“All good here, Alex,” Aaron said. “You only used a blank template for your motion for joinder. You used language and names specific to each case, so there’s no hole in the wall.”
Ryan pushed the folder back in my direction.
I shook my head. “Keep it. Estevez has been put over for a month. Get Wiggins in front of a jury as soon as you can.”
Drew Poser kept passing folders to me while I racked my brain to think of common features between and among the cases.
When we finished scouring the two piles on the desktop, Catherine began to read through the index cards boxed on the far corner of my desk. They contained the hundreds of names of defendants indicted by other lawyers in the unit.
I perched myself on the arm of one of the chairs and rubbed my forehead. “I approved all of these grand jury actions at the time they were submitted, but you’ll have to refresh me on some of them. There are so many.”
“Okay,” she said when I gave her a blank look after the sixth or seventh name. “Wanda Evins. You must know this. The mother who brought her fifteen-year-old daughter to New York from Kansas City to set her up for business during the Super Bowl last year.”
I closed my eyes. “Check that one, Aaron.”
“She was pimping her kid?” he asked.
“I’m sure I cross-referenced this with Estevez. It actually fit the trafficking laws.”
“Yes,” Nan said, “but mother and child are tucked away at home in Kansas. I’ll get the screening sheet and call to check on them.”
“Go back to what you said to me in the courtroom, Drew.”
“About what?”
I stepped out of my heels and ran my stockinged feet across the ratty carpet. “My secrets. You said that all my secrets are gone.”
“Well, I was just—”
“What did you mean?”
“Nothing, really.”
“He meant that a lot of your personal information wasn’t well protected, Alex,” Aaron Byrne said. “Yeah, Wanda Evins is a hit.”
“I’m on it,” Nan said. “I’ll cover them.”
“All the stuff in your Word files isn’t secure, in the way most of the case folders seem to be. Like, here’s a bunch of letters.”
“You keep personal correspondence on here?” Ryan asked.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Letters to the Bar Association, looks like some to a few of your victims, recommendations for a couple of guys who left the office this year. By the way, the one to the City Bar has got your home address on it, Alex.”
“That’s where they bill me.”
“What’s the difference?” Drew Poser asked. “Everything anyone wants to know about people is on the web. I’m sure Alex’s phone, her e-mail, her contacts, her shoe size—it’s all out there.”
“Then why did you make the crack about my secrets? What do you think I’ve got to conceal?”
“Your thin skin, for one thing,” Ryan said. “You want everybody to think you’ve got the hide of an elephant when you’re soft as a marshmallow inside.”
“I’m just drained. It’s been a lousy day.”
There was nothing personal on my office computer, I reassured myself. My texts and e-mails were a different thing. They wouldn’t make good reading for strangers.
“What the hell is this?” Aaron said, throwing his hands up in the air like the keyboard was toxic. “Why in God’s name are you mentioned in a letter from the district attorney himself to Reverend Hal Shipley? It sounds like Battaglia took money from that Jheri-curled dirtbag, and then you dropped a case against him?”
“I didn’t have any case—and no, I wasn’t aware I was cc’d on any correspondence,” I said, looking from one friend’s face to another as I started to pace across the room. “Are we going blood oath for a moment? Cone of silence? ’Cause the DA is going to have my head on this.”
“Have your head on what?” Nan asked. “Or is this the cue for me to say I’ve got to be going?”
“Don’t leave me now.”
“What’s the story, Alex?” Aaron said. “What’s this about?”
“There should be a memo there from Battaglia to me. About the reverend.”
“Got it. There’s the memo and then there’s also this letter. Maybe Rose Malone,” Aaron said, talking about Battaglia’s executive assistant, “sent a copy to Laura, since it mentions you, and Laura downloaded it to your documents.”
“I swear I never saw any letter.”
“I’ll print it. You’d better read it before it goes viral.”
