Lethal Legacy (5 page)

“I didn’t know you could qualify for the Supremes
if you were living in France. There must be some kind of jurisdictional
requirement.”

I looked up from my notes and bit on the tip of my
fountain pen, but I was unable to suppress a smile. “Michael Patrick Chapman.
Is that what’s bugging you? Have you been working overtime on my love life? All
you had to do was ask.”

One of the city’s most experienced homicide
detectives turned scarlet from his brow to the point where his neck disappeared
into his shirt collar.

“No need to pry into that, blondie. You’re wearing
it all over your puss. Be a shame to waste the latest Parisian fashions under
long black judicial robes, if you ask me,” Mike said. “And that skirt you’re
wearing is way too short for Judge Moffett. His defibrillator might zap into
overtime.”

I looked down at the navy blue suit I’d bought on
the Avenue Montaigne when I had last visited Luc Rouget, the Frenchman I’d been
dating since early summer. Anything not to make eye contact with Mike.

“Make you a deal,” I said. “Let’s get through this
Griggs motion today and we can catch up over dinner. I never meant to hold back
anything from you or Mercer. Luc turned up in the middle of a killing spree and
my personal life deservedly took a back seat.”

“You don’t owe me any explanation,” he said,
shifting away from me. “Skip the talk tonight and just feed me, Coop. But
you’ll have to take yourself out of that chic getup before cocktails. Too rich
for my blood.”

“I’ll call Mercer. The three of us haven’t been
out in more than a month. I’m buying.”

“What if it’s about kinky sex?” Mike asked,
balling up his napkin and tossing it over my head into the garbage.

My turn to blush. “Kinky what?”

“Not you and the French guy, kid. Tina Barr. Maybe
she was tied up ’cause she wanted to be. Could explain why she wouldn’t talk.”

We had seen it all, working sex crimes and
homicide. Just when one of us thought there was nothing left to shock, along
came a new way for two people to amuse themselves in the privacy of their
homes.

“A long shot,” I said. “But always a possibility.”

“Think about it. Broad’s tied up and
gagged—there’s evidence to support that—but tells you she wasn’t raped.
Wouldn’t be anything to call the cops about if she consented.”

I slipped my heels off under the desk before Mike
could comment on their style, and replaced them with a sturdier work shoe for
our court appearance. “Maybe.”

“What do you know about chloroform?” Mike asked.
“Pick up anything medically useful from your old man while you were growing
up?”

“Wasn’t it the first anesthetic used for women in
childbirth in the nineteenth century? Till the docs found out it was too
toxic.”

“Well, it’s still around, and it caused three
deaths, just in the north, in the last eighteen months,” Mike said.

New York County—the island of Manhattan—was split
in half by the NYPD for the management of unnatural-death investigations.
Mike’s office, the Manhattan North Homicide Squad, responded to everything from
Fifty-ninth Street to the tip of Spuyten Duyvil, while its southern counterpart
took the territory from midtown down to the Battery.

“You’re not talking serial killer again?”

“Nope,” Mike said, topping off his bagel with a
handful of red licorice sticks. “It’s a phenomenon called SSD. Sudden sniffers’
death. Lieutenant Peterson’s been all over these cases lately, he told me
yesterday. Easy to buy the ingredients on the Web. Chloroform’s a central
nervous system depressant. If it doesn’t kill you, inhaling it for the high
will at least leave you dizzy and tired, with a crushing headache.”

“So you think Tina OD’d accidentally, trying to
get tuned up for some kind of sexual encounter?” I asked. “I don’t know, Mike.
She claimed the guy tried to kill her.”

“So maybe he did, if you can believe her at this
point.”

“It’s the ‘tried to’ that stops me short. He was
in there for hours. He certainly had the opportunity.”

“She said she played dead, Coop. If her breathing was
shallow enough, maybe the perp thought he
had
killed her. Could be why
he ran out of the place the way he did.”

“It still doesn’t explain his disguise,” I said.

“I’m just saying you should call her. You’re the
hand holder. You’re the one who’s supposed to be so good at bonding with your
victims.”

Mercer and I liked working with survivors of
sexual assault, helping them recover from the trauma they had experienced, in
addition to bringing the criminal to justice. Mike was used to the cold
finality of death investigations. No victims with ambivalence about their
attackers, no quirky personalities to soothe and stroke. Dead bodies and crime
scenes might hold puzzles for pathologists and detectives, but unlike their
living counterparts, they never lied.

Laura stood in the doorway with the documents.
“Mattie just called. She’s going to jump in a cab as soon as possible. Shall I
tell her to go right to the courtroom?”

“Good idea, Laura. Thanks.”

The buzzer on my telephone console rang as its red
light flashed insistently. Paul Battaglia, the district attorney of New York
County for more than twenty years, had a hotline to each of his bureau chiefs.
He didn’t like to wait for answers to questions handed him by reporters,
politicians, rivals, and concerned citizens.

“Yes, Paul?”

