Killer Heat (2 page)

As we emerged from the mouth of the archway, under the faded
print of the sign that said BATTERY MARITIME BUILDING, one of the
crime scene cops was waiting for Mike.

“There's something snagged in one of the long wooden splinters
of the pilings, Detective. Take a look. I've photographed it there,
so let me know if you want me to fish it out.”

I followed Mike to the north side of the old structure. He
leaned over the wire fencing and his hair gleamed as the officer
held a flashlight above his head. I could see an object floating on
the surface of the water, its many thick strands splayed like the
tentacles of a sea creature.

“Bring it up, Jenks. You got something to hook it with?”

The eager kid ran to the department station wagon and brought
out a long metal pole. He disappeared inside the bay of the old
terminal and reappeared on the far side of the fence. He walked
along the edge of the building, carefully stepping down and out
onto the planks between the tall pilings.

After several attempts to snag the mysterious object, Willy
Jenks triumphantly lifted it out of the river, swung the pole over
the fence, and dumped it at Mike's feet.

I kneeled beside him and tried to figure out what I was staring
at. Mike removed another rubber glove from his pants pocket and
slipped it on before he began to separate the tangled strands.

With his index finger, Mike found what looked like a handle,
pulling on it to stretch it out toward my foot. Then he started to
count the strips as he spread them apart on the ground. “One, two,
three...”

I could see that they, too, were made of leather, knotted like
the piece the cops had found upstairs. “What do you-?”

Mike held his finger to his lips to quiet me as he continued to
count. “Six, seven, eight.”

The ninth length of rope was missing its knot.

“What is it?”

“Guess you never saw a cat-o'-nine-tails before.”

Mike picked up the whip by its handle, shook off the water, then
raised his arm and cracked it against the asphalt walk. The sharp
sound split the still night air like a gunshot.

"Bound. Tortured. Killed. It's not a pretty way to die.

Ms. Cooper, are you withdrawing your offer?"

Alton Lamont had taken the bench minutes earlier, just after
court officers had uncuffed the prisoner and seated him next to his
lawyer.

Although the odors of the waterfront and the grisly scene of
the previous evening lingered in my mind's eye and brain, I tried
to concentrate on the pretrial proceedings under way in Lamont's
courtroom

That's not a real plea bargain she suggested, Your Honor,“ Gene
Grassley said, pointing his stubby forefinger in my direction.
”It's Ms. Cooper's version of a death sentence. “Mr. Grassley knows
we're going forward.” We had spent most of the day selecting a jury
and were finishing up the afternoon with some last-minute
housekeeping before setting a timetable for opening statements. “My
victim boarded her flight in Seattle at dawn-the offer's off the
table. Floyd Warren was studying his copy of the indictment as his
lawyer talked about him. ”My client turned sixty-one last week. He
can't serve out thirty years in state prison. “He's looking at
fifty if this jury convicts him,” Lamont said, smiling at Grassley.
“I expect he'll try to do the best he can.”

Warren looked up at Lamont, scowled, and licked his front
teeth.

“I don't mean any disrespect by this. I know you've been a judge
longer than I've been practicing law.” Grassley had started his
career with the Legal Aid Society a few years before I became an
assistant district attorney. “But sixty-one-year-old men simply do
not, can not- well, they're not your typical rapists.”

“May I be heard, Your Honor?”

“Let me finish, Alex.” Grassley was a head shorter than I. He
liked to keep me in my seat once jurors were in the courtroom, as
though he feared they would be swayed by my arguments because of my
greater height. “I know what she's going to say, Judge. There's no
such thing as a typical rapist. I've heard her spiel before.”

“May I-?”

“Okay, so older guys are still capable of molesting children or
beating their wives,” Grassley said, as though those were
insignificant criminal acts. “I'm not saying such things are
impossible. But Mr. Warren is charged with climbing up three
stories on a fire escape, squeezing through a small window,
struggling with a healthy young woman to rape and sodomize her.
Suppose for a minute he even did those things- when was this?
Thirty-five years ago. Thirty-five years ago. He's not
capable of doing them now. He's not possibly a danger to anyone.
There's a legal doctrine Alexandra Cooper has no respect for. You
need to help her with it.”

“And what is that, Mr. Grassley?” Judge Lamont took off his
glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

“Rachmones, Judge.”

“Rock what?”

Alton Lamont was an African-American, a former defense attorney
who had been elected to the Supreme Court-New York State's highest
trial court-more than twenty years earlier. He cupped one hand to
his ear and shook his head.

“Compassion. It's the Yiddish word for compassion.”

