Hell Gate (36 page)

Baynes’s jaw slackened.

“The Wall Street Slave Market was at the very same intersection of Water and Wall streets. The Meal Market across the street from your coffeehouse, I guess, was the place where the enslaved Africans were sold.”

“I—I had no idea.”

“It’s helpful to know how your gentlemen’s club came to be, Donny. That original Tontine Association? It must have thrived on human trafficking.”

“Now you’ve got something to give Battaglia,” Mike said. “It’s the perfect time to call him and tell him you were tagged with a GPS. He’ll lose all interest in you once you explain how much ground we’ve covered.”

We had walked out the door of the U.S. Attorney’s Office just after six o’clock and made the left turn that put us directly in front of police headquarters.

“Better than that, he’ll be putting the knot in his black tie for whatever event his wife’s dragging him to tonight. It’s a good idea.”

I waited until we reached the quiet lobby of One Police Plaza and were waved in by the cop at the security desk.

The call was a quick one. I assured Battaglia that I was fine, that the NYPD had me covered, and that the small device attached to the rear of my car had a tampered ID number, so it would be difficult to trace.

As Mike predicted, he was far more interested in our meeting with Ethan Leighton, furious that we had stepped on Tim Spindlis’s toes by talking to Kendall Reid, and intrigued by the conversation with Donny Baynes. I had bought myself lunch with the district attorney at noon on Monday.

The Latent Print Unit was on the fifth floor of One PP. It ran 24/7 with some of the smartest detectives in the city.

I was from the new generation of prosecutors, spoiled by the revolutionary techniques of forensic DNA, which had only been introduced to the criminal justice system two decades before. But like many other young lawyers, I expected it to solve an increasing number of cases as its methods were refined and its variety of applications expanded almost explosively.

Mike’s training, and the fact that he had learned from his father since earliest childhood, kept him centered on good old-fashioned policing techniques. He was skilled at detailed interrogations and he used traditional applications, like fingerprinting, that were updated with high-tech computer assists.

He opened the door to the unit where several detectives were at work.

“Yo, Patty,” he called out across the room. A tall, thin redhead with a platinum streak in her long hair was standing next to her desk, thumbing through a pile of fingerprint cards.

“Hey, Mike. How lucky can I get on a Saturday night?”

“Patty Baker, meet Alex Cooper. You could get very lucky if you’ve got the right answers.”

“Remind me to wake up my husband and tell him. What’s happening? And if you’re asking me to jump the line, I’ve got way too much
Golden Voyage
business going on to help you.”

“We’re working that case. Nobody told you they think it’s connected to the broad who went headers in the Gracie Mansion well?”

“That’s the skinny.”

“I want you to take a look at these things for me.” Mike lifted the plastic bag out of his pocket, holding it by a corner.

“CSU see it yet?”

“Nobody has. It wasn’t found at the scene. Coop and I have a feeling it may be connected, but it was dumped somewhere else and a couple of guys have already had their hands on the bag before it got to us.”

“You have used up just about every last favor in the bank,” Patty said, sitting at her desk. She looked over at me with her intense blue eyes. “We were in the same class at the academy. That’s how come he gets special treatment. Mike knows way too many secrets about me.”

“I can relate to that.”

Patty put on her gloves, slid back the blue plastic zipper, and spread the bag apart. She set out a clean place to work and rolled the three items out onto the desktop.

Normally, the crime scene officers retrieved pieces of evidence like these. They dusted them with powder, as every television viewer seemed to know—white powder on black surfaces and black on white. Then they placed tape over the powdered area, and lifted it, attaching it to a three-by-five-inch index card. It was up to the latent-print examiners to determine if the retrieved image was of sufficient value to be useful.

Patty readied the white powder as she examined the three makeup cases.

“Forget the compact for the moment. Lipstick too,” she said. “The mascara wand is my best bet. I can probably get a good thumbprint off that. What do you think, Alex?”

She was holding an imaginary eye makeup case in the air, grasping it with her thumb.

