The Deadhouse (12 page)

When I pressed further, Shirley admitted that she had never attended
the college, and had purchased the phony card on Forty-second Street,
where just about any kind of counterfeit document is available for a
price. I clipped the fake ID to her case file and continued asking
questions.

From then on, she avoided eye contact while staring at the file.
Once the interview about the alleged attack was completed, she asked
for her ID back. I refused, explaining that it was forged and had no
legal validity. I had steered her down to Witness Aid, where she could
get help with her counseling needs and the problems with her landlord,
who was trying to evict her because she was four months in arrears in
her rent. The next day I learned she was wanted for shoplifting at a
store near her parents' home in Maryland.

"What stirred her up yesterday?"

"Well, when she read about the professor who was murdered— the
Dakota woman—she said it made her think about you again, and how mad
she was that you took her ID."

"Did she tell you what made her angry?"

"You'll think it's crazy. But then, you know she's got an extensive
psych history, right? She's been on medication for two years. Says
she's gained more than eighty pounds. Shirley says that ID has the only
pretty picture of her that she's got, and she wants it back."

"And you didn't call to tell me that she wanted it?" It would have
been easy to deal with. I could have given her the photo without the
bogus identification card.

"Well, Ms. Cooper, I know I learned it in graduate school, but I
forgot completely about the whole 'duty to warn' doctrine. I mean,
everybody says you're so independent, it never occurred to me that poor
little Shirley Denzig could really get to you."

My heart was beating faster. I was standing at the side of my bed,
with my coat and gloves still on, listening to this conversation about
the unhinged young woman who had apparently just shown up at my door.
"Warn me about
what?"

"The law says that it's not betraying the privilege for me to tell
you if a patient threatens your—"

"I know what the case law says, Joan. The patient's privilege ends
when the public peril begins. I want to know what Shirley said."

"She told me that she wanted to see you dead, just like the
professor. She asked me how you got to work every day, and what time
you left for home."

So far, I wasn't worried. The answers were that my travel route and
hours were never the same two days in a row. This outpatient on a heavy
diet of psychotropic drugs might be interested in making me unhappy,
but she hadn't seemed the least bit dangerous to me.

"Actually, Ms. Cooper, I didn't know whether to believe her or not,
but she told me she had a gun. Stole it from her father's house last
weekend when she went home to Baltimore."

That racheted up my attention a notch. "And tonight? What happened
tonight?"

"She showed up at Witness Aid. Told one of my colleagues that she
was a victim in a case of yours. That you had given her your home
number. That she'd been thrown out of her apartment for not paying
rent, and wanted to leave a small gift for you with your doorman. They
know you give witnesses your number from time to time."

Yeah, but generally not to lunatics, if I can help it.

"She acted so upset and all that they gave her the information. They
didn't know how she really felt about you. I'm the only one she told
that to. I just wanted to give you a little warning tonight in case she
shows up. She's very, very mad at you."

"Thanks, Joan. I'm going to have one of the guys from the DA's squad
make a report about this on Monday morning, okay? I'll send him down to
your office. Just tell him what you told me."

I walked to the hall closet and hung up my coat and scarf. I was too
wired to sleep and didn't need any more to drink, so I tried settling
into bed with
The Great Gatsby.
I had embarked on a plan to
reread all of Fitzgerald's novels, but this wasn't the time to begin. I
went back to the living room to find my tote and fished out the
crossword puzzle. The bottom left corner stumped me completely but I
was determined not to go to the encyclopedia to find the four-letter
name of a Tasmanian Indian tribe. I worked around the blank spaces.

At 1 A.M., I called Mike's number to apologize to him for my
remarks at the end of the evening. The phone rang five times before his
outgoing message kicked in. I guess he did have better things to do
with himself than I had suggested.

"Just me. Sorry I snapped at you. Hope you're having a good time,
wherever you are." No point telling him about my disgruntled victim.
He'd hear soon enough. "And you're right about one thing. I should have
taken the shuttle tonight."

I slept fitfully and got out of bed at six-thirty, when I heard the
thud of the Sunday
Times
landing against my door.

