The Deadhouse (14 page)

"Yes, Your Honor," we answered at the same time.

"Do either of you wish to challenge the findings?"

Again, we each said, "Yes."

Of the three possible ratings, Suggs had been evaluated a 2 by the
board. I had done a thorough background workup of him and wanted to
argue that he was eligible for the most serious monitoring level, or a
3, while my adversary was fighting to reduce his exposure and take him
down to a 1.

"I intend to call witnesses, Judge," Abramson said.

I glanced over to the row of benches behind him and saw a
middle-aged woman with a scowl on her face, sitting beside a stack of
folders. Just what I needed. An unanticipated witness for the defense
to drag out the morning's proceedings.

"I'll hear Ms. Cooper first. Are you personally familiar with this
matter?"

"Yes, Your Honor. I tried the case for our office in ninety-four."

"Perhaps you can give me more detail than the court file has." It
was always an odd experience to appear before Frances Zavin on a sex
crime. She was a very stern jurist, nearing retirement age, who had
chosen to decorate her courtroom with two oversize canvases that hung
on either side of her raised chair. Both were modern paintings in bold
colors, and the one situated above the witness box portrayed a large,
mangy dog with an exposed, erect penis. It was our practice to warn
rape victims not to look up at it as they took the stand for fear that
it would unnerve them, and we often wondered what jurors thought as
they listened to graphic testimony and stared at the aroused mutt.

I talked to Zavin, framed as she was by her artwork. "Mr. Suggs was
fifty-eight at the time he committed these acts. He is what I would
call a classic pedophile, which is the reason—" "Objection, Judge.
That's a prejudicial and conclusory—" "Mr. Abramson, hold your
objections until Ms. Cooper completes her statement. There's no jury
here, so you won't impress me with your interruptions."

"In the instant case, the defendant was convicted of sexually
abusing two girls, who were five and six years old at the time.' The
court officer standing at my back groaned softly. Score extra points
for multiple victims. Score triple miles for children under the age of
eleven. "Any force?"

"Absolutely none, Your Honor," Abramson interjected. "There's no
allegation of force or the use of any weapons."

Like the five-year-old was
willing
to be fondled? "Most
pedophiles don't use knives and guns, Judge. They don't need to. We
never charged him under the forcible compulsion theory. These are
statutory cases. Sexual abuse in the first degree, the same level of
felony as if he had been armed. These babies were clearly unable to
consent, in fact, and under the law."

"Oh, please," Abramson whined.
"Babies?
Can she call them
something else?"

"Surely they are babies, sir. What do you think is more appropriate,
'young women'? Go on, Ms. Cooper."

I laid out the facts of the case, which involved allegations that
Suggs, who was living with the mother of the children, regularly
carried them into his bed when she left for work three nights a week as
a nurse's aide at Metropolitan Hospital.

"Any priors?"

"Actually, yes, Judge. Although no convictions. Mr. Suggs was
arrested several times throughout the eighties for similar offenses.
None of those charges resulted in indictments. I pulled the papers on
the cases, and because of the corroboration requirements still in place
for child victims, the prosecution was not able to prove those matters
at the time."

"The witness I have here today can speak to the defendant's efforts
to control his own impulses." Abramson pointed at the woman seated
behind him. "Dr. Hoppins with the MAC treatment program."

I turned to catch Chapman's eye. "Everybody's got a frigging
acronym," he mouthed to me. We knew this one well. The Modality
Alteration Center on East Ninth Street, right off Lower Broadway, a
private clinic with psychologists who specialized in counseling for
admitted offenders. Half of our convicted felons went to that office as
a condition of their parole, and I had yet to see any of them
rehabilitated. The shrinks working there were some of the same geniuses
who had declared Megan's killer ready to rejoin society.

"Dr. Hoppins will tell you that Mr. Suggs was already in therapy
when he was arrested in ninety-four. He was trying to do something
about his problem, without the intervention of the court."

