Bad blood

30

Flashbulbs popped as Captain Blakely swung back the wooden door to lead us into the corridor, still full of reporters and press photographers held there since the lockdown two hours earlier. The EMTs had treated the injured court officers, and a deputy medical examiner had declared Elsie dead-long after the fact-before she was loaded into a body bag and removed from the courtroom.

Lem took off his suit jacket. He held it open, and I slipped my arms into it, wrapping it around my dress to cover the bloodstains and the long tears in the fabric. He put his arm around my shoulders as we entered the gauntlet formed by the eager press hounds.

“Hey, Alex! Who’d he shoot at first-you or the judge?” a voice called out.

Court officers and cops formed a human chain, holding back the impatient spectators.

“Lem! Hey, Howell!” It was Mickey Diamond’s voice. “Give me three words, Lem. We’ll make the headline your signature triplicate.”

We both stared straight ahead as we walked, counting the steps left to the elevator doors, half a corridor away.

“‘Gunned. Gone. Guilty.’” Diamond was relentless.

“Is it true Judge Gertz is still hiding under the bench?” A local crime reporter thrust his microphone over the linked arms of two cops.

“‘Murder. Mayhem. Manhunt.’” Diamond was stuck behind one of the film crews and I could barely hear him now.

Lem stepped up the pace. “Shit. I could write better copy in my sleep. Can you keep up with me? We’re almost there.”

“You get paid up front, Mr. Howell?” another news jock asked. “You bank your money before Quillian skips town?”

A detective-his gold shield flopped over his breast pocket-was holding the elevator open for us. “I got you from here.”

He held up his hand and the cops who had been following us from the rear turned to face the crowd as the doors closed.

“You okay?” Lem asked, letting go of me.

“I will be. It’s Elsie-it’s what happened to Elsie that just breaks my heart. And you?”

“You know me well enough to understand how much I hate it when I can’t see something coming. I thought I had Quillian convinced he was walking out a free man. I was going to blow every argument you had right out of the water.”

“Did you talk with him last night?”

“After the funeral? Yeah, he called.”

“Did you tell him what McKinney said about the possible exhumation of Bex Hassett’s body?”

Howell’s face twisted into a grimace, but he wouldn’t answer my question.

When the doors opened on the seventh floor, four detectives from the District Attorney’s Office Squad were waiting to take both of us upstairs to the Trial Division conference room, one flight above. All friends, all trusted colleagues, they surrounded me in a cocoon as we moved down the hallway and up the dark staircase-a protective shell that would have been more useful several hours back.

The chief of detectives himself was at the head of the table. He greeted both of us and had Laura standing by to get anything we needed. Jude Rutling, the head of the office’s elite Homicide Investigation Unit, had been put in charge of the investigation.

“Let’s get you comfortable first,” the chief said. “Why don’t you each go to the restroom. Alex, we’ll need you to give us your clothes. Did they get pictures of you-that blood and all-upstairs?”

“Yes. Yes, they did. Crime scene.”

“We’ll be debriefing you one at a time. Jude can start with Alex, and my men will take you in another office, Lem.”

“I’d like some coffee, please,” I said, shivering, even though Lem’s jacket was still over my shoulders. “May I talk to Laura?”

A detective escorted me down the hall, past Laura’s desk, on the way to the ladies’ room. Laura reached out to give me a hug and I pushed back. “Wait till I clean myself off. Can you dig anything up in the closet? I used my jeans for that trip to the tunnel last week.”

“Marisa’s already been over,” Laura said, walking into my office to grab a hanger from the closet.

“These should fit.”

I took the black track suit into the restroom-the same one in which Carol Goodwin had cut herself a day before. My head was spinning as I looked in the mirror-blood smears had been transferred from my hands to my face, and the layer of dirt that had previously coated the courtroom floor was on my skin and in my hair.

I undressed and changed into Marisa Bourgis’s gym clothes. I filled the sink with warm water, leaned over it, and plunged my entire head into the bowl. There were no showers in the women’s bathrooms throughout the old offices-built in the days when there had been no women on the legal staff of the district attorney.

I scrubbed my face with brown-paper toweling and ran my fingers through my wet hair. The detective standing guard at the door was startled to see my new look when I emerged minutes later. He walked me back to the conference room where Jude-and my coffee-and two Major Case Squad detectives were waiting to take me through the details of the morning’s events.

Quillian’s outburst had been sudden and short. I knew this drill as well as the men who were questioning me and tried to be patient as they went at me again and again for every nuance, every sequence of how each of us in the room had responded to the gunshots and action.

The door opened behind me and I rested my head against the back of the tall leather chair. Laura interrupted the grilling. “Excuse me, Jude. Mr. Battaglia’s back from City Hall. He’d like to see Alex.”

“We’ll be done shortly.”

“Right now.”

I stood up, grateful for the break, even though I knew I was in for a different kind of interrogation from the boss. “You think the hallways are safe enough for me to make it the next fifty feet by myself?”

