Linda Fairstein - Death Dance

"We're not the ones who let her in," Mike said, omitting the fact that she hadn't needed anyone's help in gaining access through the secret elevator in the apartment.

"Talk to my lawyers, detective. That little vonce -that cockroach-shouldn't be anywhere near my place. She's filed a lawsuit against me. She's trying to break up the business organization and my family. Desdemona Berk-my brother Izzy should rest in peace-she's a greedy little bitch."

"Want to grab some coffee before I go downtown to my office?" I said to Mike.

"Nah. I'll go up to the squad and put in a few hours."

"So how come you didn't ask him about the monitors in his apartment?"

"He was holding your hand, not mine. I thought you'd get to it. That's not homicide work, that's some kind of Peeping Tom stuff, right up your alley."

Mike was a detail guy. It was rare for him to let a single fact slip from his grasp. It was even more unusual for him to turn down my offer of a free breakfast.

"Are you going to talk to Mona?" I asked.

"About what? Right now all I'm interested in is who else saw Natalya Galinova before she disappeared and why her personal life seemed to be in such turmoil."

"I'll be in my office if you want anything," I said, hailing a Yellow Cab on the corner of Tenth Avenue and 59th Street.

It was only eight fifteen when I bought two cups of black coffee from the cart on the corner of the Hogan Place entrance to the court-house. I scanned my I.D. card and pushed through the turnstile, greeting the cop whose fixed post was security in the cramped lobby of the District Attorney's Office.

The eighth-floor corridor was still empty when I pushed open the anteroom door, passing my secretary's desk and turning on the lights in my office. I had left hurriedly on Friday evening to get to work with Mercer on the Jean Eakens case up at the Special Victims Squad. The case memos and screening sheets from the forty senior assistants who worked in my unit were still scattered on my desktop for review and response, so I spent time making comments on them until the phones started ringing at nine.

Half of the morning was occupied with phone calls to press for special attention to the new cases. I needed the toxicologist to do the routine drug screening in the Eakens case, but also to be aware that Xanax had been recovered from the doctor's kitchen counter. I begged the chief serologist to rush the DNA profile from the blood on the teeth of the dog who saved his owner from a rape in Riverside Park. A match to a known felon would launch a search that might prevent other women from being victimized.

I had no official role in the death investigation of Natalya Galinova, but knew that Mike could navigate the most professional medical examiner's office in the country with a skill that would produce the best results possible in a timely fashion.

At eleven, after I had set my secretary, Laura, to work on some correspondence, I walked across the hall to the executive wing, to see whether Rose Malone, the district attorney's assistant, could fit me into his schedule. I waited through a series of phone calls from the governor and several lesser public officials before I was summoned into the large office from which Paul Battaglia supervised the work of the six hundred lawyers on his staff.

There wasn't an hour of the day or night that Battaglia was without a cigar stub in his mouth. He could talk straight for thirty minutes without hobbling the unlit Cohiba that was stuck to his lips, and when he was actually smoking, as he was now, he would remove it occasionally to waft a ribbon of smoke in my direction.

"Good morning, Paul. Thanks for giving me some time. There are a couple of new cases that are likely to get some ink, that I thought you'd want to know about."

"Like what?" he asked, drawing back one side of his lip and speaking out of the corner of his mouth.

"Like a physician who drugged two women in order to rape them. Canadian tourists."

The press always played up the foreign element in crime stories. Politicians hated any mentions that might scare people away from the city's most profitable industry. "And the good news is that we finally have DNA from the Riverside rapist, so we're likely to have a profile to put in the databank by midweek."

I expected his usual barrage of precise questions about the pedigree of the doctor who'd been arrested or the breed of the heroic dog. "You think I think that's why you're in here to see me?"

I blushed and that drew a wide smile around the cigar clenched in his teeth.

"The commissioner called me about the Galinova woman. He seems to know that you were up at the crime scene."

And didn't call to tell Battaglia about it, which was the unspoken part of the district attorney's "gotcha."

"We were working on my rape case up at the squad when Homicide got the news she'd gone missing. Chapman thought I might be useful because of my familiarity with the ballet world, and the possibility that Galinova had been assaulted before she was killed."

"Chapman always finds a way to make you useful, doesn't he?"

I ignored the shot. There wasn't a rumor that circulated anywhere within the office that escaped Battaglia's radar. "Paul, I'd really like to ask you to assign me to the investigation."

Homicide cases were controlled in the Trial Division by Pat McKinney, a rat-faced prosecutor whose legal ability was obscured by the pettiness of his personality and the longtime affair he'd conducted with an incompetent young lawyer for whom he'd carved out a protected place in the bureau. I had challenged McKinney too many times to be favored with investigations that fell on the outer borders of my own unit. Battaglia's reliance on my sex crimes prosecutors for the resolution of so many high-profile cases-our ability to exonerate falsely accused suspects before charging them and to nail those guilty of such heinous crimes-had given me direct access to him whenever I wanted it.

"Nobody's got the case for us?"

"No suspects yet. The squad's just getting on all the employees today. Nobody's been tapped to work on it."

"It's not a rape, according to the commissioner. Any reason to think the perp was trying?"

I had gone online to find the old news stories about the first murder at the Met. I reminded Battaglia of the facts, since the case had occurred before he was in office.

"That wasn't a completed rape either, Paul, but it was certainly an attempt at one. The best those detectives could reconstruct, the violinist ran into the stagehand when she was lost. He got her in an elevator and tried to assault her. He probably killed her when she resisted, when she was struggling."

"So you want to keep that option open?"

"Yes. We've got four hundred guys who were somewhere backstage that afternoon and evening, so detectives have got to talk to every one of them, in case this was random-or to see whether one of them had been stalking Galinova since she'd arrived here. And we're developing a very complex personal life. A lover's quarrel-a domestic-isn't so far out of the question."

"How so?"

"Galinova recently put her husband on notice that she wanted a legal separation. She had something going on with this guy called Joe Berk, and a former lover is the artistic-"

"Slow down, Alex. Don't just throw Joe Berk's name in here and slide by it."

"Is he a friend?"

"He's everybody's friend. And he'd be your worst enemy."

There were no powerful businessmen or -women who had somehow not been in Battaglia's orbit throughout his several terms in office as one of the most influential law-enforcement figures in the country. Every prominent New Yorker had been solicited for campaign contributions over the years, and most had benefited from the services of the great lawyers mentored in their careers by Paul Battaglia. Among his prosecutorial alumni were partners in every major firm, litigators sought to battle in the most controversial trials, judges on the state and federal bench, commissioners leading government agencies of every type, and one protege who had been a contender for the position of attorney general of the United States- the country's premier legal post.