Final Jeopardy

CHAPTER 8

The rain had stopped by the time my alarm went off at seven o’clock, and I opened the curtains to reveal a glorious October morning. It was Thursday, and I tried to remember what the day’s line-up looked like in my red desk calendar as I showered and thought ahead to the weekend. I had planned to spend it with Jed, so I daydreamed instead about a whirlwind shopping hinge, (a haircut that would announce a new ‘me,“ and assembling a few of my girlfriends for a ladies’ night out at an elegant restaurant. 9 I didn’t feel like dealing with a yellow cab so I called a car service to deliver me to the office. I read my Times I most of the way downtown while Imus kept me diverted I on the radio, and I was pleased to note when I entered I the building through the revolving door that Battaglia’s car had not yet pulled into its reserved space directly in front of the office.

Laura was drinking her coffee down the hall with Rod’s secretary and the phones were quiet. I turned on my computer and brought up the screen for e-mail to send some messages before starting on my response to the motions I had to file in the Reynolds case.

“Mind if I come in?” I looked up to see my old friend, Mickey Diamond, the veteran court reporter for the Post, standing outside my door. He had worked the courthouse beat for almost thirty years and was the revered dean of the school of the tabloid crime story. Diamond was tall and lean, with silvery hair and an irresistible grin, even when he was at his most offensive. We never ended a press conference on a rape case without his asking what the victim looked like, and even when Battaglia refused to give an answer, Mike would invent a description of his own. If he assumed the victim had been African-American because the crime had happened in a housing project in Harlem, she would appear in print as a ‘raven-haired beauty,“ and if the rape had occurred in a townhouse on the Upper East Side, the woman was invariably a blonde.

“Enter,” I said, trying my best to be cheerful, knowing that this visit was uncharacteristically overdue, given my tangential involvement in the death of a movie star.

“Anything new?”

“All quiet, Mickey. Nothing to report.”

“No, I mean, off the record.” Right. There was no such animal as ‘off the record’ for Mickey Diamond.

“I’m not kidding. I’ve got nothing for you, really.”

“Did you see ”Page Six“ today?” he asked, referring to the Post’s gossip column.

“Nope.” I hated to admit it, but I usually bought the tabloid because so many of the office stories were covered in it. The last few years, the Metro section of the Times, which used to be too classy to report on all the city’s sex and violence, now read like the tabs on any given day.

“Johnny Garelli’s in town for the Lascar investigation.

Says he was at Rao’s with an unidentified blonde last night. Probably a starlet or hooker. Thought maybe you’d as know who she is, give me a scoop. Chapman and Peterson jer must keep you on top of things.“ he Could he tell I was blushing?

“I’m out of the loop on this st one, Mickey. Just a witness.” He smiled that impish grin that usually worked on me.

“C’mon, it’s really slow. Haven’t you got anything for me?”

Unfortunately, the subject matter of my cases was prime fodder for Diamond’s stories, and every available space in the tiny courthouse press office was literally papered with headline stories that he proudly called his “Wall of Shame.”

I had been a cover girl in more of those tales than I cared to count.

“Get out of here before Battaglia sees you with me and thinks I leaked something to you. Scoot.”

“Just give me a quote on the murder case, something I can use as an exclusive, please?”

“Are you out of your mind? I want to keep my job, I honestly do, Mickey.”

“Can I make up something, like how bad you feel about I Isabella? I promise it’ll be tasteful.” I I picked up my box of Kleenex and threw it across the room at him, laughing at that prospect. Frequently throughout the last three or four years, before I could even ask Battaglia for permission to talk to any of the reporters about a case or an issue a firm office rule Diamond would have some pearls of wisdom, in quotation marks, attributed to me. Even the District Attorney had stopped berating me and come to realize I was not guilty but that Mickey had simply fabricated the statement, trying to keep it consistent with what he thought my views would be on a given subject.

“Hey, you owe me. My editor wanted me to do a story about you and Jed Segal. Even had a headline: ”THE LEGAL MISS WHO MISSES KISSES,“ but I refused-‘ I was out of my chair and making my way toward the door in a flash. ’I’ll break your fucking neck if you even think about a story like that.”

“Easy, easy,” he said, putting his hands on top of his head, as if to shield himself from a strike by me.

“Don’t be so sensitive, I was only joking.” He backed out past Laura’s desk.

“City desk’s Working on an anonymous tip. D’ya hear that Garelli killed a guy once, when he was in the Marines?

Not the enemy, I mean one of his buddies. Beat him into a coma over nothing an insult the other guy threw at him.

Guy died four months later in a military hospital. We’re trying to check it out before anybody goes with it in print.

Hear anything like that?“

“No, I haven’t heard a word about it,” I responded, shaking my head in amazement. Not one of the things Johnny had chosen to confide in me, but that was hardly surprising.

Mickey left me with a last effort at a story line: “Call me if you get anything decent. My imagination isn’t as sharp as it used to be. I’m not so good at creative writing anymore.”

I called Mark Acciano to see how late the judge had kept the jury working last night.

“They deliberated till almost midnight, then he sent them to the hotel. Started again at nine-thirty this morning.” “Could you get any sense of the split?” ey “Nah. They all just looked tired and grumpy by the time he dismissed them. Impossibleto tell what the problems were.” as “Any guessing from the court officers?”;er Although it wasn’t cricket, if the court officers liked the he lawyers, they often reported back what they could hear of st the arguments from their stations outside the door of the er locked jury rooms. If the twelve were fighting like cats and dogs it was one thing, and quite another if eleven were ganged up against one.

“Not a whisper. I’m going up to sit it out in the courtroom.

I’ll let you know what happens. And, Alex, thanks a lot for your advice about the summation. I never would have thought to put all that detail in, but I think it helped a lot.

Your notes were a godsend.“

“That’s what I’m here for. Go get him.”

Laura buzzed me.

“Dr. Mitchell’s secretary just called.

Said to tell you he’s going to see Jed in his office at seven-thirty tonight, and that you’d know what it’s all about.“

“Yes, Laura, I do. Be right back, I’m going for a refill.”

I was on my way next door to the Legal Hiring Office, which kept fresh coffee going all day to impress the applicants who applied for positions in Battaglia’s office by the thousands every year. When I returned with a steaming cupful, Laura was standing at the side of her desk.

“It’s Mercer, I’ve got him on hold. It’s urgent.”

I picked up Laura’s phone.

“Yeah?”

“Coop, it’s almost over.”

I had to think for a minute to realize that he wasn’t talking about Isabella’s case.

“What happened?”

“An attempt this morning. Two blocks away from the last hit. M.O. was identical same approach, same description, same language. Woman lets the guy in the house, he’s got the knife. Only surprise was that her husband was in the bedroom. The husband hears a commotion and comes into the kitchen, Mr. William Montvale gets so shook up he drops everything and runs out the door.”

“Wait, wait, wait. You’re losing me. Who’s William Montvale? The husband?”

“No, no, Miss Cooper. Stay with me. The man we have been looking for is William Montvale, otherwise known to the local media as the Con Ed rapist. Not only was this morning’s attempt at a rape unsuccessful, much to the delight of the intended victim, but I am calling personally to tell you that the NYPD has solved this pattern, just for you, kid.”

“I know you’re going to explain this to me, Mercer, right?”

“Make me a promise, Coop. No dates for the next seventy hours, okay? No champagne dinners, no trips out of town.

As soon as I get my hands on Montvale, I’ll be calling or beeping you, no matter what time of day or night, so you can run the line-ups and do the Q and A. Will that make you happy?“

“Delirious, Mercer.”

“Now, what you want to know is how I know the rapist is William Montvale. Is that your question, Counselor? And the answer is, the usual brilliant detective work that you associate with me and my crew, with a dash of ahem shall we say, great good luck. Make that incredible good luck. The way most crimes are solved, Alex.”

“Tell me what happened.” My heart was pounding at the idea of catching this maniac and putting an end to his little ey reign of terror before any other woman was victimized. on “When the husband came out of the bedroom, Montvale let go flustered that he let go of his knife. He bent over as to pick it up but the newspaper he was carrying in his back rer pocket got caught under the countertop and fell to the floor, too. Either he didn’t notice or he was happy just to hang on to the knife, in case he needed it to fight his way out. By the ier time the couple called their doorman, Montvale had run down the staircase and out the rear service door. Gone.

“The people were so shaken they just sat in the living room holding on to each other till uniformed responded to the 911 call. That’s when the first cops on the scene saw the Post on the kitchen floor and picked it up.”

“There’s a scoop for Mickey Diamond. Most rapists prefer the New York Post. Hope his editor likes it. Go on.”

“Cop asks the couple if the paper was theirs. They say no. It had been rolled up to fit in the guy’s pocket, so the cop unrolls it. In it, there’s a letter from the New York State Department of Parole addressed to one William J. Montvale, inviting him to come to their offices at three o’clock this afternoon and bring his birth certificate as proof of identification. Seems he just got out of state prison in New Jersey, and they agreed to transfer his parole to New York, so he could move back in with his beloved mother.”

“Make my day tell me what he did the time for in Jersey.”

“I’m trying to keep you happy, Coop. Your instincts were right all along. Four counts of rape, Bergen County. You just couldn’t come up with him ‘cause his priors weren’t in New York. Got a release to early parole because he was in that treatment center in the Jersey system, you know the one I mean?”

“Yeah, Mercer. That one where they rehabilitate rapists.

Then they send ‘em back to us all cured and well behaved, like William Montvale.“

“This guy’s a real pro. I’ll find him for you, Coop, but then you got to put him out of business forever. Is it a deal?”

“Blood oath, Mercer. What’s the plan?”

“We got a stakeout in front of his mama’s place, but once he realizes he dropped those papers, I doubt he’ll show there or at the parole office today. They’re covered just in case. We got a team checking the Jersey prison files, looking for visitors’ names, girlfriends, cousins, cellmates anybody he might run to for a place to crash. Then we’ll fan out to all the shelters and see if they got any ”John Does“ showing up today. You know I’ll get his ass. Just stick with me and I’ll hand you a lock-solid case.”

I knew he would. Nobody could do it better.

“I’m here, and I’ll have the beeper on day and night. Whatever you need, just let me know.”

‘I’ll be in touch. Keep your fingers crossed.“

I called Rose Malone and asked her to tell Battaglia that we had a big break in the case, then told Sarah Brenner to be ready to cover me for the next few days in case I got tied up on the Montvale arrest. She offered to do my two witness interviews scheduled for the afternoon, knowing that it would be difficult for me to concentrate while I was primed to rush up to the Special Victims office the minute Mercer called.

My counterpart in the Bergen County Prosecutor’s Office had been helpful to me in the past, so I reached out for him again and asked him to pull the closed case files on the suspect, just to see whether there was any other nexus? to Jersey that might be useful. Don’t cross the Hudson, I urged Montvale silently. I don’t want to deal with the delays of an extradition proceeding I just want to grab you here, let these women have a chance to confront you and put you behind bars till you outlive the ability to do this to anybody else.

Another lunch at my desk, this time consisting of a; container of light yogurt and a seltzer. I checked Mercer’s office every half-hour, but the entire squad was out in the field and the civilian aide who was handling the phones didn’t know which end was up.

Shortly after two, Laura buzzed me to announce that we had a walk-in. The last thing I needed right now was a witness without an appointment, but that’s exactly what I had. I couldn’t pass her off to Sarah, whose hands were already full with my overflow. Angela Firkin had presented herself to the lobby security officer with a crumpled piece of paper that had my name printed on it, along with the address of the building.

I invited her into my office and seated her opposite me.

“How did you get my name, Miss Firkin?” I asked, as I took out a fresh pad to begin to make notes of our conversation.

“I called the crisis hot line, told them my problem, and they told me to come talk to you.”

“I see. Did anybody mention reporting to the police first?”

“I can’t go to the police, Miss Cooper. I appreciate your seeing me without an appointment, but I was very upset and I just couldn’t go to a police station. This is a situation about a man in an official uniform, and I’m just not comfortable talking to the police.”

“All right,” I said, after getting the pedigree information I needed, ‘why don’t you tell me what happened?“

Angela Firkin was a twenty-eight-year-old woman who lived alone in a brownstone in the East Eighties. She supported herself on disability insurance and a modest inheritance, but was unable to work because she had a long history of treatment for schizophrenia.

“I don’t go out much, just walking for some exercise in the neighborhood, and getting my groceries. Almost everything else I do by mail order, by sending away for things.

“A couple of weeks ago, our regular mailman had a heart attack and we got a new guy. I have to see him a lot, ‘cause some of the things that I order are too big for the mailbox.

My book club delivery, my home shopping network things, you know.“

“Sure.”

“Well, this new guy started off fine. Then, one day, when he rang the doorbell to give me a package, he told me the Post Office had new rules. Said it was because of all the trouble the government was having with drug smugglers and, um, I think the word he called it was ”contraband.“ He told me I had to open the wrapping in front of him, so he could see what was in the box. It was just a pair of cubic zirconia earrings I ordered for myself for sixteen dollars, so I showed it to him.

“A few days later, he did the same thing with my mystery book order, even though it had a return address and everything, from the book club.”

She was telling the story easily, in a coherent narrative, so I let Angela go on without interruption.

“Then the guy, his name is Oscar Lanier it’s right on his name tag the guy comes back this Monday they with another delivery for me. This time it’s some pills,: on but over-the-counter stuff From ABC Vitamin Company. I’m on a lot of medication for my well, you know, my, as condition but I also sent away for some vitamins. So Oscar says, ”I have to search you before I let you have this the package.“ est ”I said, “What? I never heard of this before.” He said, her “New rules, I told you, new Post Office rules. I’m sure you’re okay, but it’s gotten very dangerous to go into people’s homes these days. They’re doing this to protect us.”

