Death Dance

by Linda Fairstein

  "You know what, judge? I'm going to step back to counsel table. I'd like this entire application to go on the record."

  "Whoa, whoa, whoa, Alexandra. Mr. Ingels, don't get on this lady's bad side, I'm telling you right now," Moffett said, tapping his fingers on the railing in front of him. He pushed up the sleeves of his robe and started to play with his pinky ring. "Stay right here for a minute, sweetheart, while we talk this out."

  I didn't want this conversation to happen at a bench conference any more than I wanted to be held in contempt by a judge who had never made the effort to understand the nature of sexual assault nor to address "lady lawyers" appropriately.

  Eric Ingels had been catching cases for Legal Aid this morning and had been tossed Sengor's matter when the papers were docketed by the court clerk.

  "Whaddaya got? I mean for real," Moffett said. "You got a witness?"

  "Two of them."

  "What do they say?"

  I repeated the stories that Jean and Cara had told.

  "The doctor, he make any admissions to you?"

  "He refused to talk to me when they brought him into the squad this morning," I said.

  "Aha! Maybe I should try the same tactic sometime. I'm the judge-I can't even control my own courtroom when Alexandra here gets a hard-on for some miscreant," the judge said, talking to Ingels. He turned his attention back to me, drawing his handkerchief from his pocket to wipe the remains of cream cheese off his chin. "So how are you going to prove your case?"

  "The toxicology will confirm that Sengor drugged the women."

  "How long is that going to take?"

  Nobody would even open the evidence collection kit until Monday morning. "I should have preliminary results by Wednesday."

  "Judge," Ingels said. "You can't possibly hold my client that long on Ms. Cooper's speculation. He's a physician who-"

  "Who has been in this country for three years, whose entire family lives abroad-in Turkey-and who has the means and opportunity to flee this city the minute you let him loose."

  "You honestly think this guy is going to run home to the land of black veils and burkas when he's got college kids knocking on his door for a slumber party-coming all the way from over the border- just asking to be shtupped?" Moffett asked.

  My adversary laughed, so Moffett carried on. "Miss Cooper has no sense of humor about these things. Imagine her on a date? First time a guy makes a pass she probably whacks him across the face. No wonder she's still single."

  I turned and walked back to my position in the well of the courtroom. The stenographer put down his magazine and poised his fingers over the keyboard.

  "For the record, your honor, I'm repeating my request for the remand of this defendant."

  "So how do you get a first-degree rape charge with no force, missy?"

  "Missy" me and "Sweetheart" me again, you moron, so it's recorded in black and white and I'll whip these minutes right over to the judiciary committee. Moffett had barely squeaked by them the last time he was up for reappointment.

  "Incapacity to consent, judge. The defendant rendered them physically helpless by administering a drug without their knowledge."

  "Your honor," Eric Ingels said, "there's no evidence that my client gave these witnesses any drugs. Half the young women in America are on some sort of antianxiety medications."

  "Yeah, Alexandra. How do I know your girls didn't pop the pills themselves? Just because they don't remember taking them doesn't mean anything. Maybe they were too drunk to recall it."

  "Neither of these young women was on any sort of medication, prescription or recreational. They did not voluntarily ingest the Xanax. That's what makes this a crime. They weren't drinking heavily and they weren't drunk. Even the defendant admitted-"

  "To you?"

  "No, judge. We did a consent recording with one of the victims."

  "I thought he didn't admit anything." The cheap garnet-colored stone in Moffett's ring looked like a giant wart on his gnarled finger as he waved it in my direction.

  "Not to me. But he acknowledged to one of my witnesses that he knew she had not been drinking much alcohol."

  "This drug, what does it do to them? It's an aphrodisiac?" The judge was smiling now, twisting the ring round and around his finger. "They should have tried to stay awake."

  I had gotten up early to do my homework. "It's a central nervous system depressant."

  "So is alcohol, your honor," Ingels said.

  "That's the point, if I may continue. My victims were sipping bourbon, which is in itself a central nervous system depressant. Sen-gor slipped-"

  "Doctor Sengor, Ms. Cooper."