The heavy door creaked behind me and I turned to look over my
shoulder. A young man dressed in a T-shirt and jeans walked down
the short aisle of the small courtroom and sat in one of the empty
rows of benches.

“A few months back, Mr. Grassley, when you were here with Ms.
Cooper on another matter, you were complaining she was too soft, a bleeding heart, if I'm not mistaken.”

“Yeah, you're right. But she only bleeds for her victims. Try to
talk logic to her about an alleged offender and you can't even get
ice water from the tap. She's got blinders on.”

I was saving my arguments for the serious legal issues ahead.
Judge Lamont could handle this.

“And what's your logic this time? Seems to me Mr. Warren could
have had this all behind him if he'd stayed in town after the first
trial.” Lamont was studying the court file. “Looks like the jury
almost let him walk.”

Floyd Warren put his elbows on the table and rested his forehead
in his hands.

Grassley passed behind me and leaned against the rail of the
jury box. “They were hung nine to three for an acquittal.”

“Doesn't make sense that your man skipped,” Lamont said. “The
prosecution case never gets better the second time around.”

“There was another rape charge filed before a date for the
retrial was set, Judge. Kings County,” I said from my seat. The
defendant had been identified by a woman in Brooklyn who saw his
photograph in the newspaper.

“And even then my client was still free on bail. Couldn't have
been such a big deal.”

Lamont rested his head against the back of his tall leather
chair. “Those were different times, Mr. Grassley. 1973, I'd venture
to say there weren't a dozen rape prosecutions successfully brought
in this entire city that year. Archaic laws, no Special Victims
Units, and DNA hadn't been heard of yet. There wasn't a lawyer on
either side who could have dreamed that science would give new life
to these old cases.”

“Alex and I were still in diapers, Judge. Ancient history.”

Warren glanced at me and sneered again.

“What are you looking for here, Mr. Grassley?”

“Give him a couple years, maybe three, and membership in AARP,”
Grassley said, laughing nervously. “He'll go back to his wife and
his little suburban house outside Birmingham. Whatever you think he
may have done, Judge, he's retired now. Out of the business. For
the last ten years he's lived quietly, supported himself as a
landscape gardener. Where's your rachmones?”

Lamont looked over my head as the door opened again. Another
young man walked in, dressed like the first, and took a seat behind
him. I assumed there were cases on the calendar late in the day
that the judge would hear after he finished our arguments.

“You're putting on a good show for your client, Gene,” the judge
said, waving at the court reporter to tell her that he was going
off the record, “but your bullshit-sorry I don't have a legal term
for it, it's just plain bullshit. And it's so far over the line
that it's insulting to me and to the-how many victims, Alex?”

“Forty-two and counting.”

“Alleged victims,” interjected Grassley. “My client hasn't been
charged in any of those cases yet.”

“In 1974, Mr. Warren jumped bail before his retrial here-almost
certain to be acquitted-and began a rampage more devastating than
the worst hurricane on record. He left New York and-Alex, refresh
my recollection, will you?”

“He moved south and became the Philadelphia 'Strip Mall' rapist-
about a dozen cases reported there over the next eighteen months.
Then he continued on to the DC area, where DNA has recently
confirmed that he was the Chevy Chase 'Carjack' rapist-head count
still growing from police there and up the road in Silver
Spring-before going on to terrorize the academic community in North
Carolina as the 'Chapel Hill Campus' rapist. Patterns all along the
East Coast throughout the next twenty years.”

“And if you and your cops are so damn smart, how come nobody
identified him in all that time?”

I was standing now, and my slim five feet ten inches of
indignation towered over Grassley's short, pudgy frame.

“In the seventies and eighties, Floyd Warren had moved around
the Southeast like a chameleon, changing his name in every
location. When SVU detective Mercer Wallace backtracked to collect
the evidence from three decades of closed cases, he found local
records that matched a transient calling himself Warren Floyd, who
later became Floyd X and a variety of aliases before settling in
Alabama and adopting the name of the late judge before whom his
case had been tried-Howard Rovers. ”

“Surely you haven't forgotten, Mr. Grassley, that the defendant
attacked all of these women before 1989, which was the first time
DNA was accepted as a valid scientific technique in any courtroom
in America. And that it was another decade before databanks were
established in many of the states in which he was most successful.
God knows what we'll find when Alabama links up to CODIS.”

The Combined DNA Index System was making it easier for
communities all over the country to identify offenders from
evidence submitted to a centralized FBI computer program.

Floyd Warren licked his front teeth again, staring at me as I
spoke, and then tapped on the table to get Grassley's attention. He
wrote something on a piece of paper and slid it across to his
lawyer.

Gene Grassley looked at the note and shook his head.

