Silent Mercy

by Linda Fairstein

  We had worked a murder at the home of the great poet and storyteller years earlier, and Mike had devoured his tales of the bizarre and grotesque.

  “You keep your eyes peeled for a head,” he said, pointing the toothpick at me and tugging at a few straggling strands of my hair as he stood up. “Or somebody carrying a bag that might weigh—oh, I’d say about nine pounds six ounces.”

  The counterman handed me the check and I left cash on the table as we stood up.

  “How’d you come up with that number?”

  “My last decapitation, Coop. The human head accounts for less than ten percent of the body mass, usually in the eight-to-twelve-pound range.”

  I wouldn’t sleep at all now. Facial features were flooding my imagination. The manner of this woman’s death would haunt me. I didn’t know the first thing about her, but I was wildly creating a visual image, a life and a family, and of course a brutal death.

  “And you arrive at nine-six by? …”

  “Eyeballing her, kid. Much shorter than you. Maybe five-five. Brunette, from the rest of the hair on her body. And she wasn’t from the streets.”

  “How so?”

  “Pedicured toes. No track marks. No tats. About your age, I’d say. Breasts were firm. Skin was unwrinkled and smooth. My money’s on midthirties.”

  I had turned away from the broken body of the victim on the church portico, while Mike studied it to learn as much about her as he could in just the few minutes spent with her in the dark and cold.

  “I’ll drop you at home, Alex,” Mercer said. “Let’s see what the day brings.”

  “Expect the usual,” Mike said, gnawing the toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. “A handful of domestics, child pervs scouring the playgrounds and cyberspace, identity theft up the wazoo. Let’s meet up at the end of the day, guys, okay? See where we stand, what we find out. ’Cause this friggin’ beast will be back before you know it.”

  “Why do you—?” I started to ask.

  “There’s a bloodlust here you don’t see very often, Coop. He’s not done. That bastard tossed the head so his next vic won’t connect the dots. Whoever she is, unless we find her first, she’ll never see him coming.”

  SIX

  MERCER dropped me at the entrance to my high-rise apartment on the Upper East Side, and one of the doormen escorted me to the elevator. I rode alone to the twentieth floor, unlocked the door and bolted it behind me, comforted by the familiarity of my well-appointed home. It wasn’t the way most young prosecutors lived, but at moments like this, the security it offered provided a safety net for which I was enormously grateful.

  I didn’t disturb the sheets. I pulled back the duvet and slipped in beneath it, knowing that I needed to calm down but aware that I was far too restless to sleep. Daylight would soon flood the large windows, so for an hour, I closed my eyes and tried to transport myself to a more tranquil surround.

  Photographs on my night table allowed me a brief escape from the night’s dreadful scene and Mike’s unpleasant prophecy. My parents smiled at me from the porch of the beach home on the Caribbean island to which they had retired, and my brothers’ kids were oblivious to the camera lens as they body-surfed in the Atlantic during a visit to my summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. My lover, Luc Rouget, waved from his red convertible in the tiny village of Mougins, near the Côte d’Azur in the south of France, and thankfully didn’t seem to be an ocean away when I rested the silver picture frame next to me on the pillow.

  I must have dozed despite my apprehension of revisiting visions of the body in my nightmares. My alarm sounded at seven, and I allowed myself another hour after listening to the headlines—still vague and devoid of essential facts—on the local all-news station.

  At eight, the time I was usually at my desk in the criminal courthouse in lower Manhattan, I got up and showered. I dressed for the trial, in a gray, chalk-striped suit with a pleated skirt and a mantailored ivory silk blouse. Lyle Keets, the trial judge, was an old-fashioned gentleman who liked all the niceties of the practice of law as it was done forty years ago—professional attire was almost as important to him as professional conduct. He had once forbidden a colleague of mine to reenter his trial part in slacks after a juror remarked that he had been distracted throughout the proceedings by the tight panty line he could see as she stood behind the lectern.

