The Bone Vault

4

“I’d like to be in the room when you interview my daughter, ma’am.”

“I’ll answer all your questions, Mrs. Alfieri, when I’m done speaking with Angel. In the meantime, I’m going to give you a newspaper to read and ask you to take a seat in the waiting area. The detective and I need to be alone with her.”

“But she’s only fourteen. I got a right to-”

Somehow, everybody had a laundry list of rights that I couldn’t find anywhere in the Constitution. “We’re preparing your daughter to testify about her case before the grand jury. That’s what the law calls a secret proceeding. I’ll be the only person in the room with Angel, aside from the jurors and the stenographer. I need to get her used to talking about what happened without you holding her hand.”

She frowned at me and waddled behind Detective Vandomir as he led her down the hallway. I waited for him at my door. “I couldn’t shake her loose the other night,” he said. “Good move.”

“My first rule of thumb with a dishonest witness: get the mother, the boyfriend, the sister out of the picture. Find some way to do it, whatever works. You never get the truth when they have to admit to someone close to them that they’ve been lying. Where are you with her?”

“Mother works for one of those overnight mail services. TenP.M. to four in the morning, five nights a week. Ex-husband lives in Florida. Angel and her two kid brothers are home alone. Perp is a livery cabdriver who drove Angel to her house from the hospital about a month ago, after she visited her grandmother, who had some serious surgery.

“Kid says he showed up at the door the other night, forced her up the stairs into her bedroom at knife point, and raped her.”

“Brothers hear anything?”

“Sleeping in the room right up against her wall. Not a peep.”

“Outcry?”

“Immediate. That’s on her side. Called 911 a little after midnight, a few minutes after she says he left.”

“Medical exam?”

“Inconclusive. She says he didn’t ejaculate, so there’s no semen. No way to do DNA. And she’s sexually active. Three partners.”

“Some little angel.”

“Yeah, she’s already got chlamydia. Mother doesn’t know about that either.”

“Tell me about the perp.”

“He’s a real dirtbag. Forty-eight years old, has a bunch of collars for drug possession, boosting cars, doing break-ins. Nothing like this. Nothing violent. Floor of his car full of kiddie-porn magazines and condom wrappers. No knife.”

“He got a story?”

“Yeah. Starts the same way. Picked her up outside of Metropolitan Hospital. By the time they hit 110th Street, she was sitting in the front seat, writing down her beeper number so he could page her at school the next day. Met her a couple of times after class. Drove her around with her friends. Oral sex once or twice in the backseat. Even did a threesome with Angel and one of the other cherubs in her pack. Says she invited him to come over this past Monday night when her mother left for work.”

“You tell her what he said?”

“Yeah. She denies it. Says the only way he knew where she lived was because he had driven her home from the hospital that one time. Gave her his card with his cell phone, in case she needed to use him again. That’s how we got him. I called and asked him to pick me up in front of the deli next door to our office, and then invited him to step inside to help my clearance rate for the month. Collars for dollars.”

“She understands we’re going to get her beeper information and his cell phone records?”

“I don’t think it had the same impact on her as it does when you tell an adult. She didn’t seem to grasp that all of this is computerized now. I explained to her that every time he beeped her or she called him, it’s just like leaving a fingerprint. Not sure she believes me.”

“Or wants to. Let’s give her a go.” I turned the door handle and went into my office, where Angel had been waiting for us.

She smiled at Vandomir as we entered, and closed the small mirrored case in which she had been examining herself, rubbing one last application of a fruity-smelling gloss over her lips. She tugged at the straps of her bright yellow tank top, pulling it into place so the rhinestone letters that formed the wordGangsta stretched from nipple to nipple.

“Angel, this is Ms. Cooper, the lawyer I told you about. She’s going to be handling your case. She’s got some more questions for you.”

“You understand why you’re here today, Angel?”

“Not really. I told him everything that happened.” She jerked her head in Vandomir’s direction. “I don’t know why I have to explain it over again. You just oughtta keep Felix locked up so he don’t do this to nobody else.”

“In order for that to happen, we have to find out exactly what he did. I’m going to ask you the same things the detective did, maybe even more questions. And what you say stays in this room, do you understand that? If there’s something that went on between you and Felix that you don’t want your mother to know about, thenthis is the time and place to let me know about it.”

She lifted her eyes to look at me, without moving her head.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you have any idea what goes on at a trial, Angel?”

“I don’t want to be at no trial. I just want the judge to sentence him to jail.”

“That’s not how it works. You watch television?”

“Yeah.”

“Ever see any of those cop shows where the guys go to trial? You know who’s in the courtroom when the witness testifies?”

“Me. Him. The judge. You. That’s when I gotta tell what he did to me.”

“And what do you think Felix does, after you testify?”

“I don’t know.”

“He gets to talk to the jury, too, if he wants to. He gets to tell them the story the wayhe says it happened. Those twelve people don’t know you, and they don’t know him, so they have to try to figure out which one of you to believe, whose story makes more sense.”

