Entombed (3 page)

"So it was a good
idea, then, for me to think of doing this, wasn't it?" Battaglia said,
smiling at Mercer.

He was in a better
mood for the second part of my request. "I'm going to need money, Paul.
The ME's office will have to retest all of the old samples to conform
to the current standard number of loci. We may need to outsource some
of them to private labs, which gets pretty expensive. And Mercer's got
some interesting approaches that are going to cost us a bit of-"

"Whatever happened to
old-fashioned legwork, Detective? Pounding the pavement, spreading some
five-dollar bills around town till somebody drops a dime on the perp?"

"Mr. Lincoln's
portrait? I haven't broken a case using small change like that since I
was in the Academy. This guy beat me first time around, Mr. Battaglia,
and I'm damned if it will happen again. He's escalated the violence
already."

"I thought this case
wasn't completed. He didn't rape her, did he?"

"Only because she
fought with every ounce of strength she had to stop him. That's why she
was almost killed," I said. "Resisting him-probably because he tried to
tie her up."

This predator was fuel
for a tabloid feeding frenzy. Not only did he target women in one of
Manhattan's toniest residential neighborhoods, long known as the Silk
Stocking District because of the wealthy New Yorkers who built mansions
there a century ago. He also used panty hose to bind his victims' hands
together after he had subdued the women at knifepoint. It didn't matter
to the
New
York Post
that most hosiery hadn't been made of silk since the
Second
World War. Nylon, Lycra, and spandex didn't quite have the same ring on
the front page of the morning papers.

The police
commissioner's press release tonight would be cause for flooding the
area with additional street cops in a precinct already stretched thin
by manning security posts on the consulates, diplomatic residences, and
high-profile public buildings like art museums that sat within its
borders.

"So, no stocking to
tie her up this time, but you're willing to go with some drool on the
cigarette butt to confirm it's the same man?"

"We don't even know
what he did to her, Mr. Battaglia. She hasn't been able to talk yet.
The docs have only let me in long enough to ask a handful of questions.
I'm not sure how he tried to restrain her. She may have started to kick
and fight because of the weapon alone, or because he actually brought
out the stocking to tie her. Now that I have the hit from Thaler, I'll
go back up to the hospital and see if she's ready to give me more."

"Maybe I can put
together an array of composite sketches," I said, "to see whether she
picks out our man from the old drawing."

"When I interviewed
her briefly, it was before I knew about the DNA match. This time, I can
ask her if she saw any panty hose. With or without the hosiery, science
will prove it to an absolute certainty."

"Mercer wants me to
hire a geographic profiler, Paul. There's a guy in Vancouver who's
willing to fly in and-"

"I thought you didn't
believe in that profiling mumbo jumbo, Alex."

"I don't. Not the
psychological crap. 'You're looking for a guy who had a bad experience
with a woman when he was nine, Ms. Cooper. Your rapist probably has
trouble expressing himself to women in a normal sexual setting.' 'No
kidding, Doc. I'll keep that in mind.' We're not talking about that
nonsense, Paul."

"This fellow I've
introduced Alex to has solved pattern crimes all over the country. You
bring him in and he studies each of the scenes, same time of night,
same lighting conditions as when the crimes happened," Mercer said.
"Helps us figure out how our perp conceals himself from victims who
never see him coming until they've got the key in the brownstone lock.
And more important, gives us a clue how he gets away afterwards when
we've had the area saturated with police."

"Don't you remember,
Paul? Four years back the task force beefed up street patrol,
anti-crime units, undercovers on foot and in unmarked cars. They had
helicopters on standby, canine on the sidewalk within minutes of each
attack. Cops were at subway entrances and cruising in medallion cabs.
Even the tollbooths at the bridges and tunnels were doing car checks."

I reached for the
poster board, which had been wedged behind one of my file cabinets for
the last four years until I pulled it out on our return from the
hospital to add the new site to the old pattern. I lifted it onto my
desk so Battaglia could see it better and circled the line of pushpins
that ran from Annika's building through the locations of the older
cases. Every attack had occurred between Sixty-sixth and Eighty-fourth
Streets, Second Avenue to the river, two long blocks east of the
nearest subway line.

"The rapist likes it
here, boss. He moves around easily, he's confident that he can strike
and get away without being caught. Every time he can score and make an
escape, he'll get more arrogant about his ability."

"Which means?"

"He works right in
here, maybe," Mercer said. "Or he lives here. He's back off the street
too fast to be hoofing it over to Lexington Avenue to grab a subway.
He's got an anchor point somewhere right in this 'hood, even though
it's a lily-white part of town and his complexion is as dark as mine.
It's where he leaves from and it's where he returns right after the
attack. It's his bat cave."

"You think flying your
expert in will make a difference?" Battaglia asked, looking at his
watch. He ignored the racial observation, which raised the potential of
an ugly campaign problem.

"We've got very little
to lose," Mercer said. "This is the first time the perp has drawn
blood. If he liked it, if it didn't bother him to leave his prey for
dead, then we're going to see him do that again."

I fished in the old
case folder and pulled out a yellowed piece of newspaper. Battaglia was
turning to the door as he told us to go ahead with our plans, but I
thought I saw him flinch as I opened the clipping to show him a
headline he probably recalled from several years back, shortly before
election day in his last race: snag in silk stocking-Prosecutor's
Promises to End Serial Attacks Gets Hosed.

3

Mercer reached into my
closet for his leather jacket and handed me my winter coat and scarf.
"Are you serious about tomorrow? You want me to have one of my
complainants down here to testify?"

"I already reserved an
hour in an afternoon grand jury, just in case Battaglia saw the light,"
I said. "They were impaneled on Monday so they'll be sitting through
the end of February. Do you think you can reach any of the old
witnesses tonight?"