“I felt kind of bad for him, I mean, I wouldn’t want to go into a lot of apartments in this city. People with pit bulls and drug dealers and who knows what. So I stepped into the hallway, Oscar puts down his bag, and he starts to frisk me, like in the movies. But I’m telling you, Miss Cooper, he’s running his hands back and forth over my breasts. I say, ”That’s enough, Oscar.“ And he gives me the package and thanks me a lot.”

I asked Angela how long the encounter took and exactly where and how the mailman touched her. She explained it all.

“Then he was back this morning. I’m telling you I never got my mail so early as this week. He’s got a box for me, no return label. So he tells me it looks suspicious. I see it’s got a postmark from Philly, and I know it’s my cousin Muriel, sending me the sucking candies I like. She never puts a return address in case there’s not enough postage on it, she doesn’t want it coming back to her. Wants me to pay it. But no, Oscar says he has to search me and then see the candy for himself. This time, he puts his hand inside my blouse and actually touches my breast. Can you believe it? I smacked him across the face and stepped inside and bolted the door. Never even got the candy.”

I asked some more questions and told Miss Firkin that I would like her to wait in our reception area while I called the Post Office.

“I already did that, Miss Cooper. No new rules. Oscar was full of baloney thought he had an easy mark, just ‘cause I like my packages. They don’t have any new rules like that.”

I hadn’t thought they were actually new rules, but I did want to check to see if Oscar was, in fact, an employee of the United States Government. Laura got Angela a seat down the hall and a cold drink, and I made my calls.

Yes, there was an Oscar Lanier and indeed that was his postal route, although he was only a probationary worker at the moment. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I punched his name into the criminal justice computer network AJIS and within seconds, got the response that Lanier had a misdemeanor conviction earlier this year in Queens County. Not surprisingly, it was for sexual abuse.

My next call was to the head of the Special Victims Bureau in the Queens District Attorney’s Office. I explained the story and asked her to tell me what the case was about.

Fifteen minutes later, she called back to let me know that Oscar’s previous job had been as an airport security guard ttorney pert on mestic ises as Jogger her the jghest ith her at JFK. He was arrested after several women passengers complained that he took them out of line, into his office, and tried to do a body cavity search, looking for smuggled drugs. Fired, convicted, and rehired by the United States Post Office, all within the last six months. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.

I brought Angela back in, reassured her that this particular postman would not ring a third time, and told her that I would assign a female detective to work with her on the case. After she left, I made the necessary calls to arrange a temporary suspension of Lanier while we investigated the matter. It was almost five o’clock by the time I finished those details and attended to the rest of the paperwork on my desk.

Mark Acciano called to say that the judge would keep his jury only until ten this evening, and if there was no verdict by that time, he’d declare a mistrial. I tried to shore up his spirits, and told him I’d stick it out with him as long as there were no developments on the Montvale case.

Laura asked if she could leave a bit early to go to the dentist, and I told her I would get the phones myself. I sat at my desk, going through the pile of mail that had come with the afternoon delivery. Two demands for letters advising the Parole Board what position our office would take on cases coming before them next month, one request to lecture to a women’s group at a college in Pennsylvania, and several offers to test software programs designed to expedite the preparation of lawyer’s briefs were on the top of the stack.

Wedged in between the legal-sized envelopes that I had been opening was a small letter that appeared to be a personal note. It was stamped but had no postmark, and I guessed that it had been delivered by hand. I slit it open with the narrow point of a pair of desk scissors and unfolded the page of single-spaced typed correspondence.

It began with the salutation “My dearest Alexandra,” and my eye flipped immediately to the bottom of the paper to see the closing that was identical to the one on the papers Isabella had received: “Best ever, Cordelia Jeffers, Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine.”

My thoughts scattered in a dozen directions. I was mad at myself for touching the letter and envelope, which may have yielded fingerprints if I had not smudged them; I wanted to have Mike or David or anyone else who knew the case sitting beside me as I read through the text; I wondered whether to march directly into Battaglia’s office and tell him I was in over my head; and yet I couldn’t stop myself from reading on.

My dearest Alexandra, I debated about sending this to you at your office or your fancy apartment, but I didn’t know if you’d notice it at home among the dozens of yellow roses that our mutual friend continues to waste his money on.

Sometimes, my clever girl, your actions do surprise me. Didn’t you find it degrading, and I do mean thoroughly humiliating, to have him leaping into bed with that vacant slut, that Cleopatra-like whore you were stupid enough to befriend? And yet, thereafter you remained so desperate for his companionship that you accept rides in his limousine and let him try to wheedle his way back into your good graces. Deny him the help he seeks, he needs it not.

Like her before you, you will be shocked to find that the woman he truly loves is not your equal not in physical appearance, not social status or material wealth, not even in professional recognition in her chosen field.

As you know, women do crazy things in the name of love, and crazier still when they sense the beloved slipping away, becoming ambivalent. orne Wasn’t it the immortal Bard who said “One may crt on smile and smile and be a villain?” Keep that in mind estic and yield not to temptation. es as Best ever, ogge Cordelia Jeffers;r the Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine lies h her I read it three times to try to make it make sense. How did this woman, this person, know the things she talked about in the letter? The yellow roses, my short ride across town in Jed’s limo, his pleas for help these last few days, his betrayal of me with Isabella. I surely didn’t believe in psychics, but could I have been unaware that someone was actually following me wherever I went? Not possible.

Then that paragraph that mirrors one in Isabella’s letter, referring to the woman Jed really loves. Again, I was completely puzzled by its meaning.

Who was the beloved that Jed was slipping away from?

Who was he becoming ambivalent about? Could this possibly be his ex-wife, now bitter about their estrangement?

I had never even suggested that to Chapman. All I knew about her was that like many other women, she was unhappy in marriage and unhappier still in divorce. Why hadn’t I asked more questions about her? I called the guard at the security desk to see if he remembered anyone leaving an envelope with him earlier in the day. He reminded me that the shifts had changed at four o’clock, when he had come on duty, and nothing except deliveries from Police Headquarters had been dropped at his station. I’d have to check with the day shift tomorrow morning.

Mike Chapman and David Mitchell needed to know about this letter at once. I called David’s office and got the answering machine. I left a message, expecting that he would pick it up soon, since he was supposed to be there to meet Jed sometime within the next two hours, and I told him I would fax a copy of the letter to him before I left the office.

I tried Mike but he wasn’t at the squad yet, so I hung up and walked down the hall to use the fax machine outside of Rod’s conference room. As I walked back to my desk, I could hear the phone ringing and I ran to pick it up.

“We popped the motherfucker, Coop. We’re in business.”

“Mercer? How’d you do it?”

“Seems like the last thing he did before he left prison was get himself an ATM card. A Metro Bank cash card. I got that info from the prison this morning. I called the bank and told them to stop the card, figuring he had to get cash if he was gonna be on the run. He tried three machines, got a ”Card not valid“ printout. Picked up the courtesy phone and called the bank hot line. The branch manager told him to come in at four-thirty, after the regular banking was closed at our direction that there must have been a defect in the card.

Manager called me back, and a few of us from the squad kept that appointment with him. It gives new meaning to the word “surprise.”

“That is fantastic. Where are you now?”

“Still at the bank. Listen, take your time. We’ll take him back over to my office and process him.” Photographs, fingerprints, palm prints, background information.

“The boss’ll start assigning guys to call the victims and pick ‘em up for the line-ups. I’ll chat him up, nice and easy, see if he wants to talk to my favorite prosecutor, tell her why he likes to do this shit to women. You go home, get comfortable they it’s gonna be a long evening and get yourself over to the t on office by seven, seven-thirty. Sound okay?” “Perfect. I’ll just go home and change, then be right there.; as Let me know if there’s anything you need.” rger “You got somebody who can work on a search warrant the for his mother’s place while you’re up with us? See if any est of his clothing, any of the women’s jewelry’s there?” her “No problem. I can phone it in when I’m over with you.

It’s all on the word processor in ECAB, our early case assessment bureau, where whoever was on duty could help me through the evening’s paperwork.

“And, Mercer? One more thing. Can you control your boss on this? No perp walk. Please, beg him for me. Not before the victims have a chance to see the line-up. Take him into the station house with a jacket over his head, will you?”

“You bet. See you later.”

Publicity on these cases could get out of control. Too often, police brass staged a scene taking a suspect in or out of the patrol car, resulting in the defendant’s face being plastered all over the local TV and newspapers. For those victims who saw the ‘perp walk’ before they got to view a formal line-up, it often meant that defense attorneys challenged the propriety of the identification process, and the victim was barred from pointing out her attacker at the trial.

We were too close to a great result to screw it up now.

I packed up all the supplies I would need to run the investigation from Mercer’s office, left Laura a note telling her I might be late in the morning depending on how long I had to be at the precinct throughout the night and called Rose Malone.

“Is Battaglia in?”

“He’s in a meeting, Alex. He’s got the governor’s Criminal Justice Coordinator in there. Do you want me to interrupt?”

“Nope. Just wanted him to be the first to know that we think we’ve got the Con Ed rapist. Tell him I’m going out on the case myself to do the line-ups and try to take a statement. He’ll get a complete briefing in the morning.”

“Congratulations, Alex. He’ll be really pleased. I’ll put you in his book for lunch. I’m sure he’ll want to hear all the details.”

“Thanks, Rose.” I hope I’m here in time for lunch. This kind of case could be an allnighter, by the time we round up the witnesses and get the video team up to the squad.

My last call was to the video technicians. For most of the history of police work, statements or admissions made by suspects in criminal cases were recorded by officers in their notepads. Then for several decades, our office used stenographers who accompanied us on call and took down, verbatim, the questions and answers of an interrogation, to read back to a jury at trial. For almost twenty years in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we had developed a sophisticated unit of trained video professionals, who taped these critical sessions always with the knowledge and consent of the accused whenever a defendant was willing to participate.

This process eliminated the age-old complaint about police interrogations: that the cops coerced or beat the confessions out of the suspects. Instead, the video camera captured the entire scene. The defendant sitting calmly at a table in a detective’s office, unshackled and unharmed, often munching on a doughnut and drinking a Sprite while the prosecutor repeated the Miranda warnings and got his informed consent to go ahead without a lawyer present.

I can remember the first time I went out on call with irne a cameraman, incredulous that any criminal would agree to film a confession to a crime and have it permanently.stic recorded for use against him in the case. I read the guy his.5 as rights, showed him the camera, and explained its purpose. gger Instead of refusing to go forward, he sat up straight, r the combed his hair and reset his baseball cap neatly on his head for the movies, and spoke into the microphone as if her it was his finest moment in the spotlight. I think that jury finished its deliberations in about twenty minutes. Guilty.

Bob Bannion answered the phone in the tech office.

“Great, I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to get you tonight,” I said when he picked up. Bannion had started the system for us and he was superb at his work. He was a pro, with a keen, dry sense of humor, which helped get you through a long night in a squad room. Bob was also on call for any homicides or major cases that occurred in the next twelve hours, so I was delighted to try and wrap him up first. I explained a bit about the job we would be working on so he knew what to expect.

“Anything else cooking, or can I ask you to meet me at Special Victims by nine tonight?”

“I’m just on my way to film a crime scene. Multiple homicide in Alphabet City,” the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the streets were named avenues A, B, and C. “Looks like a couple of teens in a wild shoot-out. I No arrests yet and nothing even close for tonight, but Rod I asked me to do some interior shots of the apartment.” One of the valuable techniques Bob had developed was making videos of crime scenes as soon as they were discovered, so that there would be a permanent record of every detail in its place. The importance of objects or clues near a murder victim often did not become obvious until much later in the investigation, when detectives could refer back to their original relationship to the bodies or the evidence by looking at the video.

“When you’re done there, will you come on up to Eighty-second Street? They’ll be starting with the line-ups, so there’s no need to rush. I’ll beep you to call it off if he’s not talking. The guy’s a predicate, so maybe he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Give me a call if you get anything hotter than this, okay?” Predicate felons criminals with records of convictions for serious offenses often were savvy enough not to make admissions that would help sink them before a jury.

I ran out the door and had jumped into a taxi by the time I got to the corner of Worth Street, prepared to creep along the Drive uptown at the height of rush hour to get to my apartment. I brushed past the doorman, skipped the mailbox, waited with several of the neighbors to get on the elevator, and was inside my bedroom and stripping off my work clothes in seconds. I changed into a pair of jeans, a tailored shirt, and a blazer for the long evening of sitting on coffee-littered desktops and making notes while propped against dusty file cabinets. No need for a pocketbook I clipped my beeper onto my belt and stuffed cash into my jacket so I could send out for food and soda for the crew working on the case throughout the course of the evening.

My turn-around time was less than twenty minutes. I thought about calling David’s office to see if he had studied the faxed version of Cordelia Jeffers’s letter, but when I looked at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes after seven o’clock, I didn’t want to risk calling just as Jed arrived to meet with him. Instead, I left a message on David’s home machine, explaining where I would be for most of the evening and that I would try to reach him orne if I had any free time at the station house.

I went back downstairs and out onto the street, grabbed a yellow cab and directed the driver across the Eighty-fifth Street transverse to Columbus Avenue, and got out at the corner of Eighty-second to walk the short distance to the Twentieth Precinct. The uniformed cop at the front desk stopped me as I entered the building, so I identified myself to him and walked up the two flights to the Special Victims Squad, which had come to feel like my second home during the past few years.

