Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  “I’ve made exceptions like that before for a wide variety of reasons,” I said. “I still think it makes more sense for me to send one of my lawyers who hasn’t had a professional relationship with the judge, rather than go myself.”

  I flipped the pages of my daily calendar—still a book I kept on my desktop. “It’s already Tuesday and my week is pretty full. That’s another good reason to bring in someone else. I’ll supervise, of course. Does Janet want an order of protection in the meantime?”

  “I don’t think that’s necessary. Bud knows that she told me about his attack, so he’s been pretty well behaved the last couple of months.”

  I took one of my cards from my desk drawer and passed it to Jessica Witte. “This has my cell number on it. Janet’s welcome to use it 24/7 if she has any problems,” I said. “She’d be wise to keep it in a place Bud won’t find it. It might set him off again to know she’s been in touch with me.”

  Witte took the business card and jammed it into her wallet. “But you can’t tell me what would happen if she presses charges?”

  “There are too many details I don’t know at this moment,” I said. “First-degree strangulation, which causes severe injuries, is a felony with mandatory state prison time. Fortunately for Janet, that isn’t what you described. If this is the misdemeanor, without injury, there’s less likelihood the judge will go to jail. But you wrote the speeches, so you probably know all the distinctions.”

  Witte was so into her own importance that she didn’t take my comment as a dig.

  “I’ll get back to you about Janet’s decision,” she said, rising to her feet. “She wants you to know that she’s writing a book. It’s a novel, but it’s sort of about her marriage, and—well, Bud’s bad conduct off the bench.”

  I tried to hide my displeasure. Everyone I knew thought they could write a book. This sounded as though it was likely to fuel the flames of the Corlisses’ relationship.

  “Tell Janet we’ll need to see the manuscript, as far as she’s gotten.”

  “It’s just fiction, like I said.”

  “The manuscript may still be relevant,” I said, jotting a note on my pad about the book.

  When Jessica Witte opened the door to leave, Laura buzzed me on the intercom. “I’ve got Quint Akers on line one for you.”

  “Quint,” I said, putting the phone to my ear, “any news? Any improvement?”

  “No change at all, but I want to thank you for calling me last night,” he said. “It was the right thing to do. I sat with Francie till this morning, talking up a storm—telling war stories and gossiping about our mutual friends—and telling her how much her friends adore her. The docs say you never know what someone in her condition can hear.”

  “I gave myself a light day at the office,” I said. “I’d like to run up for a visit.”

  “They’ve moved her, Alex.”

  “Moved her? Where?”

  “To New York/Cornell Hospital. It’s got a world-class neurology department.”

  York Avenue at Sixty-Eighth Street. “I can be there in half an hour.”

  “No visitors. They won’t allow any. Not till they figure this out.”

  “Did you find out if there’s a will?” I asked.

  “I’ve got Francie’s phone and we’re going through all her contacts, but there doesn’t seem to be a trust and estates lawyer or anything connected to making out a will,” Quint said. “Young and healthy and everything to live for. The kind of thing even lawyers put off. You got one?”

  “Yeah, I actually do.” After my first unexpected encounter with someone who wanted me dead, I figured it made good sense to have a will. “What are you going to do about a health care proxy, in case there are decisions to be made?”

  “I’m putting together a troika,” Quint said. “I don’t think anyone should have sole responsibility under the current circumstances. The prospect of what might have to be done is pretty overwhelming.”

  “You’re staying on it, I hope.”

  Quint Akers had lots of backbone and keen intelligence. “Yeah, I will.”

  “Who else are you pulling in?” I asked.

  “I’ve already got Francie’s best friend from the trial group, who’s been with her since they joined Legal Aid,” Quint said. “She’s spelling me at the hospital, in case they let anyone back in to see Francie during the day.”

  “Is there a chance I could be the third one, if you don’t have a firm commitment from anyone else yet?” I said.

  “Are you serious?” he asked.

  “She was on her way to a party for me when she collapsed,” I said. “And she wanted to have lunch next week. I feel very—sort of connected to her right now.”

  I didn’t want to tell him that I knew more about her medical condition than I had a right to, nor that she was thinking of leaving her job at Legal Aid. I wanted to do something for her instead of just feel helpless about her condition.

  “I think it’s a crazy idea, Alex. I mean, suppose we have to make a life-or-death decision,” Quint said, “and you’re a person who’s been an adversary of hers for the length of her legal career.”

  “That’s bullshit, Quint.”

  “It’s the truth. That’s what you are. I mean, suppose some long-lost relative turns up with a point of view that you oppose, and finds out that your best connection to Francie is that you objected to almost everything she ever said in a court of law?” Quint asked. “I don’t need controversy.”

  “Get real,” I said. “She’s been my friend for a very long time. Who’s your third collaborator going to be? The new man in her life? Do you think he doesn’t have a horse in this race?”

  Quint took a few moments before he spoke again. “What new man? What are you talking about?”

  I guessed the medical staff at New York/Cornell wouldn’t tell Quint about Francie’s pregnancy until he had officially been granted status as her health care proxy. He didn’t seem to know any more than I did at this point.

