Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  “And him, what did he do?” I asked. “Take yourself back there, Lucy, as painful as that is to do.”

  Her eyes were shut tight and the first tears began to fall. She was reliving an encounter with her assailant.

  “Jake told me we had to seal my promise with a blood oath,” she said. “He took my hand and ran his blade across it.”

  “Then what?” I asked. “Then what did he do?”

  Lucy’s eyes were still closed. She had willed herself back to the John Wayne Motor Inn in Iowa City. “Jake cut himself, too, but it was on his fingertip. He cut open a bit of his forefinger.”

  “You saw him lots of times after that,” I said. “Is there any kind of mark or scar on his finger?”

  Lucy closed her eyes and put her fingers in her ears, as though to shut me out.

  “Lucy,” I said, pounding my fist on my desk to demand her attention.

  “I’m thinking about it. Can’t you just leave me alone?” she asked.

  “That’s the one thing I can’t do.”

  Slowly she took her fingers away and opened her eyes. “Yeah. Yeah,” she said. “Jake had cuts on his forefinger and his thumb.”

  “Cuts?” I asked. “More than one?”

  “Sometimes when we were with other people, and they’d start to ask me questions—you know, the agents and cops—he’d hold that finger up to his lips, like he was shushing me. Reminding me that I had made an oath not to talk about us.”

  “Did he bleed, too, when he cut your palm?” I asked. Maybe that would help her recall what he did to himself.

  “Yes, yes, he bled. He grabbed my hand and traced his blood along the slice in my palm with his forefinger,” Lucy said. “He mixed his blood with mine, I swear to God. And then he undressed me, and then he made me have intercourse with him.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  “I was so busy checking out his two palms, I never thought to look at his fingertips,” I said. “How stupid is that?”

  “Don’t beat yourself up,” Mercer said. “And back off the girl, too. Don’t make it too hard on her the next visit.”

  Lucy had excused herself to go to the bathroom and wash up.

  “Time isn’t with us on this. I’ve got to dig into her while we’ve got her.”

  I had called Max and she joined us in my office. “I haven’t finished briefing it yet,” she said, “but first degree in Iowa would be sexual contact with someone who hadn’t reached her fifteenth birthday. Still, under sixteen, like Lucy, makes it a felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison.”

  It was too early to claim victory, but I liked the news. “Statutory limits?”

  “Sadly,” Max said. “Yes. Ten years. We need the exact date to be sure the ten years haven’t expired.”

  “I opened in the grand jury today, so you can prepare a subpoena for me when you have a chance,” I said. “The John Wayne Motor Inn?”

  “I’ve already checked, Alex. It’s no longer in business.”

  “Damn it. Then we’ll need some other way to confirm the date,” I said. “Mercer, can you try for court records this afternoon?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t need to brief the Romeo and Juliet stuff, do I?” Max asked.

  Statutory laws in most states didn’t allow prosecutions of teenage boys for sexual contact with girls close in age, even though under the age of consent.

  “Nope. Zach Palmer was never Romeo,” I said. “He was in his thirties when he had intercourse with Lucy. How about Utah?”

  Max checked her notepad. “Rubbing against Lucy, even over clothing, makes it the crime of Unlawful Sexual Contact, and there doesn’t seem to be a statute of limitation problem in Utah.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Mercer and I will just try to get a bit more done today with Lucy. Then you and I can spend some time together figuring what’s next.”

  I could see Lucy standing by Laura’s desk, and I called to her. “C’mon back in.”

  I tried to be clinical and avoid prompting an emotional reaction from Lucy. I went over cities and towns in which Jake—she told us—had entered her hotel room, almost whenever Kathy Crain had an afternoon or evening off. Mercer was making notes, although most of the dates were vague and would require great good luck in tracking down any corroboration of them.

  “Let’s talk about Manhattan,” I said, “the time you ran away from your aunt’s house six years ago and came to the city.”

  “What’s the difference?” Lucy asked. “If people don’t care about what happened when I was fourteen, who’ll care about an eighteen-year-old runaway?”

  “Of course people will care,” I said. “Stay with me for another hour. I’d like to know more.”

  Lucy told the story of that first bus trip again, and how she got caught shoplifting in Tribeca.

  “You haven’t told us why you decided to come to New York in the first place,” I said. “Why did you risk running away from your aunt’s home?”

  Lucy took a deep breath. “Because he called me.”

  “He?”

  “Jake,” she said, “or Mr. Palmer is how my aunt knew him. He called her house to talk to me.”

  I perked up at the idea that there would be telephone company records of the call, if we could nail down an approximate date.

  “Had he called you before that?” I asked.

  “I hadn’t heard from him since Baynes was sentenced, three months after the trial,” Lucy said. “Jake had used me for what he needed, and then he just dropped me like I was garbage.”

  “Did he tell you why he was calling?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Sure he did. It was my eighteenth birthday. That’s the reason he called.”

  “Jake remembered the exact date?” I said. That would make the subpoena process so much easier.

  “He had it in his files from the investigation and trial, so why wouldn’t he know it?”

  “Do you remember the call?”

