The Kills

by Fairstein, Linda

  Tripping, when called on, rose to his feet, mustering his most forlorn expression of presumed innocence, smoothing his tie into place before lowering himself back down into his seat. Here but for the grace of God goes any one of you, was the subliminal message he was sending to all the male jurors. He looked paler than the last time I had seen him, with muddy brown eyes and hair the color of a well-rusted metal wrench.

  “Since it’s already four forty-five, I’m going to let you folks be excused. You can all sleep late tomorrow while I make these lawyers work on some other aspects of the case in the morning. You’re to be back here at two o’clock sharp, ready to go. At that time we’ll be picking a jury.”

  Moffett came out from behind his chair, leaning over the edge of the bench and wagging a finger at the panel in the box and then expanding his admonition to the rest of the prospective jurors in the gallery. “And let me remind you people that those tired, old efforts to get out of your civic duty won’t work in my courtroom. Leave your excuses at home. I don’t care if you have two plane tickets to Rio on Friday, or that nobody will baby-sit for your cat if I sequester you in a hotel room, or that your cousin’s niece’s brother is being bar mitzvahed in Cleveland this weekend. Send him a check, and as far as I’m concerned, you can bring the kitty with you.”

  The jurors gathered their belongings and made their way to the double doors at the rear of the room. I swept my notepad and case folder off the table and waited for the judge to excuse me so that I could get downstairs to my office to deal with the slippery witness and my disintegrating case.

  “What time for us, Your Honor?” Peter asked.

  “Nine-thirty. And Alexandra, you’ll have the agency people here?”

  “I’ll call over there right now, as soon as you dismiss us.”

  The corridors and elevators were packed with nine-to-five civil servants who set their schedules by the time clock, so as not to give the city an extra minute of their energy. Assistant district attorneys were swimming against that tide, making their way back to their offices from the dozens of courtrooms on both sides of Centre Street, to spend long hours readying themselves for the next day’s legal battles.

  Laura Wilkie, who had been my secretary for seven years, anticipated my return from the trial part. She was standing in my doorway, steno pad in hand, brewing a fresh pot of coffee to jump-start me for the evening ahead.

  Clipped to my In box was a wad of telephone messages. “Those you can ignore. Friends, lovers, bill collectors, snake oil salesmen. This one you can’t.”

  She gave me the yellow paper with the message she had taken from the district attorney. See me as soon as you finish in court.

  It meant Battaglia had heard about the escape and wanted an explanation.

  I walked into my office and dropped the files on top of my desk. Mercer was standing against the window, the dark outline of his six-foot-four-inch frame silhouetted against the granite gargoyles on the building ledge behind him. He was on the phone.

  “Find out what you can. Alex is gonna tank on this one.”

  “I think it’s already happened,” I said to Mercer as he turned and saw me, then hung up. “I’m about to hit bottom. Battaglia wants the story. Any news on how this happened?”

  “Bessemer’s a predicate. Facing the rest of his natural days behind bars for a five-kilo sale of cocaine. Brooklyn Narcotics made the arrest. Their lieutenant insisted that they be the ones to transport him here instead of our squad. Everybody there’s playing dumb.”

  “Sounds like they have the credentials for it. Any sightings of him yet?”

  “I’ve called anyone who owes me. I’ll get you an answer before the night is out.”

  “If it comes back in little pieces, even if the information is too late to save my tail, you know I’d be grateful.”

  I scanned my security pass to get into the executive wing. Battaglia’s executive assistant, Rose Malone, looked relieved to see me. “Go right in, Alex.”

  Rose was my early warning system. Completely loyal to the district attorney, she had a superb ability to read his moods and transmit the data to me just as the most accurate barometer at Cape Canaveral could do for Mission Control.

  “Do I get a hint about who ratted me out to the Boss?”

  “It’s not who you think.”

  I thought McKinney. The chief of the trial division, Pat McKinney was my direct supervisor. His eagle eye scoured my actions for every misstep and mistake, and he seemed never to weary of reporting them to Battaglia.

