The Kills

9

Mercer left me at my apartment at nine-thirty. I dropped my mail and files on the table in my entryway and fished Nancy Taggart's home number out of my pocketbook.

I had waited to call her, certain she would know about the disappearance of Dulles Tripping and his foster mother.

"Ms. Taggart? It's Alex Cooper."

"Yes?" It was more of a question than an acknowledgment.

"I know that Judge Moffett asked his law secretary to call you about having Dulles in his chambers late tomorrow afternoon."

"She did."

"It's not going to be a problem, is it?" I asked.

Taggart hesitated. "I don't expect so."

"Do you know where the boy is tonight?"

"Look, Ms. Cooper. I don't have to answer any of your questions. You know that."

"That's certainly true. I just wanted to make sure you knew that the foster mother called me today, to-"

Taggart snapped at me, "When? What did she want?"

"It would be awfully juvenile of me," I said, "to tell you that I didn't have to answer any of your questions, wouldn't it? I assume you have the same concerns for Dulles's well-being that I do."

There was silence. Taggart obviously wasn't willing to concede that I was interested in anything but a prosecutorial victory.

I tried again. "I don't know the foster mother's name," I said, thinking that would reassure Taggart. "But she sounded frantic when she spoke with my assistant, telling us she was taking the boy to 'a safer place.'"

"I think she panicked for no good reason at all," said the foundling hospital's lawyer. "There's nothing distinctive-looking about Andrew Tripping. I think this is much ado about nonsense."

"Is that what you'd like me to put on the record in the morning?"

"I'd advise you not to bring this up with the judge until I get to court, Ms. Cooper. His secretary told me to come at four o'clock, after school. I intend for us to be there."

"But now you know Dulles won't even be going to school."

"I have every reason to believe the foster mother-who is very reliable-will contact me first thing tomorrow and we can follow the plan that Judge Moffett wants."

"Look," I said, trying to reassure the woman. "All you need to do is say the word and the police will help you find them. We can trace the phone call, we can work with the principal. I promise I won't use that opportunity to talk to the boy. If there's a chance he's in more danger, then the police should be the ones-"

"Don't you think there's been enough damage done with the police dragging the child's father out of their apartment in handcuffs? In keeping the father on Rikers for more than a week? For splitting up the family? Let's leave the police out of it this time," Taggart said.

"Then I'll see you tomorrow afternoon, unless you need help from my assistant during the day."

I hung up the phone and walked into the kitchen, turning on the light to see just how bare the cupboard was. There was a delicious slab of a smooth pâté, mousse de canard, in the refrigerator, left over from my weekend purchases. I scrounged for some crackers and a few cornichons for garnish, poured a Diet Coke, and headed to the den to try to unwind before my last review of the morning's presentation.

The phone rang before I sat down on the sofa. "I was about to give up on you," Jake said. "Thought you'd be home early. I've already left three messages."

"I haven't even been in the bedroom to pick them up. I'm just sitting down to dinner," I said, describing my meal to him.

"Doesn't sound like enough to keep body and soul together. I'll have to make up for that tomorrow night."

"What's all the noise in the background?" I asked.

"It's the party at the British embassy I told you about. They've got all the Washington correspondents here, sort of an annual meet-the-press deal. Dinner and dancing, but it's about to break up."

Who's your date?is what I really wanted to ask Jake, but under our new arrangement, we were both free to spend time with other people if we were not available, since our jobs interfered with our personal lives so frequently. Instead, I told him I couldn't wait to see him and tried to believe it when he whispered that he loved me into the telephone.

I dialed my best friend and former college roommate, Nina Baum, who lived in California. "Great timing. You just got me coming in the door."

I could hear her four-year-old son screeching in delight at her arrival. "I'll let you go. Call me over the weekend."

"You sound flat, Alex. What's going on?"

No one on earth knew me better than Nina. We had leaned on each other through every good time and bad in each other's lives. I told her what had happened to my case, how depressing it was to see the photos of Queenie at the morgue, and how jealous I was to think of Jake at a party with someone else.

"You've heard me on this subject, Alex." Nina was not keen on Jake Tyler. She had adored Adam Nyman, the medical student I'd met during my law school days at Virginia. She had mourned with me when he had been killed in a car wreck on his way to our wedding on Martha's Vineyard, and she had helped me throughout my slow emergence from the black hole into which I sunk after absorbing the news of Adam's death.

In the years since that tragedy, I had never let myself get as close to anyone as I had to Jake, only to find that my dearest friend, whom I trusted implicitly, thought he was too superficial and self-involved for me.

