Linda Fairstein - The Bone Vault

“So we’re going to go over your statement one more time. There’s only one thing you can do wrong, from this point on.”

“What’s that?”

“Lie. You cannot tell any lies, Angel. Not about anything. No matter how insignificant you think the question is, no matter what it concerns, you can’t lie about it. If I ask you whether it was raining or sunny the day you met Felix, you’ve got to tell me the truth.”

“Like what does that have to do with my being raped?”

“Every single thing you say has to do with how we know what to believe when you get to the point of telling us what happened with Felix in your bedroom. If you lie about the little things that led up to that, then it means you’re very capable of lying about the big ones. Tell me you never gave him the number of your beeper, and I get records back from the phone company in a few days showing that he beeped you every day last week, then I know you’ve told enough lies for me not to trust anything you say. And if you do it under oath, before the grand jury, I’ll have you arrested before you leave the building.”

There were gentler ways to do this, but I was out of patience and short on time. It was almost nine-thirty, and as soon as my assistant, Laura, clocked in and got to her desk, she’d be leaving a message for Battaglia that I needed to see him.

Vandomir was a smart cop with good instincts. If he doubted the veracity of Angel’s narrative, he had reason to do so. Four and a half hours with her in the emergency room at the hospital had given him a concrete sense of where the holes in her story were. I tried to soften my tone and get back to the beginning of her meeting with Felix.

Each time she answered a question, Angel looked at Vandomir for a reaction. I had become the bad cop, and she was sticking with the version that she had originally given, even though the details did not hold together. But I couldn’t discount the complaint of any rape victim on a hunch, so I drilled away at every hour that had passed between the first cab ride in which they met and the night in question.

I was up against a stone wall. Angel wasn’t convincing, but she was tough. Vandomir wrote something on a piece of paper and handed it to me across my desk.

His note suggested a weakness to get us over the threshold. “Ask her if one of her girlfriends has a tattoo on her butt. The wordRalphie, inside the outline of a bull.”

“Who are the girls you hang out with at school?”

“Jessica. Connie. Paula. Why you gotta know?”

“Last names.”

“I don’t know their last names.” She was pushing me.

“I’ll go to the school myself and find them.”

She murmured “Bitch” just loud enough for me to hear it.

“Tell me about Ralphie’s girlfriend.”

Angel glared at Vandomir. “You been to my school already?”

“Which one is Ralphie’s girl?”

“She ain’t got nothing to do with this. You stay away from my-”

“Every single person you know who Felix met has something to do with this. The fact that he knows that one of your pals has Ralphie’s name engraved on her ass tells me that he knows more about you than I do right now. And that’s okay for me but it’s very bad for you.”

She was as startled as I was when the intercom buzzed and Laura interrupted us. “Now’s your chance, Alex. Rose said to get in there as soon as you can. Battaglia wants to know what you’ve got before he starts his ten o’clock with the deputy mayor, okay?”

“Tell her I’ll be there in five.”

I turned my attention back to Angel. “Do you know what a lie detector test is?”

“Yeah. I seen them on TV.”

“You know how they work?”

“Some cop puts like a…um, I don’t know. They ask you questions, that’s all.”

“We’ve got brand-new ones now. Computerized. Impossible to beat. They’re hooked up to your brain waves, your pulse, your blood pressure. First, we put a needle in your arm-”

“Aneedle? I don’t want no f-”

“It’s not a question of what you want. This is the point you’ve taken us to, and it’s full speed ahead from now on. It’s a big needle. It just stings for a few minutes when they inject you.”

Her bottom lip was quivering. “I don’t like no needles. I’m afraid of needles.” She had turned her whole body toward Vandomir and was begging him to intercede. The fourteen-year-old kid hiding inside the attitude of a thirty-year-old was beginning to reveal herself.

I pressed the intercom and Laura came on immediately. “Get me Detective Roman, will you, please? Immediately. Tell him I need a lie detector test in one hour. Juvenile subject. May have to make an arrest, so he better bring his handcuffs.”

Tears were poised on the bottom lids of Angel’s eyes, ready to pour down her cheeks.

“I’m going to have you wait across the hall until the detective gets up here. Come with me.”

“Ihate needles.”

“And I hate people who lie to me. Especially about being raped. You know how busy Detective Vandomir and his partners are? They get called out on three, four, five cases a day. Young girls and grown women who need their help. Badly. They work all night most of the time, just trying to keep families like yours and mine safe. Every extra minute we spend trying to get the truth out of you is time taken away from someone else who was the victim of a crime, some other person who wants to cooperate with us.”

“Can I talk to my mother first?” She was whimpering now.

“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’ve got one hour until the detective comes to give you the test. I’m going in to talk to my boss. Sit in that room and think about the choice you have. If there’s something about your story that you want to change, you just tell Detective Vandomir. He’s your best hope. If you tell him a story that makes sense, you won’t need the needle.”

I kneeled beside her chair and tried to make contact with her moist eyes. “Felix was wrong. It’s against the law for a man as old as he is to have sex with you. That’s a crime. We can still punish him for that. But if he didn’t have a knife, Angel, then you’re making up an entirely different kind of crime. If you made a mistake by starting that story and you got in over your head without meaning to, then tell us the truthnow before you dig yourself in any deeper.”

I grabbed a legal pad off my desk and told Laura to hold everything while I went over to see the district attorney.

My identification tag released the security lock on the door to Battaglia’s inner sanctum. The chief assistant was refilling his coffee mug as I walked past him. Rose Malone, the DA’s executive assistant, had the phone wedged between her shoulder and her left ear, working at the computer as she waved me into the boss’s suite. I tried to stall long enough for her to get off, so that I could get a reading on his mood, but she gave no sign of ending the call quickly.

I had practiced my approach several times on my way down to the office in the cab. A casual “By the way, I thought you’d want to hear what happened to me at the museum last night” wouldn’t work. I was confident Battaglia would back my shipyard decision if it was presented as an homage to his style, and smiled in anticipation of his reaction as I pushed open his door.

The first thing I saw was the smirk on Pat McKinney’s face. He was standing, arms akimbo, between Battaglia and me, and I knew before a word was spoken that he had gotten wind of last night’s maneuvers. The deputy chief of the trial division and my most driven in-house adversary, McKinney would have delighted in pitching this to the boss as a political embarrassment.

“I knew you and Chapman were movie buffs, Alex, butThe Mummy Returns meetsInvasion of the Body Snatchers wouldn’t even rate buttered popcorn in my house.”