In fact, it had taken the panel all of an hour of closed-door deliberations to return with their verdict. "Figa announced that there was enough evidence to conclude that Coach Mikey O'Toole violated ACAA rules governing recruiting practices and that such violations placed a stain on the integrity of his university and the American Collegiate Athletic Association," Meyers recalled.
"I couldn't believe it," O'Toole said quietly. "It was like my brother's case all over again. They said I was suspended from coaching at the collegiate level for a period of ten years. It pretty much meant the end of my coaching career-at least at the college level; no one will hire me again, even if I could wait ten years."
"We immediately asked Huttington for a public name-clearing hearing at the university," Meyers said. "It was the only chance Mikey had to get his side out to the public. But Huttington put on this long face and said he was sorry, but it wouldn't be in the best interest of the university."
"They fired me the next day," O'Toole said.
"So you filed a lawsuit in federal court?" Karp asked.
Both men nodded. "Yeah, I did some research and thought we might make a case for a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest violation," Meyers said.
"Very good," Karp said, genuinely impressed.
"I don't get it," Marlene said, looking puzzled. "I know it's been a while since I've practiced, but how is this a liberty interest case? He wasn't charged with a crime; no one is threatening to deprive him of his liberty."
Recalling his conversation on that very topic a month earlier with the Breakfast Club, Karp looked at Meyers. "Care to explain?"
"Sure, I'll take a crack at it," the young attorney replied. "Marlene, the courts have repeatedly held that the constitutional guarantees first stated in the Declaration of Independence to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness include the right of Americans to pursue their chosen profession. Mikey O'Toole's chosen profession is coaching baseball at the collegiate level. Yet, the panel took away that liberty without so much as a nod to the concept of due process. And the public university that fired him denied Mikey a name-clearing hearing, published the false and defamatory charges, and in so doing stigmatized him, which will prevent Mikey from coaching again at the collegiate and probably high school level. How's that, Butch?"
"Well put," Karp replied. "I tried one of these myself during a foray into private practice a few years back on behalf of the city's chief medical examiner. Jury bought into it and it resulted in a hefty check for the CME." He looked from one of the men to the other and smiled. "I have to say that you probably wasted your time and money coming here-not that we haven't enjoyed your company. But I think you're right on track and that, Mikey, you have a fine attorney representing you. I can't think of anything to add, though I'll mull this over, and if anything comes up that might help, I'll call. But the main point is that you don't need me."
O'Toole and Meyers gave each other the same funny look that Karp had noticed the night before. "But that's just it, Mr. Karp," Meyers said, choosing his words carefully. "I think I do need your help. I've never tried a case in federal court, or picked a jury for anything more complex than a burglary trial or a property dispute. Zusskin has twenty years of trials on me, and he'll have help from whomever the university uses as its attorney, plus the resources of the ACAA and the university."
Meyers stood and faced the picture window, looking out at the lights of Lower Manhattan, and then turned back to Karp. "I'll be honest, my friend's whole future is on the line here, and I'm scared to death that I'll mess this up-not from a lack of effort, but a lack of experience. I'm asking you to please consider being lead counsel; I'd count myself honored to sit second chair."
Karp sat stunned by the emotional appeal. "I'm the one who's honored by the request," he said. "But you'll be fine. You've done the groundwork; keep it up and you'll take it to these guys. I'm the district attorney of New York, and I'm not really free, nor am I sure it's proper for me to take on a civil case in Idaho, no matter how I feel about your client."
"Nonsense, Karp," Marlene said, surprising her husband and the others in the room. "You're on a leave of absence, and I think it would be good for you to get out of Manhattan. Think of it as dabbing your toe back in the water before you jump in feet first."
Karp started to protest but Marlene held up her hand, and this time the look on her face said as much as her words. "And are you really going to let them do to Mikey what they did to Fred?" The comment went right to his heart, as she had known it would. Her smile challenged him to come up with another excuse, but he surrendered.
"I guess not," he said, and turned to his visitors. "Looks like we'll be coming to Idaho. But on one condition, Richie."
