Linda Fairstein: Hell Gate

I saw Donovan Baynes exit the tent and headed over to talk to him.

“Can we strike a deal, Donny?” I asked.

“I don’t know what you’re thinking, Alex. It’s not the time.” He was dialing a number on his cell phone as he tried to blow me off.

“The women. That’s all I want you to give me. No detention centers, no custodial settings after all they’ve been through. Let me work with Safe Horizon,” I said, talking about the city’s leading victim advocacy organization. “They’ve got shelters we can put these young girls in to protect them. If we make them feel safe, they’ll cooperate with us. If we don’t, we’ll never gain their trust. I realize to you feds they’re not legal, but I just can’t see treating them like prisoners.”

Baynes spoke into the phone, asking to be patched through to Commissioner Scully. He answered me while he waited.

“We’ve got a new set of circumstances, Alex. You don’t even know what you’re dealing with. Want to give me a minute?”

I ducked my head and stepped into the morgue. There were ten gurneys lined up in a row, with just inches between them. Seven had bodies on them, and six of those were covered with sheets.

Willis Pomeroy, the deputy chief medical examiner, was standing at the head of the fifth body, explaining something to Mercer, Rowdy, and Mike, who were closer to me, at the feet of the deceased.

The sheet was only partially draping the young woman, whose lifeless eyes were fixed on a point above her head. Her auburn hair was snarled and tangled, and the skin of her malnourished body was almost gray in hue. Everything about her looked so youthful, even the nails that had been bitten to the quick. All except the rough surfaces of her hands.

“In water this cold,” Pomeroy said, “that wrinkled appearance-that washerwoman look on her fingers-sets in pretty quickly.”

“Does it matter whether she was dead or alive when she went in the water?” Mike asked.

Pomeroy shook his head. “No difference. Her palms, the soles of her feet. They get that way no matter whether she went overboard breathing or not.”

Was this the changed circumstance Donovan Baynes had mentioned? “What am I missing, Doc? Didn’t these people all drown?”

“It looked like that at first, Alex. Only the full autopsy will tell,” Pomeroy said, pulling the sheet back a few inches to show me a wound on the left side of her chest. “But this girl was probably dead when she hit the waves. See that bruise?”

Mercer stepped aside and let me edge in near the gurney.

“I see lots of marks.”

“All the bodies got tossed around on the ocean floor, Coop,” Mike said. “Scrapes from rocks and shells. Bloodless, postmortem wounds.”

Pomeroy’s gloved hand pointed to the middle of the girl’s rib cage.

“That’s bloodless too,” I said.

“Yes, but that’s because immersion in the water probably leached out the blood. The ocean does that to antemortem wounds. I’m pretty sure that’s a hole in her chest. It wouldn’t surprise me if this girl was stabbed to death-maybe even shot-before someone threw her in the drink.”

“C’mon outside, Alex,” Rowdy Kitts said to me. “You look like you need some air.”

I focused on the young woman’s face but I was reeling as I tried to think of the implications of this medical finding.

“I’m okay, thanks, Rowdy. I’m just stunned,” I said, turning around to Mercer. “I’ve been trying to persuade Donovan to let us keep the women in shelters. That’s beginning to look unlikely.”

“Always a master of understatement, blondie,” Mike said. “This whole operation is illegal, and we have no clue who the players are or who’s pulling the puppet strings from Stateside. Dead bodies are still washing up, the captain is nowhere to be found, and this broad was probably murdered before she took her swan dive.”

“Rowdy’s right, Alex,” Mercer said. “Let’s get some air.”

Mike pushed ahead of me to exit the tent. “It’s not air Coop needs. It’s a tourniquet for her great big bleeding heart. That and a set of directions back to Manhattan.”

“I intend to do something about these displaced girls to make their lives a bit easier over the next few weeks,” I said. “Then I’m happy to leave you to your lifeguard duties.”

“Look them over good, kid, before you go. I always forget you’ve got magic powers so you can just eyeball people and figure out who the bad guys are. You separate the snakeheads from the snakes for me, ’cause there are likely to be perps standing here in the sand up to their kneecaps, while you’re feeling sorry for them,” Mike said, gesturing with both hands. “And the murderer, Coop-got any ideas about that? ’Cause till you finger the perp who stabbed that kid lying on this slab, every one of them’s a suspect in my book.”

“What have we got here, Alexandra? Dress-down Wednesday?”

“I’m sorry, Lem,” I said, glancing down at my inappropriate attire. “I apologize for keeping you waiting. I asked Laura to call you to postpone our meeting.”

It was two fifteen and I had come straight from the beach in the Rockaways to my office on the eighth floor of the Criminal Courthouse at 100 Centre Street.

“She did indeed, but I had to be down here anyway,” he said, helping me off with my jacket and hanging it on the hook behind my closed door. “You had a shipwreck on your hands and I’ve been tied up with a new client matter.”

“And that wreck is exactly why I’m going to be rude and send you on your way, as much as I’d love to chat with you. Laura’s got my appointment book. She’ll give you a new date.”

“Windblown, breathless, and with the slightest bit of sunburn on the tip of your nose,” Lem said, smoothing his pale blue silk tie against his chest. “You’ve already brightened this dreary midwinter’s day considerably. I’d say the case of the People of the State of New York against Karim Griffin can kick back a few weeks. You haven’t seemed inclined to give him much of a break anyway, despite my most eloquent pleadings. Just one thing, my dear Ms. Cooper, before I-”

“Hold that silver tongue, Lem,” I said, motioning him to leave, with a smile. “Save it till Karim can hear you purr for his benefit. What is it, five rapes we’ve got him linked to so far?”

“Tentative, speculative, gossamer-thin shreds of matter that you’re trying to spin into some form of evidence. Latents and patents, whorls and swirls, ridges and-help me here, will you?”

“Talk to Laura. You’ll have plenty of time to work on that lost image before your opening statement.”

Lemuel Howell the Third was one of the finest litigators in the country-and one of my first supervisors in the district attorney’s office before he went into private practice-known to the bar as Mr. Triplicate for his habit of using three phrases, often when one would do, to emphasize every point he made. His sleek elegance and smooth moves likened him, in Mike’s eyes, to a panther. He had the fine-featured looks and wavy pomaded hair of a 1940s film star, and the eloquence of a Southern black preacher.

“I need your attention, Alex,” Lem said, taking hold of my wrist as I pointed at the door.

Lem had always been tactile, using his hands to establish a rapport and intimacy when he spoke to friends and colleagues. With criminals he represented, his touch implied a sense of safety or measure of trust that he expected would transfer to the jurors who watched the pair interact throughout a trial.

“I haven’t got time for this. Put together some numbers for Karim if he’s talking plea and I promise to think about it. Just don’t lowball me.”