Cold Hit (30 page)

“Iverson and Bellman.”

“Dammit, Mercer. Get your ass outta that bed. I wouldn’t let those two lightweights handle a bad check. They treat you okay, Coop?”

I shook my head up and down.

At about midnight, a policewoman from the Sixth Precinct came up to the nurses’ station with a few containers of hot soup for Mike and me.

I walked it back over to Mercer’s room. Mike was standing now, and I could hear him saying something about an administration.

“What are you talking about now?” I asked. “Can I spell you for a while?”

“Know how they say people in a coma can hear you? Well, if that’s true and he’s only sleeping off some gas, I’ll be getting through to him before too long. I just want mine to be the first voice he hears. Remember my dictionary? I’m going through it with him now. Used to make Mercer so mad — especially if all the other guys were laughing when I did it — he’d be ready to punch me in the face.”

Chapman always joked that he was going to sell a reference book to compete with the
O.E.D
. — the
Oxford English Dictionary
. He called it the
C.P.D
. —
Chapman’s Perpetrators’ Dictionary
— and he thought it should be printed and issued to every rookie in the department.

He took his seat by Mercer’s side. “I’m only halfway through the
A
’s. ‘Administration’ — that’s when a woman gets her period.” Then he launched into an imitation of the high-pitched voice of a female witness. “‘But Detective Wallace, I couldn’t let him do the nasty to me. I was on my administration last week.’

“ ‘Athaletic.’ Used interchangeably with the word ‘ epileptic.’ ‘Officer Chapman, you can’t go arresting my brother. He be having an athaletic fit right now.’

“ ‘Ax.’ What you do uptown with a question. ‘Officer, let me ax you this… ’ You ever know anybody Irish or Jewish or Italian who axes questions, do you?”

“Alex, are you in here?”

Mercer’s frail voice came at us from the other side of the bed, his eyes still closed, his head still facing toward the wall, and his words barely audible. Mike bounced up from his chair, grabbed Mercer’s left ankle — which seemed to be the only part of him not hooked to any kind of medical device — and started kissing the sole of his foot. I answered “Yes,” and we both bent over to get close enough to hear Mercer speak.

His lips pulled together to form a smile. “Will you get that racist son of a bitch out of this room?”

“Cold hit, Coop.” I had just stepped out of the shower a few minutes after seven o’clock on Monday morning, and Jake handed me the telephone to take Mike Chapman’s call.

“On what?”

“Bob Thaler just called. He said they got a match on the semen found on the canvas tarp that was in the back of Omar Sheffield’s station wagon — the one that Denise Caxton’s body had been wrapped in. Did it through the data bank.”

“Cold hit” was the slang term that scientists used to describe what occurred when a computer made a successful comparison between DNA samples, linking a piece of forensic evidence to an actual human being.

The detectives did not have to submit names, latent prints, mug shots, or vouchers for hours of overtime legwork in order for this technology to work. The computer’s ability to make a cold hit took only an instant.

Thaler was the chief serologist at the Medical Examiner’s Office and had helped to pioneer this technology. The data bank had been established by the New York State legislature, and there were data banks in almost every state by the late 1990 s. New York’s was slowly being filled with the genetic fingerprints — DNA developed from a single vial of blood — taken from every prisoner in the state convicted of sexual assault or homicide. Like their latent print counterparts, these unique codes were becoming an invaluable tool in the solution of cases of rape and murder.

“Who’s the match?” I asked.

“Anton Bailey. Convicted of larceny three years ago up in Buffalo. Did half of a four-year sentence and was released to parole eight months back.”

“Then why was he in the data bank?” His blood would not have been taken for a crime like larceny, a non-violent theft.

“That’s just it. He wasn’t in the New York base. Thaler had the Feds run it interstate and, sure enough, got a hit in the Florida data bank.” The Sunshine State had passed the legislation before most other parts of the country. “Seems like Mr. Bailey had gone by a different name down South — Anthony Bailor. And Mr. Bailor did some hard time back in Gainesville. Put away at eighteen, for almost twenty years. Rape in the first degree.

“So it looks like Anton Bailey is the man who sexually assaulted Denise Caxton.”