Every felony sexual assault that occurred on the island of Manhattan was referred to this little outpost of seasoned professionals.

When I reached the landing, I pushed open the heavy fire doors that separated the ugly brown-tiled stairwells from the dilapidated office space of the thirty-year-old squad.

The place was electric with the activity that accompanies a break in a major case. Detectives in every shape, size, and color had been pulled in from days off and borrowed from other details to help round up victims, witnesses, and the stand-ins or fillers needed to be the ringers in the line-up array with the defendant. Every shirtsleeve was rolled up, every collar was open, and the handful of ties I could see were unknotted and worn in the loose crisscross fashion on of the detective world. esti “Hey, Wallace, Cooper’s here,” I heard a guy I didn’t es as recognize call out in the direction of the sergeant’s office. 3gger Mercer appeared in the door frame and waved me;r the in. I started to offer my congratulations, but he talked best over me.

“The captain is really pissed off. Stay out of h her his way.”

“At me? What did I do? I just got here.”

“He did not like your order about the perp walk. Thinks you’re just doing that so that Battaglia can get the press release instead of the PD. He’s mad at me for letting you know about it so early didn’t want me to call you till we’d wrapped everything up tonight.”

“What a fucking baby he is. I can’t believe you gave me up on that.

When is he going to learn that it’s just the wrong thing to do at this point in the case? That’ll be like the last pattern he messed up. Didn’t want to call us for a search warrant so he gets the suspect to sign a consent. The judge threw out the whole thing all the evidence said once he was cuffed and asked for a lawyer, he couldn’t consent to anything. C’mon, what’s been going on since you called me?”

“First I had to accompany Mr. Mont va leto the men’s room so he could relieve himself. There’s a fuzzy birthmark on his thigh all right, just to the southeast of his penis, the way Katherine Fryer had described it.”

“Great. Get a photo of it before he gets to Riker’s and somebody tells him to paint it green.”

“Already done. Now, we’ve also got most of the people we need. The couple from the attempt this morning, they’re here. We reached Miss Fryer. Detective Manzi just left to pick up the first victim, and the third one’s on her way in from Westchester with her daughter. She moved out of town after the rape. I think we’re only missing one. No answer at her house, so we may have to do her down at your office next week.”

“Everybody in separate cubbyholes?”

“Yeah. We’re using the juvenile room and the detective squad on the second floor. None of the witnesses will see any of the others before the line-up. I’m telling you, you’ve got us all pussy-whipped, Cooper. We’re doing this exactly the way you want us to,” Mercer laughed.

It was important that the victims who were going to view the array were separated before the identification process. In the old days, I had watched many of them cross-examined about the police procedures. When brought to the station house in the same patrol car or kept in the same waiting area, the conversation invariably turned to the only thing the women had in common: their assailant.

“What did your guy look like?”

“The man who raped me had a mustache.”

“My attacker had an accent.”

“No, I think mine was taller than that.” The defense could argue to the jury that the witnesses recollections were enhanced by each other’s descriptions, and it became difficult to tell what each woman remembered before she talked with the others. It took three times the manpower to escort each one in individually, and every empty closet in the building became a holding place for a nervous witness before the procedure got underway. But it would all hold up in court.

“How do the stand-ins look?”

“See for yourself. You can take a peek in the viewing room. Glad it was such a beautiful evening not like last night’s rain. Lots of mopes hanging out on street t on corners who’re happy to help out for ten dollars from the stic captain.” Most of the time the cops scoured parks and playgrounds?ge to find reasonable facsimiles of the suspects similar size, the weight, skin color, hairstyle. Drug treatment centers and homeless shelters were also good places for fillers, eager her to get the ten spot for a guarantee that they wouldn’t be arrested for a crime, even if they were picked out by the victim. A couple of hours’ work, standing in the room with the perp and holding a number in front of their chests, and then walking out with the funds for a bottle of Thunderbird or a couple of vials of crack.

The squad had a regular line-up area, which consisted of two separate rooms, connected by a ‘two-way mirror.“

Montvale and five stand-ins would be in the larger one, with a couple of detectives standing inside the door to monitor his behavior and make sure he didn’t say or do anything inappropriate. He would be allowed to pick his position one through six and each man would hold a large square sign depicting his number in front of his chest.

All the men would be able to see as they faced forward was a large glass mirror, reflecting the image of the array.

Mercer, each witness, and I would be in the small room on the other side of the glass. We would take the victims in one at a time, darken the room, step them up to the glass and ask them to look at the men, who could neither see nor hear them. From our side, the mirror functioned as a window. Each woman would examine the array and tell us whether or not she recognized anyone in the room, and if so, what number identified him.

I stepped inside to check out the assembled group of skells.

“Nice going. I hope none of these guys walk out of here when I’m leaving tonight. Wait a minute, Mercer.

Number three. Make him go to his locker and change out of his uniform pants and shoes, will you. It’s a dead giveaway.“

In typical fashion, one of the fillers was a cop from the Twentieth Precinct. But once the Legal Aid attorney saw the photograph of the line-ups, he would argue that detectives had placed him there on purpose, still in half of his uniform, to make the selection even easier for the women.

Mercer yelled into the open door of the other room.

“Yo, number three. You got jeans and sneakers in your locker?

The fashion director wants you out of those brogues and your nicely creased navy blue pants. Move it.“

“I tell you, he’s as frightening-looking as those other guys you got off the street.”

“They can’t all be as good-looking as I am, Cooper. You want to see Montvale?”

“Yeah. Might as well.”

We walked down the hallway, past the captain’s closed door, and stood in front of the small cell which held a single prisoner. William J. Montvale was sitting on the narrow wooden bench that ran across the back wall of the barred area. His arms were crossed, his legs were outstretched and apart, and his face broke into a wide smirk when he saw us approach.

“Is this my district attorney, Mr. Wallace? The one you been promisin‘ me? You’ll excuse me if I don’t stand, won’t you, ma’am, but I’m havin’ myself a very bad day.” I had my look and turned to walk away, as Montvale called to Mercer, “She’s better-looking than that fat pig who tried my case in Jersey, but I bet she’s no Marcia Clark. What d’ya think, Mr. Wallace?”

It was going to be a pleasure to send Montvale up on the river. stic In the background the phones were going like crazy.

So me cop who owed a favor had undoubtedly leaked gger news of the arrest to a reporter and calls were coming in r the faster than they could be answered. best “Can we get this thing underway?” Mercer asked one her of his teammates, who was coordinating the arrival of everyone we needed.

“I’d like to get these women out of here before the news trucks sit down at the door like vultures.”

“Ready to go. We’re just waiting for you to get Montvale in the room.”

Mercer left me and went back to pull the defendant out of his cell. His wrists were cuffed behind his back and Wallace had one of his own enormous hands wrapped around the rapist’s upper arm, leading him with a firm grip into the area with the five stand-ins. He was whispering in Montvale’s ear, telling him as I had heard him do so many times that if he moved one motherfucking muscle or did so much as cross his eyeballs after Mercer uncuffed him and while those women were looking through the window, he could expect to be sporting a new asshole before the end of the evening.

While I stood outside the room, Mercer offered Montvale his choice of numbers for the line-up. He selected the fourth position, and all of the other men switched the cardboard figures around at Wallace’s order and held them on their laps as they were asked to sit in a row of chairs. The instructions were that upon command, the group would rise to their feet, each man would approach the mirror one at a time and face it directly before turning his profile to the viewer, and then they would return to their chairs and be seated.

Wallace stationed two of his teammates in with the prisoner, took several Polaroid photographs of the array to use for the pretrial hearing, and called to his sergeant to bring us the woman who had been attacked earlier this morning. I waited for her in the hallway outside the captain’s office, then quietly introduced myself to her and explained the procedure that would follow.

“I’d like you to come into this room with me and Detective Wallace. Please don’t be scared, we’ll be right next to you. You’re going to look at six men through a glass window. You can see them and hear them, but they cannot see you, I promise. We’ll turn out the lights and I’ll ask you to take a good, close look. I’d prefer that you don’t say anything to us until after you’ve seen each of them up close. Then I’ll just ask you three or four questions, and it will be all over. It won’t even take two minutes. Are you okay?”

Mrs. Jeter appeared to be a few years older than I was. She was understandably tense and nodded in compliance as I went through the steps.

“Can’t my husband be with me?”

Mercer was gentle and reassuring.

“In a minute, ma’am, we’ll have you right back to him. But he’s a witness, too, so each of you has to do it separately. I’ll be right beside you. Nobody’s gonna hurt you.” She let us lead her into the small viewing space and I stood her near the window as Mercer switched off the lights. She gave a slight gasp: “Oh my, it’s so dark, and reached out to grab onto my hand as she peered into the glass. I let her hold it and rested my other arm on her orne shoulder to offer comfort. As the six rose to their feet and the first one walked esti toward the mirror, I could see Mrs. Jeter’s eyes scanning es as the row.

“My God, I see him it’s number four. That’s ogger the man who was in my apartment this morning, that’s;r the him.” Her hand squeezed mine as though they were being best crushed together by a steamroller. h her She was perfect. She knew exactly who she was looking for and didn’t even have to wait for the motley crew to parade in front of her one by one.

Wallace asked her to go through the rest of the process anyway, and to study each of the men as closely as possible.

She did, but kept repeating, “I don’t have to I know it’s him.”

As Mercer took her out the door on the far side of the room, so she wouldn’t intercept her husband or the women who had not yet viewed, she reached up and kissed him on his cheek, telling him how grateful she was that he had made the arrest so quickly.

“I’m a very lucky woman, I know that. And thank you.”

He turned and gave me a thumbs-up.

“The first hit is always the best. Nice and solid coming out of the box. We got him, Coop. Let’s keep going.”

I backed out of the room and motioned to the sergeant to send Mr. Jeter up to us. An old uniformed cop who looked as if he could count the minutes to retirement and had been assigned to man the telephones walked through the rear of the squad.

“You had a couple of calls since you got here, Miss Cooper. I didn’t know you was up here.”

“Remember what they were? Anything more pressing than this?”

“Nah. Kid from your office, Acciano, says he’s got good news for you a guilty verdict. He’ll leave the details on your voice mail. And Chapman, Homicide. Says he knows what Final Jeopardy is tonight something like that. Wants you to call him when you get home. He’ll be at his office till 1 A.M. Lots of reporters asking what you were doing. That kind of thing.”

“Fine. Just hold everything till we’re all done and I’ll look for you on my way out of here.”

Mr. Jeter marched toward me, thrust his hand out to shake mine as we said hello to each other. He was feeling very proud of himself for having been able to thwart the attack on his wife. I started to describe the line-up but he cut me off.

“I’ve done this before. Mugged getting off work the year before last. Had to go to three of these before they caught the right guy. Take me in and let ‘er rip.”

I re-entered the room where Mercer was already standing at the window and we repeated the scene.

“That’s the little bastard. Number four. Right, am I right? Did my wife get him, too?”

Detective Wallace tried to steer Jeter’s attention back to the full panel.

“We’d really like you to let each one of them come up here and-‘ ”Waste your time anyway you like, Wallace.“ He stood still in front of the window and let the six men go through the motions, but shook his head back and forth the whole time “It’s four. I just saw him this morning. I hope my wife wasn’t too shook up to do this. Am I right?”

“Thanks, Mr. Jeter. We’ll let you two back together now and Detective Wallace will explain all this mystery to you in about ten minutes. Then you can take Mrs. Jeter on home, okay?”

“Great. You give my regards to Mr. Battaglia, will you?

This is the third time in six years I had a case with his office. He does a fine job. Met him once at a community meeting “Stic very decent man.”

“He is, Mr. Jeter. I’ll say hello to him for you tomorrow. gge Thanks for your help here.” I held the door open for him, the ushered him out, and asked Mercer to get Katherine Fryer, nest the twenty-four-year-old illustrator I had interviewed in her my office the morning after Isabella was murdered. Only one week had passed since that day, but it seemed like months.

Mercer went up to the fourth floor, where Fryer had been asked to wait, and brought her down to the viewing area himself. I recalled her extraordinary composure so shortly after her attack that day, and now felt the tremor in her hand as she extended it to meet mine. I asked how she had been doing as I guided her inside and repeated the instructions.

As Mercer reached back for the light switch, he mouthed something to me, which I realized were the words: “Stand close.”

I moved in to Katherine’s side as she advanced to the window and ohce again was glad for his advice. As she poked her head forward, nose almost against the glass, her knees buckled and she would have collapsed to the floor had Wallace not grabbed her at the waist and held her up.

“Sorry, sorry. I can’t help it,” she murmured, trying to steady herself.

“He’s in there.”

We both tried to soothe her and calm her down, but Katherine Fryer did not want to look through that window again.

“I really need you to take one more look. We’re right here with you. Just tell us whether or not you see the man who attacked you last week, and the number he’s holding, please.”

With great reluctance, the young woman pulled herself up and braced her body with an arm on each of us. She stared ahead for several seconds, then turned and glared at me.

“The rapist is holding the number four. I’ll never forget that face. Now will you let me out of here?”

I nodded at Mercer, thanked Ms. Fryer, and stepped out for some air while the next two women were located and brought up, one at a time, in the same fashion. It was no surprise that each of the identifications were so positive.

The Jeters’ attack had occurred in their home only hours ago this very day. And unlike muggings on the street that take only two or three minutes to commit, the rapes that Montvale had committed kept him with his victims for extended periods of time. These women had been forced to experience him through every one of their five senses, and it was because of that lengthy, intimate exposure that I would be able to argue to the jury that these identifications should be more reliable than those made by victims of any other kind of crime.

