Blood Oath

by Linda Fairstein

  “What is it, Billy?” I asked.

  “The doctors took the patient off life support two hours ago,” he stopped to tell me. “She didn’t make it. They said she didn’t stand a chance. I’m so sorry you had to wake up to this, Ms. Cooper, but Ms. Fain is dead.”

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  I sat on the edge of my bed for half an hour, my door open, listening to the noises that were made in the aftermath of Francie Fain’s life. It was enough to wake the dead.

  The beeping and clicking of all the monitors had ceased, but some of the heavy equipment was being taken out of the room and wheeled through the double doors, banging off the walls and sides of the entrance as it was shoved along by four chattering orderlies.

  Members of the medical staff had been called in, perhaps from the adjacent wing where other patients were being cared for. They were talking among themselves, taking turns walking in to look at the patient, as though they were doing rounds on the deceased.

  Normally, because Francie Fain had been in a hospital facility under the care of doctors, the sign-off by a medical examiner wasn’t necessary. But when I heard Dr. Jonathan Mayes introduce himself to the uniformed cop, I realized the fact that this was a homicide required the presence of a morgue official.

  I stood in the doorway of my room and waited ten minutes, until Jonathan reappeared from Francie’s bedside, and came into the hallway, talking to the doctor wearing the lab coat.

  They spoke for several minutes, then Jonathan went back into the room, reemerging with his briefcase and jacket.

  “Hey, Jonathan,” I said, thinking of both his medical expertise and his compassion. “I’m so glad you’ll be assigned to do this postmortem. I’m devastated by Francie’s death.”

  “Alex?” he said, taking the reading glasses off his nose. He had an English accent, although he’d lived in the States since medical school. “They didn’t tell me you were on this one.”

  “I’m not. I’m—uh—I’m just keeping a witness company—totally unrelated. Not really a medical case, but we figured it would be a chance to use Francie’s protection services for the next few days.”

  Jonathan grimaced. “Sorry to deprive you of that so quickly.”

  “That’s the least of it,” I said. “Scully’s got us covered.”

  “I never met Francie,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve actually ever testified in a case she represented.”

  “You’d remember,” I said. “I promise you that.”

  “I’m sure I’ll see you soon,” he said.

  “May I ask a favor, Jonathan?”

  “If it’s about cause of death and all that, my friend, the answer is no. I’m under very strict orders from the chief medical examiner not to discuss this matter with anyone.”

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “Francie’s got no family here, and I have no idea what will be decided by Quint Akers or whoever gets to run the show, but I’d like to go in to be with her now for two minutes, just to say my own good-bye.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that?” Jonathan asked. “It’s never easy.”

  “Francie was on her way to my welcome-back party when she was stricken—or whatever it was that happened,” I said. “I think it’s only right.”

  “That’s not a problem at all, as long as you’re up to it,” Jonathan said. “The nurses are cleaning up the body now. I’ll just tell them you’d like to come in when they’re done.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  Jonathan did a quick turnaround in and out of Francie’s room. “They’ll be ready for you shortly,” he said. “Do you need a steady arm to hold?”

  I had been to the morgue scores of times in connection with cases I had worked over the years. I had recently spent an hour alone with the corpse of Paul Battaglia, after witnessing his assassination.

  “I can do this, but thank you for offering.”

  Jonathan left, and when the nurses came out to motion to me to come in, I walked across the hall and stood beside the hospital bed.

  I hardly recognized Francie, although it had been such a short time since I had seen her on the street the night she collapsed. From the injuries caused by her thrashing around to the EMTs’ efforts to resuscitate her and finally to the tubes of the ventilator, I was not looking at the vibrant young defender I had sparred with so often.

  The head nurse stepped out with the soiled linens, and only Billy was left at the foot of the bed.

  “Will you think I’m crazy if I talk to her?” I asked.

  “I do it all the time,” he said. “It’s good for you, I think.”

  “Hey, Francie,” I said, biting my lip. “It’s Mrs. Burger. Mrs. Hamilton Burger. God, I loved your note. And how I hate that I didn’t get to put my arms around you one last time.”

  Billy had his head down, sort of pretending not to listen as I babbled on.

  “We’ll find him, Francie. We’ll get whoever did this and I will send his ass up the river for you, ’cause I think this is one time you might favor that result.”

  I stroked her hair and tried to understand what had happened to her.

  I lifted the edge of the hospital sheet that covered her and picked up her hand, wrapping it in mine. Rigor had not yet set in nor had the temperature of her extremities begun to chill.

  I looked down. Her knuckles were bruised and scraped from her convulsions after the fall onto the pavement of Baxter Street. I rubbed her palm, foolishly thinking it would have hurt her for me to put pressure on the back of her hands, where the discoloration was so severe.

  “I’m going to miss you, Francie Fain,” I said, stroking her fingers and bringing her hand to my mouth to kiss her fingertips. “I’m going to miss your sass and your smarts and your attitude and all you stood for. I’m going to miss every ‘objection’ you used to shout, whether you had cause to or not.”

