Death Dance

23

Within the hour, Mercer Wallace and a backup team from Special Victims were at Selim Sengor's high-rise building, a hospital-owned residence on the Upper West Side. While I waited for him to get back to me with news of when the young doctor had abandoned his home, I called the hospital's general counsel, who'd been monitoring him since his weekend suspension.

"You're telling me you had no idea Sengor fled the country?" I asked.

"I'm shocked, truly. We were beeping him two or three times a day, and ten minutes later he'd return the calls.I talked to him myself just this morning."

"I've got detectives on the way to the apartment. I expect there are documents or papers left behind. Things that might help us track his flight route, maybe computer records. He'll be on the run."

"I feel so embarrassed about this, Alex. You don't need to waste time with a warrant. We'll consent to letting you in. It's hospital property-I'll send someone from my office over to meet the detectives right now."

"That would be a help. I think they're interviewing the super and doormen first."

It was after five o'clock when Mercer called back. "We got another collar."

"A new case?"

"Nope. One of our perp's buddies. Seems Sengor skipped out of town over the weekend. Drove to Boston, flew out of Logan to London and then home. You're probably right about the phony passport. This other guy is also a psychiatric resident-maybe there's something in the water in that department. Dr. Alkit's his name. Sengor gave Alkit his hospital beeper and the keys to the apartment."

"So every time Sengor was beeped to check in…" I said.

"You got it. Alkit called him in Turkey, and he phoned the general counsel to report back, so they kept up the ruse that he was still in town. Sengor apparently figures that if he isn't here in the country, you can't go forward with the prosecution and there won't be any press. He thinks the Turkish authorities won't find out about the charges and he can keep his license to practice medicine over there. Guess he's never heard of Interpol."

"Where'd you find this guy Alkit?"

"Your man in the counsel's office sent over an assistant to authorize us to go into Sengor's apartment. Dr. Alkit was already in the bedroom, boxing up some of his buddy's things. Next to the door, packed and ready to go, was a carton of videos."

"Videos? What do you mean?"

"Home movies, Alex. Videotapes that Dr. Sengor made."

"Porn?"

"Worse than that. Sengor had a camera concealed in the bookcase opposite one of the beds in his room. Just ordinary video equipment propped up between two medical reference books. That's what Dr. Alkit was dismantling when we arrived. I opened it up and whipped the tape into his VCR. Sengor recorded himself having intercourse with Jean Eaken."

"Oh, that poor woman. What does-"

"She looks lifeless. She's out cold, never moves a muscle. It's hard to watch, Alex. It's like, like-"

"I've seen it before, Mercer. Like he's raping a corpse."

"Exactly. I'm taking the box of tapes, too. Thirty-nine of them. Each one dated and labeled, some filmed here, some in Turkey. You can tell those from the background shot and even the music playing on the radio. If they're all the same kind of thing, you'll wind up with a lot more victims."

"And Dr. Alkit? What are you charging him with?"

"Criminal facilitation-aiding and abetting Selim Sengor in fleeing the country," Mercer said. The bail-jump violation applied even to defendants who had been released on their own recognizance, like Sengor. "Tampering with evidence. This tape puts your doctor behind bars and locks the door for a long time. Alkit's blubbering like a baby. Just trying to help his friend. For some strange reason he feels these encounters wouldn't be crimes back home in Turkey."

"They wouldn't be crimes because if anybody knew about them, Dr. Sengor would be short his private parts. I'd better tell the district attorney what to expect. Call me when you get to the precinct."

"Will do. I want to check a few of the other tapes, see if they're similar."

"Be sure and have them duplicated first. I don't want the originals compromised." The best evidence would require working from copies of these tapes, so that stopping the footage, rewinding, zooming in for close-ups, and all the other wear and tear wouldn't damage the first-hand evidence of criminal conduct.

I called Rose Malone, Battaglia's assistant, and told her I needed to see him before the end of the day.

"Be here in fifteen minutes. He'll be finishing up with the asset forfeiture unit by then."

"What kind of mood will that leave him in?"

Rose had been the executive assistant longer than anyone could remember and the best barometer of the district attorney's disposition from moment to moment. "Right where you want him. The unit broke up a drug gang and we get to keep about one point two million dollars that was seized in the bust for our budget. He'll be smiling, no matter what you have to tell him."

On the way into the executive wing, I stopped by the Appeals Bureau to ask for assistance on briefing the DNA database issue, as well as to check our extradition treaty with the Turkish government. It didn't pay to engage with Battaglia unless one was fully prepared with answers to the questions he was bound to ask. I was gossiping with Rose about the latest office romances, always fertile ground in a little legal village with a population of six hundred lawyers-most wider the age of thirty-five-a support staff of many more hundreds, and the regular presence of thousands of New York's finest under the same roof every day.