“If any of this correspondence goes viral, I might as well be looking for work,” I said. My palms were breaking into a sweat. “My piece of it was simple. We had a vic who claimed a statutory case against Shipley. Mercer worked it to the bone and couldn’t get it to stick. Girl has a psych history and liked being around the celebrity—”
“He counts as a celebrity?” Ryan said.
“She’s fifteen. Even you’d count as a celebrity to her with a triple-homicide jury verdict under your belt. Her mother dragged her to a few of Hal’s rallies. Mercer thinks it was all an attempt at blackmailing him that backfired.”
“Do you know anything about a fraud investigation against Hal?” Aaron asked.
I put my head in my hand and exhaled. I couldn’t tell them the little I knew about the tithing improprieties or Battaglia would kill me. That was still a confidential investigation. “Nan,” I asked, “would you do me a favor and call Rose? Ask whether Battaglia has left for the day? I might as well do something to earn the hangover I’m going to buy myself tonight.”
“If you do that, Nan,” Aaron said, “you should also ask Rose if she’s the one who copied Alex on this letter.”
“Please don’t. Not yet,” I said. “I promised the DA I wouldn’t breathe a word of his contact from Shipley. Just see if he’s still here.”
The printer powered up and churned out two pages, which I picked up from the tray.
I faced the wall as I skimmed them.
“Jesus,” I said, starting to read the document again. “This letter thanks the reverend for his contribution, but Battaglia told me he didn’t take any money from Shipley.”
“Could be a contribution of another kind,” Catherine said.
“Who would want anything of any kind from him?” I spoke the words and then stopped in my tracks. “I don’t understand Battaglia at all.”
“What is it?” Nan asked, walking back in from Laura’s desk to tell us that Battaglia had left the office at five thirty, more than half an hour earlier.
“It’s four paragraphs long. It’s—it’s dated about three weeks before I dismissed the statutory case against Shipley. Right after the DA thanks Hal, he tells him in this letter that ‘my chief of the Special Victims Unit,’” I said, hanging imaginary quotation marks in the air, “‘says you have nothing to worry about in regard to the malicious stories being circulated about you.’”
“You must have known Battaglia traded on that kind of information,” Drew Poser said.
“No, I did not. Certainly not in a pending investigation. It’s totally improper. Two weeks before the dismissal I still had no idea whether I had a real case or a psycho teen. This makes it look like the DA was in fact doing favors for Hal Shipley and dragging me into the deal.”
“What do you think this means?” Catherine said.
“Nothing good,” I said. “At the very least, he was trying to curry favor with the devil.”
“But the boss never micromanages your cases.”
“Exactly. And, Aaron, what does it say in my files about a fraud investigation?” Now that I’d read the letter, I knew there was no point in keeping the little I knew about Battaglia’s dealings with Shipley a secret from them. These were my closest professional allies.
“Give me a minute. There’s a link here,” he said to me. “That doesn’t ring any bells?”
“Yeah, there’s a slight tinkling. Just tell us.”
The tithing scam was about to come out in the open, way before Battaglia was ready for anyone to know about it. It was as though someone was trying to plant the seed in that division that Shipley indeed had the protection of the district attorney.
“So that’s my fault, too? I’m unleashing this monster and, on top of it, I’m going to take the fall for Battaglia’s double-dealing?”
“Hold tight,” Aaron said. “The fog is lifting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the letter from District Attorney Paul Battaglia to the Reverend Hal Shipley was just dumped onto your computer today. Not months ago, at the time it was written.”
“What?” I said. “Maybe I should ask Rose why she did that after all.”
“It wasn’t Rose,” Aaron Byrne said.
“Who, then?”
“This letter was uploaded to you—and filed by Laura around noon, with your documents—by Josie Aponte. Or whoever it was who stole the Antonio Estevez file.”
We were all trying to connect the dots at once.
