The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein (4 page)

He looked up at me and saw that my eyes were open. "I'm not doing a very good job of distracting you, am I? I know, I know. It's hard to go from what you've seen tonight to making love to me. Come here." He lay flat on his back and pulled me against his side, cradling my head in his arm and holding me tight. "Close your eyes, darling. Think about something else. Pick a place, anywhere in the world. Let's plan a vacation for the end of next month. Someplace with turquoise water, no police department, and funny drinks with little paper umbrellas stuck in them that magically start appearing at noon every day."

I picked up one of his hands and pressed it against my lips. "Good night, Jake. I'm glad you're here. It means the world to me."

I stared at him as his eyes closed and he tried to position himself for sleep. I knew how fortunate I was to have a lover who understood the demands of the work I had chosen. It seemed like an odd career to many of my friends and acquaintances, but Jake understood the great emotional satisfaction the job provided for me.

Nights like this one always made me wonder about what it was in my life that had prepared me for such an unusual occupation. I had grown up in a close-knit family of great privilege and personal strength. My two older brothers and I were young children when my father, Benjamin Cooper, revolutionized the field of cardiac surgery with an ingenious invention that he and his partner created. The Cooper-Hoffman valve, a tiny piece of plastic tubing, was a critical component in every heart operation in this country for more than fifteen years after they introduced it to the medical community. Still, he and my mother remained grounded, raising the three of us in suburban Westchester County, with an emphasis on superior education and a commitment to giving back to society in any way possible.

After my education at Wellesley College, with a major in English literature, I had surprised them by going on to law school at the University of Virginia. My commitment to public service was to try a stint in the greatest prosecutor's office in the country, working to do justice with a district attorney whose integrity was legendary. Although I had planned to stay for only a few years before going on to private practice, Paul Battaglia's innovative approach to combating crime had given me a unique foothold in the legal community.

Battaglia's office had pioneered the idea of a specialized unit to investigate and prosecute crimes of violence against women and children. For so many decades, victims of sexual assault were denied access to courts of law, these intimate violations handled differently from other criminal cases. The word of a woman had not been legally sufficient to take her case into a courtroom because of myths and misconceptions that had actually become embodied in the legislation that this country had adapted from British common law. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s across America, the legislative reform that enabled these cases to proceed sparked the birth of police and prosecutorial units, evidence collection techniques, and continued lobbying efforts for improvements in the criminal justice system. Nowhere were these changes more boldly employed than under the guidance of Paul Battaglia.

It had been a dozen years since I had joined his legal staff and been promoted to run that distinctive unit. When I tried my first rape case in front of a jury, my three favorite letters of the alphabet--DNA--although sequenced that way in a laboratory several years earlier, had not yet been accepted in the scientific or legal communities or developed enough to yield the forensic results that are so decisive for victims today. And now, not only do we use it on a daily basis to exonerate men wrongly accused of crimes, but we achieve victories in cases of homicide and sexual assault that would not have been possible a decade ago.

Those triumphs, those days that we could give a just result to a victim of violence, were what made every moment of this job a joy to me and my colleagues. The rewards were much richer than the experience of an evening like this, when the enormity of a particular tragedy and the loss of a single life overwhelmed all our good work.

Jake stirred beside me and rolled onto his side again.

"You're not still writing your summation for the trial about this body you found tonight, are you? You haven't got anyone to prosecute yet. C'mon, Alex. Shut it down."

I closed my eyes and nestled my body against his. "Did you say Newark?"

"Newark what?"

"A couple of minutes ago, when I asked you if you went downtown with Thibodaux to see the girl's body, did you say you were in Newark?"

I was finally beginning to feel drowsy. "Yeah."

"So what morgue is Mike going to with the body?"

"Ours."

"How'd you get the body back over here from Jersey?"

"I stole it."

"No, seriously."

"I'm being serious."

Jake had propped himself up on one arm now, just as I was getting comfortable. "Did you give this story to anyone yet?"