  "I don't care if he's a doctor or an Indian chief, he's charged with several counts of the most serious felony on the books short of murder," I said.

  "Prematurely."…

  "May I be heard, your honor?"

  "Sure," Moffett said, flapping the wing of his black robe at Eric Ingels. "Let her do her thing. I know Alexandra. Once she puts her hand on her hip like that and loses that Colgate smile she marched in here with, she's not happy till I hear her out."

  "The instructions for the pills that we believe were used last night caution that because they're for extended release, they are explicitly not to be crushed or chewed. That's why the defendant took a vial full of Xanax-"

  "How many pills are you claiming he used?"

  "I don't know, your honor. The container was empty, and it holds twelve capsules when completely full. The lab will be able to give me an estimate of the quantity after they've examined the blood and urine samples of both women."

  "Go on."

  "The combination of the two powerful depressants causes immediate sedation, possible unconsciousness, often leads to respiratory cessation, which-"

  "What's that?" Moffett asked.

  "Death, judge. An overdose like this mixed with a combination of alcoholic beverages could actually have killed these women."

  "Your honor, you can't expect me to stand here and let Ms. Cooper go overboard with her imagination, can you? Nobody's dead."

  Moffett was digging back forty years, trying to remember how to cross-examine a witness. He seemed more interested in the consummation of the sexual acts than in the involuntary drugging. "These girls, they don't remember the sex?"

  "There's an amnesiac effect from this type of sedative. Even if they had been conscious for any portion of the encounter, they wouldn't be able to remember it. I'm going to submit the literature packaged with the drug as part of the court record."

  "Yeah, Alexandra. How's a guy supposed to know they'd pass out?" Moffett held the handkerchief over his nose and honked into it before stuffing it back in his pocket and picking up his red pen.

  "Judge, Sengor is a resident in psychiatry. His area of specialty is pharmacology. He knows the property of sedatives and that's exactly why Xanax was his drug of choice."

  Moffett looked over at the defense table and shook his head. "I wouldn't expect a medical doctor to have to-"

  "Cardinal rule of drug-facilitated rape, your honor. Expect the unexpected. It's for guys who might never resort to force to act oat their twisted fantasies. They let the drugs subdue the victims for them."

  I went on, hoping that Moffett would stop doodling on his legal pad and listen to me. "There are four parts of this puzzle, and Sengor had every one of them in place to accomplish his goal."

  The judge looked at the defendant and held up a finger for each piece of the modus operandi as I ticked them off for him.

  "He's a physician, with the knowledge of the properties of a CNS depressant and its effect when combined with alcohol. Couple that with the ability to write prescriptions for sedatives, and that gives him the means to commit the crimes-his weapon of choice. Next he needs the setting in which he controls the environment. What better than his own home? Third, he had to have the opportunity, which usually requires gaining the trust of his victims, and he'd had the first three nights of their visit to do that. Fin
ally, Sengor had to have a plan to avoid arrest. The victims generally sleep off the effects of the drugs, and here, they would have gotten on a bus to go home to Canada, no wiser for the occurrence of the crime."

  Eric Ingels was on his feet. "C'mon, judge. There was no 'plan' to do this. These women wound up in a hospital, right down the street from Dr. Sengor's home. What kind of lamebrain scheme to escape detection is that? Only a complete idiot or a man who'd never had intercourse could think that a woman might wake up and not realize she'd been… been… well, been-"

  Moffett laughed out loud in agreement with Ingels. Even Sengor was smiling, perhaps sensing an ally in judicial robes. "Yeah. Been had. That's what you mean, isn't it? What do you say to that, Alex?"

  "I'd say this is all completely inappropriate for a bail application, your honor. Do I need expert testimony here, to explain to both of you that one of the advantages of sedating someone with a muscle relaxant is that it makes it possible to consummate a sexual act without the victim's awareness? And many of these cases occur without transmission of seminal fluid?"

  Moffett looked down at the papers and then glanced at Eric Ingels, probably hoping my adversary would interrupt me.