"Try your damn case, will you?" Nina said. "You want to know what time Jake gets home tonight? Forget it. You want to know what whoever she is he settled for in your absence was wearing to the party? Trust me, you would never have bought the rag in the first place. You want to know how much she knows about you? If she isn't sticking pins in a tall, blonde, mud-wrestling voodoo doll who thrives on competition by this time, she ought to go out and buy one immediately. Speak to you on Saturday. I've got to go feed Little Precious."

I laughed at Nina's nickname for her son and put down the phone.

When I finished my snack, I spread all the case papers out on my desk. I had outlined an opening statement, and now took half an hour to reduce it to an abbreviated list of bullet points. I smiled as I thought back to my first felony trial, when I'd stood before the jurors with a painstakingly detailed speech, written in essay form, of which I'd read every word. Midway through, the judge interrupted and wiggled his finger at me, asking me to approach. "Miss Cooper, this isn't a book report. Put down those pages and talk to the people before you lose them."

I had learned to abandon the crutch of too many notes and simply sketch out the main points I needed to make. The advantage of vertical prosecution-of working a case from the moment of the first police report up to the verdict-was that we knew the facts cold and could proceed without any notes or outlines.

In the morning I would spend one last hour with Paige Vallis, steadying her before her difficult day on the witness stand. I arranged all the questions I would ask her and made a list of the items I would ask the court to premark for identification, to avoid delay in the presence of the jury.

By midnight I had undressed and turned out the light, but the adrenaline that fueled my courtroom rhythm made a good night's sleep impossible. At six o'clock I got up and showered. Blow-drying my hair, I looked at my reflection in the mirror and wondered how long it would be before the dark circles that frequently took up residence beneath my eyes during a trial would reappear.

I finished dressing and dabbed some perfume on my wrists and behind my ears. I called a car service and went down to the lobby to wait for the sedan to take me to the office, and I was at the coffee cart at the building entrance before seven-thirty.

My car was still there, so the first call was to AAA, to tow it to my repair shop and replace the two tires. Then I settled down to the business on my desk until Mercer arrived with Paige Vallis almost an hour later.

I closed my door to give us more privacy. She didn't need to go over the facts again. The events of March 6 were indelibly etched in her mind's eye. I knew that if I questioned her about them now, it would heighten her state of nervousness, as well as take the emotional edge off the presentation she would make to the jury. Instead, we talked about what I thought the pace of the trial would be and when we might expect to go to verdict.

"Andrew's lawyer?" Paige asked.

"Robelon. Peter Robelon. What about him?"

"Do you have any better sense of what he's going to do to me?"

We had been over this countless times, and Paige didn't like it better than any other witness. When the assailant in a sexual assault case was a stranger, the defense did not have to attack the victim. They could acknowledge that a vicious crime had occurred, and suggest that the woman was tragically mistaken in her identification of the defendant. Poor lighting, little opportunity to see his face clearly, and general hysteria were the traditional arguments against a reliable identification by a rape victim. All of that changed when DNA technology replaced the survivor's visual memory as the means of confirming who her attacker had been.

But it was terribly different when a woman was assaulted by someone known to her-a friend, a coworker, a lover, or an ex-boyfriend. More than 80 percent of sexual assaults occurred between people who knew each other, so identification was not the issue at trial. Yet these victims were far more likely to have their credibility attacked in the courtroom.

Mercer was standing beside his witness, removing the lids on the cardboard coffee containers he had brought for each of us. "It's like Alex has been telling you all along, Paige. Robelon can only go one way in this case. He can't say it never happened and that you're making this whole thing up. The presence of Tripping's DNA makes that impossible."

"So it's that I consented? That I'm lying about this, right?"

I nodded my head.

"Will the jury already know that when I walk into the room and take the stand? I mean, does he just say that when he addresses them the first time?"

"I'm sure he'll plant that seed in their minds," I said. Robelon was a good lawyer and likely to be more subtle than most. I didn't think he would outright accuse Paige Vallis of being a liar. Rather, he would paint the jury a picture in very broad strokes, setting them up to believe that she had been hungry for this relationship, pursuing Andrew Tripping and unhappy when something went wrong during the night in question.

I hated this moment in the process. I hated being the person who had to deliver the victim into the hands of my adversary, in public view, to tell this story of trust and betrayal to a courtroom full of strangers. In the months since Paige reported the crime, I had struggled with Mercer to gain her confidence, to ask about intimacies that most people never discuss outside of their bedrooms. Now that I had gained that acceptance, I could not give her a victory without first exposing her to public humiliation and dissection.

"Will there be newspaper reporters at the trial?" she asked.

"I don't expect any. So far they haven't expressed interest in the case, and I can't imagine why that would change. Did you end up asking a friend to come with you? Anyone to sit in the courtroom for moral support?"

Paige gnawed at the corner of her lip and twisted a handkerchief in her hands. "No. I haven't got much family. Distant relatives are all. And my closest girlfriend told me to forget about going through a trial, to walk away from the whole thing."