I poured coffee beans into the machine and opened the paper while
they ground and the brew began to drip, looking for stories about local
crimes in the Metro section, before turning to the national and
international news.

Mike was right about the food supply in my home, too. There were
three English muffins left in my freezer, so I defrosted one and popped
it into the toaster. I sat at the table and made a shopping list of
groceries to order, figuring that there were some new leaves easier to
turn over in my life than others. Filling the bare cupboards was one of
them.

"When the phone rang at seven-thirty, I was sure it was Jake, and I
picked it up, eager to make our plans for the holiday week. "Alex? It's
Ned Tacchi. Sorry to hit you so early on a Sunday, but we picked one up
during the night that you'll want to know

about."

Tacchi and his partner, Alan Vandomir, were two of my favorite
detectives at Special Victims. Smart, sensitive, and good-humored, they
got victims through the investigative process with kid gloves. When
they called me, I knew it was something I needed

to hear.

"Sure. "What did you get?"

"Push-in sodomy. East Sixty-fourth Street, right off York Avenue.
Fifty-five-year-old woman coming home from a Christmas party at three
this morning."

"How is she?"

"Seems to be doing okay. She's in the ER now. We'll pick her up as
soon as she's released and do a more thorough interview."

"Injuries?"

"Nope. In fact, she called nine-one-one to report it, but didn't
want to go to the hospital. The perp pushed in behind her when she
opened the vestibule door. A bit tipsy."

"Him or her?"

"She was. A little too much holiday cheer. He knew exactly what he
wanted. Told her to get down on her knees, right there in the hallway.
First he lifted her sweater, opened her bra, and put his mouth on her
breasts. Then he exposed himself and made her put her mouth on his
penis."

"Did he ejaculate?"

"Yeah. But she went right upstairs and brushed her teeth. Doubt
we'll get anything for DNA, but she still said she had an awful taste
in her mouth. That's probably more psychological than anything else. We
asked the nurse examiner to do the swabs anyway. We're also having them
swab her breasts."

"Good thinking." Even the microscopic amounts of saliva that might
be found on the victim's torso would yield enough material for the
newer kind of DNA process—STR testing—in which "short tandem repeats"
of the genetic fingerprint are multiplied millions of times to yield
the unique, identifiable patterns.

"Get her toothbrush, too. You may get lucky. Did he take anything?"

"Yeah. Left with her pocketbook. Didn't get much. She was holding
her keys in her hand the whole time. Just had thirty bucks in her
purse, along with some business cards and her cell phone. Schmuck
dumped the bag in a trash basket a block away. Cell phone is gone, but
we've got the purse. I'm sending the cards over to latent prints,
hoping they can lift something off the surfaces, if he touched them."

"Has she canceled the cell phone yet?"

"No. We told her not to for twenty-four hours."

"Great. When I get to the office in the morning, I'll fax you up a
subpoena." Most of the guys who stole cell phones during robberies were
stupid enough to make calls on them until the phones were cut off or
the batteries went dead. With records from the companies available in
three or four days, we could often track down the offenders through the
calls they placed to friends or

relatives.

"Thought Battaglia might want to know that the commissioner is
looking over a bunch of cases in the Nineteenth Precinct. They're
probably going to declare this as part of a pattern." "I didn't know we
had anything else like this going on." "Not up at our shop. But the
precinct has about four other push-in robberies between Sixtieth and
Sixty-eighth Streets, Second Avenue to the river, since the beginning
of November. Mostly weekends. All the victims are women. This is the
first time the perp has forced a sexual assault, but the MO is pretty
much the same. Then he snatches the bag every time and he always runs

south."

"Same 'scrip?"

"Pretty close. Most describe him as a male black, five-ten to six
feet, stocky. Well dressed, clean-cut, very articulate. Has a slight
accent, but nobody can place exactly what it is. Some say islands, some
say French. Hard to know."

"Can you get all the paperwork down to me in the morning so I can
assign it? I'm jammed up with the Dakota case. I'll probably give it to
Marisa Bourges or Catherine Dashfer, okay? But keep me posted on any
developments. Are they going to beef up patrol in that area on the
midnight tour, Friday to Sunday?"