As the head of Asset Forfeiture walked out of Battaglia's suite, he was smoking one of the DA's cigars and blowing smoke rings in my face. "My first Cohiba, Alex. Amazing what a million bucks can do for my career. He told me to send you in."

Battaglia didn't move the cigar stub from the center of his mouth. "I hope you're not about to spoil my afternoon. It's been a banner day up until now."

"Then I'll start with the good news. There's a DNA hit on the Riverside Park rapist."

"What'd the Post call it? Canine Cop Caper?"

"That's the one. The suspect has been identified and DCPI is going to put out a release with a sketch tonight. He's homeless, so it may take a few days to come up with him, but they're Optimistic."

"Let me know the minute they get anything."

"Of course. Paul, I think you need to know that this case has raised an issue about using the DNA linkage database. McFarland's going to hold my feet to the fire while I try to set a decent precedent for us," I said, taking the risk that I was better off warning Battaglia that there was the potential for trouble, even if I didn't give him the whole blueprint yet. "I'm going to ask the guys in Appeals for some help."

"So what's the bad news?"

"The drug-facilitated-rape case with the physician and the two Canadian women? I filed the indictment today," I said, as I steadied myself for the district attorney's response to my report. "But Sen-gor's already fled the country. He flew home to Turkey."

Battaglia dropped his feet from the desk and actually took the cigar out of his mouth.

"How'd you let the guy get away? I can't believe you did that. It looks awful for us."

"I asked for substantial bail, Paul. Moffett bought into the fact that he was a doctor with roots in the community and let him out."

"Roots, my ass. Any chance of getting him back?"

"The treaty allows extradition for murder and rape, but the State Department liaison just told me there's never once been a return of a Turkish national. They'll send back Americans or other Europeans, but they won't give up one of their own. Sengor was on the phone from Ankara telling me he didn't even commit a crime."

"You don't think it'll get press, do you?" Battaglia seemed as anxious to keep it out of the headlines now as the defendant did.

"More ink than you'll want, I'm afraid. The commissioner's going to take the case to Interpol, boss. He's going to ask them to issue a red notice on this." The international notice system would rely on my indictment to try to arrest Selim Sengor with a view to encouraging the Turks to let us extradite.

"Damn it."

"It gets worse. Mercer just seized a video collection from the perp's apartment. We're probably talking multiple victims-maybe dozens, here and abroad. Seems he drugged and raped them, recording the entire encounter with a camera hidden in his bookcase."

Battaglia spun his chair around away from me, pretending to fiddle with documents on the table behind his desk. He liked the success of my unit's innovative prosecution tactics, but he hated discussing the details of bizarre sexual habits. "Now what the-what the hell is that all about?"

"Paraphilia."

"Para what?

"Dr. Sengor's a paraphiliac, if I had to guess from the box of tapes Mercer just picked up. As Mike likes to say, it's Latin for 'sick puppy.' It's one of the categories of sexual dysfunction in the DSM," I said, referring to forensic psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. "The guy acts out his deviant fantasies with unwilling victims. What gets him aroused is doing things he wouldn't be able to do to a conscious partner, like maybe anal intercourse or-well, we'll know as soon as we watch the videotapes."

"But why put it on film?" Battaglia asked, still with his back to me.

"To create a masturbatory scenario, a way to reenact the events to stimulate himself when the night is over. To keep a trophy of the event." Great. I'm talking dirty to the most powerful prosecutor in the country and he's pretending to be shuffling folders on his desk, looking for an irrelevant piece of paper that doesn't even exist. "These guys lead double lives, Paul. Sengor's a licensed professional in a well-respected field, but he's obviously got a fantasy about necrophilia."

"So how come he says he didn't do anything wrong?" Battaglia said, holding up a file from the bottom of a tall Stack of yellowed papers and staring at a page of statistical information that was at least two years old. Anything to avoid eye contact with me in the middle of this discussion.

"Rapists who drug their victims don't see themselves as criminals. The women are with them by choice, the pills aren't administered by force-even though the victims aren't aware they're drinking the substance-their clothes aren't torn off them, and they're rarely injured. It's delusional on Sengor's part, but that's the nature of this kind of assault."

"Anything else on this?"

"Not for now."

He wheeled his chair around to face me. "Meanwhile, what's the progress on the case at the Met? The press iskilling us on this. There are front-page stories every day."

Like most high-profile crimes, Natalya Galinova's murder spawned a related series of features. There was a retelling of the dramatic death onstage at the Old Met of the great baritone, Leonard Warren, in 1960, as someone in the packed audience screamed out to the paralyzed cast and crew, "For God's sake, bring down the curtain!";interviews with suburban teachers and parents who worried about sending their children on Lincoln Center tours because the killer was still atlarge in the neighborhood; and countless profiles ofGalinova quoting the great, world-famous men who had partnered her of the other primas with whom she had shared a stage.

