Devil's Bridge (2 page)

Before they could gather their belongings and follow the crazy lady out of the room, the heavy doors creaked open again.

“You caught a break, Alex,” Fleming said to me. “Did you coach her? Is she part of your stalling-for-time routine?”

“Beyond my doing, Your Honor, but I like her thinking.”

“Well, speak of the devil,” Moretti said. “Detective Michael Chapman, Manhattan North Homicide. We got a body I don’t know about?”

I spun around and saw Mike standing at the back of the large room. He was holding the door open for the exiting line of prospective jurors.

“Speak of what?” Fleming asked.

“I told you Alex had detectives lined up to break my legs. Seems not to be an idle threat if she’s got Chapman on board.”

“Did your man Estevez kill somebody?” the judge said to Moretti as she motioned to Mike to approach the bench.

“Chapman has nothing to do with this case,” I said. “I have no idea why he’s here.”

“Don’t get flustered, Alex,” Moretti said to me. “I think we all have a good idea why he’s here, or haven’t you heard, Judge Fleming?”

“Can we take a break, Your Honor?” I asked. “I can assure you it’s nothing personal.”

“Ten-minute recess, ladies and gentlemen. You’re not to leave this room, but you’re free to check your messages and talk among yourselves,” Fleming said. Then she snapped at the captain as she stepped down from the bench. “Make Mr. Estevez comfortable in his office.”

The fact that any defendant on trial was a prisoner at Rikers Island was supposed to be withheld from the jury. They dressed in civilian clothes, and but for being escorted back to the holding pen behind the courtroom surrounded by four armed men, most jurors would have to guess the fact that Estevez was actually incarcerated.

“Let’s see what Chapman’s got,” Fleming said. “We’ll go to my robing room.”

“Don’t you have a
dis
robing room for them?” Moretti asked.

I walked ahead of Fleming and Moretti, into the short hallway that connected her robing room to the courtroom. Mike caught up with us, offering apologies to the judge, greeting Moretti and me, and closing the door behind him.

“Sorry to break up your trial, Judge. Commissioner Scully asked me to come over to deliver the news to Ms. Cooper face-to-face. Let you know there’ll be a passel of reporters swarming around her when she leaves your courtroom.”

“I have no intention of letting her leave till the close of business, Mr. Chapman. Now, what’s the story?”

My heart was racing. I couldn’t make a connection between Mike and this defendant. I couldn’t think of a reason for Mike to interrupt the middle of my working day, especially since our relationship had now become an intimate one. I was embarrassed by his presence.

“Bad news first. We had an attempted murder early this morning. Rape and stabbing of a teenager in Riverside Park. Likely to die when I got the call, but she seems to be coming around.”

“You’re not getting Ms. Cooper on this one,” Fleming said.

“Not a problem,” I said, avoiding eye contact with both Mike Chapman and the judge. “He’s not here for me. I had a call on this case at nine
A.M.
, before I knew there was anyone in custody, and assigned it to Marissa Bourges.”

Bourges was one of the best lawyers in my unit.

“The commissioner wanted me to deliver good news for a change, and make a plan with the judge about the media. We nailed the bastard who did the girl in the park an hour ago, Coop. It’s Raymond Tanner. You’re out of harm’s way.”

“Sit down before you fall over,” the judge said to me. “Take a deep breath.”

“I’m fine, Your Honor. Really I am. This is great news.” I was shaken by the mention of Tanner’s latest attack, and the reality that I would now have to face him from the witness stand.

“Maybe he needs a good lawyer,” Moretti said. “You might whisper my name in his ear, Chapman.”

“This is the scumbag—excuse me, Judge—that’s got
KILL COOP
inked on his hand, Gino. I’m looking to do more to him than whisper in his ear. Some of his other body parts have my more immediate attention.”

“Don’t tell me anything else about him,” Fleming said, clapping her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to have to recuse myself if this guy winds up in my courtroom. Siberia might not be cold enough for him.”

