The DeadHouse

9

The light was flashing on my answering machine when I walked into my bedroom at midnight. Jake said he and the film crew had gone out for dinner, but he was back in his hotel room and would wait up awhile for my call. The second caller was an unfamiliar voice.

"Miss Cooper? Hello? This is, um, Joan Ryan. I'm one of the counselors in the Witness Aid Unit at the DA's office. We haven't met yet, and this isn't exactly the way I, uh, wanted to introduce myself. But I need to tell you about a problem on one of your cases.

"I've been counseling one of your victims, Shirley Denzig, you know the one who claims the delivery guy attacked her? She was flirting with him in the deli when she bought her dinner, and then she paid him to bring up the dessert half an hour later?" Ryan was rambling now, in that way people do on answering machines so it seems to the listener that the story will be interminable. What's the point, Joan?

"I, um-I probably should have given you a heads-up about this yesterday, when she showed up at my office. But then, you know, whatever she tells me is privileged, 'cause I'm a social worker and she's a victim. It was only when she showed up again tonight that the supervisor called me. She really seemed out of control, asking all kinds of questions about you. Anyway, if you want to call me at home, here's my number. You'll probably want to know what Shirley was saying. My supervisor thinks I have to tell you."

I cut off her confessional narrative and dialed the number.

"Joan? It's Alex Cooper. Sounds like I woke you up."

"That's okay. This is really my fault."

I knew who Denzig was, so there was no need to go through the story again. It was during her second interview with me a couple of weeks ago, in our discussion of her psychiatric history, that I had set her off on a tirade. While I was asking the routine pedigree questions, Denzig had told me she was a student at Columbia College. Considering the other information she had provided, I was skeptical of her claim and asked to see her identification. She had presented me with a photo ID that had expired two years earlier. It looked fairly generic, with no Columbia crest, or any of the characteristic blue-and-white university markings.

When I pressed further, Shirley admitted that she had never attended the college, and had purchased the phony card on Forty-second Street, where just about any kind of counterfeit document is available for a price. I clipped the fake ID to her case file and continued asking questions.

From then on, she avoided eye contact while staring at the file. Once the interview about the alleged attack was completed, she asked for her ID back. I refused, explaining that it was forged and had no legal validity. I had steered her down to Witness Aid, where she could get help with her counseling needs and the problems with her landlord, who was trying to evict her because she was four months in arrears in her rent. The next day I learned she was wanted for shoplifting at a store near her parents' home in Maryland.

"What stirred her up yesterday?"

"Well, when she read about the professor who was murdered- the Dakota woman-she said it made her think about you again, and how mad she was that you took her ID."

"Did she tell you what made her angry?"

"You'll think it's crazy. But then, you know she's got an extensive psych history, right? She's been on medication for two years. Says she's gained more than eighty pounds. Shirley says that ID has the only pretty picture of her that she's got, and she wants it back."

"And you didn't call to tell me that she wanted it?" It would have been easy to deal with. I could have given her the photo without the bogus identification card.

"Well, Ms. Cooper, I know I learned it in graduate school, but I forgot completely about the whole 'duty to warn' doctrine. I mean, everybody says you're so independent, it never occurred to me that poor little Shirley Denzig could really get to you."

My heart was beating faster. I was standing at the side of my bed, with my coat and gloves still on, listening to this conversation about the unhinged young woman who had apparently just shown up at my door. "Warn me about what?"

"The law says that it's not betraying the privilege for me to tell you if a patient threatens your-"

"I know what the case law says, Joan. The patient's privilege ends when the public peril begins. I want to know what Shirley said."

"She told me that she wanted to see you dead, just like the professor. She asked me how you got to work every day, and what time you left for home."

So far, I wasn't worried. The answers were that my travel route and hours were never the same two days in a row. This outpatient on a heavy diet of psychotropic drugs might be interested in making me unhappy, but she hadn't seemed the least bit dangerous to me.

"Actually, Ms. Cooper, I didn't know whether to believe her or not, but she told me she had a gun. Stole it from her father's house last weekend when she went home to Baltimore."

That racheted up my attention a notch. "And tonight? What happened tonight?"

