The Bone Vault

by Linda Fairstein

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “Dinner, Coop. For four.”

  “You’re on.”

  “Tonight’s Final Jeopardy! answer is: William Shatner starred in this movie, filmed completely in the universal language Esperanto.”

  The nauseatingly cheerful music bounced along in the background as two of the three puzzled contestants stared blankly at the board. The only one of them who ventured a guess at a title was wrong, and I told Chapman that I didn’t have the faintest idea. Before Trebek read the studio audience the question, Chapman tweaked the back of my neck. “And a good bottle of wine with that dinner, too. Right, blondie?”

  I laughed and swatted his hand away. “Anything you say. Just let go of me.”

  “What isIncubus? Nineteen sixty-five. A man possessed by demon spirits. Only Shatner outing worse than that one isBig Bad Mama, ” he said, shutting off the TV and walking out of the office, “where you actually get to see his pubic hair in one of the scenes. Chow time.”

  “And you make it so appetizing, too.”

  Fenton had our drinks ready at the bar, where Mercer had greeted Nina as they were waiting for us to come back upstairs.

  “Let’s have some fried zucchini for the table while we’re talking,” Chapman told Adolfo. Nina embraced Mike, whom she had not seen in several months, and Mercer finished telling her that Vickee was less than two weeks away from delivering the child Mike referred to as “our baby.” He was the first on our team to start a family, and the significance of that was not lost on either Mike or me.

  “Cheers!” We clicked glasses and caught up briefly before Mike asked Mercer to tell us what he had learned about Katrina Grooten.

  “I couldn’t sneak the folder out so I just made some notes. The sergeant was sitting right next to the Xerox machine.”

  “Whose case?”

  “Cathy Daughtrey’s.”

  “No wonder I don’t know about it.” I’ve tried several times to have her transferred out of the squad. She had burned out somewhere along the way, and never went the extra mile needed to solve the difficult cases. She would do anything possible to avoid taking direction from me or from Sarah Brenner, because it always meant more legwork than she wanted to do.

  “Happened almost a year ago, just about this time of night. Monday, June eleventh. Katrina Grooten, twenty-nine years old. Employed at the Cloisters.

  “Sixty-one says she left the museum a little before eight and was walking her bicycle down the steep path, through the park, on her way home. That was a small apartment near Dyckman. Says a gunman pulled her off the path behind a rock, made her undress, and raped her at gunpoint.”

  “She give a ‘scrip?”

  “Male black. Tall, slim.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Face was covered with a ski mask. Couldn’t see anything but the skin color on his hands and the back of his neck. That’s why she refused to pursue the matter. Went to the hospital to be examined. Cathy interviewed her there. But Grooten herself didn’t see any point in coming to look at photos ‘cause she couldn’t make an-”

  “But DNA? Forget the corporeal ID.” I was impatient to know why I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to talk Katrina Grooten into letting us investigate and build the case.

  “He didn’t ejaculate. No seminal fluid. No DNA.”

  “Did we have any other cases like that in the park? Any other crimes to which we could have linked this one?”

  “A couple of robberies with a guy who used a ski mask. No arrests, no suspects.”

  “Witnesses? Nobody coming from or going to the museum?”

  “The Cloisters is closed on Monday. Just a few of the staff working there. She thinks she was one of the last ones to leave.”

  “Any record in the file that Cathy called me before closing out the case?” I believe in getting every victim into our office to be talked to by a member of the legal staff of our unit, whether or not it is a long shot, to see if there is any way to develop the facts into a stronger case or determine if the crime is the work of a serial offender or a convicted rapist on parole.

  “Nope. Just EC’d it and the boss signed off on it.”

  “Exceptional clearance? And she didn’t bother to call me for approval?”

  “Your best friend here likes to think she runs the NYPD, and not just my life,” Chapman said to Nina, trying to make sense of this conversation for her. “In case you don’t realize it, Coop, a lieutenant can actually close out a case without your permission.”

