Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“If there had been any evidence to examine, of course it would have been analyzed and entered in the bank. Mercer Wallace is going to see whether the kit is still around. Most hospitals destroy them after ninety days, if the victim doesn’t want to go forward.”

“But you don’t doubt the rape allegation was legit?”

“Why would we? Seemed to be an attack by a stranger, with no reason to be fabricating it, and Grooten saying from the outset she couldn’t make an ID.”

“Suppose she was having a problem with someone at the museum, Alex. A lover, a coworker, a supervisor. Someone who was giving her a hard time, harassing her, frightening her.” Battaglia reached forward to light the end of his cigar. I hadn’t finished my coffee yet and he was probably on his third Monte Cristo of the morning.

“You scare me. You’re beginning to think like Mike Chapman.”

“Maybe she reports a rape-no physical evidence, no fingerpointing or framing a suspect-maybe she calls the cops just to send a shot over the bow. ‘I’m serious about this, Mr. Whoever You Are. Leave me alone or else. I’m not afraid to bring the police into this.’”

“Anything’s a possibility at this point, Paul. But most strangerrape victims have no reason to make up the story.”

“And most of them aren’t found dead within a year.”

“Katrina Grooten might have had reasons to act the way she did. A foreigner, alone in this country with what seems to be a very small network of emotional support. An incident that she feared would be racially charged if an arrest followed. The great unlikelihood of finding the assailant. In most other cultures, there’s still a societal stigma that attaches to victims of sexual assaults. Somewhere in her life, at work or at home, there would be someone to blame her for walking into the park alone.”

“Anybody dust her bicycle for prints?”

All I needed at this point was the district attorney to micromanage my cases. I had thirty-seven open files in various stages of their investigations, and the forty other lawyers whom Sarah and I supervised had scores more. Maybe I could drop them off with Rose, and Battaglia could try to sort his way through some of those while I helped find Grooten’s killer.

“Mercer is double-checking all the paperwork to see what was done, and whether anything can be reexamined at this point.”

When he lowered his head to look at the weekly figures in the report from the Office of Court Administration, noting the arrest-to-arraignment time lag, I knew Battaglia was finished with me. I was almost out the door before he spoke: “That big-needle thing, that phony lie detector scam you pull, how often is it successful?”

I bit my lip and paused in the doorway, knowing that McKinney had given me up again. “About ninety-eight percent of the time.”

“I like it. Might borrow it someday. Just promise me you won’t ever do it in an election year, okay?”

“Sure, boss.”

No one was in yet on either side of the hallway. The display on my phone reminded me to pick up my voice mails. I punched in my password and the mechanical recording told me I had two messages.

“Message one. One thirty-fourA.M.”A real human voice kicked in: “Good morning, Alex Cooper. Or should I say I hope there’s nothing good about it.”

The stalker. Shirley Denzig’s biting tone was unmistakable. The young woman with a complicated psychiatric history had harassed me for weeks during the winter months, after a confrontation in my office when I had seized a forged document that she was carrying with her. She had ferreted out my home address and tried to get past the doormen, at the same time that I was embroiled in a dangerous homicide investigation. The detectives from the District Attorney’s Office Squad had searched for her in vain, certain also that she had stolen a pistol from her father’s garage in Baltimore.

“I haven’t forgotten what you took from me, Alexandra. And I haven’t forgotten that you told people I was crazy.” Denzig rambled on, filling the three minutes of recording time with vitriol, short of threatening but nasty and unwelcome.

The second message picked up seconds later and Denzig finished her tirade. “I’m closer than you think, Alexandra. You’d better stay out of my way.”

She was smart enough to know exactly what she was doing. At no time in either message did she express any intent to harm me. The sound of her voice and the fact that she had not forgotten her anger was enough to alarm me. I dialed the extension upstairs in the squad and reached the duty sergeant who had come on at 8A.M.

“Steve Maron will know what to do when he gets here. He and Roman handled this one last winter. I’d like someone from the tech unit to come down and tape the messages, so I have a record of them. And I’ll get Sarah to sign off on a subpoena to dump my phone.”

Computerized telecommunications systems were so sophisticated now that even the shortest telephone call or message would leave its source on our machines. We could request a “dump” of my phone line, specifying the date and time of our interest, and within a day would know from what number Shirley Denzig was calling me. It was an expensive process-five hundred dollars for each twenty-four-hour period in question-but it was foolproof.

Ryan Blackmer had walked in and taken a seat opposite my desk. “Got a minute?”

This was one of the assistants who could always make me smile. Smart, hardworking, and with a talent for attracting the bizarre and unusual, Ryan loved to produce results for the detectives and they loved bringing cases in to him.

“Remember that guy who was on-line in the chat room with Brittany in April?”

“Vaguely.” Brittany was the screen named used by a male detective from the pedophile squad, Harry Hinton, when he went on the Internet to look for child molesters.

“I’ll refresh your recollection. He wants a meet tomorrow afternoon.”

“Friday? Right before the holiday?” It was the beginning of the Memorial Day weekend, and for many New Yorkers it signaled the start of three- or four-day summer getaways to beach and country houses, hotels and inns.

“That’s the ruse. Brittany said her parents were going out of town and she’d be home alone in the city, having a sleepover at a girlfriend’s house.”

“Did you review the transcripts?”

Blackmer was always prepared. “Nice and clean, just the way you like ‘em.” He passed the folder over to me.

On the World Wide Web, Brittany was a petite thirteen-year-old cheerleader with a ponytail who attended a parochial school on the Upper West Side. In real life, Harry was a muscular thirty-six-year-old cop with lots of facial hair and fifteen years on the job.

When he went on-line to surf for pervs, Brittany-Harry never initiated the conversation. This was not entrapment. It was simply going to the cyber-caves where these creatures lurked, just as Felix steered his cab through city streets looking for underage girls.

“Which chat room?”

“It’s called ‘I likevery older men.’ The usual profile. Say the magic words-cheerleading, music videos, parochial school uniforms.”

You could watch Harry’s act in real time. Within minutes of his logging on in that kind of room with his benign teenage-girl profile, sharks would come out of the water and line up for the kill:

“How big are you?” they’d ask.

“I’m only five-three. I’m short,” Brittany would reply.

“No, I don’t mean your height. What’s your bra size?” and then “Describe your uniform,” and then “Are you a virgin?” usually followed by “Send me your picture.” Harry would press the enter key, and off would go a digital head shot of Joni Braioso, the undercover who actually took the meet, if the case progressed that far. Although she was twenty-four, Joni didn’t look a day older than sixteen. When she dressed in a plaid skirt with navy blue knee socks, fake braces on her teeth, hair pulled back in a bouncing ponytail, and weighing less than a hundred pounds, she easily passed for twelve or thirteen.