"She showed up at Witness Aid. Told one of my colleagues that she was a victim in a case of yours. That you had given her your home number. That she'd been thrown out of her apartment for not paying rent, and wanted to leave a small gift for you with your doorman. They know you give witnesses your number from time to time."

Yeah, but generally not to lunatics, if I can help it.

"She acted so upset and all that they gave her the information. They didn't know how she really felt about you. I'm the only one she told that to. I just wanted to give you a little warning tonight in case she shows up. She's very, very mad at you."

"Thanks, Joan. I'm going to have one of the guys from the DA's squad make a report about this on Monday morning, okay? I'll send him down to your office. Just tell him what you told me."

I walked to the hall closet and hung up my coat and scarf. I was too wired to sleep and didn't need any more to drink, so I tried settling into bed with The Great Gatsby. I had embarked on a plan to reread all of Fitzgerald's novels, but this wasn't the time to begin. I went back to the living room to find my tote and fished out the crossword puzzle. The bottom left corner stumped me completely but I was determined not to go to the encyclopedia to find the four-letter name of a Tasmanian Indian tribe. I worked around the blank spaces.

At 1 A.M., I called Mike's number to apologize to him for my remarks at the end of the evening. The phone rang five times before his outgoing message kicked in. I guess he did have better things to do with himself than I had suggested.

"Just me. Sorry I snapped at you. Hope you're having a good time, wherever you are." No point telling him about my disgruntled victim. He'd hear soon enough. "And you're right about one thing. I should have taken the shuttle tonight."

I slept fitfully and got out of bed at six-thirty, when I heard the thud of the Sunday Times landing against my door.

I poured coffee beans into the machine and opened the paper while they ground and the brew began to drip, looking for stories about local crimes in the Metro section, before turning to the national and international news.

Mike was right about the food supply in my home, too. There were three English muffins left in my freezer, so I defrosted one and popped it into the toaster. I sat at the table and made a shopping list of groceries to order, figuring that there were some new leaves easier to turn over in my life than others. Filling the bare cupboards was one of them.

"When the phone rang at seven-thirty, I was sure it was Jake, and I picked it up, eager to make our plans for the holiday week. "Alex? It's Ned Tacchi. Sorry to hit you so early on a Sunday, but we picked one up during the night that you'll want to know about."

Tacchi and his partner, Alan Vandomir, were two of my favorite detectives at Special Victims. Smart, sensitive, and good-humored, they got victims through the investigative process with kid gloves. When they called me, I knew it was something I needed to hear.

"Sure. "What did you get?"

"Push-in sodomy. East Sixty-fourth Street, right off York Avenue. Fifty-five-year-old woman coming home from a Christmas party at three this morning."

"How is she?"

"Seems to be doing okay. She's in the ER now. We'll pick her up as soon as she's released and do a more thorough interview."

"Injuries?"

"Nope. In fact, she called nine-one-one to report it, but didn't want to go to the hospital. The perp pushed in behind her when she opened the vestibule door. A bit tipsy."

"Him or her?"

"She was. A little too much holiday cheer. He knew exactly what he wanted. Told her to get down on her knees, right there in the hallway. First he lifted her sweater, opened her bra, and put his mouth on her breasts. Then he exposed himself and made her put her mouth on his penis."

"Did he ejaculate?"

"Yeah. But she went right upstairs and brushed her teeth. Doubt we'll get anything for DNA, but she still said she had an awful taste in her mouth. That's probably more psychological than anything else. We asked the nurse examiner to do the swabs anyway. We're also having them swab her breasts."

"Good thinking." Even the microscopic amounts of saliva that might be found on the victim's torso would yield enough material for the newer kind of DNA process-STR testing-in which "short tandem repeats" of the genetic fingerprint are multiplied millions of times to yield the unique, identifiable patterns.

"Get her toothbrush, too. You may get lucky. Did he take anything?"

"Yeah. Left with her pocketbook. Didn't get much. She was holding her keys in her hand the whole time. Just had thirty bucks in her purse, along with some business cards and her cell phone. Schmuck dumped the bag in a trash basket a block away. Cell phone is gone, but we've got the purse. I'm sending the cards over to latent prints, hoping they can lift something off the surfaces, if he touched them."

"Has she canceled the cell phone yet?"

"No. We told her not to for twenty-four hours."