  I went on. "The crime of rape is accomplished, as I'm sure your honor recalls, by penetration of the victim, however slight. There's no legal requirement that he ejaculate in each of these women."

  Moffett knew he was out of his element. The colloquy was too graphic for his old-fashioned courtroom style. "Save that talk, Alexandra. Eric says the hospital these girls went to is near his home. You heard him. What kind of scheme is that?"

  "A pretty foolproof one, if my victims had used the bus tickets they told Sengor they had for yesterday afternoon. Do you know how many victims of drug-facilitated rape ever get to a hospital in time to be tested?" I asked. "Less than ten percent. It's almost impossible to prove these crimes because some of the drugs work their way out of the system so quickly that by the time the victims sleep off the effects of the sedatives and feel well enough to get themselves medical attention, nobody even knows what toxicological tests to perform."

  "What you're telling me, missy, is that this healthy male specimen," Moffett said, an elbow resting on the ridge of the bench in front of him, his forefinger wagging at Selim Sengor, "would rather make love to somebody who doesn't even know what the heck is going on. Now why would anyone want to do that?"

  "It's deviant behavior, your honor. Obviously." Don't try to compare it to your own sexual experience, I was tempted to tell him. Don't try for a minute to think outside the box. He looked even more puzzled as he licked the tip of his finger and used it to smooth down the wisps of hair that were flipping up behind his ears. "We'll have experts to explain the psychology of it at trial. I'm just dealing with the strength of my case for the purpose of this arraignment."

  Moffett's ruling about whether or not to detain Sengor would be grounded on two major points: the likelihood that he would return to stand trial rather than be a risk to flee the jurisdiction, and the probability of my obtaining a conviction when the case went to a jury many months down the road.

  "So, let me understand this, hon. You got two women who were shacking up at Dr. Selim's place, drinking liquor with him, who wake up with a hangover and miss their bus ride home. You maybe have some seminal fluid-"

  "And both women tell me they hadn't had intercourse in more than a month."

  "The only thing you haven't got is any evidence that the drugs were even in their cocktails, no less slipped there by the doctor," Moffett said.

  Eric Ingels had very little left to do, with Moffett so obviously in his corner. A physician didn't fit the stereotypical profile of a rapist, and a man whose arousal came from sedating women for the purpose of subjecting them to sexual assault was an even bigger stretch for this jurist's small mind.

  "It seems to me, judge," Ingels said, "that until Ms. Cooper gets her lab results, you have absolutely no reason at all to detain my client. He's got strong roots in this community. It's where he lives, it's where he works. He's got no history of criminal conduct-a perfectly clean record."

  "What kind of bail can he make?" Moffett asked Ingels.

  "Your honor, most respectfully," I said, "I don't think you should approach the matter that way and accommodate the pocketbook of the very person we're charging with these crimes. We're talking about two counts of first-degree rape. I'd like to suggest bail in the amount of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars."

  "What?" Ingels said, pounding the table in front of him with a closed fist. "You know how much a medical resident earns?"

  "Calm down, both of you. Here's what I'm gonna do. She's gonna holler at me anyway, Mr. Ingels. I'm going to release Dr. Sengor on his own recognizance-no bail. You, Alexandra. Stop with the grimace and the smoke coming out your ears. I'll put the case over for a very short date. Next Friday, in my part. You'll have lab results by then. I'll hear you from scratch on this issue. If the case looks stronger then, I'll give you the opportunity to make your application all over again."

  Screwed twice. Not only would Sengor walk out the courthouse door before I made it up to my office, but Moffett had kept the matter in his own court part.

  "I'd like him to surrender his passport to you, judge. How about that?"

  Ingels whispered to his client, who told him something in response. "Of course, Dr. Sengor doesn't have it with him. The detectives rousted him out of his home in the middle of the night, with no warning."

  "So get it to me at the beginning of the week. You're not planning any vacations, are you, son?"

  Selim Sengor smiled at the judge and shook his head. "Thank you, sir. No, sir. I-I didn't-it's not what-"

  Ingels put his hand on his client's arm and told him not to speak.

