I knew that, too, and it was part of the reason it was so much more satisfying for me to work with survivors of sexual assault, who never forgot what happened to them but were most often able to move on with their lives.
"Heads, you can be the good cop," Mike said.
"Not a contest. I want another shot at her."
"Bad cop it is. This kid doesn't know yet what it's like to be in your crosshairs, Coop."
Barbara Gould was in the small cubicle used by the Twentieth Precinct detective squad for interrogations. It held a table and four chairs, and the walls were completely bare. Her head was resting on her forearms until she picked it up when we entered the room. "Hello, again," I said.
"Hello. Look, Detective, if you give me back my cell, I've got to be going now. It's almost nine o'clock and I've got a lot of stuff to do." The twenty-year-old had practiced her pout well. The moment she recognized me, she put it on and began to pull and twist a strand of her long brown hair around her forefinger.
"Ms. Cooper needs to talk to you," Mike said, leaning back against the door.
"We've had that conversation."
"And now we're going to have it once more. Only this time you're going to tell me the truth."
"I tried to tell Mr. Huff. So I was wrong the first time," Barbara said, rolling her eyes toward the ceiling and clicking her tongue against the roof of her mouth. "What happens if I leave? Can I just go now?"
"No, you can't leave."
I had no authority to keep the petulant young woman in the station house, but she accepted my answer and didn't move from her seat.
I started, calmly, to go through the story she had told me originally. "We're going to start over, Barbara, from the time you and Elise left your apartment."
Two years younger than Elise, Barbara had come to New York first and was about to enter her junior year at Marymount College. Elise had finished college in Tennessee and landed a job working at La Guardia Airport as a counter agent for Jet Blue.
The first part of the story was consistent with what she had told me a week earlier. Elise had come home from work at seven, and after eating a light supper together they went out to meet friends. Barbara was dressed in leggings and a tube top, and Elise had kept on the navy blue pants and crisp white short-sleeved uniform shirt-complete with small gold wings on the collar-that she wore at work. She liked to do that, Barbara had said with a laugh when she first talked to me about Elise, because guys often took her for a flight attendant.
"What time did you leave your apartment?"
"I don't know. Around eleven, I guess. Between eleven and twelve."
What passed for closing time in many other parts of the country was the hour at which Manhattan's cosmopolitan young ladies set out to meet guys.
"Where did you go?"
Barbara looked over my head at Mike, still twisting her hair. "I told you."
"Tell me again." I needed to know how much of the original story was true.
"Gleason's, over on Columbus. Just around the corner from our apartment."
"What did you have to drink?"
"White wine." She had surrendered her fake ID to me when I first met her. It was a forged driver's license, readily available almost everywhere in the Manhattan bar scene.
"The same for Elise?"
"Yeah."
"How many glasses?"
"Two. We each bought a round, and then some guy was hitting on me. He bought us the third drink. But we hardly touched them."
"I wish I could get a refund for every glass of wine a witness tells me she ordered but never touched," Mike said. "Eight bucks a pop, I could retire tomorrow."
"Did you see anyone else you knew?"
Barbara thought for a few seconds. "No."
"How long did you stay there?"
She rolled her eyes again. "I'm not sure. It's like more than a week already."
"And your friend Elise is dead. Mike and I need a timeline for everything she did that night. I'm not asking you about ancient history, Barbara. Think hard."
"An hour. Maybe a little longer. You're like really pushing me."
"Then where did you go?"
"There's that little place I told you about, like halfway down the block from Gleason's, with an outdoor café. We went there, so we could sit outside. Columbus Café."
"Did you order anything to eat? Or to drink?"
"Nothing to eat. Just another glass of wine. I only had like half of it."
"And Elise?"
"Same thing. She didn't drink that much."
"Did you know anyone there? Talk to anyone?"
A few seconds of hesitation, again. A few too many. "No."
"Barbara, who did you see?"
She lowered her eyes and changed hands, twirling the hair on the left side of her part. "Oh, God, I don't want to bring anybody else into this."
"That's not a choice you have, don't you understand?"
"It's not going to bring Elise back," she said, as tears welled up in her eyes. "Nothing's going to do that."
"It's about the truth, dammit. Who are you trying to hide from us?"
"Nobody. Why can't we just leave my statement the way it was?"
"You didn't split from Elise at that café, did you? You didn't leave her there and walk home, like you told me last week."
"What happens to me if I change my story?"
"If you do it now? Nothing. If you wait until you've testified falsely under oath, then we get to figure out if you've committed perjury." Barbara pulled the strand of hair across her lips and began to chew on it.
"You're doing a lousy job, Coop. You're gonna give bad cops a good name," Mike said, stretching his arms out and cracking his knuckles. "Isn't this when you tell her to get the friggin' hair out of her mouth and stop whining about herself?"
Barbara's face soured at the sharp sound of his words. "It wasn't my idea. Elise was the one who wanted to go downtown.
I told her it was stupid."
"Every minute you waste, you make it harder for us to find her killer. We've had detectives in and out of Gleason's and that café every night since Elise went missing," I said. No one recalled seeing anyone fitting her description in the early hours of the morning, either with friends or alone. "I believed you, Barbara. I believed that's where you left her. Obviously it's not true. Now, when did you leave Columbus to go downtown?"
"I don't know."
"There's a little operation called the Taxi and Limousine Commission, Barbara. They've got the trip sheets of every yellow cab-where and when the driver made his pickup and where he dropped his passengers off. I'll have those records tomorrow."
"Really?" She twisted her neck and screwed up her mouth. "It's all in their computer by now. I just have to give them the address of the café and ask for the fares that got in after one a.m. The TLC will tell me how many riders, and where they went."
"Okay, all right. There were three of us. Is that what you want to know? I hooked up with this guy I knew at the Columbus Café."
"What's his name?" She was watching Mike as he took out a pad from his rear pants pocket and began to make notes.
"He doesn't want to get involved."
"He's involved up to his eyeballs, simply because he was with you and Elise. Maybe he saw something or someone you didn't see."
"He's going to hate me."
"Did you hear what Mike said? This isn't about you."
"Look, I told Mr. Huff tonight. I told him I forgot that we stopped at another place downtown. I just didn't remember at the time is all. It seemed so unimportant, and I was so upset."