“How come he gets to talk?” That part of the process clearly bothered her. “He’s gonna lie anyway. He’s gonna say I invited him to my house.”

Angel’s tongue clicked against the roof of her mouth, sounding a strong note of disapproval at the defense she had just offered on Felix’s behalf, and she slumped farther down in her chair. Her shoulders sagged forward, theg anda rhinestones disappearing from my view. All that was left were the letters forming the wordangst.

“Let me tell you about lying in a court of law. Did the detective tell you that it’s a crime, too? That if you take an oath to tell the truth but you lie on the witness stand, you can be arrested?”

“Felix raped me. I’m not lying about that. You can’t arrest me for nothing. I’m too young.” The pout had passed momentarily, and she was emboldened by the thought that her age would protect her from my lightly veiled threat.

Don’t test me today, Angel. “Actually, wecan arrest you. Your case is heard in family court because you’re not sixteen. But the judge there can send you to a foster home upstate, take you away from your mother-”

That snapped her to attention. “I don’t want to be doing this now. I want to go home.”

“I’m afraid that’s not one of your choices. A man has been arrested because of the story you told Detective Vandomir. He’s been in jail for a couple of days, charged with the most serious thing one human being can do to another, short of murder. And he belongs there, if he held a knife to you and raped you. He belongs there for a very long time.

“So we’re going to go over your statement one more time. There’s only one thing you can do wrong, from this point on.”

“What’s that?”

“Lie. You cannot tell any lies, Angel. Not about anything. No matter how insignificant you think the question is, no matter what it concerns, you can’t lie about it. If I ask you whether it was raining or sunny the day you met Felix, you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

“Like what does that have to do with my being raped?”

“Every single thing you say has to do with how we know what to believe when you get to the point of telling us what happened with Felix in your bedroom. If you lie about the little things that led up to that, then it means you’re very capable of lying about the big ones. Tell me you never gave him the number of your beeper, and I get records back from the phone company in a few days showing that he beeped you every day last week, then I know you’ve told enough lies for me not to trust anything you say. And if you do it under oath, before the grand jury, I’ll have you arrested before you leave the building.”

There were gentler ways to do this, but I was out of patience and short on time. It was almost nine-thirty, and as soon as my assistant, Laura, clocked in and got to her desk, she’d be leaving a message for Battaglia that I needed to see him.

Vandomir was a smart cop with good instincts. If he doubted the veracity of Angel’s narrative, he had reason to do so. Four and a half hours with her in the emergency room at the hospital had given him a concrete sense of where the holes in her story were. I tried to soften my tone and get back to the beginning of her meeting with Felix.

Each time she answered a question, Angel looked at Vandomir for a reaction. I had become the bad cop, and she was sticking with the version that she had originally given, even though the details did not hold together. But I couldn’t discount the complaint of any rape victim on a hunch, so I drilled away at every hour that had passed between the first cab ride in which they met and the night in question.

I was up against a stone wall. Angel wasn’t convincing, but she was tough. Vandomir wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me across my desk.

His note suggested a weakness to get us over the threshold. “Ask her if one of her girlfriends has a tattoo on her butt. The wordRalphie, inside the outline of a bull.”

“Who are the girls you hang out with at school?”

“Jessica. Connie. Paula. Why you gotta know?”

“Last names.”

“I don’t know their last names.” She was pushing me.

“I’ll go to the school myself and find them.”

She murmured “Bitch” just loud enough for me to hear it.

“Tell me about Ralphie’s girlfriend.”

Angel glared at Vandomir. “You been to my school already?”

“Which one is Ralphie’s girl?”

“She ain’t got nothing to do with this. You stay away from my-”

“Every single person you know who Felix met has something to do with this. The fact that he knows that one of your pals has Ralphie’s name engraved on her ass tells me that he knows more about you than I do right now. And that’s okay for me but it’s very bad for you.”

She was as startled as I was when the intercom buzzed and Laura interrupted us. “Now’s your chance, Alex. Rose said to get in there as soon as you can. Battaglia wants to know what you’ve got before he starts his ten o’clock with the deputy mayor, okay?”

“Tell her I’ll be there in five.”

I turned my attention back to Angel. “Do you know what a lie detector test is?”

“Yeah. I seen them on TV.”

“You know how they work?”

“Some cop puts like a…um, I don’t know. They ask you questions, that’s all.”

“We’ve got brand-new ones now. Computerized. Impossible to beat. They’re hooked up to your brain waves, your pulse, your blood pressure. First, we put a needle in your arm-”

“Aneedle? I don’t want no f-”

“It’s not a question of what you want. This is the point you’ve taken us to, and it’s full speed ahead from now on. It’s a big needle. It just stings for a few minutes when they inject you.”

Her bottom lip was quivering. “I don’t like no needles. I’m afraid of needles.” She had turned her whole body toward Vandomir and was begging him to intercede. The fourteen-year-old kid hiding inside the attitude of a thirty-year-old was beginning to reveal herself.

