Lucy sat down again and started gnawing on a Twizzler. “How late are you going to keep me here?”
“Till I get the answers I need,” I said.
“You know this guy, don’t you?” she said.
“I’ve met him. I’m not close to him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What I’m worried about is that if I start doing this, and Jake finds out about it, and then you back off ’cause you know what a big deal he is,” Lucy said, “then I’m screwed.”
Mercer spoke, behind the girl. She didn’t turn her head to look at him. “There’s one place Alex has more power than anyone else,” he said, “and that’s the courtroom.”
She was staring me down. “You don’t have more power than the judge.”
“Depends on the judge,” I said. “But I don’t back down off cases, once I’ve made up my mind to take one. That’s why I’ll be so demanding of you when I start the questioning.”
“Demanding what?”
“There’s only one thing you can do wrong, Lucy, and that’s lie to me. No matter what I ask, you can give me an answer or you can tell me that there are specific things that you don’t remember, but if you lie to me—about the least little thing—our deal is done.”
“Little things?”
“Yes, because at the end of the case, when the jury gets instructions about how to decide on the evidence, the judge tells them that if they believe you lied about anything—anything at all—then they can discard all of your testimony. Not just the lie, even if you think it’s a meaningless part of things—but all of it.”
“Why would anyone lie if they were raped?” she asked.
“That’s a really good question, and Mercer and I wonder about it all the time,” I said. “People don’t usually lie about the crime but about some of the details leading up to it. Sometimes they minimize things they did with the bad guy—the man who raped them—because they figure I’ll think worse of them if I know everything they did.”
“Like what?” she said. “Tell me like what?”
“So many things,” I said. “It can be that they drank too much but don’t want me to know they did. Or that they did drugs with the guy, so they’re afraid I’ll have them arrested for smoking weed or snorting coke.”
“Would you?”
“No,” I said. “And sometimes it’s about something sexual that happened between them and the bad guys. Some girls don’t want me to think they made out with a man or took off some of their clothes, because they think I’ll get the idea that they wanted to have sex with him.”
Now Lucy was looking at me with greater interest. “So if I let somebody touch me—touch my breasts or something like that—it doesn’t mean I was asking to be raped, does it?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Not for a minute.”
“All right,” she said. “I think I understand. You can ask your questions.”
I took her back to the day she first met Zach Palmer, spitting distance away from here at 26 Federal Plaza.
“How long were you alone with Jake that time?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Probably fifteen or twenty minutes until Kathy came back with coffee.”
“Did you know his real name?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It was all Mr. Palmer this and Zach that, depending on how well people knew him. They all wanted me to understand what a big deal he was, so I’d appreciate what he was doing for me, I guess.”
“When you were alone with him—while Kathy went out—did he discuss the case with you?”
Lucy shook her head in the negative. “Nope. Not ever when we were alone, other than to ask me if I was scared about getting shot, like Austin and Buster did,” she said. “He just started then by telling me he needed to know everything there was to know about me—even the most personal stuff—which seemed kind of nasty.”
“Actually, Lucy,” I said, “I do the same thing. I like to tell my witnesses that I need to know as much about them as the very best defense attorney—the person representing the man on trial—could find out if he hired a private eye.”
She sneered at me. “Why do you guys say that?”
“Because we can’t have any surprises when you’re on the witness stand at the trial and I’m behind the prosecutor’s desk in the well of the courtroom, twenty feet away from you. By then it’s too late for me to prevent the other side from asking questions that have nothing to do with your case.”
She seemed to be focusing on my words, trying to absorb them.
“So in that first meeting, did he tell you why he wanted you to call him Jake, instead of his proper name?” I asked.
“He told me that our relationship was going to be different than that of all the other agents and cops,” Lucy said. “That he would ask me about things that no one else needed to know, so he promised to keep any secrets I had to himself and not to share them with others or make them part of the case file.”
“Secrets from Kathy Crain, too?” I asked.
“Especially her,” Lucy said. “Jake said Kathy told him she had taken the place of my mother, and he knew that every teenage girl likes to keep secrets from her mother.”
“Pretty savvy of him,” I said. “That’s not a crazy view of a typical mother-daughter dynamic. What else happened in that first meeting?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, looking away.
I wanted to prod her memory a bit, without leading her. “Did he ask you personal questions?”
“I don’t remember,” Lucy said, expressing her annoyance with me. “You can’t expect me to remember everything he said to me.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’m just trying to figure out when you say you’re not sure, if it means you actually don’t remember or you’re just not ready to tell me something yet.”
“Is it okay not to remember something?”
“Sure it is,” I said. “A lot of this happened a very long time ago. But the more I make you go over things again and again, the more details that will come back to you.”
Memories were likely to flood back in, whether Lucy wanted them to or not. Mercer and I knew how many painful episodes were repressed by survivors, and yet the imprint of the criminal behavior was so dominant that it didn’t take much to bring them back to the surface.