“It never occurred to me, but it looks like you could be right.”

Patty did the lifts herself, taping them onto a card. She was a lefty, and it seemed as though she was doing everything backward as she went about her work.

Then she picked up a magnifying glass and examined the marks carefully, studying three cards. “I’ve got a nice clean one here. A couple of partials but one good print.”

On two of the index cards Patty placed a red dot—a notation that they were of no value. NV is how they would be filed.

“I can try for a match with this one,” she said about the single lift from the mascara wand that was OV—of value.

“Go for it,” Mike said. “Salma Zunega—that’s the woman whose body was in the well—is she in the system?”

The techs at the morgue would have rolled all ten fingers of the dead woman onto a card before she was autopsied, to preserve for identification purposes.

“Yep. Her inked prints were loaded yesterday on the day tour.”

“You eyeball them?”

“Me? No. But I saw the entry in the case log. Salma’s in. I’d do a visual comparison to the inked card myself, but the boss must have it under lock and key. I can’t get in his office tonight either. He’s squirrely about his evidence.”

SAFIS—the Statewide Automated Fingerprint Identification System—was a giant computer databank that went into operation in 1989, the same year that DNA was accepted in American courts as a valid scientific technique. In tandem, the two sophisticated processes were able to resolve an unimaginable number of cases.

“Can you upload this one now?”

“You have a date or something?” Patty asked, continuing on with her meticulous work. “Patience never was your strong suit.”

“I want to know whether to wait or not.”

“Take a load off. There are fingerprint images of more than three million people in this computer brain. He’s pretty fast, so just calm yourself down.”

“We’re in there, too, aren’t we?” I asked.

Every prosecutor, cop, government employee, elected official, and federal agent was in the system. We all had to be fingerprinted as part of our ordinary background check.

“You bet,” Patty said. “I’ll scan this in. You know where the vending machines are, Mike? Feel like springing for hors d’oeuvres?”

“Sure.”

Patty yawned. “Get me two sodas—whatever promises the most caffeine.”

Mike left the lab and I stayed riveted at Patty’s side, following her from her work space to the giant machine that would perform the search. “Mind if I watch?”

“Not at all. You get this?”

“I hope so. I’ve had so many of your colleagues on the stand, I’ve had to relearn it as each technique has been developed to make it clear to the jurors.”

Prints usually appeared as a series of dark lines, representing the high peaking portion of the friction ridge skin. The white spaces—the shallow portions—were the valleys in between. The identification and matching is based primarily on what are now called minutiae—the location and direction of ridge endings and bifurcations along the ridge path.

“I’m going to scan this in, Alex, see? Sir Francis takes it from here for a while.”

“Sir Francis?”

“The best partner I ever had. And he’s not a ball breaker like Mike. Give me a nice, quiet computer any day,” Patty said. “Francis Galton was the first guy to define the characteristics for a scientific identification of unique prints. Galton Points—loops, islands, whorls, deltas—they make up the minutiae from which comparisons are made.”

Patty finished scanning, hit the Search button, and walked back to her desk.

“What’s Francis doing now?” I asked.

Mike walked back in with an armload of soda cans, bags of chips, and candy bars. “Cocktails are served.”

We each grabbed a soda and something to eat, while Patty explained. “He’s assigning a numerical value to the fingerprint I just submitted. And he’s searching the Latent Cognizant database. Give him a few minutes.”

“Is he as good at it as you?” Mike asked, tousling her hair.

“Not always,” Patty said. “Sir Francis is a genius—don’t get me wrong. But we do things differently. He assigns values to things that I sometimes disagree with. Hey, you—keep your crumbs off my desk, Mike.”

Those of us in law enforcement talked about fingerprint identification as a science, but it was much more accurate to call it an art. The skill of the examiner, the ability to distinguish between blindingly similar ridge endings and bifurcations, was something far too complex to take for granted.

“There are a lot of holes in the net,” she went on. “Garbage in, garbage out. Had a case last month—a homicide in Staten Island. The perp’s been in the system for a lot of years, but his inked prints were done so badly back in 2003 that Sir Francis here missed him. Couldn’t get a read at all.”