“What you’re telling us,” I said, “is that there is some kind of connection between Estevez, a world-class sex trafficker—”
Detective Drew Poser finished my sentence. “And the Reverend Hal Shipley, who’s a world-class pimp in every sense of the word.”
“Aaron,” I said, aware that more than half of what the white-collar lawyers dealt with was Internet crimes, “you know everyone in the fraud division. Will you nail that piece of it for me as discreetly as you can? We need to know as much about this as possible or you’ll be drawn into the quicksand with me.”
“Starting right now,” he said, pushing back from my desk. “Be back to you by morning. All you have to do is figure out the link between Estevez and Shipley.”
“Well, if there is one,” I said, “why would Estevez want to do anything to discredit Shipley? It might cause his flock to think twice about giving to him.”
“Nothing has ever made Shipley’s people second-guess him, Alex. They seem to like the scoundrel side of the reverend.”
“Whatever the link,” Drew said, “it’s pretty obvious Estevez and Shipley have the same goal. Looks like they’ve got a plan to bring you down, Alexandra Cooper.”
SIX
“Let’s knock off,” Aaron said. “What’s your day like tomorrow? That’s Thursday, right?”
“Right. It’s only six forty-five. Why don’t we keep at it?” I asked.
“Your witnesses are all accounted for,” Drew said. “And your trial is adjourned, so you’re wide-open tomorrow, to answer Aaron’s question.”
“What’s your rush?”
“I’ve got a class to teach at NYU,” Aaron said, “and if everyone is safely tucked in for the night, let’s pick up first thing in the morning.”
“Hey, it’s only me they’re aiming at, guys. Take the rest of the day off, why don’t you?”
“You’ve been telling us there’s nothing personal in your files here,” Drew said. “You can’t go face-to-face with Battaglia till he shows up in the A.M., and we’ve got three teams looking for the Josie Aponte wannabe. Stay here late by yourself, but that’s when the roaches come out of the woodwork to play. Get a life.”
“C’mon, Alex,” Catherine said. “Time for a cocktail. There’s a Dewar’s with your name on it at Primola. Nan?”
“Have to help the girls with math homework. Have one for me.”
Catherine waited till I shut down my computer. I threw a trench coat over my suit against the cool fall air, and we walked down the dimly lit corridors to the elevator.
Centre Street was populated, as usual, by a mix of lawyers and perps—the former leaving work after a long day or pausing for a meal, the latter just released after an arraignment in night court. Too many of the arrestees were making their way to the Canal Street subway station. The last thing I needed was some frotteur—a subway rubber—celebrating his release from custody on our way uptown. Catherine was known to paralyze them with a single kick.
“I know you don’t want to train it, but there are no cabs in sight,” Catherine said.
“I’ll punch in Uber,” I said. The app for the service usually resulted in a black car arriving at the courthouse within five minutes. I tapped out our location and the address of the restaurant, one of my favorite Italian eateries, on Second Avenue in the Sixties.
“I spoke with Marissa. All good with Tanner. It’s wise for her not to join us tonight, so she’ll go home as soon as he’s on his way down here to meet the judge.”
“So who’s at Primola besides Mike?”
“Most of the guys from the task force that has been trying to hunt Tanner down,” she said. “Mercer called Vickee in, too.”
“Sweet. I know she’d rather be home with her son at night.”
Vickee Eaton, Mercer’s wife, was also a detective. She was assigned to the office of the deputy commissioner for public information and usually knew more about what was going on in headquarters than most of the chiefs. We were close friends, and I was godmother to their four-year-old, Logan. I’d spent many nights in their guest room while Tanner was on the loose.
“She and Mercer want to stay for dinner with us.”
“Guess that trumps my plans,” I said, glancing at my watch. “I was supposed to meet an old friend who’s just in town for a couple of days. I can always move that back to a nightcap.”
The car arrived seconds later and we settled in to the backseat.
“You want to tell me how it’s going with Mike?” Catherine asked.