“When Jake was alone with you in the FBI offices, did he touch you?” I asked, speaking calmly, in a soft voice.
She thought for twenty seconds.
“Like, in a bad way?” she asked.
“In any way,” I said. I’d be the judge of what was good touch and what was bad.
“I mean, he hugged me,” Lucy said. “That’s all. He asked me a bunch of questions about Austin and Buster—how close we were to each other and general stuff like that.”
Mercer and the guys in my unit had hugged women, too—sometimes to comfort them, sometimes in celebration after a trial victory. But the Me Too movement had made us more careful about the way we interfaced with our victims. There would be no more hugging from this point on.
“How close were you to Austin and Buster?”
“Jake wanted to know if I’d ever had sex with either one of them,” she said, her annoyance on full display. “He said that would come out at the trial if I had, so he wanted to start with that information, to see whether I’d trust him with it.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“They were just my friends, those guys. No, I’d never had sex with them,” Lucy said. “I was fourteen years old. I’d never had sex with anyone.”
“You told that to Jake?” I said. “Just like you’re telling me now?”
“Maybe I used different words, but that’s what I said.”
“And did he respond?” I asked.
“That’s when he pulled me toward him and hu
gged me,” Lucy said. “Nothing bad, I swear it. Just like a big bear hug. That’s when he said we were going to do fine together. ‘The prosecutor who’d never yet lost a case to a jury,’ Jake said to me, ‘and the truth-telling virgin with hazel eyes.’”
TWELVE
Catherine texted me and the incoming alert interrupted my talk with Lucy. I stepped out to Laura’s desk to answer her, shortly after nine P.M.
“Spoke to Mike just now,” she wrote. “He asked me to confirm that Francie was on her way to Forlini’s to surprise you at our party.”
“Was she?”
“Yes,” Catherine responded.
“Any more details?”
“No. She was a no-show. Now we get why.”
“Talk to you tomorrow.”
I went back to my desk and apologized to Lucy for interrupting her. I wanted to move the story along. I could fill in Jake’s foreplay in the next interviews, but before we broke for the night, I wanted to see if there was criminal conduct.
“How long did you stay in New York on that first trip?”
“Three days.”
“Did you see Jake again that week?”
Lucy put her finger to her lips as she thought about the answer. “No, but I saw Mr. Palmer a few times, if you know what I mean,” she said. “I never saw him alone, so it was always ‘Mr. Palmer’ in front of the other lawyers and agents.”
“That’s good, Lucy. That’s really good that you can make the distinction between the personal interactions and the ones with the legal team. That kind of careful thinking is very helpful.”
She liked being told she did something well. She blushed a bit and smiled at me.
“Any other instances of touching while you were in New York City?” I can’t believe I found myself hoping that something inappropriate had happened within my jurisdiction.
“He hugged me is all,” Lucy said. “Mr. Palmer did. I mean, in front of everybody, in just a friendly way. Sort of each time the day was over.”
Lucy must have been starved for affection. No family around, no good friends, and now suddenly a cadre of people with voices—lawyers who spoke for the most vulnerable population—suddenly they were looking out for her, too.
“When did you see him next—Jake, or Mr. Palmer?” I asked.
“It was in Portland, Oregon,” she said. “Kathy and I flew out because the trial was going to be held in Oregon, for all the guys who were murdered by Welly.”
“What happened there?”
“Nothing. Nothing at all,” she said. “We were going to begin the preparation for trial, but then the judge did something that Mr. Palmer didn’t like.”
“What do you mean?”
“A ruling, is that what you call it?” Lucy asked. “The judge ruled against something the team wanted to do, so Kathy and I flew back to Chicago. There was never a trial set in Oregon.”
I made a note on my pad to research the background of the prosecution’s case, city by city, crime scene by crime scene. Media clippings would help me establish where Zach Palmer was at any given point in time.
“The next time?” I asked.
“I was going to all these places,” Lucy said, “even though they had nothing to do with my case. Next was Utah. Salt Lake City.”
As in Portland, a man jogging in a park had been gunned down.
“Mr. Palmer had a hearing of some kind,” she said. “He wanted me to be there—‘in the wings,’ he called it—in case the judge wanted to hear evidence of a similar kind of crime.”
“Did you testify?” I asked.
“Nope,” Lucy said, shaking her head. “But I did spend some time with Jake. Alone time.”
“Exactly what was that,” I said, “and where?”
“It was springtime, I know. May or June, I’m pretty sure,” she said. “Kathy and I flew out to Salt Lake City from Chicago and got in on a Saturday night, really late. I was supposed to get together with some of the agents at the courthouse on Monday morning.”
“Where did you and Kathy stay?” I asked.
“Same place as everyone else,” she said. “Some big hotel that gave government rates, Kathy told me. Anyway, on Sunday morning, Kathy wanted to go to church, which was the last thing I wanted to do. I remember a whole bunch of agents were going to go with her.”