There was even a sidebar by Mickey Diamond, who had covered the first murder at the Met. Running out of fresh leads to keep the current frenzy on the front pages, Diamond revealed that the only time the Post had ever rejected one of his tasteless headlines was in that earlier case, when he submitted his story with a title captioned Fiddler Off the Roof.

"Lieutenant Peterson's got everybody working double shifts, Paul, You know how methodical he is."

"I've got a black-tie dinner at the Pierre Hotel Saturday night for some committee my wife's on-I can't remember which disease. Odds are that somebody or other from the Lincoln Center board will be there. You've got to give me something to say about the progress of the investigation."

"You'll have whatever I know by then."

Prominent people tried to treat the DA as their private attorney. Church leaders called to press for leniency when parishioners were caught up in white-collar crimes, parents of elite prep school students urged the hush-up of teachers arrested in Internet pedophile stings, and well-to-do investment bankers promised treatment programs for offspring netted in campus drug sweeps. Battaglia had developed an enviable immunity to all the pressure, and settled for being in the know about every detail of a case before muscle was applied by outsiders.

"Alex," Battaglia said as I started to get up to leave, "those television monitors that were in Joe Berk's apartment. The commissioner told me about them, even though you saw fit to leave me in the dark. You ever find out what they were filming?"

"We didn't have any way to run with that, Paul. Especially once they disappeared. I just don't know what he could have been watching."

"Have you talked to the tech guys about it?"

"Yes, of course. They're on standby to give us a hand. But first we have to know exactly where the cameras were concealed-I mean, in what building-and what Berk was looking at. We never got there."

"I'm just wondering whether he could be a-a-" He stopped himself midsentence, not even wanting to say the word.

"A paraphiliac?"

I thought about the interiors Mike and I had seen on the screens in the brief moments before Mona Berk had interrupted us. "Possible. Voyeurism's a form of paraphilia. Peeping, watching someone disrobe or engage in a sexual act. Depends where he had those cameras positioned. We thought it looked like dressing rooms or bath-rooms, maybe in some of the Berk theaters."

"So why didn't you follow up?"

"It didn't seem to have anything to do with Galinova's murder, Paul. The cops went over her dressing room with every piece of equipment they had. There were no cameras concealed there, at the Met."

"Let me know if you come up with any dirt on old Joe," Battaglia said, smiling as he chewed on the wet tip of his cigar. "I'd love to have it in my arsenal."

I could see where he was going now. He wasn't suggesting that Berk was involved in Talya's death. In Battaglia's world of power and privilege, it would be a useful chit to know that Berk had a personal point of vulnerability, something he might someday trade for information of value in another case.

"Sure, Paul. When I was in here on Monday, you mentioned that you had a lot of background on Berk. That you thought he'd been involved in some kind of illegal tax schemes."

Again he removed the cigar from his mouth. "Yeah."

"He told Mike and me there's a messy lawsuit going on. His niece wouldn't let us get into the details at all. Do you know anything about it? Maybe it would give us a broader family picture if I under-stood it, now that we've also got this incident with the girl who fell from the swing."

"You talk to her yet?"

"She's in what the doctors call a controlled coma. One that they've medically induced. They don't want her to wake up till they've got the pain management under control. Then they'll assess the brain damage."

What Battaglia didn't like discussing about sex, he more than made up for when the subject was financial fraud.

"Don't run off, Alex. He's quite a character. You have any idea what Joe Berk is worth today?"

"Not a clue."

"He makes the rest of the Fortune 500 look like amateurs. I'd say he and his brother built themselves an empire worth twenty-five billion dollars. Real estate, theatrical properties, airplane leasing, almost as many hotels as Hyatt and Hilton combined. It's a phenomenal operation."

"Why did you start an investigation of the Berk Organization, boss?"

"Somebody snitched-brought me in some good information."

"About Joe?"

"Joe and his brother, Izzy, they were inseparable. Izzy was the real brains of the family, plus he didn't have Joe's big mouth. They shared one common trait."

"What's that?"

"They hated the taxman. I'm not talking about shipping your purchases to an out-of-state address or minor scams like that. Izzy Berkowitz might be the shrewdest guy who ever took on the feds, back when the two of them started making money, more than forty years ago. He was doing leveraged buyouts in the 1940s, before anyone ever heard of them. Izzy had more money hidden offshore than Captain Kidd."

"Legally?"

"That's the issue. What do you know about 1740 Trusts?"

Ask me anything about the variety of deviant acts that comprised section 130 of the Penal Law and I could cite chapter and verse as well as draw diagrams, but this was as foreign to me as Swahili.

"Never heard of them. 1740-the year?"

