Bad Blood (28 page)

“He doesn’t trust his mother. We’re all in.”

“Then we’ll let you see the answer,” Trebek said. “Look at the board and there it is — ‘First occasion in which the United States government attempted to overthrow a foreign regime.’ Which affair was that?”

The musical tick-tocking of the show’s theme song counted down the seconds. I was mired in thoughts of the Spanish-American War and knew that it wasn’t even worth mentioning when I saw Mike’s wide grin as he rubbed his hands together.

“I’m clueless,” said Nan. “Do you know?”

“
Semper fi,
you two heathens. Think of the ‘Marine Hymn.’”

“I’m sorry you came up blank, dear,” Trebek consoled the computer programmer from Kansas City who had bet the farm on the big question. He held his hand to his ear, getting advice from someone offstage, as he moved to the second contestant. “Okay, Kevin, we’ll accept that answer, too. ‘What are the Barbary Wars?’ We’ll take that, Kevin. The question we were actually looking for is—”

“What was the Tripolitan War?” Mike asked.

“—probably the least known conflict in American history, folks, ‘What was the Tripolitan War?’ Yes, indeed. President Jefferson sent forces to the shores of Tripoli because the pasha and his Barbary pirates were threatening all the merchant ships in the Mediterranean and taking our sailors captive. So that’s all for this evening—”

Mike clicked Trebek off midsentence. “Double or nothing if you can name the hero who led the battle. Twenty-five years old, they made him the youngest captain in the navy.”

“Humor him,” I said, walking out with Nan. “John Paul Jones usually works when you need a naval hero.”

“Stephen Decatur, girls. ‘Our country, right or wrong,’ and all that. Died in a duel.”

“Yeah, but can you remember what you’re going to testify about in the case this week?”

“Spontaneity, Coop. You need to lighten up. You got to rock and roll with the circumstances at hand.”

“I’m rocking as best I can. What if the arraignment judge decides to let Carol Goodwin go instead of holding her for a psych exam?”

“You worried about her coming after you?” Mike asked.

“No, I’m concerned that she’s going to do something more dramatic to hurt herself and blame that on me. I kept flashing to that snapshot of her bloody arm on the bathroom floor when I should have been concentrating on other work all day.”

“Give me five minutes to close up my office and I’ll meet you outside the building,” Nan said. “Whose car?”

“I’m the wheelman.”

I took a couple of folders, shut out the lights, and headed for the elevator with Mike. The brisk night air was refreshing after an entire day inside the courthouse. I waited at the curb until Mike brought his car around.

I leaned into the window. “Would you mind checking with Central Booking as long as we’re waiting? See if you can get a status update on Goodwin?”

“You’re really nervous, aren’t you? Wait here for Nan.” Mike left the engine running and walked to the rear of 80 Centre Street, into the open garage through which prisoners were delivered for their first court appearance following their arrest and for fingerprinting.

Nan joined me in the car, and Mike returned shortly and said, “Your fruitcake won’t see a judge until sometime tomorrow. She threw a little tantrum in the ER over at Beekman, so they had to restrain her for a while to sleep it off. They’ll keep her in the psych ward tonight for observation, and she’ll be arraigned in the morning if she behaves. Feel better?”

“Yes. As long as she’s in a locked facility getting medical attention, it’ll get my day off to a better start.”

When we reached Thirtieth Street, Mike parked the car on Tenth Avenue and we walked into the construction site. Patrolmen were still guarding the entrance and the perimeter, but all of the media were gone.

When we reached the double-wide trailer that was the sandhogs’ headquarters, Mike entered first, holding open the door for Nan and me. Teddy O’Malley and a handful of men had their lunch boxes opened on desktops. The conversation stopped dead as the group stared at the three interlopers.

O’Malley got to his feet to greet us. “Hey, Mike. C’mon in. Miss Cooper.”

Mike stepped over and started shaking hands with the first two workmen closest to us. “Mike Chapman, NYPD. Nan Toth, Alex Cooper, from the DA’s Office.”

The man we had seen on our first visit — Bobby Hassett — was sitting near the rear of the room with O’Malley. He closed the lid of his tin box and stood up, jerking his head toward the door. “Let’s go.”

