Killer Heat

SEVEN

Kerry Hastings's hands were trembling as she lifted the coffee mug to her mouth. It was eight-thirty on Wednesday morning, and we had spent the last hour in my office with Mercer Wallace, reviewing the questions I intended to ask her when I called her to the witness stand

It's going to be very different this time," I said to her. "I wouldn't urge you to go through with your testimony if I couldn't promise you that. Thirty-five years earlier, Hastings had told her story to a jury, answering questions about the crime that were virtually the same as those I had framed for her now. But her cross-examination had gone on for two days, and I expected that the tactics that had worked so well for Floyd Warren's defense at the first trial wouldn't fly today

I don't want to look at him again, Alex. I've spent all these years trying to erase the image of his face. You can't imagine how agonizing it is to be back in a room with that man. Kerry Hastings was one of the most intelligent witnesses I had ever worked with. She knew she would sit only a short distance from the man who had forever changed her life in the course of their forty-fiveminute encounter. She had been told that she would be asked to point out her attacker, if she could-even though his DNA now resolved the issue of identification

I know that. I'll do everything in my power to make this easier for you."

"Do I get to tell the jury how Floyd Warren has affected every single day of my life? That not once in the three decades since he awakened me and held a knife to my neck have I been able to sleep through the night?"

She didn't have to tell me that the crime itself and the shame that society imposed on rape victims of Kerry's generation had combined to prevent her from ever developing a successful intimate relationship in the intervening years.

Mercer was sitting behind her, off to the side. He leaned forward and rested his hand on her shoulder. "Judge Lamont will hear all that, Kerry. Alex will get her conviction and you can say what you damn well please in your impact statement to Lamont."

It wasn't often in a prosecutor's career that the outcome of a trial could be predicted. Juries were fiercely independent, as this victim had learned so harshly the first time out. But the science of DNA and the rapidly evolving technology of computer-generated matches made it ever more difficult for a defense attorney to suggest reasonable doubt when identification of the perp was the sole issue.

I handed Hastings the photograph that had been taken at Bellevue after the rape. She would have to authenticate it for me in court. The black-and-white shots of the slashes on her neck, made by the sharp blade of Warren's knife as she struggled to get away, would corroborate the deadly force he had used to subdue her.

"You think anyone will believe that this is the same woman?" She smiled as she showed the picture to Mercer.

Twenty-two-year-old Kerry Hastings was tall and slightly overweight, her pretty round face accentuated by short curly hair held back on one side to allow the photographer to capture the wounds that circled her neck. The hospital gown hung loosely and topped her knees. Bruises were visible on the shins of both legs.

The fifty-seven-year-old who sat between us had lost all the baby fat in the intervening years. She had taken up running, training for marathons as a way of focusing her energy and channeling her anger into a more positive goal.

"You look just great," Mercer said.

"Youth, middle age, and 'you look just great,' " Kerry said, turning the photo facedown on the edge of my desk. "Those must be the three stages of life, Mercer. There's only so much you can humor me."

"There won't be any surprises in my direct examination."

"And Mr. Grassley? Is he going to do what they did to me back then?"

"He's not required to tell me that in advance, Kerry. I'm hoping not."

"You'll hear Alex shout 'objection' any chance she can," Mercer said. "Don't you even think about answering if you see her on her feet."

The three-volume transcript of the first trial was part of my case file. The cross-examination was one of the ugliest I'd ever read.

"Four men on that jury thought I was a prostitute," Kerry said. "Four others figured that I might have simply fabricated my story."

"Rape shield laws have saved victims from that kind of horror," I said. They had been enacted in every state in the country, but too late to help Kerry Hastings.

Floyd Warren's first counsel had claimed that his client was a pimp and that the seemingly demure young woman on the witness stand had actually worked for Warren. He had peppered Kerry with hours of questions about their supposed relationship, suggesting that she was racist as well and that the argument in her tenement apartment-the one that had caused a concerned neighbor to call 911 at 4:23 a.m.- was about money she had refused to turn over to Warren.

"Did you know there was only one other woman in the entire courtroom in 1973? Just one juror, a few years older than I."

"The legal system wasn't very friendly to us back then. This office had a staff of two hundred lawyers, and only a handful were women. That district attorney didn't think lady lawyers should be exposed to the blood and guts elements of violent crimes or to any discussion of sexual predators. There were very few women on the bench or at the bar, and it was still a novelty for them to serve on juries. Not much different than in your field."

Kerry Hastings had been in the first year of a master's program in neurobiology at NYU-a brilliant student who excelled in a specialty dominated by men-when the break-in and rape occurred. She was one of the first women in her field to get a doctorate, returning to school after a three-year hiatus when Warren's mistrial-and his subsequent flight-caused her to leave Manhattan for the West Coast, fearful that he would find her again.

I held up the clear plastic sleeve that contained the pale blue cotton underpants in which the evidence was found that linked Floyd Warren to scores of cold cases.

"I'll ask if you can identify these."

Kerry bit her lip as she looked at the panties and nodded. She had worn them to the hospital after the attack, where they were taken from her. Her initials were written on the label in black marker, and a hole was cut in the crotch where the semen stain was found.

"I've tried so hard to forget all this, and now the memories come flooding back in," she said, closing her eyes and taking several deep breaths. "It's amazing that someone had the foresight to save my underwear all these years."

"I wish we could tell you that's what happened," Mercer said. "The guy who used to have Alex's job? Just thank your lucky stars he was sloppy. When Warren jumped bail, the prosecutor dropped the trial folder in the back of his file cabinet. If he'd followed protocol and returned the evidence to the property clerk, it would have been thrown out years ago."

The telephone rang and before I could reach for the receiver, I could see from the light on the console that Laura Wilkie had answered. Seconds later, she opened the door and greeted us. "Mercer, it's for you."

"Have any other women come forward, Alex? I mean, here in New York?"

"Let's talk about that after you're off the stand."

There had been a perp walk when Floyd Warren arrived in New York in police custody from his home in Georgia. Mercer Wallace had escorted him from Central Booking to the street, where an eager group of paparazzi waited to take pictures to run alongside his original mug shot. Women who had never dared report the crimes decades ago called the Special Victims Unit to unburden themselves of the pain of their experience.

"The whole thing's so damn unfair," Kerry said. "His lawyer was free to make up the most outrageous lies about my life, yet I'm not allowed to mention that Warren raped God knows how many other women-stabbed two of them. They were allowed to think that he's the virgin and I'm the roundheel. Your legal system makes no sense."

Battaglia had appointed me to head this specialized bureau after my rookie years in the criminal court. All the groundbreaking work on these issues had been done by prosecutors who preceded me-the tedious labor of changing laws and the harder task of educating the public about these highly charged crimes.

Mercer opened the door and signaled me to join him.

"I promise you, you'll know everything I do by the end of the day," I said as I walked past her to leave the room.

"That's the warden at Attica, returning my call about Pablo Posano," Mercer said. "We've got to look somewhere else inside the Latin Princes for the problem. Looks like this monster has grown a new head."

"Why?"

"The order to stalk you couldn't have come from Posano. He's been in solitary confinement since two weeks after he got there. Tried to jump a guard and they jammed him up. Twenty-three hours a day under bright lights-no reading material, no communication with the outside world. If he hated you before that, imagine how it's festered now."

"So he didn't give the orders himself this time," I said. I thought of the tall, solidly built Posano, with dark curly hair that had undoubtedly been shaved by the guards, and the intensity of his light eyes, which bored through me when he stared me down. "One of his homies is looking to make points by getting back at me?"

"Bank on it, Alex," Mercer said. "You're the devil who put Pablo Posano in a black hole.