"Don't be ridiculous. This neck that you were kissing? It may not be marble, but I'd still like to keep it intact. The cardinal rule is that I need to tell the district attorney about the case before anyone writes a press release. Remember?"

Paul Battaglia had more media sense than anyone I had ever encountered. He had the wisdom to call in chits and favors owed from reporters with valuable information and unnamed sources, and he knew how to repay them with a great scoop carefully timed and planted. An exclusive, if the subject matter was right for it. This one was his to deal out.

"You think this story's going to stay quiet, just amongst your little circle of friends?"

"For the moment, yes. Thibodaux has no interest in publishing a rumor that some unfortunate young lady shuffled off her mortal coil on her way out the door of his museum, if that's what happened. Nobody knows who she is, or where and how she died. And Mike Chapman hates the press. All the guys in his squad do. The media does nothing except make their work more difficult, especially in a high-profile investigation. Then there's me, and I have the good sense to drop this right in Paul Battaglia's lap. Not to mention that I'm exhausted now. Can we talk about this tomorrow?"

"That's my point, darling. I'm having breakfast with Brian Williams." Jake subbed for Williams on the nightly cable news desk, and they had become good friends.

"Don't even think about it."

"I'd never discuss your cases with anyone unless you gave me permission. You know that. But this one's going to get out before the day is over. You can't sit on the story of a dead girl in an ancient sarcophagus shipped out of the largest art museum in America, and a controversial prosecutor who spirited the body out of one jurisdiction back to Manhattan. We'll do it tastefully, darling. It might as well be our story to break."

"Save thedarling for another time, will you? Tell anyone and I swear that I'll never talk to you again." I pulled the sheet up over the top of my head to end the conversation.

It wasn't enough that the coffin had developed cracks. Now I had to worry about leaks from my own bedroom.

4

"I'd like to be in the room when you interview my daughter, ma'am."

"I'll answer all your questions, Mrs. Alfieri, when I'm done speaking with Angel. In the meantime, I'm going to give you a newspaper to read and ask you to take a seat in the waiting area. The detective and I need to be alone with her."

"But she's only fourteen. I got a right to--"

Somehow, everybody had a laundry list of rights that I couldn't find anywhere in the Constitution. "We're preparing your daughter to testify about her case before the grand jury. That's what the law calls a secret proceeding. I'll be the only person in the room with Angel, aside from the jurors and the stenographer. I need to get her used to talking about what happened without you holding her hand."

She frowned at me and waddled behind Detective Vandomir as he led her down the hallway. I waited for him at my door. "I couldn't shake her loose the other night," he said. "Good move."

"My first rule of thumb with a dishonest witness: get the mother, the boyfriend, the sister out of the picture. Find some way to do it, whatever works. You never get the truth when they have to admit to someone close to them that they've been lying. Where are you with her?"

"Mother works for one of those overnight mail services. TenP.M . to four in the morning, five nights a week. Ex-husband lives in Florida. Angel and her two kid brothers are home alone. Perp is a livery cabdriver who drove Angel to her house from the hospital about a month ago, after she visited her grandmother, who had some serious surgery.

"Kid says he showed up at the door the other night, forced her up the stairs into her bedroom at knife point, and raped her."

"Brothers hear anything?"

"Sleeping in the room right up against her wall. Not a peep."

"Outcry?" "Immediate. That's on her side. Called 911 a little after midnight, a few minutes after she says he left."

"Medical exam?"

"Inconclusive. She says he didn't ejaculate, so there's no semen. No way to do DNA. And she's sexually active. Three partners."

"Some little angel."

"Yeah, she's already got chlamydia. Mother doesn't know about that either."

"Tell me about the perp."

"He's a real dirtbag. Forty-eight years old, has a bunch of collars for drug possession, boosting cars, doing break-ins. Nothing like this. Nothing violent. Floor of his car full of kiddie-porn magazines and condom wrappers. No knife."

"He got a story?"

