wouldn’t even take pictures of them without asking him.”

  “Why don’t you call him on his cell and ask?” I said.

  “Loo’s kind of jammed up today,” Walsh said.

  “A phone call, Jerry,” I said. “My whole case might turn on a photograph you’ve got there. I’m not going to move them. I’d just like you to take photos of them.”

  Mike was right. It wasn’t going to take long for me to get from being very hot to a boiling temperature.

  “Stay tuned,” Walsh said. “I’m putting you on hold while I reach out to him.”

  Ninety seconds waiting for Walsh to get back to me seemed like an hour.

  “Lieutenant Creavey said he had a message for you, Ms. Cooper.”

  “Really?” For a second I thought I was going to get what I wanted.

  “Yeah. He said if it’s about some photographs that young lady he sent over to you saw last night—”

  “Those are the ones.”

  “Creavey said to get yourself a search warrant, Madame Prosecutor.”

  “What?” I responded, trying to keep my cool.

  Of course Creavey had seen Lucy Jenner react to someone’s picture on the wall of his squad room. Maybe that was part of his motive in shipping her over to me.

  “And the lieutenant said you ought to start with some probable cause in order to do that, but then I’m preaching to the choir when I tell you that, aren’t I?” Jerry Walsh said, with a sharp edge in the tone of his voice. “The first thing you need is evidence of commission of a crime. Get all that, and then come on back with your search warrant.”

  FIVE

  “Catherine called. She’s counting on you for dinner tonight,” Laura said when I opened my door and stepped out of my office with Mercer. “At Forlini’s. She said she asked you yesterday.”

  “I knew I was supposed to tell you something,” Mercer said, snapping his fingers. “I’m in, too.”

  Forlini’s Restaurant, behind the courthouse on Baxter Street, had been like an annex of the DA’s office for more than fifty years. Judges, cops, and prosecutors ate many of their lunches and dinners in the joint, assistant district attorneys and their adversaries waited out jury verdicts at the bar, and all of us drowned our sorrows there when cases went the wrong way.

  “Sure,” I said, although my focus was on getting Lucy’s story from her before she spun out of control or shut me down. “Has Mike phoned?”

  “No.”

  “Is Lucy awake?”

  “Not yet. Max is making calls to find the complaining witnesses who swore out the original complaint against Lucy, outside the room where she’s napping,” Laura said. “Not a peep.”

  “What are you thinking?” Mercer asked.

  “That Mike’s right. That I need to have this conversation with Lucy sooner rather than later,” I said. “If Creavey thinks I’m investigating a cop, I’ll have the whole department in an uproar against me, and for all I know, it’s just a wild guess I made.”

  “Let me see what I can pull up on the Internet about Welly’s case—see if the investigators’ photos come up, and print them out for you.”

  “Print out the Feebies, too,” I said. “You can use Max’s desk. Nothing would make Mike happier than if the bad guy was a fed and not a cop.”

  Laura gave me the rest of the messages. I put them to the side and looked up the number again for Hannah Dart. This time when I dialed, she answered.

  “This is Hannah.”

  “Ms. Dart? It’s Alex Cooper again. From New York,” I said. “About Lucy.”

  “Is she all right?”

  “She’s fine. She’s sleeping now, but she’s fine.”

  “Sleeping? It’s the middle of the day,” Ms. Dart said. “Is Lucy in trouble?”

  “No, she’s not in trouble. Why do you ask that?”

  “Well, you’re calling from a prosecutor’s office, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, but that’s because I’m trying to help Lucy.”

  “Help her? How?”

  “Ms. Dart, I’m thirty-eight years old, and I was just a year out of law school when Weldon Baynes shot Lucy’s friends,” I said. “But I remember the shock and horror of those crimes.”

  My statement was met by silence, before an icy response.

  “If Lucy hadn’t run away from home—my home—those kids would still be alive and her head might have stayed on straight.”

  Hannah Dart might have exactly what I needed to know about Lucy’s head to get her story.

  “That man was a stone-cold killer, Ms. Dart. Nothing that you or Lucy did could have altered his path.”

  “Can we make this quick, Ms. Cooper? If my daughter walks in the house and hears me talking about Lucy, she’s likely to rip the phone out of my hand.”

  The cousins who didn’t like Lucy Jenner. She was obviously right about that.

  “It’s your niece I’m calling about, Ms. Dart. If I’m not mistaken, you’re her only blood relatives,” I said. “You might want to care about how she is.”

  “She’s got a father. Let him start to care.”

  “Lucy’s father is dead. That’s why she came to New York.”

  “Why? Then where has she been staying in the city?”

  “Well, actually, I don’t know the answer to that question,” I said. “I thought perhaps you could fill in some of the blanks.”

  “Why is she in your office?
” Dart asked. “There can’t be a good answer to that.”

  I sighed and gave a short explanation. “Five years ago, when Lucy was in New York for a brief period, she may have stolen some food and necessities. I’m trying to clear that warrant—which seems mighty unimportant compared to her role in the murder case.”

  Hannah Dart’s voice seemed to soften. “Everything pales in comparison to what Lucy experienced, and to the death of those boys.”

  “Then you’ll help me?”

  “What happens if I do?” Ms. Dart asked. “What happens if the judge agrees to let Lucy go?”

  “Well, I was hoping you might be willing to take her in for a while,” I said. “Let her live with you.”

  “Lucy’s not a minor, Ms. Cooper. She can make her own way,” Dart said. Whatever had briefly melted the ice was gone. Her voice was again as cold as the words she uttered. “That would be good for her.”

  I stifled my anger. “When was the last time you saw your niece?”

  “Five years ago, Ms. Cooper. Right before she took off for New York.”

  “You can remember that so precisely because—?”

  “Because it was my birthday. June twenty-second,” Dart said. “Easy to remember because she spoiled the entire evening for my family. Something about wanting to go to New York to see one of the people who had handled her case—”

  I took a deep breath. That part fit with the bits that Lucy had told us.

  “—and when I disapproved of that, she simply left the house in the middle of the night.”

  “There might have been a good reason for her to want to make that trip,” I said. According to the little that Lucy had revealed to me, she had a score to try to settle.

  “Well, if there was,” Dart said, “Lucy didn’t think it necessary to tell me. She simply stole the money for the bus trip from my briefcase before she left.”

  “That wasn’t smart.”

  “I could forgive that easier than the fact that she stole a ring I had given to my daughter for Christmas.”

  “A ring?”