“The commissioner wants to know whether your court officers can take Alex down to her office at the end of the day. Just so the press guys don’t throw microphones in her face.”

“Sure. We can put her right on the judges’ elevator. Nobody has access to that bank.”

The tiny elevator kept the judiciary away from the great unwashed, so they didn’t have to ride up and down with perps and witnesses, snitches and scoundrels of all sorts. It opened directly into the back room of the office of District Attorney Paul Battaglia on the eighth floor of the massive courthouse.

“Perfect,” I said, trying to control the tremor in my hand by steadying it on the judge’s desk. “Where’s Tanner now?”

“Look,” Fleming said. “Why don’t you two take five minutes in here? Answer all her questions, Detective, so she can get back to concentrating on the business at hand.”

Gino Moretti winked at me as he followed Janet Fleming out of the robing room, a stark space with only a desk, three chairs, and an empty bookcase. There were no curtains on the windows that overlooked the narrow passage of Hogan Place. Elsewhere in the courthouse the judge had chambers with a large office, well decorated and watched over by her secretary.

“You’re okay now, Coop,” Mike said, bracing his back against the door to the room.

I bit my lip and nodded.

“This is weird, don’t you think, kid? That you’re just standing there staring at me?”

“What’s weird about it? I’m not staring.” I shifted my eyes from Mike’s face, focusing on a button on his navy blazer.

“Six months ago, if the same thing had happened, the judge would have walked out and you’d be clinging to me for dear life, asking me to tell you details and stop you from shaking.”

“It’s different now.”

“Yeah, it’s different,” he said, brushing back a shock of dark hair. “It’s supposed to be better. C’mere.”

I walked toward Mike and let him wrap his arms around me. Inside that embrace had always felt like the safest place to be. We had started working together more than a decade ago, and throughout those years had become best friends. Just two months earlier, in August, we had crossed the line and turned our friendship into a romance. I still wasn’t clear on how that would affect things on the job—at crime scenes, the morgue, my office, or his squad room.

Mike took my chin in his hand and tipped my face up to look into his. “It’s over for Tanner, Coop.”

“Don’t kiss—”

“You think I was going to kiss you? Get over yourself, girl. I know where we are.” Mike threw his hands up in the air and walked to the window.

“Sorry for being so awkward,” I said. “Where’s Tanner now?”

“The lieutenant’s going to hold him up uptown at the squad till you leave the building tonight. Whatever time that is. He just doesn’t want you under the same roof at the same time.”

“Crazy to slow down his arraignment for that reason.” I walked to one of the chairs and sat down. “Is he talking?”

“As in a confession? Not a word,” Mike said, walking to the desk, leaning on it as he looked into my eyes. “We don’t need anything from Tanner. Put together all the stuff he’s been doing since he slipped out of his work release program and his rap sheet will reach to Cleveland.”

“The girl, Mike. The likely from this morning. How’s she doing?”

“Collapsed lung from the stab wound, but she’s out of surgery and expected to make it.”

“No lead pipe?” The lethal weapon had been his signature in several cases.

“Except for the crater in this vic’s head, you’d hardly know it was Tanner. Yeah, he had a pipe. Yeah, he tried to smash her skull with it. The guys just haven’t found it yet.”

“Who collared him?” I asked, over my own reaction and interested now in the details. “Please tell me it was Mercer.”

“That’s a better attitude. Show me those whites, Coop.”

I smiled at him, reaching out and covering his hand with one of mine.

“Call it rookie luck. A kid on patrol heard screams, but they stopped so abruptly that he couldn’t find the location. Tanner apparently laid low for a couple of hours, hiding in one of those huge rock formations in the park till the cops scoured the area and cleared out. This kid asks his boss if he could stay on the scene for a while, guessing Tanner hadn’t made it far. Good instincts. And he asked for the K9 Unit to give him a dog to sniff around. The rookie eventually broke with the rules—let the dog off the leash to hunt on his own—and the animal actually rousted the rapist from his spot. The kid saw Tanner running down a grassy slope toward the river. Gave chase and caught up with a blood-spattered perp.”

