Cold Hit (3 page)

Directly beneath the huge screens was the podium, to which speakers would be called at the whim of the chief of operations. Lunetta would tell the computer programmer who sat beside him which graphics to display over their heads on the three screens — usually starting with a map of the precinct, a chart of the previous month’s crime statistics, and a graph plotting the most recent week’s violent crime activity, with robberies flagged in red, rapes in blue, and burglaries in green.

Lunetta and his superchiefs sat in the rear at a table perpendicular to the array of well-decorated men spread down the center of the room. He was tall and lean, with angled features and black hair that was drawn sleekly back and trimmed at the neck in military fashion. He looked great in the dark navy blue uniform, and knew it.

My seat was in one of the three rows of folding chairs behind the chief’s position, which were reserved for non-NYPD spectators. Each chair was labeled with a scrap of paper torn from a legal pad. Excusing myself, I tried to slither into place, passing over two lawyers from the United States Attorney’s Office and four guys from upstate police departments, before sitting down next to a woman who introduced herself as a trend researcher from the Department of Justice. I opened the lid of my coffee cup and took a slug as Lunetta called the first group of officers to the podium.

Frank Guffey moved forward to the mike, flanked by his supervising staff. He was smart and well liked by police and prosecutors, a tough boss who had been moved from the East Harlem area a year earlier down to the cushy confines of Wall Street, and now back to the high-crime neighborhood of the Twenty-eighth Precinct.

“G’morning, Chief. I’m reporting on the period that closed July thirty-first.” Guffey smiled and paused briefly, weighing whether to add a personal pleasantry. “Nice to be here again in the North, after a brief visit to Manhattan South, sir.”

Lunetta shot back, “I hope you can say as much
after
the meeting.”

“First of all, the decrease in overall crime continues.” Clearly, Guffey knew the drill. That’s what these guys wanted to hear, right out of the box. “Now, we do show an increase in robberies, but—”

Forget the “buts,” buddy. I watched as Lunetta turned his head ninety degrees and gave a command to the computer programmer sitting at his right shoulder. Seconds later, the three overhead graphics changed. A map of the Twenty-eighth Precinct’s territory dominated the middle screen.

Lunetta barked, “Break them down for me, Inspector. I want them by day of the week, and then by the time of day of the tour.”

Before Guffey could lift his papers and find the correct answers, we could all see the numbers in the projections that the chief’s team had prepared for this attack.

“I want to get right into these spikes, Guffey. Take us through them. Give me reasons.”

I could see the color rise in Frank’s cheeks, as most of the bosses around the tables seemed to squirm in sympathy.

Guffey started to respond. “Several of them seem to be the work of the same team, Chief. The numbers started to spike when a pair of male Hispanics began to hit a couple of apartments on Broadway, just north of McDonald’s. Same M.O. Gain entry with a ruse — female knocking on the door for the perps and asking for her sister. Then she disappears while the guys tie up everyone inside with speaker wire—”

“Drug related?”

“Probably. Only, the one last week, on the twenty-ninth—”

“You mean the restaurant manager they burned with an iron?” Lunetta thrived on displaying to the crowd how well he could learn the detail of hundreds of these cases, outlined for him in his briefing books, and talk about them as familiarly as if he were working on them himself.

“Yeah. We figure that was a mistake. They went to the wrong apartment. I got Louis Robertson here. They’re his cases, if you’d like to hear from him.”

“Not unless he’s got answers for me, Guffey. Excuses I got plenty of. It’s answers I want. You guys doing the obvious? Running fingerprints through Safis?” The new, automated fingerprint-matching system was solving scores of cases that used to require tedious hand searches. “Checking with surrounding precincts to see if they got anything like this going? Parole — probation — informants? I assume you’ll study these charts and decide how to redeploy your manpower to address the situation more aggressively.”

Guffey said his men had been doing all of the above and that he would certainly make use of the time charts. He got through the other crime categories fairly gracefully and back to his seat without a great deal of damage.