“And killed her.”

“Talk about cold hits,” Mike said. “If this isn’t a straight-out sexual assault gone bad, then someone must have hired old Anton to do Deni in. That could be the coldest hit of all.”

“Now all we need to do is figure how and where he came into this picture.”

“Thaler’s the only government guy whose office opens up at seven a.m. I’ll get on the horn to State Correction after nine. Just thought you’d like to know first thing.”

“How’s your patient?”

“Restless night. He was in a lot of pain. But they’re taking some of the tubes out today and hope to get him moved into a private room.”

“Battaglia arranged a full security crew for me until this thing is over. I told him I already feel like I have a human straitjacket wrapped around me. They’re driving me down to the office. Are you doing any interviews today?”

“If they have Mercer set up by the early afternoon, I’ll call you so you can come up to the office with me. I’m beginning to think it’s safer to let our interviewees drop by our place.”

“What did you do about sleeping?”

“Not as cozy as you. Nurses let me curl up on a gurney in the hallway.”

“Anybody I.D. the girl yet?” I asked, assuming the receptionist who opened the door for Mercer and me yesterday, whom I had first seen at Deni’s gallery, could be a link to the killer.

“Yeah. Name was Cynthia Greeley. Twenty-three years old, from Saint Louis. Bryan Daughtry claims that most of the time she freelanced. He insists that it was Deni who hired the kid, not him. And that Deni met her when she was working for Lowell, on Fifty-seventh Street. Lowell thought Cynthia had too many pierced body parts to be working the uptown scene, so he was glad to let her go.”

One more twisted path to unravel. “I’ll get down to work and wait to hear from you. Give Mercer’s hand a squeeze for me. Tell him I’ll come over with you tonight. Need a place to clean up this morning?”

“Nah. I can shower at the squad. Change of clothes in my locker. See you later.”

Battaglia had assigned two detectives from the D.A.’s Squad to accompany me from place to place for the duration of the investigation. I didn’t like the restrictions it imposed or the waste of taxpayers’ money. But he had given me no choice and had sent them to the hospital last evening. They had driven me to my apartment so I could pack a suitcase of belongings that would get me through the week, and then on to Jake’s home, not too far from my own. Front-door-to-front-door service.

I had reached there in time to find Jake watching the news on CNN. It was after one o’clock in the morning. “Turn it off and I promise not to tell anyone at NBC that you were checking out the competition,” I said to him when he embraced me at the door. “I don’t want to hear anyone else’s spin on the day, okay?”

I stripped my blood-soaked clothes off right there in the hallway and stood naked, offering them to him with both hands. “Take these to the incinerator and just throw them down the chute, would you please? I’m going to take a bath. I don’t suppose you have anything that passes for bubbles here, do you?”

“No, but the bar’s still open,” he said, kissing the tip of my nose. “If I can see through the steam, I’ll bring you in a drink as soon as I’ve dumped these.”

I soaked in the tub while Jake sat on the floor beside me, sipping his drink while I tasted mine. I told him how Mercer and I had walked into the trap that had been so carefully laid for us at the exhibit, and how terrified I had been at the thought of losing Mercer. Jake didn’t interrupt at all as I went on and on, stepping from the tub into the bath sheet that he wrapped around me; then I shivered for the first time in days as I tied the belt of his white terry robe on my waist and sat on the edge of the bed to call my mother and let her know that I was okay.

I stared into the masked face of our gunman — seeing nothing — for what seemed like hours, until I finally fell asleep on my side, with Jake’s arm resting on my shoulder.

At seven forty-five I was ready to leave for the office. “What’s your day like today?” I asked Jake, watching him knot his tie and ready himself for the crosstown ride to the NBC offices at Rockefeller Center.

“Kind of like yours, in the sense that I won’t really know until I get there. I’m supposed to be covering the secretary of state’s speech at the U.N. Do I have to worry about
you
as well, or just nuclear warheads, civil wars, and an erupting volcano in the Antilles?” he said jokingly.

“Battaglia has me under lock and key. So, your beeper will call my beeper?”

“Count on it. See you tonight.”

