Cold Hit

3

There were still a few cars parked on Hogan Place near my office, most of which belonged to the lawyers working the midnight shift in night court, when I pulled my Jeep into a reserved slot behind the district attorney’s space at six forty-five on Friday morning. I took the shortcut over to One Police Plaza, cutting behind the Metropolitan Correctional Center and alongside the staggeringly expensive new federal courthouse, which made our digs, complete with oversized rodents and roaches that obviously thrived on Combat, look like judicial facilities in some third-world country. I stopped at a cart being wheeled into place by one of the regular street vendors and bought two cups of black coffee, remembering that the brew served in the hallway outside the meeting room was too weak to start me up for the day.

One by one, black Crown Vics with red flashers mounted on each dashboard pulled into the tightly secured parking garage beneath Police Headquarters, marking the arrival of bosses from all the commands in Manhattan North, the upper half of the island. I continued past that underground entrance and jogged up the two tiers of granite steps, walking around in front of the building to display my identification to the cop at the door and run my shoulder bag through the metal detector.

“Eighth floor,” the guard said. “Elevator’s behind the wall to the back.”

I knew the way well. In over ten years as a prosecutor, I had come to this building more times than I cared to count. Some days I was sent to sit in at meetings called by the commissioner in which the district attorney himself had no interest; on other occasions I came to brainstorm on investigative strategies in cases the department was struggling to solve; frequently I was there to plead for manpower in a matter that was not getting appropriate police attention; and every now and then-under this administration’s budget-driven oversight-I walked over to attend the promotion of a friend to a higher-ranking post.

Compstat had revolutionized the accountability of precinct commanders when it was introduced to the department in the early nineties. Several times a month, at seven o’clock in the morning, bosses from one of the city’s geographic divisions were summoned to appear at One Police Plaza, to spend the next three hours being grilled by the chief of operations and two of his trusted henchmen. There was only one direction in which this mayor wanted the crime rate to move, and each man was called upon to answer for the evil that crossed his borderlines and played havoc with the numbers regularly released to the press by the Public Information deputy.

When the elevator doors opened on eight, I was facing a wall of blue-uniformed backs of the commanding officers, pressing ahead against each other as the invited guests who were not members of the department turned the corner to enter the Operations Room and take their seats in anticipation of the arrival of Chief Lunetta.

Chapman called out to me before I noticed him, wedged between two full inspectors who were laughing at whatever tale he was spinning. “Hey, Coop! Meet Lenny McNab. Just been transferred over to clean up the Three-three. Take a good look at him now, because after this meeting I doubt he’ll be able to sit down for a week.”

McNab shook his head and my hand at the same time. The newspapers had been full of stories about the string of bodega burglaries in McNab’s territory. If he couldn’t account for progress in the investigation by this morning, he’d be made to look like a fool by the three grand inquisitors.

Lunetta’s voice boomed out at us from the stairwell door. “Let’s get it going, guys. We’ve got a lot to cover this morning.” His entourage brushed past us and we dutifully followed.

Room 802 was a cavernous space, with double-height ceilings and state-of-the-art electronic equipment, that had been designed to become Command Central in case of any terrorist takeover or natural disaster in New York City. Three gigantic media screens filled the front wall of the room, which was lined on one length with concealed booths-to hold the crisis solvers at more critical points in time, and observers on more benign occasions-while the other wall was decorated with police shields and murals featuring flags of various law enforcement agencies. Two tables ran through the center of the room from forward to rear, around which the commanders seated themselves with the personnel who ran their investigative and uniformed forces, as well as a few detectives who might be called upon to explain the status of a particular case that had attracted media attention.

Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to display over their heads on the three screens-usually starting with a map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month’s crime statistics, and a graph plotting the most recent week’s violent crime activity, with robberies flagged in red, rapes in blue, and burglaries in green.

