Linda Fairstein - Final Jeopardy

My last call was to the video technicians. For most of the history of police work, statements or admissions made by suspects in criminal cases were recorded by officers in their notepads. Then for several decades, our office used stenographers who accompanied us on call and took down, verbatim, the questions and answers of an interrogation, to read back to a jury at trial. For almost twenty years in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we had developed a sophisticated unit of trained video professionals, who taped these critical sessions always with the knowledge and consent of the accused whenever a defendant was willing to participate.

This process eliminated the age-old complaint about police interrogations: that the cops coerced or beat the confessions out of the suspects. Instead, the video camera captured the entire scene. The defendant sitting calmly at a table in a detective’s office, unshackled and unharmed, often munching on a doughnut and drinking a Sprite while the prosecutor repeated the Miranda warnings and got his informed consent to go ahead without a lawyer present.

I can remember the first time I went out on call with irne a cameraman, incredulous that any criminal would agree to film a confession to a crime and have it permanently.stic recorded for use against him in the case. I read the guy his.5 as rights, showed him the camera, and explained its purpose. gger Instead of refusing to go forward, he sat up straight, r the combed his hair and reset his baseball cap neatly on his head for the movies, and spoke into the microphone as if her it was his finest moment in the spotlight. I think that jury finished its deliberations in about twenty minutes. Guilty.

Bob Bannion answered the phone in the tech office.

“Great, I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to get you tonight,” I said when he picked up. Bannion had started the system for us and he was superb at his work. He was a pro, with a keen, dry sense of humor, which helped get you through a long night in a squad room. Bob was also on call for any homicides or major cases that occurred in the next twelve hours, so I was delighted to try and wrap him up first. I explained a bit about the job we would be working on so he knew what to expect.

“Anything else cooking, or can I ask you to meet me at Special Victims by nine tonight?”

“I’m just on my way to film a crime scene. Multiple homicide in Alphabet City,” the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the streets were named avenues A, B, and C. “Looks like a couple of teens in a wild shoot-out. I No arrests yet and nothing even close for tonight, but Rod I asked me to do some interior shots of the apartment.” One of the valuable techniques Bob had developed was making videos of crime scenes as soon as they were discovered, so that there would be a permanent record of every detail in its place. The importance of objects or clues near a murder victim often did not become obvious until much later in the investigation, when detectives could refer back to their original relationship to the bodies or the evidence by looking at the video.

“When you’re done there, will you come on up to Eighty-second Street? They’ll be starting with the line-ups, so there’s no need to rush. I’ll beep you to call it off if he’s not talking. The guy’s a predicate, so maybe he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Give me a call if you get anything hotter than this, okay?” Predicate felons criminals with records of convictions for serious offenses often were savvy enough not to make admissions that would help sink them before a jury.

I ran out the door and had jumped into a taxi by the time I got to the corner of Worth Street, prepared to creep along the Drive uptown at the height of rush hour to get to my apartment. I brushed past the doorman, skipped the mailbox, waited with several of the neighbors to get on the elevator, and was inside my bedroom and stripping off my work clothes in seconds. I changed into a pair of jeans, a tailored shirt, and a blazer for the long evening of sitting on coffee-littered desktops and making notes while propped against dusty file cabinets. No need for a pocketbook I clipped my beeper onto my belt and stuffed cash into my jacket so I could send out for food and soda for the crew working on the case throughout the course of the evening.

My turn-around time was less than twenty minutes. I thought about calling David’s office to see if he had studied the faxed version of Cordelia Jeffers’s letter, but when I looked at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes after seven o’clock, I didn’t want to risk calling just as Jed arrived to meet with him. Instead, I left a message on David’s home machine, explaining where I would be for most of the evening and that I would try to reach him orne if I had any free time at the station house.

I went back downstairs and out onto the street, grabbed a yellow cab and directed the driver across the Eighty-fifth Street transverse to Columbus Avenue, and got out at the corner of Eighty-second to walk the short distance to the Twentieth Precinct. The uniformed cop at the front desk stopped me as I entered the building, so I identified myself to him and walked up the two flights to the Special Victims Squad, which had come to feel like my second home during the past few years.

Every felony sexual assault that occurred on the island of Manhattan was referred to this little outpost of seasoned professionals.

When I reached the landing, I pushed open the heavy fire doors that separated the ugly brown-tiled stairwells from the dilapidated office space of the thirty-year-old squad.

The place was electric with the activity that accompanies a break in a major case. Detectives in every shape, size, and color had been pulled in from days off and borrowed from other details to help round up victims, witnesses, and the stand-ins or fillers needed to be the ringers in the line-up array with the defendant. Every shirtsleeve was rolled up, every collar was open, and the handful of ties I could see were unknotted and worn in the loose crisscross fashion on of the detective world. esti “Hey, Wallace, Cooper’s here,” I heard a guy I didn’t es as recognize call out in the direction of the sergeant’s office. 3gger Mercer appeared in the door frame and waved me;r the in. I started to offer my congratulations, but he talked best over me.

“The captain is really pissed off. Stay out of h her his way.”

“At me? What did I do? I just got here.”

“He did not like your order about the perp walk. Thinks you’re just doing that so that Battaglia can get the press release instead of the PD. He’s mad at me for letting you know about it so early didn’t want me to call you till we’d wrapped everything up tonight.”

“What a fucking baby he is. I can’t believe you gave me up on that.

When is he going to learn that it’s just the wrong thing to do at this point in the case? That’ll be like the last pattern he messed up. Didn’t want to call us for a search warrant so he gets the suspect to sign a consent. The judge threw out the whole thing all the evidence said once he was cuffed and asked for a lawyer, he couldn’t consent to anything. C’mon, what’s been going on since you called me?”

“First I had to accompany Mr. Mont va leto the men’s room so he could relieve himself. There’s a fuzzy birthmark on his thigh all right, just to the southeast of his penis, the way Katherine Fryer had described it.”

“Great. Get a photo of it before he gets to Riker’s and somebody tells him to paint it green.”

“Already done. Now, we’ve also got most of the people we need. The couple from the attempt this morning, they’re here. We reached Miss Fryer. Detective Manzi just left to pick up the first victim, and the third one’s on her way in from Westchester with her daughter. She moved out of town after the rape. I think we’re only missing one. No answer at her house, so we may have to do her down at your office next week.”