The Kills

25

"Get me Monica Cortellesi on the line," I said to Laura, as I unlocked the door to my office. I had explained to Mercer that she was in charge of our frauds bureau and would know who the best experts were for evaluating any unusual artifacts.

"Who's your contact in the Oak Bluffs Police Department?" he asked.

"What's the point in tipping off Spike Logan that we realize he wasn't entirely candid with us? As long as we know where he is, let's hold the calls until we decide what to do with the information we get."

"Alex," Laura said. "That's Cortellesi on your backup line."

"Monica? Quick question. Who do I want to talk to about rare coins?"

"I can give you the head of the American Numismatic Association. It's in Colorado Springs. They do a lot of-"

"Too far to go. Today. Closer to home."

"How's Fifty-seventh Street?" she asked.

"Perfect."

"Stark's. Probably the preeminent firm in the nation for private dealers."

"Reliable?"

"Like Fort Knox. Family business, started by two brothers in the 1930s. There probably isn't much they can't help you with."

"Thanks, Monica," I said, handing Mercer a piece of paper with the name on it. "Want to call and get us an appointment while I work on those FOIA requests for the CIA?"

Laura came in with a handful of messages. "Call Christine Kiernan. She's been up all night on a new case. The others can wait."

"Would you see if you can book me on a flight to the Vineyard tomorrow?" I asked.

"Don't you have to be in front of Judge Moffett in the morning?"

"Yes. A mercifully short appearance, I hope. Something late in the day. If I can wrap up the Tripping case early, I may take a long weekend."

I sat at the computer working on the requests for the old CIA files while I talked with Christine, the phone propped between my shoulder and ear. "What'd you get?"

"Rape-robbery in Hell's Kitchen. Can I come up?"

"Sure. You got a victim?"

"Nope. She's still at the hospital. Took a bad beating when she resisted the guy."

By the time I had completed the boilerplate applications for the information I wanted and sent Laura to get Battaglia's signature for the cover sheet supporting the urgency of my request, Christine had appeared with her file.

"I got the call at threeA.M.," she said, handing me copies of the detective's scratch sheet.

"This all the paperwork you have?"

"Yeah. The cops haven't had time to type up the police reports yet."

"What's the story?" I asked.

"My complainant is in her twenties. She's a medical student at NYU. Just moved into a renovated brownstone in the west Forties. Dicey block."

Every time a run-down section of Manhattan was gentrified, there was a period of increased violence before the neighborhood reinvented itself. Thirty years earlier, when TriBeCa was transformed from an area of commercial buildings and warehouses to residential lofts, the first tenants were exposed to muggings and assaults on a regular basis. There were no streetlights, no local merchants with familiar faces, no grocery stores to duck into when being followed, and many marginal transients who squatted in abandoned spaces. A similar fate befell the residents of Alphabet Town-Avenues A through D-when they reclaimed their streets from the drug dealers and prostitutes who had made the neighborhood so unsavory for so long.

"Coming home from the hospital?"

"You got it. Twenty-four-hour shift, she was exhausted and completely oblivious to her surroundings. She had the hood of her anorak pulled up over her head because it was raining so hard."

"Tell me about it."

"Never heard the guy coming. Got her as she was going into the vestibule of her building."

"A push-in?"

"Yeah. He held something against the small of her back, sharp and pointed. She thinks it was a box cutter. Told her to get under the stairwell and keep her mouth shut or he'd slit her throat."

"I hope she obeyed," I said quietly. I had seen too many autopsies of victims who had unsuccessfully tried to resist an armed attacker.

"She did exactly what he told her to do. Took off her clothes and laid down on the floor. He was about to penetrate when a hypodermic needle fell out of his jacket pocket. She freaked and started to scream."

"AIDS?"

"That was her first thought. She was sobbing to me at the hospital, asking me what the point of surviving the attack was if the rapist transmitted a terminal illness."

"So he beat her to shut her up."

"Broke several bones in the orbital socket of the right eye. Knocked out a tooth."

"And raped her anyway?" I asked.

Christine nodded her head.

"Have they offered her the prophylactic to prevent HIV transmission?" There were powerful drugs that physicians believed would block the virus, but they were only effective if taken within twenty-four hours of the assault.

"Yes. She's probably going to start them this morning."

"What did he take?"

"Her briefcase."

"Was she wearing scrubs when he attacked her?"

"Yeah, he figured out she was a doc. Kept asking if she had drugs in her bag, or any blank prescriptions."

"Did she?"

"No. Just books. A ton of medical texts, a wallet, a cell phone."

I looked up at Christine. "You do a trap-and-trace yet?"

"I haven't done anything. I just got down here from Roosevelt Hospital and knew I had to give you the details."

"Ever done one?"

"Nope," she said, with obvious hesitation in her voice. "What is it?"

"It's a triangulated cell phone call. It works like GPS-global positioning satellites. If the perp is using the stolen phone to make calls, the cell company can tell us exactly where he's standing when he's on the line. Just one catch. You've got to get it done before the battery charge runs down and he tosses the phone away."