Inspector Jaffer was next up. A real breath of fresh air for the department. As I ran my eyes around the table, Joanne Jaffer and Jane Pearl were the only two women inspectors I noted in the room. They were both young, bright, and attractive, and were changing a lot of opinions about female bosses in the department, held by too many of the hairbags, those dyed-in-the-wool old-timers who were petrified in their traditions.

Jaffer’s numbers in the Twentieth Precinct were excellent. The Upper West Side had always been one of the safest residential areas in Manhattan. Robberies, burglaries, and car thefts continued to be lower than ever. No homicides in over six months. Her only problem was a serial rapist who had been operating for more than two years — hitting sporadically, and not even linked to a pattern until DNA tests on the rape kits had confirmed that the most recent attack was committed by the same assailant as the first one, which had occurred more than twenty months ago. Battaglia had been asked to address a community meeting about the case in a few days and would be pleased if I could come back to him after this morning with a sense about the chief’s role in the investigation.

Jaffer gave her report and began to answer Lunetta’s questions about the rapist.

“How many cases you up to now, Inspector?”

Jaffer answered sharply. “Eight, sir. That we know of. Eight with an identical M.O., and two of those have been linked to each other by DNA. Serology is working on two others this week.”

“What took you so long to put this pattern together? Somebody asleep in the station house?”

She started to answer, as a hand went up on the right side of the room. Sergeant Pridgen, who was assigned to Special Victims, was responsible for the task force handling the investigation. He had been running the cases long before Jaffer became involved and was trying to jump in to take some of the heat.

Lunetta ignored Pridgen’s waving arm. I knew he’d like to see Jaffer sweat, and I kept my fingers crossed that he would fail to make it happen.

“Serology finally came up with a cold hit, Chief. That’s what broke it for us.”

Her answers were clipped, to the point, and good. The investigation had floundered until the Medical Examiner’s Office made a computer match — known in the still-evolving language of genetic fingerprinting as a “cold hit” — between DNA samples left by the rapist in his victims’ bodies more than two years ago and those found in the most recent case. Cops who had argued about whether or not the older attacks bore any connection to the current crimes were silenced by the stunning ability of the database to definitively link an assailant’s targets to one another.

“Why can’t serology match it to a perp in their data bank?” Lunetta asked.

“Because the bank is just up and running in New York. It’s only been in operation since last year, and they’ve got fewer than a hundred samples from convicted rapists and murderers.”

Legislation created genetic data banks in most states across the country during the late nineties, but few of their labs were equipped to process the information collected from inmates and create the pools from which to search for repeat offenders, until quite recently. It would be unlikely to get a hit on this serial rapist, who had been operating on the streets of Manhattan since the days before the law enabled the collection of blood samples from incarcerated prisoners.

Jaffer continued to describe the team’s approach. Last week the department sketch artist, working with several of the victims, had completed a composite that was being distributed to stores and residences throughout the precinct — the “generic male black,” as Mercer liked to describe the suspect. Medium complexion, average height, average build, between twenty-five and thirty-five years old, possible mustache, close-cropped hair, no distinguishing features, scars, or marks. Before too long, every African American adult male who set foot north of Sixtieth Street and south of Eighty-sixth Street, between Central Park West and Riverside Drive, would be stopped and questioned. Neighbors would be turning in their deliverymen or elevator operators, and good citizens would be frisked by anxious and weary cops, each one hoping to get a lucky break and catch the compulsive rapist.

“Stop dancing around, Pridgen. I’m getting to you. What else is your crew doing about this one?”

The sergeant stood to answer. “We’ve got Traffic giving out summonses on the midnight tour, tagging all the unregistered and uninsured plates. Mounted’s working the area on weekends, which is mostly when he hits.”

I could see Lunetta rolling his eyes even as I stared at the rear of his head. Mounted cops riding up and down West End Avenue at midnight on a Saturday. Not the most subtle way to patrol the neighborhood. Even the rapist might catch on and change his movements.

