Entombed

by Linda Fairstein

  You can interrupt me but you can't shut me down. "I said we've got five women whose cases were matched up to each other's by the serology lab and four more victims of attempts that scream his MO loud and clear, even without a trace of physical evidence. Now we have a fresh hit."

  Paul Battaglia turned away from me and took a step toward the door. "So I'm supposed to tell the press that this maniac is back on the loose, and I've decided to indict some indecipherable genetic markers to make the public feel safe? Come back to me when Mercer has someone in handcuffs. Give me a name, a date of birth, and a mug shot I can plaster all over the newspapers. Am I right, Detective?"

  The expression on Mercer's face was obscured by Battaglia's cigar smoke.

  "I'd like your permission to indict him."

  "Indict who, Alex?"

  "John Doe. I want to charge this rapist as John Doe. Would you just stay here long enough to listen to what we've put together?" What I really wanted to tell him was not to be so dismissive of me without letting me make my case, but even after running his sex crimes prosecution unit for almost ten years, there were some lines I couldn't cross with Paul Battaglia.

  "You've done this before, haven't you? Why do you need me-"

  "I'm not wasting your time, Paul. We've only done it twice here, on cases that didn't have any ink. No press coverage. Sort of slipped it under the radar screen."

  It had been a risky move the first time I decided to indict a rapist when all we knew about his identification was the unique combination of alleles that made up his DNA profile. No flesh-and-blood image to go with it, no clue what his name was or where to find him. I wasn't even sure Battaglia had been aware that I'd tried the novel approach.

  "Once the commissioner goes public tonight with the fact that the Silk Stocking Rapist is back, you'll have the entire Upper East Side squeezing you for a solution."

  I had his attention now. Maybe Battaglia's election campaign slogan assured Manhattan's citizens that you can't play politics with people's lives, but he would again be on the ballot in November and vulnerable to concerns about every spike in violent crime statistics.

  He leaned against the doorframe and talked out of the side of his mouth, his cigar wedged firmly in the center. "What advantage does it give me, this John Doe indictment?"

  "Two things. This new case isn't the issue. But the older attacks took place more than four years ago. If we don't get the guy soon, the statute of limitations runs out on those and he can't be charged for any of the cases."

  Unlike murder, which could be prosecuted whenever the killer was caught, sexual assault cases in New York had to be brought within five years of the occurrence of the crime, barring special circumstances that the courts had recently allowed.

  "So by charging him now, this, uh, this-"

  "This John Doe, whose genetic profile we literally spell out in place of the defendant's name on the front of the indictment, has a combination of DNA alleles that the chief serologist is going to tell you is expected to be found in only one in a trillion African- American men. Once the squad puts a face and name to this evidence, I promise you we'll get a conviction on all counts."

  Mercer's back was against a row of file cabinets in my crowded office. His soft, deep voice added the latest news from the NYPD's press office. "The commissioner's called a conference for seven o'clock. He's releasing the composite sketch from the last reign of terror. This new victim won't be able to work with the artist for days, but we don't have to worry about that with the match Thaler gave us. All of the women from four years ago signed off on the accuracy of the sketch back then. Same face as last time, same skills."

  "When we get him, we make sure he never sees daylight again," I said. "He goes away for this case and anything else that he does from this point on. And trust me, Paul, he isn't stopping with Annika Jelt."

  Mercer agreed with me. "He's way too frenzied now. Coop's plan gets him for every attack the first time he was in town. We beat the statute and ask for a sentence of life imprisonment-plus how's another two hundred fifty years for good measure?"

  "Annika's mother and father are flying in from Sweden tomorrow. All she wants to do is go home, and all her parents want is to get her out of big, bad Gotham City. I've got to take her testimony as soon as she's able to move from the hospital bed."

  "What else? You said there were two advantages to indicting Mr. Doe."

  "We enter the profile in the data bank. Upload it to CODIS." The Combined DNA Index System collected results from both convicted offender databases and unsolved casework from every contributing lab in the country. Our evidence was routinely transmitted to Albany as well as to the federal system.

  Battaglia shifted his position and chewed the cigar over to the corner of his mouth. "Why isn't it already in CODIS from the time the old cases were tested?"

  Mercer spoke. "We weren't linked to the feds when the first cases occurred."

  "And the profile had to be reworked, Paul. Four years ago, DNA matches were declared with as few as eight loci in common. Now we can't upload a sample unless we've got a thirteen-loci hit."

  The reason that DNA had become such a critical tool in identifying individuals is because no two people, with the exception of identical twins, have the same genetic fingerprint. Lab analysis doesn't look at all of a person's DNA, because more than 95 percent of it is exactly the same among every human on earth-two arms, two legs, one head, and so on. What makes us unique is the area of DNA within our chromosomes that is different, and that's called a locus, or location. The more loci that are compared in the laboratory, the more valid the DNA match.

  "I assume you hope to find something if you put this information in CODIS. What good is it if it doesn't tell you who he is?"

