Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  We got off the elevator on the eighth floor and headed for my office.

  I turned the corner and was surprised to see Lucy Jenner standing behind my desk. The top drawer was open and she withdrew her hand from it the second she caught sight of me.

  “What are you doing?” I asked, shocked that the young woman would be brazen enough to go through my things. “Where’s Kerry?”

  “Bathroom, I guess,” Lucy said, without a hint of embarrassment, as she slid the drawer back into place.

  “There isn’t any money in my desk,” I said, angry that someone we were trying to help would take advantage of me. But it had happened so many times before that I had learned to use the drawers as they were intended—for pens, papers, and legal pads, not my wallet. “There’s nothing of value.”

  “I was looking for a key,” Lucy said, answering me but staring at Mercer. “Who’s he?”

  “Stick with the key for a minute,” I said. “A key to what?”

  “Ms. O’Donnell said you got my stuff back. My cash and my personal stuff,” Lucy said. “I need to have those things before I leave.”

  “Kerry told you where they are?”

  “Nope. But the paralegal who brought them from police headquarters told us that she locked them in Laura’s desk.”

  “What do you mean by ‘told us’? Told you?”

  “Well, I overheard them talking to each other,” Lucy said. “I want my things and I want to go to this Streetwork place where you said I can live for a while.”

  “That’s half the deal,” I said. “Let’s switch places and you sit down over here. We haven’t finished talking, you and I. I made good on my part.”

  Kerry came back in the room. “Everything okay?”

  “Thanks, Kerry,” I said. “Lucy’s been on a scavenger hunt for the key to Laura’s desk.”

  Kerry reached into her pants pocket and pulled out the key, handing it to Mercer, who was closer to her than I was. “You’ve got really good hearing, Lucy Jenner, if you picked up on that conversation. And I’d stay out of Ms. Cooper’s drawers. She keeps a mousetrap in the second one on the left. The last witness who tried to look for something that didn’t belong to her had her finger snapped in half.”

  Lucy Jenner stared at me with new respect. “You did that to someone?”

  Kerry answered instead of me. “That’s the third time it worked on nosy witnesses. Two teenage girls—just a month apart from each other—got their digits crushed down to the knuckles. But they reattached the top joint of the most recent one at Bellevue. So you just sit down and do whatever Ms. Cooper tells you to do. She doesn’t suffer fools—or dissemblers—”

  “Dissemblers?” Lucy asked. “What’s that?”

  “Thanks for all the time, Kerry,” I said to her as she backed out of the room with a wave. “The mousetraps with those little steel teeth on the clamps work so much better than flypaper, don’t you think?”

  “What’s a dissembler?” Lucy asked again.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s not what you are. It’s late. It’s late for all of us, so why don’t we get started?”

  “I asked you who this man is and you didn’t answer me,” Lucy said.

  “Here I was, silly enough to think that if I got your warrant dismissed and set you free of the criminal justice system, you might warm up to me a little bit and appreciate that we’re going to help you,” I said, pulling out my chair and taking my position behind my desk. “All of us. This is Mercer Wallace. He’s the best Special Victims detective I’ve ever worked with, and he’s one of my closest friends.”

  “Did you really think that by bringing a black man in to question me instead of that Chapman cop, I’d fall for it?”

  “Mercer’s here because I need a partner on every case,” I said, trying to keep my temper in check. “I’m bringing in the best SVU cop in the business, and that has nothing to do with his race. Now, sit up and let’s get to work.”

  Lucy shuffled in her chair and played with the buttons on the cuffs of the new shirt she was wearing.

  “I’ve had a lot of hours to think about what I said to you this morning,” she said. “You know, about what happened to me.”

  “I’m sure you have,” I said. “You’ve had time to rest and clean up and get some new clothes—and lots of time to think, to pull yourself together for me. I’m ready to get this done.”

  Lucy looked down and fingered the material of her shirt and pants. “Can I keep the clothes you bought me?”

  She wasn’t my first witness to seem to be as interested in the new things—free threads—as she was in the business at hand.

  “Compliments of the City of New York,” I said. “Are you comfortable now? What I want you to do is trust me. I’d like you to start back all those years ago and tell me the story of what happened to you.”

  Lucy glanced around to look at Mercer, who had taken a seat behind her, near the door.

  “Pretend he isn’t even here,” I said. “Mercer’s just an observer.”

  He was there to back me up on every detail that Lucy was about to reveal. Mercer was protection for me at this point.

  “I’m going to ask all the questions for now,” I said. “So if there is anything you want to know before we begin, anything that will make you more comfortable, you can ask them right now.”

  Lucy wiped her hand back and forth across her mouth. “My things. Can I have them?”

  “When we’re done,” I said. I was trying to find the perfect pitch for the tone of my interrogation, somewhere between firm—helped in that regard by Kerry’s anecdote about the mousetraps—and compassionate.

  Lucy Jenner pouted.

  “The best I can figure, the man who took advantage of you was involved after Buster and Austin were killed, am I right?”

  No answer.

