“I understand.”
“Do you still have a meeting with Palmer?” he asked.
“I’ve asked for one at two P.M., Midtown.”
“You’re not going without backup, Alexandra,” the commissioner said.
“I appreciate that,” I said. “You’re right.”
“We know how the nerve agent got into the country,” Scully said. “Again, this is for you and Chapman, but no one else. If it turns out to have anything to do with Palmer and be useful to you, I want you to have it from me.”
“I’m ready for you.”
“There was a bottle of perfume on Francie’s desk,” Scully said. “The nerve agent solution was in the perfume, so when she applied it, she essentially killed herself.”
“A perfume bottle?” I asked. “How can that be? How did she walk out of her office and get three or four blocks away?”
“The quick answer is that this Kiss of Death poison can work in a couple of different ways. You need to understand this, Alexandra, so you don’t go off the rails before we know the whole story.”
“I’m listening.”
“Basically, if Francie—or anyone else—inhaled the nerve agent, it would take effect in her lungs at once, causing them to stop working by interfering with the nerve function in all her major organs. She’d have suffered cardiac arrest, and if she had just collapsed at her desk, there’s a chance no one would find the death suspicious.”
“But she walked, Commissioner,” I said. “She seemed fine in those videotapes.”
“Because it’s most likely that the perfume was applied to her skin—to the pressure points on her wrist and her throat. The agent operates more slowly that way, which allowed for Francie to be out on the street, almost reaching your party, by the time it was absorbed through her skin, yet no one else would be contaminated.”
“Who gave her the perfume?” I asked, trying to control the anger in my voice. “Major Case took the Legal Aid visitors’ log and we have no idea who got in to see Francie that day.”
“Calm down,” Scully said. “There was an empty bag in Francie’s wastebasket. It had the box from the perfume bottle—the fragrance brand is a new one, called Duchess, if I’m not mistaken. We can’t find the receipt, but it’s possible that Francie bought it at the duty-free shop at Heathrow Airport when she was leaving England a few weeks ago. It’s a brand that isn’t sold in the States.”
“Oh, Keith,” I said, slipping into the familiar as I lost my patience with him. “Don’t tell me you think Francie poisoned herself? That’s absurd.”
“The first uses of Kiss of Death as a murder weapon, like Novichok before it, have been on British soil,” he said. “In the case of Novichok, some of it was sprayed on door handles to penetrate the skin of an unwitting man and his daughter.”
“Yes, I know. The double agent who’d defected.”
“But more recently, Alexandra, the nerve agent killed a couple of friends—not former spies, just ordinary citizens—who had picked up a bottle of cologne in a park and taken it home. They died days later, after applying it to themselves.”
“So you can send out a recall of all the bottles of Duchess that have been manufactured,” I said, “on the chance that you’ve got a madman working in a perfume factory. Or you can tell Mike and me that we should go on looking for our killer. It’s your call, Commissioner Scully. Your call.”
FORTY-ONE
Two tech guys wired me up for my two P.M. meeting with Zach Palmer. He had responded to my call by midmorning, and chose as the setting the large lobby of the Palace hotel, which extended from East Fiftieth to East Fifty-First Street, with a comfortable cocktail lounge—open and completely visible to passersby—on the Fifty-First Street side.
Another pair of detectives from the DA’s Squad drove me to the hotel—one man, one woman—and each waited for me inside one of the entrances, so that I remained in their line of sight. They were meant to be obvious to Zach, and I assumed they were. They were on board to protect me, in case my target didn’t like the news I was prepared to drop on him.
Zach was already seated when I arrived. As I got thirty or forty feet away from him, Josie Breed—his so-called body man—turned her back to me and walked off to a darkened area beyond the concierge desk.
Zach had chosen a small round table with two wing chairs on either side of it as our setting. A bottle of sparkling water and two glasses were on the table. He didn’t bother to get up when he greeted me.
“Now, really, Alexandra,” he said, “what were you thinking by bringing along an entourage from the NYPD? I’m not about to take you down in the lobby of the Palace—or are you that insecure?”
“You’ve gotten me over my basic insecurity,” I said. “Do you mind if I sit?”
“Help yourself,” he said, flipping his hand over as he pointed to the second chair.
“I’ve got something very serious to talk to you about,” I said, sitting down on the edge of the chair and putting a folder and manila envelope on the table between us, “and I want you to know that I’m wearing a wire. I’m recording our conversation.”
“What’s good for the goose, my friend, is good for the gander.”
“Sorry?”
“You think you’re the only one who can wire up?” he said. “I don’t want to steal your thunder, but I can’t for the life of me figure out why you lied to me the other night.”
“Lied?” I asked. “Me?”
The last thing I wanted was to have this discussion turned around to make me the bad guy, especially preserved on tape.
“It’s hard to trust someone who makes things up—fabricates conversations and encounters out of whole cloth.”
“Tell me what you mean, Zach, so I can get on with our business.”
“You told me that story about meeting a retired FBI agent named Katharine Crain, two or three years ago,” he said, imitating my tone of voice. “Some gathering of women in law enforcement, going on and on about how you talked to her about my prosecution of Welly Baynes. So persuasive you were, so honest—why, you almost had me.”