"What's that?"
"There's no second seating," Karp said, standing up. "It's an equal partnership, or nothing."
Meyers laughed and stuck out his hand. "Then put it there, pardner."
O'Toole also stood to shake his hand. "Thanks, Butch, my brother was right about you. He always called you his brother."
Karp felt his throat constrict at the word. "He was a good man," he said. "I owe him."
The moment was shattered by the ringing of the telephone. Marlene and Karp both looked at the phone but neither moved to pick it up immediately.
"Late-night calls to the home of the New York district attorney are rarely good news," Marlene said to the confused visitors as she finally moved to look at the caller ID. She picked up the phone and handed it to Karp. "It's Gilbert Murrow."
12
It took a moment to grasp what Murrow was saying. He was obviously crying and it was all Karp could do to calm him down as he sat on the couch and started scribbling on his notepad.
"There's been a bomb!" Murrow yelled into the telephone. "At your uncle's restaurant in Brighton Beach. The Black Sea Cafe. And…oh my God, what am I going to do…everybody's dead…I think Ariadne's dead!"
Murrow had broken down again, and there'd been nothing Karp could do except show his notes to Marlene, who was looking over his shoulder. Bomb at the Black Sea. Ariadne may be hurt.
"Okay, Gilbert, I know this is tough," Karp said as calmly as he could. "But start at the beginning and tell me what you know is for sure."
His tone seemed to help Murrow pull it together. "Ariadne said she was going to meet someone at the Black Sea Cafe for an interview. She didn't say who or what it was for but that it had to be tonight. I shouldn't have let her go…I should have gone with her…"
"Gilbert," Karp said sharply. "I need you to stay with me. I'm sure there's nothing you could have done differently, but that's not what's important now."
Karp heard loud sniffling and throat-clearing before Murrow continued. "Anyway, she had this interview. She called me just before going into the restaurant. She had to have been there for a couple of hours at least. The police have talked to witnesses who saw someone who looks like her having dinner there with another one of the victims-some mob guy. Then the bomb went off."
The phone went quiet and Karp sensed Murrow struggling to remain in control. "I was asleep…waiting for her to come home." He choked up. "I…I got a phone call-some guy with an accent told me to turn on the news… I think he was trying to help. I turned on the television and this was all over it. As soon as I heard the name of the restaurant, I rushed over here as fast as I could. It's horrible. There's blood and bodies everywhere… Fulton's here, too. I called him on the way down."
"Thanks, Gilbert, let me speak to him for a moment," Karp said.
"Butch?"
"Yeah, Clay. Sounds bad."
"It is. According to witnesses, there was at least one family with kids, maybe two, plus some other folks and the staff. They're still trying to clear the rubble and put out small fires. But they haven't found anybody alive yet."
"Have they identified Ariadne?"
"Nope," Fulton said. "But most of the bodies they have recovered so far are pretty torn up and burned. It may take DNA testing for so
me of them, according to the crime scene guys. But Gilbert thinks she was here and like he told you, a woman matching her description was seen at one of the tables just before the bomb went off."
"Who do they have for suspects?"
"Not much," Fulton answered. "A couple of NYPD detectives working in organized crime think this was aimed at the Karchovskis. Apparently, some youngbloods from Moscow are trying to establish themselves."
Fulton let the last sentence hang in the air. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that Vladimir Karchovski was the nephew of Karp's paternal grandfather. As a young man, Vladimir had been forced to flee the Soviet Union, leaving his young wife and son, Ivgeny, behind. Ivgeny had overcome his Jewish heritage-definitely not an advantage then in that part of the world, no more than it had been in the past-to become a colonel in the Red Army. But after he'd been wounded in Afghanistan and forced out of the military, he'd immigrated to America to join his father.
There'd never been much contact between Karp's family and the Karchovskis over the years; they had a mutual understanding that their respective careers made it problematic. Karp was the district attorney of New York. The Karchovskis ran a crime syndicate. Granted, it was one of the more benign criminal enterprises-no drugs, no prostitution, just smuggling Russian emigres and goods like caviar into the United States and exporting U.S. goods into the black market in Moscow. But they'd been known to defend themselves and their turf with swift, ruthless violence.