  “What I mean is, I won’t make you go through all of that again at this point in time, okay?” I wanted to lower the emotional content of the interview. “You choose the way you want to tell the story. I want you to try to relax. I’m not taking any steps until you’re one hundred percent on board.”

  Lucy’s chest started heaving. It was obvious she was getting upset, and she refused to make eye contact with me.

  “I can’t do it,” she said, looking down at some place on the floor between my desk and her feet. “I thought I could, Ms. Cooper, but I just can’t. Not because I don’t want to, but I just can’t.”

  “This morning you said you had told people five years ago, when you were here in the city. People who didn’t believe you and didn’t do anything about it.”

  Now Lucy had twisted her head to the side and was gnawing at a hangnail.

  “I didn’t say that,” Lucy said. “I told you I tried.”

  “Tried what?”

  “Tried to tell people.”

  I knew she had said that she had told people. Now she was backing off from that statement, proving my need to have Mercer present.

  “Like I said to you then, Lucy, try me.” I was leaning in toward her, trying to make the conversation as easy and intimate as I could.

  Her chest heaved again as she exhaled and wiped a tear from her eye. “I can’t do it, Ms. Cooper. I can’t do it now for the same reason I couldn’t do it then.”

  “Sure you can,” I said. “These are different times—you said that yourself—and I’m here to work my tail off getting some kind of justice for you. You’ve come through so much in your young life that even though I’ve known you for just a few hours, I don’t think there’s much you can’t do. What’s the reason you’re saying that?”

  I pulled a Kleenex—a staple of my trade—from the box on my desk and passed it to her.

  “Please, Lucy. Give me the reason.”

  She wiped her eyes and her cheeks and balled up the tissue
in her fist.

  “If anything worse happens to me than what I’ve been through,” she said, “I won’t be able to take it.”

  “Don’t talk that way, Lucy. Let’s see what we can do—together,” I said, curious that she was worried about something bad that could happen—something she didn’t have the fortitude to endure. “Have you ever tried to hurt yourself?”

  She was still sniffling as she pulled up one of the cuffs and showed me the scars of several marks where she had cut herself on her inner wrist.

  I had seen scores of self-inflicted cuts on young women. These, like many others, looked superficial. They looked like an effort to call attention to herself, but not really to endanger her.

  “If you trust me—and Mercer—there’ll be nothing anyone can do to hurt you. Do you understand that?”

  “I understand what you’re saying, Ms. Cooper,” Lucy said. “That doesn’t mean I believe it.”

  “Who are you afraid of?” I asked. “The man who hurt you?”

  “Yeah. Exactly. The man who raped me. He didn’t just hurt me, he raped me.”

  I had been waiting for Lucy to use that word. Rape. She hadn’t said it earlier in the day, and though it seemed to me to be the issue, she needed to speak it out loud and not have me guess at it.

  “We put rapists in prison, Lucy. That’s what Mercer and I do.”

  She had shredded the tissue in her hand, so I gave her two more.

  “The reason I’ve never been able to tell anyone is that the man—my rapist,” Lucy said, catching her breath, “my rapist threatened that if I ever said anything about what happened, he’d personally make sure he’d find me and find a way to break my spirit. To break me completely—whatever was left of me.”

  I tightened my lips and tried to find the right approach to reach her. “Whoever he is, Lucy, he can’t be that powerful. Nobody is. You’re got strength and courage you’re not even aware you have.”

  Lucy pushed her chair back. She was defiant now. “He is powerful, Ms. Cooper. And beyond that, he made me swear not to tell.”

  “He obviously made you do a lot of things you didn’t want to do,” I said. “You were a kid, Lucy. Don’t be afraid now of things that scared you then. Swearing to a rapist that you’d protect his secret is not a pledge you have to keep. Bring him to justice and I promise you that not even he can break your spirit.”

  “It was more than a pledge I made to him,” Lucy said, hesitating for several seconds. “It was an oath. He said it was every bit as sacred as a religious rite—a promise to God.”

  “But, Lucy—” I started to say.

  “He had a razor blade, Ms. Cooper. He cut his hand with it,” she said, “and then he cut mine.”

  This time when she offered her hand to me, she opened her fist and showed me her palm. There was a scar across it, from the base of her index finger to the opposite corner where the palm joined with the top of her wrist.

  “He mixed our blood together and made me swear never to tell,” Lucy said, rubbing her palm.

  “I don’t know what will happen to me if I break that pledge, she said, pausing again. “It was a blood oath.”

  NINE

  I got up and walked to Lucy, who stood up as I put my arms around her slender shoulders and squared her off to face me.

  “That’s a whole lot of mumbo jumbo,” I said, urging her to look at me and listen. “A blood oath has no meaning in this day and age. It’s just superstition, and the kind of irrational belief a man like that would use to twist you into knots when you were most vulnerable.”

  “He told me that it was a religious thing. Break it and my soul breaks with it.”

  “Are you religious?” I asked.

  “No,” Lucy said. “My mother gave up going to church when she found out that she was going to die and leave me all alone. I had no reason to believe in God after that.”

  “Sit down, please,” I said to Lucy and then turned to Mercer. “Get in this with me, will you?”