  While I was talking, I touched something hard on the surface of her skin and turned her hand over to look at it.

  On the palm of her hand was a scar. A long scar, from the base of her forefinger to the lower corner on the opposite side of her hand.

  I breathed in and threw back my head.

  “You took a blood oath, Francie Fain. A goddamn blood oath,” I said aloud. “When the hell did you do that?”

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  “Can you find out whether the cops and feds are still going to be here for a few hours?” I asked Billy. “I’m just going to jump in the shower and clean up before I wake Lucy up. I don’t want her to see any of this.”

  “Will do,” he said.

  I took my clothes down to the restroom at the end of the hall and showered there. I had a black blazer, white shirt, and black slacks to put on—a somber outfit for my meeting to drop the news on Zach Palmer.

  But that was before I saw Francie’s scar and was scrambling to rearrange my priorities for the day.

  By the time I had dressed, brushed on some makeup, and walked toward my overnight cubicle, another cop and another agent—this time both women—were standing outside Francie’s room.

  Billy Feathers saw me coming and pulled me to the side. “There’s a new shift, with new officers, as you can see,” he said. “Seven A.M. to seven P.M. Apparently, the police commissioner wants the body to stay here until this evening—or maybe even until tomorrow—and then she’ll be transported to the morgue when he gives us the orders.”

  “Thanks so much,” I said.

  “The docs here want to take some tissue samples, too,” he said. “Sadly, this is an opportunity for them to learn more about how your friend died.”

  “I wish I could tell you myself,” I said.

  “I know better than to ask questions,” Billy said. “There’s a century of secrets under this old roof.”

  “I bet there are,” I said. “I’m expecting a detective named Mercer Wallace, wh
o’ll be hanging out with Lucy after I leave. Is there any place close by that won’t have her staring at Francie’s room all day?”

  “For sure,” Billy said. “There’s a really lovely solarium for the patients—when they’re well enough—if you head out that exit, just past the restroom you used. It’s sunny and light, right overlooking the East River. There’s a TV and lots of green plants—”

  “I don’t mean to be rude, Billy,” I said, cutting him off. “I get it. Will you have a breakfast tray for Lucy, and can you bring it out there?”

  “You get her up and dressed, I’ll bring you each a tray.”

  I ducked into my room and dialed Mike’s number. “She’s dead. Now you’ve got yourself a homicide.”

  “I know that, kid,” he said. “Scully had Vickee call me five minutes after he got the news. And Mercer’s on his way to you, to take Lucy under his wing. Sorry you had to be so close to all this.”

  “Why is he keeping Francie’s body here all day?” I asked.

  “Because he’s going to have a presser this morning to announce the attack—the first attack in this country that we know of with this new nerve agent,” Mike said.

  “What’ll that do now that she’s dead?”

  “The commissioner thinks it’s smarter to pretend Francie’s still alive—next door at New York/Cornell Hospital, where she was supposed to be—to see if it pulls any suspects out of the woodwork. The commissioner’s hoping you can keep your yap shut and go along with the program.”

  “Anything that helps, of course,” I said, “but I made a pretty dramatic discovery. I need you to get here ASAP and get back in Francie’s room with a camera.”

  “Speak up, Coop. I can hardly hear you.”

  “I can’t shout it to you. There are people I don’t know in the hallway.”

  “Go.”

  “Dr. Mayes was here,” I said. “He let me go in to be with Francie. I held her hand, Mike. I meant to just do it for myself, you know? To make me feel better, ’cause I sure as hell know that she didn’t feel it. But when I had her hand in mine, I felt something raised on her palm. When I turned it over, there was a scar—a line cut diagonally across her palm, identical to the one Lucy has.”

  Mike didn’t comment.

  “Did you hear me?”

  “Like you had a megaphone held up to your mouth.”

  “Will you tell Scully?” I asked. “Get someone in to photograph Francie’s hand, bring it to Jonathan Mayes’s attention so he can give us a medical opinion about what caused it, and figure out how to use that information.”

  “The second we hang up,” Mike said.

  “I’ve never met a successful sexual predator who stops at one victim,” I said. “I should have thought about this possibility before.”

  “What’s your plan?” he said. “Are you still going to call Zach and meet with him today?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t stop me,” I said. “After I do a thorough background workup on the late Francie Fain, to see where her life intersected with Zach’s.”

  THIRTY-NINE

  Mercer and Lucy were set up in the solarium by eight A.M. He had a plan to talk to her about how and where she had spent the last six years, and whether she had made any enemies who might want to hurt her—lies, thefts, family discord with her half brother in Brooklyn. Anything at all. He had an IT guy ready to research all her social media contacts, too, to see if there was anyone on the list who might have been looking when she posted her New York City location.

  Mike and I went directly to my office and got to work. I called Zach Palmer’s number, determined to make an appointment with him before the news of Francie’s ambush went out over the wires.

  I left a message, asking him to meet me at two P.M. at either the Four Seasons or the Palace. I figured that by giving him a choice of hotel lounges, he wouldn’t think I had planted any listening devices or backup men in advance.