  “Who then?”

  “The commissioner. Don’t worry, the Boss isn’t angry. He just wants to know some background before he takes the call.” She had intercepted the message and was giving me the opportunity to explain the situation to the DA, so he could be in the driver’s seat during his conversation with the police commissioner.

  The boss wasn’t upset yet, because the screw-up was the doing of the NYPD. He just wanted to know the extent of our complicity before he pointed his finger at the cops.

  Battaglia exhaled as I entered the room, the smoke from his Cohiba obscuring the expression on his face. “Why don’t you sit down and bring me up to speed, Alex?”

  Unless I was in his office to deliver good news-a DNA databank cold hit, the sentencing of a serial rapist, a bit of personal gossip he could deposit in his limitless storehouse of information-I preferred to stand and answer the questions he had ready for me, leaving as rapidly as I had arrived.

  He glanced at the paper on his desk. “This-this Bessemer character. Why’d you need him brought down here?”

  “I’m about to start a trial, Paul. The defendant is a guy-”

  “Yeah, Andrew Tripping. That military nut who was disciplining his kid.”

  There were more than six hundred assistant district attorneys in Battaglia’s office, the best training ground for litigators in the entire country. No detail was too small to engage Battaglia’s attention, and there was no fact that I had ever briefed him on that he couldn’t call up from memory unless it had to do with money I asked for to fund a special sex crimes project.

  “It’s a tough case, Boss. And last week Mercer Wallace got a call that one of Tripping’s cellmates from the time he was in Rikers had some useful admissions to give me. Something that might put my rape victim over the top.”

  “Like what?”

  “That’s what I was supposed to find out, right about now.”

  The left side of Battaglia’s mouth pulled back as he talked around the large cigar stub that hung between his lips. “You’re losing your charm, Alex. Who thought a prisoner would prefer his freedom to tea and crumpets with you? How unusual was this arrangement?”

  “Not very. The routine dance. He refused to tell the cops exactly what he had to offer until he eyeballed me to see what I was willing and able to do for him. I wouldn’t talk possibilities till I knew what he was putting on the table.”

  “Promises?”

  “Of course not. I was fairly skeptical.” Snitches like Bessemer usually did more harm than good in a case like this. He had waited too long to make his offer seem sincere, and he was just as likely to be jerking me around as to have any tidbits of value. I couldn’t refuse to see him without knowing what he might be sitting on, but I wasn’t prepared to waste a great deal of time playing with him. CIs were the bottom feeders of the prison population.

  “Worth the embarrassment of putting him back on the street while he’s on his way to keep a date with you?” Battaglia asked.

  “Not for a second. But, Boss, in more than a decade here, I’ve never heard of anything like this happening. I’ve had prisoners produced here scores of time-we all have. This was completely unpredictable.”

  “You had a loser of a case before Bessemer’s phone call to the cops. So you still got a loser.”

  Now both sides of his mouth pulled back around the cigar into a broad smile. He went on to explain how he knew. “I just heard from Judge Moffett. Wants me to lean
on you to be more reasonable.”

  I smiled back. That was one thing Paul Battaglia would never do. If my judgment call was a belief that the defendant was guilty as charged, and I thought I could prove it, then the district attorney’s only rule was for me to do the right thing. It was one reason I loved working for the man.

  “Is that why he called you?”

  “In part. He wants to know what’s in this case for Peter Robelon. How can Tripping afford his rates?”

  Robelon was a partner in a small firm, a well-regarded boutique that specialized in white-collar litigation. His fees were among the highest in the New York bar-$450 an hour.

  “I think there’s some family money. Tripping’s mother died about a year ago, several months before these events occurred. She had been raising her grandson until that point. She left everything she had to the defendant.” I hadn’t been able to discover anything unusual from the bank records.

  “Interesting, but only if she had enough to cover the retainer and trial costs.” Battaglia paused. “Robelon’s dirty, Alex. I’ve got good reason to know. Watch your back.”