"The boss in the Nineteenth wants them to saturate it, but we've
still got Savino and his gang running the task force on the West Side
rapist, so we're stripped of manpower as it is." For almost three
years, an attacker had been operating on the Upper West Side of
Manhattan, and despite an extensive manhunt and a genetic profile that
had been entered in local, state, and national data banks, he continued
to elude us. "We'll call you later if we break anything else on this
today."

I crunched on the cold muffin and poured a second cup of coffee.
Shortly before I started at the district attorney's office more than
ten years ago, not a court in the United States accepted DNA technology
as a valid forensic technique. By the late eighties, as the methodology
was refined in the handful of laboratories that performed the testing,
Frye hearings were held in criminal courtrooms around the country.
Every prosecutor, case by case and state by state, had to convince the
judge—before the evidence could be used at a trial—that the kind of
genetic testing at issue had been deemed reliable by the scientific
community.

By the time this groundbreaking investigative tool had gained
general acceptance in the criminal justice system, it roared into the
headlines in the O. J. Simpson trial, and skeptics everywhere attacked
the soundness of its findings. As a result, standards in lab procedures
were instituted and accreditation practices were firmly established to
reassure investigators of the value and accuracy of this innovative
technique.

Even more important, the actual method of testing improved and
changed dramatically. The original means of performing the exams was
referred to as RFLP, for restriction fragment length polymorphism. It
required large amounts of body fluid, in good condition, to yield a
result. By the late nineties, the transfer to PCR-based
technology—polymerase chain reaction—and the use of short tandem
repeats, almost like photocopying the minuscule particles, expanded the
horizons enormously. It is a method that requires just a minute amount
of material from which to test, and is even successful with old and
degraded samples. DNA technology had revolutionized the nature of our
Work in the short time that I had come to the practice of law, and was
making possible solutions to crimes that had not been dreamed of a
short decade before.

Within a week's time, the swabs taken from a victim's body hours
earlier might supply us with a secret code, unique in all the world to
the man who forced himself upon her this morning. It would be analyzed
and mapped, serologists detailing at least thirteen distinctive loci,
or places on the assailant's genetic fingerprint that matched no other
human being's on earth. They would feed it to the medical examiner's
crime scene computer database to see whether this offender had
committed a similar offense anywhere in New York City. Within the
month, his profile would be uploaded to the state's files in Albany and
the FBI's system in Washington, in hopes that one of those sources
would have this suspect on record in an unrelated arrest, and solve
this latest case with a computer-generated cold hit.

The phone rang again at nine-thirty. "Only three shopping days left
till Christmas. Where shall we meet? Everything in town is open late
today. I need to get Jim's gift, and then pick out something for you to
tell him that I want, just in case he hasn't done

that yet."

One of my closest pals, Joan Stafford, was in town for the weekend,
and we had planned to spend the day together finishing our lists. "He's
already got it wrapped and in your stocking, kiddo. I know exactly what
it is and you're going to be very happy with Santa. You've got to help
me with Jake's. I've thought of almost everybody but him. I'm ready
anytime you are."

"Okay. I've set an itinerary for us. Your time is too precious to
screw around with. We start at James II. Best antique cuff links in
town. Across the street to Turnbull. You must get Jake some more of
those great striped shirts with the white collars. He'll never outdress
Brian Williams, but you can keep trying." A wonderful respite from the
week behind and the week ahead. Joan could make me laugh about
anything. "We skim past Escada. Make sure Elaine has something in mind
for Jake to take you to the Washington Press Club dinner in style. A
quick peek at Asprey. Then a triumphal march up Madison Avenue, in and
out of all the little boutiques. Do you have things for les deux divine
detectives, messieurs Chapman and Wallace? We've got to take care of
those guys—they're so good to you. Lunch at Swifty's, with a spicy
Bloody Mary, and dinner at Lumi's. Dewar's for you and some kind of
delicious red wine for me. You can help me concoct a menu for my New
Year's Eve dinner party. Are we broke yet?"