Deadfall

by Linda Fairstein

  She welcomed me warmly and offered me food, which I refused, before walking us across the lawn to one of the outbuildings. It was a two-bedroom cottage, which had been set up for my arrival. Both detectives—Kate Tinsley and Jimmy North—were waiting for me in the living room.

  I greeted the team, thanked Peterson for the ride and for carrying my luggage, and asked what my instructions were. I watched Sister Louise as she walked down the steps of my temporary shelter, turning to say good night, her face framed by her white coif under the dark head veil that blended in with the color of the sky.

  “Sleep, Alex,” the lieutenant said. “Nobody needs you in the morning. James Prescott’s been told you can’t come in. No more than that at the moment. This will be the first time you can catch up on your sleep all week.”

  “This is a psych ward, Loo,” I said. “If you can find someone on staff to dispense a sleeping pill, I might be able to take your advice. Otherwise, I’m fresh out of pleasant dreams.”

  “I’ll ask. There are a couple of docs in residence,” he said. “That phone next to your bed is for incoming only. Don’t you give the number out to anyone, okay? If you need someone or something, let Tinsley or North make the call. They’ll take turns sleeping—twelve hours on, twelve off. Something like that. You understand they’ll get you whatever you need.”

  “I do.”

  “You’re safe here, Alex. Give in to that.”

  “Thanks, Loo. I intend on trying.”

  I readied myself for bed, showering and changing into my pajamas and robe. There was no minibar or television, and no lock on my bedroom door, but there were no straitjackets or restraints either. Peterson had come back with a Lunesta. I took it from him, along with a bottle of water, swallowing it and climbing under the covers.

  I slept until eleven o’clock Friday morning, feeling halfway human when I awakened. North was asleep in one of the twin beds in the other room. Tinsley called the main house to ask for some coffee, cereal, and fruit to be sent over to me.

  I showered again and put on clean clothes, then ate my breakfast when it arrived.

  “What’s the news from headquarters?” I asked.

  “The explosions made all the papers—at least, online,” Tinsley said. “No mention of you, just Scully saying that the ME would be trying to identify the remains of the homeless woman.”

  “Would you mind calling Mike for me?”

  “Not at all.” She dialed the number and handed me the phone, but it went right to voice mail after one ring.

  I left Mike a message and gave back the phone.

  “How about a walk?” Tinsley said. “You’ll go stir-crazy if you don’t get out, and Sister Louise said there are pretty nice hiking trails.”

  It looked like a beautiful fall day, so I threw on a sweater and we left the cottage for a brisk walk in the woods.

  Prescott’s assistant was my first caller. He reached Tinsley while we were on a path that circled a small pond on the property. Since Scully wouldn’t give out my location, they decided to postpone my meeting until Monday morning, when they hoped to be able to get to me. I liked being lost in the woods, even if I did have keepers to monitor my activities.

  We were back in the cottage by two. The detectives switched duties—Tinsley going inside to rest—and I was glad for the chance to talk with Jimmy, whom I trusted and liked.

  It was after four when Mike called for the first time. The phone rang next to my bed, and I went in the room to answer it, closing the door behind me.

  “Hey,” he said. “All good?”

  “Too much time to think,” I said. “That’s never good when what I’m thinking about is murder.”

  “Missing me?”

  “Sister Louise does empathy a lot better than you do, Detective,” I said. “You calling because you woke up without me today?”

  “I’m calling to tell you what a good nose you have.”

  “For what?”

  “Snooping,” Mike said. “Instincts. Sense of smell.”

  “Better than a springer spaniel?” I asked, sitting down on the bed.

  “More like a grizzly, kid. They can sniff out an elk carcass that’s underwater from six miles away.”

  “What’d I do to earn your praise?”

  “For starters, you kept your cool last night on Sixty-Fourth Street, when my car got singed.”

  “Thanks.”

  “And for another, you may have hit the jackpot on your theory about Battaglia and the animals.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Sanitation found an abandoned bicycle this morning.”