Most thieves who took victims' cell phones, even as an afterthought, used them until the batteries ran out, for sport if not necessity. Before the recent successes of the GPS technology, we could often connect them to the crime weeks or months after it was committed by tracking calls on the stolen phone to long-lost relatives and friends. This gave us the chance to find the assailant before he attacked again.

"You need to call TARU," I said, referring to the NYPD's high-tech-equipment unit. If there was any way to eavesdrop surreptitiously or use electronic surveillance of any kind, these teams were the leaders in the field. "Get started with a court order and they'll have tracking devices up and running within the hour."

I could smell Battaglia coming. The cigar smoke wafted into my room before the district attorney turned the corner. I sent Christine on her way and offered him a chair.

"Let me guess," I said. "Judge Moffett called. Wants you to convince me to let Tripping take the misdemeanor plea without any further complaining-or research."

"Can you tell me this weekend's Yankees-Red Sox scores, too?"

"Hardly clairvoyant, Paul."

"Put this whole thing to bed, Alex. You got bigger fish to fry. While I have your ear, got a piece of advice for a friend of mine?"

"Sure."

"What do you do with an employee-single mother, law degree, supervises young attorneys-goes on an office business trip paid for by the government and gets herself featured in a glossy woman's magazine headlining an article called 'Romance on the Tracks'?"

"Meaning what?"

"Gives them an actual photo of herself to run with the article. Describes meeting a guy on a train ride from Albany, having a few drinks with him, and then going back to his apartment for a one-night stand."

"If she admitted it was job-related? I'd can her. That's a stupid and dangerous message to send to the public in my line of work, not to mention to your own troops. But then, not everyone's a sex crimes prosecutor."

"Well, the woman I'm talking about is. DA's office in another borough. Can you imagine what a role model she must be?"

"Don't tell me-"

Battaglia chomped on the cigar and stood up. "Yeah, your friend Olivia. Do me a favor, Alex; if you decide to go public with your sex life, no illustrations, please. Check the October issue of that sex-and-the-single-girl's magazine. The DA's wife saw it in the dentist's office."

"Sorry to interrupt, Mr. Battaglia. Alex, Will Nedim says it's pretty important."

"Hold on a minute, Paul. This might be of interest. The Nedim kid is handling the female defendant who was caught with McQueen Ransome's mink coat. We've been trying to flip her."

I picked up Nedim's call. "Will? I've got the boss here with me. Any developments?"

"We may have a change of heart on Tiffany Gatts."

"Way to go. Helena Lisi call you?" I said, referring to Tiffany's lawyer.

"Nope. Tiffany herself just called. Left a message that she wants to talk to me after all."

"You have a plan?"

"I thought I'd have her produced in my office tomorrow."

"With the lawyer, of course."

"Certainly. I thought you might want to be there."

"No way," I said. "You'll never get anything out of her in my presence. I'm like a lightning rod for Tiffany Gatts. If she's getting along with you, let's leave it at that."

I cut Nedim short, realizing that I was holding up Battaglia. "Nothing to report yet, Paul. This girl could give us a big break on Kevin Bessemer, if we're lucky."

He waved his cigar in the air as he left, a sign that I was to carry on with whatever I had been doing before he came in the room. I sorted out the usual problems of the day and ordered in lunch for Mercer and me.

"Bernard Stark will see us at four o'clock," he reported to me. "He's the patriarch of the firm. Happy to help. Mike's going to meet us in their offices on West Fifty-seventh Street. That's the good news."

I smiled at him. "What's the bad?"

"The phone company in Massachusetts confirms that a call came in to Spike Logan's house on the Vineyard the afternoon before he drove into the city."

"You think he wasn't as surprised about Queenie's death as he told us he was?"

"The records show the caller's address-the deceased's next-door neighbor. I've checked with the squad. The guy had already been interviewed by the time he called Logan, no doubt to give him the sad news. No way that jerk didn't know she was dead."

We were eating our sandwiches at my desk at two-thirty when Laura came in with a sheaf of papers she had pulled out of the fax machine. "I got a call from an administrative assistant at the CIA," she said. "There will be a hard copy of these in the mail, with all the formal signatures and seals, but that's going to take another month. The agent said he was told to comply with Mr. Battaglia's requests as soon as possible."

"Must be nice to have a name so big you can throw your weight around gracefully and get answers the same day," Mercer said. "Maybe these papers will resolve some questions about our odd group of players."

I thumbed through the photocopied documents, knowing that the pile wasn't thick enough to contain anything of value. The answers for the file requests of Victor Vallis, Harry Strait, and McQueen Ransome had exactly the same explanation as the one for the late King Farouk.

As the agency's coordinator of information and privacy, I must advise you that the CIA can neither confirm nor deny the existence or non-existence of any CIA records responsive to your request. The fact of the existence or non-existence of records containing such information would be classified for reasons of national security under Section 1.3 (a)(5)-Foreign Relations-of Executive Order 12368.

Mercer listened to me read him the response before speaking aloud what both of us were thinking. "The King of Egypt was sent into exile almost half a century ago, and he's been dead more than thirty years. What the hell does he have to do with our national security now?"