“Sounds impressive,” I said. “The knife?”

“Yeah. Tanner dropped it during the chase.”

“They’ll get prints off it? Or submit it for touch D—?”

“You know what?” Mike said, straightening up and adjusting his tie as he walked to open the door. “They’ll do everything they’re supposed to without you breathing down their necks. They’re pros, kid. Just like you think you are. You get back to Mr. Estevez.”

“When do we celebrate? I mean, not us, but the team.”

“You do what you gotta do for the rest of the afternoon. A few of us will be lifting a glass to that rookie a little later this evening. You’ll be the first to know where.”

I headed for the door. “The lieutenant call you in on this today?”

“No, no. Mercer gave me the heads-up first, and the commissioner knew I had a keen interest in the motherfucker’s arrest.”

“So you’re still doing a midnight?”

“That’s what the loo tells me. Lets you get a good night’s sleep.”

“The weekend can’t come soon enough.”

“Scoot, Coop.”

One of the court officers was waiting for me in the hallway. Mike walked past us and we entered the courtroom. Fleming nodded at the captain to return the defendant from the small cell that held him during these proceedings to his place at counsel table.

Janet Fleming gaveled the group back to order and asked the clerk to put fourteen more citizens in the box. “And if I didn’t tell you earlier, folks, once you leave here tonight, there will be no tweeting, no Facebooking, no Instagramming your buddies about what goes on in here. For the forty dollars a day the state pays you, you get your train fare and your hot dog from the umbrella man in front of the building. No selfies with me or my staff. You don’t get to link in or friend me, understood?”

She rose again to project her voice to the entire room. “This is just to remind you that the unexpected interruption had absolutely nothing to do with the case at trial. You are not to speculate about anything you see or hear the parties do. The only evidence will come from that witness box, or from physical evidence and exhibits introduced during the trial,” she said, going on with the general instructions.

Fleming liked to control the voir dire of the panel as well. She would allow Moretti and me to ask a limited number of questions, but it wasn’t like the old days when a lawyer could free-form and inquire about magazine subscriptions or favorite television shows, hoping to glean a bias that would make a juror’s exclusion automatic.

After the judge finished forty-five minutes of questioning and entertaining three requests to be excused from the case, Fleming nodded to me for my turn. I carried an old green felt board, eighteen inches long, with two slotted tiers that held the summons for each of the individuals seated in front of me, so that I had their names and addresses at the ready. I rested it on the wooden flap that served as a mini podium attached to the side of the jury box.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Riley,” I said to the man in the first seat. An unemployed electrical engineer, he had tried in vain to have Fleming let him go. He didn’t answer me but stared straight ahead, determined—it seemed to me—to make himself unlikeable to Moretti and me so as not to make the cut.

The second juror was my age—thirty-eight—and a professor of women’s studies at Columbia College. I was quick with her, too, for the opposite reason. Human trafficking had become a hot-button issue with feminists and academics, and I had the gut instinct that she would be sympathetic to my victim, despite the witness’s history of prostitution. No need for me to open any doors for Moretti to slip in and knock her off.

Prospective juror number three was a challenge. An African-American male in his early thirties, he seemed affable and engaged in the proceedings, but a bit too eager to get the attention of the defendant, who looked over at the box from time to time. His black T-shirt featured a small logo of a pizza in the center of his chest, although I found the large neon green letters above it—
EAT ME
—to be not only off-putting but also totally inappropriate for the occasion.

“Mr. How-ton,” I said, phonetically breaking up the name that I read on the summons. It was spelled
Houghton.
“Am I pronouncing it correctly?”

“Nope. No, you’re not. My people say Huff-ton.”

Strike one for me.

“Could you tell us a little more about the work you do at Metropolitan Hospital?” He had his sneakered feet up against the wall of the jury box. His hands were clasped together and he was twiddling his thumbs somewhat nervously.