  "Maybe we learn where he's been. I'd settle for that, for starters. Cold hits on serial rape patterns in other cities, a connection to a relative, or a jurisdiction he relocated to for a few years. Rapists this successful don't go dormant, Paul. If he wasn't in jail somewhere-which CODIS also finds out for us-then you can bet he was committing these crimes on somebody else's watch. Maybe the national data bank will tell us where."

  I could see the frown lines setting in on Battaglia's face. "So if I follow the commissioner's press conference with one of my own next week-the day you get your first grand jury filing-telling them about my idea to indict the DNA of this monster, you'll give me a briefing on all this, right? Loci and alleles and the rest of the scientific lingo. I'll be able to handle questions on this, in English?"

  He was a very quick study. Half an hour in his office before the press corps arrived and the district attorney would be explaining the process of polymerase chain reaction testing and short tandem repeats to them as well as the best serologists would do it on the witness stand at trial.

  "This John Doe business stands up on appeal?" he asked.

  It was still a controversial technique, used first on a serial pedophile case in Milwaukee and not yet litigated before our appellate jurists. "Our cases were both pleas. It hasn't been tested yet in New York. But the higher courts in Wisconsin, California, and Texas have all upheld it."

  "Yeah, well, those judges won't be close enough to this courthouse to see the egg on my face if there's a screwup at 100 Centre Street, will they? You got law for me to read?"

  It didn't pay to try to put anything past Battaglia. "I'll give you cases, but yes-there's a slight distinction."

  He started to shake his head at me.

  "We're solid, Paul. Really. Those other states don't have grand jury systems, so they don't have to go forward by way of indictment. The prosecutors simply issued warrants with sworn affidavits from witnesses and lab techs. It's not that the law is different, it's just an easier way for their lawyers to proceed. Think of it like this, boss. You can announce that you're the first district attorney in the country to do John Doe DNA indictments."

  He liked being first at everything. Creating specialized investigative units, taking down in
ternational banking firms that no other government agency dared touch, putting deadly drug cartels out of business-originality was a hallmark of his prosecutorial style.

  "So it was a good idea, then, for me to think of doing this, wasn't it?" Battaglia said, smiling at Mercer.

  He was in a better mood for the second part of my request. "I'm going to need money, Paul. The ME's office will have to retest all of the old samples to conform to the current standard number of loci. We may need to outsource some of them to private labs, which gets pretty expensive. And Mercer's got some interesting approaches that are going to cost us a bit of-"

  "Whatever happened to old-fashioned legwork, Detective? Pounding the pavement, spreading some five-dollar bills around town till somebody drops a dime on the perp?"

  "Mr. Lincoln's portrait? I haven't broken a case using small change like that since I was in the Academy. This guy beat me first time around, Mr. Battaglia, and I'm damned if it will happen again. He's escalated the violence already."

  "I thought this case wasn't completed. He didn't rape her, did he?"

  "Only because she fought with every ounce of strength she had to stop him. That's why she was almost killed," I said. "Resisting him-probably because he tried to tie her up."

  This predator was fuel for a tabloid feeding frenzy. Not only did he target women in one of Manhattan's toniest residential neighborhoods, long known as the Silk Stocking District because of the wealthy New Yorkers who built mansions there a century ago. He also used panty hose to bind his victims' hands together after he had subdued the women at knifepoint. It didn't matter to the New York Post that most hosiery hadn't been made of silk since the Second World War. Nylon, Lycra, and spandex didn't quite have the same ring on the front page of the morning papers.

  The police commissioner's press release tonight would be cause for flooding the area with additional street cops in a precinct already stretched thin by manning security posts on the consulates, diplomatic residences, and high-profile public buildings like art museums that sat within its borders.

  "So, no stocking to tie her up this time, but you're willing to go with some drool on the cigarette butt to confirm it's the same man?"

  "We don't even know what he did to her, Mr. Battaglia. She hasn't been able to talk yet. The docs have only let me in long enough to ask a handful of questions. I'm not sure how he tried to restrain her. She may have started to kick and fight because of the weapon alone, or because he actually brought out the stocking to tie her. Now that I have the hit from Thaler, I'll go back up to the hospital and see if she's ready to give me more."

  "Maybe I can put together an array of composite sketches," I said, "to see whether she picks out our man from the old drawing."

  "When I interviewed her briefly, it was before I knew about the DNA match. This time, I can ask her if she saw any panty hose. With or without the hosiery, science will prove it to an absolute certainty."

  "Mercer wants me to hire a geographic profiler, Paul. There's a guy in Vancouver who's willing to fly in and-"

  "I thought you didn't believe in that profiling mumbo jumbo, Alex."

  "I don't. Not the psychological crap. 'You're looking for a guy who had a bad experience with a woman when he was nine, Ms. Cooper. Your rapist probably has trouble expressing himself to women in a normal sexual setting.' 'No kidding, Doc. I'll keep that in mind.' We're not talking about that nonsense, Paul."

  "This fellow I've introduced Alex to has solved pattern crimes all over the country. You bring him in and he studies each of the scenes, same time of night, same lighting conditions as when the crimes happened," Mercer said. "Helps us figure out how our perp conceals himself from victims who never see him coming until they've got the key in the brownstone lock. And more important, gives us a clue how he gets away afterwards when we've had the area saturated with police."

