Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  “No,” Mike said. “I tried to get in the house, but his security guards wouldn’t let me. So I got back into the car with Coop.”

  “You couldn’t get past security either?” Vickee asked, turning to me.

  “I’m the one who wasn’t supposed to be there,” I said, giving her a sheepish grin. “And lucky for me I didn’t try to take on the guards when Mike was turned away, because the person who emerged from the town house was none other than Paul Battaglia.”

  Vickee put down her fork. “Strange bedfellows, especially in the middle of the Savage homicide investigation.”

  “You bet,” I said.

  “And Battaglia never told you or Mike about his relationship to Kwan,” she asked her husband, “even though he knew you were working the case?”

  “Not a word,” Mercer said.

  “So what if the guy—what if Kwan Enterprises is into some other kind of illegal operation?” Mike said.

  “Like what?” I asked. “What made you think of that today, besides the word-association stuff, at the zoo—the zoological park—of all places?”

  “What Deirdre said about traditional medicine and how many of the Asians don’t even care about killing their own endangered species to get the ingredients,” Mike said. “I can’t put my finger on it, but the late district attorney, if it’s true he was at the hunting preserve where Scalia died, and the ghostlike Mr. Kwan, who doesn’t put any stock in the lives of the humans who work for him, seem out of place in the world of animal conservation.”

  “Did you bring any of that up to Kwan tonight?” Vickee asked. “Did he react to it?”

  “I couldn’t read him,” Mike said, shaking his head back and forth. “He’s totally without emotion on the surface. Oozes confidence, but he didn’t convince me that anything he said—about his relationship with Battaglia or his interest in wildlife—was sincere.”

  Vickee turned her head to me. “How about your impression?”

  “Pretty much the same,” I said. “Kwan managed to express how important the conservation issue is, but both he and the DA really seem like misfits in that world,” I said, “especially if you get confirmation on Battaglia and the Saint Hubertus story.”

  “I would have pressed him more on the animal stuff,” Mike said, “but I didn’t want to make my interest too obvious, since he wasn’t giving us a minute more. He practically slammed the door in Coop’s face as it was.”

  “What does tomorrow look like?” Vickee asked.

  “I start the day with Prescott,” I said.

  “I’m going to take you home so you can get your ducks in a row for that one,” Mike said, ordering a round of decafs for the table. “I’ll go down to his office with you.”

  “He’s not going to let you in, Mike. He’ll make you sit and wait downstairs again.”

  “You did that to me for ten years, kid. I can take a few hours more.”

  “How about you?” Vickee asked Mercer.

  “I’ll go to the squad for the morning. Make an appearance. See if anything needs doing.”

  “I think we take Deirdre Wright up on her offer to have someone on staff give us a tour of the entire park tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “Tell us about the animals—where they come from and how they live. Which ones are endangered and which ones interest smugglers.”

  “You’re back into the idea of smuggling, then?” Vickee said.

  “That doesn’t mean it’s the Kwans,” I said. “But the rhino horns and other contraband certainly don’t get here legally. Someone has to have the means to transport them to this country.”

  “That zoo is still two hundred sixty acres of wilderness in the middle of a big city,” Mike said. “If it’s part of the backdrop for the death of the district attorney, then we have to figure out why.”

  TWENTY

  “I won’t answer another question with Detective Stern in the room,” I said.

  James Prescott was standing face-to-face with me. Jaxon Stern was sitting near the door. It was nine thirty Thursday morning, and I wasn’t in the mood to be intimidated.

  “We’re a team, Alex,” Prescott said. “What you tell me, you tell all of us.”

  “Let me repeat, in case you didn’t understand me. Detective Stern leaves the room—maybe he can keep Mike Chapman company downstairs in the library—or I leave the room.”

  “I remember that streak from your younger days,” Prescott said. “Irascible, some called it. Others had stronger words, with less pleasant connotations.”

  “Fortunately, it’s part of my nature that hasn’t changed over the years. It’s a trait I practice and polish all the time, because it’s served me so well in the face of adversity,” I said. “Stern goes or I go.”

  “Detective Stern is here because I need him to run your piece of the case. You’re here,” Prescott said, turning to his desk and reaching for a piece of paper, “because I had a chance to open this matter before the grand jury yesterday and I came out with a subpoena for your appearance to testify before them.”

  I took the paper from him. A prosecutor doesn’t need a perp in custody to start a grand jury proceeding. He just needs evidence of the commission of a crime, and the fact that he wants to dig further to investigate it. Prescott certainly had that.

  “Looks like I have to come back in a week,” I said, looking at the date on the document. “That works just fine for me.”

  I turned to leave the room.

  “You know I can’t put you in cold, Alex,” Prescott said. “You know I’ve got to prepare you beforehand. I have to know what you’re going to say. That’s what today is for—and the next several days.”

  “You’ll have to take your chances on this one,” I said. “You’ll just have to trust me, the way you used to do.”

  “You know I trust you.”

  “Jaxon goes.”

  Stern got to his feet when I used his first name.