"No, 1740 of the IRS trust and estate provisions. In the 1960s, Congress passed a set of laws that basically ended the tax benefits of foreign trusts for residents of the U.S. To get around the legislation, Izzy dreamed up a scheme that he got going down in the Bahamas. As long as he could prove to Uncle Sam that a foreign citizen actually set up the trust and kept a legal presence in the islands, he wasn't subject to U.S. taxes. Izzy found some friendly local, put him in business, and used the millions generated in cash from that general partnership to lend it to the other Berk Organization trusts and companies."

"That works with the IRS? The feds bought into it?"

"They did originally, but not anymore. By then the Berks were grandfathered in by the government when the law changed a decade ago. I went into it to try to break the damn thing up but ran into a stone wall," Battaglia said, plugging the cigar back into the corner of his mouth. "As long as the income is loaned to other Berk ventures or reinvested-get it? As long as Joe doesn't distribute the money to himself or his heirs-he sits pretty on top of his billions. No taxes, no obligation to even tell the IRS what's in the trusts."

"Quite an arrangement."

"I guess Joe's got the same idea as Izzy had. The Berk family plan is to die broke."

"Broke? You've lost me. None of them is broke."

"On the estate tax return, Alex. Izzy's heirs claimed he was only worth twenty thousand at the time of his death. That's what got me into the matter to begin with. The feds grabbed it from me-they always take the easy ones-but they made a really bad deal. They let Joe call his own terms."

"Why?"

"If I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't have lost jurisdiction of the case. Joe paid ten million to settle the tax claims, and the IRS agreed never again to tax any of the Berks' oldest offshore trusts. Never."

"Sweet deal. That's why there's no way of knowing how much money is actually at stake here."

"And that's why Izzy valued the family's privacy so much. He hated Joe's flapping mouth."

"It can't make Joe very happy that now there's a lawsuit within the family. It's bound to make some of this stuff public," I said.

"Why do you think I'm watching the suit so carefully?" Battaglia hated to lose. If he could find a way back into an investigation that so obviously intrigued him, he'd be looking for the first crack in the door through which to insert his toe. "The two youngest kids-Izzy's daughter and Joe's son. They're the ones suing."

"So that would be Mona Berk-Izzy's girl. And her cousin, Briggs. Suing who?"

"Joe Berk."

"Why, exactly?"

"Greed. Entitlement. Revenge. Pick your vice. Joe and Izzy built an empire in a single generation. The whole point was to pass it along intact to their heirs, blanketing the family in this curtain of confidential dealings."

"What changed that?"

"After Izzy's death, Joe quietly started restructuring a few of the trusts. His older kids, and Izzy's, wanted some of the stock and cash transferred."

"But who suffered? I mean, how many billions does it take to feed a Berk?"

"Joe had two wives. So did Izzy. The kids from each of their first marriages are all in their late forties and fifties, all close to each other-brothers and sisters, first cousins-and very involved in the business. The two you're talking about are both the offspring of second wives, and in each instance, there was a fairly acrimonious divorce. These kids are a generation younger and don't have much to do with their half siblings. Since Joe was the trustee of Izzy's estate, he began to shift the assets around, very quietly-mainly to benefit the older kids."

"And Mona found out?"

"Joe's kid-Briggs-told her. Two years ago he was still estranged from his old man. That's when he told Mona what had been going on. I imagine it's why Joe made such an effort to bring his son back under his wing. To keep him close and get him to drop the lawsuit."

"What amount did she sue him for?"

"About five billion dollars, Alex, for the invasion of her trust fund. She claims that Uncle Joe bled her accounts dry. The irony is that the deal Joe Berk made with the feds to pay up the tax claim put such a tight clamp on his settlement agreement that even in the discovery process of her civil suit, the judge hasn't allowed Mona's lawyers to get disclosure of the terms and amounts of the trusts. Nobody really knows how much money is at the base of the Berk empire."

"Hard to believe she could want that much more money than what she's got."

Battaglia smiled at me. "Her lawyers whine to me that it isn't about the money. She just wants to be on the same footing as the other children-it's all about being treated like family, is what they tell me it's about."

"I'll let you know when I find the chink in Joe's armor. And I'll give you the latest on the Met before the weekend."

Two other bureau chiefs were lined up to see the district attorney as I said good night to Rose. It was almost six and the corridors were empty now, most workers on their way home, and many young trial lawyers hunkered down over their desks, assiduously starting a long evening of legal research or trial preparation.

Laura had left a note on my desk, clipped to three telephone messages and a crisp white envelope, hand-delivered from the hospital's general counsel, who'd been monitoring Selim Sengor's suspension since last weekend.

The three calls were personal, so I sat down to deal with the letter before I dialed to gab and make social plans with my friends.

As I tore an opening across the top of the sealed envelope, I could hear the noise of a sharp scratch against a piece of flint within it. The paper was immediately engulfed in a burst of flames, which licked at my face, setting fire to my hair and the collar of my silk blouse.