  “Mostly all of it,” Lucy said. “First, he wished me a happy birthday, when I didn’t have much in my life to make me happy.”

  “Did you tell him that?”

  “No reason to,” she said. “He knew too much about me as it was. Then he asked me what I was doing, and I told him I was waiting tables and doing some office work—like answering phones—for my uncle.”

  “What else?” I said.

  “Jake started cutting me off when I was telling him,” Lucy said. “Like he wasn’t really interested in me at all. He just kept repeating, ‘So we’re good, right? So we’re good?’”

  She stared at the floor. “I really wasn’t sure what he meant by that—maybe that I had kept my promise not to tell? ‘You’re good with me, Lucy, right?’”

  I nodded at her.

  “Then he told me he had to go, and he ended the call, just like that,” she said.

  “That was it? Nothing about what he was doing or where he was?” I said. “What did you do?”

  “Somehow I got past my aunt and went into the room I shared with my cousin, and I curled up on my bed and started to cry. Like really cry, the way I hadn’t done in years.”

  “That’s good for you, Lucy,” Mercer said. “It’s good to let it all out.”

  “So my aunt has this button on the phone,” she said. “You can press it and it gives you the number of the last caller. Later that same night, I hit it, and it showed me a phone number from the 212 area code.”

  “Manhattan,” I said.

  “New York University Law School,” Lucy said. “I called it the next day, but it was the main number, and I couldn’t get an extension for Professor Palmer. The main office wouldn’t give it to me unless I left my name.”

  “Did you keep trying?”

  “No, I looked the school up on the Internet, and it said he was teaching there.”r />
  That was true. I had been one of his guest lecturers.

  “I just decided to come here, to come to New York and kind of surprise him. I wanted to see him in person so that he couldn’t hang up on me or just blow me off like he did on the phone,” Lucy said. “I wanted to tell him something. I wanted to do it right in his face.”

  “Tell him what?”

  Lucy took her time before she answered, full of fire. “I wanted him to know that things really weren’t ‘good’ for me, like he was asking. That it wasn’t bad enough that my life sucked because I watched my two friends be slaughtered, but then Zachary Palmer—who everybody treated like he was a god—then he raped me. And he raped me over and over again.”

  She stopped for an intake of breath. “You want specific details, Ms. Cooper? You think I’d make this shit up?” she asked. “Tell me if this sounds real. That we’d be at dinner with the agents and all that, and Jake would always find a way to say he wanted to stop by his hotel room and go over the next day’s testimony with me. Or that he’d take me out to dinner alone, and then have his way with me in the car on our way back to my room.”

  “It’s okay, Lucy. Have some water,” I said. “Mercer and I believe you.”

  “How about this? D’you ever do this with a witness? We’d be in my room—he’d send Kathy on a break with the other agents—and the local news would come on at ten o’clock,” Lucy said, back in the moment again. “And Jake would get up to adjust the angle of the mirror on the wall so that he could watch himself having sex with me, and at the same time catch himself being interviewed on the courthouse steps.”

  I couldn’t find words to adequately express my shock. I taught my prosecutors not to react physically to the descriptions accusers often gave. Some of them shut down when they saw that we were horrified by the perpetrators’ actions. I simply let Lucy go on. The perp having sex with his victim while exercising his vanity and watching himself on a televised news feed. This was the kind of detail that would convince any jury of Lucy’s truth-telling.

  “Jake used to tell me he could win any trial because he was—what’s the word—meticulous?” Lucy asked rhetorically. “He would save every scrap of evidence—every note or document or photograph. He took photographs of me. Lots of photographs.”

  “What kind of pictures?” I asked.

  “The first ones were normal,” she said. “Me doing everyday things—in his office, with Kathy at a restaurant, or in front of our hotel, riding in his car.”

  Lucy’s eyes shifted to the ceiling. “Then he started taking ones of me with no clothes on, posing me the way he wanted me.”

  When she stopped for a minute, I asked questions. “Did he take them with a camera?”

  “Nope. Just with his phone.”

  “Did he ever give you copies?”

  “No, not even when I asked for them,” she said, lowering her head and her voice. “He said that he took them so he could remember me when we weren’t together anymore. Jake said the photographs would be evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” Mercer asked.

  Lucy got up from her chair. “You want to know what I think, or what Jake thinks?”

  “You first,” Mercer said.

  “If I could get my hands on anything he had from that time, back when I was fourteen, I’d be able to take him to court and kick his ass.”

  “You’re doing fine right now,” I said. “What did Jake tell you?”

  Lucy pursed her lips. “He told me that the photos, that the scraps of paper I wrote on that he kept, with dates and addresses and all sorts of names of people we came into contact with—he told me all of that would be evidence of our affair, if I ever went back on our oath.”

  “Affair?” Mercer said, looking as though he would put a fist right through Zachary Palmer’s face.

  “He told me it was a love affair—not a crime. It got to be so routine for him to have sex with me that he didn’t even pay attention when I said I didn’t want to do it or that I was afraid to be with him again,” Lucy said, rubbing her palms back and forth on the legs of her jeans. “I didn’t know it wasn’t legal for a thirty-five-year-old man to have sex with a teenager. How was I supposed to know that?”

