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night to Mercer before Battaglia arrived, and let the squad detectives take me
back to Jake s apartment for the night.
And one other thing. The police have arrested that Wakefield man who was here
at the office looking for you earlier.
Did he come back? I asked, alarmed at his persistence.
No. But that young girl who was in your office was it Ruth?
Yes.
She showed up at his apartment this afternoon, to try to get together with
him again. He beat her up pretty seriously. For admitting to you that she d
been sleeping with his roommate.
Oh, no. I closed my eyes and gritted my teeth at the thought of the anger
that Wakefield must have unleashed at that child. I thanked Rose for the call
and hung up the phone.
You re running on fumes, Coop, Mike said. I ll sit with Mercer tonight. Let
me take you downstairs and send you off. Get a good night s sleep and we ll
talk in the morning. Put a double rush on those prison phone records when you
get to the office. We gotta figure out who Bailey s connected with, okay? And
I think we need to find Marina Sette as soon as possible.
I sat in the back of the unmarked car, looking out at the dark streets as we
drove uptown and making small talk with the detectives about the usual office
gossip. They discharged me in front of Jake s building, watching as the
doorman let me in and then parking at the curb, where they would sit out their
shift before they were replaced by the midnight team in a couple of hours.
I turned the key in the lock and entered the apartment. A small lamp was
lighted on the vestibule table, where I saw a handwritten note addressed to
me.
Dearest A My turn to disappear. Running for the last shuttle to Washington.
Have a 7 a.m. interview with the secretary of defense. Sweet dreams, see you
tomorrow. Love, J.
I groped the walls in the semidarkness of the unfamiliar layout to turn on a
light switch in the hallway leading to the bedroom. Once I found my way, I
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reached for the suitcase I had packed the evening before and laid out some of
the clothes for the next day.
The silence and the emptiness made me uncomfortable. I wanted the comfort of
my own home, and the warmth of Jake s caress.
28
I couldn t find the coffee beans in Jake s kitchen when I got out of bed,
shortly before seven o clock. I showered and dressed, joining the team in the
department car for the ride down to 1 Hogan Place. They let me out right in
front of the building, and I bought us each some breakfast at the cart on the
corner before going up to my office. Now that Wakim had been arrested I felt
at least somewhat more secure.
The pile of unanswered correspondence on my desk was growing out of control.
There was a stack of indictments on sex crimes cases that needed to be
proofread and approved before the end of the August term, which was a week
away. Phone messages from friends were taped to the computer screen; a request
from Elaine to set a time to come into the Escada store to have the clothes I
ordered from the fall collection shortened had been ignored; and solicitations
for charitable fund-raisers collected dust on the far corner of the desk. It
was still too early to find most people at their offices, so I busied myself
in the review of grand jury proceedings to make sure the lawyers in the unit
met their filing deadlines.
The first call was from Bob Thaler, the chief serologist at the Medical
Examiner s Office. It was not even eight thirty, and I was answering my own
phones because Laura would not arrive for another hour.
Sorry it took me so long for the tox on Omar Sheffield. While autopsy
results were available to us quickly, it frequently took weeks to run all the
toxicological tests looking for foreign substances in the deceased s brain,
liver, tissue, or lungs.
Find anything?
Just about everything. Omar might have been breathing when that train ran
over him, but he wouldn t have been aware of very much. He was loaded up with
speedballs, more than enough to kill himself with if he d been attempting to
O.D.
And if someone else was trying to kill him? Speedballs were a deadly
combination of heroin and cocaine, usually mainlined right into the system.
It d work like a charm. Just keep pumping it into his arm.
But the cause of death, what have you put down for that?
Gross internal trauma. I mean, he died at the moment the train ran over his
body, Alex. But in all likelihood the drugs could have done the trick by
themselves. Somebody finds you in a hotel room in a coma, they can still get
you to a hospital and try to pump the stuff out of you. Slim chance, with this
amount of poison in his veins, but it might have been possible for him to
survive. Run a few railroad cars over this perfectly inert body, it s a sure
thing he s gone to meet his maker.
Thanks, Bob. Would you fax over a copy of the report to me?
Lawyers were beginning to dribble into the office. I had my door open,
listening for Pat McKinney s arrival. The click of high heels on the tiles of
the deserted hallway caught my attention. Pat s office, like Rod Squires s,
was at the far end of my corridor. But there were no other women assigned to
this executive wing of the Trial Division, so I stepped out to Laura s desk to
see who was walking by.
I recognized Ellen Gunsher from the back. She was junior to me, having been in
the office for almost eight years. Bright enough and quite aggressive, she had
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taken to all of the duties of a prosecutor fairly well except for the one that
counted most. She had never grown comfortable in the courtroom and backed away
from trying cases. Her surname lent itself to the unfortunate alias Gun-shy,
and her colleagues teased her mercilessly about her retreat from the kind of
professional battle that most of us relished.
Ellen had found a protector in Pat McKinney. As deputy chief of the division,
he had taken her out of her trial bureau and created a special unit for her to
supervise. Most of us recognized that it was a make-work kind of assignment to
serve as a contact with the NYPD s Warrant Squad, to initiate and oversee
active searches for the most dangerous of the thousands of defendants who
failed to appear on their cases after bail had been granted. Many of the
prisoners for whom Wanted cards had been issued were petty offenders who would
turn up in the system before too long on charges of shoplifting or jumping a
turnstile. Ellen s job consisted of sifting through court papers and targeting
the more violent offenders, then assigning Warrant Squad officers to make an
active search for their return.
I believed that McKinney had manufactured that niche because Ellen was a
decent lawyer and a nice person who was not otherwise a fit in our division.
For two years I had ignored office gossip that they had been having an affair,
but now the amount of time they spent together behind closed doors seemed
inordinate for the nonessential nature of Ellen s work.
I went back to my desk to gather the notes I planned to take in to McKinney to
discuss the latest interviews Mike and I had done on the Caxton investigation.
McKinney waved at me as he passed by my doorway. We gotta talk.
The case papers had outgrown a single folder. I pulled out the sheaf of
reports we had worked from yesterday, took my thick legal pad including my
to-do list, and headed down to the deputy s office. I knocked on the heavy
metal door.
Come in, Ellen called out to me. Not exactly the welcome I wanted.
She was standing by a hot plate at the far end of the room, boiling water for
tea. She had opened a jar of honey and was holding two mugs. McKinney had his
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