“But you did?” I asked.

“It wasn’t easy. We just don’t always see things the same, Francis and me.”

Mike was on his second candy bar. “How about the plastic bag, Patty? You think you could get any lifts off that?”

“Not my job, sweetheart.”

“By the time I find Crime Scene on a busy Saturday night and get them over here to dust it, I might as well go to a double feature, take a nap, come back all fresh in the morning. Like that.”

She reached for the corner of the bag with her gloved hand. “You fall for his bullshit, too, Alex? I’m telling you, he wheedled everything out of me except my virginity.”

“That was so long gone by the time you got to the academy, Detective Baker, not even Sherlock Holmes could have found a trace of it.”

“Then why’d you spend so much time looking?” Patty was bent over again, moving her hand over the bag with her magnifying glass. “Plastic’s great for prints. What are you hoping to get?”

“I guess you’re going to tell me pretty soon whether Sir Francis can put the mascara case together with Salma.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, she’s not the one who dropped it at City Hall, ’cause she was already dead. I’d like to think the guy who handled the bag might have left his prints on that.”

“You got a load of partials on here. But they’re mostly smudged. Overlaid on each other. You might have multiple handlers.”

“Two tickets to the Super Bowl?”

“You got ’em?”

“Find me a killer and I’ll put you on the fifty-yard line.”

“See what I mean, Alex? And still I go for the bait.”

Patty took the bag over to a larger workbench against the wall and turned on a brighter lamp. “Here’s my advice. I’ll break the rules for you, Mike. Again. If I get anything of value, I’ll give you a call immediately. My guess is that I’m going to get an endless bunch of overlays.”

She was already at work, dusting the first side of the bag and taking her lifts.

“We know at least one guy in the Parks Department picked it up out of a ditch,” Mike said. “No telling how many hands have been on it.”

Patty handed Mike the first of the index cards she was making after marking it with a red dot. “No value.”

“You gotta find me one,” Mike said. He was throwing back M&M’s now, washing them down with soda. “Just one that great big brain can read.”

“I’m giving you something better, okay? When you leave here, you going uptown?”

“Yeah.”

“Stop at the DNA lab. Give ’em this. See if your blarney works on those dames.”

“It’s no value, you said.”

“Fingerprints, sweetheart, are a mixture of sweat and oils and skin cells. You figured that out yet, Mike? There are tiny little repositories of DNA in all that minutiae,” Patty said. “That smudge is of no value to me, but I can give you a whole bunch of lifts that may just have the genetic fingerprint—the DNA—you’re looking for.”

“Touch DNA,” I said. “That’s what they’re working on for me on that old case I have against Lem Howell. We’ll have them rush it. Howard Browner will do it.”

“Let me get the four or five best partials for you.”

We waited another fifteen minutes for Patty Baker to finish her work. She straightened up, packaged together the lift cards, and handed them to Mike.

“I think Sir Francis has spoken,” she said.

“How’d you know?” I asked.

“Just used to his whirring sound. I heard something coming into the printer.”

“I’ll get it,” Mike said.

“Mitts off, sweetheart. Keep that leash on him for a few minutes, will you, Alex? The computer may kick out a handful of close possibilities. I do the final comparison, and I do it without a bloodhound breathing sour-cream-and-garlic-chip odors over my shoulder.”

Patty walked to the machine and scooped up a sheaf of papers. She returned to the desk, picked up the magnifier, and got back to work. “You heard me, didn’t you, Mike? Back off.”

Mike turned away from Patty and began to pace. Another twenty minutes went by before she raised her head to speak to us.

“I hope you weren’t too wedded to that match,” she said. “The computer didn’t kick out Salma Zunega for you.”

“Maybe Sir Francis is wrong again, Patty. Can’t you call the lieutenant and dig her card out of his office?”

“I think the old boy knows exactly what he’s doing, sweetheart. He and I are ready to declare the same match.”