The Karchovskis had been careful not to let their business affairs cross into Karp's jurisdiction and put him in an awkward position. But over the past year, their paths had suddenly converged. It began when the Karchovskis had come into information that helped Karp nail a gang that had viciously raped and nearly killed a young woman. And, by seeming coincidence, Marlene had proved the innocence of Ivgeny's half brother, a professor of Russian literature, who'd been wrongfully accused of sexually assaulting a student. The cases had brought the families back into each other's orbit and it had grown from there.
Compounding the problem was the fact that Karp actually liked his relatives, not to mention Marlene had been practically adopted by Vladimir as the daughter he'd never had. Thus far, the family connections had been kept a secret from the outside world, but Karp had deemed it necessary to let a few of his closest advisors in on "the family skeleton."
As the keeper of Karp's schedule and office administrator, Murrow had been told of Karp's connection to the Karchovskis, and to Karp's surprise he had apparently kept the information from his girlfriend; at least it had never appeared in print. V. T. Newbury, Ray Guma, and Harry Kipman, the trio who formed the inner circle of his office confidants, had been told because they were also his best friends and the men he trusted most. Of them, Guma had seemed the least surprised, and Karp surmised that due to Ray's own familial ties to the Italian mob, he might have already known. The other two had taken it in stride. In fact, nothing seemed to surprise anybody when it came to the Karp-Ciampi clan anymore. "The Coincidence Fairy needs to take a Valium when it comes to this family," Butch had told Marlene. "Even fiction doesn't get this weird."
And, of course, Fulton knew about the Karchovskis because he was responsible for Karp's security. His response was typical, a shrug and a comment: I'm like you. As long as they're not breaking any laws in my neck of the woods, I don't have time to worry about it. Besides, you can't pick your relatives, and you know the rest.
"Who do you think planted the bomb and why?" Karp now asked Fulton, and could almost hear the big detective again shrug his shoulders.
"This stuff happens in gangland," Fulton said. "There's no saying what Ariadne was up to except that the guy she was with was part of the Karchovski family. She could have been working on a story about the Russian mob. Then again, there are those reports she's been writing about Kane and the hostage situation at St. Patrick's."
Ivgeny Karchovski was convinced that elements of the Russian government were complicit in staging "terrorist" attacks in Chechnya in part through the efforts of Russian agent Nadya Malovo, who'd pulled off Kane's escape. He believed that these elements were using the threat of Islamic terrorism to cast aspersions on the legitimate aims of Chechen nationalists, who happened to be Muslim, in order to control the oil flow through that satellite state.
Karp was about to ask which theory Fulton was leaning toward when he heard a shout in the background. "Hey, Butch! Looks like they found somebody alive," Fulton yelled into the phone. "I'm handing this back to Gilbert."
The next thing Karp heard was the sound of Murrow's breathing as he apparently ran toward where the shouts were coming from. "Gilbert, tell me what's going on," he demanded.
"They've found somebody, Butch," Gilbert replied breathlessly.
Karp detected the hope in his friend's voice and prayed that it wouldn't turn out to be false. This time his prayer was answered.
"It's her, Butch," Murrow shouted. "And she's alive! I think I saw her move her fingers. They're bringing her out on a backboard." There was silence and when Murrow came back, he was more subdued. "She's unconscious and…she looks pretty banged up. Sorry, Butch, I gotta go. I want to ride with her to the hospital."
The telephone went dead, but Fulton had called back from his phone a few minutes later. "Hard to tell," he replied when asked about Stupenagel's condition. "Out cold. Unresponsive. They had her strapped to a backboard, but that could have been precautionary. They loaded her up pretty quick into the ambulance."
"Let's get her some protection," Karp said. "I don't want to see what happens when somebody swings a third time."
"Already on it," Fulton said. "A couple of my guys are on their way to the hospital as we speak. Not that any bad guys will get past Murrow. They weren't going to let him on the ambulance, but he climbed in anyway and wouldn't come out. I had to have a word with the driver. I also sent a couple more to watch your place, just in case this is the start of something big."
