Entombed

3

Mercer reached into my closet for his leather jacket and handed me my winter coat and scarf. "Are you serious about tomorrow? You want me to have one of my complainants down here to testify?"

"I already reserved an hour in an afternoon grand jury, just in case Battaglia saw the light," I said. "They were impaneled on Monday so they'll be sitting through the end of February. Do you think you can reach any of the old witnesses tonight?"

Mercer was religious about staying in contact with his victims. In the decade since we started using DNA to solve stranger-rape cases, even the civilians were aware that investigations that seemed to have gone cold could be revived instantly as the input from data banks all over America grew and became standardized.

He listed the names of the women he had to call this evening. Neither of us wanted them to hear from the media that the man who had attacked them was suddenly active again. Each of their lives had been traumatized by these events, and all had recovered to different degrees. I was a firm believer that a successful prosecution would further aid their recovery.

"I'd like to start with Darra Goldswit. She's solid, she's always been ready to do whatever you think is best, and she still lives in the tristate area."

I flipped through her case file, which Mercer and I regularly updated with contact information as she and the other witnesses moved to new homes, graduated from schools, changed jobs, married, and generally got on with their lives. "Need the number? I'll read over the police reports and be ready for her by the time you get here."

He copied her home telephone number and cell from my folder.

"If you can have her here at one, we'll be the first in the afternoon jury at two o'clock. I can put the medical evidence and lab report in after she finishes." There were at least six grand juries that sat in Manhattan every weekday, three that convened in the morning and the others in the afternoon.

"I'm off to headquarters. The commissioner wants me right by his side when he makes the announcement."

It was usually tough for the PC to decide when to publicly declare a crime series a pattern. Too early and it might create unnecessary panic within the community, while too late would lead to criticism about failure to keep those at risk from knowing the danger. This was an easy call because the cases had been such big news stories four years earlier, and now the reliability of DNA technology left no doubt that the new attack was the work of the same man.

The news reporters would want details of Annika Jelt's assault and though they were few at this point, Mercer Wallace knew them better than anyone else. He and I were the only people who had interviewed every one of the women who had been brutalized in the older cases. He would stand on the podium behind the commissioner, alongside the very somber chief of detectives, and provide whatever information they deemed appropriate to release at this point.

"I'll watch for you on the eleven o'clock news. Call me if anything interesting develops tonight, okay?"

"You going to be home, Alex?"

"Girls' night out. But a very tame one. There's a seminar at NYU Law School and Nan Toth is dragging four of us with her. We get our continuing legal education credit if we show up for the two-hour lecture, made painless by stopping at the alumni reception first with Nan. She promises enough wine and cheese to tolerate a panel of legal experts explaining the most significant Supreme Court decisions of the last year."

We rode down in the elevator together and walked out onto Hogan Place, the narrow side street that housed both buildings of the DA's office. The wind and biting cold embraced me.

"You meeting them here?" Mercer asked.

I looped the scarf around my neck and shook my head. "They gave up on me when they heard Battaglia was stopping by my office at six. I'll grab a cab up to Washington Square."

Mercer waved one down in front of the courthouse and tugged on the fringe of my scarf as he said good night. He was three short blocks from One Police Plaza.

The law school was on Fourth Street, the southern border of the square, and a very short ride from my office. I got out of the cab in front of the main building, careful to step around the icy patches of sidewalk left over from the weekend storm.

A security guard stopped me at the front door and asked where I was going. "The reception has already started, miss. It's in the new building, not here."

"But I thought-"

"Eighty-five West Third Street."

My dismay was obvious. I had rushed Nan off the phone and never asked the exact address. Now I didn't feature going back out into the cold.

"Just around the corner, miss," the guard said. "Not very far. The block between Sullivan and Thompson Streets."

It felt like it was twenty degrees or below outside. I put my head down and fought the wind as I made my way down the narrow street, so typical of Greenwich Village. I followed several men with litigation bags up the steps of the small brick building in the middle of the block, moving against the flow of other partygoers on their way out.

"Your coat, madam?" A young man standing beside a metal rack checked my things and I continued inside until I saw my friends from the office.

"I recommend the red," Catherine Dashfer said, holding up her glass. "Enough of the wine and you won't feel quite the urge to punch out Scalia when they discuss his opinions."

"Sorry it took me so long. I went to the law school first. What's this?" I looked around at the bare walls of this shell of a building, which looked more like a tenement than a major academic facility.

"They're tearing this dump down and putting up an enormous new structure in its place," Nan said. "Check it out downstairs."

"Check what out?"

"The dean's got a construction crew in the basement, using crowbars to break down pieces of the wall."

"Seven o'clock at night? With that kind of overtime, no wonder the tuition here is so high."

"It's all part of the show for this evening's alumni dedication ceremony for the new school building."

The bartender handed me a glass of red wine. "Am I supposed to say that sounds like a riveting evening? Worth skipping the lecture to see?"

"Not exactly. But this brownstone is more than two hundred years old. The excavation has turned up all sorts of artifacts from colonial days. Teacups, silverware, pewter bowls. You'd love it."

"Why now? Why tonight?"

"Give the big donors a show. How often do you get to see a bit of New York City history uncovered before your very eyes? C'mon."

"I've seen enough. It's claustrophobic down there," Marisa Bourgis said to Sarah Brenner, the deputy of my unit, who was nodding in agreement.

"I'm game," I said, and followed Nan and Catherine to the staircase that led down to the basement.

Two dozen men in a variety of pin-striped and chalk-striped suits mingled with a handful of lady lawyers, while three other guys in hard hats chipped away at discolored old bricks. A table in the corner held the assorted debris recovered from behind the eastern portion of the wall that had been revealed in the hours before I arrived. I sipped at my wine and examined a wooden implement- some kind of primitive kitchen tool, I assumed-while Nan stopped to speak with one of her former professors.

"What would you guess this is?" Catherine asked me, holding up a twisted piece of black metal. "A pair of spectacles or-"

The crowded space reverberated with the shrill screech of a woman who looked as though she had been one of the earliest female graduates of the distinguished law school. She was on the far side of the room and several of the men rushed to help her to a chair.

"Poor old dame probably got nailed by the backswing of a crowbar," Catherine said. "Every ambulance chaser in the house will be looking for a piece of the action."

We walked toward the site of the commotion. A couple of welldressed visitors had moved to the staircase to hold off onlookers from above, while others clustered in front of the fractured bricks, staring into a dark hole and murmuring their surprise. One man moved aside and I stepped into his place.

Perfectly smooth ivory-colored bones framed the empty orbital sockets that met my horrified stare. I was face-to-face with a human skull, buried behind the ancient wall.