Bad Blood (12 page)

The door to the holding pen opened and a court officer waved to Artie Tramm, summoning him out of the courtroom.

“Calm down, Mr. Howell. Ms. Cooper, you’re not suggesting that the deceased was pregnant, are you?”

“No, sir. Not at all. The autopsy report is clear on that.”

“But it’s quite a claim you’re stating. Makes us sound like a third-world country. The numbers back you up?”

“Yes, Your Honor. That’s my point. Again, I’m trying to demonstrate for you that the latest studies in this field have had some astounding results. Certainly, if this court isn’t aware of the facts, I would hardly expect a jury to know them. Most people assume that pregnancy is an event to celebrate, while the maternal mortality studies prove that the stressors added to the intimate relationship put the woman at far greater risk during those nine months if she is in an unstable situation.”

“You said there were two bad times, Ms. Cooper.” Gertz pointed his finger at me. “What’s the other one?”

“Separation, Your Honor.”

Gertz held up his hand — palm outward — to stop another outburst from Howell. “But the Quillians were living together.”

“Amanda Quillian had told the defendant the marriage was over, Judge. Dr. Enloe’s study proved that
seventy-five
percent of the women who’d been murdered by their partners or exes had tried to terminate — or had announced their intention to terminate — the relationship.”

It was clear from the expression on Fred Gertz’s face he was hearing this information for the first time. Had the facts been so well-known — say, such as Madison Avenue is one block due east of Fifth — that the court could have taken judicial notice of them, I’d have no need to introduce them through an expert. But the study was new enough, and shocking enough, to warrant my effort to do it this way.

“When did you plan on calling Dr. Enloe?” the judge asked. “How far into your case?”

“Probably next week, when I’ve completed the forensics.”

“Judge, you’re going to have to take that testimony subject to connection,” Howell said, gesturing with his gold pen. “If Ms. Cooper fails to provide any evidence that links my client to the murder, then the prejudicial nature of this woman’s testimony would far outweigh any probative value.”

Howell could tell that Gertz was beginning to lean in my favor. His best hope was to force me to save the expert until the end of my case, hoping — or knowing — that Marley Dionne, my snitch, might be lost to me.

“I don’t mind holding Dr. Enloe until that link is established,” I said. I wasn’t about to let Lem Howell dictate my order of proof, but I was confident that leaving the jurors with Enloe as their last witness could be a powerful way to arm them for their deliberations.

“I’ll reserve decision on your application, Ms. Cooper. At the moment, I’m inclined to take the doctor’s testimony, so have her on standby once you’ve proved the elements of your case.”

“Yes, Your Honor.”

“Get Artie back in here,” Gertz said to one of the two officers standing behind the prisoner.

It was unorthodox to leave a homicide defendant in the care of one guard. And Lem would normally have been the first to remark on how different the rules were for a white businessman who had no violent criminal history. The short, stocky woman in the crisp white shirt and tight navy serge pants that bulged at the hips with her holster and gun pointed to her young colleague and sent him to find Artie.

The judge stood up and flipped his papers impatiently. “You have any witnesses here, Alex, if we get our panel in by the afternoon?”

“Yes, sir. I’m ready to go.”

“Just to be clear, Judge,” Lem said, “we have the day off tomorrow, isn’t that right?”

“Yes. We promised that to Ms. Cooper. She’s moving in on my turf, Lem,” Gertz said, signaling to the reporter that we had gone off-the-record. “Is this legit, Alexandra? This is going to be legal?”

“Chapter 207, Section 39, of the Massachusetts General Law. One of my dearest friends is getting married, at my home on Martha’s Vineyard, and the governor has granted her request to allow me to perform the wedding. It’s a one-shot deal — your job is perfectly safe.”

We were talking about the ceremony I had written for the event when Artie Tramm came back into the courtroom. He was twisting the end of his mustache with one hand and motioning to Lem and me to stay back.

Artie went directly up the steps to the bench and pulled on Gertz’s arm to turn him away from us while he whispered something to the judge.

Gertz remained standing and glanced from Lem to me, shaking his head from side to side. “Ms. Cooper, Mr. Howell. Would you approach the bench?”

“You want this on the record?” the stenographer asked.