  “You want to tell me what you mean?” I asked. Peter Robelon had often been mentioned as a possible candidate to oppose Battaglia in the next election.

  “Not for the time being.” Battaglia protected his hoard of information like an eagle on its nest. The fact that I had spent the last year in a serious relationship with a television news reporter made him far less likely to trust me with something sensitive that could play into his political future. “Did Peter know about this Bessemer guy? Is his escape anything Peter could have had a hand in engineering?”

  I was caught completely off-guard by his question. “That never crossed my mind.”

  “Well, keep it open, Alex. And if you’re going to go belly-up on this case, do it fast. We’ve got a busy fall lineup and I’d like your help drafting some of the legislative proposals for the next session.”

  I returned to my office to find Mercer sitting at my desk, still working the phone. I motioned to him to stay put and sat facing him, waiting for him to finish his conversation. From over my shoulder I heard a knock on my office door, which was ajar. Detective Mike Chapman braced himself against the jamb, smiled at me broadly as he ran the fingers of his right hand through his thick black hair.

  “Hey, Coop. What am I bid for one ‘Get out of jail free’ card? Only slightly used by the very nimble Kevin Bessemer.”

  I looked at Mercer. “Why do I think I’m about to be told what a sucker I was to fall for Mr. Bessemer’s proffer of prosecutorial assistance? Do I owe Mike’s appearance to the fact that you’ve run out of chits to call in?”

  Before Mercer Wallace transferred to the Special Victims Unit several years ago, he and Mike had worked together at the elite Manhattan North Detective Squad. Like me, Mercer thrived on making the system work better for women who were victims of violence. Like the jurors of whom Moffett spoke, Mike preferred murder. There was none of the emotional baggage of traumatized rape victims to deal with, nor any handholding, dissembling, or cross-examination of living, breathing witnesses.

  “He’s my go-to man, you know that, Alex.”

  “And if I’ve got what you need, you buying dinner?” Mike asked.

  “What I need is for Kevin Bessemer to walk up to a beat cop and ask for directions to my office.”

  “So where’d the guys from Brooklyn tell you this went down, Mercer?”

  “Came off the ramp from the Triborough Bridge, heading here. Four-car pileup right in front of them-”

  “And while they’re watching some poor slob from Highway One clear up the mess, Kevin gives new meaning to E-ZPass, hops out of the unmarked narc-mobile, starts singing ‘Feet don’t fail me now,’ and hightails it off into the sunset right in his own ‘hood? That’s what you hear?”

  “Look, Mike, if you know something different, tell me,” I said. “Let me score a few points with Battaglia, so he can tell the PC.”

  “The real deal? These morons from Narcotics tried to sweeten the pot for Kevin. Gave him a slight detour on his way downtown.”

  “How’d you find out?”

  “Walter DeGraw. His kid brother’s in the unit.” Maybe Mike wasn’t joking. DeGraw was solid as a rock.

  “Where to?”

  “Seems whenever they want something from Bessemer, he’s much more cooperative after he’s had some fried chicken and a piece of uptown ass. They made a pit stop at his girlfriend’s apartment. One Hundred Twelth and Second Avenue.”

  “You can’t be serious?” I was furious.

  “It’s not the first time. The cops were sitting at the kitchen table, nibbling on wings and watching One Life to Live while Bessemer was supposed to be relieving his sexual tension in the bedroom.”

  “And when they took a commercial break?”

  “The window was wide-open. The bed had never been touched. The fire escape ran straight down five stories to an alleyway behind the projects. Bessemer and the girl were both in the wind.”

  3

  “Tonight’s ‘Final Jeopardy’ category is Astronomy,” Alex Trebek told us after Mike had coaxed me away from my desk shortly before seven-thirty to turn on the television in the public relations office down the hall from my own.

  “Don’t waste my time. I’ve got work to do so I can go home and get a good night’s sleep.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, blondie. Throwing in the towel ‘cause you didn’t take any science courses at Wellesley? Well, I never studied it either. But I did spend some time in the planetarium recently, don’t you remember?” Mike winked at me as I nodded my head. “What do you say, Mercer, ten bucks apiece?”