Like his younger brothers — identical twins who stood up at his command — Bobby Hassett was about six foot two. All three Hassetts were strapping young men, with wide, moon-shaped faces and high foreheads, heads sitting atop thick necks that widened into barrel chests. All three wore work clothes covered with dirt.

Bobby’s expression was stern and his voice sharp. “Emmet, Hal — I said, let’s go.”

The twins hadn’t moved the first time. They were as curious as the other men about who we were and how O’Malley seemed to know Detective Chapman.

“Mike, here, was hoping to talk to you guys,” O’Malley said, looking at Bobby Hassett as he spoke. There was no question who was calling the shots for the brothers. “He’s on the team that’s investigating the blast.”

Bobby stowed his lunch box above a locker and put his hard hat back on his head.

“Can’t help you, pal. I wasn’t working that night. Emmet, bring some extra cigarettes. Let’s get back to work.”

He came at us, stuffing half a sandwich in a plastic bag and pocketing it in his overalls.

Mike had moved from the door, but I was standing next to it, with Nan a few steps farther away.

“It won’t take long, Bobby,” Mike said. “There’s just some things you might be able to help us with.”

The big man put his hand on his waist, and as he turned to answer Mike, his elbow caught the side of my chest, knocking me back a few steps. I tripped over the chair leg behind me, and a stack of papers tumbled off the nearest table.

“You okay?” Nan said, grabbing my hand to pull me up.

“Take the broads and get out of here, Mr. Chapman. There’s a lot of accidents can happen around the tunnel, do you hear me? I’ve got nothing at all to say to you. Emmet, Hal — this isn’t a picnic,” Bobby said, reaching for the doorknob. “Hey, Teddy, since when are you doing the man’s bidding? Next time you want to invite me for dinner, tell me who else’ll be at the table.”

Bobby and his brothers stomped down the steps of the shack in their mud-caked boots. Mike was annoyed, his lips clamped together and his eyes darting from Teddy to the door. He hadn’t come this far to be dissed.

“Wait here,” he said, holding his hand up at Nan and me as he headed out.

O’Malley was on his heels. “That’s a bad idea, Mike. Let them be. Cop or no cop, you’ll not make them talk to you. You’d best try to set up a meeting through the union rep.”

Nan looked at me and we dashed for the exit, too. A couple of overhead lights helped us navigate around the giant machinery and over the pockmarked ground as we trailed behind O’Malley.

I couldn’t make out the words but I could hear Mike’s voice, badgering the trio of Hassetts as they made their way to the top of the cylindrical entrance to the tunnel shaft. They moved swiftly — more sure-footed on this rough terrain than either Mike or the two of us.

“They’ll turn on you, Mike,” O’Malley said. “Don’t be riding them.”

Bobby Hassett grabbed the wire cage opening on the side of the Alimak and slammed it shut as soon as the twins stepped on behind him. He flipped a switch and the bare lightbulb over his head glowed against the schist in the bedrock wall.

“You want to talk about the Quillians, Mr. Chapman? I’ll make an appointment for you to come downstairs here to my office sometime. Leave your little girls at home,” Bobby said, leering at us, his blackened fingers clutching the mesh of the cage. The grinding noise of the motor started up, Bobby raising his voice to shout over it. “Teddy knows how to find me, as you can see. Keep my brothers out of this.”

“I want to know everything there is to know about Duke Quillian,” Mike said.

“You shoulda been at the church, Detective. Teddy says Duke got himself a really deserving send-off,” Bobby said, his white teeth shining as he threw his head back and laughed. He obviously had no reason to know that Mike had been at the funeral service.

“I need to talk to you about Brendan Quillian, too.”

The Alimak started to move slowly off the platform.

“You got him in the right place, Mr. Chapman. Let’s see if you can keep him there.”

“And Bex,” Mike said. All we could see of the Hassetts were the crowns of their bright yellow hard hats. “Your sister, Rebecca. I want to ask you about her murder. I want to ask what you remember about how she died.”

The groaning wire cage disappeared down into the deep black hole, and none of the three men aboard it — a true band of brothers — said a word.

We had a quick dinner together at Primola before Mike put Nan in a cab for her ride home to Brooklyn Heights and dropped me in front of my door.

