He pulled in the driveway in front of my building and waited for one of the doormen to open my car door. “Not everybody can handle the self-sufficient types like you, Blondie. It’s nice to be needed every once in a while.”
Take your best shot, Chapman, I thought to myself as the car pulled away and I walked inside. What would I have to do to look to the rest of the world as vulnerable as I felt?
I emptied the mailbox of its usual impersonal tidings and took the slow elevator ride to my empty apartment. I didn’t bother to hang up my coat but simply threw it on the ottoman in the living room.
The change from the precinct’s soda vending machine weighed on the threads in my jacket pocket, so I reached in and stacked the quarters on my dresser before hanging the suit in my closet. I had forgotten to return Gemma’s apartment keys to Mercer and laid the chain, with its souvenir of London ’s Tower Bridge, on my bedside table next to the thick volume of Trollope. No one would be needing them tonight.
At least by this time tomorrow I’d have the company of a cold-nosed weimaraner to console me.
13
I WAS UP AT 6:45 ON FRIDAY MORNING AND out of the shower by seven when Chapman called. “Shut off your radio and turn on the tube. I haven’t checked theToday show yet but Jim Ryan’s leading with the story on the local news. He’s got great sources. Says we’re holding a blood-stained psycho in the med center murder case.”
I clicked the remote to activate the set but Ryan was already on to the story of the subway shooting in the Bronx IRT station. “Damn. I just missed it.”
“If you’re coming to the station house before you go to your office this morning, I’ll give you a lift, okay?”
“Fine. I’ll be ready in twenty minutes. Pick me up around the corner, in front of P. J. Bernstein’s.” I finished blow-drying my hair and tried to bring myself to life with some mascara and a touch of blusher. I was sick of the somber colors of the winter wools I had worn throughout this dreary week and decided to lighten the palette and perhaps, thereby, my mood. I sifted through my clothes for a favorite Escada suit-lipstick red with black trim on the collar and around the kick pleat.
The deli owner greeted me warmly when I walked into Bernstein’s and ordered two dozen bagels, rolls, doughnuts, and enough coffee cups to earn me a moderately pleasant welcome to the squad room.
Mike’s car was curbside when I emerged with my small load. He drove downtown to the 17th Precinct station house, gnawing at a piece of coffee cake held in one hand and steering with the other. I picked up thePost from the car seat and found Mickey Diamond’s byline on page 3:DOC DIES DEFYING RAPIST-SUSPECT HELD IN QUESTIONING.
There were no reporters outside the building when Mike and I arrived. We walked in together, past the sergeant on duty at the front desk and the uniformed cops in the muster room who were about to turn out for a day on foot patrol, 8A.M. to 4P.M.
Lieutenant Peterson was already at the desk that had become his command center since Wednesday morning. He lived fifty miles outside of the city but had spent the night-or the three hours’ sleep he had allowed himself-on a cot in the Homicide Squad office farther uptown.
“Good morning, Alexandra. Morning, Mike. Had some progress overnight. Albany came up with a hit on the fingerprints and we got an ID on Pops.”
Peterson handed Mike the printout of the New York State Identification System rap sheet. Chapman read from it aloud. “ ‘Austin Charles Bailey. Date of birth, October 12, 1934.’ Makes him sixty-three. Looks like he’s got about twenty priors. Burglary, grand larceny, possession of stolen property, burglary again.” He flipped the pages, his eyes scanning the list faster than he could call out the charges.
“Last one, twelve years ago. Murder. Not guilty by reason of insanity.”
Peterson had already checked out the rest. “Yeah, institutionalized in the state loony bin for the criminally insane in Rockland County. Only problem is, he walked off the campus two and a half years ago and nobody reported him missing.”
“Who’d he kill?”
“His old lady. He’d been in and out of mental hospitals most of his life. Both of ‘em were drinking. She hit him with a sixteen-ounce bottle of Colt.45-a broken one. That accounts for the scar that runs across his cheek and down his neck. He went loco and-”
Chapman broke in. “Let me guess. He stabbed her with, what? A kitchen knife?”
“Serrated steak knife.”
“Not once or twice, right, Loo?”
“About twenty-two points of entry. Not to mention some extra slashes on the face just for good measure.”
“Typical domestic,” I murmured. It fit the pattern of most familial homicides. Not only the fatal wounds but the savage disfigurement of the victim in addition, usually saved for someone the killer knows well enough to hate.
Many batterers were never violent outside the home against strangers, saving their venom for the people closest to them while presenting a different face to the world. But for scores of others, the first killing broke down the boundaries and expanded the focus of the rage.
“Still feeling sorry for the old guy, Coop?”
I was already shifting gears, mentally and emotionally. The challenge was no longer figuring out who had killed Gemma Dogen. Now I needed to think in legal terms, to build the careful and logical blocks toward cementing a circumstantial case that would withstand procedural challenges in a court of law.
“Is he talking this morning?”
“I haven’t let anybody near him yet. Mercer’s got the best rapport with him so far. I’ll send him back in as soon as he arrives.”
“Mike, why don’t you take him some breakfast and see if you can make nice to him while we’re waiting for Mercer.”
My beeper went off as Mike opened the shopping bags of food and coffee to distribute to the guys in the squad room. I unhooked the little black device from my waistband and checked the number that appeared on the screen.
“Schaeffer,” I said. Chapman paused at the door and waited for me to return the call to Bill Schaeffer, the serologist who ran the laboratory at the Medical Examiner’s Office.
He answered his own phone. “Didn’t want to disturb you during the night but thought you’d want to know first thing. Thatis human blood on the pants you sent down to me last night. Sure you all knew that but I figured you’d want it confirmed.”
Things were falling into place. I thanked Doctor Schaeffer and nodded at Chapman, mouthing the word “blood” as I gave him a thumbs-up.
“What else can you tell me?”
“I’ll have preliminary DNA results for you in the next day or so. We’re working on it. Can you get me a sample of the suspect’s blood, too? Just on the chance he nicked himself anywhere and it’s on the deceased’s clothing.”
“Great. Sure thing. Sarah can write up a court order to get a sample from the defendant this morning. You want to send someone up here to draw his blood?
“And thanks for the call, Bill. I’ll speak to you over the weekend.” Setting up the gels and running the probes for DNA results, the genetic fingerprinting that could determine to a virtual certainty the source of the blood on Pops’s pants, was a process that could take as long as two or three months. A new technique, known as the PCR testing of DNA, would give Schaeffer an early reading, which could be confirmed by later tests, in as short a time as forty-eight hours.
“Nothing much in these but I’ve made copies of all of ‘em for you,” Peterson said, handing me the police reports he’d been reviewing. Each one summarized an interview with a hospital employee or official concerning their whereabouts and activities in the hours before and after the stabbing.
I glanced at the contents but my thoughts were in the room with Austin Bailey. I fast-forwarded to worries about how tough an adversary the judge would appoint to represent him. I knew that every step we took from this moment on would be scrutinized under the harsh and unforgiving eye of the trial and appellate courts.