Lethal Legacy (4 page)

“Date of birth?”

She gave the year first, then told him March 14.

“Your height and weight?”

“Five-four.” She was six inches shorter than I,
and weighed almost the same. “One thirty-five.”

“What kind of insurance you got?”

Tina covered her mouth with her hand, as though
she was going to be sick again.

“You got insurance?”

“No.”

The EMT looked over her head at me and I nodded.
The hospital would get its money from the crime victims compensation board if
Barr didn’t pay. This wasn’t the time or place to dicker about who’d foot the
bill for the expensive sexual assault examination.

“How about your occupation?”

“I’m—uh—I’m a librarian.”

“Nice. You like books. Me, I don’t have time to
read.” Vasquez was filling in the blank spaces on his form. “Who’s your
employer? Would that be the city?”

“I’m not working at the moment. I quit my last job
just a week ago.”

“City’s got good benefits. You should think about
it. Which branch, Ms. Barr? It’s regulations. I gotta put something in this
box.”

“No, it wasn’t the city. It was private. It’s
over.”

The driver made the turn onto Madison Avenue and
we headed north. Vasquez put his clipboard on his lap, took Tina’s pressure,
and recorded the numbers.

“You mind if I check your eyes?”

The young woman shook her head from side to side
and Vasquez leaned in, studying her pupils and making a note, I guessed, about
how dilated they were.

“You want to start with what happened to you,
miss?”

“I’m not really sure. I know I was drugged, but
that’s all I can tell you,” Tina said. “And I’ve got a terrible headache now.”

“Any idea what kind of drug?”

“Like I told Ms. Cooper, I don’t know. But I’m
really thirsty,” she said, licking her lips.

“Sorry. You’re dehydrated, but the triage nurse
will see you in a few minutes. No point giving you anything before that. She
may want to start an IV.”

We were at the hospital in less than five minutes.
It was background information about Tina Barr that I wanted—something to lead
me to why she was victimized this way—but Jorge Vasquez had as much pedigree as
he needed.

When he opened the rear doors of the ambulance at
the hospital receiving bay, Mercer was waiting for me. I stepped around the
gurney and jumped down, holding on to his hand.

“I think we’re better off keeping Ms. Barr right
here till she’s called in for triage. It’s kind of zooey in there,” Mercer
said.

“We can hold,” Vasquez said. “I could use the
break.”

“They got a gunshot wound in the chest.
Fifteen-year-old kid caught in the crossfire of two dealers. A bad car crash on
the FDR Drive—three passengers with head trauma—and the typical assortment of
fractures and bellyaches. You know a possible rape won’t be seen till daybreak
unless you can pull some strings, Alexandra.”

Most victims of sexual assault presented to
treating physicians without any external physical injury. To an emergency
specialist, the trauma had occurred when the crime was committed. The survivor
who presented at the hospital was not in need of life-saving treatment like the
other medical patients, but rather was there for evidence collection and
psychological counseling. Without advocates or forensic examiners on call,
these women were often the most neglected emergency room visitors, waiting
hours to be evaluated.

“We’ll try to get you in as quickly as we can,” I
said to Tina, leaving her in the care of Vasquez and his partner as I turned to
follow Mercer into the ER.

The security guard stood back as Mercer flashed
his gold shield and the automatic double doors swung open to admit us. A dozen
curtained cubicles—all seemingly occupied—formed a semicircle around the
nurses’ station, where Mike had settled in with his feet on the counter, eating
chocolates from a box on the desk.

“Have you spoken to the head nurse?”

“Yeah, we’re somewhere between the heart attack in
that corner and the domestic dispute racheted up till the missus settled it by
hurling a meat cleaver at the bum’s neck,” Mike said.

One of the nurses emerged from behind the thin
curtains of the first treatment area, and Mike waved him over. “This is Ms.
Cooper, Joe. You any good at splinter removal? She’s had a stick up her ass for
the last couple of months, and I was hoping—”

“We’re waiting for one of the SAVI volunteers, Ms.
Cooper,” Joe said, stripping his bloodied gloves off and dropping them in the
hazardous-waste bin along with the syringe in his hand. He was the size of a
fullback, a black man with skin as dark as Mercer’s, and not in the mood for
Mike’s humor. “Get you in here as soon as we can. I’ve got one going up to
X-ray and another for admission, just waiting on a room.”

“This may not have seemed urgent when the
detectives first called,” I said, knowing that it might take half an hour for a
sexual assault violence intervention program advocate to reach the ER, “but
Tina’s in worse shape than we thought.”

I pulled the rag from my pocket, pinching it on a
corner to hold it up. “The perp soaked this in something and knocked her out by
putting it over her nose and mouth.”

“Nice save, Coop.” Mike stood and bent over the
counter, sniffing at the rag. “What’s your guess, Joe? Ether of some kind? Not
so noxious as that. Maybe chloroform?”

Joe didn’t want to come closer. “If that’s what it
was, it’s enough to cause a fatal cardiac arrhythmia.”

“That baby’s going straight to the lab, Coop.”

“Tell the EMTs to bring her right in,” Joe said.
“Let’s get your girl worked up.”

The three of us headed for the exit, past the
waiting area filled with anxious family members and friends, down the driveway
and onto the street. The driver had backed out of the bay to leave room for the
next arrival and double-parked on Madison Avenue.