The question for William Montvale’s jury would not be how these witnesses remembered what he looked like, but rather, how they could ever forget the face of the man who so tortured them. they t on stic 5 as Jger the est her While Mercer made arrangements to get each of the witnesses home, the sergeant paid the satisfied stand-ins and sent them off into the night. I asked one of the guys on the team to take sandwich and drink orders and we called out to the deli on the corner of Columbus for a delivery.

“No beer till after all the work is done, agreed?” I asked, as I laid out the cash, noting that it was after nine o’clock as we moved into the next phase of the arrest process. Some of the guys grumbled but everyone knew there were still a lot of loose ends to tie up before the end of the evening.

“I’m gonna go in and try to warm him up for you, Cooper.

The desk says your video man is downstairs. I told ‘em to send him here so he can start getting set up.“

”That’s good. I’ll get on the phone and work on the search warrant. You certain he was living at his mother’s place?“

“Yeah. That all had to be confirmed for Paroleto approve the move to New York. Doesn’t mean he hasn’t flopped somewhere else a couple of nights. But if you look through the fives,” Mercer went on, calling my attention to the police reports known as Detective Division 5s, ‘you can make a list of some of the items of clothing the women described and some of the jewelry he stole. Maybe even the knife.“

“It’ll be drawn up and signed, ready to go so you can be at his mother’s door at the crack of dawn.”

“When do we worry about DNA?”

“Nothing to worry about. At the arraignment, I ask the judge for a court order to draw a vial of Mr. Montvale’s blood. If there were ever a case with probable cause, this one is it. Got the best serologist in the country right in the ME’s office. They’ve got the blood from each of the victims already, to develop their typings to do the eliminations for the DNA results, and in a few weeks, that nail’ll also be in Montvale’s coffin.”

“I just want to place a few of these facts in front of him.

Might help us get him to talk nice to you, Coop.“

It took me almost forty-five minutes to work through the application for a warrant by telephone to one of the rookie prosecutors who was manning the late shift in ECAB. There was a form in the word processor which made the conversation pretty easy, but there were a lot of details in Mercer’s paperwork and I didn’t want the detectives to have to go back twice. If Montvale’s mother got smart, some of the things they weren’t authorized to grab on the first trip might disappear by the time they returned with an amended warrant. We faxed the completed documents back and forth several times while I corrected the points that would be sworn to before a judge.

Mercer waited patiently until I was satisfied with the finished product. Then he signaled me to join him in the sergeant’s office, where I started on my third or fourth cup of coffee, wide awake and tingling with the excitement of a good arrest and the rush of caffeine.

“Well, I’ve moved him along a little. When we glommed him in the bank, it was the usual ”I-don’t-know-what you-talking-about“ bullshit. Then I unrolled his birth certificate and the Parole letter and stuck it up in front of his nose just now, and he mumbled something about making a mistake and knocking on the Jeters’ door when he was really looking for his Uncle Louie’s apartment. Of course, he doesn’t have a fuckin‘ clue where his Uncle Louie lives. And I spent the last half-hour talking fingerprints, a little lecture about DNA, and then some yammer about everything the Jersey cops told me about his priors, and how similar they are to these cases.”

“Where’d that get you?”

“First he insisted that he was completely cured in that prison treatment center. Doesn’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Likes women now, understands them better.”

“The therapist hasn’t been born yet who can rehabilitate one of these predators. I once had a defendant who’d been treated in one of those programs tell me that if I broke the sstic word ”therapist“ into two words, it forms ”the rapist.“:s as How’s that for rehabilitation, huh?” gger Mercer went on, “He saved the best for the last.” r the Sergeant Barbero stuck his head in.

“You guys taking calls bes yet? These phones are wild.”

“Hold everything, Sarge. I want to see if he’ll talk to Cooper.”

“What’s the best?” I asked.

“After I laid it all out, I began to jerk his chain about how smart he was, you know, the ruse about Con Ed and talking his way into the apartment. Man, this guy is a sucker for having you tell him he’s smart.”

It was odd what worked with different suspects what approach would make them want to talk to you. The most unpleasant part of this process for me had always been sitting in these rooms, face to face with men who were capable of monstrous acts against other humans, and speaking to them civilly when the evidence of their guilt was overwhelming. Doing it, one hoped, to get even more information to use against them.

“I hit the button with Montvale. Enough times of complimenting him and he actually wanted to tell me how he I did it. Not the whole thing, he’s still not admitting the I in rapes. Says that till today he had never guessed wrong about which apartment he wanted to be in.”

I listened as Mercer went on.

“Getting past doormen is easy. He says you never have to wait more than an hour, even to get into the best buildings. Sooner or later, guy gets distracted by a couple of moving men, an argument with a porter or handyman, pain in the ass tenant who expects him to know what the temperature is today and what time it was when I went out to walk their dogs. None of that happens, the guy eventually has to leave his post to take a leak. That gets him in the front door and on his way upstairs.

”This is his favorite part. Montvale says his prime time is the middle of the day. He walks up and down the hallways, listening at the doors. If he hears the television, and the noise is a soap opera, it’s a pretty sure bet you got a woman home alone watching the tube. Sometimes she opens the door and it’s an old lady, so he’s not interested.

And sometimes there’s extra baggage, like Mr. Jeter, so he usually just apologizes and walks away, saying he made a mistake. But he says the city is full of housewives and unemployed broads who are addicted to the soaps the way you and Chapman like your quiz show shit, and he thinks he can smell ‘em right outside their doors.

“Days of Our Lives,”

“All My Children,”

“General Hospital”-says they’re a dead giveaway.“

“Thank goodness for watching American Movie Classics and reading great murder mysteries. Even when I’m home sick, I’ve never in my life seen a soap opera.”

“Anyway, that got him going.”

“Foolish question, Mercer, but did you read him his rights?”

“I told you how scared we all are of you, didn’t I?

You think I’m gonna risk your wrath over a little thing like that?“

“And no noise about a lawyer?” I asked.

“How’d we get so lucky?”

“If I were you, I’d get Bannion ready to roll right away.

I don’t know how long this’ll last. Montvale knows the system better than we do he’s probably been in court more times in his life than you have.” stic Mercer returned to the holding cell to continue talking with the prisoner while I sent a detective down to the gger lobby to help Bob Bannion bring his video equipment the upstairs and get ready for filming a statement. I called the Deputy Inspector of the Police Department’s Public her Information Office and urged him not to allow Montvaleto be photographed by the press on his way down to Central Booking, since we had other witnesses who had not yet had a chance to see an array, and his identification would be the key issue. The polite conversation became heated and, over my objections, it looked as if the inspector was headed to staging a press conference on the steps of the station house before I could even finish my work and get out of the way. Bannion had cleared a place to set up in the sergeant’s office. Montvale would sit behind the desk, and a huge wall clock over his head would show the court and other viewers that the sequence of the questioning if the Q and A went as long as I hoped it would had not been tampered with. He would face Wallace and me in the two chairs, our backs to the camera, which Bob had moved to the far side of 8 the desk. As usual, I would ask the questions and Wallace I would cue me if there were specifics about a particular one I of the cases or details provided by a victim that only the assailant could confirm. We were ready to go. I called to Mercer to bring Montvale into the room, and watched as he opened the barred cell and walked the sullen suspect down the hall to where Bannion and I were moving around the desktop letter trays and clutter to keep everything out of arm’s reach. He took his seat and I took mine, three feet away from him, head to head, about to try to see how he described these hours of horror that so completely altered the lives of the women he’d encountered.

I repeated to Montvale what Mercer had told him about the video process and explained that I would begin the taping by telling him again, as Mercer had done hours ago, what his rights were. He leered as if he was looking forward to playing with the camera, and his smile broadened when Wallace leaned over and removed the handcuffs from his wrists.

“My name is Alexandra Cooper. I’m an assistant district attorney, and I am here with William Montvale and Detective Mercer Wallace of the Special Victims Squad, Thursday evening at‘ – I glanced up at the clock on the wall above Montvale – ’nine fifty-five.” I was putting the necessary heading on the tape.

“Mr. Montvale, I am going to ask you some questions about events that occurred in this county on a series of dates over the past six weeks, but before I do, I want to advise you of your rights.”

This is the part of doing interrogations where I always hold my breath and rely on whatever inexplicable phenomenon has made confession work so well for centuries in the ecclesiastical settings. Ignore what I am about to tell you about your legal entitlements, Mr. Montvale, and spill your guts to me. Tell me what you did. Every raw minute of it, so that you can pay for it for the rest of your miserable life.

“You have the right to remain silent and to refuse to answer questions, do you understand that?”

His head moved up and down, but he didn’t speak.

“Mr. Montvale,” I pushed him softly, ‘it would help if you spoke your answers aloud, instead of just nodding.“ ton ”Yes, yes, Miss Cooper. I got it. Understood.“ stk ”Anything that you do say tonight may be used against you later in court, do you understand that?“ ”I certainly do.“ the ”You have the right to consult with an attorney before est you answer our questions, and to have an attorney present her during this questioning, as well as in the future. Do you understand that?“

“Loud and clear, Miss Cooper. I understand you.”

I was almost there.

“If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you without cost, do you understand that?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you don’t have a lawyer available, Mr. Montvale, you have the right to remain silent until you’ve had the chance to speak with one. Understand?”

“Yeah.”

“Now that I have advised you of your rights, just as Detective Wallace did, are you willing to answer my questions?”

The leer was still there.

“Try me. Let’s see what you want to know.”

A wise-ass. I’ve been there before. Stay cool and he’ll settle in. He’ll be fine, just don’t let him rattle you.

“Mr. Montvale, let’s begin with this morning. I’m going to ask you some questions about what happened today, in an apartment at 246 West Sev-‘ ”Well, shit, Miss Cooper. I don’t want to talk about that.

I don’t want to discuss that with you or your dumbass detective friend here.“ Montvale’s voice began to escalate as he rose to his feet and began pounding on the desk.

“I WANT A LAWYER. GET ME A FUCKING LAWYER.”

Mercer was around the desk and slammed the defendant back into his seat by his shoulders before I could even open my mouth again.

“Bannion, keep this video rolling,” Mercer shouted.

“Get every minute of this, so the judge can see how gently I treated this scumbag. You, Cooper, out of the room, now. NOW.”

I hesitated and Mercer screamed at me again. On my way out I was almost trampled by three other detectives who heard the shouting and ran in to give Mercer a hand.

There was the sound of scuffling from the small room, punctuated by laughter from Montvale, who knew these guys were dying to land a few gut punches on him, but thanks to Mercer’s quick thinking, the video was actually keeping him safe.

I was annoyed and deflated. I thought we had been so close to getting admissions to the string of rapes. They were not essential to a prosecution, just icing on this particular case, but I wanted to hear how it felt, from the rapist’s perspective, to do these despicable things to other living beings.

I wondered if it was my approach that made him flip, as I paced back and forth in the filthy hallway. Sometimes these guys will talk to men, but not to women and I kicked myself for not having had one of my male colleagues from the unit here as a backup to try to do the interrogation in case the suspect went dry on me. I knew Mercer would tell me not to take it personally, but whenever this kind of thing happened, I did.

“Hey, Coop, nothing personal,” Mercer said, as if on cue, when he stuck his head out of the room a few minutes later.

“Montvale had this one planned. He was no more gonna give you a story on videotape than I’m gonna give t on him a lobster dinner. He was just in the mood to play with you a little variety in his day for the last time in a very long while.” He stepped out of the way as two teammates led the shackled prisoner out of the sergeant’s office and back to est his wooden bench. Montvale laughed out loud all the way down the hall, and I fought to hold my tongue so my comments wouldn’t be repeated back to whichever judge we stood before together tomorrow morning.

Mercer had no time to deal with my long face and wounded ego.

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Alex. You got everything you need here, plus whatever we get from the warrant. D’you really think that a guy with that many felony convictions and so much state time behind him’s gonna sit here and weave you some kinda tale of his exploits? You got a rock-crusher of a case, what more do you need? Now just take yourself outta here and get some sleep. I’ll do the warrant first thing, then we’ll have the arraignment by early afternoon and you can make the Grand Jury dates for next week.”

As high as I had let the adrenaline and caffeine carry me, as quickly did I drop when Montvale brought it all to an abrupt end.

“I hate it when they beat me,” I moaned in disgust.

“Beat you. How long you figure this guy’s gonna spend in Dannemora? A hundred, a hundred-fifty years? That enough for you, or you want longer?” Mercer asked me.

“I’ll take three lifetimes, consecutive. No parole.”

“Not likely that anybody’s gonna parole Mr. Montvale early again. I bet they’ve got the editorials written for the morning edition already. Give it a rest.”

“I’m ready to pack it in,” I told him.

“Do you need anything else from me tonight? I’d like to get out of here before that press conference starts. Battaglia will never believe I tried to talk them out of doing it. Whew, those guys are stubborn.”

“I’m fine. Want me to call downstairs and see if they can free up someone who can take you home?”

I looked at my watch.

“No, it’s not even ten-thirty. If there’s anybody loose, I’ll grab him. If not, I can get a yellow right on Columbus Avenue. It’s still early.”

“Want the phone? Some privacy? You can use the sergeant’s office I’ll close the door.”

“Mercer, I am going directly home. Not passing Go, not collecting two hundred dollars. Directly home. I’ll return my calls from there. I’m whipped.”

“Thanks for coming out on this. I’ll be in your office right after we hit his mother’s apartment.”