"What Dr. Hoppins, and perhaps counsel himself, may not be aware
of—since Mr. Suggs was represented by Legal Aid at that time—is that
when the defendant was apprehended for these charges, he had just left
Dr. Hoppins's office. Suggs was picked up for public lewdness directly
across the street from the clinic, standing against the wire fence.
That's the playground at the Grace Church School, where he had exposed
himself while watching the kindergarten class playing kickball in the
yard. Unfortunately, the center is a magnet for all sorts of sex
offenders."

"Judge, my client is sixty-four years old now. He's hardly able,
well—hardly likely"

"The crimes Mr. Suggs has been charged with are not assaults that
require the use of Viagra for a perpetrator to commit them. We're not
claiming that he's completing sexual assaults like rape, which require
penetration. No matter how old and how infirm he gets, these are acts
he'll still be able to perform. This is a man who should never be
allowed in the unsupervised presence of children." I knew the NYPD's
monitoring unit had designated Megan-mappers, officers who worked with
parole and probation to make sure pedophiles did not move out of jail
and into apartments on the same blocks as elementary schools and
day-care centers.

"Mr. Suggs has been a model prisoner during the term of his
incarceration. No disciplinary infractions, no positive drug testing."

"I spoke with the warden at Fishkill last week, Judge. He told me
that when they moved Mr. Suggs down here for this hearing on Wednesday,
they conducted a routine search of his cell. There were more than five
hundred photographs of naked children under the mattress of his bed.

"And one more thing on that point." Abramson and Sugg
^s
both
glared at me as I spoke. "Mr. Suggs has his own Web site."

Zavin was about to turn against me. "I'm well aware, Ms. Cooper,
that no prison in this country allows inmates access to the Internet.
Don't undermine your entire case by making claims you can't support."

I slipped a downloaded series of papers from my folder and handed
copies to the court officer to deliver to counsel and the judge.
"There's a woman in Missouri who operates a third-party Internet
service for prisoners. Ten dollars bought Harry Suggs his own
biographical sketch, his photo, and the opportunity to have this woman
forward to him—by regular U.S. mail—any responses he gets to his
inquiries. I'd like to read this into the record:

Hi, I'm Harry. I'm caring, honest, and lonely. I'm sixty-four years
old, looking for a home with someone who shares my love for kids and
animals. I've got a few grandchildren of my own, and there's room in my
heart for you and yours. I've been traveling a lot these last few
years, but I'm ready to settle down. Write anytime. Send family photos.
I'm a good correspondent.

"I think this goes directly to his behavior while incarcerated." Add
ten points, I thought. There aren't many other ways to act out your
interest in child abuse from behind bars.

"What I would like to do, Your Honor," I went on, "is to keep this
defendant in state prison for another twenty years. Unfortunately, he
has served the maximum sentence that the court was able to impose for
these crimes, and with his good time factored in, he will be eligible
for parole by February tenth. It is imperative, I think, that he be
re-rated as a Level Three offender, with all the attendant
consequences."

"If you're done, Ms. Cooper, I think I would like to hear from Dr.
Hoppins. Would you please call your witness to the stand, sir?"

Suggs was trying to get Abramson's attention. He was angered by my
remarks and clearly agitated. Abramson ignored his client.

"I'd like a few minutes to talk with my witness." He turned and
walked out of the well, as the judge announced a five-minute break and
stepped off the bench to go to her robing room.

I reached for my pad to draw up a list of questions for
cross-examination. With a deafening crash, Suggs lifted the massive oak
counsel table off the floor in front of him and heaved it on its side.
At the same time, he charged across the well and threw himself at me
with outstretched arms, screaming my name and spitting as he came
flying through the air. Court officers rushed from every direction to
grab for a piece of the prisoner and subdue him, while the captain of
the team picked me up from the floor, where I had landed when Suggs's
body collided with my own.

Chapman vaulted over the railing and helped the guys lead the
laughing pedophile back into the holding pens. "You okay? Did he hit
you?"

I sat at the table and tried to will myself to stop shaking. "I'm
fine. He just bounced himself off me."

"And here I thought you were way too old to be
my
type,
no less his. You're safer in the field with me and my murderers than
with these pervs of yours. Let's go, blondie."