  “Whole song and dance in there about Ms. Grooten being from South Africa. She felt that too many black men had suffered in prisons in her country for crimes they didn’t commit, so she didn’t want to take the chance of starting a manhunt when she couldn’t even identify the rapist.”

  “Great. So we got a bleeding heart. She’s got a Dutch name-descended from Boers, who killed more Africans than you or I could count,” Chapman said, holding his empty glass up in the air for Fenton to see, ordering another round of drinks. “Meantime, one of the brothers be having a field day in my neck of the woods and she decides she’s gonna give him a pass. America the Beautiful. And nobody notices a mope running around the park with a ski mask on in the middle of June, his dick hanging out of his pants.”

  “Who was the outcry witness?” The first person Katrina called from the hospital might suggest the name of the friend or relative to whom she was closest, in whom she confided.

  “She didn’t make any calls. She told Cathy she had no family in this country. And she didn’t want anyone at the museum to know what had happened. Katrina said she planned to be going back to Cape Town before the end of the year anyway.”

  “What’d she do at the museum?” Chapman asked.

  “Worked on medieval art. How’s this for weird, considering her final resting place? Had an expertise in tomb sculpture.”

  11

  “Nobody’s touched the story yet. You lead a charmed life, Alex.”

  Battaglia had the morning newspapers stacked on his desk, and someone from the public relations office had gone through them to check for crime-related clippings before I showed up on his office doorstep shortly after 8A.M. on Thursday.

  I had scanned them myself before leaving my apartment. Below the fold on page A1 of theTimes was the feature on Pierre Thibodaux’s sudden resignation. Trustees gave opinions in unsourced quotes, and art critics gnawed at some of the questionable purchases made during his tenure. Everyone was surprised at the timing of the announcement, and some even speculated at a behind-the-scenes scandal involving fiscal impropriety or a masterpiece of questionable provenance.

  No mention was made of a dead woman found in an ancient sarcophagus. Thibodaux himself had made only a vague reference to the unfortunate coincidence of an ongoing police investigation. His assistant explained that he would hold a press conference in a week’s time, after he’d had an opportunity to brief the board members in private on his decision.

  “Mickey Diamond called me at home late last night,” I told the boss. “He said they didn’t want to go with it because no one over at the museum would confirm the girl’s ID and the paper was spooked about the next-of-kin thing. Afraid to print something and find out she had family here who would only learn about her death that way.”

  “Since when are they so sensitive? Truth of the matter is, as one of the other reporters put it to me, Katrina Grooten wasn’t really ‘anybody.’ Pretty pathetic commentary on their values.”

  “Paul, I spoke to Jake about the leak.” He had returned my call shortly after I left the office. He’d also tried to get through to my cell phone, but it wasn’t working-just as Anna Friedrichs had described-while we were in the museum basement. So Jake had come over after dinner, when he finished working. “He didn’t do it. He wouldn’t lie to me.”

  “It’s dead in the water. I trust it won’t happen again.”

  “Have you heard from your counterpart in New Jersey?”

  “A casual in
quiry. I didn’t get the sense he’d want to fight for jurisdiction of the case unless he knew it could be solved with very little effort. Or until you solve it for him.”

  “So I can keep working on it because the press isn’t interested?”

  “You can stay with it because Katrina Grooten was a rape victim.” That would be his answer to Pat McKinney. “Any chance that attack last June is related to her death?”

  “Very unlikely, but we’re going to run it down. She was treated at Presbyterian Hospital. An evidence collection kit was prepared, but it never went to the lab because she refused to cooperate with the investigation.”

  “Didn’t the ME want the genetic profile developed from the DNA to put in the data bank?”

