The butterflies in my stomach were fluttering wildly. “Don’t go there, Joan. If you’re really my pal, back off this subject. Way too premature.”
“Is it the commitment thing? Swear to me it’s not that.”
“I don’t know him, okay? The last forty-eight hours have proved that beyond-”
“Don’t give me ‘beyond a reasonable doubt,’ babe. Forget the law in your brain and flex those underused muscles in your heart.”
“You’re spoiling Luc’s surprise, Joan, if that’s what it was supposed to be.”
“Well, clearly the Hope diamond won’t be jumping out of your birthday cake if you’re spending that evening alone. Forget I said anything.”
“Forgotten.”
“He told me you’re bent out of shape about Brigitte.”
“Not true.”
“What are you hoping to find at our age? A guy who’s a forty-year-old virgin with no prior love life or involvements? No ex, no kids-maybe even an orphan so you won’t have in-laws either? The Dalai Lama’s been off the table for quite some time.”
“How well do you know Brigitte?”
“Total pain in the ass.”
“Would you trust her, Joan? I mean between Brigitte and Luc, who-?”
“Luc, of course. How can you even ask that?”
“Because if he’s so over her, why does he keep her photograph in the drawer of his night table?”
“What were you doing going through his drawer?”
“I wasn’t going through it. I was looking for some nail clippers, okay?”
“He probably hasn’t cleaned it out in months. What is it, like a family shot with the boys?”
“Like Brigitte on the beach in Cannes. Topless.”
The man next to me coughed and lowered his newspaper to look at me again.
“Get over it. Everyone in France is topless, especially those fat old tourists from Eastern Europe you’d rather not see, even when they have clothes on.”
The flight attendant signaled me to turn off my phone. “Gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow. We’re taking off now.”
By the time we climbed out of Paris and through a cloud cover that blanketed the view for the first half hour of the route, I found a comfortable position, reclined my seat and covered myself with a blanket.
Hurtling across the ocean miles above the earth gave me a surfeit of hours to think about my personal situation. When I was immersed in the work that I found so challenging and rewarding, it was easy to put off analysis of my emotional state. Until this weekend, all my time spent with Luc was joyful and loving, and I often fantasized about leaving behind the high pressure of my prosecutorial position for more intimacy with him. Neither one of us had talked about marriage yet, but Joan had succeeded in delivering a shot across the bow of my unsteady ship.
I was a natural for a life of public service because I had been encouraged by my parents to use the opportunities they’d bestowed on me to “give back” to others less fortunate. But it would have been more logical for me to have put down roots in the medical community from which they both came.
My mother, Maude, was the daughter of Finnish immigrants, raised on a dairy farm in New England and later moved to New York to study nursing. She had the skills and compassion of a superb RN, and that talent-along with the deep green eyes, winning smile, and great long legs-attracted the attention of my father.
Benjamin Cooper-my father-was the son of Russian Jews who fled political oppression there, the first of their three boys to be born in America. It was during his medical internship that he fell in love with Maude, who converted to Judaism when she married him.
He was a young cardiologist in private practice when he and a partner fashioned a half-inch piece of plastic tubing into a device that was adapted for use in almost every operation involving the aorta. The Cooper-Hoffman valve revolutionized cardiac surgery and changed the financial circumstances of our family. Unlike both my parents, my two older brothers and I were raised in the upscale Westchester suburb of Harrison. The trust fund they set up for each of us enabled my first-rate education at Wellesley College, where I majored in English literature before deciding that I wanted a legal career, which I prepared for at the University of Virginia School of Law.
“Something to drink?” the attendant asked me as she passed through the cabin.
“Just water.”
“A newspaper?”
“Yes, please. Le Figaro and also Le Monde.” I wanted to see how the French press-from the far right to the left-was reacting to the news of Gil-Darsin’s arrest.
“I’ll be right back with Le Figaro. I just gave this gentleman the only copy of Le Monde I had left after first class devoured them.”
Now my seatmate looked up again. “The news is interesting today, no?” he said in heavily accented English. “You’re welcome to the paper when I’m finished.”
I forced a smile. The last thing I wanted was to be a captive audience for a lecture from a Frenchman about MGD for seven hours of air travel. “Thanks. I’m hoping it will put me to sleep.”
“You’re going home to a big scandal. You’ve heard?”
“No. I haven’t followed the news. Just visiting friends.” I reached for my tote to take out sunglasses to make my unwillingness to engage more obvious.
The man put the front page in my lap, patting the photograph of the perp walk. “Disgusting what you Americans do. This kind of thing wouldn’t be tolerated in France before someone’s convicted of a crime. You’ve ruined the career of a brilliant economist.”
The attendant returned with a copy of Le Figaro and passed it over to me. Not surprisingly, the same photograph was displayed, with a caption calling for the WEB chief to step down immediately.
“I heard you say on the phone-forgive me-that you know Paul Battaglia. That you work for him.”
“You must have misheard me. I’ve got a friend in his office.”
“He’s known all over Europe for his work. Sounds like a fine man. You should tell your friend to convince him that he must do the right thing, or he’ll lose the respect of the world.”
“The world?” I asked. “Really? Well, I’m just a stay-at-home mom with three kids, so I don’t have much to say to the district attorney.”
I knew from experience that that description of my life was likely to shut down our exchange. He leaned back in his seat and I rested my head against the window, closing my eyes again.
I couldn’t help but think about Mercer and Mike, and what these last twenty-four hours had been like for them. Mercer Wallace, five years older than I and whip-smart, had earned the coveted gold shield with daring undercover exploits in his early days on the job, then continued to be promoted because of the brilliant detail work he had put into a series of homicide investigations.
But like me, he didn’t thrive on murder cases. The department valued them as the most important crimes and the most elite units, but Mercer preferred the more sensitive matters of a special victims detective squad. He surprised the top brass years ago by asking for a transfer to the Manhattan unit that corresponded to my prosecutorial bureau, after solving a serial rape case involving more than seven teenage girls who’d been brutalized on East Harlem rooftops and in project stairwells.
Mercer’s work, like mine, was a specialty that combined his investigative talents with a measure of compassion that allowed him to earn the trust of the most traumatized survivors-victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. The feature that Mike Chapman relied on most-no need to take up any time hand-holding the dead-was what made special victims work so satisfying to Mercer and me.
Mercer’s mother died in childbirth, and he’d been raised in Queens by his father, Spencer, a mechanic for Delta Air Lines assigned to LaGuardia. He turned down a football scholarship at Michigan to join the NYPD. His second marriage was to Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a four-year-old son named Logan. There was as much heart in Mercer as his six-foot, six-inch frame could hold, and he had covered my back in court and on the street more times than I could count.