“I need ten minutes of your time,” Battaglia said.
“The mayor’s looking for where I stand on that legislative proposal we
discussed.”

“I’ll be over as soon as I finish an argument I’ve
got in front of Judge Moffett.”

“I need you right now, Alexandra. I’m already late
for City Hall. I don’t expect you to keep the mayor waiting.”

FOUR

Rose Malone, Battaglia’s executive assistant
and my trusted friend, waved me into his suite without buzzing the intercom.
Her lack of a cheerful greeting let me know that the district attorney hadn’t
started the day in a good mood.

“Do I have a position on this Halloween business,
Alexandra?” Battaglia had called me in to discuss a legislative proposal about
sex offenders that had become a controversial piece of the city council’s
agenda. He started walking from his desk to the large conference table at the
rear end of his office as soon as he saw me cross the threshold. “Did I make up
my mind about what we’re going to say?”

“Not as of the last time we discussed it.”

“Sit down,” he said, his teeth gripping the long
unlit cigar in the middle of his mouth. “What is it, just a few weeks until
Halloween?”

“Yes.”

“I guess the mayor is trying to grandstand here.
Show that his balls are bigger than mine. What’s he up to?”

“I read the proposal. Half a dozen states and a
lot of local authorities have been trying to place restrictions on registered
sex offenders for just that one night a year,” I said. “Some communities are
requiring them to attend four-or five-hour educational programs on Halloween.
In Virginia, they’ve all got to report to their parole officers between four
and eight p.m., so they’re not at home to answer the door when kids come
trick-or-treating. That’s the model the mayor wants to adopt in the city.”

“What do I think of it?” Battaglia asked. He was
the consummate politician and had enough confidence in his senior staff to let
us participate in important decisions, even though he had a long memory for
mistakes.

“Pretty useless.”

He lifted his glasses off his nose and rested them
on top of his forehead. “Sexual predators are one of the major concerns in law
enforcement. You’ve got a holiday here that offers a tantalizing chance for
these perverts to have unsupervised contact with kids. The youngsters knock on
the door, ask for some candy, and God knows what can happen to them.”

“It’s one night a year, boss. If the legislature
puts some teeth in the laws we’ve already got, then maybe the police could
actually monitor the offenders they’re supposed to be tracking.”

Battaglia rarely removed the cigar when he spoke,
just stretching the corners of his mouth around it without slurring any of his
words. “And the advocate groups? Where do they come down on this?”

“Not impressed. Most children are victimized by
people they know and trust, not by strangers. This draft doesn’t even
distinguish between pedophiles and perps who committed crimes against adults.
You won’t get any heat from victims’ groups if you don’t support the proposal.
Press for enough money to track the registered offenders 24/7. That’s where the
real problem is.”

Battaglia got up and removed his suit jacket from
the back of the chair. That would serve as a dismissal. I stood up to leave the
room.

“How about the flip side?” he asked.

“What would that be?”

“Well, that Halloween presents another danger for
kids. Offenders could be dressed in costumes, too. Abducting teens or children
from the street, or knocking on doors in some kind of disguise.”

“I’ll tell you, Paul, we haven’t seen any problems
on Halloween over the years. Late October hasn’t been high season for sex
crimes.”

“You’re not hanging me out to dry in front of the
press, Alex, are you?”

I assumed Battaglia was joking, and I laughed as I
started for the door. “I wouldn’t think of doing that until my pension vests,
Paul.”

“I’m not kidding. I smell a setup over at City
Hall.”

I turned to face him, and he removed the cigar
from his mouth. “This brouhaha last night, Alex. Some guy broke into a girl’s
apartment dressed up like a fireman, right?” he said. “How come you didn’t call
me about it?”

“Well, there isn’t actually a case, Paul,” I said.
His displeasure was visible in his scowl. I had irked him by neglecting to
inform him about a matter that I’d miscalculated in importance, but which must
have a link to a player in his political world.

“Somebody at City Hall seems to think otherwise.
It’s all to do with disguises and assaults, isn’t it?”

“I wish I could tell you what happened, but the
victim hasn’t been cooperative with us.”

“Get on it, Alex. Bring her in. Find out what this
is about.”

It hadn’t occurred to me while I pleaded with her
in the drab hallway outside her basement sublet the night before that Tina Barr
had any high-powered clout. I wanted to know who had gotten to Battaglia on her
behalf—or on the part of her mysterious assailant, which worried me more.

“You know something about Ms. Barr that I should
be aware of?” I asked.

He put his glasses back on and started to read a
memo that was on the table. It was an easy way to ignore my question. Either
Battaglia had been leaked a tidbit and was looking for me to give him more
information, or something so sensitive was involved that he wasn’t willing to
disclose it.

I tried again. “Is it the victim you’re interested
in, Paul, or is it the perp?”

“As long as I’m the district attorney, Alexandra,
I’ll ask the questions,” Battaglia said. “You get me the girl.”

FIVE