“Laura’s in charge. But the chief’s giving you a detail once you leave this building-Lem Howell, too-till they find Quillian. Two detectives with you round the clock. You’ve got your choice of someone sleeping at your place during the night. The other one will be in the lobby.”

“Ignacia Bliss,” I said, smiling at Jude. “Unless Lem picked her first. Or Sue Morley. It’s just more comfortable for me to have a woman there.”

“I understand. See you later.”

Laura walked me across to the executive wing and stopped to fill Rose Malone in on what had been happening, as Rose waved me into Battaglia’s suite.

Mike Chapman was sitting at the district attorney’s desk, his feet on top of a file drawer and a Cohiba between his lips. “You gotta be the most high-maintenance broad in the universe, Coop. You can’t even be in the courtroom without drawing fire.”

Mercer Wallace walked toward me and put his arms around me, drawing me tight against his chest. He had always been as easy at expressing emotion as Mike had been restrained. Paul Battaglia was seated at the far end of the long table, holding up a finger to tell me he’d be off his call in a minute.

“And you got that drowned-rat look on top of it,” Mike said. “Very becoming. Your only hope is an earthquake in some third-world country that swallows an entire village tonight so you’re not on the cover of the papers looking like that.”

Mercer whispered to me, “You’re shaking, Alex.”

“I can’t stop it. I’m cold.” I didn’t need to add that I was also scared.

“Rose had a late lunch sent in. There’s some soup here for you.”

“What time is it?”

“After two.”

“Have they-have they found Quillian yet?”

Mercer shook his head.

“Any other bodies?”

“No,” he said, stroking my arm.

I sat at the table and opened the cardboard container of lukewarm tomato soup. My stomach growled as I tried to fill it with something nourishing.

“I really underestimated your trial skills this time,” Mike said. “Maybe you were actually gonna pull a rabbit out of a hat and put that boy away.”

Battaglia hung up the receiver. He did his best to ask about my well-being-no more anxious than Mike to bring out any emotional reaction-and to confirm the courtroom encounter as it had already been reported to him. Then it was on to business.

“I’ve been talking with the guys here, Alex. It’s quite puzzling, this desperate attempt at an escape by Brendan Quillian.”

“Attempt my ass, Mr. B,” Mike said. “You might take note that he made it.”

“Without your snitch, your case didn’t appear to be all that airtight.”

“No, Paul. It wasn’t. But-”

“Well, what the hell do you think spooked him so that he would go to this extreme, at this point in the trial? Now he’s got a cold-blooded murder witnessed by Freddy Gertz and Lem and you.”

“From what I hear,” Mike said, “the justice was really blind this time. Forget about Gertz.”

I looked from Mike to Mercer. “What do you two think?”

“We got under his skin somehow,” Mercer said. “And I don’t believe it had anything to do with Alex’s case against him for the killing of his wife.”

I turned to Battaglia. “I think the things we’ve been digging at-things that still seem so remote and unrelated-must have struck Quillian right in the gut.”

“Like what?”

“The day we met with his sister-the day before her brother’s funeral,” I said. “Trish told Brendan when she saw him for the first time in years that she was planning to talk to Mike about the Hassetts.”

“Why?”

“She’s convinced that Duke Quillian’s murder was arranged or committed by the Hassett brothers. And yet, Brendan demanded that she not tell that to the police.”

“If there was any truth to her reasoning,” Mercer said, “you’d think Brendan would want her to dangle that before our noses. Makes you wonder what he knew-what Trish didn’t know-that made him crazy at the thought she might tell us.”

“What else?” Battaglia asked.

“I’m in,” Mike said. “On the drive back from the funeral with Quillian, I brought up the unsolved case of the murdered teenager, Rebecca Hassett.”

“You asked him about it? You questioned him?” Battaglia was annoyed enough to remove his cigar from his mouth and clearly articulate his concern.

“Nah. I just goosed him. I didn’t think it would set him off on a rampage. I wanted to see if I could raise some hairs on his neck, and like I told Coop, I think I did.”

“Add one more straw to the camel’s back,” I said. “Quillian called Lem Howell last night. Just the usual daily update, I’m sure. But that was after Lem and I left the meeting with Judge Gertz-and McKinney. I asked Lem if he told Brendan that McKinney had talked about an exhumation. If he mentioned that the girl was named Rebecca Hassett.”

“Yes? He said yes?”

“For once Lem didn’t have his best poker face on. I’m assuming he mentioned to Brendan that the subject had been raised in front of Gertz, without any way of knowing that it was a follow-up to the bombshell Mike dropped in the car. Lem wasn’t going to give up any privileged conversation with his client-so if he doesn’t drop a hint of it to whoever is interrogating him now about the shooting, I’m just saying that I think I caught him off guard when I asked about it.”

“But this one issue…?”

“Not one, Paul,” I said. “Three points, each of them coming from a different direction-his sister, the cop who locked him up, and then his own lawyer.”