Pridgen continued. “We’ve called in the Profiling Unit at Quantico and—”

Say the magic word and the duck comes down, hitting Lunetta square on the head. “Feds?
Feds
? Whose stupid idea is that? Aren’t you guys up to handling this one yourself? Answer me, Pridgen. Whose idea was it?”

Lunetta saw Pridgen flash a glance in my direction. “ District attorney calling the shots on this one, Sarge? You just sit back and let them take right over and run the show, huh? Maybe you’re moonlighting on the side, too busy to do major investigations? We got an opening over at the auto pound, looking after towed vehicles, if you think this is too tough for you. What does Cooper use on you guys anyway, a nose ring? Just leads you around on a leash all day? Let me know if you start rolling over on your back or baying at the moon.”

The woman researcher from Justice bit into her lip and looked at me for a reaction. I didn’t know whether I was blushing for Pridgen or for myself. I ripped some paper from my legal pad and dashed off a note to Lunetta, passing it forward, in which I asked his permission to explain where we were going with the investigation. By the time it reached him, was opened and read, he had continued to pepper the sergeant with questions and then kept on going at Pridgen even harder, choosing to ignore my offer. If he had intended to call on me before I asked to speak, I had just sealed my fate by assuring him that I wanted to give him answers to these questions.

“Last week’s attack — was this girl coming from one of those Columbus Avenue bars, too?”

“No sir,” Pridgen answered.

“Where from, then?”

“Actually, her boyfriend drove her home, just before two in the morning. Let her out of the car about half a block from her apartment, up at the corner. She walked to the front of the building alone. The rapist pushed in behind her, after she unlocked the vestibule door.”

“So much for the boyfriend. I guess chivalry’s dead, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant? I want some progress on this one before the next time you come back here. Take your seats. I want the Three-four up now. Let’s hear about last night’s homicide.”

Chairs pushed back and the podium assembly changed over, with Lieutenant Peterson and Chapman accompanying the CO up to the stand.

The general precinct figures were good. Lunetta was pleased that the deputy inspector in charge had taken the story of one of his burglary patterns to a local cable TV program,
¿Que Pasa NY
? , which resulted in an informant breaking the case. He liked that kind of creative policing, as he would call it. What he never had liked was wisecracking, not even back when he had been Chapman’s boss in the Street Crime Unit, almost a decade earlier.

“Who’s going to bring me up to speed on the new case?”

Peterson pointed at Chapman and stepped aside. Mike rested his notes on the podium and ran his fingers through his thick dark hair. He dug one hand into the pocket of his blazer, then started his description of how he was summoned to the scene. He was thorough, detailed, and professional — the best homicide cop in the business — but I fidgeted and recrossed my legs when he got to the end of the narrative and closed his description with Dr. Fleisher’s directive to load “Gert” into the EMS van.

“ ‘Gert’? I didn’t know she’d been identified.” Lunetta was annoyed. His head whipped from side to side as he checked with each of his aides to see if they had failed to give him the morning update on the city’s most visible crime of the moment. The case was the cover of both daily tabloids, and he should have had the newest information about the unfortunate victim before the public did.

“She hasn’t been identified yet, Chief.”

“Well,
is
her name Gert, or isn’t it?”

Don’t go there, Chief, I urged quietly from the peanut gallery. All of us who worked with Mike knew that he named his victims in every case. Always did it, and often stuck with his nickname, no matter what the eventual I.D. — his own perverse way of personalizing his cases.

“I call her that, Chief, so she’s not just some number, some cold statistic for the mayor to get off on. I named this one in honor of Gertrude Ederle — three Olympic medals and the English Channel. I figure, given the way somebody tried to send her to sleep with the fishes for keeps, she must have had the soul of a great swimmer to stay afloat.”

There were a few snickers around the room, but most of the group knew it wasn’t the safest direction to follow.

Lunetta wouldn’t bite twice. He moved away to the next questions. “What are you looking at here?”

Chapman went on. “After the autopsy results today, we’ll work on a press release and sketch.”

“Can’t you give the papers a photo from the scene — a closeup? Get an I.D. more quickly?”