  I had missed rush hour, so I grabbed a yellow cab for the fifteen-minute ride down the FDR to the courthouse.

  “Morning, Ms. Cooper,” one of the uniformed cops on security said as I passed through the metal detector at the One Hogan Place entrance to the building. “Half a day, huh?”

  It was easier to smile and nod at him than expect him to have linked my night’s activity to the morning news.

  My office was on the eighth floor of the massive courthouse structure, just across the hallway from the district attorney’s executive wing. I had enormous respect for Battaglia, whose long tenure and innovative policies as Manhattan’s chief prosecutor had made him a legend in law enforcement. The pioneering Sex Crimes Unit, created three decades earlier, was one of the jewels in his crown. Battaglia was not a micromanager. He left daily details of running investigations in the hands of me and my staff of dedicated lawyers, but he insisted on being kept up to speed on any high-profile matters that would affect his standing in the community or his political base.

  “You’re running late.” My secretary of many years, Laura Wilkie, knew when not to waste words. I rounded the corner into my office and she followed with a handful of phone messages.

  “Sorry. I thought I told you Keets had a dental emergency to deal with.”

  “You did. But I didn’t know you’d be out with my boyfriend half the night.”

  Laura had an unrequited crush on Mike Chapman. There were days I think she came to work just in order to talk with him on the phone, or be dazzled by his broad grin when he perched on the edge of her desk to flirt.

  “He ratted me out already?” I untied my cashmere scarf and hung it with my coat behind the door.

  “Nope. But Mercer did,” Laura said, reading from a list on her steno pad. “Told me to keep Mike’s calls away from you so you could get done what you needed to do in front of Keets.”

  “Okay.”

  “Nice thought, but I’ve already had to scratch the idea of giving you space. Battaglia skipped his meeting at City Hall to get in early. He wants you to brief him on the murder.”

  “He picked up from the news that I was out on that? I didn’t think they made me.”

  “No again. Some guy named Wilbur Gaskin called him to complain about how you were all browbeating a bunch of kids at his church. Gaskin’s on some charity board with the boss.”

  “The guy was more upset about our questioning trespassers than finding a headless corpse on his doorstep?” I took the messages from her and flipped through them. “Have you Googled Gaskin for me?”

  Laura handed me a two-page printout. She’d never let me see Battaglia unprepared, if she could help it. “The profile I found reads a tad self-serving. Doesn’t say what the man eats for breakfast, but gives you the rest.”

  “Sound legit?” I brushed my hair and reapplied some lipstick in the small mirror above the coat hook.

  “Banker. Family man. Do-gooder. Moved here from Atlanta a few years ago. I’ll run a broader search.”

  “I’m looking for an ax murderer, Laura. See if you can find me one before the end of the day.”

  “Got it. And Mercer told me to check with the press office. Tell them to let us know about calls coming in through the switchboard on the news reports.”

  “Any yet?”

  “Minor flood. Not a tsunami, so far.” Laura read from her notes. “Some of these missing girls go back months. Who’s going to vet the callers?”

  “I’ll look these over. Can you find Nan Toth?” She was one of the most experienced lawyers in the unit with plenty of homicide experience, as well as one of my closest friends.
Nan could be the liaison to the squad for the remainder of the day. “Maybe she’ll have time to take it from here.”

  I grabbed a legal pad from my desk to list the things Battaglia would tell me to do. If the pastor of Mount Neboh had pulled out votes for his last election, I’d be reporting to the boss with updates four times a day and ordered not to step on the toes of any more parishioners.

  “On the lighter side, Alex,” Laura said, checking off her notes, “am I confirming that reservation for four at Patroon Saturday evening ? You still expecting Luc for the weekend?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said. The owner of the restuaurant, Ken Aretsky, was a great friend to Luc and me, and Joan Stafford was one of my closest confidantes. She moved between homes in Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, and I was looking forward to spending time with her at dinner. “Fingers crossed. And will you ask Ken if we can dine in the wine cellar? It’s a surprise I’d like to arrange for Joan.”