Lunetta and his superchiefs sat in the rear at a table perpendicular to the array of well-decorated men spread down the center of the room. He was tall and lean, with angled features and black hair that was drawn sleekly back and trimmed at the neck in military fashion. He looked great in the dark navy blue uniform, and knew it.

My seat was in one of the three rows of folding chairs behind the chief’s position, which were reserved for non-NYPD spectators. Each chair was labeled with a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Excusing myself, I tried to slither into place, passing over two lawyers from the United States Attorney’s Office and four guys from upstate police departments, before sitting down next to a woman who introduced herself as a trend researcher from the Department of Justice. I opened the lid of my coffee cup and took a slug as Lunetta called the first group of officers to the podium.

Frank Guffey moved forward to the mike, flanked by his supervising staff. He was smart and well liked by police and prosecutors, a tough boss who had been moved from the East Harlem area a year earlier down to the cushy confines of Wall Street, and now back to the high-crime neighborhood of the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

“G’morning, Chief. I’m reporting on the period that closed July thirty-first.” Guffey smiled and paused briefly, weighing whether to add a personal pleasantry. “Nice to be here again in the North, after a brief visit to Manhattan South, sir.”

Lunetta shot back, “I hope you can say as much after the meeting.”

“First of all, the decrease in overall crime continues.” Clearly, Guffey knew the drill. That’s what these guys wanted to hear, right out of the box. “Now, we do show an increase in robberies, but-”

Forget the “buts,” buddy. I watched as Lunetta turned his head ninety degrees and gave a command to the computer programmer sitting at his right shoulder. Seconds later, the three overhead graphics changed. A map of the Twenty-eighth Precinct’s territory dominated the middle screen.

Lunetta barked, “Break them down for me, Inspector. I want them by day of the week, and then by the time of day of the tour.”

Before Guffey could lift his papers and find the correct answers, we could all see the numbers in the projections that the chief’s team had prepared for this attack.

“I want to get right into these spikes, Guffey. Take us through them. Give me reasons.”

I could see the color rise in Frank’s cheeks, as most of the bosses around the tables seemed to squirm in sympathy.

Guffey started to respond. “Several of them seem to be the work of the same team, Chief. The numbers started to spike when a pair of male Hispanics began to hit a couple of apartments on Broadway, just north of McDonald’s. Same M.O. Gain entry with a ruse-female knocking on the door for the perps and asking for her sister. Then she disappears while the guys tie up everyone inside with speaker wire-”

“Drug related?”

“Probably. Only, the one last week, on the twenty-ninth-”

“You mean the restaurant manager they burned with an iron?” Lunetta thrived on displaying to the crowd how well he could learn the detail of hundreds of these cases, outlined for him in his briefing books, and talk about them as familiarly as if he were working on them himself.

“Yeah. We figure that was a mistake. They went to the wrong apartment. I got Louis Robertson here. They’re his cases, if you’d like to hear from him.”

“Not unless he’s got answers for me, Guffey. Excuses I got plenty of. It’s answers I want. You guys doing the obvious? Running fingerprints through Safis?” The new, automated fingerprint-matching system was solving scores of cases that used to require tedious hand searches. “Checking with surrounding precincts to see if they got anything like this going? Parole-probation-informants? I assume you’ll study these charts and decide how to redeploy your manpower to address the situation more aggressively.”

Guffey said his men had been doing all of the above and that he would certainly make use of the time charts. He got through the other crime categories fairly gracefully and back to his seat without a great deal of damage.

Inspector Jaffer was next up. A real breath of fresh air for the department. As I ran my eyes around the table, Joanne Jaffer and Jane Pearl were the only two women inspectors I noted in the room. They were both young, bright, and attractive, and were changing a lot of opinions about female bosses in the department, held by too many of the hairbags, those dyed-inthe-wool old-timers who were petrified in their traditions.

