Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  I wrote that on the pad. Lucy stretched up to see what I was doing.

  “It’s Kathy with a K, not a C,” she said, correcting me. “She became, like, as close to me as anyone had been since my mother died. She sat on me like a hawk, watching me real carefully.”

  “So you didn’t get hurt,” Mercer said.

  “I guess so. It was like she didn’t want me out of her sight,” Lucy said. “I was at my aunt’s house part of the time, and in some different hotels and motels when we had to go to Iowa City to work on the case.”

  “But Agent Crain—Kathy—was always with you?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Always,” Lucy said. “Sometimes they sent a relief agent in when Kathy had days off.”

  “But always a woman?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Kathy was bodyguarding me at my aunt’s house—my aunt really hated having an agent living with us—when we got the news that Welly Baynes had been caught.”

  “That must have been a huge relief,” I said.

  “It was. But it couldn’t bring back Buster and Austin.”

  “Totally right. But it would stop Baynes from killing anyone else,” I said, and from trying to eliminate an eyewitness, like Lucy.

  “That’s what grown-ups kept telling me, but it didn’t make me or their mothers feel any better.”

  “What was the next thing that happened, after you heard Baynes had been caught?”

  “That’s when I found out about the trip to New York,” she said.

  “Why New York?” I asked. “What was the trip about?”

  “There was this whole team, this task force,” she said. “You probably know that. They’d been going all over the country, all over to interview people to see which cases were the ones that Baynes did.”

  “Yes, I remember.”

  “They were from lots of places,” Lucy said. “All the cities where murders happened, but most of them were from New York. Detectives and federal agents.”

  Mercer was still behind Lucy, off to her side, out of her direct line of sight. As he listened to us talking, he was looking through the pile of news clips that he was holding on his lap, beneath his pad.

  “Agents,” I said. “Lots of FBI guys, I’m sure.”

  Mercer nodded. We’d been looking for photos of cops, but maybe Jake was an agent. That could make sense, too. And the picture on the precinct wall might have had the task force teammates all together, including the feds.

  “You and Kathy flew to New York?” I asked.

  Lucy smiled at that memory. “That was the good part. I’d never been on an airplane before, and I’d never been to the city, so all of that was really exciting. Best of all is that the government paid for it—my plane, my hotel room, my meals, and all that. Kathy took me to a Broadway show and to the Museum of Natural History.”

  “I’m glad you have good memories, too,” I said. “Where did you meet Jake?”

  Lucy bowed her head and started swinging her legs back and forth. I had wrenched her out of the happy parts of her trip to get her to give us what Mercer and I wanted.

  “He came to the meeting at FBI headquarters,” she said.

  “Twenty-six Federal Plaza,” I said, staring at Mercer over Lucy’s head.

  “I don’t remember the address, but it was a tall office building with a ton of security around it.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t expect you to remember,” I said. “I was just trying to get some facts grounded. I can always reconstruct that. Actually, that building is just a few blocks away from here.”

  I could see why I had made Mike so angry. It wasn’t that he didn’t want justice for whoever had hurt Lucy—cop or no—but I had jumped at the idea that the bad guy was a cop, when it just as easily could have been a fed.

  “I spent an hour or so with the guys who had been assigned to my case,” Lucy said. “Kathy, too. They just wanted to separate me from the people from the other cases, so we didn’t mix up our stories.”

  “I do that all the time,” I said, keeping my tone casual and friendly. “It’s a good policy. We all think we can remember things perfectly, but once someone else says, ‘Oh, she was driving a blue car,’ a lot of witnesses fill in the blanks of their own recollections without ever meaning to.”

  “Yeah, Kathy told me that’s what it was about,” Lucy said. “Anyway, the main FBI guy was the one who began to ask me questions. Sort of like this, starting with my background and stuff, and then going on to—you know, to ask about what I was doing with Buster and Austin.”

  “How many people were in the room?” I asked.

  Lucy pulled her hands out from under her thighs and counted on her fingers, closing her eyes to re-create the scene. “Me, Kathy, the guy doing all the talking,” she said. “Actually, when he got to the day of the shooting, he made the other cops leave the room.”

  We must have been getting closer to my target.

  “That’s good practice, too,” I said. “The only one he needed in there with him was Kathy, because she knew everything you’d said up until that point.”

  She was biting one of her nails. “That’s about when Jake came into the room.”

  I was waiting for this moment, but I was still startled when she introduced him into the narrative.

  “I stopped talking, because I hadn’t seen him before,” Lucy said. “Kathy knew him really well. She got up and they kissed each other on the cheek, and then she told me his name—his real name, like kind of formal—and said they were old friends.”

  Mercer had put down his papers and was as riveted by Lucy’s words as I was.

  Lucy paused and smirked. “Kathy told me I could trust him with my life. She told me how lucky I was that he was my team leader.”

  “Then what hap—?” I began.

  Lucy interrupted me. “The four of us talked for a few minutes, then he told them it was time to take a break, to leave us alone for a bit so he could get to know something about me. One-on-one. Things that weren’t in the police reports.”

  “Did Kathy go?”