"Great. When I get to the office in the morning, I'll fax you up a subpoena." Most of the guys who stole cell phones during robberies were stupid enough to make calls on them until the phones were cut off or the batteries went dead. With records from the companies available in three or four days, we could often track down the offenders through the calls they placed to friends or relatives.

"Thought Battaglia might want to know that the commissioner is looking over a bunch of cases in the Nineteenth Precinct. They're probably going to declare this as part of a pattern." "I didn't know we had anything else like this going on." "Not up at our shop. But the precinct has about four other push-in robberies between Sixtieth and Sixty-eighth Streets, Second Avenue to the river, since the beginning of November. Mostly weekends. All the victims are women. This is the first time the perp has forced a sexual assault, but the MO is pretty much the same. Then he snatches the bag every time and he always runs south."

"Same 'scrip?"

"Pretty close. Most describe him as a male black, five-ten to six feet, stocky. Well dressed, clean-cut, very articulate. Has a slight accent, but nobody can place exactly what it is. Some say islands, some say French. Hard to know."

"Can you get all the paperwork down to me in the morning so I can assign it? I'm jammed up with the Dakota case. I'll probably give it to Marisa Bourges or Catherine Dashfer, okay? But keep me posted on any developments. Are they going to beef up patrol in that area on the midnight tour, Friday to Sunday?"

"The boss in the Nineteenth wants them to saturate it, but we've still got Savino and his gang running the task force on the West Side rapist, so we're stripped of manpower as it is." For almost three years, an attacker had been operating on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and despite an extensive manhunt and a genetic profile that had been entered in local, state, and national data banks, he continued to elude us. "We'll call you later if we break anything else on this today."

I crunched on the cold muffin and poured a second cup of coffee. Shortly before I started at the district attorney's office more than ten years ago, not a court in the United States accepted DNA technology as a valid forensic technique. By the late eighties, as the methodology was refined in the handful of laboratories that performed the testing, Frye hearings were held in criminal courtrooms around the country. Every prosecutor, case by case and state by state, had to convince the judge-before the evidence could be used at a trial-that the kind of genetic testing at issue had been deemed reliable by the scientific community.

By the time this groundbreaking investigative tool had gained general acceptance in the criminal justice system, it roared into the headlines in the O. J. Simpson trial, and skeptics everywhere attacked the soundness of its findings. As a result, standards in lab procedures were instituted and accreditation practices were firmly established to reassure investigators of the value and accuracy of this innovative technique.

Even more important, the actual method of testing improved and changed dramatically. The original means of performing the exams was referred to as RFLP, for restriction fragment length polymorphism. It required large amounts of body fluid, in good condition, to yield a result. By the late nineties, the transfer to PCR-based technology-polymerase chain reaction-and the use of short tandem repeats, almost like photocopying the minuscule particles, expanded the horizons enormously. It is a method that requires just a minute amount of material from which to test, and is even successful with old and degraded samples. DNA technology had revolutionized the nature of our Work in the short time that I had come to the practice of law, and was making possible solutions to crimes that had not been dreamed of a short decade before.

Within a week's time, the swabs taken from a victim's body hours earlier might supply us with a secret code, unique in all the world to the man who forced himself upon her this morning. It would be analyzed and mapped, serologists detailing at least thirteen distinctive loci, or places on the assailant's genetic fingerprint that matched no other human being's on earth. They would feed it to the medical examiner's crime scene computer database to see whether this offender had committed a similar offense anywhere in New York City. Within the month, his profile would be uploaded to the state's files in Albany and the FBI's system in Washington, in hopes that one of those sources would have this suspect on record in an unrelated arrest, and solve this latest case with a computer-generated cold hit.

The phone rang again at nine-thirty. "Only three shopping days left till Christmas. Where shall we meet? Everything in town is open late today. I need to get Jim's gift, and then pick out something for you to tell him that I want, just in case he hasn't done that yet."

One of my closest pals, Joan Stafford, was in town for the weekend, and we had planned to spend the day together finishing our lists. "He's already got it wrapped and in your stocking, kiddo. I know exactly what it is and you're going to be very happy with Santa. You've got to help me with Jake's. I've thought of almost everybody but him. I'm ready anytime you are."