Jaffer’s numbers in the Twentieth Precinct were excellent. The Upper West Side had always been one of the safest residential areas in Manhattan. Robberies, burglaries, and car thefts continued to be lower than ever. No homicides in over six months. Her only problem was a serial rapist who had been operating for more than two years-hitting sporadically, and not even linked to a pattern until DNA tests on the rape kits had confirmed that the most recent attack was committed by the same assailant as the first one, which had occurred more than twenty months ago. Battaglia had been asked to address a community meeting about the case in a few days and would be pleased if I could come back to him after this morning with a sense about the chief’s role in the investigation.

Jaffer gave her report and began to answer Lunetta’s questions about the rapist.

“How many cases you up to now, Inspector?”

Jaffer answered sharply. “Eight, sir. That we know of. Eight with an identical M.O., and two of those have been linked to each other by DNA. Serology is working on two others this week.”

“What took you so long to put this pattern together? Somebody asleep in the station house?”

She started to answer, as a hand went up on the right side of the room. Sergeant Pridgen, who was assigned to Special Victims, was responsible for the task force handling the investigation. He had been running the cases long before Jaffer became involved and was trying to jump in to take some of the heat.

Lunetta ignored Pridgen’s waving arm. I knew he’d like to see Jaffer sweat, and I kept my fingers crossed that he would fail to make it happen.

“Serology finally came up with a cold hit, Chief. That’s what broke it for us.”

Her answers were clipped, to the point, and good. The investigation had floundered until the Medical Examiner’s Office made a computer match-known in the still-evolving language of genetic fingerprinting as a “cold hit”-between DNA samples left by the rapist in his victims’ bodies more than two years ago and those found in the most recent case. Cops who had argued about whether or not the older attacks bore any connection to the current crimes were silenced by the stunning ability of the database to definitively link an assailant’s targets to one another.

“Why can’t serology match it to a perp in their data bank?” Lunetta asked.

“Because the bank is just up and running in New York. It’s only been in operation since last year, and they’ve got fewer than a hundred samples from convicted rapists and murderers.”

Legislation created genetic data banks in most states across the country during the late nineties, but few of their labs were equipped to process the information collected from inmates and create the pools from which to search for repeat offenders, until quite recently. It would be unlikely to get a hit on this serial rapist, who had been operating on the streets of Manhattan since the days before the law enabled the collection of blood samples from incarcerated prisoners.

Jaffer continued to describe the team’s approach. Last week the department sketch artist, working with several of the victims, had completed a composite that was being distributed to stores and residences throughout the precinct-the “generic male black,” as Mercer liked to describe the suspect. Medium complexion, average height, average build, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, possible mustache, close-cropped hair, no distinguishing features, scars, or marks. Before too long, every African American adult male who set foot north of Sixtieth Street and south of Eighty-sixth Street, between Central Park West and Riverside Drive, would be stopped and questioned. Neighbors would be turning in their deliverymen or elevator operators, and good citizens would be frisked by anxious and weary cops, each one hoping to get a lucky break and catch the compulsive rapist.

“Stop dancing around, Pridgen. I’m getting to you. What else is your crew doing about this one?”

The sergeant stood to answer. “We’ve got Traffic giving out summonses on the midnight tour, tagging all the unregistered and uninsured plates. Mounted’s working the area on weekends, which is mostly when he hits.”

I could see Lunetta rolling his eyes even as I stared at the rear of his head. Mounted cops riding up and down West End Avenue at midnight on a Saturday. Not the most subtle way to patrol the neighborhood. Even the rapist might catch on and change his movements.

Pridgen continued. “We’ve called in the Profiling Unit at Quantico and-”

Say the magic word and the duck comes down, hitting Lunetta square on the head. “Feds? Feds? Whose stupid idea is that? Aren’t you guys up to handling this one yourself? Answer me, Pridgen. Whose idea was it?”