  The three of us had a long-standing habit of betting on the “Final Jeopardy” question whenever we happened to be together at this hour, whether in a station house, a bar, or at a crime scene.

  “A dime it is,” Mercer answered, and I nodded my head while the three contestants entered their multi-thousand-dollar bids on their private scorecards. “What did you tell Paige Vallis, Alex? You want me to bring her to meet with you in the afternoon?”

  “We won’t get to her tomorrow. I spent so much time prepping her last weekend that I think she’s really ready to go. If we get anywhere near finished picking the jury by midday Friday, we can get her in then. Meanwhile, let her stay away from my office and go about her normal routine. She’s more likely to keep calm.”

  “The answer is,” Trebek said, stepping aside to reveal the printed statement in the blue box on the large screen, “‘Warrior who called Halley’s comet his “personal star,” sparking European invasion that massacred millions.’”

  Mercer folded his bill in the shape of a paper plane and sailed it at Mike. “Who was Attila the Hun?”

  “This was rigged.” I laughed. “You must have known it was really a history question.” Mike had majored in the field at Fordham, and knew more about military history than anyone I had ever encountered. “Before I hand over ten, how about William the Conqueror?”

  “Not a bad guess for either of you.” He clucked his tongue the same way Trebek did at our wrong answers. “Who was Genghis Khan?” That would be the winning ticket.

  “Yes, Mr. Wallace, a comet did portend the sack of Gaul, and you were very close, Ms. Cooper. William embarked on the Norman invasion when Halley’s comet streaked by, calling it a sign from heaven.

  “But it was Khan who thought it was his personal star. Twelve twenty-two. Swooped down from Mongolia and killed everyone he could find in southeastern Europe.”

  “You don’t mind if I go back to work, do you?” I headed out the door as Mike started to play with the remote.

  “She almost had the right answer. Only off by two hundred years and one continent. I can’t believe that guy I told you about called her a dumb blonde,” I heard him say to Mercer before I was ten feet away.

  “What guy?” I made a U-turn and stuck my head back in the door. “Who called me dumb?”

&nbs
p; “Just a cheap ploy to get you back here with me. There’s your man.” He clicked up the volume as NY1, the local news channel, flashed a mug shot of Kevin Bessemer.

  “���convicted felon escaped from police custody earlier today. Bessemer, who has a long history of drug trafficking involvement, is thirty-two years old. He is believed to be extremely dangerous,” the earnest young newscaster said, “and may possibly be armed.”

  “Yeah, with a drumstick and four stale biscuits,” Mike said, shutting off the television. “C’mon, let’s grab a meal. Gotta fortify myself for a midnight tour. I’m doing night watch tonight.”

  Mike would be working from twelve till 8 A.M., available to respond to every major crime that occurred in Manhattan.

  “I really don’t-”

  “C’mon, Alex. You’ve done everything you can to get your ducks in order,” Mercer said. He had been working with me on the Tripping case during the two weeks since my summer vacation ended after Labor Day weekend. “You’re just spinning wheels at this point. We’ll feed you and drop you off at home. Call Primola. We’ll be waiting for you at the elevator.”

  I went back to phone my favorite Italian restaurant for a reservation, straighten up my desk, and pick up the file folder to take home to organize my questions for the morning’s hearing. The message dial was illuminated on my voice mail, telling me that two calls had come in while I had stepped away.

  I pressed the playback button. “It’s Jake, darling. I was hoping to scramble to make the last shuttle home tonight. Whatever’s rocking the stock market has the staffers jumpy down here, so I think I’d better stay overnight. I’ll try you later. Pleasant dreams.”

  Jake Tyler and I had been trying to sort out our relationship these past few months. We had spent the end of August alone together at my home on Martha’s Vineyard, and the weeks of playful solitude had pushed from my mind the reality of what a wedge our two intense professional schedules put between our attempts at a serious romance.