Floyd Warren started to get to his feet and the two court
officers standing behind him stepped forward to hold him in place.
“Judge Lamont. Yo, Judge.”

Lamont banged his gavel. “Stay seated, Mr. Warren. Tell Mr.
Grassley what you want to say. It's really not appropriate, nor is
it smart, for you to speak directly to me.”

Grassley slipped into his seat and tried to calm his client.

Floyd Warren wasn't interested. “Judge, what about my
statues?”

“I'm warning you, Mr. Warren. Speak through your lawyer.”

“Don't you have no damn statues in this state?” He held up the
piece of paper he'd just written on. “Statues of limitation?”

“Statutes? You mean statutes?”

“Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Statues.”

The court officers were trying to keep Warren in place by
holding on to his broad, powerful shoulders. They were waiting for
a signal from the judge to use more force.

“Hasn't Mr. Grassley explained this to you?”

“He hasn't 'splained nothing to me. I got rights, don't I?”

“Of course I've told him,” Grassley said, as the court officers
shoved him aside so they could keep their hands on the
defendant.

Lamont banged his gavel again. “Shut up, Mr. Warren. This isn't
going to be a free-for-all in front of the jury. Not in my
courtroom, I can promise you that. Handcuffs and leg irons come
next.”

There was a momentary silence and the officers let Floyd Warren
settle back in his chair. His face was rounder now than in the mug
shot taken at the time of his arrest so many years ago, and his
dark skin wrinkled. He seemed to like being the center of
attention.

Just as quiet resumed, the doors opened again and a third young
man stepped inside, scoped the situation, and joined the others in
the rows behind my seat. All three were wearing bright yellow
T-shirts.

“Perhaps, Judge, you can repeat for Mr. Warren what I've already
brought to his attention several times.”

“I'd be happy to, Mr. Grassley.” Lamont checked with the
reporter to make sure this would all be part of the official
record. “In New York State, until quite recently, there was a
statute of limitations on rape cases, just as there are for all
other violent felonies, with the exception of murder.”

“I didn't kill nobody,” Warren said, in a stage whisper meant
for all of us to hear. He picked his teeth with the tip of his lead
pencil.

"Because of the advances in DNA technology-the certainty of that
science-many state legislatures have eliminated those five-year
statutes. The district attorney is now able to bring charges on
sexual assaults that occurred yesterday, even if they aren't solved
for another fifty years.

“But that's a new law, Mr. Warren. That wouldn't apply to your
old case. The sole reason Ms. Cooper is able to go forward now is
because of your own actions. You kept this case alive all by
yourself, all this time, by jumping bail and fleeing the
jurisdiction.”

Even if a second jury had convicted Floyd Warren three decades
earlier, the sentences imposed on rapists were so light then that
most were released to parole within five to ten years. The
recidivism rate- the rate at which they repeated their offenses,
often using exactly the same modus operandi-was staggering.

Lamont stopped speaking as the doors opened and swung shut
again. I turned my head and saw two more young men, both
yellowshirted, walk in and take seats with the others. The judge
removed his glasses and looked at me quizzically. I realized these
kids must not have been there to see him, and I shrugged my
shoulders.

I looked back once more. There was something written on the
front of the T-shirts, but the five solemn onlookers were sitting
with arms crossed over their chests and I couldn't make out the
words.

Lamont went on. “The statute was tolled by your very-”

“Told what?” Warren mumbled. “Nobody told me nothing.”

Lamont pretended he hadn't heard the belligerent prisoner. He
wagged a finger in Warren's direction. “The effect of the statute
was suspended by your flight. That's what has kept the case
alive.”

It had been dead in the water for thirty-five years, until the
day a few months earlier when Floyd Warren, aka Howard Rovers,
stopped at a dealer's outside of town to buy a shotgun. Confident
that he had eluded law enforcement for over three decades, he
submitted his fingerprints for the application. When he returned to
make the purchase, the local police were waiting. The New York
warrant for bail jump had appeared as a match in the automated
fingerprint system when Warren's background check was run. After
the NYPD's Special Victims Unit was notified, Mercer Wallace asked
me to dig through the archives to find the old trial folder, in
hopes that some evidence still existed to send to the lab for DNA
analysis. A crumpled pair of cotton underpants gave us our
break.

“Ms. Cooper, Mr. Grassley-are you clear with the rest of my
rulings?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” I answered aloud, and Gene Grassley
nodded.

“And I want the record to reflect,” Lamont said, standing so
that he could gesture with both arms, expressing the enormity of
his outrage, “that I consider it shameful, a morally offensive blot
on the legal history of this state that I am obliged by the
Constitution to take this woman's testimony according to the laws
of 1973.”