“‘Mr. Palmer wants to spend some time with you,’ Kathy said. That was okay with me, ’cause I knew we had work to do,” Lucy said. “She told me to meet him in the lobby at eleven.”
“Okay, and—”
“Wait. Wait,” Lucy said, holding up her hand at me. “Kathy also said all that stuff you tell kids when you’re going out and leaving them with a babysitter, you know? ‘Do whatever Mr. Palmer tells you to do. Don’t talk back to him like you used to do with your aunt,’ she told me. ‘Just do whatever he wants.’”
Child abuse cases often started that way. So did situations with members of the clergy or with schoolteachers. The party placed in the care of the abuser was always told to obey his orders, often too young to understand the forbidden nature of the conduct. Do whatever he wants. I had heard those instructions more times than I could count.
“Did you meet with him at eleven?”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Did you stay in the hotel, or go somewhere else?”
“I met him in the lobby, just like Kathy told me to,” Lucy said. “We sat on one of the sofas in the huge room and talked a bit, just about how I was doing back home and how I was dealing with this case hanging over my head.”
“That sounds like it was fine.”
“It was,” she said. “And I thought it was going to be even better when he told me he had a surprise for me.”
“Oh, what kind of surprise?” I asked.
“Now it was Jake talking to me, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded my head.
“He told me that he had rented a car so he could show me around the city, take me out to the Great Salt Lake. Let me be a kid for the day and not a witness, is how he put it.”
“Just you two?”
“Yeah. Just me and Jake,” she said. “We walked out to where the valet parking guy was, and when he saw Jake, he ran down to the lot and came back to the front of the hotel with a car—a Mustang convertible, a red one.”
When Lucy grinned at me, I couldn’t help but smile back.
“That was one of the best days ever,” she told me, emphasizing the word “best.” “Here was this really smart man who everybody respected and listened to, and it seemed like all he wanted to do was to let me have fun.”
Zach certainly had developed a gift for the perfect predatory setup.
“I was wearing jeans,” Lucy recalled. “In fact, we were both wearing jeans. He had ordered some food from the hotel and brought a couple of towels and said we were going to picnic.”
I hid my facial expressions well. I was used to doing that whenever survivors told me their stories. I couldn’t be judgmental of choices they had made. I knew that Lucy Jenner had just boarded an express train that would go off the rails and wreck itself before too long, but I understood what those hours of freedom must have represented to her.
“Did Palmer tell you to call him Jake that day?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t have to remind me,” Lucy said, trying to imitate him when she spoke. “‘Forget I’m the United States Attorney. Now I’m just your buddy Jake. We’re not talking about trial prep or learning about the law, we’re just hanging out and being friends.’”
She paused for a few seconds. “And you know what, Ms. Cooper? That worked for me just fine.”
“Was this supposed to be a secret, this day trip?”
“Jake turned it around on me. He said that he was the one who would get in trouble if all the church mice on his team thought he was goofing off,” Lucy
said. “That made sense to me. He told me our picnic would have to stay between us so he didn’t make the agents mad that he was joyriding while they were praying for Welly’s victims.”
Another well-planned grooming device—each step gradual and each one completely calculated—by Zach Palmer. He let Lucy think she was protecting him rather than keeping her own secrets from Kathy Crain.
“I have to ask you, Lucy, whether there were lots of other things that you kept from Agent Crain before you started going places with Jake?”
She bit her lip and gave the question some thought. “I didn’t go to very many places or do many things without Kathy, or whoever was standing in for her when she was off duty,” Lucy said. “I kept a lot of my thoughts from her, a lot of the things I was feeling, but she knew everything that I did.”
“Were you dating anyone during that time, after Buster and Austin were killed, but before the trial?”
“Now, that’s a really stupid question, Ms. Cooper,” she said, laughing and wagging her finger at me. “Did you ever know a boy who wanted to put the moves on anyone who spent day and night with an armed guard? He’d have to be crazy.”
“One thing I can promise you is that before you and I are done, I’ll have asked a bunch more stupid questions,” I said, holding my hands up in the air, in surrender. “Fourteen’s a tough age. You must have wanted a social life?”
Zach Palmer would have relied on that fact in his approach to Lucy, targeting her isolation and her emotional neediness.
“I wanted a lot of things I couldn’t have,” Lucy said. “They weren’t any of Kathy’s business, as nice as she could be.”
“Tell me about the picnic, okay?”
Lucy described the ride out of town to the Great Salt Lake in the red convertible. It was such a unique experience in her young life that she recited specifics that left no doubt they were real. Jake’s conversation had nothing to do with the law and everything to do with eliciting personal information about Lucy’s interactions with family and friends—dead or alive.
I knew that I could retrieve all the data from those conversations on another day.
She talked about her reaction to seeing the vast lake. Although she had spent a lot of her youth in the general area of Lake Michigan, everything about this journey evoked different sensations.
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