  “That must happen ten times a day, Mike.”

  “A racer. An expensive ten-speed that looks brand-new,” he said. “On East Sixty-Fifth Street, just off Lexington Avenue, in an alleyway.”

  That was only around the corner and a few blocks from where the explosion had been.

  “Does the lab have the bike?” I asked.

  “Yeah. Going over it for prints and any kind of trace evidence. Clothing fibers, glass fragments, oil.”

  “Near Lex,” I said. “Interesting location. Have they checked video for the subway entrance at Lex and Sixty-Eighth after nine in the evening?”

  “The last twelve hours the tech guys, supplemented by an FBI unit, have been checking street surveillance videos enough to blind them. They were on it full-time since Monday night’s shooting. This latest focus is for the explosions,” Mike said. “But it’s not the Lexington Avenue line that may have captured our Molotov man.”

  “Somewhere else?”

  “Yes. There’s a video of a young guy stripping off a hoodie and trashing it in a can on Fifth Avenue,” Mike said. “Fifth and Sixty-Fifth Street, before he started to run.”

  “Run where?” I asked. “There’s a stop for the Q train, and I think the N, a block south of there.”

  “Across Fifth Avenue,” Mike said. “But this clown wasn’t headed for the subway. He ran right down the path that leads into the zoo. The Central Park Zoo.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  “How about if Kate and Jimmy drive me down to the city?” I said, pacing the small cottage bedroom.

  “Don’t need you yet,” Mike said. “I’ve been to the zoo.”

  “Did this guy actually get inside?” I asked. “I mean, it’s not open at night.”

  “Seems like you’re not the only one with keepers, Ms. Cooper. He works there.”

  “You’ve ID’d him? That’s fantastic.”

  “I have a name and a bogus address at the moment. I’ve only been on this for half an hour.”

  “Tell me,” I said. “Is he Asian?”

  “Profiling is bad for you, Coop. His name is Henry Dibaba,” Mike said. “His parents emigrated from Kenya thirty years ago. He’s twenty-two. No worries, he’s a citizen.”

  “What does he do at the zoo?” I asked.

  “Night shift. Henry works eight P.M. to eight A.M. He called in that he’d be late last night—which fits our time frame—and he was gone, as expected, by the time I got the heads-up a while ago about his premiere on the CCTV street scenes.”

  “You like him as our bomber?”

  “Too early to tell,” Mike said. “I couldn’t ID either of them. You think you can?”

  “No way. But there should be more video from other avenues in that grid, don’t you think?”

  “I do. These tech analysts are working as fast as they can.”

  “Last night,” I asked, “how many people were on staff at the Central Park Zoo?”

  “Just a handful. There are two guys who work security—one of them let Henry in at that gate when he arrived. The rest are animal keepers and feeders.”

  “Only two security at night?”

  “Don’t forget,” Mike said. “This little zoo is inside
Central Park. So you’ve got an entire police precinct—not a miniature substation like in the Bronx—surrounding it, protecting it. It’s not hundreds of acres of wilderness in the Bronx, like the big one is. That’s so much harder to patrol.”

  “Understood,” I said. “But both are run by the Wildlife Conservation Society?”

  “They are,” Mike said. “And the connection proved helpful to me.”

  “How?”

  “So Henry is a feeder. He’s in charge of midnight snacks for the snow leopards.”

  “Love those cats.”

  “But he’s not your kind of guy,” Mike said. “His passion is snakes, the bigger the better.”

  “Spare me,” I said.

  “Henry likes feeding rats to the blood pythons and tree boas. Keeps him busy at night. He’s a herpetologist at heart.”

  “Oh, Henry! How I hate snakes.”

  “So he used to live with his parents in Brooklyn,” Mike said. “Moved out last year to a girlfriend’s house, but she said he split from her a couple of months back. She said Henry took his favorite gopher snake with him when he left, so she’s pretty sure he’s done with her.”