  With the astounding technological advances in the science of DNA, it was the practice of the serology lab to develop the “fingerprint” from every piece of crime scene evidence-blood, semen, saliva-and add it to the local data bank. Unsolved cases that had never seemed to be part of a pattern before were connected by the cold hits that the computer made between one violent occurrence and another, all over the city. Some resulted in links to convicted offenders whose samples had been obtained prior to their release from state prison, leading to arrests in matters that had been investigative dead ends.

  “If there had been any evidence to examine, of course it would have been analyzed and entered in the bank. Mercer Wallace is going to see whether the kit is still around. Most hospitals destroy them after ninety days, if the victim doesn’t want to go forward.”

  “But you don’t doubt the rape allegation was legit?”

  “Why would we? Seemed to be an attack by a stranger, with no reason to be fabricating it, and Grooten saying from the outset she couldn’t make an ID.”

  “Suppose she was having a problem with someone at the museum, Alex. A lover, a coworker, a supervisor. Someone who was giving her a hard time, harassing her, frightening her.” Battaglia reached forward to light the end of his cigar. I hadn’t finished my coffee yet and he was probably on his third Monte Cristo of the morning.

  “You scare me. You’re beginning to think like Mike Chapman.”

  “Maybe she reports a rape-no physical evidence, no fingerpointing or framing a suspect-maybe she calls the cops just to send a shot over the bow. ‘I’m serious about this, Mr. Whoever You Are. Leave me alone or else. I’m not afraid to bring the police into this.’”

  “Anything’s a possibility at this point, Paul. But most strangerrape victims have no reason to make up the story.”

  “And most of them aren’t found dead within a year.”

  “Katrina Grooten might have had reasons to act the way she did. A foreigner, alone in this country with what seems to be a very small network of emotional support. An incident that she feared would be racially charged if an arrest followed. The great unlikelihood of finding the assailant. In most other cultures, there’s still a societal stigma that attaches to victims of sexual assaults. Somewhere in her life, at work or at home, there would be someone to blame her for walking into the park alone.”

  “Anybody dust her bicycle for prints?”

  All I needed at this point was the district attorney to micromanage my cases. I had thirty-seven open files in various stages of their investigations, and the forty other lawyers whom Sarah and I supervised had scores more. Maybe I could drop them off with Rose, and Battaglia could try to sort his way through some of those while I helped find Grooten’s killer.

  “Mercer is double-checking all the paperwork to see what was done, and whether anything can be reexamined at this point.”

  When he lowered his head to look at the weekly figures in the report from the Office of Court Administration, noting the arrest-to-arraignment time lag, I knew Battaglia was finished with me. I was almost out the door before he spoke: “That big-needle thing, that phony lie detector scam you pull, how often is it successful?”

  I bit my lip and paused in the doorway, knowing that McKinney had given me up again. “About ninety-eight percent of the time.”

  “I like it. Might borrow it someday. Just promise me you won’t ever do it in an election year, okay?”

  “Sure, boss.”

  No one was in yet on either side of the hallway. The display on my phone reminded me to pick up my voice mails. I punched in my password and the mechanical recording told me I had two messages.

  “Message one. One thirty-fourA.M.”A real human voice kicked in: “Good morning, Alex Cooper. Or should I say I hope there’s nothing good about it.”

  The stalker. Shirley Denzig’s biting tone was unmistakable. The young woman with a complicated psychiatric history had harassed me for weeks during the winter months, after a confrontation in my office when I had seized a forged document that she was carrying with her. She had ferreted out my home address and tried to get past the doormen, at the same time that I was embroiled in a dangerous homicide investigation. The detectives from the District Attorney’s Office Squad had searched for her in vain, certain also that she had stolen a pistol from her father’s garage in Baltimore.

  “I haven’t forgotten what you took from me, Alexandra. And I haven’t forgotten that you told people I was crazy.” Denzig rambled on, filling the three minutes of recording time with vitriol, short of threatening but nasty and unwelcome.

  The second message picked up seconds later and Denzig finished her tirade. “I’m closer than you think, Alexandra. You’d better stay out of my way.”

