"Put your toy away," I said, pushing in the double doors.
"Mercer said you might need help carrying your files downstairs after he left."
I handed him the paper bag with the Yankees jacket. "Hold on to this for me. I don't have enough evidence in this case to overburden myself."
"I'm also here to tell you that we might get lucky. Those lifts we got from Queenie's apartment?"
"Yeah?"
Mike was referring to the latent fingerprints for which the Crime Scene Unit had dusted.
"Well, they got prints of value."
"Fresh? I mean, it sounds like there were kids in and out all the time, doing errands for her."
"These should be good. You know those raised seats, the plastic ones, that have to be on top of the toilet if you've got injuries or health problems and you can't lower yourself down all the way?"
"Sure." Queenie Ransome had suffered a stroke, and I thought again of how every aspect of her privacy, every shred of dignity left to her, had been invaded and abused by this investigation.
"The killer must have stopped to relieve himself, and picked up the seat to place it on the floor. Lifted some good prints right off the sides. Both hands, four fingers each. Clean and clear."
"Have you run them through NCIC?"
"Jeez, Ms. Cooper, how did I make it this far without you?"
"So there's no match?"
"Nope, not yet. But it gives us something to work with."
"See you downstairs. I've got to finish up here," I said, letting the doors swing shut behind me.
Within minutes, Nancy Taggart and Dulles's lawyer, Graham Hoyt, pushed through the same doorway, and marched together, grim-faced, down the aisle toward us.
"I don't like to be kept waiting, Ms. Taggart. You're holding up the works here. And that's the second time today for you, Mr. Hoyt," Moffett said, stepping down from the bench, unhooking the clasps of his black robe and heading for his chambers. "You, Robelon. You and your client are excused until Monday. We'll start up at nine-thirty sharp."
Hoyt shook hands with both Andrew Tripping and Peter Robelon as they passed him, with Emily Frith trailing behind them. He spoke quietly into Robelon's ear.
"Follow me," the judge said, when the others had left the room. "You wanna get the kid? And the foster mother?"
"We've come to tell you we can't do that, Your Honor. There's a problem," Taggart said, unable even to look in my direction.
"Now what?"
Nancy Taggart began to explain to the judge. I rose to my feet, tapping the cap of my pen against my file, anxious to tell Moffett that this was predictable from the mother's phone call to me last evening. Now we had lost a whole day because Taggart had demanded that I leave this in her capable hands.
"Judge, Ms. Taggart isn't being entirely candid with you. Let me tell you what happened yesterday afternoon, and about my conversation with Ms. Taggart thereafter. I offered to provide all the help she needed to find this foster mother, whoever she is-"
Taggart pointed to the hallway behind her. "I've got Mrs. Wykoff here-the foster mother. She's not the problem. It's Dulles who's gone missing, sir. He's run away."
13
Six o'clock on Friday afternoon, I was sitting in Battaglia's office with Mike Chapman, Mercer Wallace, and Brenda Whitney, who was in charge of the district attorney's press relations.
"You think kidnap or you think runaway?" the DA asked. The smoke from his cigar mingled with the smoke of the cheaper brands he had given to Mike and Mercer.
Brenda coughed as I answered. "The foster mother thinks the kid just bolted from her car and took off, while she went into the high school to pick up her older child. But I've never laid eyes on her before," I said of Cicely Wykoff, "so it's impossible for me to gauge her credibility."
"What's the department doing to find him?" Battaglia asked of the cops.
"I called headquarters from the courtroom. Chief of D's put a couple of guys from Major Case on it. We're dumping phones, doing a background on the foster mother and everybody in her orbit, and checking with the crossing guards near the school to see if they can ID the kid," Mike answered.
"Where's Mrs. Wykoff now?"
"Pat McKinney assigned the investigation to the Child Abuse Unit. I'm not sure who's interviewing her. He figures they'll get a lot more information if she isn't worried about me using it in the case. The child welfare agency had drilled that into her."
"He's right, you know," Battaglia said, chewing on the cigar end as he talked. "Besides, you're in the middle of a trial. You can't possibly handle this."
"I know it," I said. "But the kid's life is a hell of a lot more important than the Vallis rape. I hate to say that, but the reason she was attacked was because she wanted to make the boy safe. I'm ready to walk away from this case if it's freaked out the child so much."
"And let him go back to that lunatic father?" Mercer asked. "No way."
"Boss, I know I won't be able to concentrate on the testimony if we haven't found the boy by Monday."
"Don't jump the gun, Alex. Do what you've got to do and trust the PD to do their bit. Can't you buy a little time from Moffett?"
"He looks ready to tank the whole thing. We'll finish the Vallis cross on Monday. Then I've got a waitress from the coffee shop, the cops, and the nurse. Without the boy, the judge is likely to dismiss for failure to make out a prima facie case if Robelon is persuasive when he makes his motion."
"Brenda, how do we handle this? I'm sure DCPI gave it to the press," Battaglia said. He knew how to spin the media better than most people knew how to spell their names.
The NYPD's deputy commissioner for public information would have already released a photograph of Dulles Tripping, asking for help in locating him.
"They're faxing over a copy of their press release. They don't want to connect it to the trial at all. They're just sticking with the missing child approach. The chief was hoping to make it in time for coverage on the six o'clock news. It'll probably be the lead story by eleven."
Mercer had dropped off Paige Vallis at her apartment in TriBeCa and returned to my office before Battaglia had called me in. "You'd better get back on the phone with Paige and explain it to her before she hears it on television," I told him.
"This is going to hit her hard. She'll blame herself for his disappearance," he said.
"There goes my jury," I said, practically groaning. So wrapped up in worry about the boy, I hadn't thought about the need for press announcements to mobilize the public to help find Dulles. My jurors would see the weekend news on television and in print. There had been so much testimony about Dulles, through Paige, that they would certainly connect the fact that he had vanished to our trial.
"Didn't the judge instruct them not to listen to media accounts involving your case?" Battaglia asked.
Chapman blew a smoke ring and stood up, helping himself to another cigar from the DA's humidor. "Yeah. The jurors won't dare read the page-one headlines about the case, just like I'm about to slither into a hot tub tonight for a ménage with Sharon Stone and blondie, here, and like you won't be sitting behind that desk when you're eighty-five years old. Get a grip, Mr. B-they'll devour the story."
"I'll keep you both posted over the weekend," I said to Battaglia and Whitney.
We walked back to my office. Mercer said good night to us, heading over to the sixth floor across the street, which housed the Child Abuse Unit. He was going to bring the detectives up to speed on everything he knew about Dulles Tripping. Nancy Taggart was probably already there, being debriefed.
"So much for bonding with my witness," I said, taking the paper bag from Mike and locking the Yankees jacket in a filing cabinet. "You got anything else for me?"