“I think he was so close to beating the rap on Amanda’s case,” Mercer said, checking my reaction to Battaglia’s dismissal of my effort, “at least in Lem’s view, that he was devastated at the idea of being trapped by something more deadly, from his past-maybe something more readily connected to him-than what he faced with this jury.”

“Makes you wonder,” Battaglia said, replugging the cigar in his mouth, “why he didn’t try for a clean kill of Alex while he had the chance.”

“If what Mercer says is right, Quillian didn’t have any reason to connect these past events to me. He just wanted to get out of there-out of the courtroom, out of custody,” I said, shredding the napkin with my fingers, the soup stains on it a pale imitation of Elsie’s blood.

“You got it,” Mercer said.

“Elsie was the weakest link. He just overpowered her and started shooting. He wasn’t after her any more than he wanted to kill me. I wasn’t an obstacle to his freedom at that moment. Brendan Quillian just wanted to be gone.”

We kicked around ideas for more than fifteen minutes. Rose interrupted us when she opened the door, and Battaglia snapped at her before she could speak.

“I told you no calls.” He was waiting for the commissioner of correction to tell him how they planned to handle this fiasco before he went public on it.

“It’s Judge Gertz, Mr. Battaglia. I thought you might want this one.” Rose knew him better than he knew himself.

His lips widened into a broad smile around the cigar stub as he reached for the telephone. “A real profile in courage,” he said, winking at Mike. “Freddy, what the hell were you running up there, the O.K. Corral? Where are you now? You got a panic room here in the courthouse I ought to know about?”

Whatever the answer was, and it was a long one, erased Battaglia’s smile.

“She’s okay. She’s here with me now. Naturally, she’s shaken up about the woman who was killed, seeing her friends shot and all that. But you know Alex. One hundred percent business when she needs to be.”

“More like ninety percent blended Scotch whiskey in her veins and ten percent hair spray that makes her look like she’s glued together from the outside,” Mike said. “Blow on her gently and I think she’ll be down for the count today.”

“Lay off it, Mike,” Mercer said, putting the lid on my coffee cup. “I’ll drive you home as soon as Mr. B lets us go, Alex. Enough with the caffeine.”

“You did what?” Battaglia asked, crushing the cigar’s remains in his ashtray. “Yeah, I got Chapman here with me. I’ll tell him. Thanks, Freddy.

“Now, see, Alex? Sometimes you shouldn’t be so stubborn about listening to Pat McKinney. There’s an old saw that says, ‘All politics is local.’ Well, I guess all crime is personal, too.”

“He’s got me in this mix?” Mike asked.

“Looks like Gertz did some thinking while he was resting under the bench this morning. He’s got a real hard-on for Brendan Quillian now, if he didn’t have one before today. Wants us to leave no stone unturned in the effort to find Quillian, and to put him behind bars for the rest of his life.”

“So?”

“He’s already called the Bronx district attorney to tell him about that old murder case-the Hassett girl. He’s about to call the chief administrative judge of Bronx County, see if he can move that tough old bastard to order an immediate exhumation. Gertz wants to know what your plans are for tomorrow, Chapman. If he gets the court order, can you be there at the cemetery and get things rushed through at the morgue?”

Mike put his feet on the floor and saluted Battaglia. “I’m on the job, Mr. B.”

“Check with the Hassetts, too,” Battaglia said. “It goes even easier if you get consent from a family member. I know you told me the father was killed years ago. Is the mother still…?”

“She died recently,” I said. “Mike asked Trish about that just before we left her.”

“The brothers, then. Contact the brothers. We may not even need the damn judge.”

The door opened again and Nan Toth came into the room. “Rose sent me in,” she said to Battaglia, talking to him as she walked to take the seat beside me, rubbing my back with her hand and asking how I was.

“You have something new?”

“Lawrence Pritchard just canceled our meeting. I thought you’d want to know right away.”

“What’s got him backing off?”

“Frightened isn’t exactly the word he used. But he won’t sit down with me as long as Quillian is on the loose. He’s worried about who’s going to be shielding Quillian on the outside. Pritchard thinks he’s got too many enemies of his own in the sandhog community, so he doesn’t want anything to do with cooperating until Quillian’s caught.”

Battaglia was through with us now. He was waving Mike away from his desk, or, more precisely, from the humidor behind his desk chair. “All right, then. You’ve all got things to do. Take care of yourself, Alex. Do whatever Mercer thinks is best. You got a mistrial here, so you can rest up before you go at Quillian again. I’m sure they’ll have him back in custody before the end of the day.”

“I just saw the chief of detectives flying out of the lobby on my way in. Didn’t you get the latest word about the car?” Nan asked.

Battaglia held a match to the cigar tip and inhaled as he lit it. “What car?”

“Patrol just found the Toyota that Quillian stole when he broke out of the courthouse. Abandoned along the East River beneath the FDR Drive. He’s on foot now, somewhere loose in the city. All the APBs and highway notices for the stolen vehicle have been canceled.”

Mike shook his head. “So now we’re just looking for a one-eyed white man-with a couple of guns-who’s a subway ride away from freedom.”