  “Yeah, she said she’d bring us back some coffee,” Lucy said. “She said this work was all about trust. We’d have to get to trust each other.”

  “And the man?”

  “The first thing he said to me—Kathy was still there, so she can tell you it’s true—the first thing he said to me was how easy it was to trust girls with hazel eyes,” Lucy said, putting her hand to her mouth. “He had this great big smile, and he was just a foot away from my face. He said I had the most beautiful hazel eyes he’d ever seen, and that the two of us were going to do just fine together.”

  Shit. The grooming began the moment he laid eyes on his victim.

  “Did you say anything?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “He did all the talking at first. ‘Lucy, we’re going to be spending a lot of time together. And you can count on the fact that I’m going to be the best friend you’ve ever had.’”

  She paused. “I didn’t have many friends, with Buster and Austin gone. I was sort of glad to hear him say that.”

  I bet she was.

  “That’s when he told me I could call him Jake. Not in public, not in court, but that would be our secret name when I wanted to tell him something private.”

  This time I took a deep breath. “Jake. Okay, that’s his nickname,” I said. “What else did he say?”

  “‘Call me Jake, Lucy,’” she repeated. Then she dropped the bombshell. “‘I’m going to be the prosecutor for your case.’”

  TEN

  A cop had been my first guess as the bad guy. Gut reaction, because of Lucy’s panic in a police station, but the wrong one. Then I had figured a federal agent. I had failed to look at one of my own as the villain—a prosecutor. There were powerful men with dark secrets hiding in plain sight everywhere.

  “H
ow stupid of me,” I said, pounding my fist on the desktop. “How narrow-minded and shortsighted.”

  “Zachary Palmer,” Mercer said, flipping through the news clips until he found one of the cops and agents posing with their lead prosecutor. “Zachary J. Palmer.”

  We had let Lucy Jenner take a break—wash her tearstained face and get a soda from the vending machine.

  “Jake,” I said, throwing up my arms. “Nobody ever calls him Jake.”

  I grabbed the paper from Mercer’s hand. “No doubt there’s a photo like this on the wall in the station house. Palmer’s Posse is what they called his team. He was the architect of the brilliant plan to join all Welly’s local crimes to mount one federal case.”

  “How did he—?”

  “Zach,” I said, rambling on. “I’ve known him forever as Zach. First as a fed and then as an adjunct professor of Con Law at NYU—I guest lectured for him several times—and then as a liaison between the Justice Department and Homeland Security, and now—”

  “Take a deep breath, Alex,” Mercer said. “We can deal with this. And now what’s he doing?”

  “Zach is on the mayor’s Anti-Terrorist Task Force,” I said, “doing pretty much what he pleases. Making contacts with the top dogs at every law firm and hedge fund, flying off to Paris and London and Moscow and Jerusalem to meet with those special NYPD units in each of the foreign cities. Raising his political profile while he trolls for campaign donations and promises of help from American expats and Russian oligarchs—that’s what I would call his full-time job.”

  “Nice deal.”

  “All mostly a cover while he positions himself to make a run for office.”

  “What off—?” Mercer said, shaking his head from side to side as the obvious answer dawned on him.

  “District attorney of New York County,” I said, almost in a whisper. “Can you believe the irony of this? Zach dancing circles around me, always ready to shove a shiv in my back if I got in his way, and meanwhile, Lucy Jenner walks in my door with a backstory that might blow him off the map.”

  “Have you seen him recently?”

  “Zach made all the right noises when I was down for the count,” I said. “Called and offered to stop by and visit. Wanted to make sure I was getting the counseling I needed.”

  “Sure he did,” Mercer said. “Something he could use against you if you decide to run—emotional instability and dependence on drugs.”

  I crossed my arms and tossed back my head. “And always that same inappropriate language about the physical appearance of all the professional women he came across.”

  “You?”

  “Fortunately, he spared me his compliments.”

  “Maybe he recognized you wouldn’t tolerate them.”

  “Hindsight’s a wonderful thing,” I said. “If I had shut down every inappropriate comment I heard in this office since I’ve been bureau chief, I would have probably changed some behavior, don’t you think?”

  “You’d never have had time to get any work done, if you’d been like that,” Mercer said. “Besides, how do you separate it all out? You’ve got a team of forty lawyers whose business it is to talk about penises and vaginas and whether a touching was consensual or not. You all make a living bouncing case ideas off each other—whose private parts were where and how did they get there? It’s not as though you work in a bakery, kneading dough. I’d expect the language to be different here.”

  “I’m not exactly blind to the offensiveness of it all,” I said. “Accepting all the dark humor and bad jokes.”

  “Started as a cop thing,” Mercer said. “That’s life on the job.”

  “There was a time not that long ago that I went in to see Battaglia,” I said. “One of the bureau chiefs was harassing a young woman in my unit. Total asshole. Married guy.”

  “The worst ones usually are.”

  “He was stalking her after work, leaving notes on her desk that were disgustingly suggestive, refusing to give her good cases unless she met him for a cocktail. Then the touching began.”

  “The tired old mashing at the Xerox machine?” Mercer said.