"Yeah. Starts the same way. Picked her up outside of Metropolitan Hospital. By the time they hit 110th Street, she was sitting in the front seat, writing down her beeper number so he could page her at school the next day. Met her a couple of times after class. Drove her around with her friends. Oral sex once or twice in the backseat. Even did a threesome with Angel and one of the other cherubs in her pack. Says she invited him to come over this past Monday night when her mother left for work."

"You tell her what he said?"

"Yeah. She denies it. Says the only way he knew where she lived was because he had driven her home from the hospital that one time. Gave her his card with his cell phone, in case she needed to use him again. That's how we got him. I called and asked him to pick me up in front of the deli next door to our office, and then invited him to step inside to help my clearance rate for the month. Collars for dollars."

"She understands we're going to get her beeper information and his cell phone records?"

"I don't think it had the same impact on her as it does when you tell an adult. She didn't seem to grasp that all of this is computerized now. I explained to her that every time he beeped her or she called him, it's just like leaving a fingerprint. Not sure she believes me."

"Or wants to. Let's give her a go." I turned the door handle and went into my office, where Angel had been waiting for us.

She smiled at Vandomir as we entered, and closed the small mirrored case in which she had been examining herself, rubbing one last application of a fruity-smelling gloss over her lips. She tugged at the straps of her bright yellow tank top, pulling it into place so the rhinestone letters that formed the wordGangsta stretched from nipple to nipple. "Angel, this is Ms. Cooper, the lawyer I told you about. She's going to be handling your case. She's got some more questions for you."

"You understand why you're here today, Angel?"

"Not really. I told him everything that happened." She jerked her head in Vandomir's direction. "I don't know why I have to explain it over again. You just oughtta keep Felix locked up so he don't do this to nobody else."

"In order for that to happen, we have to find out exactly what he did. I'm going to ask you the same things the detective did, maybe even more questions. And what you say stays in this room, do you understand that? If there's something that went on between you and Felix that you don't want your mother to know about, thenthis is the time and place to let me know about it."

She lifted her eyes to look at me, without moving her head.

"What do you mean?"

"Do you have any idea what goes on at a trial, Angel?"

"I don't want to be at no trial. I just want the judge to sentence him to jail." "That's not how it works. You watch television?"

"Yeah."

"Ever see any of those cop shows where the guys go to trial? You know who's in the courtroom when the witness testifies?"

"Me. Him. The judge. You. That's when I gotta tell what he did to me."

"And what do you think Felix does, after you testify?"

"I don't know."

"He gets to talk to the jury, too, if he wants to. He gets to tell them the story the wayhe says it happened. Those twelve people don't know you, and they don't know him, so they have to try to figure out which one of you to believe, whose story makes more sense."

"How come he gets to talk?" That part of the process clearly bothered her. "He's gonna lie anyway. He's gonna say I invited him to my house."

Angel's tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth, sounding a strong note of disapproval at the defense she had just offered on Felix's behalf, and she slumped farther down in her chair. Her shoulders sagged forward, theg anda rhinestones disappearing from my view. All that was left were the letters forming the wordangst. "Let me tell you about lying in a court of law. Did the detective tell you that it's a crime, too? That if you take an oath to tell the truth but you lie on the witness stand, you can be arrested?"

"Felix raped me. I'm not lying about that. You can't arrest me for nothing. I'm too young." The pout had passed momentarily, and she was emboldened by the thought that her age would protect her from my lightly veiled threat.

Don't test me today, Angel. "Actually, wecan arrest you. Your case is heard in family court because you're not sixteen. But the judge there can send you to a foster home upstate, take you away from your mother --"

That snapped her to attention. "I don't want to be doing this now. I want to go home."

"I'm afraid that's not one of your choices. A man has been arrested because of the story you told Detective Vandomir. He's been in jail for a couple of days, charged with the most serious thing one human being can do to another, short of murder. And he belongs there, if he held a knife to you and raped you. He belongs there for a very long time.