  I gathered up my papers and medical research and walked the length of the courtroom with Mercer beside me.

  "You didn't want me to collar him when I was in the apartment, did you?"

  "I can't fault you for that," I said. "I never dreamed the pills would be there in plain view. I figured you'd execute the warrant, we'd test the findings, and the arrest would go down later during the week. You couldn't do anything but lock him up once you saw what you did in there. I'm fine with it."

  "And now you've got to argue this case before that Neanderthal?"

  "Not if I can help it." The district attorney, Paul Battaglia, occasionally pulled strings to move high-profile cases after too many embarrassing episodes of trials in front of the handful of judges who couldn't manage the more notorious crimes.

  Mercer's cell phone was vibrating in his jacket pocket and he removed it to speak while we continued through the rotunda within the 100 Centre Street lobby.

  "No, we're done with that," I heard him say to his caller. "On our way to her office. You want to ask her?"

  He handed me the phone, telling me that it was Mike.

  "What's up?"

  "Nothing good," Mike said. "I'm on my way to Lincoln Center. The Metropolitan Opera House."

  "Natalya? Has anyone heard from Natalya yet?"

  "Nope."

  "No one's even seen her?" I asked.

  "They found some stuff. She'd been dancing a scene from Giselle-that's the one with the Wilis, right?"

  "Yes." Mike knew I had studied ballet all my life.

  "Like a headpiece, and some tulle from the costume that mast have caught on a nail and ripped off."

  "A garland of white flowers, with a veil?" There was a standard costume for Giselle's graveyard scene.

  "That sounds right. Would dancers like her go out on the street after a performance, Coop, in a full-length tutu and toe slippers?"

  "Very unlikely. Even if she had a coat over her costume, she'd put shoes on so she wouldn't rip the satin pointe slippers on cement sidewalks or asphalt. Why, Mike? Where did they find the clothing?"

  "In a hallway, going up to the third floor, a few flights above the stage and the dressing rooms. Along with a gl
ove-a man's white kid glove. A dressy one, if you know what I mean. I had a pair like it once that I had to wear when I was an usher at a wedding at St. Patrick's. And blood, there's a few droplets that look like blood on the wall."

  "That could mean any number of-" I said.

  "Did I mention a contact? One contact lens. The agent confirmed she wears them."

  I thought of what kind of blow to the socket could cause the lens to be forced off the surface and expelled from the eye. "You're ruling out everything but some kind of struggle, aren't you?"

  "They're checking all the corridors, top to bottom-every room and cubbyhole. That place is just massive. I can't sit on my ass anymore and wait for the twenty-four hours to pass."

  I could picture Talya-a magnificent creature whose fragile appearance masked the incredible strength and stamina possessed by the great ballerinas. I had seen her at Lincoln Center just months earlier, commanding the enormous stage as though it was her natural home.

  "It's unthinkable," I said.

  "What is, Coop?" Mike's personal tragedy had made him more cynical than ever. "That Talya Galinova might have been unfortunate enough to put herself in the running for this year's homicide stats?"

  More than a decade in this business had made me mindful that no one was guaranteed immunity from that often random list. But to disappear inside the most famous theater in the world, with more than four thousand people under the same roof at the very moment she vanished?

  "It's not possible she was murdered at the Met."

  4

  Mercer parked in the driveway that arced away from Broadway and ran the entire length in front of the plaza at the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, from 65 th down to 6znd Street. The travertine complex of theater and music facilities was built in the 1960s at a cost equivalent to more than a billion dollars today.

  Bright April sunshine bounced off the waters in the enormous fountain in the center of the buildings as streams gushed in the air at timed intervals, delighting the tourists who gathered around it with their guidebooks. We ignored the structures to the north and south- the Philharmonic's Avery Fisher Hall and the City Ballet and Opera's home, the New York State Theater. The block-long giant that dominated the plaza set back on its western end was the Metropolitan Opera House, and I tried to keep pace with Mercer's great strides as we both hurried to hook up with Mike Chapman.