She let us lead her into the small viewing space and I stood her near the window as Mercer switched off the lights. She gave a slight gasp: “Oh my, it’s so dark,” and reached out to grab on to my hand as she peered into the glass. I let her hold it and rested my other arm on her shoulder to offer comfort.
As the six rose to their feet and the first one walked toward the mirror, I could see Mrs. Jeter’s eyes scanning the row. “My God, I see him—it’s number four. That’s the man who was in my apartment this morning, that’s him.” Her hand squeezed mine as though they were being crushed together by a steamroller.
She was perfect. She knew exactly who she was looking for and didn’t even have to wait for the motley crew to parade in front of her one by one.
Wallace asked her to go through the rest of the process anyway, and to study each of the men as closely as possible. She did, but kept repeating, “I don’t have to—I know it’s him.”
As Mercer took her out the door on the far side of the room, so she wouldn’t intercept her husband or the women who had not yet viewed, she reached up and kissed him on his cheek, telling him how grateful she was that he had made the arrest so quickly. “I’m a very lucky woman, I know that. And thank you.”
He turned and gave me a thumbs-up. “The first hit is always the best. Nice and solid coming out of the box. We got him, Coop. Let’s keep going.”
I backed out of the room and motioned to the sergeant to send Mr. Jeter up to us. An old uniformed cop who looked as if he could count the minutes to retirement and had been assigned to man the telephones walked through the rear of the squad. “You had a couple of calls since you got here, Miss Cooper. I didn’t know you was up here.”
“Remember what they were? Anything more pressing than this?”
“Nah. Kid from your office, Acciano, says he’s got good news for you—a guilty verdict. He’ll leave the details on your voice mail. And Chapman, Homicide. Says he knows what Final Jeopardy is tonight—something like that. Wants you to call him when you get home. He’ll be at his office till 1 A.M. Lots of reporters asking what you were doing. That kind of thing.”
“Fine. Just hold everything till we’re all done and I’ll look for you on my way out of here.”
Mr. Jeter marched toward me, thrust his hand out to shake mine as we said hello to each other. He was feeling very proud of himself for having been able to thwart the attack on his wife. I started to describe the line-up but he cut me off. “I’ve done this before. Mugged getting off work the year before last. Had to go to three of these before they caught the right guy. Take me in and let ’er rip.”
I reentered the room where Mercer was already standing at the window and we repeated the scene. “That’s the little bastard. Number four. Right, am I right? Did my wife get him, too?”
Detective Wallace tried to steer Jeter’s attention back to the full panel. “We’d really like you to let each one of them come up here and—”
“Waste your time any way you’d like, Wallace.” He stood still in front of the window and let the six men go through the motions, but shook his head back and forth the whole time. “It’s four. I just saw him this morning. I hope my wife wasn’t too shook up to do this. Am I right?”
“Thanks, Mr. Jeter. We’ll let you two back together now and Detective Wallace will explain all this mystery to you in about ten minutes. Then you can take Mrs. Jeter on home, okay?”
“Great. You give my regards to Mr. Battaglia, will you? This is the third time in six years I had a case with his office. He does a fine job. Met him once at a community meeting—very decent man.”
“He is, Mr. Jeter. I’ll say hello to him for you tomorrow. Thanks for your help here.” I held the door open for him, ushered him out, and asked Mercer to get Katherine Fryer, the twenty-four-year-old illustrator I had interviewed in my office the morning after Isabella was murdered. Only one week had passed since that day, but it seemed like months.
Mercer went up to the fourth floor, where Fryer had been asked to wait, and brought her down to the viewing area himself. I recalled her extraordinary composure so shortly after her attack that day, and now felt the tremor in her hand as she extended it to meet mine. I asked how she had been doing as I guided her inside and repeated the instructions.
As Mercer reached back for the light switch, he mouthed something to me, which I realized were the words: “Stand close.”
I moved in to Katherine’s side as she advanced to the window and once again was glad for his advice. As she poked her head forward, nose almost against the glass, her knees buckled and she would have collapsed to the floor had Wallace not grabbed her at the waist and held her up. “Sorry, sorry. I can’t help it,” she murmured, trying to steady herself. “He’s in there.”
We both tried to soothe her and calm her down, but Katherine Fryer did not want to look through that window again.
“I really need you to take one more look. We’re right here with you. Just tell us whether or not you see the man who attacked you last week, and the number he’s holding, please.”
With great reluctance, the young woman pulled herself up and braced her body with an arm on each of us. She stared ahead for several seconds, then turned and glared at me. “The rapist is holding the number four. I’ll never forget that face. Now will you let me out of here?”
I nodded at Mercer, thanked Ms. Fryer, and stepped out for some air while the next two women were located and brought up, one at a time, in the same fashion. It was no surprise that each of the identifications were so positive. The Jeters’ attack had occurred in their home only hours ago this very day. And unlike muggings on the street that take only two or three minutes to commit, the rapes that Montvale had committed kept him with his victims for extended periods of time. These women had been forced to experience him through every one of their five senses, and it was because of that lengthy, intimate exposure that I would be able to argue to the jury that these identifications should be more reliable than those made by victims of any other kind of crime.
