Cold Hit (26 page)

I got out of bed, made the coffee, dressed in jeans and a blazer, and sat on the deck while Jake unpacked his golf clothes from his duffel and got ready to leave the house.

“You sure you don’t want me to go back with you?”

“Of course not. It’s a sin to leave anything as beautiful as all this unless you have to. You’ve got a lot of friends on the Vineyard,” I said, “and tonight, when I finally crawl into my bed at home, it will give me enormous pleasure to close my eyes and think of you being right here, wrapped in my sheets and looking out at this view.

“I’m the one who feels guilty, promising you a weekend together and then flying off-island to go to work.” I was worried that the unpredictability of my job and its all-consuming nature when I was working a big case or a complex trial would put Jacob Tyler off, as it had done other men.

“Hey, if a guy with
my
schedule and lifestyle can’t relate to this, then you’d have something to worry about.”

The airport was on the way to the golf course, so he dropped me at the terminal, kissed me good-bye, and I promised to be careful and stay in touch. There was no direct service to New York on Saturday morning, so I took the next Cape Air flight to Boston and called the Special Victims office to tell Mercer that I’d be on the ten-thirty shuttle.

With runway delays and air traffic, it was after eleven thirty when I got through the gate at the Marine Air Terminal.

“Sorry, Alex. Sounds like you were planning a nice couple of days. Hate like hell to pull you away from it.”

“You know that’s never a problem. How’s she doing?”

“She’ll be okay. She’s got a lot of guts. Tried her damndest to fight him off. She saw the gun but didn’t think it was real, so—”

“That’s some chance to take,” I said.

“You’re not kidding. She grew up in Florida, around handguns. So she felt pretty comfortable with her guess. Maybe she was right. The guy stuck it back in his waistband and started to pummel her with his fists.”

“Completed rape?”

“Legally, yes. He penetrated but he didn’t ejaculate. So there’ll be no DNA on this one.”

The elements of the crime required penetration of the victim’s vagina, however slight, for the charge to be rape. Most victims had no reason to be aware of this technicality, so many would tell us that the assailant “tried” to rape them but hadn’t completed the assault. In fact, the insertion of the defendant’s penis, whether or not he completed an act of intercourse, was all that was needed, by law, to accomplish the act.

“Where are we going?”

“She’s down at headquarters now, working on a sketch. The lieutenant figured you’d want to get as detailed an interview as soon as possible, so that’s where we’ll do it.”

“What time did she leave the hospital?”

“I got called at home and went over to Roosevelt Hospital at three. Treated and released. Had a head-to-toe exam, and one of the advocates stayed with her the whole time.” The Rape Crisis Intervention Program run by the hospital was one of the best in the city. Like most others, it was underfunded and staffed by volunteers, but the quality of the care and service was superb.

“I took her home so she could clean up and rest for a while, then picked her up at nine this morning to take her to One Police Plaza.”

The NYPD had a unit of detectives whose specialty was the artistic re-creation of likenesses of defendants, the police sketches that were made into Wanted posters and distributed throughout the neighborhood at risk or the city at large. Some preferred to work freehand, and others used computer generated programs that assigned a particular feature from a description provided by a witness or victim. Every nuance, each subtle distinction, led to a thickening of facial hair or a change in shape of an eyelid. The results in many cases eventually proved to be almost photographic reproductions of the attacker’s face.

In this instance, with a serial rapist, the artists had already produced several composites. And although each one resembled the others, there were variations that were reflective of the circumstances under which each woman saw the man who committed the crime. This witness would add her own detail to the pictures that had already been circulated.

“You think it’s too much for her if I go back over everything with her today? Can she handle it now?” I asked Mercer, trusting his judgment and knowing the sensitivity that he brought to this work.