I was very comfortable confiding in the close circle of women with whom I’d worked for so long at the DA’s office.
“Baby steps,” I said, leaning my head back against the seat cushion. “We’re taking it very slow. So far, so good.”
“Sorry, but that must have been a weird transition—the first time you took your clothes off—after working together for such a long time.”
“Weird but good. You know, even in bed—”
“TMI, Alex. Stop right there,” Catherine said, holding her hand between our faces. “Way too much information.”
“I wasn’t headed where you think,” I said, smiling at her. “No inappropriate reveals here. I was just about to say that Mike’s never going to cease taking shots at me. It’s totally disarming. There’s no angst, no pressure, no relationship psychobabble. We just make each other laugh. It’s refreshing after some of the self-involved guys I’ve dated.”
“It’s great to see you relaxed and happy. You know I told Mike if he ever made you cry, I’d break every bone in his body.”
“Catherine—it’s been six weeks. That’s all. Don’t blow things out of proportion.”
“Just for the record, Grand Central Terminal’s a pretty offbeat place to start an affair.”
“Foreplay only. It was that weekend in September that we went to the Vineyard.”
“Yeah, the one that was supposed to be ladies only. The one you canceled on me.”
My old farmhouse on a hilltop in Chilmark, overlooking Vineyard Sound, was the most romantic spot I’d ever known. It was a haven for me, a small piece of paradise where I was able to escape from the stress of a constantly challenging job. My colleagues and I held lives in our hands—our victims, the accused, those wrongly accused, and the cops who fought to keep our city safe—every day of the week.
“Pick a date. We can do it next month.”
I was the third child—two older brothers—of a marriage between a doctor and a nurse, an ordinary upbringing until my father and his partner revolutionized heart surgery with the invention of a small plastic device used in operating rooms worldwide. The Cooper-Hoffman valve had paid for our educations, and the trust fund established with its proceeds allowed me the luxury o
f a Vineyard vacation home that I couldn’t have dreamed of on a public servant’s salary.
“Yes. Let’s go before it gets too cold,” Catherine said. “You’ll have to tell me how you managed to seduce a man in your country house when you can’t even cook. You could store some of your shoes inside your oven, it gets so little use.”
“Can you believe that Mike cooks? Like, really well.”
“You’re shattering my image. I know he loves chowing down fried clams at the Bite, and I can see him sitting at the bar at the Chilmark Tavern, chatting up the hostess. But cooking? He’s such a tough guy. Just makes you think a woman would love to take care of him,” Catherine said, “although you’re really useless at that.”
I picked my head up. “I beg your pardon. I’ve got certain charms. Limited in the kitchen, maybe, but talents that come in handy.”
“So what did he serve?”
“Oysters from one of the island ponds, which Mike shucked himself. And lobster. Two-and-a-half-pounders from Larsen’s—which he cooked to perfection.”
Larsen’s Fish Market, in the tiny fishing village of Menemsha, had the most amazing selection of fresh seafood, off-loaded from working boats that docked right at the back door in the small harbor.
“You melted the butter and poured the drinks. A match made in heaven.”
“Don’t forget I’m in charge of the fireplace, too. I even remembered to open the flue.”
“Mid-September? Wasn’t it a tad warm for a fire?”
“I opened all the windows. The fire helped with the atmosphere,” I said. “You can’t imagine how nervous I was.”
“Did you manage to get through the first night without any shop talk?” Catherine asked. “No double helixes or autopsy photos or dramatic readings from the penal law?”
“Totally social. I don’t think Mike’s ever gone that long without measuring someone for a body bag.”
Catherine was quiet for the next few blocks. “I have to ask,” she said. “Did any of your demons show up after dark?”
“You’re a great friend,” I said. She had been witness to all of my darkest moments over the years. “Thanks for asking. No, nothing at all. No nightmares, no one stalking me, no old lovers. The whole thing felt very safe, very normal.”
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