The question for William Montvale’s jury would not be how these witnesses remembered what he looked like, but rather, how they could ever forget the face of the man who so tortured them.
While Mercer made arrangements to get each of the witnesses home, the sergeant paid the satisfied stand-ins and sent them off into the night. I asked one of the guys on the team to take sandwich and drink orders and we called out to the deli on the corner of Columbus for a delivery. “No beer till all the work is done, agreed?” I asked, as I laid out the cash, noting that it was after nine o’clock as we moved into the next phase of the arrest process. Some of the guys grumbled but everyone knew there were still a lot of loose ends to tie up before the end of the evening.
“I’m gonna go in and try to warm him up for you, Cooper. The desk says your video man is downstairs. I told ’em to send him here so he can start getting set up.”
“That’s good. I’ll get on the phone and work on the search warrant. You certain he was living at his mother’s place?”
“Yeah. That all had to be confirmed for Parole to approve the move to New York. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t flopped somewhere else a couple of nights. But if you look through the fives,” Mercer went on, calling my attention to the police reports known as Detective Division 5’s, “you can make a list of some of the items of clothing the women described and some of the jewelry he stole. Maybe even the knife.”
“It’ll be drawn up and signed, ready to go, so you can be at his mother’s door at the crack of dawn.”
“When do we worry about DNA?”
“Nothing to worry about. At the arraignment, I ask the judge for a court order to draw a vial of Mr. Montvale’s blood. If there were ever a case with probable cause, this one is it. Got the best serologist in the country right in the ME’s office. They’ve got the blood from each of the victims already, to develop their typings to do the eliminations for the DNA results, and in a few weeks, that nail’ll also be in Mo
ntvale’s coffin.”
“I just want to place a few of these facts in front of him. Might help us get him to talk nice to you, Coop.”
It took me almost forty-five minutes to work through the application for a warrant by telephone to one of the rookie prosecutors who was manning the late shift in ECAB. There was a form in the word processor which made the conversation pretty easy, but there were a lot of details in Mercer’s paperwork and I didn’t want the detectives to have to go back twice. If Montvale’s mother got smart, some of the things they weren’t authorized to grab on the first trip might disappear by the time they returned with an amended warrant. We faxed the completed documents back and forth several times while I corrected the points that would be sworn to before a judge.
Mercer waited patiently until I was satisfied with the finished product. Then he signaled me to join him in the sergeant’s office, where I started on my third or fourth cup of coffee, wide awake and tingling with the excitement of a good arrest and the rush of caffeine.
“Well, I’ve moved him along a little. When we glommed him in the bank, it was the usual ‘I-don’t-know-what-you’re-talking-about’ bullshit. Then I unrolled his birth certificate and the Parole letter and stuck it up in front of his nose just now, and he mumbled something about making a mistake and knocking on the Jeters’ door when he was really looking for his uncle Louie’s apartment. Of course, he doesn’t have a fuckin’ clue where his uncle Louie lives. And I spent the last half-hour talking fingerprints, a little lecture about DNA, and then some yammer about everything the Jersey cops told me about his priors, and how similar they are to these cases.”
“Where’d that get you?”
“First he insisted that he was completely cured in that prison treatment center. Doesn’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Likes women now, understands them better.”
“The therapist hasn’t been born yet who can rehabilitate one of these predators. I once had a defendant who’d been treated in one of those programs tell me that if I broke the word ‘therapist’ into two words, it forms ‘the rapist.’ How’s that for rehabilitation, huh?”
Mercer went on, “He saved the best for the last.”
Sergeant Barbero stuck his head in. “You guys taking calls yet? These phones are wild.”
“Hold everything, Sarge. I want to see if he’ll talk to Cooper.”
“What’s the best?” I asked.
“After I laid it all out, I began to jerk his chain about how smart he was, you know, the ruse about Con Ed and talking his way into the apartment. Man, this guy is a sucker for having you tell him he’s smart.”
It was odd what worked with different suspects—what approach would make them want to talk to you. The most unpleasant part of this process for me had always been sitting in these rooms, face-to-face with men who were capable of monstrous acts against other humans, and speaking to them civilly when the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Doing it, one hoped, to get even more information to use against them.
“I hit the button with Montvale. Enough times of complimenting him and he actually wanted to tell me how he did it. Not the whole thing, he’s still not admitting the rapes. Says that till today he had never guessed wrong about which apartment he wanted to be in.”
I listened as Mercer went on. “Getting past doormen is easy. He says you never have to wait more than an hour, even to get into the best buildings. Sooner or later, guy gets distracted by a couple of moving men, an argument with a porter or handyman, pain in the ass tenant who expects him to know what the temperature is today and what time it was when 14B and 6A went out to walk their dogs. None of that happens, the guy eventually has to leave his post to take a leak. That gets him in the front door and on his way upstairs.