Mercer picked up his case folder, escorted me to the stairwell, and held the door as I walked out. Most of the guys were too busy chowing down their hero sandwiches and uncapping bottles of beer to notice my departure, but I gave a general wave in the direction of the squad room and leaned on the banister as I plodded down the steep flights of steps to make my exit.

When I reached the ground floor, I could see through the glass partition that the lobby was swarming with activity.

Men and women officers were beginning to trickle in for the late tour, and several uniformed cops were trying to hold reporters and cameramen at bay on the front steps of the station house.

I pushed through the door, lowered my head, and began to wind my way through the ranks of thick, uniformed bodies and around the side of the news crews. The reporters were listening attentively to an announcement from the desk sergeant about the fact that the Deputy Inspector would be speaking in a few minutes, and there would, indeed, be a photo-op of Montvale himself being booked at the desk.

Dammit. I kept walking and was only made by one cameraman as I reached the pavement.

“Hey, Miss D.A. this your case?”

I shook my head in the negative and kept going, turning right to head to Columbus Avenue and the steady flow of cabs that I assumed would be making their way to nearby Lincoln Center for the after-theater pickups.

“Alex? Alexandra Cooper?”

My head lifted up at the sound of my name, and I saw Ellen Goldman step toward me from the front of the car she had been leaning against, at the edge of the precinct driveway, adjacent to the station house.

I smiled in relief. She didn’t have a camera in her hand and she wasn’t on a deadline for an 11 P.M. broadcast or a morning tabloid.

“The news of the case is all over the radio and local TV.

My editor called me at home and asked me to get over here. We thought perhaps I could watch you do a line-up or something like that for our profile.“

I kept walking and her shorter legs tried to keep pace with my stride.

“Sorry, I could have saved you the trouble of coming out. I couldn’t have let you up there you might have become a witness in the case, you know, if you had been present for any of the crucial events, or the defense claimed you had seen or heard something important. Sorry.

I wish I had known you were there I could have told you not to waste your time.“

“That’s okay. I kept trying to call upstairs but they wouldn’t put me through to you.”

“I know,” I told her.

“My orders. Again, I apologize.”

“Don’t be silly. That’s the kind of job this is. You know we always keep trying. Listen, can I buy you a cup of coffee?”

“Ellen.” I stopped to face her, dropping my shoulders and letting her look at the dark circles I’d been growing under my eyes for the past week.

“Coffee? I think I’ve had half of El Exigente’s North American supply in the last eight days.

I don’t want to be rude, but I just need to go home and get a decent night’s sleep.“

I didn’t mean to be as clipped as I was when I spoke to icy her, but I heard the edge in my own voice and I immediately 0 n tried to soften my response with a small bribe…

“There’ll be an arraignment tomorrow, probably by midafternoon, and if you call Laura around eleven, I’ll tell you exactly when to be in court, if you’d like to see it. Then, once. the fireworks are over, it’ll be a typical Friday afternoon t slow, I hope and I’ll give you an hour or so on the case and the investigation.” Battaglia wouldn’t mind, I thought, because she’s writing a piece that won’t appear for months, rather than a story about this particular arrest.

Ellen obviously liked that offer and thanked me for it.

“Why don’t I give you a lift home?” she countered warmly.

“Really, I won’t pester you. I see how tired you are and I’ll just drop you off and plan on seeing you and having all my questions answered in the afternoon.”

I hesitated and she seemed to sense exactly why. My reflexes were slowing down and she continued to speak.

“Don’t worry about your privacy, Alex. I already know where you live.

Remember, I dropped those flowers off for you the day after your friend was killed? You had canceled our first interview, don’t you remember? I told you I’ve done my research that’s not the kind of thing I want to write about.”

I was relieved and, of course, her reminder was correct. It made me smile ‘cause I remembered Mike’s comment when I referred to the sender of the flowers as a ‘nice reporter, and he told me that was an oxymoron.

“Sure, Ellen, that’d be lovely. As long as you don’t think I’m abrupt for not asking you up for a nightcap.”

“C’mon. I understand. I’m parked right across the street.”

We checked the traffic and jaywalked over to the car she pointed out at the corner of the block. She unlocked the driver’s side and my door latch popped up automatically.

As I lowered myself into the passenger seat, I could hear someone calling my name from the front of the station house.

“Cooper, hey, Miss Cooper! Miss District Attorney!”

I could see in the rearview mirror that a couple of heads turned from the crowd of news people to see if I was somewhere in the vicinity. But I had already climbed into the car and was not about to walk back into that media circus without a pithy sound bite the last thing Battaglia would want to hear from me anyway.

The voice shouted out, “Cooper, call for you! C’mon back.”

Ellen put the key in the ignition and the engine started, but she looked over at me with concern before she set the car in drive.

“It’s okay,” I told her, ‘you’ll have me home in five minutes and I’ll return my calls from there. It’s just a feeding frenzy with all those reporters at the precinct. I’ll be much happier once I’m home. Let’s go.“

I leaned my head against the backrest of the seat in Ellen Goldman’s car, somewhat grateful that I had exchanged the adventure of a cab ride home in a fleet car with no springs or shock absorbers for the smoother trip in her later model rental that would simply cost me some chatter and forced girl-talk “What’s the best way to get through the park from here?” she asked as we pulled away when the traffic light changed to green.

“South on Columbus. You can pick up the transverse on Sixty-fifth Street.”

I closed my eyes against the bright reflection of the overhead streetlights as the car moved down the avenue, and wondered whether Montvale’s victims would sleep any differently tonight.

“Must be very satisfying to get someone you’ve been after for a while, isn’t it?” Ellen asked.

I had hoped she would have had the good sense not to interview me on the way home, but her natural curiosity apparently took over. I reminded myself not to let my guard down completely and not to answer the question as though I were talking to a friend who could be trusted with the information. Yeah, I would say to Sarah or Nina or David or Mike, it feels better than you could ever imagine, and it is one of the great satisfactions of my professional life to know this bastard is going to spend the foreseeable future in a woefully unpleasant place where he can’t hurt anybody else. But because I knew how a reporter could twist my words in print to make me sound like Torquemada or some man-hating witch, I simply said, “Yes.”

Goldman made a left turn on Seventy-second Street and headed toward Central Park West.

“Don’t you ever worry that one of these guys you prosecute is going to come back after you?” she queried.

I had been asked that question a million times, most often by my mother. That’s not the kind of thing that keeps people in my business up at nights.

“That happens in the movies, Ellen. You can’t let that drive you when you do this work. We’d never get anything done.”

“I read the clips about that case of yours that was just overturned on appeal. The serial rapist in Central Park wasn’t his name Harold McCoy?” she continued. It was the case I had just reminded Wallace about, in which the judge had thrown out half the evidence we had seized because the captain had refused to call us to get a search warrant.

“Does that mean he’s out of jail now?”

“Don’t remind me about him, Ellen. Yeah, Harold McCoy is out. We get to retry him after the first of the year. But in the meantime, his brother posted bail for him and he’s on the street.”

“I don’t know how you do it, Alex. That would give me the creeps every time I go through the park. I’d be looking I’M for him everywhere I went.”

“You think I don’t? It’s not even conscious at this point, I told her.

“Certain places just evoke connections, memories on and they’re not always good ones. It’s ironic. I happen to think that Central Park is one of the safest places in as the city. Look at the size of it, more than eight hundred?er acres. You’ve got more crimes committed in any two- or -he three-square-block area around the park every month than -St. you have inside it. But when something does happen here, ier especially because it’s so isolated at night, it’s a legitimate public safety issue. It’s awfully hard for the police to patrol a space like this.”

Goldman was driving east. She passed the guardhouse at the Dakota, and then continued straight on into the park.

As soon as she entered the roadway, I realized her mistake.

“Whoa, I meant the transverse the road that cuts through, from West to East. This is the long way,” I complained.

“Oh damn. I just saw this opening and thought it was what you were referring to. My fault,” she apologized.

The few extra minutes hardly mattered at this point.

Instead of going directly across, this would lead us on the more rambling route down the West Drive and back up to the exits on the East Side.

“No big deal, Ellen. It’s a prettier ride.”

The moon was full maybe that had helped us catch Montvale, I thought to myself, if the cops were right about all the lunatics coming out under its spell and it would probably result in an overflow of business in my office tomorrow. Not the quiet Friday I had just predicted.

The park showed itself brilliantly in the lunar glow, the foliage with its dapplings of yellows and auburns having replaced much of the verdant color of summer. The fallen leaves made it possible to see further off the road, into the beautiful park grounds, than you could when the trees were full of thick greens.

I was relaxed now, taking in the quiet view as we rounded the south end of the drive, and noting that the number of late-night runners and dog walkers tapered off as we left the areas of the park closest to the entrances and coursed up the Center Drive, almost smack in the middle of the two sides. Hard to believe this pastoral setting, with its fifty-eight miles of paths, was once the site of stench-filled swamps and pigsties. I enjoyed the tracks it provided for jogging, the lawns that hosted concerts I had attended with friends, and the cheerful zoo where I took my niece and nephew when they visited me in town.

But I knew better than most who loved its lush comfort the danger that could lurk in its bushes, the terrors hidden behind its trees and stone walls. I had enormous respect for the splendor it added to the city, and just as much respect for the power with which it controlled that gift.

We were past the Carousel now, almost parallel to the Bandshell, and nearing the fork that led to the first East Side exit at Seventy-second Street. Ellen knew my address, so it didn’t occur to me to remind her to bear right at that point. When she missed the turn and veered off to the left, I groaned at the thought of having to circle around that long loop again.

“Shit, Ellen, you missed the turnoff.”

“Oh, sorry, Alex. I’m not that familiar with the park, especially at night. I haven’t spent that much time in New York. I… I guess I just lost my bearings. It’ll just be a couple of minutes. It’s always when I’m rushing to do things right, if you know what I mean.”

I did. I guess that’s why they always used to say most accidents happen close to home. I straightened up in my seat to try to observe the directions more carefully in order ton to get us back to my apartment as soon as possible. stic Now we were traveling north again, on the portion of the road just beyond the curve that cuts off to the West Side jger at Seventy-second Street. I was watching the light from the the sky dance on the small pond which was below me and off to my right, but was jolted back to attention when the car her veered off the drive to our left and Ellen braked to a stop, almost flush against a large elm tree.

I had instinctively thrown my arms up against the dashboard to protect myself, but my head still smacked against the roof of the low car from the impact it made jumping the curb.

“Jeez, Ellen, take it easy,” I mumbled, shaking my head, as though that would clear the stars that started flashing in my eyes, and rubbing my neck, which already seemed to be sore.

“What happened, what’s your prob-‘ ”I need to talk with you, Alex.

You’re going to get out of this car, and walk down that path with me-’ I hadn’t looked up yet and I was massaging my temples with my fingertips. Everybody wants to talk to me except William Montvale, everybody wants to tell me their troubles.

“Ellen, this is stupid. If you’d like me to drive, I’ll be happy to do it, but I’m not wasting another minute here…”

“Look at me, Alex. This is my investigation. I’m the one in charge now, and you’re going to take orders from me.”

I lifted my head to try to see whether the words I was listening to bore any relation to the speaker or the circumstances I was in, or whether I had been knocked around in the car by that bad bounce so that I was truly a bit foggy. I was staring directly into the muzzle of a small handgun.

“Ellen, my God, Ellen put down that gun and talk to me, tell me what you want!” My body had reacted immediately to the signals my tired brain was sending out, and I was shaking uncontrollably as I tried to shield myself from the pistol with my quivering hands.

“You’re even more stupid than I thought if you haven’t figured out what I want by now. You like everybody to think you’re so smart that’s so important to you but even I know the ridiculous mistakes you’ve made this time, and you’re about to find out that I’m more clever than you are. Get out of the car, get out very slowly and stand right next to the door. This is not a joke do it now.”

I looked at the gun again and remembered that Goldman had told me she had been in the Israeli Army an elite antiterrorist unit. I had no reason to doubt her. The dark pathway in front of the car frightened me as much as she and her weapon did, and I had no intention of following her to a more isolated piece of turf.

“Let’s talk right here, please, Ellen. I’ll tell you whatever information you want to know. Whatever it is.” Where the fuck are the Park Rangers? I asked myself. Don’t leave this car. Nobody’s allowed to park off the roadway it’s a worse offense to the Rangers than a triple homicide. Keep her in the car and someone will come upon us, I kept thinking.

Stay put.

“Get out!” she barked. She was out of her door, gun down at her side, and around the back of the car to me in a matter of seconds. I had thought about trying to climb over the console and into the driver’s seat, but the model was too H ii compact to do it quickly, and she had taken the key out of icy the ignition. on Ellen had an automatic light beam on the key ring which she held in her left hand, and she pointed it at my lock, as which popped up at her command.

“I told you to get out of the car and I mean it, Alex, right now.” the “It doesn’t seem to make any difference to me. I’m not?s moving.

Either you shoot me in your car, which at least creates some problems for you, or you take me down into a park ravine and shoot me, God knows why. But I’ll take my chances here.”

“Stop playing Clarence Darrow with me, Alex. I don’t intend to shoot you, so get your ass out of the car and walk with me. We have things we need to talk about.”

My mind was trying to move more nimbly to process the words Goldman was speaking, while the rest of my I body stayed taut in the presence of her pistol. Why was she holding me at gunpoint, why was she threatening my life, if she didn’t intend to kill me? It made no sense, since I would obviously have to report this abduction to the police. Of course she was going to shoot me, so why give her the location of her choice? At least my body or my blood in her rented car would link her to my death. A wave of nausea swept through me at the thought of the possibility of those two words: ‘my death.“

Goldman had seemed so sane and articulate and rational until moments ago, and now, so completely crazy.