Jorge Vasquez was leaning against the side of the
red-and-white ambulance. Mercer waved at him as we approached, telling him to
move it in and unload the patient.

Vasquez shrugged his shoulders.

“Don’t give me that ‘not my job’ crap,” Mike said.
“Roll it.”

“I’m empty, man,” Vasquez said, brushing his hands
against each other like he was dusting off crumbs. “The broad took off.”

“Took off where?” I asked.

“RMA, Ms. Cooper. I can’t be holding nobody
against her will.”

Tina Barr had refused medical attention, despite
the ordeal she’d survived.

“Which way’d she go?”

“No sé,”
Vasquez
said. “She told me she never wanted the cops called in the first place. Jumped
out the bus and said to tell you to leave her alone.”

THREE

“I still think we could have beat Tina to her
apartment,” Mike said, several hours later, as he sat across the desk from me.

“To what end? For some reason, she never wanted
any of us involved in the first place. It was the neighbor—not Tina—who called
911.”

“I don’t know. Should have scooped her up and made
her a material witness till we figured out what happened.”

“No such thing as getting a material witness order
unless there’s a pending prosecution,” I said, continuing to make notes on a
legal pad, charting the chronology of a murder investigation we’d been working
on for several months. “You know that.”

“Are you going to follow up with her now?”

“I’m giving Tina a day to settle down. By then
she’ll realize the flashbacks and night sweats won’t go away by themselves. She
might even welcome the chance to talk about it.”

We were in my office in the Sex Crimes Prosecution
Unit on the eighth floor of Manhattan’s Criminal Courthouse at nine-thirty on
Wednesday morning. Mike had brought me a third cup of coffee and took the lid
off after he set out his bagel on top of a file cabinet, using a manila folder
as a place mat.

“How come Judge Moffett scheduled a hearing on the
Griggs case? You don’t even have an arrest yet.”

We had been working on the rape-homicide of a
nineteen-year-old-girl named Kayesha Avon that had taken place almost eight
years earlier. The case had gone cold long ago, but the recent submission to
the databank of the DNA profile of a man named Jamal Griggs and the near match
that resulted had given Mike a reason to revive the investigation.

“Jamal Griggs doesn’t like the idea that we’re so
interested in his family tree,” I said.

Jamal and his brother Wesley, known to us as the
Weasel, had floated in and out of the criminal justice system for most of their
adult lives. Despite Jamal’s homicide conviction as a teenager—or maybe because
of it—he and Wesley had become part of the entourage that surrounded and sold
drugs to the crews of late thug rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.

“I applied for a search warrant to get into the
California database to see what it tells us about Wesley’s DNA, and must have
struck a nerve. Jamal’s new counsel requested a chance to oppose my motion. I
need you and Mattie Prinzer,” I said, referring to the forensic biologist who
headed the lab at OCME, the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, “to make my
case.”

“Jamal get himself a new suit? Last I knew he was
a poster boy for the Legal Aid Society. How’s he paying for a lawyer?”

“I have the feeling we’re going to meet the new
suit in the courtroom. He’s been dispatched from the City of Angels by the
Weasel.”

“Amazing that Wesley made it out the ’hood,” Mike
said. The thirty-two-year-old wannabe gangsta had moved from pushing crack
cocaine on East Harlem street corners to producing records in Hollywood, while
his baby brother was behind bars again for an armed robbery of a gas station in
Queens. “I think a proper homecoming would be a sweet thing, Coop.”

“I’m a long way from blowing up balloons and
mailing out save-the-date cards for the Weasel’s return to New York,” I said.
“Would you give these lab reports to Laura, please, and ask her to make copies?
I’ll have to turn them over to defense counsel if Moffett makes you two
testify.”

Mike walked to the door and handed the case file
to my secretary. He was wearing his trademark navy blazer with a pale blue
button-down shirt and crisply pressed khakis. His dark good looks and
irrepressible grin were an appealing combination, and his intelligence and
experience made him a trusted partner—like Mercer—in the most difficult cases
we’d handled together.

“You think maybe she knew him?”

“Did Kayesha Avon know Wesley Griggs?” I asked.

“No, no, no. I’m thinking about Tina Barr. Maybe
she didn’t want to cooperate with us because she made the man beneath the mask.
Or he actually took it off once he got inside the apartment. If she recognized
the guy, could be she knows how dangerous it is for her and that’s why she fled
the scene.”

I was studying Jamal Griggs’s presentence report,
trying to get a sense of whether he had a favorite modus operandi. “Could be.”

“Don’t you think that puts her at greater risk
now? Don’t you need to do something to safeguard her?”

“And what would that be, since she’s expressed
herself so clearly? I can’t take her hostage if she’s so dead set against
reporting this.”

“Did you ask for a detail to sit in front of
Tina’s house?”

“The CO turned me down flat.”

“Use your juice, Coop. There’s a couple of dudes
at headquarters who think you walk on bottled water. Call in a chit.”

“Yeah, and maybe you can forward my nomination to
the Supreme Court in case there’s a vacancy. That would be an easier task than
getting Commissioner Scully to sign off on a spare RMP for a victim who tied up
enormous resources in the middle of the night and then took a hike with no
explanation at all.”

There was a shortage of both manpower and radio
motor patrol cars because of the spike in violent crimes charted since the
summer.