“It seems like I took you away from where you wanted to go with me this morning,” I said. “I’m happy to carry on.”
“Alexandra, have you got that new phone number for me yet?” Prescott asked.
“I’m enjoying the radio silence. It’s good for my mental health.”
“Being available to me would be even better for you.”
Prescott tossed the Chapman folder to the side of his desk and picked up the stack of photographs again.
“Do you believe in coincidence, Alexandra?” he asked, eyeing me like the enemy.
“No, I don’t.”
“Neither do I,” he said. “I’ve got to hand it to you. Somehow, you got out ahead of me on this one.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“George Kwan,” he said, sifting through the photographs to pull one out from the bottom of the pile. “He was on my list of things—of people—to talk to you about today, and yet here you go, bringing up his name before I can get the first question in.”
“Now, that’s really uncanny,” I said.
Prescott slapped the photograph—the same one Vickee had shown us last night—in front of me on his desk and turned it around so it faced me.
“I understand that’s you in some kind of disguise, is it not?”
“An outfit, James. Not a disguise. A vintage dress designed by the man being honored at the Met gala.”
“You’ve seen the photograph already, haven’t you?” he asked.
“Last night, yes,” I said. “Commissioner Scully sent me a set of the shots that were downloaded from the television feed.”
“That wasn’t coincidence, either,” he said. “More like convenience, wasn’t it?”
“Scully’s not a ‘gotcha’ kind of guy, James. The video was already public record,” I said. “He had a pretty good idea that the image was familiar to me.”
“So you’re telling me between Monday night of the murder and last evening, you’d already seen this image?” Prescott asked, pushing the full-color image closer to me. “Do me the favor of looking at the picture, Alexandra, and not at my forehead.”
I held up the photograph. “I lived that moment, James. I was there, can’t you tell?”
“Fetching, weren’t you?” he said, with arrogant sneer. “And that’s Anna Wintour?”
“Sure thing.”
“And obviously—now that you’ve just refreshed my recollection of what you claim to have told Detective Stern—you know the man seated next to her, too.”
I ignored his use of the word “claim.”
“I don’t know him, James,” I said. “I’d met him once before Monday night.”
“George Kwan.”
“Exactly.”
“And you stopped to talk to him,” Prescott said.
“It certainly looks like I did,” I said.
“What did you say?” The US attorney asked.
“To Kwan? Nothing at all.”
“This is a photograph, Alexandra. It doesn’t lie.”
I had stayed up most of the night, since leaving Patroon, struggling to recall what had actually happened in this moment, captured on film.
“It’s the money shot in this case,” Prescott said. “It’s what propelled Paul Battaglia out of his lair to come at you.”
“Then he was a fool to put himself at risk over something that never happened.”
“Something else, perhaps, that you neglected to tell Jaxon Stern?”
I stood up and put the photograph between us on James Prescott’s desk.
“Do you know how I described to Vickee Eaton where Ms. Wintour was sitting?” I asked. “I told her it was on the fifty-yard line. Best seat in the house, front row and right in the middle of the runway.”
“Obviously,” he said.
“Where was the photographer who shot the roll of tape standing, do you think, from looking at this shot?”
“I’d have to call it the end zone,” Prescott said, “using your lingo. Right between the goalposts.”
“Fair to say he was at an angle from the prime seats, right? You get Wintour and Kwan in profile, and you get me almost face-forward into the camera, because I was leaning over, looking that way, between the uprights,” I said. “That’s how Battaglia made me—that’s the moment he recognized my face.”
“So now tell me what it is you muttered to Kwan,” Prescott said, not giving me an inch.
“You think I muttered? Or do you think I asked him what Battaglia was doing at his house the other day?” I said. “Really, what are the bets, James? Who’s got the over-under that I was luring Paul Battaglia out to a meet by whispering in George Kwan’s ear?”
Prescott just stared.
“Not to prove that Mike Chapman is ten times the investigator Jaxon Stern pretends to be,” I said, “but Mike had the idea to take me down to One PP this morning, on our way here.”
One Police Plaza—NYPD headquarters—was adjacent to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District.
“We spent thirty-six minutes going through the tapes that aired on the local news channels Monday night,” I said. “And lucky for me, one of the cameramen actually set up directly across the way from Ms. Wintour—behind the last row of seats on the opposite side’s fifty-yard line. One photographer—that’s all it takes—was more interested in Wintour’s reaction to the runway show than in the models vamping on the catwalk.”
Prescott had picked up a yellow pencil and was holding it with both hands.
“Would you like to know what that tape showed, Skeeter? Because it seems your team stopped searching after they found the one shot they thought nails me as a conspirator,” I said. “Because contrary to this optical illusion you’re banking on to skewer me, I never had the reason or the opportunity to speak with Mr. Kwan.”
“What then?”
“I was all over the Savage investigation, because the dead man’s daughter, Lily, grew up with me,” I said. “She called me when his body was found. When everyone else—Battaglia included—believed Savage was a suicide. When everyone else was ready to shut the case down and bury the man without an autopsy.”