“This is his favorite part. Montvale says his prime time is the middle of the day. He walks up and down the hallways, listening at the doors. If he hears the television, and the noise is a soap opera, it’s a pretty sure bet you got a woman home alone watching the tube. Sometimes she opens the door and it’s an old lady, so he’s not interested. And sometimes there’s extra baggage, like Mr. Jeter, so he usually just apologizes and walks away, saying he made a mistake. But he says the city is full of housewives and unemployed broads who are addicted to the soaps the way you and Chapman like your quiz show shit, and he thinks he can smell ’em right outside their doors. ‘Days of Our Lives,’ ‘All My Children,’ ‘General Hospital’—says they’re a dead giveaway.”
“Thank goodness for watching American Movie Classics and reading great murder mysteries. Even when I’m home sick, I’ve never in my life seen a soap opera.”
“Anyway, that got him going.”
“Foolish question, Mercer, but did you read him his rights?”
“I told you how scared we all are of you, didn’t I? You think I’m gonna risk your wrath over a little thing like that?”
“And no noise about a lawyer?” I asked. “How’d we get so lucky?”
“If I were you, I’d get Bannion ready to roll right away. I don’t know how long this’ll last. Montvale knows the system better than we do—he’s probably been in court more times in his life than you have.”
Mercer returned to the holding cell to continue talking with the prisoner while I sent a detective down to the lobby to help Bob Bannion bring his video equipment upstairs and get ready for filming a statement. I called the Deputy Inspector of the Police Department’s Public Information Office and urged him not to allow Montvale to be photographed by the press on his way down to Central Booking, since we had other witnesses who had not yet had a chance to see an array, and his identification would be the key issue. The polite conversation became heated and, over my objections, it looked as if the inspector was headed to staging a press conference on the steps of the station house before I could even finish my work and get out of the way.
Bannion had cleared a place to set up in the sergeant’s office. Montvale would sit behind the desk, and a huge wall clock over his head would show the court and other viewers that the sequence of the questioning—if the Q and A went as long as I hoped it would—had not been tampered with. He would face Wallace and me in the two chairs, our backs to the camera, which Bob had moved to the far side of the desk. As usual, I would ask the questions and Wallace would cue me if there were specifics about a particular one of the cases or details provided by a victim that only the assailant could confirm.
We were ready to go. I called to Mercer to bring Montvale into the room, and watched as he opened the barred cell and walked the sullen suspect down the hall to where Bannion and I were moving around the desktop letter trays and clutter to keep everything out of arm’s reach. He took his seat and I took mine, three feet away from him, head to head, about to try to see how he described these hours of horror that so completely altered the lives of the women he’d encountered.
I repeated to Montvale what Mercer had told him about the video process and explained that I would begin the taping by telling him again, as Mercer had done hours ago, what his rights were. He leered as if he was looking forward to playing with the camera, and his smile broadened when Wallace leaned over and removed the handcuffs from his wrists.
“My name is Alexandra Cooper. I’m an assistant district attorney, and I am here with William Montvale, and with Detective Mercer Wallace of the Special Victims Squad, Thursday evening at”—I glanced up at the clock on the wall above Montvale—“nine fifty-five.” I was putting the necessary heading on the tape.
“Mr. Montvale, I am going to ask you some questions about events that occurred in this county on a series of dates over the past six weeks, but before I do, I want to advise you of your rights.”
This is the part of doing interrogations where I always hold my breath and rely on whatever inexplicable phenomenon has made confession work so well for centuries in the ecclesiastical settings. Ignore what I am about to tell you about your legal entitlements, Mr. Montvale, and spill your guts to me. Tell me what you did. Ever
y raw minute of it, so that you can pay for it for the rest of your miserable life.
“You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions, do you understand that?”
His head moved up and down, but he didn’t speak.
“Mr. Montvale,” I pushed him softly, “it would help if you spoke your answers aloud, instead of just nodding.”
“Yes, yes, Miss Cooper. I got it. Understood.”
“Anything that you do say tonight may be used against you later in court, do you understand that?”
“I certainly do.”
“You have the right to consult with an attorney before you answer our questions, and to have an attorney present during this questioning, as well as in the future. Do you understand that?”
“Loud and clear, Miss Cooper. I understand you.”
I was almost there. “If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you without cost, do you understand that?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“If you don’t have a lawyer available, Mr. Montvale, you have the right to remain silent until you’ve had the chance to speak with one. Understand?”
“Yeah.”
“Now that I have advised you of your rights, just as Detective Wallace did, are you willing to answer my questions?”
The leer was still there. “Try me. Let’s see what you want to know.”
A wise-ass. I’ve been there before. Stay cool and he’ll settle in. He’ll be fine, just don’t let him rattle you. “Mr. Montvale, let’s begin with this morning. I’m going to ask you some questions about what happened today, in an apartment at 246 West Sev—”
“Well, shit, Miss Cooper. I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t want to discuss that with you or your dumbass detective friend here.” Montvale’s voice began to escalate as he rose to his feet and began pounding on the desk. “I WANT A LAWYER. GET ME A FUCKING LAWYER.”
Alex Cooper 01 - Final Jeopardy Page 29