  “I thought I could make you smile. You’ll have your appetite back by then. If not, well, you can always just drink, right?”

  Luc was a restaurateur whose father had been one of the most prominent men in that business on both sides of the Atlantic. While his main outpost was a destination spot for fine dining in Mougins, Luc’s plan was to reestablish Lutèce, his father’s great culinary creation that had once been New York’s swankest French restaurant. Until that time, the elegance and quality of Patroon made it his favorite dining experience whenever he reached Manhattan.

  “Dead right about that,” I said, thinking about the assistant DA who was my trial partner in the case. “One more thing. Would you please call Barry Donner?”

  “Damn. Back to business. I so prefer the social side of your life.”

  “Me too.” I looked at my watch. “Ask him to meet me here at ten thirty so we have a little time together before we go up to court.”

  “Sure. And Rose says the boss is in a perfectly good mood. Somebody just comped him four tickets for opening day at the stadium.”

  “That always helps,” I said as I left Laura to pass yet another security officer in order to enter Battaglia’s inner sanctum.

  Rose Malone, my good friend and the DA’s longtime executive assistant, was the most trusted person in the office. She was the personification of a loyal and devoted employee who knew where all the bones were buried, with the side benefits of great looks and style that belied her age. Battaglia and his predecessors had no secrets from Rose, nor did any young assistant who caught the attention—for better or worse—of the front office.

  “Good morning, Alexandra. That’s a handsome suit,” Rose said. “How is everything?”

  “Too good to be true, till last night.”

  The city’s murder rate had dropped to an all-time low. The mayor claimed credit for it, Police Commissioner Keith Scully went on air regularly to remind voters that dynamic policing techniques were responsible, and the DA ignored them both with arguments that he had jailed most recidivist criminals and successfully used diversionary programs to rehabilitate the rest. There was no logical explanation for the phenomenon. We all knew that such trends were cyclical and that the numbers would eventually spike again.

  “You can go right in. He’s alone.”

  Rose was my barometer for the measure of Battaglia’s temperament. In the few seconds I had before entering his office, the warmth of Rose’s greeting let me know how the DA’s day was going. The strong odor of cigar smoke that wafted over her desk suggested that he had just walked away from her post to settle back into his own suite.

  “Have a seat, Alex.” The cigar—a contraband Cuban, no doubt, that someone had given him to curry good favor—was plugged into the middle of Battaglia’s mouth, and would be replaced throughout the day by one after another. If you hadn’t worked with him for a period of time, you’d need an interpreter to understand the words that leached out around the thick stub. “Rough scene last night, I take it?”

  “Unimaginable.”

  “What does Chapman think?” I could barely see his mouth over the top of the Wall Street Journal. He was examining yesterday’s market results while he talked to me.

  I was tempted to tell him that I had a full plate and he was welcome to call Mike for his thoughts, rather than my own, if that was the reason he’d brought me in here. Battaglia had a much more welcoming attitude about women in the criminal justice workplace than the lead prosecutors who came before him did, but like most of the guys who had been in this business a long time, he still viewed homicide investigators as members of an elite professional men’s club.

  “That the killer knew his victim, chose her purposefully. That this isn’t his first kill, nor will it be his last. That he picked his venue for a reason.”

  “Good people at Mount Neboh. Don’t let the guys hassle them.”

  If Wilbur Gaskin described that little encounter as a hassle, I thought, wait till he sees Mike and Mercer close in on a suspect. “Of course not. There’s no reason to.”

  “Who was she?”

  “We don’t know.”

  “I realize no face, no fingerprints, but no paper in her pockets?”

  “No clothes, Paul. A dump job. Naked, with a blanket that was torched.”