My paralegal, Maxine, would be her anchor during the trial. They had worked together since Paige's first interview here, and I had encouraged them to talk to each other regularly. Maxine would be the virtual handholder for her through these next difficult hours.

"Do you think Andrew will take the stand?"

"I haven't a clue at this point, Paige." So much of that will depend on how you do, I thought to myself. Robelon did not have to make that decision until I had completed my case and rested. If Paige held up well throughout cross-examination, then he might gauge it necessary to let Andrew Tripping speak to the jurors. It could be a real problem for the defense, since the "bad acts" that had been ruled inadmissible on my direct case were things I could question him about if he chose to testify on his own behalf.

She could see that I was frustrated by my inability to give her definite answers about so much of what we were facing. "It seems so unbalanced," she said, forcing a wan smile. "You have to tell them everything about your case, and about me, but they don't have any obligation to do the same."

I returned the smile. "You've got to relax a bit and let me worry about that. It's a very uneven playing field, but Mercer and I are used to it."

I stood up to move Paige into the adjacent conference room and give her a newspaper to read for the time remaining before we went to court. "Alex, one more thing. Did you get a ruling about my sexual history? I mean, can Mr. Robelon ask about other men I've had intercourse with?" She colored deeply as she spoke to me.

We had talked about this issue before. "I thought I explained this to you," I said, sitting down again so I could look Paige directly in the eye. "That's why I gave you such a hard time about exactly what went on between you and Andrew on the three occasions you were together."

Like every witness I interviewed, I had pressed her aggressively about whether there was any kind of sexual overture or foreplay before the rape. It was common for many women to minimize or omit that fact from their narratives, fearful that a prosecutor would refuse to entertain a case in which there had been any sort of consensual conduct leading up to the crime.

"I've told you the truth about that, Alex."

"Then why are you worried? Nothing else is relevant."

"I went on-line last night," she said, now wringing the handkerchief between her hands. "I started to look up articles about cases that had been written up in the newspapers. Sort of to see what to expect."

I guess everything I had told her had not provided enough reassurance.

"I found a long feature in the Times that quoted you last year, talking about how bad the laws used to be. It kept me up all night."

"That's old news, Paige. That's all changed now." Rape shield laws had passed in every state in America in the last quarter of the twentieth century, protecting victims from questioning about their sexual activity with men other than the defendant. But until that time, a woman who had ever had intercourse prior to the rape-who was "unchaste"-was assumed to have consented to the act with the man on trial. The courts defined the ideal victim as a "virgin of uncontaminated purity."

"But that case you cited in the article?" she asked.

"It was decided before I got to law school. It's history, Paige."

At the time I studied the case, I had been stunned and disgusted that in my lifetime there was still a court in this country that threw out a man's rape conviction because the accuser had not been a virgin. Using the flowery rhetoric that referenced ancient Roman history, the court had asked: "Will you not more readily infer assent in the practiced Messalina, in loose attire, than in the reserved and virtuous Lucretia?" The unfaithful wife of Claudius was the Eighth Judicial Circuit's vision of an unfit victim, just as they held up to the world the virtuous Lucretia, who killed herself rather than see her rapist brought to justice.

"There'd have to be some direct relevance to Andrew's case," I told her. "They just can't go fishing into your private life anymore."

"C'mon, Paige," Mercer said, leading her out to the conference room. "Alex'll rip the throat out of anybody who tries to go after you that way. Won't happen."

They were almost at my door when she turned to look at me. "There's something else I need to tell you, Alex."

My fingers froze on the sheaf of papers in my hand. I was less than an hour away from addressing the jury. If Paige had not been honest with me about some fact in the case, this was my last chance to make that discovery.

"I had a phone call last night from a man I was-well-was involved with."

"Sexually?" Mercer asked. There wasn't enough time to be subtle.

"Socially, first. Then, yes, sexually."

Now I was standing, too. "Let's cut to the chase. Does it have anything to do with Andrew Tripping? With this trial?"

"It might." Paige's teeth were practically biting through her lip as she hesitated.

"The reason he called was to try to persuade me not to testify today."

"Someone threatened you?" I asked, as Mercer spoke over me, trying to get the man's name at the same time.

Her head swung back and forth between the two of us. "I can't exactly call it a threat. But it seems he talked to Andrew yesterday. He actually came to the courtroom and met with him."

I slapped my hand on the desk as I looked at Mercer. There hadn't been many people in Moffett's trial part, and I thought immediately of the lawyer who was the young boy's legal guardian. "Graham Hoyt," I said aloud. "The kid's lawyer."

"No, no. I don't know who that is. That's not his name," Paige protested. "It's Harry Strait, the one I'm talking about. He's a government agent, like Andrew Tripping claims to have been. He's with the CIA, I think."