The Kills (9 page)

Robelon
spewed out some form of objection and tried to make up for lack of case law to
support his position by the sheer volume of his rhetoric.

"Alexandra,"
Moffett said, "I'm talking to you. We'll stop with your witness at five
o'clock tomorrow and then I'll give you a chance to see if the kid'll
cooperate."

"Fine,
Your Honor." I had a better chance of winning the lottery than sitting in
a room with Dulles Tripping by the end of the next day.

"Anything
else?" he asked, unhooking the clasp of his robe and handing it to the
court officer to hang until the morning.

"Judge,
I'd just ask you to remind the defendant, now that proceedings have started,
that the order of protection is in full force. He is not to attempt or have any
contact with his son, whether in this courthouse, at his school, or-"

"That's
really unnecessary, Alex," Robelon objected. "We don't even know what
school the kid goes to or where he's living."

"I
have no idea what you or your client know at this point. I'm in the rather
unorthodox position of not having access to my own witnesses. It's quite clear
that the family court, by allowing telephone calls and several meetings between
Mr. Tripping and his son, undercut the order of one of the criminal court
judges-"

I knew
how to get under Moffett's collar. "Which she had no business doing. Alex
is right about that. Be a good boy, Mr. Tripping, understood?"

"Yes,
sir." The defendant seemed to be smirking at me as he answered Moffett.

The
elevators stopped on the seventh floor and I ran my security badge through the
scanner, walked down the quiet corridor and up to my eighth-floor office.

Ryan
Blackmer, one of my favorite young lawyers, was keeping Mercer company in my
office when I dragged in. "You need me?" I asked.

"Just
a heads-up. Mind if I work on an investigation at Bayview?"

The
prison facility on Manhattan's West Side was the only place in the county where
female inmates were housed. "Be my guest. What is it?"

"Prisoner
claims one of the guards-he's a captain, actually-has been having sex with
her."

"Wouldn't
be the first time. But those can be awfully hard to prove."

"She's
doing seven years on a robbery with physical injury. Her lawyer claims she
hasn't had a single visitor since Christmas, when her husband left her for her
younger sister. Now she's four months pregnant. Might be as easy as a fetal DNA
test."

"Go
for it," I said as the phone rang.

Mercer
answered it. "I don't think she's in the mood," he said, holding out
the receiver to me.

"Chapman?"

"I'm
running out of steam, Coop. Never shut my eyes for a minute last night and I'm
just about to go lights-out."

"I'm
too busy to tuck you in."

"I
need a favor."

It was
hard to refuse Mike. He had saved my neck on more occasions than I could count.
"Shoot."

He
laughed. "But first, what do you give for 'Famous Funerals'?" I
glanced down at my watch. The "Final Jeopardy" question.

"Nothing.
The subject's too close to home at the moment."

"Laid
to rest in London's Highgate, his orator described him as the 'best hated and
most calumniated man of his times.'"

From the
days when I was immersed in my major in English literature, I knew that one of
my favorite authors was interred there. "George Eliot's buried in
Highgate. But she doesn't fit. And Bram Stoker's notorious vampire, Miss Lucy.
Otherwise, not a clue. Skip the education and tell me what the favor is."

"That
was Engels describing his buddy Karl Marx to the eight mourners who gathered at
the graveside. Only eight. Imagine that. So can you stop at the morgue on the
way home?"

"Sure.
I didn't want to eat any dinner or polish up my opening statement."

"I
know your style. You had your opening in the can a month ago. You've already
written the summation."

Mike was
right. I had learned from the old school, the guys who had mastered the art of
criminal trial work under great prosecutors. Start your preparation with the
closing argument. That way you could make a coherent presentation from the
outset, building your case with a sound structure and layering in any new
information that you gathered during the testimony of the witnesses. I had
outlined those arguments weeks ago.

"What
do you need?"

"You
told me you were going to assign last night's homicide to someone."

"I
forgot about it completely." I had promised Mike that I would tell Sarah
Brenner, my deputy, to make one of the unit assistants available on the murder
of the elderly woman.

"I
know. I just tried to reach Sarah so I wouldn't bother you. She didn't know
what I was talking about. I could hear her kids in the background-"

"She's
got her hands full at this hour."

"I
think I can make it easy for you. Just a quick detour. Dr. Kirschner thinks I'm
wrong about the rape. Autopsy shows no sign of sexual assault."

"Nothing?"
I asked.

"Not
a single thing with a foreign profile. No semen, no loose pubic hair-"

"Bruising?"
I would expect, in a woman as old as Mike's victim, that the vaginal vault
would exhibit lacerations and swelling, because of the atrophy that accompanied
the lack of sexual activity.

"Not
internal. Not even on her thighs."

"Sounds
like a blessing to me if she wasn't subjected to rape as a final
indignity."

