"I'm on my way. Just having a bite to eat."
"Don't let Chapman's appetite run up your bill. You'll go broke feeding him."
Someday, if I lived long enough, I might get to tell Paul Battaglia something he didn't already know. The longtime prosecutor had developed an incredible array of sources in the unlikeliest of places, and he delighted in putting the information he gathered to good use-to solve crimes, respond to critics, engage reporters, or simply amuse himself. "I'll cut him off at dessert."
"Why didn't you come by to tell me about the case Mike brought you in on last night?"
"I didn't think it was going anywhere, Paul. I was in court all day on Floyd Warren. We never expected to get a name on the woman so fast."
Now I was sweating again. There was no fan in the hallway and the hot air coming in from Second Avenue was stifling. So was the thought that I had done to Battaglia what he liked least-let him be the last to know.
"This Amber Bristol, how was she killed? "Bludgeoned to death."
"With what?"
"Don't know yet." Never a good answer to give the district attorney. "Figure it out, will you? The story's already out on the wire services," Battaglia said, pausing between sentences. "I'm going to tell you something that has to be held in strictest confidence."
"Of course." I walked to the sidewalk and seated myself at one of Giuliano's café tables. It was too oppressive for any customers to have eaten outside.
"Have you ever met Herb Ackerman?"
"No. I've seen him at a few of your press conferences." Damn, the last thing Mike needed was one of the city's best investigative reporters breathing down his neck so early in the process.
"He's going to be in your office first thing tomorrow morning. You need to talk to him."
Battaglia knew all about the Floyd Warren trial. It was the most dramatic cold case we had solved, with national consequences, and he had used it as the best example of his leadership in the recently completed drive to eliminate the New York State statute of limitation for rape.
"It's the main testimony in my case in chief, Paul. I'm meeting with our victim at seven thirty."
I was close enough to know that Ackerman had been one of Battaglia's earliest supporters on the editorial board of the Tribune, the most important local weekly news magazine. And I was keenly aware that their relationship had taken a bad turn two years ago, when the coverage of a vigilante subway shooter in Ackerman's influential column had resulted in a series of critical pieces about the DA's office Major Felony Project.
"I'll tell him to be there at eight. I'd like you to keep him waiting,"
Battaglia said. "Just give him fifteen minutes before you go up to court.
And don't forget that he screwed me on the Metz case."
The district attorney's memory was infallible. And payback was one of his strongest motivators.
"I've got nothing to tell him, Paul." It was uncharacteristic of Battaglia to let his prosecutors meet with the media before a trial. He was the master of the well-timed leak, but I had no information to give away. "He's not coming to get a story, Alex. We're in the driver's seat this time."
"Why? What's he got?" I asked.
"What Herb Ackerman's got is a problem. He tells me he was a client of Amber Bristol's.
SEVEN
Kerry Hastings's hands were trembling as she lifted the coffee mug to her mouth. It was eight-thirty on Wednesday morning, and we had spent the last hour in my office with Mercer Wallace, reviewing the questions I intended to ask her when I called her to the witness stand
It's going to be very different this time," I said to her. "I wouldn't urge you to go through with your testimony if I couldn't promise you that. Thirty-five years earlier, Hastings had told her story to a jury, answering questions about the crime that were virtually the same as those I had framed for her now. But her cross-examination had gone on for two days, and I expected that the tactics that had worked so well for Floyd Warren's defense at the first trial wouldn't fly today
I don't want to look at him again, Alex. I've spent all these years trying to erase the image of his face. You can't imagine how agonizing it is to be back in a room with that man. Kerry Hastings was one of the most intelligent witnesses I had ever worked with. She knew she would sit only a short distance from the man who had forever changed her life in the course of their forty-fiveminute encounter. She had been told that she would be asked to point out her attacker, if she could-even though his DNA now resolved the issue of identification
I know that. I'll do everything in my power to make this easier for you."
"Do I get to tell the jury how Floyd Warren has affected every single day of my life? That not once in the three decades since he awakened me and held a knife to my neck have I been able to sleep through the night?"
She didn't have to tell me that the crime itself and the shame that society imposed on rape victims of Kerry's generation had combined to prevent her from ever developing a successful intimate relationship in the intervening years.
Mercer was sitting behind her, off to the side. He leaned forward and rested his hand on her shoulder. "Judge Lamont will hear all that, Kerry. Alex will get her conviction and you can say what you damn well please in your impact statement to Lamont."
It wasn't often in a prosecutor's career that the outcome of a trial could be predicted. Juries were fiercely independent, as this victim had learned so harshly the first time out. But the science of DNA and the rapidly evolving technology of computer-generated matches made it ever more difficult for a defense attorney to suggest reasonable doubt when identification of the perp was the sole issue.
I handed Hastings the photograph that had been taken at Bellevue after the rape. She would have to authenticate it for me in court. The black-and-white shots of the slashes on her neck, made by the sharp blade of Warren's knife as she struggled to get away, would corroborate the deadly force he had used to subdue her.
"You think anyone will believe that this is the same woman?" She smiled as she showed the picture to Mercer.
Twenty-two-year-old Kerry Hastings was tall and slightly overweight, her pretty round face accentuated by short curly hair held back on one side to allow the photographer to capture the wounds that circled her neck. The hospital gown hung loosely and topped her knees. Bruises were visible on the shins of both legs.
The fifty-seven-year-old who sat between us had lost all the baby fat in the intervening years. She had taken up running, training for marathons as a way of focusing her energy and channeling her anger into a more positive goal.
"You look just great," Mercer said.
"Youth, middle age, and 'you look just great,' " Kerry said, turning the photo facedown on the edge of my desk. "Those must be the three stages of life, Mercer. There's only so much you can humor me."
"There won't be any surprises in my direct examination."
"And Mr. Grassley? Is he going to do what they did to me back then?"
"He's not required to tell me that in advance, Kerry. I'm hoping not."
"You'll hear Alex shout 'objection' any chance she can," Mercer said. "Don't you even think about answering if you see her on her feet."
The three-volume transcript of the first trial was part of my case file. The cross-examination was one of the ugliest I'd ever read.
"Four men on that jury thought I was a prostitute," Kerry said. "Four others figured that I might have simply fabricated my story."
"Rape shield laws have saved victims from that kind of horror," I said. They had been enacted in every state in the country, but too late to help Kerry Hastings.
Floyd Warren's first counsel had claimed that his client was a pimp and that the seemingly demure young woman on the witness stand had actually worked for Warren. He had peppered Kerry with hours of questions about their supposed relationship, suggesting that she was racist as well and that the argument in her tenement apartment-the one that had caused a concerned neighbor to call 911 at 4:23 a.m.- was about money she had refused to turn over to Warren.