"Okay. I've set an itinerary for us. Your time is too precious to screw around with. We start at James II. Best antique cuff links in town. Across the street to Turnbull. You must get Jake some more of those great striped shirts with the white collars. He'll never outdress Brian Williams, but you can keep trying." A wonderful respite from the week behind and the week ahead. Joan could make me laugh about anything. "We skim past Escada. Make sure Elaine has something in mind for Jake to take you to the Washington Press Club dinner in style. A quick peek at Asprey. Then a triumphal march up Madison Avenue, in and out of all the little boutiques. Do you have things for les deux divine detectives, messieurs Chapman and Wallace? We've got to take care of those guys-they're so good to you. Lunch at Swifty's, with a spicy Bloody Mary, and dinner at Lumi's. Dewar's for you and some kind of delicious red wine for me. You can help me concoct a menu for my New Year's Eve dinner party. Are we broke yet?"

"Credit cards will be totally maxed out and it will be a perfect diversion for me."

"And you'll turn the damn beeper off, right?"

"I'll switch it to the vibrate mode. You'll never know it's there." Even my best friends had to deal with the fact that my days often started with an assault or were punctuated by a murder.

"Heat wave, Alex. It may actually get up to twenty-eight degrees today. See you in an hour."

The day went exactly as planned. Bundled up against the cold, we shopped ourselves into a state of exhaustion. Most of my family's gifts had been mailed out of town so they would arrive in time for the holiday. I could scatter the rest to my friends throughout the week, take a carload to the office for everyone there, and save Jake's for Christmas Eve.

We were savoring our last cup of espresso after dinner when the small device attached to my waistband began to buzz and wriggle against me. I pulled it off and saw the lighted notice declaring that I had one page. I depressed the button and it displayed Mike's home number.

"You call him back. He always asks how you are." I handed Joan the phone, knowing she would break the ice between Mike and me.

She dialed the number and spoke into the receiver, affecting her best French accent. "Can I interest you in a brandy, Detective Chapman?"

"Who's-?"

"Surely a flic as brilliant as you should be able to-"

"Mademoiselle Stafford! Your place or mine?"

"I'm afraid that I'm not alone. I've got that blonde with me. Don't forget, I'm expecting some little Christmas trinket from you."

"Well, I've got Coop's all picked out." "What are you getting her? I'm green with envy already." "You know those Lojack things you install in cars so the cops can track them in case they're stolen? I'm gonna do the first human Lojack insertion. I spend more time hunting down this broad around town, trying to figure out where she is when I need her. I'm gonna stick a needle with that computer chip deep into the buttocks of her cute little right-you've probably seen 'em bare, Joanie. Which one's cuter? The right or the left cheek?"

"Neither one's that appealing, Mike. They're both a bit scrawny. Drinks on me. Please come join us. We're at-" "No can do. Somebody beat you to it. Put blondie on." I put the phone back to my ear. "Did you get my message?" I asked sheepishly.

"Yeah. Had to run right out and get myself a date last night. Didn't want you checking my hand for blisters."

"I'm sorry for-"

"There's more important stuff to talk about. Just got a call from the captain over in the two-six. One of the custodians was going through the dorms at King's College today. Making sure everybody was out 'cause they're closing the building down till after the first of the year.

"The guy had to break open the door to one of the bedroom suites that was locked and bolted from the inside. Found a kid from Philly, a twenty-one-year-old senior, swinging from the railing in his closet. Hung himself with the drawstring from a pair of sweatpants. Suicide."

I thought first of the boy's family, and how their lives would be shattered by this news they might not even know yet. Mike talked on.

"Criminal justice major. Julian Gariano."

"In Lola Dakota's classes?"

connection to her that anyone can make. Seems your office was about to bust Gariano next week. Six-month investigation with an indictment that was supposed to be unsealed for his arraignment, by the Special Narcotics Bureau. Kid and his accomplice have been importing huge quantities of Ecstasy for a couple of years. His codefendant was arrested at the airport, coming in from Amsterdam with more than a hundred thousand tablets. Rolled over and gave up Gariano in a flash."

"So what's this got to do-"

"Guess who he lived with a year ago, his main squeeze? Charlotte Voight, the girl who's been missing since April."