Linda Fairstein - Entombed

While Mercer did the heavy lifting, I tried to measure the guy's responses. At times he seemed earnest and as candid as he could be, and at moments when his facial expressions seemed identical to the police artist's sketch, I was ready to lock the door on the cell and throw away the key. The brilliance of DNA meant that science would resolve any of our uncertainty within twenty-four hours.

Forty-five minutes into questions and denials, Peterson knocked on the door and smiled at me, offering a pack of cigarettes, his lighter, and an ashtray. "I forgot the captain got rid of his illegal paraphernalia a year ago, at the mayor's request. We'll bend the rules for you a bit."

He had remembered the cigarette butt recovered from the stoop in front of one of the crime scenes. The perp was a smoker, and the remains he left on the desk would be another easy source of DNA analysis, from saliva.

Mercer and I each took a cigarette from the pack to make the activity inviting to our target. David Maswana wrinkled his nose at the smell of the match lighting. "Thanks. I don't smoke."

Maybe he didn't. Maybe he was smart enough not to make the process of evidence collection any easier for us.

At the end of an hour, Mercer was ready to play hardball. The vague answers about recent dates and times-those that would key into the January assaults-were unacceptable. Mercer pressed for firm answers, for information undoubtedly recorded in this generation's ubiquitous PalmPilots and desktop calendars.

He asked David to voluntarily give a DNA sample, to allow us to swab the inside of his mouth with a Q-tips. The young man welled up with tears before refusing the request, saying that he would ask his father about that before leaving the precinct later on.

Then Mercer removed a slip of paper from the folder. He turned it face-up and placed the composite of the Silk Stocking Rapist's face under the nose of our prime suspect.

David recoiled automatically and started breathing heavily. "It's-it's like me a lot, but then, who made this? White women? A lot of the characteristics would, well-look like any, um-"

Mercer's dark brown skin was almost the same shade as David's. He leaned in and pointed at the kid. "Don't let me hear any we-all-look-alike-to-them bullshit, okay? This sketch looks more like you than the photo on your driver's license."

Another knock on the door and Peterson cracked it enough to motion me out. I thought Mercer had David on the ropes for the first time, making progress and softening him up. My annoyance at the interruption was visible.

"Sorry, Alex. I assumed you'd want the call. Darren Waxon, the chief of protocol says he has to talk to you."

I took the receiver and spoke brusquely into the phone. "Yes, Mr. Waxon?"

"Miss Cooper, I'm wondering how much later you're going to keep the ambassador and his son in the police station. It's after eight-thirty and if you're planning to take any kind of action, I'll need to know about it as soon as possible."

I hesitated, afraid there had been a leak from someone in the department who saw the two men waiting downstairs earlier in the evening. "Who told you Mr. Maswana was here?"

"He called me himself, to thank me and let me know what was going on."

"Thank you? For what?"

"For telling him why the district attorney subpoenaed the personal-residence information in the first place and what the investigation concerned."

My annoyance was fast turning to anger. "Exactly when did you tell him that?"

"Miss Cooper, I gave each of the missions the courtesy of informing them that we had no choice but to respond to the proper legal process. Protocol requires-"

"But what time? At what hour did you tell that to Mr. Maswana?"

"This afternoon, shortly before I gave Detective Wallace the list of addresses."

The whole time that Mercer thought that he had pulled a fast one on Maswana with the ruse of getting information from him via the INS agent, the ambassador knew we were looking at one of his sons as a possible serial rapist.

"You had absolutely no business revealing that-"

"Miss Cooper," Waxon said, meeting my ire with his own, "I wasn't about to cause an international incident over a-a handful of hysterical women."

Mike Chapman would have called him a frigging idiot, would have threatened to lock him up for obstructing governmental administration.

"Hysterical women? What kind of misogynist are you? Well, if you've disturbed the domestic tranquillity by giving one of the other Maswana sons the time to get out of the country this evening before we could get our hands on him, I'll bring a few of those victims by your office so you can explain the concept of diplomatic immunity to them face-to-face."

I told Peterson to carry on the interrogation and to ask the wily Mr. Maswana for his permission to swab David, in order to exclude him as a suspect. "Keep someone with him all the time. He's likely to be talking to his son Hugo by cell phone. And let him think we got called out to the scene of a new rape. Stall them here as long as you can."

I opened the door and asked Mercer to step out. "You and I are headed back to the airport tonight. Tell the ambassador anything you want-anything but that. Tell him we've been called out on another case. We've got a flight to catch."

Shortly before 9P.M. we were in Mercer's car, at the intersection of Sixty-seventh and Park Avenue.

"Which way, Alex? JFK or Newark?" he asked.

I had called my travel agent's office in hopes she was working late, but got her voice mail. "Just go south. If our best bet is Kennedy, we can take the Thirty-fourth Street tunnel, and if it's Newark, we get the Lincoln at Thirty-ninth Street."

I dialed Information for American Airlines. We had crossed Fifty-seventh Street by the time I got through the recorded menu prompts and was put on hold for a live human being.

"The night we went to the airport to get Annika Jelt's parents into the country," I said to Mercer, "there was that guy at Kennedy who finally helped us work it out. Did you keep his name?"

He pulled the leather case that held his gold shield out of his pocket. "The newer business cards I've picked up are behind the badge."

I found the one for the Port Authority supervisor and tried his cell phone. He answered on the second ring and I gave Mercer a thumbs-up.

After I reminded him who I was and the urgency of our purpose, I asked him to find out what airlines had late-night European flights to cities that would connect to something that flew near Dahlakia, like the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa.

Mercer steered up the ramp that encircled Grand Central Terminal and pulled over while we waited for an answer.

"Most of your European flights departed between six and eight o'clock. We've only got a few going out between now and midnight."

"Where to?"

"London, Paris, Rome with American. Stockholm on SAS. Moscow via Aeroflot. And it looks like Rome has been canceled because of a mechanical problem."

"Newark. Can you get us a fix on Newark?"

"London and Paris. Both on Continental. They go out around eleven, too."

"This is a police emergency. There's a felon-possibly a murderer-that we have to stop before he leaves the country. If I give you his name, can you check the manifests?"

The supervisor was silent. "Will you cover me in writing? You know it's forbidden for us to give out passenger information."

"You have my word, you'll get whatever you need."

"Just the flights that haven't left yet?"

"Start with those," I said. "Then you can work backwards."

There was always the possibility that if the older Maswana son was actually our man, and was warned by his father in midafternoon to get out of town, he had done it by train to another city or by shuttle to other airports that also serviced Europe. I crossed my fingers that the array of available flights was so much broader from New York than any other Northeastern port that he would have taken his chances by staying local.