Linda Fairstein - Bad blood

“They’ve found body parts at the blast site, Lem,” the judge said quietly. “It seems that several workmen were killed in yesterday’s explosion.”

My master-of-the-universe perp, the Upper East Side millionaire who passed in New York society with as fine a pedigree as his late wife’s, had a brother who was a sandhog?

“Hog heaven, Mr. Howell,” Artie said, walking over to open the door for him. “Duke Quillian is one of the guys who was blown to bits in the tunnel last night.”

“Did I wake you?” I asked Mike, after dialing his apartment from my office.

“Nope. Came home from the Bronx around six a.m. Napped for a few hours. Got the call from Lieutenant Peterson,” Mike said, referring to the commanding officer of Manhattan North’s Homicide Squad.

“Did you know Brendan Quillian had a brother?”

“Never came up in the investigation. I thought I knew him inside out, Coop. Now Peterson tells me he had three brothers-including the late Duke-and a sister. All the men are sandhogs, like their father before them. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know how I missed them.”

There wasn’t a more thorough investigator than Mike Chapman. “I’m not blaming you for anything.”

“Didn’t surface in any of the background checks, nothing on the phone records, not on the radar screen in weeks of surveillance. Didn’t sign the funeral-parlor memorial book for Amanda. Not even jailhouse visits. Like they were separated at birth. Knowing how close these sandhog families are, it’s really weird. How’d he react to the news?”

“Gertz was smart enough not to let me in on the session. He dismissed the jurors who’d shown up until after the weekend. Excused me, too. Then gave Lem the jury room and had Artie bring Quillian in there so he could tell him about it privately.”

“And the trial?”

“Adjourned till after the funeral. If I thought I had a chance to win up to this moment, watch when the news breaks. Talk about a sympathy vote. I can see it now. Lem will stand there wringing his handkerchief while he sums up. He’ll find some way to bring this tragedy right into the well of the courtroom.”

“Let me talk to Mercer.”

“He’s gone back to Bellevue,” I said. The hospital had a prison unit, where Marley Dionne was being guarded after his surgery. “Your snitch said he wasn’t into conversating this morning. Mercer wants to try to get a rise out of him with a mention of Duke Quillian’s death. See if he knew anything about the brother.”

“I’ll catch him there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Peterson’s setting it up for us to meet at the union headquarters near the entrance to the hole. Get a briefing on what they’ve found since the recovery began this morning. You want in?”

“Sure.”

“Four o’clock. Be there.”

“They using the FRV?” I asked, referring to the NYPD’s experimental Forensic Response Vehicle, a mobile lab that could actually be driven to the blast location to analyze evidence, turning around DNA results in less than ten hours.

“Yeah. They expect to have positive IDs on some of the remains by then. Dress down, kid. I’ve taken you to some dives, but this joint is really rough.”

“I’ve got my crack-den crime-scene jeans ready to go.”

“Brendan Quillian might be the luckiest guy in the world if this whole thing is just one great big coincidence and he skates right out of the courtroom ’cause people feel his pain. Me, I’m more of a master-plan kind of guy. This thing stinks of trouble. See you later, Coop.”

My secretary, Laura, stuck her head in the door. “I’m ready to go to lunch. I’ll bring you back some tuna salad, okay?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“That young woman who works at Chase Bank? You know, the one who’s being stalked?”

“Yeah. Carol Goodwin.”

“She’s here, Alex.”

“I told her I couldn’t see her this week. She knows I’m on trial.”

“She really sounds desperate.”

“Did you call around the unit to see whether-”

“Catherine and Marisa are both interviewing witnesses. Nan Toth is lecturing at Columbia Law School. You said Goodwin needs somebody senior, right? I couldn’t find anyone else,” Laura said. “Anyway, she only wants to talk to you.”

Our pioneering Sex Crimes Unit had forty lawyers, most of them with caseloads so heavy that they were often on trial or evaluating new matters.

I looked at my watch. “She can’t be much more desperate than I am at this point. One fifteen. Okay, I’ll see what this is about. I’m out the door at three thirty to meet Mike and Mercer.”

Laura ushered Carol Goodwin into my office. “I’m sorry to do this to you,” she said, sniffling and reaching for my tissue box as she sat down. “Just show up, I mean. But I’m getting frantic about this investigation, and the detective from my precinct just doesn’t care. He hasn’t done a thing for me.”

The twenty-eight-year-old woman worked in private banking. She was intelligent and well-spoken, but obviously high-strung, and I doubted that the time she had spent in counseling for an eating disorder during college had completely cured the problem. She was several inches shorter than I and rail thin, nervously fingering the strap of her designer handbag while I shuffled through a file cabinet for her case folder.

“I don’t think that’s fair, Carol. They’ve been working with you on every angle of this for two months.”

“Then how come they haven’t caught the guy? What if he-what if he hurts me before they do? I’m the one at risk here. They need to be taking this more seriously.”

“Why don’t you calm down? There’s no point discussing any of this when you’ve got yourself wound up in such a state.”

Carol Goodwin had been referred to me by a victims’ advocacy group. She was reluctant to press charges when she first encountered her stalker, but once I’d offered to monitor the case, she had agreed to cooperate with the detectives to try to nail him. The man she described to us had taken to following her from work once or twice a week, showing up at events she attended for business purposes, sending her menus from restaurants she frequented that arrived in her mail a day or so after she had been to one of them, calling her in the middle of the night from phone booths in her neighborhood-all the activity following a note that had been slipped under her door one night this spring, with the words I’LL GET YOU cut out from a newspaper and pasted onto a textbook photograph of a corpse.

“You think this is easy, living in fear all the time? Have you ever been the victim of a crime?”

I needed a high-maintenance witness right now like I needed my wisdom teeth extracted without anesthesia. It wasn’t my practice to talk about my personal problems with them, either. I had stories that would make Goodwin’s silent stalker seem like her best pal.

“My update from the detectives only carries me through last weekend. I apologize for that, Carol. I’ve been on trial with a murder-”

“Is that what it’s going to take to get your complete attention, Ms. Cooper? Would you prefer that this man murders me?”

I stood up from my chair. “I think you’ll be happier dealing with one of my colleagues, Carol. I’ve obviously let you down. I’m going to reassign your matter to someone else in the unit who can devote the time you require to it.”

“No, no. That’s not it. I really want you to handle my case yourself.” She stretched out her arm to me. “I’m sorry-it’s just that I’m losing control and I feel so helpless all the time. My counselor told me to trust you. Please don’t give up on me.”