  The huge detective with the gentlest touch of any I knew walked forward and kneeled next to Lucy’s chair.

  “The power of blood oaths is mythical, Lucy, not real,” Mercer said, talking softly, as though there was someone else around to hear him. “Princes and knights would shed their blood in ancient times, according to oral histories, swearing to protect their people from foreign conquerors.”

  At first she ignored him, but that was hard to do with Mercer.

  “Mafia mobsters used that term,” he went on, “to command the loyalty of new recruits, just like gang members still do. It’s the stuff of Samurai legends you see in movies—scenes that are meant to make you cringe when blood is drawn.”

  Lucy tilted her head and looked at Mercer.

  “It’s vampire stories and gothic novels—and even in the pages of those things, when the good guy is ready to shed the influence of the bad guy, he or she just renounces the oath.”

  “Renounces it?”

  Mercer stood up. “You abandon the covenant,” he said, brushing the palm of one hand across his other as though he was ridding them of dirt. “Mobsters and gang members and Samurai and vampires—it’s okay to be afraid of them. But you’re not bound by any covenant a rapist swore you to. Over and done, Lucy Jenner. Let’s us go bring this bastard to his knees.”

  Lucy looked from Mercer’s face to mine. “How do I renounce a solemn oath I made?” she asked. “Will you help me?”

  “There was nothing solemn about it,” I said. “You tell me you want to break it? Consider it broken.”

  Mercer reached for a piece of paper on my desktop and grabbed a felt-tip pen.

  “Write it out for me. That’s more formal,” he said. “That’ll work in court, if you want to show it to the judge.”

  He had picked up on the childlike qualities Lucy exhibited, despite the street smarts she had been forced to develop by her lifestyle. He sensed that she needed something that was as visible to her as the razor cut on her hand.

  She bent over the paper and wrote for a minute, then handed it to Mercer, who read it aloud.

  “‘I, Lucy Jenner, break the covenant I made with my rapist on August twenty-third, the year I turned fourteen, in the John Wayne Motor Inn, in Iowa City.’”

  “Is that okay?” she asked, placing her hands under her thighs and sitting on them.

  “It’ll do fine,” Mercer said. “Let’s have Alex sign and date it.”

  He passed the paper to me. I was already agitated. What business would I have making this a case if it happened in Iowa City?

  “You sure that’s the name of the hotel?” I asked as I added my signature with the date and time. “John Wayne?”

  “He was born in Iowa City,” Lucy said, smiling at me. “I know he got to be a movie star cowboy, but he was born in the Midwest.”

  I had a legal pad in front of me. I was used to the balance of establishing rapport with the victim through eye contact and paying careful attention to the facts and details. But some of the specifics had to be noted contemporaneously so that they didn’t get lost in the bigger picture.

  “I don’t want to keep calling him ‘the man’ or ‘the rapist,’” I said. “Are you ready to give us his name now?”

  Lucy was warming up to Mercer. I think she liked the way he had given her the permission she had long wanted to abandon the oath that had silenced her.

  She picked her head up, looking at him. “Later. I’m almost there.”

  “That will help,” I said. “Do you remember the first time you met him?”

  Lucy nodded her head. She had been a severely traumatized teenager when Austin and Buster were murdered, someone had come along to be part of her recovery team, and then betrayed her. Asking if she remembered how and when and where she first met her rapist was like asking me if I remembered my first root canal. I couldn’t
forget if I wanted to.

  “Let’s give him a name for now,” I said. “Just so we can refer to him.”

  “Jake,” Lucy said. She hadn’t paused for a second to think about it.

  “Jake?” I asked. “Is that what you actually called him—or did you just pick that to use with us tonight?”

  “That’s what he wanted me to call him,” she said, seemingly attaching no significance to the name. “He didn’t want me to use his real name.”

  “And that wasn’t his nickname?” I asked.

  “It was his middle name. I mean, I didn’t know it back then, but one time a few months back, I Googled him and saw that his middle name is Jacob.”

  Jacob. Jacob. Jake. Jake. I thought of the photographs of cops and FBI agents that Mercer had printed out for me. I didn’t want to stop Lucy now that she was talking. I could look up each one of them later, if she still balked at naming the man, to find the elusive “Jacob.”

  I scribbled “Jake” and “Jacob” and “J.” on my pad, although there was no chance of my forgetting it.

  “And you remember the first time you met Jake?” I prompted.

  Lucy bit her lip and nodded again.

  “Would you tell us about it? Would you tell us where it happened?”

  She rocked her body from side to side.

  “I met Jake here,” she said. “I met him in New York.”

  Bingo, I thought to myself. I might have jurisdiction after all. I did nothing to give away the fact that her answer pleased me.

  “What were the circumstances, Lucy?” I said. I wanted to draw her out and have her give us a narrative. I didn’t want to pick at and pull for every fact. “Why were you here and who were you with?”

  “After Austin and Buster were killed, there was an FBI agent assigned to my case,” she said. “Assigned to me.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “Her name, actually. Her name is Kathy Crain,” Lucy said.