“So Lone Ranger of you, Alexandra,” Prescott said. “Along with Tonto, of course, always faithful to you.”
I reached for my iPad and opened the photograph app. “Here’s a screenshot I took just an hour ago,” I said. “It’s a better angle, don’t you think?”
I handed the device to Prescott, who put his thumb and forefinger on the photo to enlarge it.
“Can you see all the players?” I asked.
He wouldn’t answer. He just shifted the image from larger to smaller and back again.
“That guy sitting next to George Kwan, on his other side—the one who looks like Oddjob,” I said. The muscled Asian man with the stone-faced expression was a body double for a character in a Bond movie. “The one that has ‘killer’ written all over him. He’s one of Kwan’s bodyguards, but you couldn’t see him in the photos you were working from, because of the angle.”
“Next to him is my childhood swim-team pal,” I said. “Wolf Savage’s daughter, Lily. You can’t see her in your set of photographs, can you? She just moved into that seat beyond Oddjob from the back row, seconds before I went by.”
“You’re telling me that’s the person you leaned in to talk to?” Prescott said, his voice lowered a notch. He seemed almost disappointed by the visual proof that I wasn’t in cahoots with Kwan. “This woman? This—this Lily? You actually remember that encounter, despite your—shall we call it your state of shock?”
“Frankly, James, I didn’t remember at all until I saw the tape at headquarters this morning. I was blank on the whole thing—alcohol, shock, exhaustion—that part of the evening was all a total blank to me,” I said. “Then this popped up on the screen th
is morning. Full-frontal image, with no dead angles to skew the view.”
“You were talking to Lily,” Prescott said, all hostility drained from his voice. “Why?”
“She was the only person in that row I knew, James. Nothing else makes sense. She had talked to me backstage and started to ask me, earlier in the night, if I thought we were close to catching her father’s killers.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I didn’t answer her. I cut her off, actually, because there were too many people around to bring up that subject, and I was trying to keep a very low profile,” I said. “Lily was standing up, looking for her husband, when she saw me walking by, as this photo shows. She waved—she waved repeatedly to me—and so I stopped.”
“She asked you something, didn’t she?” Prescott said.
I shook my head. “Lily told me something,” I said. “She told me that the DA—that Battaglia—had just texted her. That he told her he wanted her to come to his office the next day.”
“Did you answer her?” he asked.
I didn’t speak to Prescott. I took the photograph of Lily and me and held it up in front of his face.
“What did you say to her, Alexandra?”
“Go to the videotape, James. You can read my lips,” I said. “You can read my lips for yourself, on the outtakes from Channel 5.”
Prescott put down the pencil and banged his clenched fist on the desk. “What the hell did you tell your friend Lily about Battaglia’s invitation?”
“‘Don’t go,’ is what I said to her. Just two words, behind George Kwan’s back. ‘Don’t go.’”
TWENTY-THREE
“When does he want you back?” Mike asked.
We had grabbed lunch in the federal courthouse cafeteria and were finishing up, shortly after one P.M.
“Tomorrow afternoon,” I said. “We’ll be going over my phone records, emails, and texts, if you want to talk about painful.”
“Too much gossip with your buddies,” Mike said.
“That’s only because I haven’t had any business to discuss while I was on leave,” I said, scraping my tray and following Mike out the door. “No worries. It’s not like I’ve been talking about the size of your—”
“My appetite?” he said, reaching back to tousle my hair as he interrupted me. “Talk all you want. Any surprises you should be prepared for? You or I, that is?”
“No old lovers, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “Joan’s latest manuscript, Nina’s kid, manicures and pedicures, hair color. It’ll sound like a broken record.”
“You were doing plenty of e-chatting and texting about the Wolf Savage investigation,” Mike said. “That will give them some fodder.”
“I went rogue and you came along with me,” I said. “Old news.”
“They must have all of Battaglia’s communications by now, too,” Mike said. “They’ll wonder why the text to Lily didn’t show up as outgoing on his phone. They must have run all of Monday’s numbers on his devices by now.”
“When he was communicating from home,” I said, “he often used his wife’s phone. No point to that, really, but whichever device was closer to where he was sitting. I’d better tell Prescott to get Amy’s records, too, or he’ll challenge me about that text.”
“Lily can back you up.”
“Yeah. That’s true.” I hadn’t heard from Lily since the takedown of her father’s killers at the Met. But then, without a phone, it was hard to know whether she or anyone else was trying to call me.
“Did you tell Prescott we’re going to the Bronx Zoo now?” Mike asked.
“I didn’t see the need. He’s been briefed on everything we know, including the possibility that Battaglia was at the hunting preserve the night Justice Scalia died, but he never went near that subject with me.”
“Okay.”
“Besides that,” I said, “James is still refusing to take Jaxon Stern off the case. He ended by telling me that he thinks the solution to this whole thing—Battaglia’s murder—is within my grasp, if I can just clear all the emotion out of my head.”
“What kind of bullshit is that?” Mike asked. “He thinks you’re holding something out on him?”
