Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“She went there for exactly the reasons you think. And she liked it there fine, gettin‘ it on with Ralphie. Turns out he’s dealing crack from the apartment. Kept her pretty well tuned up since she arrived. Angel decides to pocket some vials before she’s ready to leave, to make a few bucks on the visit.”

“I see it coming.”

“He catches her, smacks her around. Now she wants to scoot, but she’s got a black eye and he doesn’t want to let her out. Angel threatens to snitch, and he’s got a reason to go ballistic, ‘cause he knows she’s called the police before, to have Felix locked up. She picks up the gun and points it at Ralphie, but he grabs it back and can’t think of any place to stick it except right up against that underutilized bundle of brains the child has. Neighbor hears screams, dials 911.”

Maybe this is the wake-up call Angel needed. Why couldn’t she come out of this like Dorothy in Oz and realize that at her age there’s no place like home?

“Look, Alex, I’m whipped. I’ll give you chapter and verse tomorrow. Angel’s being treated at Mount Sinai, Ralphie’s spending the night courtesy of my brothers in blue down at central booking. We recovered two guns, a load of ammo, and forty-two crack vials from his apartment. Everybody’s safe and sound. Tell Mr. Chapman to let go of your hand and go home. See you tomorrow.”

There was no point in telling Mercer that Mike hadn’t waited out the siege with me. I turned off the tube, rolled over on the sofa, and fell asleep.

In the morning, I showered and dressed, met the cops in my lobby, who took me to the garage so that one of them could ride with me over to Park Avenue. No sign of my nocturnal stalker, so I let him out, continuing on to pick up Clem from the hotel at eight. We found a space on Mulberry Street and I tossed the laminated NYPD parking plate on the dashboard.

We walked through the small asphalt-paved park that only twenty-five years ago had been the heart of Little Italy but was now the center of a greatly expanded Chinatown. Mike called it Tiananmen Square. Men and women dressed in black mandarin-style jackets bustled back and forth, carrying plastic bags from the Canal Street fish markets and the Division Street vegetable trucks. Kids from the local elementary school played kickball. Nobody was speaking English.

As we emerged from the gates on the Baxter Street side of the park, the sound of the screeching children was replaced by the chants of about twenty adults who were marching in two rows, up and down the length of Hogan Place. Some of them were carrying posters and placards, hand-lettered with an assortment of slogans. All of them were shouting in unison.

“It’s safe and sane! End Battaglia’s reign!”

I could read the signs now as we approached the corner. It was a group from the American Alliance for Sexual Freedom, protesting my arrest of their sadomasochistic spelling whiz, Peter Kalder. A few had their organization logo labeled on large cardboard signs while others had printed more original thoughts:WHIP SOME SENSE INTO ALEX COOPER! andCOOPER-SHOW SOME RESTRAINT-STAY OUT OF OUR BEDROOMS! Stick drawings of me, cat-o‘-nine-tails in one hand and cuffs dangling from the other, would have pleased Mike Chapman immensely.

Prosecutors and cops were weaving their way among the demonstrators, visibly annoyed at having to maneuver around the rowdy cluster to get to the office entrance.

“Shit.” I stopped in my tracks when I saw aPost cameraman waiting opposite the building. This was a good morning to avoid a photo opportunity, obviously arranged by the alliance. “Do you mind if we go in through the back door of the Tombs?”

“Whatever’s easiest for you,” Clem said, standing on tiptoe to try to read all the comments. “I never realized there was a unit like yours, just specializing in sexual assault cases. You must walk a tight line, trying to keep everybody happy.”

“I gave that idea up a long time ago. Most people have no reason to know we exist until the unimaginable happens to them or a loved one.”

“Doesn’t this make the district attorney angry with you? He’s elected, isn’t he?”

“Battaglia’s the best. He’s got one rule, Clem, when we make decisions about prosecuting. ‘Do the right thing.’ Don’t play politics with people’s lives, don’t try to think how something will spin in the next day’s op-ed pieces, just try to do justice. He hates all the tabloid titillation with sex crimes, but he’ll stand behind any decision his top people make.”

“Lucky for you.”

I pounded on the heavy door behind the building, where the grim green trucks of the Department of Correction were depositing the day’s defendants who were being bused in from Rikers Island.

“Hey, Jumbo, can you let us in? There’s a lynch mob at my front door.”

The eight-to-four guard on the rear door of the Tombs was the size of a Mack truck. He pressed the button to open the wide mouth of the garage, and Clem and I walked inside. The pens were still empty but the crew was getting ready to receive its allotment of felons-in-waiting.

“G’morning, Ms. Cooper. You need any help with that little commotion outside? I could round up some of my guys and show them what black and blue looks like, in living color.”

“Save your strength, buddy. Nothing out there I can’t handle with a tough hide and a decent sense of humor.”

He took us through a lock-and-block system of corridors. The one behind us had to be secured before he could open the next door in front. There were five from the point at which he admitted us, until we emerged from the cells into the arraignment part, which would be called to order in less than fifteen minutes, at nine o’clock.

A rookie prosecutor I recognized, who was nearing the end of his first year in the office, was reviewing case files. He would be manning the court calendar for the rest of the day. He was puzzled to see me enter from the prisoners’ doorway.

“Need anything here?”

“Just taking a visitor on tour. What’s your name?” When he told me, I wrote it on a Post-it in my wallet, telling him I might be down with a search warrant later in the day, and asking him to tell the judge to expect me.

I stopped for coffee in the cafeteria in the courthouse lobby, which had long been known as the roach coach. We rode up on the elevators that carried convicted felons to the probation office. I tried to avoid eye contact with one of them-a taxi driver who two weeks ago had been found guilty of fondling an intoxicated passenger who had fallen asleep in the rear seat of his Yellow Cab.

The circuitous routing had added almost twenty minutes to the trip to my desk.

I unlocked the door and told Clem to settle in while I checked my voice mail and organized my desk after the long weekend.

“Here’s what we’d like you to do.” I set up my laptop on the table between a row of filing cabinets. “I want you to log on a guest account, so it will show your regular address. Last night at dinner, we drafted an e-mail that we’d like you to send.”

“To?”

“You tell me. Our thought was that you would send it to the team that was working on the exhibition. Was there a user-group address?”

“Yeah. There was a special ‘org’ account set up for joint access by workers from both museums.”

“Would it be logical that you could still get into it?”

“Sure. It’s meant to be used by interested people in museums all over the world. A lot of them are former employees or student interns, and many are scholars who know the collections. We’re all encouraged to send in suggestions for the exhibition. Things like that.”

“Is everyone we talked about last night included in that grouping?”