  At nine, reminding Mike that Francie had been a prosecutor before she switched teams, I called our Human Resources director. “I need an old personnel file,” I said to the guy. “Francie Fain. F-A-I-N. She worked here for four years—and left maybe six years ago.”

  When Laura came in, I barely greeted her before barking orders. “Would you pull up that profile the American Lawyer did on Zach Palmer last year, and see if you can find a complete bio of him anywhere?”

  “I brought you coffee, too,” Laura said, knowing it took three cups to get me on my way in the morning. “Sorry, Mike. I didn’t know you’d be here.”

  “You’re slipping, Moneypenny,” he said. “I figured you’d anticipate my every move.”

  She was smiling so broadly she barely heard me thank her.

  A new paralegal delivered Francie’s personnel file ten minutes later and I buried myself in it.

  “Okay. Francie was thirty-six years old,” I said. “Two years younger than I am.”

  “And Zach?”

  “Laura should have a printout of the article for us any minute, with specifics. He’s forty-four, I think.”

  Francie’s file read backward, after listing her DOB. She was a graduate of Cardozo Law School and Middlebury College. Neither of those was Zach’s alma mater, nor would the eight-year age difference have allowed them to overlap.

  “Here are the notes of the interview write-up for this job,” I said, reading from the recommendation of one of my former colleagues. “He makes a lot of the fact that she had a fractured upbringing and—”

  “Fractured? What does that mean in DA-speak?” Mike asked. He had a toothpick wedged between two teeth, and he was chewing on it while he talked.

  I skimmed the essay and flipped through other papers that included her references. “That woman in a nursing home in Texas—the one I said was her mother—adopted her,” I said. “Looks like Francie’s parents were killed in a car crash when she was seven, and then she spent time in a series of foster homes, in Northern Virginia, where the family lived.”

  “Go on,” Mike said.

  “It’s really impressive that she pulled herself together,” I said, turning another page. “One of her references says she ran away from foster care a couple of times, that she learned about court hearings when one of her foster dads had her picked up on a PINS petition.”

  Persons In Need of Supervision were kids under the age of eighteen who were chronic runaways or who consistently played hooky from school.

  “Listen to this,” I said to Mike. “‘Francie’s personal experiences gave her a particular empathy for the underdog, for the person who was never given a fair chance,’ is what one of her law school profs wrote about her.”

  “It must have made her a powerful advocate for victims of violence when she started here,” Mike said.

  “It did. And when she decided to put her talent to work for the accused,” I said, “it made her just as determined to get her clients off.”

  I continued to read as I walked to Laura’s desk, just as she was printing out some of the articles about Zach Palmer, and returned, handing them to Mike.

  “‘Ms. Fain,’ the recommendation closes, ‘exhibited a noticeable change in her attitude and in her adjustment to living a more meaningful life after entering a program the court directed her to participate in’—this part’s in quotes, Mike—‘as an incorrigible fourteen-year-old.’”

  I stopped for a moment. “Imagine,” I said. “Francie, incorrigible? I just can’t.”

  I skimmed the rest of the letter, telling Mike the highlights. “Anyway, this thing was like Outward Bound, the guy says. It was called OVERCOME, and it sent problem kids like Francie into a national park for the summer with a small peer group and two leaders—hiking twenty miles a day with all their gear, pitching tents every night, cooking their own food over a fire they had to make.”

  “And you probably whined and moaned abou
t having to practice for the swim team races every day at your parents’ country club,” Mike said.

  “Hey, don’t I always tell you how lucky I am?”

  I was searching for the connection to Zachary Palmer but couldn’t find it in the old personnel file.

  Mike was studying the media pieces about Zach. “Middle-class family in the District of Columbia. Three older siblings. Mother a schoolteacher, father was retired military working as a civilian for the Department of the Navy in Anacostia.”

  He stopped chewing the toothpick and sat up. “‘When Mr. Palmer was twenty years old,’” Mike read to me from the monthly legal periodical, “‘between his sophomore and junior years at Harvard University, he worked as a counselor for a program run in the DC and Virginia courts for disadvantaged youth called OVERCOME.’”

  “Grooming 101,” I said, putting my papers down, riveted on the fact that we had located the missing intersection in the lives of Francie Fain and Zachary Palmer.

  “Find someone needy, vulnerable, and fragile, isolate her from anyone who possibly still had an interest in her, and swear her to secrecy,” I said. “I’m sure the well-meaning judge told young Francie to obey whatever her team leader told her to do.”

  “Into the woods seemed to be a perfect formula for our predator,” Mike said. “And it made him an absolute pro by the time he encountered Lucy Jenner.”

  FORTY

  I picked up the phone on my desk and dialed the commissioner’s cell.

  “Scully.”

  “Mike and I just found the link between Francie Fain and Zachary Palmer,” I said, telling him what we had put together.

  “Who else knows?” the commissioner asked.

  “No one. We’re alone in my office.”

  “Keep it that way,” he said. “I’ve called a conference for noon. The story will be about the use of a nerve agent on a citizen in this city, and the fact that the victim is recovering and cooperating with us on the investigation.”