“Walk down this trail with me, Alex. We just need to get a bit away from the road for a while, so we can discuss things.”

She had opened the car door and was nudging me with the short barrel of her gun, motioning me toward a narrow footpath leading downhill between a clump of trees and bushes. I stepped out, and let my blazer, which had been draped across my lap, fall to the ground.

I didn’t have enough possessions with me to make a track to follow, but surely it would be an identifying piece of clothing that would make someone look for me if I were missing. I fast-forwarded through every kidnapping case I had worked on and every dreadful story of disappearing people I had clipped from the tabloids.

“Pick it up, Alex,” Goldman chided me. ‘I’ll wear it.

It’s chilly, tonight. A little big for me, but it’ll be fine.“

She waited until I handed her the jacket and then put it on, one arm at a time, rolling up the sleeves to fit her shorter arms.

I scanned the area for signs of a jogger, a member of the Road Runner club, a homeless guy who’d have some kind of box cutter or object I could use to try to defend myself, but we seemed to occupy this little pocket of the park entirely by ourselves.

Goldman tugged on the sleeve of my shirt and pressed the gun into the small of my back. We started along the tree-lined walk and halfway down I stumbled on a piece of loose rock, falling backward and sliding another four or five feet, pounding my back against the stones and branches, and scraping my hands as I tried to break my descent. An involuntary screech let out as I fell and Goldman hurried to catch up to me, smacking me across the face with her free hand in punishment for the noise.

“It was an accident. I slipped. I’m not being difficult.”

“I thought you were so graceful,” she sneered, ‘the ballet dancer. Ha! Get on your feet.“

I pushed myself up, wiping the pebbles from the ie abrasions that now covered the palms of both hands, on but as I tried to stand it was obvious I had turned an ankle and couldn’t put my weight directly on it. as “Keep going. Drag your damn foot if you have to, but move it over this way.” She poked me with the gun barrel to be cross the paved sidewalk and moved me further downhill, st near a weeping willow that was bent over, gleaming in the ier moonlit radiance of the lake.

“Under these trees, here. Now sit down. Does this place look familiar to you?”

How closely she had done her research was even more apparent now. We weren’t more than thirty feet from the site of Harold McCoy’s last rape, diagrammed on the front pages of each of the city papers when he struck the last time before his arrest eleven months ago. McCoy had brought his victim in from the other direction after he dragged her off her bicycle late one night, coming to this area from the north, near the Loeb Boathouse.

I couldn’t tell which was throbbing more violently now, my head or my ankle. The former was urging me not to obey the command to sit, and the latter was eager to be relieved of my dead weight.

Goldman leaned over and seemed to be placing her gun in a holster on her ankle, hidden beneath the leg of her slacks. I lightened for a moment, thinking she had meant her statement not to shoot me, but closed my eyes in terror at the sight of the knife with the six-inch blade which she unsheathed and withdrew in the next gesture.

From her pants pocket she unrolled a small length of cord.

“Give me your hands. In front,” she demanded as she kneeled and wound the rope around my wrists, securing it with a knot that looked like some professional job the kind that might have been taught to an army Special Forces recruit.

Talk, I kept telling myself. You’ve heard of victims who have talked themselves out of their situations. Offenders who can be reached and reasoned with, who walk away from the ultimate crime and leave their prey unharmed.

“Ellen, I won’t run away, you don’t have to tie me up.

Please tell me what it is you want to know.“ I tried to be forceful without letting the degree of desperation that I felt spill over into my voice.

”This is how Harold McCoy would do it, isn’t it? This is his “signature,” you were quoted as saying. Get them into the park, off the roadway, always near one of the bodies of water, trussed up like the pigs they are, and then cut them up.“

There was no place for me to recoil as she took the knife and slit a line across my jeans, right at the crease where the top of the thigh meets the hip. The thick denim material yielded like butter to the fine-bladed, sharp knife, and like a paper cut, I didn’t even feel it pierce my skin until the stinging sensation began to smart and I looked down to see the oozing line of blood.

Ellen Goldman was laughing now as she saw the red stain creep onto the faded denim of my pants.

“I didn’t even mean to cut you yet. I have plenty of time for that.”

Talk to her, I thought to myself again. But words didn’t jy in ic as er come, and I didn’t want her to enjoy the fact that I was in pain.

She went on.

“Don’t you see how easily I could make it look like Harold McCoy did this to you? That he waited outside the precinct when he heard on the radio that you were there, then he forced you into the park. People would buy that, you know. The press would love that story.”

Was that her plan? To make it look like a copycat crime?

Goldman had studied my cases and knew that Harold McCoy was out of jail. She could make it look like he had stalked me his prosecutor, his nemesis and taken me to his special place in the park and killed me there.

“No one would believe that, Ellen. People saw me get in the car with you.” I prayed that was true, as I said it aloud, although I had no more reason to believe it than she did.

“No one saw that no one who knows me,” she snapped back at me.

“Yeah, but guys who know me saw us. That would destroy your game someone would put it together.”

“But at least this time they wouldn’t blame Jed. I never meant for that to happen, but you’ve got him in so much trouble he’s likely to be charged for a murder he didn’t commit.” Ellen Goldman was raging now, and suddenly things were coming into focus for me.

“Isabella Lascar?” I asked her. I was incredulous.

“This is about Isabella?”

“No, no, no. Not at all. She was nothing. This is about Jed Segal.”

Crystal clear. answer tonight is erotomania, and now I knew the question: “What killed Isabella Lascar?”

Sitting before me was the person who had shot Iz through the center of that magnificent head, and she did it because of an obsession with a man who barely knew her: Jed Segal.

This must be the woman who had stalked Jed in California, a woman whose delusion had already driven her to kill. I was about to become Ellen Goldman’s next victim, and I was struggling to call up the things I had read about her mental disorder erotomania before I fell asleep last night, hoping that something would trigger how to deal with this otherwise intelligent, functional human being.

The stillness of the night was cut by the shrill squeal of my beeper, ringing out high-pitched tones from its perch on my waistband. Ellen stood and reached down to rip the small black device from me, clicked it to the off position, and pressed the lever on the illuminated dial to see the caller’s number.

“Who’s looking for you? It’s a nine one seven number who is it?”

“It must be someone from my office. This happens all the time, Ellen. There must be a new case.” I tried to urge her to take me to a phone booth, sure that I could signal some kind of distress if I could get on the phone with Mike or Mercer or Sarah. “They’ll look for me if I don’t get back to them soon. Please let us call in, and then we can walk away from this rationally, Ellen. Please? I’m through with Jed, we can-‘ ”Well, he’s not through with you. Nor am I. Who is this trying to reach you now?“ She repeated the nine one seven area code and began to recite the rest of the number to me.

It was Chapman’s cell phone. He was somewhere in the field, roaming, probably in some joint having a beer and getting ready to hit on a girl at the next table, with no idea that I was sitting under a tree in Central Park with a lunatic.

I lied to Goldman: “I don’t recognize the number. It could be from any squad. I’m on call tonight, all night. Let’s just go on up to the street, we’ll phone them back and you can listen to the conversation.”

Chapman had tried to reach me at the Special Victims office during the line-ups tonight and I had put off the ie calls. Maybe that was Mike trying to contact me as I was on about to get in Goldman’s car, when the cop was yelling to me from the steps of the station house. Of course, as he must have spoken with David Mitchell after David’s rer appointment with Jed at seven-thirty this evening. They he had probably put some of this together tonight and wanted to tell me about it. Had they figured out that perhaps there ier was another connection between Jed and Isabella that both of them were being stalked by the same person one whom she wanted desperately, and one whom she desperately wanted out of the way? Maybe they had figured it out, but never dreamed she would be waiting for me as I emerged from the station house at the end of my long evening.

Goldman took the silenced beeper and stuck it in the pocket of the jacket.

“You’re the woman who met Jed in California, aren’t you?” I asked her as she loomed over me, looking around at the grounds above us, as though to see whether the loud ‘beeps’ had attracted any attention on the road or pathways.

Engage her. Do it gently. She’s not crazy, the book says, in any other way. She just has this delusion about Jed. Apart from that, she’s not odd or bizarre. I hope these fucking shrinks know what they’re talking about.

“Didn’t you meet him when he was running for the Senate, in California? You were in graduate school out there.”

Goldman cocked her head and looked back down at me.

“Why, did Jed talk to you about me?”

“Yes, yes he did.”

“Did he say I was crazy? Did he tell you he didn’t want anything to do with me?”

Keep lying. They all do it to you.

“No, Ellen, he never said that.” Flatter her, tell her what she wanted to hear. Tell her that the unfaithful bastard really wanted her.

“I never had the idea he got to know you very well, but he used to tell me you came to all his speeches, his events said you were very smart.”

She was thinking now, thinking about what I was feeding her, and whether there was any kernel of truth in it. It had to at least intrigue her, I told myself, that Jed had spent any time talking about her when he moved East. At least it kept her on her feet, with that blade away from me, as I sat in place, my body aching and my mind trying to give her some thread back to life.

“Jed was in love with me, you know. There was a time when we first met that he wanted to go out with me,” Goldman told me.

“I didn’t know that.” Let her talk. Let her tell me any bizarre imagining that popped into her twisted brain.

“I’m not surprised he didn’t tell you that. That’s what got him in trouble with his wife.”

That and the thirty-six other women he had probably screwed behind her back.

“I know he felt terrible when the police arrested you in L.A.” I said. Find out why that didn’t make her turn against him. It’s hard to believe anybody sane wouldn’t give up after that.

“That wasn’t his fault, Alex. Didn’t he tell you that? His wife was insanely jealous. Every time he saw me at a rally or a cocktail party, the minute he wanted to make his way across a room to me, his miserable wife would get one of his aides to stop him. You were much luckier he finally got smart enough to get rid of her before he moved to New York. She was the reason I was in jail until the end of the summer. They arrested me because she complained that I was harassing her.

That explains a lot. No wonder Jed never mentioned anybody bothering him here, in New York, when we started dating in June. There was no interference from Goldman, that I was aware of, as of the last week. But obviously, her approach to me which started before Isabella’s death was a pivotal part of it. I had never even asked Jed the name of the California stalker. It hadn’t seemed relevant.

Goldman kneeled in front of me again.

“What else did Jed tell you about me, anything?”

Maybe this is part of my lifeline. Enough about you, Goldman must be thinking, now let’s hear what Jed thinks about me. Use your imagination, Cooper. Fill her with whatever will fuel her fantasies of life with Segal. Keep talking to her.

“Well, yes, Ellen. You must know that what we had is over, ended. Maybe that’s why he was talking about you so-‘ ”Don’t lie to me, Alex, you know it wasn’t over.“

“But for me it is, I swear to you. I can talk to him about you, I can arrange for you to be with him.” You two creeps really deserve each other, I thought. I’ll even spring for the hotel room just let me out of this deathtrap alive, please.

Why did Ellen Goldman think it wasn’t over with me and Segal? She knew about Jed and Isabella. She must have thought I would break up with him once I found out about it, too. Didn’t she kill Isabella because that temptress, that irresistible goddess, stood in the way of her reunion with Jed? I wanted to remind her of that, to give my breakup with Jed more credence. And yet I didn’t want to make her think of Iz the rational part of her must have some consciousness of guilt for shooting another human being to death.

I tried it out on her gently.

“I – I broke up with Jed this week, Ellen. I’m not going to see him anymore.”

“That’s what you say tonight, but I’ve heard him talk to you, I’ve heard him beg you,” she sneered at me.

Where? I thought. What could she have heard?

She went on.

“You still got in his car, didn’t you?

Accepted his flowers?“

The same observations that “Dr‘ Cordelia Jeffers made in the letter that arrived today. Were those letters also a device of Goldman’s?

“No, Ellen I’ve ended the whole goddamn thing. It was much too painful for me. I don’t want to be with Jed Segal and he isn’t begging me to come back to him, I swear to you.”

“I’m the one who knows exactly what he’s up to, and you’ll fall for it sooner or later. You’ll take him back, too, now that your competition Isabella Lascar is out of the way. I know you won’t throw away everything he offers you. I’m sick of his pleading with you.”

“Don’t believe him, Ellen,” if she’s really spoken with Jed, I thought. Maybe he’s told her, like he’s told Joan and Mike that he has tried to reach me.

“He’s telling people he’s begging me, but I swear to you that he hasn’t said a word to me.”

“That’s because I’ve been picking up those messages, Alex. I know how he feels about you, and you’ll give in eventually.”

“You’ve been picking up my messages?” My face distorted itself in puzzlement, as I looked over at Ellen, not believing what she had just said.

“You couldn’t possibly have-‘ She interrupted and seemed pleased to carry forward this part of the dialogue an opportunity, it was dawning on me, to tell me how much smarter she was than I. My hands twisted and turned against the cord on my wrists as she showed off her superior intelligence, but it didn’t feel as though I was making any progress.

She fixed her gaze on me.

“Did you know Lascar had a Filofax, you know, a date book and address directory?”

“Yes, I did.” Iz’s bible.

“Well, I guess the stupid cops never knew it. At least, I never read that it was stolen, in any of the newspaper accounts of her death,” Goldman said.

That’s because one of the smart things we do is to keep a few critical details away from reporters so we know when we’re talking to the real culprit, Ellen. I knew about its disappearance before anyone else did, but it certainly hadn’t been in the papers.

“No, I never read about that either. Was it with her, in my house?”

“No. It was right in her tote, on the front seat of her car.