I left the apartment at 7 a.m., driving myself to the courthouse and parking on the empty street behind the small park in Chinatown that Mike called Red Square. Fishmongers were packing ice chips onto their sidewalk display cases, filling them with wriggling crabs and lobsters and fish whose odor would grow less appealing with the heat of the June day, while Asian farmers from rural New Jersey were unloading mounds of fresh, exotic vegetables.

I stopped at the cart on the corner of Centre Street for two large cups of black coffee and a Danish — caffeine with a sugar boost of pastry to get me through the morning.

I didn’t expect to see two detectives from the Special Victims Unit — Alan Vandomir and Ned Tacchi — waiting for me at my desk when I walked in the door at seven thirty.

“Don’t worry, we know you’re on trial,” Alan said. “We’ve got Ryan Blackmer writing up the case downstairs. But he said you’ll be the one to deal with the administrative end of this. That Battaglia would handle the politics. I was just leaving you a note. Hope that you don’t mind that we let ourselves in.”

“Of course not.”

Vandomir and Tacchi were two of the best detectives in the department, in both investigative style and in their manner of relating to victims of sexual violence.

I dropped my case folders on the desk. “What have you got?”

“Viagra,” Alan said. Neither one had a good poker face.

“What do you mean?”

“Around midnight last night, we locked up an old friend of yours. Derrick Ferris, remember him?”

“I certainly do. We convicted him for three rapes in the Taft Housing Projects. Must have been one of my first patterns with you guys. That’s going back.”

“Yesterday, we got a hit to the data bank from these two new cases — the girls up on Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in May. The one you assigned to Ryan.”

“Great.”

“Got a tip from Parole that his mama still lived in one of the buildings at Taft. We just staked out her apartment till he came home from his night’s prowl. You know how these two victims said he never lost his erection — that each of them said the rapes went on for an incredibly long time?”

“I do.” I had struggled to convince many jurors over the years that the sexual dysfunction some rapists exhibited was usually quite different from consensual coupling. It was exhibited in a variety of behaviors, including — as with Ferris — the ability to maintain an erection for hours.

“Well, we patted him down at the scene for weapons—”

“Get the knife?” I interrupted.

“Nope, but CSU is searching the stairwell. We had a bit of a chase. Then Ned searched Ferris back at the stationhouse and took this out of his pocket.”

Alan held out a baggie with a white plastic pill bottle inside.

“Viagra,” I said, studying the label. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. It’s probably easier to get this on the street than smack.”

“It isn’t street stuff, and it didn’t fall off the back of the truck. This is your tax dollars at work, Ms. Cooper.”

“What?”

Ned handed me a piece of paper. It was a receipt for a prescription with Derrick Ferris’s name on it — for Viagra — from a pharmacy that filled the request and received payment from Medicaid funds.

“It doesn’t make any sense for the government to do this. Derrick Ferris is a level-three offender,” I said. “I did the hearing myself.”

Ferris was eighteen at the time of his conviction and had been released after serving only eight years of his twenty-five-year sentence. But he had been designated the most-serious-level sex offender, to be tracked by the convicted-felon registry on the underlying facts of his original case and his risk to the community — far more likely to commit similar assaults again than most other criminals.

“I spoke to his parole officer yesterday,” Ned said. “Ferris is actually supposed to be on medication that — what do I say? Suppresses the urge.”

“You know how this stuff works?” I asked, shaking the bottle. “It increases blood flow to the penis. If he was having any trouble performing, this just enhances his ability to complete an act of intercourse. How many of our guys is Medicaid enabling?”

“Sit down for this one, Alex. We did a check last night. All the level-three offenders are registered online. The sergeant’s calling in the names this morning to the Medicaid office as soon as they open, but there’s more than two hundred convicted rapists in this county alone, and they’re all eligible for the drug. He thought you’d want to let Battaglia know this one’s going to hit the media.”

“Thanks a lot. Ask Ryan to do a memo to the boss for my signature. Remind him to emphasize that level-three offenders don’t change their colors. I’ve never met one who’s been ‘rehabilitated’ by a visit to jail.”

“Good luck today,” Alan said.

“My first witness is Curtis Pell,” I said. They both knew the detective who worked Manhattan North, in the office adjacent to theirs, with Chapman. “I’ll be prepping him as soon as he gets here and we go upstairs to Gertz before nine. If the jurors are all there on time, we’ll be on at nine fifteen. If you hear anything from Medicaid on this by then, give me a heads-up.”