Linda Fairstein: Death Dance

The eighth book in the Alex Cooper series

"You think we've got a case?" Mercer Wallace asked me.

"The answer's inside that cardboard box you're holding," I said, opening the glass-paneled door of his lieutenant's office in the Special Victims Squad.

I placed my hand on the shoulder of the young woman who was slumped over a desk, napping while she waited for my arrival. She lifted her head from her crossed arms and flicked her long auburn hair out of her eyes.

"I'm Alex Cooper. Manhattan DA's office." I tried not to convey the urgency of what we had to get done within the next few hours. "Are you Jean?"

"Yes. Jean Eaken."

"Has Detective Wallace explained what we need?"

"You're the prosecutor running the investigation, he told me. I've got to go through the details with you again, and then make a phone call that you're going to script for me. Is Cara still here?" Jean asked.

"She's in another office down the hall," Mercer said. "It's better we keep you separated until this is done. Then we'll take you over to the hotel and let you get some rest."

I had been the assistant district attorney in charge of the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit for more than a decade, and Mercer had called me into the case to try to add something from my legal arsenal to speed the arrest process and increase the likelihood that Jean Eaken would be a successful witness in the courtroom.

Mercer told me that the twenty-four-year-old Canadian graduate student had met the suspect at a conference on adolescent psychology at the University of Toronto, which she had attended with her friend, Cara, four months earlier.

I sat opposite Jean, who stifled a yawn as I asked the first question. It was almost midnight. "When you met Selim back in January, how much time did you spend with him then?"

"I sat next to him at a couple of lectures. We made small talk during the breaks. He bought Cara and me a glass of wine on the last afternoon, at happy hour. Told us he lived in Manhattan, that he was a doctor. Nothing more than that."

"He invited you to New York?"

"Not exactly. I told him that we'd never been here, but that we had a trip planned for the spring. He was very friendly, very kind. Cara asked him if he knew any inexpensive hotels, since we're on student budgets, and he told us we could stay at his apartment."

"Did you talk about the sleeping arrangements?"

"Yes, of course. Selim told us he had a girlfriend, and that he'd either stay over at her place or sleep on a futon in the living room. He offered us the twin beds," Jean said. "He gave me his card, Ms. Cooper, with his office phone and everything. He's a medical doctor- a psychiatric resident. It seemed perfectly safe to both of us."

"It should have been perfectly safe," I said, trying to reassure her that it was not her own judgment that precipitated her victimization. "Did you correspond with him after that first meeting?"

Jean shrugged. "A couple of e-mails, maybe. Nothing personal. I thanked him for his offer and asked him whether he really meant it. Then I sent him another one a month ago, after Cara and I set our travel dates, to see if those were still good for him."

Mercer nodded at me over Jean's head. He was keeping a list of things to do, and getting subpoenas for the e-mail records of both parties would be added to his tasks. We had worked together often enough to know each other's professional style, especially for documenting every corroborating fact we could in this often bizarre world of sex crimes.

"Were there any phone calls between you two?"

"Just one, a week ago. I left him a voice mail explaining when our bus arrived at the Port Authority and making sure it was a convenient time to show up at his apartment. He called me back late that night and we talked for a while."

"Can you reconstruct that conversation for us? The details of it, I mean."

There would be skeptics on any jury that was eventually impaneled, people who would assume that there must have been verbal foreplay between the time of the first meeting of this attractive young woman and the stranger at whose home she later arranged a sleep-over. I needed to know that before Mercer and I took the next steps.

"Selim asked me if we had made plans for the days that we'd be in the city and what we wanted to see. Things like that."

"Did he say anything at all, Jean-anything-that made you think he was interested in you, maybe socially or even sexually?"

She answered quickly and firmly. "No." Her green eyes opened wide as she looked at me to measure my response.

"Nothing inappropriate?"

She thought for several seconds. "He asked me why my boyfriend wasn't coming with me. I told him I didn't have one," Jean said. "Oh, yeah. He wanted to know if I liked to smoke marijuana, 'cause he could get some while I was here."

Mercer moved his head back and forth. This was a fact he was hearing for the first time. It didn't necessarily change the case at all, but it reminded us that we had to constantly press for things that often seemed irrelevant to witnesses-and for the truth.

"What did you tell him?"

"That I don't like weed, that it makes me sick."

"Did you expect to spend any time with him, Jean?"

"No way. Dr. Sengor-Selim-told us he'd be at work all day and with his girlfriend most evenings. I just thought he was being a nice guy, letting us crash at his place."

Most of my prosecutorial career had involved women meeting nice guys who had other things in mind. Cops and prosecutors-and often Manhattan jurors-found young people from west of the Hudson River and north of the Bronx a bit too trusting much of the time.

"So he didn't come on to you at all?"

Jean forced a smile. "Not until I was ready to go to bed the first night."

"What happened then?"

"It was after nine when we got to his place. We sort of settled in and talked for an hour. Just stuff. Psychology and how hard grad school is and what were our first impressions of the city. When Cara went into the bathroom to take a shower, Selim came over to the couch I was sitting on and like, well, he tried to hook up with me."

"Tell Alex exactly what he did," Mercer said, coaxing the facts we needed out of her as he had done earlier in the day.

Jean was a well-built young woman, almost as tall as I am at five-foot-ten, but much stockier. "I was tired from the long bus ride, and kind of leaning back with my head against a pillow. Selim reached over and tried to kiss me-right on the mouth-while he was fumbling to get his hand on my chest."

"What did you do?"

"I just pushed him away and stood up. I asked him to give me the telephone book so I could find a hotel to stay in."

"How did he react to that?"

"He was very apologetic, Ms. Cooper. He told me how sorry he was, that he had misinterpreted my body language. He pleaded with me not to tell Cara. He told me that in his country-"

"His country?" I asked.

"Selim's from Turkey. He said that back home, if anybody did that to his sister, he'd be pilloried in the town square."

He'd be short one hand and castrated, too, no doubt. "So you stayed?"

"He was a perfect gentleman from that point on. He was just testing me, I guess. It's happened to me before. Maybe that's why I thought I could handle the situation."

"And Cara?"

"You'll have to ask her about that," Jean said, blushing perceptibly.

Mercer had already told me that Selim Sengor hit on Cara, too, after Jean fell asleep the first night. They stayed in the living room talking, and she engaged in some kissing and fondling with him, but had stopped short of further sexual intimacy. That was another reason to keep the witnesses separated. They were likely to be more straightforward with us out of each other's presence. Cara might blame herself for what happened thereafter-an unfortunate but typical reaction when some of the sexual contact was consensual. She might even be less candid in front of Jean.