  "Don't you remember, Paul? Four years back the task force beefed up street patrol, anti-crime units, undercovers on foot and in unmarked cars. They had helicopters on standby, canine on the sidewalk within minutes of each attack. Cops were at subway entrances and cruising in medallion cabs. Even the tollbooths at the bridges and tunnels were doing car checks."

  I reached for the poster board, which had been wedged behind one of my file cabinets for the last four years until I pulled it out on our return from the hospital to add the new site to the old pattern. I lifted it onto my desk so Battaglia could see it better and circled the line of pushpins that ran from Annika's building through the locations of the older cases. Every attack had occurred between Sixty-sixth and Eighty-fourth Streets, Second Avenue to the river, two long blocks east of the nearest subway line.

  "The rapist likes it here, boss. He moves around easily, he's confident that he can strike and get away without being caught. Every time he can score and make an escape, he'll get more arrogant about his ability."

  "Which means?"

  "He works right in here, maybe," Mercer said. "Or he lives here. He's back off the street too fast to be hoofing it over to Lexington Avenue to grab a subway. He's got an anchor point somewhere right in this 'hood, even though it's a lily-white part of town and his complexion is as dark as mine. It's where he leaves from and it's where he returns right after the attack. It's his bat cave."

  "You think flying your expert in will make a difference?" Battaglia asked, looking at his watch. He ignored the racial observation, which raised the potential of an ugly campaign problem.

  "We've got very little to lose," Mercer said. "This is the first time the perp has drawn blood. If he liked it, if it didn't bother him to leave his prey for dead, then we're going to see him do that again."

  I fished in the old case folder and pulled out a yellowed piece of newspaper. Battaglia was turning to the door as he told us to go ahead with our plans, but I thought I saw him flinch as I opened the clipping to show him a headline he probably recalled from several years back, shortly before election day in his last race: snag in silk stocking-Prosecutor's Promises to End Serial Attacks Gets Hosed.

  3

  Mercer reached into my closet for his leather jacket and handed me my winter coat and scarf. "Are you serious about tomorrow? You want me to have one of my complainants down here to testify?"

  "I already reserved an hour in an afternoon grand jury, just in case Battaglia saw the light," I said. "They were impaneled on Monday so they'll be sitting through the end of February. Do you think you can reach any of the old witnesses tonight?"

  Mercer was religious about staying in contact with his victims. In the decade since we started using DNA to solve stranger-rape cases, even the civilians were aware that investigations that seemed to have gone cold could be revived instantly as the input from data banks all over America grew and became standardized.

  He listed the names of the women he had to call this evening. Neither of us wanted them to hear from the media that the man who had attacked them was suddenly active again. Each of their lives had been traumatized by these events, and all had recovered to different degrees. I was a firm believer that a successful prosecution would further aid their recovery.

  "I'd like to start with Darra Goldswit. She's solid, she's always been ready to do whatever you think is best, and she still lives in the tristate area."

  I flipped through her case file, which Mercer and I regularly updated with contact information as she and the other witnesses moved to new homes, graduated from schools, changed jobs, married, and generally got on with their lives. "Need the number? I'll read over the police reports and be ready for her by the time you get here."

  He copied her home telephone number and cell from my folder.

  "If you can have her here at one, we'll be the first in the afternoon jury at two o'clock. I can put the medical evidence and lab report in after she finishes." There were at least six grand juries that sat in Manhattan every weekday, three that convened in the morning and the others in the afternoon.

  "I'm off to headquarters. The commissioner wants m
e right by his side when he makes the announcement."

  It was usually tough for the PC to decide when to publicly declare a crime series a pattern. Too early and it might create unnecessary panic within the community, while too late would lead to criticism about failure to keep those at risk from knowing the danger. This was an easy call because the cases had been such big news stories four years earlier, and now the reliability of DNA technology left no doubt that the new attack was the work of the same man.

  The news reporters would want details of Annika Jelt's assault and though they were few at this point, Mercer Wallace knew them better than anyone else. He and I were the only people who had interviewed every one of the women who had been brutalized in the older cases. He would stand on the podium behind the commissioner, alongside the very somber chief of detectives, and provide whatever information they deemed appropriate to release at this point.

  "I'll watch for you on the eleven o'clock news. Call me if anything interesting develops tonight, okay?"

  "You going to be home, Alex?"

  "Girls' night out. But a very tame one. There's a seminar at NYU Law School and Nan Toth is dragging four of us with her. We get our continuing legal education credit if we show up for the two-hour lecture, made painless by stopping at the alumni reception first with Nan. She promises enough wine and cheese to tolerate a panel of legal experts explaining the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the last year."

  We rode down in the elevator together and walked out onto Hogan Place, the narrow side street that housed both buildings of the DA's office. The wind and biting cold embraced me.

  "You meeting them here?" Mercer asked.

  I looped the scarf around my neck and shook my head. "They gave up on me when they heard Battaglia was stopping by my office at six. I'll grab a cab up to Washington Square."

  Mercer waved one down in front of the courthouse and tugged on the fringe of my scarf as he said good night. He was three short blocks from One Police Plaza.