Linda Fairstein - Bad blood

“How about his sister, Trish?” I asked.

“A cop is sitting on her house. Mike wants to talk to her,” Ignacia said, putting her feet up on the ottoman. “So far, no luck with her or Bobby Hassett. There’s always tomorrow, Alex.”

“Trish’s phone,” I said. “Did he remember to ask Peterson to dump it?”

“Relax,” Nan said as the intercom rang to announce the arrival of our dinner. “I did the subpoena this afternoon. You can’t run this case anymore, my dear. You’re in somebody else’s hands now. Sit back and let us worry about it.”

The five of us ate dinner together before my friends said good night and Ignacia locked the door behind them. I turned in at eleven, while she was still in the den watching an old movie.

Mercer picked me up at 8 a.m. on Thursday, and I thanked Ignacia as she headed home at the end of her tour.

“You sleeping?” he asked.

“So-so. Anything new?”

“I wish I could tell you something good, Alex. I know you don’t like living this way.”

We parked around the corner from the Hogan Place entrance and Mercer escorted me up to my office. Laura made sure there was no welcoming committee to overwhelm me on my return and kept McKinney at bay while I dealt with the pileup on my desk.

At ten thirty, Mercer and I made our way up to Part 83.

Fred Gertz was ready for his close-up this time. He had opened the courtroom doors to the press and public half an hour earlier, knowing it would be a capacity crowd. Lem Howell was sitting at counsel table, and an all-new crew of court officers-eight of them now-staffed the room. I didn’t recognize the man who had taken Jonetta Purvis’s place, but when he looked up as he saw me start down the aisle, most heads in the room turned around to note my arrival, too.

Shortly after, Judge Gertz took the bench. He strode out of the robing room with an uncharacteristically purposeful attitude, as though he were fit to ascend the bench and take his place among the nine Supremes.

He had prepared remarks to deliver and waited until the two officers in front of the press row had quieted everyone.

For almost fifteen minutes, Gertz droned on about the tragic events of Tuesday morning. He explained that he had excused the jury until next Monday, at which time he expected he would have no choice but to declare a mistrial, because of the media coverage that would have been impossible for any New Yorker to miss. He talked about the courage of the court officers and his staff-with an emphasis on the unimaginable loss of Elsie Evers.

Gertz closed his statement with a self-congratulatory description of how he had used the power and dignity of his judicial status to restore calm after the chaos of the shooting.

He thanked Lem and me for our assistance and waved at Lem to remain seated when he tried to stand to put something on the record.

“There will be no interviews of Mr. Howell and Ms. Cooper. They are still involved in these matters, and while I’m not going to gag them, I think it would be most inappropriate if they make any public comments.”

Then Gertz walked off as briskly as he had entered, and the reporters raced out to call in their stories.

Lem crossed over to talk to me. “That gets the man his fifteen minutes of fame, I’d guess. Or do you think he didn’t want us to talk because he’s afraid we might say that when he was hiding in the kneehole under the bench, I didn’t quite think he was doing much to restore order in the court?”

“He can’t really believe his own statement, can he?”

Lem had clutched my forearm in his usual style. “You okay, Alexandra? I hope you understand that I was as shocked, as surprised, as appalled, as you were by what happened in here with my client.”

“I know that, Lem.”

“Miss Cooper,” the substitute clerk called out. “There’s a call for you on the DA’s phone over here.”

I broke away from Lem and signaled for Mercer to wait for me in the well of the courtroom while I took the call.

“Alex? It’s Laura. I’ve got Jerry Genco on the phone. He said it’s urgent. He asked me to patch him through to you.”

I was standing in the same place I had been when the door had opened on Tuesday and the defendant had grabbed Elsie’s gun to shoot her. I was tethered to the wall by the long beige extension cord, waiting for Genco to come on the line.

“Alex? Forensic biology ran our sample overnight for that prelim I promised you.”

“Yes, Jerry?”

“I never expected to have a result as fast as this, but the match comes up in our own linkage database.”

“To whom? Can you be more specific?”

“The fetal tissue I extracted yesterday, that’s what I submitted to the lab. I don’t know much about the old case, but I never thought I’d be ready to give you confirmation on the paternity as fast as this.” Genco paused to take a breath. “Rebecca Hassett was pregnant with Brendan Quillian’s baby.”

“God, my heart breaks for that kid,” I said to Mercer as I slumped into the chair at counsel table in the empty courtroom. “Why didn’t we think of this?”

“Hey, I missed the same signs you did. Mike told me all that talk about how Bex had spent so much time at the Quillians, practically living in their house.”

“Of course she wanted to come into Manhattan with Trish the day she went to have lunch with Brendan and meet his fiancée,” I said. “No wonder he became so upset when he saw Bex in the rowboat. He probably thought she was going to do something to break up his engagement, act out in front of Amanda Keating. Who knows how long she’d been sleeping with him at that point, on his infrequent visits home?”

“Or playing hooky, slipping into town to meet up with him somewhere. Then she appeared at the church the day of the wedding and went home to the Bronx, all furious with Trish. By then, Bex was pregnant.”

“You should have seen that pitiful sight when they opened the coffin yesterday. And I’m thinking she was buried with a stuffed animal like it was a childhood toy.”

“And wasn’t it that?” Mercer asked.

“A little brown-and-white bulldog? Try Jack the Bulldog, the mascot of the Georgetown Hoyas. A present from Brendan, no doubt. I suppose some family member put it there beside her without having any idea what it stood for.”

Mercer and I had been to enough college basketball games at the Garden to recognize the symbol of Brendan’s alma mater.

Mercer said, “So if we suppose Brendan knew Bex was pregnant-”

“Of course he knew,” I snapped. “He was calling her house, up until the day of the marriage. He was probably trying to reason with her, checking on whether or not she’d told anyone about it. Wondering how she would be able to deal with it, knowing that terminating a pregnancy wasn’t an option with the religious upbringings they’d both had.”

“There’s his whole golden opportunity-a new life as part of the Keating kingdom-just weeks away from being formalized, and he’s messing around with his kid sister’s best friend.”

“And she’s the only one-the only person in the world, little Rebecca Hassett-who stood a chance of getting in the way of Brendan’s shot at the entire Keating fortune.”

Mercer was leaning against the edge of the table, working the points over and over, and shaking his head from side to side. “Alex, it still doesn’t change the fact that Brendan was out of the country on his honeymoon the night Bex was killed.”

I tossed my head back and grimaced. “But look at the weight it adds to his desperate breakout this week. Who else stood to know that in a careful reexamination of the body, there was physical evidence that connects him to a murdered teenager?”