  I turned to look at him. “James and I have been close for so long that I just feel it’s time for you and I to be on a first-name basis, too—much as you don’t like that.”

  “Suit yourself,” Stern said.

  “After all, you’re so far up and inside all my business—or haven’t you told that to the US attorney yet?” I asked.

  Stern didn’t flinch.

  “You never met each other until the night before last,” Prescott said. “You don’t know each other. I went to great lengths to find a homicide detective who hadn’t worked with you, Alex, so we don’t get burned by a defense attorney once we have a case to mount. We’re all in your business now, and we’ve got every right to be.”

  “I wouldn’t care if Jaxon had just been tough on me the other night because he imagined I’d be uncooperative before he actually met me or he tagged me as a coconspirator in Battaglia’s assassination,” I said. “But that isn’t the case.”

  “That’s his style,” Prescott said.

  “Tell him, Jaxon,” I said.

  “We’ve never met,” Detective Stern said.

  “Did you know I prosecuted the detective’s brother-in-law?” I asked Prescott. “Convicted his ass of rape in the first degree—for drugging and molesting a Columbia grad student?”

  Prescott looked quizzically at Stern, who was stone-faced.

  “Jaxon came to the arraignment himself and posted bail, ’cause the perp used every ounce of the influence he counted on his brother-in-law to bring to bear, once the cuffs were tightened around his wrists.”

  The detective was looking right through me.

  “Jaxon asked the SVU detectives to charge the case as a misdemeanor so his brother-in-law could make bail, and when they refused to do that, he had his sister call in anonymous complaints against them to the CCRB.”

  “Any of this true?” Prescott asked the detective.

  “Your team
leader here was almost flopped to a foot patrol in Bed-Stuy for trying to pull strings and get the case fixed, instead of upgraded to the Homicide Squad,” I said. “Somebody in the chain of command was watching out for him. He tends to step out of line, James.”

  “My sister never made any such calls,” Stern said.

  I didn’t know at the time who had made them, but I bet we could prove it now, with phone records and email traces.

  “But your brother-in-law was the prisoner?” Prescott asked. “It actually was one of Alexandra’s cases?”

  “I had no idea who the prosecutor was, sir,” Stern said. “I only went to the arraignment because my sister begged me to. I did it for her, sir, and for her kids. But I never showed up at any trial.”

  “You can hold to your affirmative action stance, James,” I said, “or you can excuse the detective and I’ll answer your questions, but Jaxon Stern and I are not going to fly in the same airspace any longer.”

  I could see James Prescott weighing his political future. I could count the seconds as he looked at each of us.

  “Why don’t you excuse yourself for a while, Detective?” Prescott said to Jaxon Stern. “I’d like to talk reason to Alexandra so we can move on and solve this damn case.”

  Prescott was in my corner on this one, maybe thinking I still had a future if I came out of this investigation unscathed. I guessed the news that I would not be on the governor’s short list to be the interim DA hadn’t yet reached the street.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Thanks, James,” I said. “You can’t begin to imagine how it unhinged me when I put Stern together with the case I handled last year. It made his animosity toward me crystal clear.”

  Prescott was seated at his desk. He stood a Redweld on its side and lifted the flap. The label facing me had my name on it, typed in all caps. It was already a pretty thick folder.

  “I heard he was tough, but I don’t believe there was any conflict involved,” Prescott said. “It just seems to be the man’s style.”

  “You’re not taking him off the case, after what I just told you?”

  “Try to remember you’re not in charge, Alexandra.”

  “I’m fine with that. You feds have a way of screwing up all on your own,” I said, keeping my composure. “We run a much cleaner operation. If any cop dared to undermine a case one of my guys was working on—”

  “I heard you the first time,” Prescott said. “We have a lot of work to do before you testify and I’d like to get started.”

  “Is there anything new you’d like to tell me about?” I asked.

  “Nothing breaking our way yet,” he said, removing a stack of photographs from the folder and placing it in front of him.

  It wasn’t hard to guess what the pictures were. I settled back in my chair.

  “That’s bound to change, sooner rather than later,” I said.

  “I did get some material from Commissioner Scully yesterday afternoon that I’d like to start with,” he said.

  They were the still shots from the fashion show Monday evening—the ones Vickee had brought to dinner last night. Everyone involved—including me—was trying to figure why Battaglia made a mad dash to the museum, and they were hoping a replay would offer the missing clue.

  I had wanted Jaxon Stern off my ass for more than one reason. This was my opportunity to set the record straight.

  “Before you do that,” I said, “I’ve been in such a—well, such a state of confusion—and I was so crushed by Stern’s manner the other night—that I’m not sure I got all the facts out in order.”

  “Really? I think of you as so compulsive about the way you organize yourself.”

  “I’m sure he got it all down,” I said, “but you have to understand the trauma to me of witnessing Paul Battaglia’s death, of having him collapse onto me—and I’m not sure Stern had an ounce of the empathy the situation required.”

  Prescott listened without responding.

  “I just want to be sure it’s all clear,” I said. “The questioning started just a couple of hours after the murder.”