Karp hung up and told Marlene and their two visitors what he knew. He walked over and looked down at the street from his window just as an unmarked police car pulled up and parked across the street.
"Wow," O'Toole said. "My problems are pretty insignificant compared to something like this. Maybe it's not fair to ask you to help me."
Karp looked at his wife, who was waiting to see how he would answer. "We'll play it by ear," he said. "But for now, I'm still on your team."
Two weeks later, Karp and Marlene walked into the room at Beth Israel hospital where they found Murrow sitting next to Stupenagel, reading to her from David McCullough's book 1776.
"Amazing we ever won the Revolutionary War," Murrow said when he saw them. "I think Americans today could learn a lesson or two from those first guys about courage and faith in the face of adversity." He put the book down and stood to hug them, then excused himself.
It had looked dicey when Stupenagel was brought in. Along with a broken arm, cracked vertebrae in her neck, and burns to her left leg, her skull had been fractured and there'd been significant swelling of her brain that could have proved fatal. But the doctors had induced a coma to allow her brain to heal, and she'd hung in there until gradually awakening on her own.
When she woke, the first person she saw was Gilbert Murrow sleeping in a chair next to the bed. With his round cheeks and pouty lips, his glasses askew on his face, he looked like a little boy, except for several days' growth of beard. He appeared to have been wearing the same clothes for a week.
In that instant, Ariadne's qualms about spending the rest of her life with just one man evaporated. She was content to watch him sleep and get used to the idea that she was completely in love with him. When he finally opened his eyes and saw that she was awake, he smiled and wiped away at a tear that rolled down his cheek, then stood to lean over and kiss her tenderly on her bruised lips.
"I love you, Ariadne," he said quietly. "You are never to go where I can't follow."
"I love you, too, Gilbert," she wh
ispered. "And I would never dream of it."
They had all since learned that it was the call of nature that had saved her. "I was sitting on the damn toilet when the world came apart." She'd been found sandwiched between the steel walls of the toilet stall, which had protected her from most of the flying debris, the flash fire, and the weight of the wall that collapsed on top of her.
"Glad to see you're doing okay," Karp said after his assistant left the room. "But we didn't mean to chase Gilbert off."
"I asked him to give us a few minutes alone when you arrived," Stupenagel explained. "Hearing about all of this upsets him. Anyway, I know you don't have to answer me, Butch, but I need to ask if you've reviewed the evidence from the crime scene?"
Karp nodded. "I'm on the Five Boroughs antiterrorism committee and we got a report. Plus, Fulton and I asked to sit down with the detectives handling the case and review what they'd found to see if we might spot something that would indicate this was something more than gang warfare."
"So you've concluded that this was a terrorist attack, not a mob thing?" Stupenagel asked.
"Do you ever stop being a nosy reporter? Only a few days removed from getting blown up, and you're trying to get a quote out of me," Karp said, shaking his head.
"Nah, I'm not looking for a quote," Stupenagel insisted with a laugh that made her wince in pain. "At least not at the moment, though give me a couple more days and I'll be banging on your door."
"Well-and this is off the record, just in case you 'forget' what you just said-we're not sure yet if this was a turf battle or something else," Karp said. "But we're treating any mass murder, particularly in this fashion, as a terrorist act."
"I think you know better," Stupenagel said. "They were after me and/or the guy I was meeting and what he was about to give me."
"Yeah, and what was that? I heard you haven't been too cooperative about your dinner date," Karp replied.
The forensics guys had told him what they knew. The bomb had been contained in a blue Samsonite Oyster 26" Cartwheel, purchased in 2005 at the company's store in Stratford, Canada. It had contained hundreds of ball bearings packed around a very difficult to obtain, military-grade plastic explosive, and a canister of high-octane fuel. The bomb had been detonated by remote control using a transmitter and receiver from a toy car available at any electronics store-presumably by the couple who had been sitting with the suitcase when Stupenagel entered the restaurant.
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