And now I’ve got it.“

I am looking at a woman who could kill a person she thought was in the way of her love object, and then step up to the bloodied murder scene and reach her hand in to remove a diary from the car seat next to the warm body. I shivered at the reminder that I was being confronted by a professionally trained killer, who had learned her trade for a good cause and had thereafter been hideously derailed.

“Why did you want the Filofax, Ellen?”

“You know as well as I do that it would have every number and every detail I wanted. Most women keep their lives recorded that way these days phones, faxes, birthdays, anniversaries, shoe sizes, maitre ds, unlisted information. I knew she’d have numbers for Jed and for you private lines, home phones, apartment locations things I’d never be able to get from public directories for months. It was just an afterthought, but it was too good to walk away from.”

“Iz had all my numbers, of course, but she didn’t have my answering machine code.” I hoped I wasn’t risking an outburst by challenging Goldman, but this bit about the messages had me upside down. What was she talking about?

“I couldn’t convince Jed how smart I was all those months. Maybe this will help him see it. You can’t figure out how to pick up a message on somebody’s machine? Ha.

Wait’ll I tell him.“

I was barely computer literate and completely mechanically dysfunctional. But I had never had a reason to give anyone else the code to pick up my messages.

Goldman loved to display her cleverness.

“Once I had Lascar’s Filofax, the rest was easy. All these machines are the same. People like you only buy one or two models.

You’re like Jed totally name brand, top of the line.

You’re Sony, Panasonic the expensive models. Look at you once and it’s obvious you’re too materialistic to buy a discount, no-name item. That’s just a guess, but it didn’t fail me.

“Then you look at the instruction book for how they do the remote pickup. They’re all basically alike. That’s how I used to get all Jed’s messages, from his campaign office in California. That’s how I knew he was going to the Vineyard. Press three-three to see if there are messages. Press two-two-two to see if there are messages. Press seven-seven to see if there are messages. Try it a couple of times and you can figure out what brand of machine you’re dealing with.

His headquarters was a Sony. So is your apartment. Jed’s is a Panasonic.“ Ellen Goldman was puffing now, standing as though she needed to stretch her legs, and pleased with the demonstration she was giving me.

“I do have a Sony, you’re right, but-‘ ”I know I’m right.“

“There’s also a personal code you need to program in.

How did you get to that?“ Let her know how impressed you are with what she’s done. Every time I thought I heard footsteps or voices in the distant background, the noise soon faded to quiet, blending in with the natural sounds of squirrels stepping on dry leaves or birds flapping wings as they landed on nearby branches. Cars whizzed by on the cross-drive from time to time, but the steady hum of their wheels suggested that none even braked at the sight of a car pulled in off the roadway. Lights from above in the apartment windows at the majestic San Remo were shutting off throughout the building as people all over the city were going to sleep, and my only companions were the scores of blue rowboats behind my back, beached on their sides and chained together near the boathouse.

“The Filofax,” Goldman said, smiling.

“There’s always stuff in that, if you’ve got half a brain.” So much for me.

She continued.

“People are too lazy to be subtle. Most of us use the obvious significant dates, ann iv-‘ ”But you didn’t have my Filofax, you had Isabella’s.“ I wasn’t playing coy I simply didn’t know what she had done to get into my code.

“That’s all I needed. When Jed was in L.A.” he used to use his anniversary as the code. A lot of married people do, especially the women. His was February eighteenth two eighteen. I’m surprised he could remember it it didn’t seem too significant, given the state of his marriage. It was probably his wife’s idea, you know, for the home machine. Here, in New York, I got his unlisted number from Isabella’s book, then guessed he was using his birthday, now that he’s divorced.

“For you, the birthday was my first guess. Never been married, no special anniversary date. Lascar had your birthday in her book, along with her other information about you. April thirtieth. Four three zero. You’re probably stupid enough to use it for your banking code and all your other pin numbers.”

She had me there. Goldman was rapt in her own self congratulatory explanation and didn’t seem to notice that I was making headway against my binds. I wasn’t free, but they were loosening.

“And you picked up messages from my home machine‘ all week? And you erased them after you listened?” I had ignored Jed’s protestations that he had called repeatedly, and I had been depressed that there were so few calls from any of my other friends and family. This was not the moment to find out who else had been intercepted and erased from my radar screen. No wonder Jed had been trying so frantically to get me and my network of friends to believe him. Goldman had found him again, had reapplied herself to the effort to attract him in the days after Isabella’s murder, and he indeed was asking for my help these past twenty-four hours.

“If you’re telling the truth about not wanting anything to do with him,” she scoffed at me, ‘then you wouldn’t have missed his calls, anyway. Pleading for forgiveness and complaining about me. Those things were bad enough.

But telling you how much he loved you that you were his golden girl, that Isabella was just a mistake, that he wanted to marry you more than anything in the world all that made a mockery of what I had risked my life to accomplish. I didn’t want you to hear any of them, if I could help it. Maybe he was getting that through to you some other way, but not with the messages I could stop.“

Ellen Goldman was intense now, concentrating her anger on me again.

“I followed him to New York when I got out of jail. I found him again. But he had become distracted because of you,” she said, with obvious disdain.

“I wanted to meet you, to see what you were like. So I arranged the interview.”

“Don’t you really work for the Lawyer’s Digest?” I asked, knowing that the Public Relations Office had vetted her before letting me set an appointment with her.

“What a joke,” she blasted back at me.

“I just said I was freelancing for them I’ve never published anything in my life. I never finished graduate school. Your people were so hungry for good press about the office that once I told them how much I admired your work, I could have said I was writing for Popular Mechanics and they would have given me carte blanche. Nobody ever checked my credentials.”

My thoughts flashed back to the day after Isabella’s shooting, when Mike brought me home to the apartment from the office, and Ellen had left flowers with the doorman. I had been so pleased to see them I had assumed Laura had given her my address. How easily I had been misled, to have commented to Mike then about what a nice reporter she was. Oxymoron, he had said.

“But why Isabella?” I asked her.

“I can understand you were mad at me for taking up with Jed while you were in jail, but Isabella Lascar?”

“All of a sudden, last month, I began to find out about his meeting her. I could deal with you, I was sure. There was nothing that special about you,” she said.

“I knew if I made him aware of me again, you wouldn’t be in my way.

But then when she began calling him and seeing him, here and in L.A.” I knew it was a serious problem. I may be able to compete with you, but she was a movie star people idolized her, adored her, worshiped her. He’d never come back to me as long as she was in his life. Once I learned they were going to Martha’s Vineyard together, it just seemed so easy for me. I drove right onto the ferry, didn’t need any reservations off season. Got up to your house easily between the listing in the phone book and those locals in the post office who’d trust anybody pulled off the main road, just like I did tonight… and waited. I was back on the boat within hours. I just never meant for Jed to get blamed for it.“

Psychose passionelle. I tried to recall more facts from my reading the night before. Ellen Goldman really believed that Jed loved her, that he would actually return her affection, were it not for some external influence. The person in jeopardy is not the beloved she’d have no reason to harm him. The most likely recipient of the violent act, I had read, is the person perceived to be standing in the way of the desired union: Isabella Lascar. Get her out of the way and Jed Segal would be free to devote himself to Ellen.

And then, once she was dead, instead of turning his attention to Goldman, he tried to repair his romance with me. I wasn’t interested, but that didn’t lessen the annoyance of his calls and entreaties in her mind. For me, this was final jeopardy, too. Ellen was too impatient to wait for Jed’s ardor to subside. She had seized the moment of my precinct visit this evening when she learned about it on the radio, and used the fact that it drew me through Central Park, to come up with a scheme. Kill me, in the style of Harold McCoy who had a reason to want me out of the way and it wouldn’t look anything like the death of Isabella. Abduct and stab me to death, don’t shoot another one. She was right the tabloids would love it, and more importantly, no one would connect it to the death of Isabella Lascar.

How sadly ironic for me, to have spent a decade prosecuting men for crimes of violence against woman, and now to meet my peril at the hands of a woman. Perhaps that’s what had me blinded in this case all along.

I thought of the lines of poetry scribbled in Isabella’s manuscript, sent to her by Goldman, in the guise of the letters of “Dr. Jeffers‘: ”Is it… a crime… to love too well?“

Pope named it aptly a most unfortunate lady. The crime was not the loving, but the murder.

I tried to give her more incentive to back off.

“Let’s call Jed together, Ellen. Let’s talk with him about-‘

”I don’t ever want him to talk to you again, don’t you understand that? If you’re out of his life, he’ll come back to me. I know that.“

“I’m leaving New York. I’m going out of town this weekend. I – I won’t come back till you work it out with Jed.” I’d go anywhere, forever, if you’d let me out of here.

I was almost able to work loose my hands, but had no idea what I could do with them, against her weapons and her physical ability, if I were free.

“You’re playing with me again, Alex. You won’t leave for long. This is where your work is, you can’t stay away.”

Shit, maybe they need a sex crimes prosecutor in Wyoming or Montana. Someplace without investment bankers and without erotomaniacs.

A man’s voice from the top of the staircase on the Bethesda Terrace, to our south, broke the stillness. Both of our heads snapped in that direction, vainly trying to see who he was and where he stood, as he called out, “Hey, girl, hey, pooch. You down there? C’mon back up here to me.”

A dog walker. Goldman tensed and held a finger in front of her mouth, warning me to stay quiet. I prayed whoever he was would venture down the steps to my hellhole.

“Hey, Zac. C’mon back up here. Zac? Zac? C’mon, let me put your leash on.”

David Mitchell? David and Prozac was it possible?

My eyes were riveted to the top of the great staircase as David, snapping his fingers as though to attract a wandering dog, moved into sight, flooded in the full light of the moon.

“Hey,” he called out again.

“Anybody there? Anybody see a Weimaraner loose around here?”

It was impossible to know whether he could see Goldman from his angle, but I was certain that he wouldn’t be able to tell that I was seated below her on the ground. She didn’t speak. I assumed that she hadn’t recognized him, but she had done so much research about me that I couldn’t be sure she hadn’t checked my building and neighbors as well.

“Yes!” I screamed out at the top of my lungs, and she swung around to stick the tip of her knife against the back of my neck, without uttering a sound.

David started down toward us at a trot.

“Great,” he was enthusing, ‘which way did you see her go?“ He was still acting as though he were simply looking for a lost dog, so it was impossible to tell if he had anyone else with him, or if he had identified the sound of my voice.

He was coming at us too quickly now, and I feared that Goldman wouldn’t let him intrude on our session without penalty. I could feel her body leaning over, from behind me, and although she was out of my range of vision, I was afraid she was going to make a move to reach for her holster.

“David!” I screamed out, ‘she’s got a gun.“

I lurched forward by my own motion and pulled one hand out of the rope. But it was my left hand, and as I broke away from Goldman’s grasp, I was useless to do anything to disarm her with it. My right one was still entangled in the cord. As she dropped the knife to the ground and reached for her pistol, four or five dark figures ran down the steep incline and the staircase heading for us, as David dropped to his knees in place.

I could hear Chapman’s voice yelling orders from somewhere in this small charging force. First at me, to stay flat, and then at the others to move in slowly, and next at Ellen to throw down her gun.

A shot rang out from just inches above my right ear and I looked for a place to shelter myself without success. I had no idea who Goldman was aiming at, but if she chose to focus her attention on me again, there was no way she could miss.

Someone on Mike’s team had apparently been waiting for Goldman to shoot first, and fired back in our direction.

I flattened myself on the ground, my face crushed against a sharp rock my left arm out to the side and my right one pinned beneath me.

Chapman shouted at her once more: “Drop it!”

Goldman fired again and again. I ached so badly from every bloodied joint and bruised skin surface that I wasn’t sure I would know if a bullet struck me or not.

Seconds later, I heard footsteps approaching Goldman from the rear a crunching on the dry leaves as someone ran down the slope from the north. She must have heard the sound as well, since she swung herself around to point her pistol in the direction of the man coming in behind her.

But he got a shot off first, and she screamed as she dropped backward, her body falling across my own.

The gun was still in Goldman’s hand as she lay writhing in pain, her body cushioned against mine. I couldn’t tell where she had been hit, but her legs were still twitching and kicking like a frog on a dissection table in a high school biology class.

I didn’t know whether to try to wrest the weapon from her grip, but within moments the cops were on her, and I was relieved of that decision.

I could see, from my limited angle of vision, that the shooter was the first to get to us, landing on her right arm with his foot and bending down to take the small pistol away from her as he pressed her elbow against the rocks with his heavy boot. I didn’t know who the guy was or whether I would ever lay eyes on him again, but I was certain I would be in love with him for the rest of my life.

Goldman was coughing and crying at once, and in an instant we were surrounded by six or seven other men, Chapman and Mitchell among them. They were all talking over each other, as two of them lifted her off my body and David leaned in to help me raise myself up from my awkward position on the ground.

“Where’s she hit?” I heard someone ask, while Mike got to his knees in front of my face, questioning me at the same time “Are you shot?”

I rolled onto my back, biting the corner of my lip to prevent myself from crying, and shook my head in the negative.

“Looks like the gut,” was someone’s answer to the question about Goldman, and the men carrying her between them started up the pathway to the street. Another guy was on a walkie-talkie ordering two ambulances stat to meet us at the pavement above the Bethesda Terrace.

David was on one side of me, asking where I was injured and checking my vital signs. He pressed my shoulder back against the ground as I tried to sit up, cradling my head in place with his sweater and stroking my hair to calm me, telling me not to try to talk yet. Chapman was on my other flank, working his cell phone, telling someone probably his boss where we were and what had gone down. He reached for my right hand, inspecting the abrasions and rope burns that covered its surface, and I grabbed him back, squeezing as hard as I could and holding on to him, because it was so much easier than saying anything aloud.