  “What do you think Stern missed?” Prescott asked.

  “You can appreciate that I didn’t know where he was coming from when he started the interview with such antagonism,” I said.

  “Go on.”

  “I know I was running on fumes then. You must realize that, don’t you?”

  “Give me an example, Alexandra.”

  “I’m sort of fuzzy on whether or not I talked about the day Battaglia showed up at my apartment,” I said, wearing my most earnest expression. “He actually crossed paths with me on the street, on my way home.”

  “We have that,” Prescott said. “I’ll get back to it when I reach that point in the prep.”

  “Good,” I said. “Then I wasn’t as addled as I feared.”

  “Let’s get on with it.”

  “I must have talked about the Reverend Hal, didn’t I? Hal Shipley, and his curious influence on Battaglia?” I asked. “I mean, I’d been keeping that pretty close to the vest, which is the way the DA wanted me to play it—”

  “You told Stern and Tinsley about Shipley,” Prescott said, interrupting me. “When I’m ready for more detail on that issue, I’ll come back to it.”

  “Sure. I understand.”

  I needed to put George Kwan’s name on the table before Prescott did. I had to have a reason for not disclosing his meeting with Paul Battaglia to Detective Stern when he had me jumping all over the place at the morgue interrogation.

  “I guess they made notes of my last sighting of the district attorney, too,” I said.

  Prescott flipped the pages of notes that must have been the first night’s interview of me by Stern.

  “Near your apartment,” he said, nodding as he looked for the reference.

  “No, no. Those were two separate occasions,” I said, as evenly as I could, shaking a finger at him.

  Prescott studied what I assumed were the lines Stern had written when he questioned me.

  “Explain that,” he said.

  “Like I told the detectives, I was walking down East Seventieth Street, coming from the Met, I think, when I heard Battaglia’s bodyguard—”

  “Not that one,” he said. He was getting short with me. “There was a later time?”

  “Yes, like I told the detectives, a day or so after that, Mike Chapman and I were on our way to interview a witness in the Wolf Savage case,” I said.

  Prescott was flipping the pages back and forth, looking for this notation—in vain.

  “Which witness?” he asked.

  “A man named Kwan. George Kwan.”

  Prescott wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of looking up, but he stopped flipping pages. I couldn’t tell whether he would challenge my recollections.

  “You recognize his name?” I asked.

  “Go on, Alexandra. Just go on.”

  “We had met Kwan at the Savage offices and wanted to ask him some more questions—apart from the family. So Mike and I went to the town house, on East Seventy-Eighth Street, I think it was.”

  Now I knew he was bluffing, pretending to be following along with me on Stern’s notes by running his forefinger across the page.

  “Yes?” he asked. “And you got in?”

  “No, no. It’s just like I told Stern and Tinsley,” I said, with a wan smile. “At least I’m pretty sure I did.”

  An omission in Stern’s notes didn’t trouble me. I had proven his reason to trash me by citing the case I had tried, and Prescott had signed on to that.

  Tinsley was another matter. But she hadn’t taken notes. She had simply observed our interplay, so her memory of the three A.M. interrogation was as fallible as my own.

  “The security guard refused to admit Mike to Kwan’s home. His home is the enterprise
office too,” I said. “But it’s not this guy Kwan who’s important, of course. The issue was about Paul. It was the last time I saw Paul.”

  “When?” Prescott asked, tipping his empty hand by looking up at me. “What was? On the street near your home?”

  “No,” I said. “Like I told them the other night, Mike got back into his car and we were pulling out of the block, a bit frustrated that we hadn’t gotten a chance to get in and meet with Mr. Kwan.”

  “And?”

  “I looked up and saw one of the security men step out, so I told Mike to stop the car, figuring we might be able to get inside,” I said. “But that’s when the district attorney came through the front door. The last time I saw Paul Battaglia—before he was shot—he was leaving the home of a man named George Kwan.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  “You got out of the car to talk to Battaglia, I assume,” Prescott said.

  He was scrambling to make sense of this piece of news, which was under his nose for the first time. I felt a huge sense of relief having unpacked the heavy piece of baggage—a link between Kwan and the dead DA—and doing so before it was Prescott who brought up the name George Kwan.

  “Actually, Mike had already turned the corner, and that gave me a second to catch myself from jumping out to approach Paul, since he was already urging me to keep out of the case.”

  Prescott looked as though he was trying to see through a very dark cloud that had just descended in front of his face.

  “This factoid isn’t in the notes, Alexandra,” he said.

  “It’s not a factoid,” I said. “It’s a fact. It happened. You can ask Mike about it too.”

  Prescott looked for another Redweld labeled CHAPMAN.

  “I mean, that’s assuming Stern asked him that question about having seen Battaglia, James. After all, Stern’s just out of Internal Affairs. He’s not exactly a crack homicide detective, but that’s the choice you made when you put him on this case.”

  He rifled through it, but it was much thinner than my folder—and of course, no one had any reason to ask Mike about the last time he saw the DA.