“I’m, like, a phlebotomist, you know?”

“So you’re trained to draw blood.”

“I’m in a tech program right now. I’m being trained,” Houghton said, looking over at Antonio Estevez. “I’m not quite Dracula yet.”

Estevez pulled back one side of his mouth in half a smile and Houghton laughed. Half of the prospective jurors laughed with him, at my expense.

Strike two for me.

“Is there anything you’ve heard so far that might make you uncomfortable sitting on a case of this nature?” I asked.

“Nah. You gotta prove what you gotta prove.”

“One of the charges here is that Mr. Estevez used force to compel a young woman to engage in acts of prostitution. You understand that?”

“I’m good.”

I walked toward the railing at the end of the well of the courtroom. “Do you know who Jason Voorhees is, Mr. Houghton?”

He sat up straight and dropped his feet to the floor. “You kidding me? Of course I do.”

Jurors number two and four looked at him, puzzled by either the question or his answer.

“Miss Cooper,” Judge Fleming said, glancing up from her notebook, “I hope you’re going somewhere with this.”

“I am, Your Honor.” I continued talking with Mr. Houghton. “And who is Jason Voorhees?”

“He’s the guy—the creepy one with that kind of full-face hockey mask—in the
Friday the 13th
movies.”

Gino Moretti was on his feet. “I’m going to object to this line of questioning, Your Honor.”

“What’s your point, Ms. Cooper?” the judge asked.

“We intend to present evidence that—”

“Wait a minute,” Moretti said, losing his cool. “May we approach? She can present her evidence when she’s got witnesses in the box.”

I wanted to give the prospective jurors a taste of the People’s case. Houghton, after his Dracula reference, seemed a likely candidate to know the horror-movie genre. I thought I could see whether anyone in the room would be freaked-out by a description of Estevez, whose victims claimed he wore the distinctive goalie mask, punctuated by holes and painted with red triangles—and wielded the same machete Jason did—when he threatened them to go to work for him. Better to find out they had weak stomachs now than midtrial.

“It’s not about the evidence, Judge. I’d like to—”

“I know what you’d like to do, Ms. Cooper. Don’t even think about it. Next question, please.”

“Mr. Houghton, is there anything about your familiarity with the fictional movie character Jason Voorhees that would prevent you from analyzing the facts in this case, independent of—”

“I object,” Moretti said, practically shouting at the judge.

“Sustained, Ms.—”

But Houghton was ready to take his shot. “Mr. Estevez isn’t charged with hacking his old lady’s head off like in the movie, is he? I didn’t hear that count.”

The judge had to gavel the courtroom back to order, while Houghton basked in the amusement he had provoked with his response.

“Approach the bench, both of you,” Fleming said, making her displeasure clear when we got within earshot. “Over and out, Alex. You’re done. Move on to the next seat and ask a few questions and then Gino takes it from there.”

“Understood.”

“Do you want a curative instruction, Gino?” she asked.

“Are you crazy, Judge? Call a little more attention to it? Spare me a ‘No, ladies and gentleman, Mr. Estevez is neither a vampire nor a homicidal maniac.’”

“He’s just a pumped-up pimp,” I said, whispering to Moretti, “who uses masks and machetes to coerce young women—to scare them to death—so they turn tricks from which he profits.”

“Your choice,” the judge said.

“If you’re not going to allow me to ask anything else,” I said, “I’d like you to go a little deeper into the meaning of sex trafficking, Judge. It’s not a familiar statute to most jurors.”

The sex-trade profession may be the oldest on earth, but the crime was a very new one on the books, ramped up recently in recognition of the brutal nature of sex slavery and the inadequacy of the old “promoting prostitution” laws.

“I’ll entertain some questions from you, Alex, but keep them within reason.”

The door creaked open at the rear of the room. I didn’t bother to turn this time as I tried to suggest a punch list for Fleming to use.