“No,” Gertz said, “not yet. Artie, you want to have the crew take Mr. Quillian back inside for a few minutes?”

Lem and I walked toward Gertz to see what had him looking so sober, while the court officers walked the defendant back to the holding pen.

“Artie, tell them what you heard,” the judge said. “I don’t know how to deal with this.”

“It’s his brother. It’s his brother that’s one of the dead.”

“Whose brother?” I asked.

“The defendant’s brother, Ms. Cooper.”

“I didn’t know he had one, Your Honor. Was he—”

“You know about this, Lem? How do you want me to handle this?” the judge asked.

“I’m in the dark, too,” Lem said. “Exactly who is his brother and how did he die? I certainly don’t intend for Brendan to hear this news in a public courtroom.”

“Artie says there’s a rumor—”

“It’s not a rumor anymore, Judge,” Artie said. “The mayor’s gonna have another press conference at one p.m. to announce it. Duke. Duke Quillian. It’s your client’s brother, Mr. Howell.”

“What about him?” Howell asked, taking a few steps toward the door that led to the pens. He looked flustered and truly surprised.

“They’ve found body parts at the blast site, Lem,” the judge said quietly. “It seems that several workmen were killed in yesterday’s explosion.”

My master-of-the-universe perp, the Upper East Side millionaire who passed in New York society with as fine a pedigree as his late wife’s, had a brother who was a sandhog?

“Hog heaven, Mr. Howell,” Artie said, walking over to open the door for him. “Duke Quillian is one of the guys who was blown to bits in the tunnel last night.”

“Did I wake you?” I asked Mike, after dialing his apartment from my office.

“Nope. Came home from the Bronx around six a.m. Napped for a few hours. Got the call from Lieutenant Peterson,” Mike said, referring to the commanding officer of Manhattan North’s Homicide Squad.

“Did you know Brendan Quillian had a brother?”

“Never came up in the investigation. I thought I knew him inside out, Coop. Now Peterson tells me he had three brothers — including the late Duke — and a sister. All the men are sandhogs, like their father before them. I don’t know what to say to you. I don’t know how I missed them.”

There wasn’t a more thorough investigator than Mike Chapman. “I’m not blaming you for anything.”

“Didn’t surface in any of the background checks, nothing on the phone records, not on the radar screen in weeks of surveillance. Didn’t sign the funeral-parlor memorial book for Amanda. Not even jailhouse visits. Like they were separated at birth. Knowing how close these sandhog families are, it’s really weird. How’d he react to the news?”

“Gertz was smart enough not to let me in on the session. He dismissed the jurors who’d shown up until after the weekend. Excused me, too. Then gave Lem the jury room and had Artie bring Quillian in there so he could tell him about it privately.”

“And the trial?”

“Adjourned till after the funeral. If I thought I had a chance to win up to this moment, watch when the news breaks. Talk about a sympathy vote. I can see it now. Lem will stand there wringing his handkerchief while he sums up. He’ll find some way to bring this tragedy right into the well of the courtroom.”

“Let me talk to Mercer.”

“He’s gone back to Bellevue,” I said. The hospital had a prison unit, where Marley Dionne was being guarded after his surgery. “Your snitch said he wasn’t into conversating this morning. Mercer wants to try to get a rise out of him with a mention of Duke Quillian’s death. See if he knew anything about the brother.”

“I’ll catch him there.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Peterson’s setting it up for us to meet at the union headquarters near the entrance to the hole. Get a briefing on what they’ve found since the recovery began this morning. You want in?”

“Sure.”

“Four o’clock. Be there.”

“They using the FRV?” I asked, referring to the NYPD’s experimental Forensic Response Vehicle, a mobile lab that could actually be driven to the blast location to analyze evidence, turning around DNA results in less than ten hours.

“Yeah. They expect to have positive IDs on some of the remains by then. Dress down, kid. I’ve taken you to some dives, but this joint is really rough.”

“I’ve got my crack-den crime-scene jeans ready to go.”

“Brendan Quillian might be the luckiest guy in the world if this whole thing is just one great big coincidence and he skates right out of the courtroom ’cause people feel his pain. Me, I’m more of a master-plan kind of guy. This thing stinks of trouble. See you later, Coop.”

