“How about Duke? Didn’t they question him?”
Mike brushed his hair off his forehead and read on. “Mrs. Quillian was interviewed. Talked to two of her other sons at the house and spoke with Trish, too. Brendan was out of the country and his mother didn’t know where he was or how to reach him. Double-check that honeymoon story with Amanda’s family, will you, blondie? And Duke Quillian was a patient at Sloan-Kettering. He was being treated for cancer. The detective checked that out. Has a phone number at the hospital, too.”
“Hey, it was a long shot anyway,” I said.
“Maybe not as long as you think. You got a date tonight? You didn’t even look at this set of phone records.” Mike was leaning against the desktop, shoving another page of numbers under my nose. “The detective was obviously interested in Brendan-interested enough to subpoena his cell phone information.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“The last phone call made from Brendan Quillian’s cell phone the day before his wedding. It’s to the Hassetts’ phone number. Mrs. Hassett told the detective Brendan had called there looking for her daughter, Bex.”
24
“I know it’s an old case. I wouldn’t be begging you for help if I could walk into the morgue and chat up the guy who did the autopsy,” I said at eight fifteen on Monday morning to Jerry Genco, the forensic pathologist who had testified for me last week. I had called him from my desk. “Your Bronx office handled it.”
“The doc who performed the postmortem is dead,” he said. “Natural causes. He was an old-timer back then. No way you can talk to him, Alex.”
“I’m not as interested in him as I am in the homicide victim. There are some anomalies in the investigative file, and Mike Chapman thinks it would be useful to look at the physical evidence again. He doesn’t think the police work was kosher-doesn’t like the suspect they were looking at. Wants to check the original ME’s notes and photos-they’re not in the detective’s records.”
“You two are killing me. Agita, that’s going to be the cause of death. Agita by prosecutorial pressure to the gut. What’s Mike after?”
“He found Brendan Quillian’s name in the dead girl’s case folder.”
“Anything else? You know we don’t have the physical evidence here.”
“I understand. Mercer is going out to the NYPD storage facility in Queens to see what he comes up with.” Pearson Place was where all the property from old cases was stored until it was either thrown away or, if it had any independent value, auctioned off to the public. “The case got stalled along the way. The detective settled on a suspect whose admission doesn’t seem to square with the autopsy report.”
“Oh, no. I see where you’re going with this. Is Battaglia pushing you?”
“I haven’t seen him since last week, Jerry. Pushing me where?”
“He called the ME himself. Wanted to know what he needed to allege in order to get permission to exhume a body. That case in Chelsea from a couple of years ago? The cops just caught a killer who said he shot the guy, but the autopsy findings showed knife wounds.”
“You’re way ahead of me here. An exhumation? That never occurred to me.”
“Yeah. Well, it turns out they arrested the right guy anyway. He shot the victim in the chest-then tried to dig the bullet out with a penknife. The mistake was on our end. Missed the bullet hole on autopsy,” Jerry said. “What’s a little piece of lead between friends?”
“All I’m asking is if you can pull the Hassett file for me.”
“That’s the way trouble always starts for me. One of you young Turks is trying to be creative and do the right thing. Then Battaglia gets a whiff and takes it to the next level. Save yourself some paperwork. Does the deceased have any family?”
“She does,” I said.
“Get their permission. The court likes it better if they’re on your side before you go disturbing the peace.”
I don’t think an exhumation was what Phin Baylor had had in mind when he’d told us to tell Trish Quillian to dig for the bones in her own backyard.
“Jerry, are you suggesting this is a road I want to go down?”
“If you’ve got a reason to think something was overlooked when the autopsy was done, that the examination wasn’t thorough, then as much as I hate to do these things, it might be worth another look. Nobody has better instincts about these cases than Mike.”
“Let me talk to him about it, okay? Just call me when you find the file.”
Mike had dropped me off at home last night shortly before nine o’clock. The exhilaration of the wedding, and my Saturday-night encounter with Luc Rouget, had carried me through the events of the day. But I was tired and knew that I was facing another difficult week in the courtroom, so I said good night to Mike and went upstairs to order in a salad from P. J. Bernstein’s deli.
This morning, I spent the next hour on the phone, greasing the wheels to arrange the things that would need to be done in the forensic biology lab and medical examiner’s office if Mercer was successful in finding the long-neglected case evidence. Messages from the end of last week were stacked on my desk, and I returned calls on the less urgent matters that still required attention, trial or no trial.
Rose Malone, Battaglia’s executive assistant, buzzed me on the intercom the minute he arrived in his suite an hour later. “Pat McKinney’s over here with the boss. There’s some kind of emergency meeting with the police commissioner at City Hall and the district attorney wants your input.”
McKinney was my direct supervisor in the Trial Division, a rigid bureaucrat who liked to try to micromanage the several hundred prosecutors in our section of the six-hundred-lawyer office, dealing with every street crime from homicide and sexual assault down to trespass and harassment. McKinney resented my unique relationship with Battaglia, who respected the work of the men and women in the Sex Crimes Unit and allowed me direct access to him without reporting up the chain of command.
I walked across the eighth-floor hallway, and the security guard opened the door to the administrative wing. “Good morning, Rose. Is this any way to start my week?”
She had been a loyal friend to me for years and was the most discreet person on the planet. She organized Battaglia’s professional life with skill and precision-not a moment of his day wasted with nonessential meetings or visitors-and she quietly did what she could to protect me from Pat McKinney’s frequent attempts at backstabbing.
Rose was leaning over a file drawer with a sheaf of papers in her arms. Always perfectly coiffed and dressed in slim skirts and high heels that showed off her great figure, she added a note of style to the grim decor of the front office. She picked up her head and nodded in the direction of Battaglia’s office. “Pat was waiting for him when he got here. It’s something to do with the water tunnel explosion, so I told the boss you ought to be in on this.”
“Thanks, Rose. Let’s have lunch when my trial ends.” I turned the corner and smelled the smoke from Battaglia’s Cohiba, probably his third of the morning by this hour, before I reached his room.
The district attorney was sitting at the far end of the long conference table, his hand on the receiver of the multiline phone that served as his mini-command center when he moved away from his oversize desk. McKinney sat next to him in one of the red leather chairs, both of them surrounded by dozens of Battaglia’s framed awards and citations, which were hung around the office on the faux-wood-paneled walls, tributes to him from every legal organization and law enforcement agency in the country. For most New Yorkers, he was the only person in recent memory to have held this elected position, now serving in his fifth four-year term.