  “Cops hold anything back from the press?”

  They always did, in hopes that when a suspect was confronted and interrogated, he would reveal a scintilla of evidence that had never been made public.

  “She might be Jewish. Or the killer is. There was a Star of David found beneath her body—a delicate piece of jewelry.”

  Battaglia flattened the newspaper on his desk. “For all his bullshit, Chapman always comes up with the goods.”

  No point correcting his conclusion. Mike needed the credit for occasions on which his outspoken manner and his gallows humor offended the district attorney. I nodded and smiled, explaining the history of the old church. “That’s why there may be significance to the victim’s religious affiliation.”

  “You ever think about running for this job, Alex, remember what I tell you. There are three hundred seventy-one Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of New York. I’ve worshipped at one of them all my life, so I’ve got to attend. The rest are part of the must-do stops in every campaign. God knows how many Baptist and Protestant churches—the Separatists, as my mother called them all her life, even though they separated from Rome four hundred years ago.”

  He laughed at his own remark. He often did.

  “Ten minutes apiece on Sunday morning for every primary race, till the sermons come out your ears,” Battaglia went on. “Then Friday night or Saturday morning for the seventy-seven synagogues on this island. Shecky Feinberg contributes to your race? You’ve got to show up at his kid’s bar mitzvah—and that’s before you do the O’Donnell christening. Cold little piggies in soggy blankets and more rubber chickens than you can count. The one sure place you don’t want to find bodies is a house of worship. Got that? This one will cost me a month of Sundays at Mount Neboh.”

  “Got it.” The campaign poster that hung in my office had Battaglia’s head shot over one of his favorite slogans: You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives.

  “More likely you’ll come to your senses and settle down with your Frenchman and have a brood of little litigators who can also cook a mean omelet.”

  “Now, that doesn’t sound very enlightened of you, Paul,” I said, wagging a finger at him.

  “Be realistic. I got Sonia Sotomayor a seat on the Supreme Court, didn’t I? That kind of lightning won’t strike twice for my best staffers.”

  He was in his late sixties and had been reelected five times, with no signs of slowing down.

  “When you tell me you’re ready to step aside, I’ll have it figured out.”

  I had my own unique piece of the criminal law in our Special Victims Unit, and loved everything about my ability to do advocacy for victims who’d been denied voices for so long. The political aspect of the DA’s job—trying to be
all things to all voters—left me cold.

  “Whatever you need, pull it together for this one. Don’t hesitate to ask for anything,” he said, reaching across his desk for the daily court calendar, the multipage roster that reported every trial case and disposition in the Supreme Court parts, where all the felony cases were argued. “How’s that Koslawski matter going? You’re doing a good job keeping it under the radar screen.”

  “Flip to page five—you’ll see it there. We’re in front of Lyle Keets. I left an update memo with Rose before I went home last night. I just assumed you’d seen it.”

  “Must be in this pile,” he said, twizzling the cigar butt between his lips as he looked for the memo.

  “Barry Donner caught the case when it came in. He’s a good junior assistant, so I didn’t want to take it away from him. But once the defense waived a jury in front of Keets and we figured out there might be a surprise witness, I decided to second-seat Barry in the event he needed a hand.”

  A second seat in the courtroom—literally an extra chair at counsel table—was usually occupied by the less-experienced lawyers who were assigned grunt work for the bigger guns. In our office, they wheeled the evidence cart of exhibits to and from the trial, put on witnesses of lesser importance, and made routine notifications to get cops and civilians to court at the proper day and hour, often haggling with police bosses about bringing essential players in on overtime.

  This time we turned the tables on the tabloids. The defendant—a private-school teacher charged with molesting a fourteen-year-old student—had no name recognition to attract media attention, and by listing Barry Donner as the lead prosecutor, the crew in the press room failed to attach any high-profile connection to the case.

  “I made a lot of promises there’d be no grandstanding on this one, Alex.”