“Must be, and he’s also convinced I could read Battaglia because I knew him so well,” I said. “Surely I can sort out why he was coming to talk to me with such urgency.”
“In that case, you need to be thinking how to solve this 24/7, just like the man told you to do,” Mike said.
“What if Battaglia’s first calls to me were about Lily?” I asked. “Maybe when she responded to his invitation to come to the office, she told him I was there with her at the Met and told her to say no?”
“Would she have done that?”
“Who knows?” I said. “It would have made the old guy really mad if she did.”
“What now?”
“Weren’t we going back to the Bronx this afternoon? For that tour at the zoo?”
“The zoological park,” Mike said. “You still think there’s some link there to Battaglia’s death?”
“We’ve got nothing but our guts to go on,” I said. “And I had such a good time yesterday. So humor me, will you?”
“Every now and then you get a good hunch, kid. Mercer’s at the squad, having a quiet day,” Mike said, handing me his phone. “He’ll shoot across the bridge and meet us there if you give him a call.”
I reached Mercer as we got in the car and headed to the FDR to drive uptown and cross over into the Bronx. I called Deirdre Wright and asked if she could set us up with a guide in half an hour. The more exotic, the more endangered, the more valuable the animal—those were the ones we wanted to see.
“How’s your head?” Mike asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
“By the time I was finished this morning, I felt like it was going to split in half.”
“You made me a promise, Coop, just days before the murder,” he said. “You told me you were ready to start going to talk to Dr. Ricky.”
“I know I did.” I slinked down in the car seat and rested my head against the window. “I saw her twice, but I didn’t feel any better at the end of the session.”
When I was kidnapped, the chief of detectives made Mike sit down with a shrink—a brilliant psychiatrist whose job it was to get inside his brain to help the commissioner and the hostage negotiation squad try to assess how I might react to the stresses of my abduction. Mike kicked and screamed at the idea of it, but came away with boundless respect for Ricky Friedman and urged me to see her to try to deal with the flashbacks from my kidnapping.
“Twice?” Mike said. “You didn’t even give her the chance to get through your thick skull. She’s not about making you feel better. It’s not like an appointment at a day spa.”
“Dr. Ricky was pushing me too hard,” I said. “Too fast.”
“Do you want me to call her and see if she’ll squeeze you in?” he asked.
“I was almost ready to do that again myself,” I said.
This was a punishing position for me to be in: a witness to the assassination of a professional mentor and good friend of a dozen years, as well as a survivor of an abduction that had taken five days—and countless sleepless nights—out of my life. I was finding ways to cope with the latter—none of them good for me—but the former still registered as shattering.
“I feel a ‘but’ coming on,” Mike said.
“A big ‘but,’” I said. “James doesn’t want me getting what he calls brain-teased by a shrink. He doesn’t want my recollections—such as they are—to be tinkered with by analysis and psychobabble. He figures I’ll eventually be the centerpiece of a trial, and he wants my mind in pristine condition.”
“Then he should have put your head in a bubble when you were twelve years old,” Mike said. “You’ve seen as much bad shit as anyone I
know.”
“He’s counting on that,” I said. “He wants to control me, and I get that. He’s giving me enough rope to either lead him and the task force in the right direction, or better still, to hang myself in the process.”
“I don’t give a damn what he wants,” Mike said. “I’m talking about what you need.”
I reached over and took Mike’s right hand off the steering wheel. “I’ve got that.”
“All the more reason you need a good shrink, kid,” he said, withdrawing his hand from mine.
Mercer was waiting for us in the parking lot when we reached the Bronx Zoo. He walked to the car and opened my door. “Good afternoon to you both. Who showed up today, James Prescott or his Skeeter alter ego?”
“Both were in the house,” I said, stepping out. “I am so grateful to Vickee—to the commissioner—for sending over the photographs, and to Mike for taking me to view all the tapes this morning. What’s happening at the SVU?”
“Low numbers, Alex. Crime stats continue to stay down,” he said. “One date rape after an office party at an ad firm, but the vic went right to Catherine. Skipped the 911 call completely. I’m cool to hang with you two unless she calls me in.”
“Good.”
“The whole team at One PP thinks Prescott’s got something in his mind that he’s not willing to let them in on,” Mercer said. “Some far-ranging international target that Battaglia must have tried to cross him up on.”
“Dancing in the dark,” Mike said. “DA gets assassinated and his archrival can’t bring himself to get in the sandbox and play nice with everyone else.”
“Vickee did have this, though,” Mercer said, reaching into his jacket pocket and coming out with a Xerox copy of an old newspaper clipping. “Seems this William Hornaday fellow—the taxidermist who was the zoo’s first director?”
“Yes,” I said, as we walked toward Astor Court on our way to the Development Office, “the guy Deirdre talked about yesterday.”
“He put Vickee’s great-grandmother out of business,” Mercer said, handing me the paper.
The 1916 New York Tribune didn’t have quite the headline writers that the Post can brag about, but it wasn’t bad for an old-time news desk: HARLEM HATTERY CLOSED BY HORNADAY.
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