“I didn’t push her. Thought if you and I did the questioning together at once, we’d get whatever we need, and she’d have to explain it all one less time. She’s game, Alex. Determined to get this guy and put him behind bars forever.” He had pulled away from the curb and we were headed for the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and the bridge to Manhattan. “I promised her I’d find him and that you’d make sure he never sees daylight again. She’s really eager to talk to you.”

So much had changed in this business, just in my professional lifetime. Women, who had traditionally been reluctant to report cases of sexual violence, were now far more likely to come forward, as society lifted the age-old stigma on victims who cried rape, and began placing the blame where it belonged: on the offender. Still, those who were attacked by strangers and not acquaintances were believed more readily and were far more likely to be victorious in the courtroom. Paul Battaglia, who was passionate about this issue, had devoted resources to prosecuting these cases that no other office in the country could match. Whether the assailant was a date, a relative, a spouse, or a professional colleague of the victim, we had a mandate to vigorously investigate and take to trial the case of any credible witness who deserved her day in court.

“Guess you didn’t get much rest last night,” I said. Mercer looked exhausted. He had worked all week on the Caxton case, which relieved him of other duties at the Special Victims Squad. So he had not caught new cases, but he was still the one they beeped when the West Side rapist struck. He had been assigned to that task force from the outset, and the lieutenant counted on his skill in relating to victims, as well as his ability to remember the similarity in modus operandi — language, actions, order of the sexual acts — that would help coordinate all the cases in the pattern.

He laughed. “First night in weeks I had some companionship in the form of a warm body, other than Chapman. I don’t think I’d been home an hour when I got the call.” He took his eye off the road for a moment to look over at me. “This job can’t do much for your love life either, can it?”

“I’m in no position to complain after you gave me the day off yesterday.” I spent the rest of the ride telling Mercer about my evening with Jake and how relaxing a single day away from the city had been.

“Did anything important develop on Caxton?” I asked, as we parked behind headquarters and walked up the long sets of steps from Park Row to the front of the building.

“Bits and pieces. The manufacturer of the ladder found the lot number of the one that was attached to the deceased. Sold last spring to a hardware store on lower Broadway. We got them checking receipts now. Not going to be any kind of surprise if it came from her own gallery. Wouldn’t have been unusual for Omar to have one accessible to him. You’d need to use them to install all the art and exhibits.

“And we located Preston Mattox, the architect boyfriend of Deni’s. He was abroad on business all week. Gets back here today. Said he’d give me a call so we could speak to him about her this weekend.”

“What did Crime Scene come up with on Varelli?”

“The studio was clean as a whistle. Someone got in and out without leaving a print, or else they polished the place up before they left. Nothing appeared to be disturbed. Only thing that looked out of place was a pair of sunglasses.”

“Prescription?” I asked optimistically.

“Not so lucky. Could belong to anybody, but they’re just a bit too mod for the old man. And there is a young apprentice who worked for Varelli. He’s been home in California all month, visiting his family. He wasn’t due back here until after Labor Day. But he’s apparently distraught, so he’s coming in tonight to see the widow. We can interview him on Monday.

“Also, Caxton’s lawyer came up with more of the letters that Denise had received from her blackmailer. Mike didn’t see any point in taking them to the lab for fingerprints. They’d already been handled by too many people for us to get anything off them. He copied them for the case folder. Said he’d take a set home to read this weekend.”

We had gone through the security checkpoint and were in the elevator heading upstairs to the artists’ unit.

Josie Malendez was sitting with two plainclothes detectives, eating a roast beef sandwich and drinking a can of soda. She smiled as she saw Mercer enter the room, and I struggled to show no reaction as I looked at the large purple bruise that had swelled and caused the closing of her left eye. She squinted at me from the good one and held out a hand. “You must be Alex Cooper.”

Mercer and I let her finish her lunch. We examined the sketch that resulted from her session with the detectives. “She gives him a rounder face than the last two. Thinner mustache, same eyes, same nose. And she’s adamant about the lisp. Slight, but it’s there. She’s the first one to mention anything significant about his speech.”