My mouth twitched nervously once or twice, but I hoped Zach hadn’t caught it. I didn’t want him in the driver’s seat.
Lucy’s handkerchief was in the manila envelope on the table in front of me, but it seemed less useful as I gathered that my first bluff had failed.
“Maybe I was mistaken about the agent’s name,” I said. “Maybe I—”
“Like I told you,” Zach said, “Kathy Crain was done with the life. You know, the whole FBI thing. Off the grid is where I said she went when she retired. Seemed to me she wasn’t going to any conferences, wasn’t linking in with you law enforcement ladies, wasn’t Instagramming her personal business to the rest of you. Chewing the fat over an old case, the way you told it—well, that just isn’t the Kathy Crain I know.”
“Then it was someone else,” I said. “I made a mistake.”
Zach leaned in on both elbows. “You’ve made mistakes all right, but I don’t think this was one of them. This was just a mean-spirited lie—let’s call it what it is. So I phoned Kathy Crain just to be certain, and your name didn’t ring the first bell with her. And yakking with a stranger about an old case and about me? Well, that was no more likely to happen with Kathy than if you summoned J. Edgar Hoover to a ladies’ lunch and really believed that he’d show up in a dress.”
“I apologize,” I said, nervously fingering the manila envelope.
“Just what is it you were fishing for?”
I hadn’t meant to start my speech on the defensive. I needed to regain my composure and control.
“I want you to know that I’ve opened a grand jury investigation, Zach, and that you are the target,” I said. “There’s not much more I can tell you right now, but I suggest that you get a lawyer as soon as possible. You’ll have to make a d
ecision about testifying—maybe as early as next week—before I ask for a vote.”
Zach looked as though he’d been gut punched by a heavyweight boxer, but then picked himself up and kept jabbing.
“You could have done this in a phone call,” he said. “It’s not like I needed to see you again.”
“That seemed a bit cowardly on my part. I wanted to face you when I gave you the news.”
“What do you think you have on me?” he asked. “You know you damn well better be right because this will look like nothing more than a publicity stunt when my PR team gets in gear.”
“I have you so rock solid that unless you hire a wizard to defend you—someone who can make the testimony and evidence evaporate into thin air—you’ll be lucky they don’t name a prison wing for you, instead of a federal courthouse,” I said.
“You’re out of your mind,” Zach said, taking gulps of sparkling water between sentences. “That’s the first thing everyone’s going to think, going to say about you. ‘That girl has just gone and lost her mind.’ And you already know that word has been on the street, since you went all batshit crazy—between being kidnapped and somehow entangling yourself in Paul Battaglia’s murder. You’ll just be that crazy girl who used to be a player.”
“Undoubtedly, it will start that way with some people,” I said, “but then I’ll get to unseal the indictment and the charges against you will become public. The tide is likely to turn, not all at once, I expect. But some dogged reporter will see past your smarmy persona and begin turning over every rock he can find from the time you stopped bed-wetting until the minute you walk out of here, worrying about who’s left for you to call as character witnesses.”
“What’s the crime?” Zach said, pounding his fist on the table. “What are you possibly alleging as criminal conduct?”
“More counts of sexual assault than I can enumerate right now.”
“Sexual assault?” he said, throwing back his head and laughing—almost as though he meant it. “Do I look like I need to force myself on a woman? Are you insane? Do I look like I’m starved for sexual attention?”
“You know that has nothing to do with this issue,” I said.
“Why? Just because I never hit on you? You feeling all left out and lonely, Ms. District Attorney? Won’t you sound all high-and-mighty when you can say you never fell for my—”
“Zach,” I said. “Cut it out, will you? I’m taping you.”
“Then don’t edit out the part about the night after Battaglia was honored by the Oliver Wendell Holmes Society four or five years ago,” he said, “when you were so tipsy that you were practically falling off your chair, begging me to take you home. Was that the Scotch whiskey speaking to me, or was it my archrival, looking for some honey in all the wrong places?”
“That never happened, Zachary Palmer. Don’t muddy this up by making it personal between the two of us.”
“Oh, it is so personal. This whole thing is nothing but personal.”
“You want to go on with your bullshit, Zach, or do you want me to tell you what you’re facing?”
He paused, but he wasn’t focusing on the problem I was dumping in his lap.
I lowered my voice. There weren’t many people in the lounge, but the restaurant staff was watching this mini drama unfold.
“I was asking you about trying the Weldon Baynes case,” I said. “I brought up the name of one of your most loyal agents, Kathy Crain. I even recognized your body man—Josie Breed—from the old news clips about the trial.”
“What of it? I’m a hero to the Justice Department and to anyone who cares about hate crimes, about civil rights,” he said. “I prosecuted a maniac who had killed people simply out of the horrible bias that drove his life. What’s the part of that you don’t understand?”
“Frankly, I don’t understand the split personality, Zach. Who’s Jake, and when does he come sneaking out from behind your zipper?”
“Jake? A childhood nickname is all,” he said. “You’ve let yourself be tied up in knots by a manipulative little liar, and she has played you for a total fool.”