  “Just do what you have to do, Quint,” I said. “I’m backup for anything Francie needs.”

  “Don’t hold out on me now,” he said.

  “I can’t help you. I’m the one you don’t trust, just ’cause I sit on the other side of the courtroom.”

  “You know why I won’t have you in on this, Alex? ’Cause you’re unstable,” Quint said. “That kidnapping rocked you. You may be back at your desk, but you’re still out to lunch so far as I’m concerned. Just play back this conversation in your head, will you? You’re bonkers.”

  “Troika, my ass,” I said. “I have a steadier hand than you ever will, and a keen sense of devotion to my friends. So I hope you use better judgment than you’re claiming to have now when it comes to saving Francie’s life.”

  FIFTEEN

  Max was back in my office fifteen minutes later.

  “Do we have a plan?” she asked.

  “I’ve split up my ‘to do’ list,” I said. “Can you handle half of it for me?”

  “Sure.”

  “Start with Streetwork. Ask them to report in to you twice a day, starting today, about how Lucy Jenner is responding to their efforts.”

  “They’re not going to snitch on her, you know,” Max said. “They’re advocates and counselors and therapists who’ll be working with her.”

  “I’m not looking for a snitch. I trust their work completely. But I want intel on whether Lucy’s cooperating with their efforts to get her on her feet, and trying to make sure she doesn’t go AWOL”

  “What else?” Max said, nodding her head and writing everything down on a legal pad.

  “I’m giving you the SOL laws to brief for me,” I said. “Statutes of limitations for prosecuting sexual abuse of an underage girl in Oregon, Utah, and Iowa for starters. The ages and requirements are likely to be different in every state.” />
  “Am I looking for forcible assaults or statutory?” Max asked.

  “I still don’t have the details of each encounter yet, so you might as well search for both,” I said.

  “Lucy was fourteen when she met Zachary Palmer?” Max asked.

  “For the time being, with an entire legal staff surrounding us, let’s continue to refer to him as Jake.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s a unique situation and we’ll have to make up rules for this as we go along.”

  “Fourteen?” she asked again.

  “That’s what she says. But her aunt makes her out to be an unreliable storyteller, so I’ll spend a few hours today trying to run down some of her claims against him. The things she told me last night,” I said. “See if we can corroborate her recollections with dates of hearings and local news clips—so we can match up her whereabouts, her age at the time—all that kind of thing before we move on to hotel records. Start with information in the public domain before we try to get it some other way.”

  “But suppose we need subpoenas? Who’s our go-to person for sign-offs on them or the use of government search engines and any expenses we incur?” Max said.

  “Me.”

  She squinted and looked me in the eye.

  “No, really,” Max said.

  “Battaglia’s dead and the front office is in complete turmoil. This is only my second day back at my desk, but it’s pretty obvious,” I said.

  “You should be reporting to someone, Alex. It’s safer that way.”

  “The special election is almost six months away, in April. All the executive assistants and super-titled special counsel designees are tripping over each other to sit closest to Paul Battaglia’s empty throne.”

  Max had always been solidly in my corner.

  “So who do you trust in this scramble for power in the pecking order above me?” I asked. “Pat McKinney?”

  McKinney, the chief of the Trial Division, had a tortured history with me. Although technically higher up in the chain of command and above me in rank, he resented that Battaglia had urged me to skip over him to report directly to the DA. McKinney was sour and stubborn and would do almost anything to thwart an investigation I led.

  “Never,” Max said.

  I reeled off four other names to her.

  “It’s kind of like the Seven Dwarfs in the inner sanctum,” she said, responding to my list. “Dopey, Lazy, Grumpy, and Dweeby.”

  “Which one of them has ever handled a rape investigation?” I asked.

  “Not one. But the weight of all this doesn’t fall on your back alone if things go terribly wrong, once you’ve run it up the ladder,” Max said.

  “Things have gone terribly wrong for Lucy Jenner since she was fourteen,” I said. “There are so many loose rungs on that ladder in the executive wing at the moment that I’d rather take the hit and avoid it. Besides, I certainly don’t know if Lucy has every detail right—memories can occasionally take strange detours over time. But I believe the broad strokes of her story.”

  Max just looked at me and nodded.

  “Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “You can always say ‘I told you so.’”

  “I’m ready to run with this,” she said, turning to leave the room. “Pile on anything else you need.”

  The day was a mix of the usual things—phone calls from detectives and witnesses wanting updates on their cases, meetings with assistants in the unit to help strategize about upcoming trials, helping Laura handle the flow of walk-ins who wanted interviews about assorted criminal events, and trying to get deeper into the facts of Lucy’s case.

  Mercer showed up an hour after Max left the room. He brought me another large cup of black coffee and sat down across from me.

  “How goes it?” he asked. “What do you know about Francie?”

  “Quint Akers is running the show,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “He’s cutting me out of things because he thinks I’m mad.”

  “Mad what? Mad at him?”

  “Nope. Mad, as in unbalanced,” I said, blowing on the hot dark liquid. “You’ve been through this whole post-kidnapping thing with me, Mercer. Am I unbalanced?”