Lunetta saw Pridgen flash a glance in my direction. “ District attorney calling the shots on this one, Sarge? You just sit back and let them take right over and run the show, huh? Maybe you’re moonlighting on the side, too busy to do major investigations? We got an opening over at the auto pound, looking after towed vehicles, if you think this is too tough for you. What does Cooper use on you guys anyway, a nose ring? Just leads you around on a leash all day? Let me know if you start rolling over on your back or baying at the moon.”

The woman researcher from Justice bit into her lip and looked at me for a reaction. I didn’t know whether I was blushing for Pridgen or for myself. I ripped some paper from my legal pad and dashed off a note to Lunetta, passing it forward, in which I asked his permission to explain where we were going with the investigation. By the time it reached him, was opened and read, he had continued to pepper the sergeant with questions and then kept on going at Pridgen even harder, choosing to ignore my offer. If he had intended to call on me before I asked to speak, I had just sealed my fate by assuring him that I wanted to give him answers to these questions.

“Last week’s attack-was this girl coming from one of those Columbus Avenue bars, too?”

“No sir,” Pridgen answered.

“Where from, then?”

“Actually, her boyfriend drove her home, just before two in the morning. Let her out of the car about half a block from her apartment, up at the corner. She walked to the front of the building alone. The rapist pushed in behind her, after she unlocked the vestibule door.”

“So much for the boyfriend. I guess chivalry’s dead, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant? I want some progress on this one before the next time you come back here. Take your seats. I want the Three-four up now. Let’s hear about last night’s homicide.”

Chairs pushed back and the podium assembly changed over, with Lieutenant Peterson and Chapman accompanying the CO up to the stand.

The general precinct figures were good. Lunetta was pleased that the deputy inspector in charge had taken the story of one of his burglary patterns to a local cable TV program, ¿Que Pasa NY?, which resulted in an informant breaking the case. He liked that kind of creative policing, as he would call it. What he never had liked was wisecracking, not even back when he had been Chapman’s boss in the Street Crime Unit, almost a decade earlier.

“Who’s going to bring me up to speed on the new case?”

Peterson pointed at Chapman and stepped aside. Mike rested his notes on the podium and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. He dug one hand into the pocket of his blazer, then started his description of how he was summoned to the scene. He was thorough, detailed, and professional-the best homicide cop in the business-but I fidgeted and recrossed my legs when he got to the end of the narrative and closed his description with Dr. Fleisher’s directive to load “Gert” into the EMS van.

“ ‘Gert’? I didn’t know she’d been identified.” Lunetta was annoyed. His head whipped from side to side as he checked with each of his aides to see if they had failed to give him the morning update on the city’s most visible crime of the moment. The case was the cover of both daily tabloids, and he should have had the newest information about the unfortunate victim before the public did.

“She hasn’t been identified yet, Chief.”

“Well, is her name Gert, or isn’t it?”

Don’t go there, Chief, I urged quietly from the peanut gallery. All of us who worked with Mike knew that he named his victims in every case. Always did it, and often stuck with his nickname, no matter what the eventual I.D.-his own perverse way of personalizing his cases.

“I call her that, Chief, so she’s not just some number, some cold statistic for the mayor to get off on. I named this one in honor of Gertrude Ederle-three Olympic medals and the English Channel. I figure, given the way somebody tried to send her to sleep with the fishes for keeps, she must have had the soul of a great swimmer to stay afloat.”

There were a few snickers around the room, but most of the group knew it wasn’t the safest direction to follow.

Lunetta wouldn’t bite twice. He moved away to the next questions. “What are you looking at here?”

Chapman went on. “After the autopsy results today, we’ll work on a press release and sketch.”

“Can’t you give the papers a photo from the scene-a closeup? Get an I.D. more quickly?”

“I don’t think the way she looked coming out of the water is the way any of her loved ones would want to see her featured. We’re working with Missing Persons and each of the precincts.”

“You checking every area that borders the creek? May turn out to be a Bronx homicide after all, Chapman. The numbers get tallied in the precinct where the crime occurred, you know.”

“I don’t care where she dove in, Chief. We got her now.”