  “The zoo doesn’t have a more current address?”

  “Nothing. Henry shows up for work on time—usually—and does the deed. Some people don’t mind handling live rats, and others can deal with slimy serpents. But very few folk like to do both. In fact, Henry used to work at the Bronx Zoo but requested a transfer to Central Park.”

  “Recently?” I asked.

  “Two months ago.”

  “Did you run a rap sheet?”

  “Yeah, the snake’s got a couple of assaults, Coop. One attempt at strangulation and—”

  “No games. Henry Dibaba, not the serpent,” I said. “I’ll pull a better escape from this place than Houdini unless you keep me in the loop.”

  “Henry’s got two collars,” Mike said. “Both in the Bronx. Low-level felony for a controlled substance, pleaded down to a misdemeanor and fine because it was his first arrest.”

  “What drug?”

  “Patience, kid. One PP is pulling up the records now.”

  “What’s his other arrest?”

  “Henry took one of his snakes for a ride on the C train,” Mike said. “Just a harassment of some kind. The lady sitting next to him fainted when the snake poked his head out of a Barnes and Noble book bag. But it’s opened a new vista for the US attorney.”

  “How?”

  “Prescott has subpoenaed a list of all the employees at Wildlife Conservation—both zoos and the society’s staff—and Animals Without Borders,” Mike said. “We’ll be running record checks on everyone. Amazing what the feds can do that we can’t. They’re also going to put all the names into passport control. See who’s been traveling where. Even if we can only find some of the low-level runners this way, they can eventually lead us to the head of the enterprise.”

  “That’s a needle in quite a big haystack,” I said. “People like Deirdre Wright and Stuart Liebman—a lot of the other employees, too—have to go abroad.”

  “No harm in knowing who’s dancing with the animals, and who shouldn’t be.”

  I had walked back and forth so many times I was leaving footprints in the carpet.

  “Why can’t you come up here for dinner, Mike?” I asked, feeling restless and removed from my routine.

  “I’m short one department car, Coop, until the lieutenant replaces it. Remember that?”

  “Mine’s in the garage.”

  “Against the rules. You just hunker down and listen to Kate and Jimmy,” Mike said. “I’ll call you later.”

  At five o’clock, Sister Louise came over with a man she introduced as a staff physician. He took my blood pressure, asked me five innocuous questions about my mental health, offered to listen to me if I wanted to vent, and doled out a single sleeping pill to get me through the night.

  As in most institutions, the dinner plan included an early meal. Three of the nuns walked over with trays—some unidentifiable fish covered in a thick white sauce, an underdone baked potato, and a soft roll with margarine on the side. I probably wasn’t the only patient on a bland diet—I think that’s all the kitchen had in its repertoire.

  Jimmy and Kate were both hanging out with me for the evening, doing all they could to pretend it was not an assignment. One of them occasionally went outside to check the perimeter of the building and walk down the main driveway, following the six-o’clock curfew, to make sure there were no unwelcome visitors making their way onto the property.

  The cottage was way too small for three of us to have a comfortable evening with no TV to divert us. I made as much small talk as I could and was grateful that Vickee had packed a volume of Conan Doyle stories that she found next to my bed. There was nothing like Holmes to get me out of a funk.

  Mike called at ten. He was in Queens, having dinner with Vickee and Mercer. I envied him the normalcy of life in the home of our dearest friends. I didn’t know the Final Jeopardy! question he answered for me—no surprise—since the category was physics. I said good night to him, then to the detectives, before washing up and getting in bed to read.

  I took my pill—my sleeping draught, as Conan Doyle would have it—and before Watson could engage me in the tale of the creeping man, I fell asleep.

  “Alex?”

  I heard my name and sat up in bed, glad that I had left a light on in the bathroom. The small clock next to my bed showed that it was 2:53 A.M.

  “Sorry,” Kate Tinsley said. “I knocked but you didn’t hear me.”