I pressed the intercom and Laura came on immediately. “Get me Detective Roman, will you, please? Immediately. Tell him I need a lie detector test in one hour. Juvenile subject. May have to make an arrest, so he better bring his handcuffs.”

Tears were poised on the bottom lids of Angel’s eyes, ready to pour down her cheeks.

“I’m going to have you wait across the hall until the detective gets up here. Come with me.”

“Ihate needles.”

“And I hate people who lie to me. Especially about being raped. You know how busy Detective Vandomir and his partners are? They get called out on three, four, five cases a day. Young girls and grown women who need their help. Badly. They work all night most of the time, just trying to keep families like yours and mine safe. Every extra minute we spend trying to get the truth out of you is time taken away from someone else who was the victim of a crime, some other person who wants to cooperate with us.”

“Can I talk to my mother first?” She was whimpering now.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve got one hour until the detective comes to give you the test. I’m going in to talk to my boss. Sit in that room and think about the choice you have. If there’s something about your story that you want to change, you just tell Detective Vandomir. He’s your best hope. If you tell him a story that makes sense, you won’t need the needle.”

I kneeled beside her chair and tried to make contact with her moist eyes. “Felix was wrong. It’s against the law for a man as old as he is to have sex with you. That’s a crime. We can still punish him for that. But if he didn’t have a knife, Angel, then you’re making up an entirely different kind of crime. If you made a mistake by starting that story and you got in over your head without meaning to, then tell us the truthnow before you dig yourself in any deeper.”

I grabbed a legal pad off my desk and told Laura to hold everything while I went over to see the district attorney.

My identification tag released the security lock on the door to Battaglia’s inner sanctum. The chief assistant was refilling his coffee mug as I walked past him. Rose Malone, the DA’s executive assistant, had the phone wedged between her shoulder and her left ear, working at the computer as she waved me into the boss’s suite. I tried to stall long enough for her to get off, so that I could get a reading on his mood, but she gave no sign of ending the call quickly.

I had practiced my approach several times on my way down to the office in the cab. A casual “By the way, I thought you’d want to hear what happened to me at the museum last night” wouldn’t work. I was confident Battaglia would back my shipyard decision if it was presented as an homage to his style, and smiled in anticipation of his reaction as I pushed open his door.

The first thing I saw was the smirk on Pat McKinney’s face. He was standing, arms akimbo, between Battaglia and me, and I knew before a word was spoken that he had gotten wind of last night’s maneuvers. The deputy chief of the trial division and my most driven in-house adversary, McKinney would have delighted in pitching this to the boss as a political embarrassment.

“I knew you and Chapman were movie buffs, Alex, butThe Mummy Returns meetsInvasion of the Body Snatchers wouldn’t even rate buttered popcorn in my house.”

No point asking him how he knew. He’d be only too happy to regurgitate the details. His fingers tapped excitedly on the conference table behind him and his mild overbite looked like it had grown into fangs overnight.

“Paul, I’d like to-”

But Battaglia seemed content to let McKinney play out his hand. “Your pal Chapman was a bit out of control last night. Tried to push the Crime Scene Unit to drag themselves down to the ME’s office to take photos in the middle of cleaning up a job at a triple homicide in Midtown. Chief of D’s had to call me at three-thirty in the morning to referee the decision.”

I had no idea that some other sensational crime had occurred after midnight.

“Jeez. And I know how you hate to be bothered at home about anything job-related.” More than half the legal staff of six hundred lawyers were on felony call at any given point in time, and all of the supervisors knew that being beeped and contacted twenty-four hours a day came with the territory. Most of us welcomed the opportunity to have input on case actions that would affect the way they would later move forward through the system. McKinney was an exception to the rule. He lived without an answering machine, didn’t give out his beeper number, and punished all but his handful of pets who dared to find him once he left his office.

“I hated having to say no to something you were working on, Alex. But we had a real serious investigation going on, not some cute publicity stunt.”

Battaglia usually couldn’t stand that kind of bickering. There was no point defending my actions in front of McKinney. But I had insisted that Chapman get the sarcophagus photographed before it was removed from the back of the truck at the morgue and was incredulous that my own colleague had prevented such critical documentation of the findings.

“Paul, may I talk to you about this alone?”

“Not until I return the phone calls I’ve got here.” He flapped a stack of messages at me. “I’m trying to understand why the press found out this happened before I did.”

My face reddened. “Boss, I’ve talked to no one about this, except-”

“Just find out who the girl is, where she was when she was killed, some reason for anyone to want her dead, and then we’ll figure out what to do with this mess you’ve created for me.”

“I’d like you to understand that I had Jake’s word that he would not tell anyone about the case.”

I tried to convince myself that I believed what I was saying, but Battaglia wasn’t even interested in my denials. “Maybe McKinney’s right about this. You can’t be expected to keep confidences while you’re personally involved with a newshound. We should leave you off some of these high-profile cases.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but McKinney spoke over me.

“This might be the perfect place to start.”