  “You serious?”

  “Dead serious.”

  “Your hands are steady as the Rock of Gibraltar holding that cup of mud you’re about to drink,” Mercer said. “A month ago, you were trembling like a hummingbird.”

  “I feel good,” I said. “I think people are sticking me with a label.”

  “Prove them wrong. Take a slam-dunk case away from one of the kids and stand on your own two feet,” Mercer said. “Be top trial dog again.”

  I poked my finger at the stack of Lucy’s paperwork on my desktop. “Stay with me on this one. I’d rather reestablish my bones with a gnarly mess like this case.”

  “Always with you,” he said. “Find anything yet?”

  I had the bag of items the police had taken from Lucy and vouchered. “Illinois driver’s license, with a Chicago address,” I said, handing it to him. “She lied about her date of birth on it. Makes herself twenty-two, two years younger than she is, according to the facts we know.”

  “I wonder when that started,” Mercer said, jotting down the info on the license. “The lying about her age, I mean.”

  “Will you try to get a birth certificate?” I asked. “If we make a statutory case, then everything relies on her age—down to the month and the day—since she was moving around from state to state in prep for Welly’s trial.”

  “No problem. Public record, probably Illinois, right?”

  “Probably,” I said. “And see if Kathy Crain is still an agent. She’ll be a critical witness in this, if she hasn’t been brainwashed by Jake along the way. I don’t want to make any contact with her yet, but we need to know who’s available if this picks up any speed.”

  Our lists grew and grew throughout the next few hours, and we stopped only to eat the sandwiches we ordered in.

  At three o’clock, Laura buzzed me on the intercom. “Line two, Alex. I’ve got Zachary Palmer.”

  I froze for a second, looking like a deer in the headlights with all of the evidence of Palmer’s split personality laid out on my desk. Then I shrugged as I looked over at Mercer and picked up the phone.

  “Alexandra Cooper,” I said.

  “Madame Prosecutor. It’s Zach,” he said. “How are you doing?”

  “All good. And you?”

  “Top of my game,” Zach said.

  “Glad to hear it. Are we still on for a drink?”

  “Something’s come up that’s going to make me late,” he said. “Can we change it to dinner instead? Eight o’clock.”

  “I can do that,” I said. “How about Patroon? It’s my favorite steak place, and they make a fine cocktail.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “We can put a little bit of meat on you. Fatten you up, Alex.”

  “Fatten me up? What, for the kill?”

  “Oh yeah,” Zach said. “I’m just looking to slaughter you at the polls next April, if you go that far. That’s why I’m trying to rattle some of the skeletons in your closet now.”

  I seemed to be surrounded by people who were counting the chinks in my armor, but I had every reason to believe that Zachary Palmer’s closet had more skeletons in it than my own.

  “Rattle away, my friend,” I said. “Game on.”

  SIXTEEN

  Mike and I were driving up Third Avenue toward East Forty-Sixth Street, where Patroon was located, squaring the block so that he could park in front.

  “What did Zach Palmer do in the Weldon Baynes case that was so unusual?” Mike asked.

  “Back at the time of Baynes’s rampage, Zach was a civil rights lawyer for the Department of Justice,” I said. “He had always been a p
olitical activist, with a great record at NYU Law School. When the double murder happened in Salt Lake City, the attorney general assigned Zach to prosecute the case.”

  “You mean, just that one case?”

  “Yes, that’s how it started,” I said. “But when he looked at the big picture, it was obvious that Welly Baynes was a white supremacist who had terrorized the country by going around shooting blacks, especially when they associated with white people. He did the same thing with Jews.”

  “Jews? But he didn’t get tried for that in Utah,” Mike said.

  “Not then. Because Zach was smart enough to hone his issue down for the purpose of getting leverage for the trial,” I said. “Look, Baynes even shot the white guy who published True Hustling magazine, because he printed articles showing interracial couples having sex.”

  “That guy who was paralyzed? Still in a wheelchair?”

  “That’s the one. Also a different issue and a separate trial,” I said. “But in putting together the Salt Lake case, Zach came up with a novel theory. Instead of a murder case, he found an unusual statute that made it a federal crime to kill people—because of their race—in a public park.”

  “So the Civil Rights Division got to handle these cases,” Mike said. “That’s why Zach was able to bring in other incidents, like Lucy’s.”

  “Yes. He was successful in arguing that the cases be joined—since he had federal jurisdiction in all of them—and tried together, in Salt Lake City.”

  “So he dragged Lucy all over the place with him—wherever there were pretrial hearings and opportunities for him to keep her close,” Mike said.

  “And everybody in her life—from her aunt to Agent Crain to the Palmer’s Posse team—thought he was watching out for the girl and taking great care to prepare her for the rigors of her testimony,” I said.

  “The bastard fooled a lot of people,” Mike said, checking the time on his watch. “You’re way early.”

  “I figured this gives us a chance for the Jeopardy! question,” I said, “and also a chance for Stephane to find me the quietest table so I can record the conversation.”