  “What happened when you came to Manhattan—when you turned eighteen?” I asked.

  “I took the bus from Chicago to the Port Authority, and then got directions for a subway down to Washington Square, where the law school is,” she said. “Jake didn’t have a regular office ’cause he wasn’t there full-time, but I left him a note telling him that I was in New York. I signed my name and wrote my phone number.”

  “You have a cell phone?” I asked.

  “Not now,” she said. “I just use burner phones when I have the cash. But my aunt bought me a cell phone when I lived with her. I can give you that number, too. She cut it off when I didn’t come home after a month.”

  “And Jake called you back?”

  “The next day,” Lucy said. “The day I went shopping and got picked up by the police.”

  I didn’t want to stop her narrative by making her angry, but I didn’t know why she was shoplifting undergarments that anyone would describe as “sexy.”

  “Silk underwear, a thong, leather leggings,” I said, recalling some of the items on the police voucher. “Who were you planning to wear those for?”

  In a flash, Lucy kicked my desk with the toe of her shoe. The loud bang startled me. “It’s not what you think, okay?”

  “Then help me,” I said, thinking the assortment of clothing more suited an assignation than a confrontation.

  Lucy looked away again. “I wanted to have the clothes to tempt him—Jake or Zach, whoever he was going to be when I showed up. I was afraid he’d turn me away before I could make him understand that he had ruined my life. Then I got arrested and the police took all the things from me. The things I wanted to buy.”

  The things she stole, but no need to underscore that.

  “I called him the next day, after I got out of jail—I was still in my T-shirt and jeans—and told him what happened,” I said. “He wanted to see me. He wanted to know what I said to the police.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That I didn’t tell the police anything. I think he agreed to meet me because he wanted to be sure of that.”

  “Where did you meet?” I asked.

  “He had an apartment in the East Twenties,” Lucy said. “I went there. And yeah, I know what you’re going to say.”

  “I’m not here to be judgmental, Lucy. I understand your rage,” I said.

  “It was eight o’clock at night. He buzzed me in the lobby door with an intercom, and I climbed three flights,” she said. “I was fighting back tears and shaking all over. Jake opened the door and I started to cry.”

  Mercer was off to Lucy’s side, motioning to me with his hand, suggesting that I take things down a notch.

  “He took my hand and brought me inside the door, pulling me against him and giving me a hug—like a big embrace,” she said. “I pushed back, but there was really nowhere to go. The thing that was strangest was that the apartment was empty. Not a piece of furniture in it, and just a bare lightbulb overhead.”

  “Why was it empty? Do you know?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Jake was moving out that coming weekend,” she said. “He was really anxious about whether I told the police about him—about what he had done to me when I was a kid—but I held up my hand to show him the scar and told him I would never forget our oath.”

  “Smart.”

  “Then he pushed me against the wall and started to kiss me,” Lucy said. “I told him to get off.”

  “Did he?”

  “He said he wouldn’t let me go until he had a taste of me again. A taste of my skin.”

  “Why don’t you stop for a while, Lucy?” I said.
“You’re beginning to tremble, just talking about him.”

  “I am? I didn’t even realize that,” she said, leaning back in the chair, her face streaked with tears and whatever makeup she had put on before coming to my office. “There isn’t much left to say anyway. Jake pinned me against the wall with one arm across my neck, pressing so hard I could barely breathe. Then he unzipped my jeans and pulled them down. I was crying so hard and gasping for air that I couldn’t stop him. That’s when he unzipped his fly and exposed himself. That’s when he raped me, Ms. Cooper. That time, by force.”

  I didn’t care about professional boundaries when she was so distraught. I kneeled in front of Lucy Jenner and took her in my arms, encouraging her to let out all her pain and anger.

  “I’ll tell you why that apartment was empty, Ms. Cooper,” Lucy said a couple of minutes later, wiping her eyes with the back of her hand. “It was three days before his wedding. His marriage to a student of his just a few years older than me. He was moving in with her.”

  There were no words I could offer in exchange.

  “Jake left me there, curled up in a ball on the floor of the empty apartment. As he walked out the door, he thanked me for giving him such a great bachelor party. And he told me I could tell anyone I wanted about him, because no one would ever believe me.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “Just don’t be all full of yourself,” Mercer said, “because you’ve got Zachary Palmer nailed on a first-degree rape that you can prosecute in this county.”

  “‘Nailed’ is an overstatement,” I said. “But I think I have probable cause. I need to back up some of this information—like seeing if we can get the address of the apartment Zach lived in while he was teaching at NYU, and Lucy’s cell phone records if she or her aunt remember the carrier.”

  We knew that Lucy needed a break from the intensity of the questioning. At one o’clock, Maxine came by to take her out for lunch, to a Chinese restaurant a few blocks away from the courthouse.

  Laura ordered in sandwiches for Mercer and me as we continued to talk about what to do next.

  “What’s your plan?” Mercer asked. “Do you intend to tell Zach he’s a target?”