  “What is it?” The drug had worked. My sense of alarm had been dulled but I was unnerved enough by Kate’s voice to try to shake off the sleep.

  “It’s James Prescott, Alex,” Tinsley said. “Put on your robe and come into the living room.”

  “He’s called?”

  “No, Alex. He’s here.”

  I reached for the phone next to my bed. I was frightened by this unexpected nocturnal visit from the US attorney, and I wanted to talk to Mike.

  “Prescott’s not on the phone, Alex. He’s right here.”

  “I heard that,” I said, snapping at her, remembering that my landline didn’t make outgoing calls. “I’d like to use your phone.”

  She was next to my bed, holding out my robe. “I’m afraid you’ll have to wait.”

  I slipped it on and tied the belt, fumbling with it because my hands were shaking. “What’s wrong? What’s going on?”

  “I have no idea,” Tinsley said.

  I walked into the living room. James Prescott was flanked by two men—the agents Bart Fisher and Tom Frist, whom I had met in his office the first day. They were each dressed in jeans and outdoor jackets—country gentlemen ready for a hike in the woods.

  “I’m sorry to wake you, Alex, but it’s all good.”

  I cocked my head and looked at him. Good for whom? I wondered.

  “It’s the middle of the night,” I said. “You should have called.”

  “I texted Kate. I told her to let you sleep until we arrived,” Prescott said. “You gave us a good lead, whether you realized it or not.”

  Kate Tinsley was standing in the doorway to my bedroom, and Jimmy North in the doorway to the second bedroom. Prescott and crew were between me and the cottage door. I felt as though the room was closing in on me.

  I didn’t remember giving Prescott any lead.

  “I’ll bite.”

  “It was your suggestion to get Amy Battaglia’s phone, to look for texts,” Prescott said. “Mike passed along the word that the DA often used her phone when he was at home, picked it up if it was close by.”

  I felt queasy. I had put them into the private space of the DA’s wife, giving her even more reason to hate me.

  “What’s good about that?” I asked.r />
  “Battaglia’s text to Lily—your school friend—was there, like you thought.”

  “Any mention of me?” I asked, swallowing hard.

  “Yes. Lily replied to Battaglia,” Prescott said. “She told him that you advised her not to meet with him.”

  It was no wonder, then, that Battaglia’s first two phone messages to me had an urgency to them. They were probably motivated by Lily’s mention of me in her text. That urgency had turned to anger by the last call, when the news clip placed me at the Met—not only with Lily, but with George Kwan. The combination of players must have caused the DA to go ballistic.

  “The more important thing is that we’ve found Diana,” Prescott said. “The guys at TARU going over the phone records with Mrs. B’s luds and muds identified Diana.”

  “That’s amazing.” I said, trying to shake off the effects of the sleeping pill. “Who is she?”

  “Goddess of the hunt,” he said.

  “I guessed that much myself,” I said, picking up the collar of my robe and holding it tightly against my chest. “I hope you can do better.”

  “That’s the ‘who’ part of it,” Prescott said. “Diana’s also the name of a private club—like Saint Hubertus. A billionaire boys’ club for big-game hunters.”

  “Paul Battaglia?” I asked.

  “Amy called him two weekends ago, while he was holed up with his buddies at a game preserve. The number of the place shows up on her outgoing calls four times in three days. All she knows about it is that he went out there to meet with someone about a case.”

  James Prescott had my complete attention.

  “Battaglia and four others, as well as their host, were on the ranch together,” Prescott said. “It didn’t make the national news because the dead man wasn’t a Supreme Court justice, so the local paper just notes that one of them perished in a hunting accident.”

  “Six people on a weekend trip, and one died?” I said.

  “Yes, he was shot in the chest—friendly fire—by one of his companions,” Prescott said.

  “The local sheriff must have deemed it an accident,” I said, noting the irony of that fact, like the Scalia death. “Private preserve of the rich and famous, right? Kind of a Dick Cheney moment, planting birdshot in the aorta of a crony.”