I was out the door and down the FDR Drive with my armed escorts. The early arrival gave me time to catch up on the matters that had come in on Friday, when I had stolen the day to get away to the Vineyard. I checked my appointment book. One of the assistants had asked me to pencil in a re-interview at ten with her witness in a domestic violence case.

That gave me a couple of hours to return phone messages and speak with friends. As my colleagues began to arrive, many dropped by my office to see how I was, express their concern, and ask about Mercer, having heard accounts of the shooting on last evening’s news. I finally shut my door to avoid a visit from Pat McKinney. There was enough salt in my emotional wounds without his venom added.

At ten fifteen I called Maggie to check whether her witness had arrived.

“She just called to cancel. Her husband offered to take her on a cruise over Labor Day weekend. She’d like to come see you when she gets back in two weeks. Guess she isn’t quite as frightened of him as I thought.”

That freed up another hour of the morning, or so I thought until Laura buzzed to say that one of the young lawyers from Trial Bureau 60 had been sent to discuss a new case with me. I opened my door and found Craig Tompkins waiting outside.

“Something different, at least for me. The intake supervisor thought you might have some ideas about how to charge this.”

“What have you got?”

“The security guards over at the Javits Center are holding a guy, but I’m not sure they’ve got a crime to arrest him for.”

“What did he do?” The Javits building was the city’s convention hall and regularly the scene of large group meetings, trade association gatherings, and exhibitions.

“He signed up to attend this week’s Trekkies reunion. Seems to have spent all day yesterday riding up and down the escalators, from floor to floor. Kind of got the guards’ attention ’cause he was sort of goofy looking, carrying around a big gym bag the whole time, but never actually went into any of the lectures or conference rooms. When he came back in this morning, the head of security took a few rides up the escalator, right behind the guy.

“This jerk’s got a video camera hidden in the bag. What he does is wait for a girl in a short dress to get on in front of him, then he rides up behind her, holding the camera so it shoots the view up her skirt. A thrill a minute, I guess.”

“So what did they do with him?”

“Arrested him for harassment. Confiscated the gym bag and the video camera.”

“Sounds right to me. What’s the problem?”

“Well, they don’t have any victims.”

“What about the women he was filming?” In order to make out the charge of harassment, there would have to be people who would claim that the amateur moviemaker’s conduct had annoyed or alarmed them.

“None of them ever realized what he was doing. They each just stepped off the escalator at the end of the ride, unaware that they had been immortalized on film. Then the security guys played back the videotape. Thighs, knees, lots of underwear — but nobody is recognizable from the angle of the shots. No way to figure out who they are.”

I thought for a minute. “How about trespass? That he was unauthorized to be in the center.”

“Won’t work either. He paid full price for admission and that entitles him to be in the facility.”

“Did he make any statements? Admissions?”

“Yeah, he gave it all right up. Married businessman from Connecticut, works for a public utility company there. Started doing this a year ago, just ’cause it turns him on.”

“Talk about arrested development. Guess he never got past the sixth grade.”

“Now he says he can sell them to a Web site. It’s called U.S. Videos — only, the initials stand for ‘Up-Skirt.’ Lots of videocam voyeurs, he claims. Cops checked it out. Each tape sells for forty bucks.”

“And that’s exactly what’s on ’em?” I asked incredulously. “I’m not sure there’s anything criminal to charge him with. Let me call Mark.” The usual response for any of us in the Trial Division when we were stuck on legal issues a lot thornier than this was to reach out for the head of the Appeals Bureau, our in-house lawman. We waited for his callback, which confirmed that there was no recourse in the criminal justice system for the Trekkie’s actions. Craig used my phone to tell the Javits security force to let the guy go. The Internet was creating more opportunities for perverts than most of us had imagined, and law enforcement agencies were less aggressive than the cyber-geeks in coming up with solutions.

Mike called from Mercer’s room at eleven thirty. “Forget those surgeons you saw yesterday. There’s a lady doc here today, and a posse of very attentive nurses, and I think Mercer Wallace is really on the mend.

“I’m gonna scoot up to the squad at one. The pain medication makes Mercer pretty sleepy. His father wants to sit with him this afternoon. Varelli’s assistant is going to come in for an interview. Wanna be there?”