  “That and the overdone elevator crush and the supply closet jam-up.”

  “I bet Battaglia didn’t give a damn.”

  I looked up at him in surprise. “How’d you figure that? He liked to think of himself as such a great feminist.”

  “Generational thing, I’m sure. Battaglia was from the days of the ‘good ole boys’ just having a little fun.”

  “Dead on,” I said. “He told me that Jimmy was just going through a midlife crisis when I went to him with the story. That we all needed to ignore him till it passed. So of course we transferred the woman out of Jimmy’s bureau, and double of course, she’s a star. Midlife crisis, my ass. Jimmy K is just a pig.”

  “The victim always loses,” Mercer said. “Did you tell him about any of your own shit? Lipsky hitting on you big-time, showing up at your apartment door with his load on, when you were supposed to be helping him with his summation on that double murder case your rookie year? Frank Roper trying to tackle you to the ground after that black-tie dinner at the country club?”

  “Sometimes it’s better for me to fight my own battles,” I said. “All those years of ballet lessons helped me develop a swift knee hoist to the groin. Frank’s tuxedo pants split down the seam and I don’t think he ever looked in my direction again. Not so much as a glance.”

  “Sounds like Frank,” Mercer said.

  “This is an office with five hundred lawyers and another thousand support staff,” I said. “What percentage of them have been on the receiving end of harassment or assault, and who do they go to when it’s one of us who’s the abuser?”

  The Special Victims Bureau had a hotline phone right down the hall from my office, but I doubted my own colleagues would use it.

  “I may have just landed a prosecutor with felony habits, and you know they rarely strike once.”

  “One vic at a time, Coop. Take ’em as they come to you.”

  “For now, I can’t shake the image of Zach Palmer—distinguished federal prosecutor—climbing into bed with a teenage witness.”

  I had a ticking time bomb—Lucy Jenner—almost ready to come back into my office and tell me things about Zach Palmer I didn’t want to know. But I had planted myself firmly in this quicksand up to my neck and was not about to crawl out because the possible perp was law enforcement, too.

  “No more assumptions,” Mercer said. “Lucy has to paint this picture for you.”

  “It gets worse,” I said, ignoring his comment but thinking of my own predicament. “I’m having a drink with Zach tomorrow night. His invite, to discuss the race. He’s pretty sure that if he makes it clear that he’s raised the money already and has the community—and the Reverend Hal Shipley—in his pocket, I’ll realize running would be wasting my time and energy.”

  “You keep saying you’re not going to run,” Mercer said. “Maybe it’s time to let Zach Palmer think otherwise. Game him for a while.”

  “My head is spinning,” I said, lowering myself into my chair. “This is the moment I always told myself it was time to go in to talk to the boss.”

  “Get your ‘do the right thing’ speech from him?” Mercer said. “Is that what you need?”

  “Yeah, but the boss is dead,” I said, spinning my chair away to face out the window into the dark of night. “I don’t have a boss right now.”

  “You’ve got a conscience, Alexandra Cooper. That old windbag Battaglia didn’t have anything to do with the settings on your moral compass.”

  I could see the streetlights below on Baxter Street. I was hatching a plan and could feel a grin growing on my face.

  “You hear me?” Mercer asked. “Keep your date with Zach Palmer.”

  “I fully intend to,” I said. “There’s a v
acancy in the front office, so no one to tell me I can’t.”

  “Turn around, will you? Look me in the eye,” Mercer said.

  I swirled the chair slowly.

  “Now, that expression on your face is a real shit-eater,” he said, pointing right at my mouth. “Exactly what is it you’re thinking? Are you getting out ahead of me with a plan?”

  “Just a work in progress,” I said. “I’m getting my Jake on.”

  ELEVEN

  My desk phone rang and I answered it. “Alexandra Cooper.”

  “Chapman.”

  “How’s Francie?” I asked. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Bellevue,” Mike said. “She’s critical, Coop, but the docs are working on her like she’s the only ER admission tonight.”

  “Look, Mike, I was telling Mercer that maybe she was attacked by—”

  “Stick to the law,” he said. “There were no signs of injury to her head, and the marks on her legs and arms were from flailing because of the seizures—she got completely scraped up on the cement sidewalk. They’re doing every kind of brain scan and test imaginable.”

  “Are you with her?”

  “Back off, Coop. I rode in the ambulance, but she had no idea who she was or where she was, so forget about me,” Mike said. “And now she’s inside for all the tests.”

  “But you’re staying with her?”

  “The nurses want to know where her family is.”

  “Her mother lives in Texas, in an assisted living facility with a full-time companion,” I said. “There isn’t much other family. See if you can get a Legal Aid supervisor to find her next-of-kin contact.”

  Lucy was back, carrying a can of root beer and some red licorice from the vending machines. She knocked on my open door and I waved her in.

  “I’ll get on it,” Mike said. “Are you making any progress?”

  “A ton of it,” I said.

  “How big of an apology can I expect?” he asked.

  “Super-size,” I said. “Gotta go, though.”

  Mercer walked to the door and closed it.