I spoke each word slowly, keeping my emotion in check. “You had a sexual relationship with one of your witnesses, during the Baynes trial in which she testified, at a time when she was below the age of consent.”
“Don’t be stupid, Alexandra,” Zach said, pounding the tabletop again for emphasis. “I was a prosecutor, not a predator. You want the story? You want to know why you’re wrong?”
“I’m not here to argue the facts with you today. I’m just telling you what you’re up against,” I said. “Have your lawyer call me on Monday. He can bring you in to my office and you can do queen for a day. You have a story? Tell it to me once you’ve got representation. Or I’ll be telling it to the grand jury, my way.”
“Do you have a witness? You have someone you think a jury will believe?” he asked. “Or do you have an emotionally disturbed kid who never quite matured properly because of the trauma she suffered, watching a double murder of her friends? A young woman who lies and steals and tries to suck you in and drag you under because she gets caught doing something wrong?”
I was mildly nauseous to hear the outlines of Zach’s defense. His description of Lucy Jenner was very much like the one her aunt had given me. I believed that I had gotten beyond all that with Lucy, but every now and then I had second thoughts.
“Did you ever know what it’s like to have a witness in a matter—or maybe it’s just so unique to special victims’ cases that you don’t know—a witness so young or so inexperienced that she or he doesn’t even know the language for sexual acts? Who can’t describe the body parts because she or he hasn’t yet learned those words?” I asked, reining in my temper and channeling the weight of my years of experience. “There is nothing more powerful than when that kid sits in front of a jury and brings the horrific event totally to life by recalling detail or description that just makes you know with every fiber of your being that she or he was subjected to that life-altering experience.”
Zach fidgeted in his chair, but he was listening to me.
“Language doesn’t matter, date and time and place don’t matter, the fact that she or he may not even know then that what happened is a crime doesn’t matter,” I said, “because the retelling is so immediate, so ingrained in the memory of that child, and so vividly described to me and then to the jurors, that you know—you just know—and you know beyond a shadow of any doubt, that she or he is telling the god-awful truth.”
Zach sat back in his chair and put two fingers to his mouth, taking a deep breath. Then he put his hands together and started clapping, a slow, steady round of applause, growing louder and louder, that had everyone around the lobby looking over at him.
“Is that your closing argument?” he asked, smirking at me. “Is that the very best you can do? Because I will wipe the floor with your mealymouthed words. I will kick your ass right out of the well of the courtroom with that jibberish about someone’s addled memories tugging at the heartstrings of the jury—speaking words that have not a scintilla of evidence to back them up. I swear that will happen. I swear you will live to regret the huge mistake you are about to make.”
“You do? I’d advise you to think long and hard about what I’m telling you,” I said, standing up and grabbing my tote. “You’re on notice, Zach. Like I said, get yourself a lawyer and tell him to call me before I start presenting evidence next week.”
“Rhetoric never convicted anyone of anything,” he said. “You may think your highly prejudicial imagery will carry you to the finish line in a case like this, but you haven’t got a lick of evidence. And without that, you lose in the jury room, and you lose again in the court of public opinion.”
I was standing beside the table. “Remember putting cases in the grand jury?” I asked. “Surely you remember how to do that?”
&nbs
p; “Indeed I do.”
“After I put in the first part of my case on Monday, and I leave the room, not planning on coming back in for a day or two, remember how the foreman will ask me for a code name? A code name for the case I’m presenting, so the jurors can distinguish it from others they hear in between?”
Zach didn’t answer. He just cocked his head and looked at me.
“I can’t simply say the word ‘rape,’ because we have dozens of those cases before the grand jurors every month,” I said. “And I can’t just say ‘cold case’ or ‘Me Too,’ because we have scores of them as well.”
“What’s your point?” Zach asked.
“I was thinking the code word I’m going to use to help the jurors remember my presentation will be ‘blood oath.’”
Zach Palmer nearly dropped his water glass.
“Let the record reflect,” I said, speaking to an imaginary court reporter, “that the defendant attempted to take a sip of his drink, but his hands were shaking so badly upon hearing the phrase ‘blood oath’ that the liquid spilled all over the table and onto his pants and the carpet beneath it.”
“Get out of here,” Zach said, putting the glass down and standing up to face me across the table. “Get out of here right this minute.”
I reached for the manila envelope, and when I picked it up, I removed Lucy’s handkerchief from it.
I held it at the corner by my fingernails and dangled it over the tabletop.
“You got the sniffles now?” he asked, staring at the old piece of cotton cloth.
“No,” I said. “I prefer to think that I’ve got the bloody knife—the evidence you didn’t imagine I’d come up with.”
Zach tried to snatch it from me but I pulled back and held on to it. I lifted it again, close to my chest, steeling myself for the bluff.
“See that embroidered letter L on it?” I asked. “Lucy’s mother gave it to the girl, just before she died. I’m on my way to the DNA lab with it now. That very pale stain just off the center is from the blood—the mixture of bloods, I should say—that Lucy wiped away from her hand after you cut her. And there’s no statute of limitations—none at all—on the reliability of DNA.”
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