Mercer was religious
about staying in contact with his victims. In the decade since we
started using DNA to solve stranger-rape cases, even the civilians were
aware that investigations that seemed to have gone cold could be
revived instantly as the input from data banks all over America grew
and became standardized.

He listed the names of
the women he had to call this evening. Neither of us wanted them to
hear from the media that the man who had attacked them was suddenly
active again. Each of their lives had been traumatized by these events,
and all had recovered to different degrees. I was a firm believer that
a successful prosecution would further aid their recovery.

"I'd like to start
with Darra Goldswit. She's solid, she's always been ready to do
whatever you think is best, and she still lives in the tristate area."

I flipped through her
case file, which Mercer and I regularly updated with contact
information as she and the other witnesses moved to new homes,
graduated from schools, changed jobs, married, and generally got on
with their lives. "Need the number? I'll read over the police reports
and be ready for her by the time you get here."

He copied her home
telephone number and cell from my folder.

"If you can have her
here at one, we'll be the first in the afternoon jury at two o'clock. I
can put the medical evidence and lab report in after she finishes."
There were at least six grand juries that sat in Manhattan every
weekday, three that convened in the morning and the others in the
afternoon.

"I'm off to
headquarters. The commissioner wants me right by his side when he makes
the announcement."

It was usually tough
for the PC to decide when to publicly declare a crime series a pattern.
Too early and it might create unnecessary panic within the community,
while too late would lead to criticism about failure to keep those at
risk from knowing the danger. This was an easy call because the cases
had been such big news stories four years earlier, and now the
reliability of DNA technology left no doubt that the new attack was the
work of the same man.

The news reporters
would want details of Annika Jelt's assault and though they were few at
this point, Mercer Wallace knew them better than anyone else. He and I
were the only people who had interviewed every one of the women who had
been brutalized in the older cases. He would stand on the podium behind
the commissioner, alongside the very somber chief of detectives, and
provide whatever information they deemed appropriate to release at this
point.

"I'll watch for you on
the eleven o'clock news. Call me if anything interesting develops
tonight, okay?"

"You going to be home,
Alex?"

"Girls' night out. But
a very tame one. There's a seminar at NYU Law School and Nan Toth is
dragging four of us with her. We get our continuing legal education
credit if we show up for the two-hour lecture, made painless by
stopping at the alumni reception first with Nan. She promises enough
wine and cheese to tolerate a panel of legal experts explaining the
most significant Supreme Court decisions of the last year."

We rode down in the
elevator together and walked out onto Hogan Place, the narrow side
street that housed both buildings of the DA's office. The wind and
biting cold embraced me.

"You meeting them
here?" Mercer asked.

I looped the scarf
around my neck and shook my head. "They gave up on me when they heard
Battaglia was stopping by my office at six. I'll grab a cab up to
Washington Square."

Mercer waved one down
in front of the courthouse and tugged on the fringe of my scarf as he
said good night. He was three short blocks from One Police Plaza.

The law school was on
Fourth Street, the southern border of the square, and a very short ride
from my office. I got out of the cab in front of the main building,
careful to step around the icy patches of sidewalk left over from the
weekend storm.

A security guard
stopped me at the front door and asked where I was going. "The
reception has already started, miss. It's in the new building, not
here."

"But I thought-"

"Eighty-five West
Third Street."

My dismay was obvious.
I had rushed Nan off the phone and never asked the exact address. Now I
didn't feature going back out into the cold.

"Just around the
corner, miss," the guard said. "Not very far. The block between
Sullivan and Thompson Streets."

It felt like it was
twenty degrees or below outside. I put my head down and fought the wind
as I made my way down the narrow street, so typical of Greenwich
Village. I followed several men with litigation bags up the steps of
the small brick building in the middle of the block, moving against the
flow of other partygoers on their way out.

"Your coat, madam?" A
young man standing beside a metal rack checked my things and I
continued inside until I saw my friends from the office.

"I recommend the red,"
Catherine Dashfer said, holding up her glass. "Enough of the wine and
you won't feel quite the urge to punch out Scalia when they discuss his
opinions."

"Sorry it took me so
long. I went to the law school first. What's this?" I looked around at
the bare walls of this shell of a building, which looked more like a
tenement than a major academic facility.

"They're tearing this
dump down and putting up an enormous new structure in its place," Nan
said. "Check it out downstairs."

"Check what out?"

"The dean's got a
construction crew in the basement, using crowbars to break down pieces
of the wall."

"Seven o'clock at
night? With that kind of overtime, no wonder the tuition here is so
high."

"It's all part of the
show for this evening's alumni dedication ceremony for the new school
building."

The bartender handed
me a glass of red wine. "Am I supposed to say that sounds like a
riveting evening? Worth skipping the lecture to see?"

"Not exactly. But this
brownstone is more than two hundred years old. The excavation has
turned up all sorts of artifacts from colonial days. Teacups,
silverware, pewter bowls. You'd love it."

"Why now? Why tonight?"

"Give the big donors a
show. How often do you get to see a bit of New York City history
uncovered before your very eyes? C'mon."

"I've seen enough.
It's claustrophobic down there," Marisa Bourgis said to Sarah Brenner,
the deputy of my unit, who was nodding in agreement.

"I'm game," I said,
and followed Nan and Catherine to the staircase that led down to the
basement.

Two dozen men in a
variety of pin-striped and chalk-striped suits mingled with a handful
of lady lawyers, while three other guys in hard hats chipped away at
discolored old bricks. A table in the corner held the assorted debris
recovered from behind the eastern portion of the wall that had been
revealed in the hours before I arrived. I sipped at my wine and
examined a wooden implement- some kind of primitive kitchen tool, I
assumed-while Nan stopped to speak with one of her former professors.