Mike picked up my folders and we started out of the courtroom, while
Abramson and Hoppins followed us down the aisle. "Hey, Alex. Don't hold
that flying tackle against me," Bobby urged. "I'll just adjourn the
case till the middle of next month. Have Ryan or Rich stand up on it
for you next time. They won't collapse like a house of cards."

"Thanks, Bobby, I'll be sure to do that."

"Ms. Cooper? May I have a word with you?" Hoppins asked.

"Some other time, doc," Mike said as he prodded me toward the door,
away from her.

"It has to do with King's College, Detective. You both might want
to hear it."

11

Hoppins followed us into the hallway to an alcove near the elevator
bank.

"You handled a case several years back, Ms. Cooper. David Fillian,
do you remember him?"

"Of course." Fillian was a street kid from Manhattan with a serious
cocaine habit who supported himself by selling drugs to the rich prep
school students of Carnegie Hill and upscale collegians. One night,
after delivering a load of blow to a senior in one of the Columbia
College dorms, he partied with his customer, who let him sleep over.
When everyone had fallen asleep, Fillian prowled the dormitory halls,
looking for things to steal. In one suite, he accidentally awakened a
girl during the theft, who resisted and struggled when he tried to
assault her. Fillian stabbed her in the chest, leaving her for dead. A
roommate's quick response and the surgical team at St. Luke's saved her
life.

"I've been doing some of the offender counseling in state prison.
Fillian's in my program. You probably know that he wants to become a CI
for the department."

Confidential informants—CIs—were a staple of narcotics
investigations. Fillian had been hammered by the judge at his sentence,
as we requested, and had been trying everything possible to reduce the
time he spent in jail. I hoped no power on earth could

speed his release.

"Hard to be useful to cops with current street news when you're as
far north as Dannemora." He was incarcerated just miles away from the
Canadian border.

"Some of the kids he ran with still keep in touch with him. He
thinks he's in the know. Anyway, he's been telling me that one of the
King's College professors has been selling drugs to the students—a
regular candy shop. You ask for it, the prof's got it." "Who is it?
What's the guy's name?" Chapman asked. "I don't have a name for you.
There was no point in my asking him for the information, since I
couldn't do anything with it professionally, and it has nothing to do
with the treatment program. David was just complaining to me that
nobody in the correction department seemed to be interested in the
fact. I see from the papers that you've got this murder case, and also
that one of the students with—shall we say, an alternative
lifestyle?—disappeared last spring."

"How often do you see Fillian?"

"I'm not due to see him again until the end of January. I spend one
week a month traveling around to the maximum-security jails,
supervising the sex offender groups. I thought that if, perhaps, David
had some valuable information to help you on the King's College cases,
you could support his request for an early release to parole."

It was my devout wish that Fillian's parole officer had not yet been
born. And I doubted that an occasional session, up close and personal,
exchanging techniques with other convicted rapists had "cured" him of
his habits. I was anxious to dismiss Hoppins and get on to our more
immediate work. "We'll see if we can get him produced at a prison
downstate to interview him. If he doesn't have any more details than
this, he won't be much use to us."

We thanked her and walked away. I'm sure she detected the chill in
my voice, as I questioned the sincerity of her patient's bona fides.

Joe Roman was waiting for us when we reached my office. "You still
have that photo of the Denzig girl?" he asked.

"Sure. It's attached to her folder, on my desk."

"Talk about archaeological digs," Mike said, shaking Joe's hand.
"That's what the pile on your desk looks like."

I flipped through the manila case jackets till I found Shirley
Denzig's file. "What did you learn from the Baltimore cops?"

"That her papa has a licensed handgun. Kept it in a locked storage
box in his garage. Sometime during the week he noticed it had been
taken, so he reported it to the local detectives. I'm going to have
copies of this photo made to give to Security downstairs here and to
keep with the doormen at your building. Bad news is, she finally was
evicted from her apartment. Captain's going to let Frankie and me work
on it. See if we can find her and tell her what a lovely person you
really are."