"Kirschner
thinks the scene was staged to look like a sexual assault. He just finished up
and if you can get there within the hour, he'd go over the results with you and
show you the crime scene photos. Brainstorm and see what you think. That way I
can get started in a new direction when I go in tomorrow morning."

"Okay."

"And
Coop? Say good night to Queenie for me?"

"Is
that her name?"

"McQueen
Ransome. Known to her neighbors as Queenie. Lived in that same little apartment
for the last fifty years. Never hurt a fly."

"Family?
Next of kin?"

"Not
a soul. Had one son who died before he got to high school. No sign that she was
ever married, but there are pictures of the boy on the wall in the living
room."

"Sounds
like a stupid question to ask about an eighty-two-year-old lady, but did she
have any enemies?"

"Not
that I heard about today. Kids were hanging out all over the stoop. They loved
her. Did all the errands for her in exchange for candy, and some
entertainment."

"What
do you mean?"

"She'd
sing and dance for the kids, that's what they say. Put on her old vinyl records
and cut a rug. I got a whole children's crusade working on the case with me.
Told 'em all they could be my deputies if they catch the killer. Anyway, leave
a message on my cell and I'll speak to you at the end of the day
tomorrow."

"Last
thing, Mike. You make any progress on Tiffany Gatts?"

"She
won't be arraigned before morning. There was a labor demonstration over in the
garment district, and the backup cause of all the extra arrests for dis con is
cramming the system. Have Mercer walk you to your car. Mama Gatts'll be looking
for blood."

"Thanks
for the reminder."

"We
may have a lead on the mink. Found an open squeal in the Seventeenth Precinct.
UN delegate from France named du Rosier. Reported a theft six months back. He
and his wife thought it was an inside job. His chauffeur had access to the
apartment, even when the couple was back in Europe. A bunch of jewelry, two furs,
and some pricey antique silver service."

"Any
description?"

"The
du Rosiers are traveling at the moment. I'll try and get something more
detailed from their insurance company tomorrow. Speak to you then."

Mercer
waited while I closed up and we headed out the door together. My car was parked
near the intersection of Centre Street and Hogan Place, at the corner of the
courthouse. The laminated NYPD plate displayed in the windshield was one of the
privileges of rank in the office, and I was pleased that no one had
double-parked me in place, as often happened when cops delivered prisoners to
the courthouse.

The dump
sticker from the town of Chilmark, where my home on Martha's Vineyard was
located, and the Squibnocket beach pass on the rear window, were the only
things that personalized my winter-green SUV. It was even more heartwarming to
see that the Vineyard stickers had not seemed to draw the attention or wrath of
Etta Gatts, who might have noticed the Vineyard posters in my office. The
windows were intact.

I stepped
off the curb at the rear of the car, keys in hand. Mercer went around in front
to open the door for me.

"Looks
like I'm your transportation for the evening," he said, taking the keys
out of my hand. "Your car's in dry dock, Alex. Someone slashed your two
front tires."

There is
a cruel invasion of privacy that attends a death by violence.

Mercer
and I sat in a small cubicle adjacent to the autopsy theater in the office of
the chief medical examiner, Chet Kirschner. The brilliant pathologist had finished
his work for the day, and was taking us through the Queenie Ransome homicide
findings.

The
strong odor of formalin was exaggerated by the closeness of the room. I coughed
to clear my dry throat, listening to Kirschner's voice, which was so oddly comforting
in these starkly clinical circumstances.

I stared
at close-ups of the nude corpse, taken in her home by a Crime Scene Unit
detective, shuffling them around on the table in front of me.

"There
are two different scenarios you want to think about here," he told us,
after describing what McQueen Ransome's body had revealed to him. "You
remember the old Park Plaza cases?"

Both
Mercer and I recognized the name. The building had been a flophouse on the West
Side of Manhattan, a dilapidated single-room-occupancy hotel that was home to
dozens of senior citizens living on welfare. Throughout a two-year period,
several of the octogenarians had died without any suspicion of foul play.

"The
first five women had no relatives in the city to raise any concerns, no
property of any value, and histories of illness that allowed their physicians
to certify their deaths as occurring from natural causes."

"They
weren't even autopsied?" I asked.

Kirschner
shook his head. "The sixth one was slightly different. Mildred Vargas. She
owned a television set, and it was missing from her room when her body was
found. We did a postmortem, even though there were no signs of a struggle, and
we wound up with unexpected evidence that there had been a sexual
assault."

"What
killed her?" Mercer wanted to know.

"She
was suffocated. Smothered with a pillow."

Exactly
what Mike said had happened to Queenie.

"I
got an order to exhume the other bodies and autopsy them," Kirschner said.

Mercer
remembered the outcome. "All five had been raped."

"And
smothered. No external signs of injury. Just the internal bruising, and the
minute petechial hemorrhages in their eyes that the physicians missed in each
case."