“Just rest for a few minutes,” David urged me.

“Listen to your doctor, Coop. We’ll explain it all later,” Chapman said, laying the phone on the ground and trying to muster up something that resembled a smile.

I closed my eyes, keeping hold of Mike’s hand and attempting to make myself breathe more evenly. The noise and commotion of people running up and down the incline continued to swirl around me, and I relished the sound of sirens coming closer and closer to the roadway above.

Within minutes, two EMS workers came pounding down the staircase, carrying a stretcher which they placed beside me on the ground.

“Which one we got here, the perp or the victim?” one asked.

“You got the victim,” Mike said, rising to his feet and flashing his badge at the pair.

“She’s a prosecutor,” he went on, summarizing the story in a couple of sentences.

“V.I.P treatment or else she’s likely to drop a dime on you.”

My mouth curled up in a grin as he used police lingo for ratting someone out.

“I’m a physician,” David added, “I’d like to ride with you.

She’s my friend.“ He began to describe his observations of my condition as they gently lifted me onto the canvas.

“I don’t need this, really. I can walk,” were my first words as they carried me toward the staircase.

“Relax, blondie. You’re going first class. You’re my case now I make all the decisions,” Chapman replied.

It wasn’t exactly Notorious, but I was every bit as grateful as Ingrid Bergman must have felt as my saviors swept me up the grand steps toward the waiting ambulance. It was almost 5 A.M. by the time I was comfortably settled into a nightgown and robe, sipping some warm, exotic combination of herbs that was prepared for me by Joan Stafford’s Asian housekeeper, after David had refused my request for a double Dewar’s. He had called Joan from the Emergency Room of New York Hospital, when I admitted that the only way I could get any sleep during the next few days was in the care of a friend I could trust.

Mike had known the triage nurse in the ER from years of working the same midnight shifts. She had taken me into an examining room after the domestic stabbing and before the alcoholic who cracked her elbow tripping off a curb. By the time the resident came into the cubic leto inspect me, the nurse had wiped all my scrapes with alcohol, determined that the wound on my thigh was too shallow to need stitches, and ordered that a set of x-rays be taken to make sure the injuries to my ankle were not serious. The doctor finished the once-over and prescribed some medication for pain and sleep.

Ellen Goldman had been taken to a hospital on the West Side. Mike was smart enough not to tell me which one, although I overheard him phoning the captain to say that her condition was critical but stable when she got out of surgery shortly after four, about the same hour of the morning I was released from the Emergency Room.

Mike and David drove me to Joan’s apartment, where she had dressed to meet us in the lobby.

“I didn’t think you could look any worse than you did when we had dinner on Tuesday, but you’ve reached a new low, girl. We’ll get you back in shape,” she said as she embraced me, preparing me for what I would see when I got up my nerve to look myself over.

She lived in a eight-room duplex in one of the most elegant buildings in Manhattan, and her guest bedroom, overlooking the East River, was plumped and fluffed for my arrival, like a soft aqua-toned cocoon, ready to shield me from the real world. I spent a few minutes checking myself out in the bathroom mirror, appalled by the number of lacerations and marks that crisscrossed my cheeks and neck, and the variety of bruises that had swollen and discolored my slender fingers and hands. I changed into Joan’s lingerie and velvet robe, and descended to the library, where she had poured a brandy for herself, David, and Mike.

“Anybody want to tell me what took you guys so long?” I asked, directing my question to Mike. I screwed up my face at the first swallow of the tea, which was sour and tasteless,

Joan came to sit beside me on the thick arm of my lounge chair, offering me a mouthful of her Courvoisier.

“Next time I call you, don’t tell me you can’t take the call,” Mike fired back at me.

“In the middle of a line-up? The first time you called, right after I got to the Special Victims Squad, nobody said it was urgent.”

“Well, it wasn’t then. I hadn’t spoken to David yet. After I started to get information from him, I called back twice.

Got some old hair bag who didn’t seem to know what was going on.

Finally, when we put most of it together, I called there frantically, telling them to find you and get you back upstairs to take the call. That’s when the desk sergeant told me you’d gotten into a car with a woman.“

“Start over,” I said.

“Tell me how you figured it out.”

David started to talk, describing his meeting with Jed.

“He showed up in my office a bit earlier than expected, at seven-fifteen, eager to tell me to tell anyone who would listen, I think what had been going on. I asked him to describe the details of the case of the woman who had been stalking him in California he said her name was Ellie Guttmann-‘ Mike interrupted him.

“Yeah, I had already gotten that from the Threat Management Unit during the afternoon, when they pulled up Segal’s case for me in Los Angeles.

I just had no way to connect it to Ellen Goldman then.“

“Jed insisted to me and I believe him, Alex that he never had any kind of relationship with Goldman or Guttmann, whichever is her real name.”

“It’s Guttmann,” Mike broke in again.

“I checked with Immigration. Israeli passport.”

Joan had joined in the hunt.

“After you guys called me from the hospital, I checked-her name in Nexis, on my computer. Just territorial on my part I couldn’t believe a writer had tried to kill you, Alex. There must be fifty Ellen Goldmans with published articles in the last year alone. My guess is that it was a pretty safe alias, close to her real name, if anybody was going to try to check out her press credentials and see if she had ever written anything before.”

David went back to his story.

“My secretary had pulled some of the recent publications on erotomania. I read them on the shuttle yesterday, and then Jed and I went over the information. He had never heard whether there was a diagnosis in Goldman’s case, but it’s true that Jed’s wife was the complaining witness. He had wiped his hands of the matter once the police locked her up, and he was moving East.”

“No diagnosis was made, according to the LAPD,” Mike reported.

“They had an easy conviction for aggravated harassment, based on the telephone records of her calls to Segal’s home and office, and the letters to his wife. Just a lock-up, no psych report.”

“Ellen Goldman is a classic case. I read Dietz, Zona, Sharma all the current experts on the subject.”

“What’s a ”classic“ erotomaniac?” I asked.

“To begin with,” he responded, ‘most of the subjects of the disorder are women, young women like Ellen Goldman in their early thirties. Their victims are male, usually older, and usually men of a higher status, socioeconomic class or even an unattainable public figure, like a celebrity or politician. Jed fit every one of those categories when she first encountered him in California.“

We were all listening attentively.

“It’s interesting, too, that almost half of the subjects studied were foreign-born.

Again, like Goldman. And a lot of them adopt different persona that they use for writing letters to their subjects, because they’re so smart and articulate in this instance, the Cordelia Jeffers correspondence.“

“How long before they give up this delusion?” Joan wanted to know.

“With other obsessions, so-called ”simple“ obsessions,” David told her, ‘the subjects only made contact for less than a year. With erotomaniacs, these episodes have gone on for ten or twelve years, with repeated efforts to keep in touch with the man. They make phone calls, write letters, stalk their subjects at home, in offices, on airplanes, in hotels you name it. They are convinced that’s the delusion that if they can get the obstacle, the other woman, out of the way, the man they’re obsessed with will be united with them and able to declare his love.“

“Wasn’t Jed aware of any of this, with Isabella? Didn’t it ever occur to him that Goldman was her killer?” I wanted to know.

“Absolutely not,” David said.

“When Goldman got out of jail, there was an order of protection still in effect by the court. She was not allowed to have contact with either of the Segals. And she was otherwise sane enough to avoid them at first, knowing that would land her back in jail.

“So she didn’t bother Jed when she first got to New York last month. At least, not directly not that he knew about.

There was enough publicity about his move to find his office at CommPlex, after the Senate race. But I’d have to guess that she spent more of her energy finding out about you, once she learned you were dating him. Was that fact ever in the newspapers?“

”Yeah, Liz Smith did an item in her column,“ Mike added, ”“SEX CRIMES CRUSADER DOES SENATE LOSER,” Something like that. That’s how she knew about you. We figure she found out about Isabella by intercepting some of Jed’s messages on his voice mail at CommPlex. He said she did that all the time when he was in California.“

“She had her eye on you, Alex,” David continued, ‘trying to figure how long you would last with him. Then along came the ultimate antagonist, in the form of a Hollywood goddess: Isabella Lascar. You were a mere mortal, but Isabella was serious competition.“

Ellen and I apparently had that much in common.

“But I thought Jed and Isabella had discussed their stalkers with each other?” I queried aloud, remembering that snippet of conversation with him.

“Yes, that’s true, in general,” David told us.

“But it had never occurred to either one of them that they were being harassed by the same person. Isabella was a celebrity and had been exposed to a lot of unwanted attention, as you know, Alex. When she started to get hang-up calls at the hotel she didn’t know what their source was, and the letters from Cordelia Jeffers were a complete mystery to her. She never divulged their exact contents to him and Jed thinks that’s because she knew how guilty he felt about betraying you.”

“When David called me tonight after he finished his meeting with Segal, he asked me to come over to his apartment to talk to him about the interview. I got there about nine, with Joe Duffy, one of the other guys who worked the squad with Mike.

“Up to that minute, I was still convinced Segal was the killer.

“But David said Segal could prove his alibi that his lawyer had the Cape Air ticket receipt that would show he was already on the plane off the Vineyard by the time Iz was blown to bits. Just that his lawyer is playing hardball ‘cause we haven’t released the exact time of her death yet.

He doesn’t want to show us the plane ticket till we tell him time of death.“

David was nodding his head in support of Mike’s information.

“The reason Jed was leaving messages for you all over, Alex, was that Goldman finally began to dare to get closer to him. Finding Isabella’s Filofax was a gold mine for her, and made it much too easy. It had loads of information about access to Jed, as well as to you. Not only was she erasing the messages he left you,” David explained, ‘but she waited for him outside his office these last few mornings not to make contact, but just to see him. That’s typical of the disorder.“

“So who figured out that Ellen was the killer?” I looked from David to Mike, but both shook their heads.

“We didn’t exactly figure it out,” Chapman said.

“When David told me about the reappearance of Jed’s stalker, I asked him to make a call and get her description.

Jed told us what she looked like, even mentioned the accent, and told us she was driving a white Celica, with rental plates.

“I gotta say, Alex, my thinking was like yours. It never occurred to me a woman was the killer. I was so sure it was Jed or some other jilted lover boy.

“But by the time David and I had gone over all the stuff about erotomania, and how the person most in danger is the one in the middle, and Jed’s insistence that he was leaving messages that you weren’t getting we just assumed you were in danger, whether or not it had anything to do with Isabella Lascar.”

“So why did you call me back at the precinct, you know, the last call?”

Both David and Mike hesitated, before David answered.

“Actually, it was Jed’s idea.”

I was stone faced but David went on.

“When Mike told me to call him and get the description of the woman, Jed pleaded with me to make you understand how dangerous he was afraid she could be. Once he saw her here in New York knowing how she had plagued his wife he was afraid she’d start to harass you next. He didn’t think murder, but just an embarrassment you didn’t need, with the public nature of your work.”

“I called them to tell you not to go home alone,” Mike said, ‘and to make sure Mercer got a patrol car to get you to your apartment and then down to your office in the morning, just until we could find this woman and identify her. But I couldn’t get Mercer on the phone. And it didn’t become urgent till the guy on the desk told me you were fine you had just gotten into a car with some woman up at the corner. A white car.“

“Dammit, nothing like this ever happens to me,” Joan said.

Mike went on to describe that he had called his office for a backup car to meet him at Fifth Avenue and Seventysecond Street. He planned to go over to the West Side, near the Special Victims Squad, and see if people on the street had seen or heard anything that would give him a lead. He requested that headquarters put out an alert in Manhattan North for a white Celica with two women traveling in it. Then he and Duffy started out of David’s apartment and David insisted on going along.

Chapman and the backup team met eight minutes later at the Fifth Avenue entrance to the park and started on the cross-drive to the West.

“Like Mercer always says, detective work is ninety-nine percent genius and one percent luck,” Mike reminded me.

“I’m whipping through the park like a tornado on the Seventy-second Street crossroad, then Doc in the backseat screams out that there’s a white Celica pulled in under a tree on our right side. I braked, made a U-turn and parked across the way, in front of the Bandshell. We all fanned out, and David offered to do the ruse about the dog figured you’d either make his voice or the dog’s name.

Best thing you did was warn us about the gun. I knew we had a whack job but I still didn’t guess that she was the shooter.“

”Talk about blindsided, I’m the one who got right in the car with her,“ I said quietly, wondering how an intelligent human mind like Ellen Goldman’s could go so singularly off-track.

“What hurts more, Coop,” Mike questioned me, ‘your feelings or your neck?“

“At this point it’s about even,” I told him, smiling for the first time in hours.

“She’ll stay with me for as long as her doctor wants her in town, and then, I’m taking her away for some tropical sunshine,” Joan announced.

“This isn’t a great time for me to go-‘ ”Hey, you think there won’t be any perverts left in town for you to handle two weeks from now? You think they’re gonna go out of business while you take a break, Cooper?

Give it a rest you’re the only person I know who isn’t gonna be outta work in the foreseeable future.“

I wanted to keep my three friends around me and talking to me for hours more, despite my exhaustion, until the daylight poured in through the windows over the river.

I wanted to put off my dreams for as long as possible dreams that would inevitably be haunted by delusion and betrayal, murder and death.

Keep talking, I said to myself, keep talking. It had worked with Ellen Goldman, maybe it would hold off my nightmares as well.

“Did Alex ever tell you about the first case we had together?” Mike asked Joan and David, as I shifted my body in the comfortable chair and rested my head against the pillows, watching for the sunrise.