Linda Fairstein: Death Dance

"Did you socialize with him during the week?"

"No. In fact, he actually did spend the night before last with his girlfriend. We hardly ever saw him." She bit at the cuticle of one of her nails, until she noticed me watching her. Then she straightened up again and began to wind a strand of her long hair behind her left ear.

"And yesterday?"

"In the morning, after Cara and I made our plans, I beeped him at the hospital. When he called back, I told him that we were going sightseeing and planned to pick up some half-price tickets to a Broadway show, in Times Square. We invited him to join us, to thank him for letting us stay with him."

"Did he spend the evening with you?"

"No, he didn't seem the least bit interested in doing that."

"Did you and Cara go to the theater?"

"Yeah, we saw that new Andrew Lloyd Webber thing. Cara loves him. We got back to the apartment after eleven o'clock and Selim was waiting up for us. We bought him a gift, an expensive bottle of Kentucky bourbon," Jean said, smiling again, now braiding the length of hair as she talked. "It sounded very American."

"What did you do then?"

"He offered us a drink and we both said sure. We sat in the living room while Selim went into the kitchen and mixed the cocktails."

"Mixed them? What did he make for you?"

Again she shrugged and shook her head. "I don't know. I never drank bourbon before. I heard that loud kind of noise that a food blender makes, and he came out with something-I don't know-it looked very frothy when he brought it to us."

I couldn't imagine anyone adding something to a good scotch, and I doubted there was much to improve on in a fine bourbon either.

"Had you changed your clothes, Jean, to get ready to go to sleep?"

"No. Cara turned on the CD player and we started listening to the soundtrack from the show. Selim came back into the room and handed us each a drink. He offered a toast to our friendship and we clinked our glasses together."

The young woman rested her elbows on the desk and cushioned her head in her hands while I asked her how much of the cocktail she drank.

"Three sips of it, Ms. Cooper. Maybe four. I swear I didn't have any more than that."

"Any marijuana?"

"No. I mean he had some in the apartment-he offered me a joint that he took out of a drawer in one of the tables, but I didn't smoke any."

I needed her candor. The blood and urine that had been collected by the nurse-examiner would confirm her answer.

"Did he smoke?"

"Not in front of us. Not that I saw."

"What's the next thing you remember?"

"There was no next thing. That's the last memory I have, really. I felt dizzy and weak-so weak that I tried to stand up but I couldn't. The room started spinning and then it was dark. Completely black. That's all I know." Jean pushed herself upright again, looked at her nail-the bed red with irritation from her biting-and then back at me.

"Until…?"

"Until I woke up this morning."

"In the living room?"

"No, no. No. I was in one of the beds in the other room. That's what's so strange about this, Ms. Cooper. I was dressed in my nightgown, my clothes were folded neatly on top of my suitcase," Jean said, dropping her head back in her hands and lowering her voice. "And I ached. I ached terribly."

"I need to know where it hurt. Exactly where you felt it."

Jean Eaken didn't lift her head. She rubbed her lower abdomen with one hand.

Mercer and I both knew what she meant, but that wouldn't be specific enough for the purposes of the law. "On the outside of your body?" I asked, speaking softly.

"No. Inside me. Like someone had sex with me. Too much."

"Do you remember having intercourse with Selim? Do you think you might have consented to it after you started drinking with-"

Jean flashed another look at me as I gently challenged her and cut me off abruptly with a single sharp word. "No."

"Tell me what you did this morning, Jean."

"I was frozen. I didn't know what to do. At first I couldn't even remember where I was. I looked at my watch and saw that it was eleven thirty in the morning. We'd had the alarm set all week for seven, but I didn't even hear that go off. I got out of bed-I was still a little dizzy-to lock the bedroom door. Selim had been working rotating shifts-different hours all week. He told us he had to work sixteen hours today-eight a. m. to midnight-but I was scared he might still be there. Then I woke Cara up."

"Where was she?" I asked.

"In the other bed. Same as me-dressed in her nightgown and her jeans and sweater all folded up neatly. She was sleeping so deep, I had to keep shaking her to get her up. She didn't remember anything, either. She started crying, so first I had to calm her down. It was my idea to get dressed and go over there to the hospital."

"That was the best thing you could have done, Jean. Very smart."

"But the doctors haven't told me anything."

"We won't let you go home until they've explained their findings to you," Mercer said, watching Jean nervously twist and untwist the same plait of hair.

"Did you leave your things at Selim's?"

"Are you crazy? I never wanted to see that guy again. We brought our suitcases with us."

"The glasses you drank from," I said, "did you see them in the apartment this morning?"

"I didn't look around. I just wanted to get out of there as fast as possible."

"Did you have any reason to go into the kitchen, to put things away or clean anything up?"

"No. That's his problem."

Even better. It meant there was a shot that we might get lucky and still find some inculpatory evidence if Mercer and I could get going on this.

"I know it's been a long day for you, Jean. Just give us a few minutes to put things together and we'll be back," I said, stepping out of the room behind Mercer, who had picked up the cardboard evidence collection kit that had been prepared by the nurse-examiner at the hospital. We were in the hallway of the quiet corridor that Special Victims shared with the Manhattan North Homicide Squad.

"How long will it take to get the tox screening back on these?" he asked, referring to the slides and plastic bottles inside the compact box.

In addition to the traditional testing of fluids and stains recovered from a patient's body during the emergency room treatment of a rape victim, the latest kits required samples be taken of blood and urine for the most refined testing, as assailants used more sophisticated methods to overcome their prey.

"Seventy-two hours, if they jump us to the front of the line."

"I'm sending this whole thing to the M.E.'s office, to Serology?"

"It starts there," I said. Mercer knew that our medical examiner's serology lab did most of the analyses we needed. "Unfortunately, if there are any exotic drugs involved, it'll go out to a private lab and take even longer."

"Damn. I hate to give this bastard a three-day pass. We'll even have the DNA results by this time tomorrow."

"DNA tells us next to nothing in a case like this. We know they spent the night in his apartment. We know the docs recovered semen specimens from both women. None of that's a crime unless he used force-"

"No sign of that," Mercer said.

Even the aches that Jean described could be consistent with consensual sexual activity if it was vigorous or prolonged-or infrequent, since she had told Selim she did not have a current boyfriend.

"Or he spiked their drinks to render them unconscious. nowhere without the toxicology," I said.

"How do you want to take it from here?"

My deputy, Sarah Brenner, had stayed behind at the DA's office to draft the search warrant with the facts Mercer provided to her, and she would take it before the judge who was sitting in night court to sign while we set the rest of the operation in motion.