Fat chance, Lunetta. Count it as an outer-borough murder so we keep the Manhattan numbers down? Nope, I’m with Chapman. She landed here, and no matter where she was killed, that gives us jurisdiction.

“I see from the newspapers that you had Miss Cooper up at the scene last night. You throwing in the towel, too, Detective? Ready to call in the Feds? I can’t help but wonder what it is you need a pet D.A. for at all these crime scenes and station houses. D’you carry her lipstick case for her, or her hairbrush?” The chief smirked at his put-down, jabbing the detective and me in the same thrust.

But trying to embarrass Chapman that way wouldn’t quite work. He’d simply use the opportunity to get more laughs, even if they would be at my expense. “No, no, sir. She never lets me near the makeup. You know me, Chief-I’m strictly a leg man. I’m in charge of her spare panty hose. Each time there’s a run in one of those suckers, I pull out a replacement pair. Best I can do at the moment.”

A couple of my friends around the room raised their eyes cautiously to meet mine, to make sure I was rolling with the flow. Not a problem. Battaglia had trained me well. I could control my short fuse with the knowledge I’d get some shots back at the chief eventually. The district attorney might even take them on my behalf.

Lunetta’s number-two man leaned over and whispered something to him, flipping through the briefing book to an earlier page. He scanned it and looked up. “Is that case of the body that came out of the East River last month related to this one, you think? That’s still open, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, but no connection. That one, a homeless man was fishing, hooked up and pulled an arm out of the water. Right out of its socket, actually. Scuba went in and found the rest of the body, weighted down with concrete blocks. She’d been in the water more than half a year. Feet bound, ligature round the neck. That’s a mob case-got a good snitch who’s working with us. We know who we’re looking for, just haven’t been able to find him yet.”

Great restraint, Mikey. He had resisted the temptation to tell Lunetta that he had christened that victim “Venus.” A onearmed Italian woman in a cement overcoat didn’t lend herself to any appellation except Venus de Milo.

The aide whispered to Lunetta again. “We had Bronx South here on Wednesday of last week. They’ve got a rape pattern as well in a couple of the housing projects. You might check over there to see if there are any similarities.”

Chapman looked less than interested. The likelihood that the well-groomed, silk-clad woman he had dubbed Gert had anything to do with ghetto dwellings in a run-down neighborhood that wasn’t his official territory didn’t engage him very seriously.

Lunetta listed off a punch list of places to go and things to do that would have been elementary for a rookie homicide detective. Mike listened patiently and assured the chief that as soon as they figured out who the deceased was, he’d be off and running. “I assume we’ll know who she is by the end of the day.”

“That’s great, Chapman. Then I’ll expect an arrest within the week. Maybe next time you’ll do a better job keeping the shutterbugs away from the scene you’re working. No reason for a case like this to be front-page news, except for the photo opportunity you gave them. Now it’ll take a couple of days to make these headlines go away.”

Lunetta finished snapping at Chapman, looked around the room, and announced to the bosses, “I think you gentlemen realize how much the commissioner hates it when this kind of thing happens. Tourists aren’t scared away by drug dealers killing each other off on their own turf or gang members shooting other gang members to death. But if this woman turns out to be an innocent victim of violence, I don’t think I have to tell you what it means to the city. Last night, at a fundraiser, the mayor was just telling his supporters that murders in New York had dropped to their lowest numbers in more than a quarter of a century-when he got word of this mess.” Lunetta scanned the brass arrayed in front of him. “That’s the point of all these exercises-in case it’s slipped your minds. Letting everyone know how safe this city has become. Our homicide rate hasn’t been this good since nineteen sixty-one.”

Chapman made sure he muttered into the microphone as he picked up his notes and pocketed them. “I hate to burst Hizzoner’s bubble, but I gotta tell you his numbers are small comfort to the broad who’s laid out in a refrigerator up at the morgue, waiting for her last physical.”