“She’s the first one to engage him in as much conversation, trying to talk him down, talk him out of it, isn’t she?” I asked, relying on Mercer’s knowledge of the details. “And she was stone sober — unlike the last two — which makes me want to trust her observations even more. They giving this one to the press?”

“Yeah. The commissioner and the mayor want it for the six o’clock news. Any objections?”

“Nope. Ask them to use the same quote from Battaglia’s comment, the one he gave last time the guy struck. It got lost in the coverage of the bomb scare story that broke the same night.”

We knew that for a rapist to be operating in the same geographic area for more than two years, it had to be, for him, a comfort zone. Clearly he was someone who lived or worked in the neighborhood and could move about it easily without seeming to be suspicious. If the police and scientific techniques did not break the case, our best hope was that a neighbor or coworker would notice a resemblance to the sketch and call the hot line with a tip. The most difficult thing to overcome was the stereotypical reaction of most of the public — that the guy who lives next door couldn’t possibly be a rapist.

When it appeared that Josie had finished eating and had a few minutes to rest quietly, I went over to sit with her and began to talk, to explain the process. The detectives who had worked with her on the drawing excused themselves, and Mercer replaced them at the table, ready to take notes of our conversation.

Our questions had to be more specific than those that had yet been asked. While the physician who had conducted the physical needed answers to what kind of contact had occurred and what Josie had experienced at her attacker’s hands, and the uniformed cop who responded to her home had asked for the broad outlines of the criminal event, Mercer and I began our probe in microscopic detail. Things that frequently seemed insignificant to the victim were crucial to our ability to put the puzzle together, and often to link one case to another. I always started the process by explaining to the witness why such seemingly irrelevant minutiae could be useful to us.

And so we went on, asking Josie to explain her whereabouts all throughout the previous afternoon and early evening. While her actions may have had nothing to do with what happened on her front doorstep, we could not eliminate the possibility that she and her assailant had crossed paths earlier that night, or that he had followed her from one location to another.

The original police report, as in most cases, had summed up Josie’s assault in a single sentence: “At the time and place of occurrence, the defendant displayed a pistol, beat the complaining witness about the face with his fists, causing physical injury, and thereby forcibly engaged her in an act of sexual intercourse.”

Almost four hours after we began to talk with our victim, Mercer and I were ready to wrap up the interview. We knew exactly how the rapist’s approach had been made, where Josie was in regard to him when she was first aware of his presence, the precise language he had used when he accosted her in the vestibule of the building, and how she had responded to him. We knew in which hand he had held the weapon, and what about its design and appearance had allowed her to assume that it was an imitation.

The process was inordinately draining on the witness, and we were keenly aware of that.

“Can you think of anything else that we
haven’t
asked you that you think we should know?”

“Not a thing.” Josie’s fatigue was obvious.

“Are you going home tonight?” I asked. It was almost six o’clock.

“No, no. I’m not ready to go back there alone. My sister lives in Brooklyn Heights. I’m going to spend some time with her till I figure out what I want to do.”

“That’s smart. I’m sure the counselor at the hospital told you, but these first few nights are going to be hard.”

“I know. The doctor gave me something to help me sleep.”

“Yeah, but even sleeping doesn’t always provide an escape. You may have dreams — nightmares, actually — and flashbacks. You’ll see people on the streets who will remind you physically of your attacker, and you may have a visceral reaction — tremble, recoil, cry. All of these things are normal in light of your experience. And believe it or not, time will truly make it better.”

“And finding this son of a bitch will be the best of all,” Mercer assured her.

One of the detectives who had done the sketch was driving home to Bay Ridge and said he would deliver Josie to her sister’s apartment. I walked with her to the restrooms down the quiet hallway, and waited while she went inside. In a few minutes, from where I stood, I could hear her sobs coming from within. I opened the door and found the young woman leaning against the sink, running a finger over the discolored portion of her thin face as she stared at her almost unrecognizable image in the mirror.