My secretary, Laura, stuck her head in the door. “I’m ready to go to lunch. I’ll bring you back some tuna salad, okay?”

“Fine, thanks.”

“That young woman who works at Chase Bank? You know, the one who’s being stalked?”

“Yeah. Carol Goodwin.”

“She’s here, Alex.”

“I told her I couldn’t see her this week. She knows I’m on trial.”

“She really sounds desperate.”

“Did you call around the unit to see whether—”

“Catherine and Marisa are both interviewing witnesses. Nan Toth is lecturing at Columbia Law School. You said Goodwin needs somebody senior, right? I couldn’t find anyone else,” Laura said. “Anyway, she only wants to talk to you.”

Our pioneering Sex Crimes Unit had forty lawyers, most of them with caseloads so heavy that they were often on trial or evaluating new matters.

I looked at my watch. “She can’t be much more desperate than I am at this point. One fifteen. Okay, I’ll see what this is about. I’m out the door at three thirty to meet Mike and Mercer.”

Laura ushered Carol Goodwin into my office. “I’m sorry to do this to you,” she said, sniffling and reaching for my tissue box as she sat down. “Just show up, I mean. But I’m getting frantic about this investigation, and the detective from my precinct just doesn’t care. He hasn’t done a thing for me.”

The twenty-eight-year-old woman worked in private banking. She was intelligent and well-spoken, but obviously high-strung, and I doubted that the time she had spent in counseling for an eating disorder during college had completely cured the problem. She was several inches shorter than I and rail thin, nervously fingering the strap of her designer handbag while I shuffled through a file cabinet for her case folder.

“I don’t think that’s fair, Carol. They’ve been working with you on every angle of this for two months.”

“Then how come they haven’t caught the guy? What if he — what if he hurts me before they do? I’m the one at risk here. They need to be taking this more seriously.”

“Why don’t you calm down? There’s no point discussing any of this when you’ve got yourself wound up in such a state.”

Carol Goodwin had been referred to me by a victims’ advocacy group. She was reluctant to press charges when she first encountered her stalker, but once I’d offered to monitor the case, she had agreed to cooperate with the detectives to try to nail him. The man she described to us had taken to following her from work once or twice a week, showing up at events she attended for business purposes, sending her menus from restaurants she frequented that arrived in her mail a day or so after she had been to one of them, calling her in the middle of the night from phone booths in her neighborhood — all the activity following a note that had been slipped under her door one night this spring, with the words
I’LL GET YOU
cut out from a newspaper and pasted onto a textbook photograph of a corpse.

“You think this is easy, living in fear all the time? Have you ever been the victim of a crime?”

I needed a high-maintenance witness right now like I needed my wisdom teeth extracted without anesthesia. It wasn’t my practice to talk about my personal problems with them, either. I had stories that would make Goodwin’s silent stalker seem like her best pal.

“My update from the detectives only carries me through last weekend. I apologize for that, Carol. I’ve been on trial with a murder—”

“Is that what it’s going to take to get your complete attention, Ms. Cooper? Would you prefer that this man murders me?”

I stood up from my chair. “I think you’ll be happier dealing with one of my colleagues, Carol. I’ve obviously let you down. I’m going to reassign your matter to someone else in the unit who can devote the time you require to it.”

“No, no. That’s not it. I really want you to handle my case yourself.” She stretched out her arm to me. “I’m sorry — it’s just that I’m losing control and I feel so helpless all the time. My counselor told me to trust you. Please don’t give up on me.”

I sat on the edge of the desk, scanning the file. “You still have no idea who might be doing this?”

“I can’t seem to help the cops with that at all,” Carol said, shaking her head. “I was sure it was my ex-boyfriend — the guy who broke up with me two years ago — but they’ve ruled him out.”

The man she referred to had married and moved to Connecticut. The police reports detailed his whereabouts on the dates in question, and the investigators excluded him unequivocally. His physical characteristics matched the description of the mystery man — but so did those of millions of other five-foot-nine-inch, sandy-haired white men with an average build.

“What brought you here today?” I asked the questions but could barely concentrate on the woman’s answers. No matter how many times the detectives had followed her to and from her office or planted themselves undercover at evening social encounters or meetings, the stalker never appeared. I was so focused on the Quillian connection that I knew I had given Carol Goodwin short shrift.