  She was smart enough to know exactly what she was doing. At no time in either message did she express any intent to harm me. The sound of her voice and the fact that she had not forgotten her anger was enough to alarm me. I dialed the extension upstairs in the squad and reached the duty sergeant who had come on at 8A.M.

  “Steve Maron will know what to do when he gets here. He and Roman handled this one last winter. I’d like someone from the tech unit to come down and tape the messages, so I have a record of them. And I’ll get Sarah to sign off on a subpoena to dump my phone.”

  Computerized telecommunications systems were so sophisticated now that even the shortest telephone call or message would leave its source on our machines. We could request a “dump” of my phone line, specifying the date and time of our interest, and within a day would know from what number Shirley Denzig was calling me. It was an expensive process-five hundred dollars for each twenty-four-hour period in question-but it was foolproof.

  Ryan Blackmer had walked in and taken a seat opposite my desk. “Got a minute?”

  This was one of the assistants who could always make me smile. Smart, hardworking, and with a talent for attracting the bizarre and unusual, Ryan loved to produce results for the detectives and they loved bringing cases in to him.

  “Remember that guy who was on-line in the chat room with Brittany in April?”

  “Vaguely.” Brittany was the screen named used by a male detective from the pedophile squad, Harry Hinton, when he went on the Internet to look for child molesters.

  “I’ll refresh your recollection. He wants a meet tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Friday? Right before the holiday?” It was the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend, and for many New Yorkers it signaled the start of three- or four-day summer getaways to beach and country houses, hotels and inns.

  “That’s the ruse. Brittany said her parents were going out of town and she’d be home alone in the city, having a sleepover at a girlfriend’s house.”

  “Did you review the transcripts?”

  Blackmer was always prepared. “Nice and clean, just the way you like ‘em.” He passed the folder over to me.

  On the World Wide Web, Brittany was a petite thirteen-year-old cheerleader with a ponytail who attended a parochial school on the Upper West Side. In real life, Harry was a muscular thirty-six-year-old cop with lots of facial hair and fifteen years on the job.

  When he went on-line to surf for pervs, Brittany-Harry never initiated the conversation. This was not entrapm
ent. It was simply going to the cyber-caves where these creatures lurked, just as Felix steered his cab through city streets looking for underage girls.

  “Which chat room?”

  “It’s called ‘I likevery older men.’ The usual profile. Say the magic words-cheerleading, music videos, parochial school uniforms.”

  You could watch Harry’s act in real time. Within minutes of his logging on in that kind of room with his benign teenage-girl profile, sharks would come out of the water and line up for the kill:

  “How big are you?” they’d ask.

  “I’m only five-three. I’m short,” Brittany would reply.

  “No, I don’t mean your height. What’s your bra size?” and then “Describe your uniform,” and then “Are you a virgin?” usually followed by “Send me your picture.” Harry would press the enter key, and off would go a digital head shot of Joni Braioso, the undercover who actually took the meet, if the case progressed that far. Although she was twenty-four, Joni didn’t look a day older than sixteen. When she dressed in a plaid skirt with navy blue knee socks, fake braces on her teeth, hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and weighing less than a hundred pounds, she easily passed for twelve or thirteen.

  Harry had downloaded the response to the photo he sent: “This is me at my computer.” Attached was a picture of a middle-aged man in a polo shirt, looking like an ad for a sportswear catalog.

  “And this is mymonster. ” The printed page that followed was a close-up of a penis.

  I did a double take.

  “Huge, huh?” said Ryan. “Harry and I are betting he borrowed that from a porn site. These guys never have the equipment they claim is theirs. I especially love it when they name their private parts. Just something that never occurred to me to do.”

  “Shall I read on?”

  “Follows the basic outline. Wants to show her the ropes. Meet the monster and learn how to make love.”

  “Is he explicit?” I didn’t want to waste police manpower if he was simply talking dirty.