Entombed (2 page)

"Mercer's right. You
need to get all the rest you can. We'll be back to see you every day.
We'll get you everything you need."

"Home?" This time I
could hear her clearly.

"Of course you can go
home as soon as you're well enough to travel," I said.

"She's almost due for
her pain medication," the nurse said. "She gets agitated whenever
anyone mentions her family. She doesn't want them to see her this way
and she worries about how upset they must be. They never wanted her to
come to New York for school."

We waited until she
had composed herself, and the MorphiDex that the nurse added to the
drip began to take effect.

Annika's watery brown
eyes blinked repeatedly, like she was fighting sleep, determined to
make sure that Mercer stayed by her side. She closed them at last, her
small head barely making a dent in the firm pillows behind her, looking
pale and sallow against the crisp white hospital linens. The lifesaving
machinery that surrounded her outweighed her twofold. Its blinking
lights and beeping noises wouldn't disturb her medicated slumber, and I
hoped as well that nightmare visions of her attacker couldn't penetrate
the veil drawn around her by the strong painkillers.

It was not even five
o'clock when we got back into the car for the ride downtown to my
office, but it was already pitch-black and the windchill factor had
dropped several notches.

Mercer's cell phone
vibrated and he unhitched it from his belt to flip it open as he pulled
out of the driveway onto York Avenue.

"Sure, Bob. I'll take
a preliminary," he said, looking over at me.

It was Bob Thaler, the
chief serologist at the medical examiner's office, who had worked up a
quick analysis, less than twenty-four hours after getting the evidence
found at the scene of Annika's assault. These tentative findings would
later be validated with further testing. This first run wouldn't hold
up in court, but it would give us an immediate idea if there was
evidence of value.

"Yeah, we picked up
those four cigarette butts from the stoop in front of the building. You
find something?"

Thaler gave him an
answer, which caused Mercer to turn and wink at me. Good news, I
assumed.

But their conversation
went on, and as he listened, Mercer's smile faded to a serious
expression, almost an angry one. He hung up the phone, dropped it on
the seat between us, and accelerated onto the FDR Drive.

"There's that word
'lucky' again. I was afraid we were hopeless on the serology because
there was no semen. Thaler's got Annika's blood on one of the cigarette
stubs. That's why he wanted to know where we found them. Looks like the
guy stepped on it on his way out of the building, with wet fluid still
in the creases of his shoes from where he dropped her on the landing."

"You heard something
else you didn't like."

"They were able to
work up a profile from the saliva on the same butt, too. I'd say it's
our man, without a doubt."

It would be a stretch
for Mercer to get excited about a random item that wasn't even found
inside the apartment hallway, where the crime occurred. He knew better.

"Didn't you just say
there were four-"

"I'm not talking about
a foreign profile, Alex. It's a very familiar one. Three of the
cigarettes are useless. The butt with both blood
and
saliva on
it was
dropped there-maybe on his way up the steps when he spotted his prey-by
someone you and I haven't seen in a very long time."

"We know him?" Someone
we sent away who got out of jail, I expected Mercer to tell me. Someone
we'd put away who was back to haunt us. A paroled convict who would be
easy to track down through new sex offender monitoring laws. The
surprise chance of something breaking in our favor so early shot
through me like a burst of adrenaline.

"If I knew who he was,
if I could tell you his name, then I wouldn't be cruising you downtown
right now. I'd be knocking on his door and throwing the cuffs on him
tonight," he said. "The bastard beat us cold four years ago then
disappeared long enough for me to begin to believe he'd come to his own
violent end. Now here he is again, obviously more dangerous than
before."

"You think you know-?"

"I do know, Alex.
Thaler just confirmed it for me. The Silk Stocking Rapist is back in
business."

2

I looked at the grid
of the Manhattan street map mounted on poster board behind my desk and
pressed a red plastic pushpin into the location of Annika Jelt's
apartment. The distance between the building in which she had been
attacked and the one in which I lived was less than the width of my
fingernail, barely five blocks away.

I turned around to
face the district attorney of New York County. "I'm ready to go to the
grand jury tomorrow and start taking testimony."

"You've got to catch
the creep first, Alex. You have to know who committed the crimes before
you indict anyone for them."

"I
do
know who he is, boss."

"You got a name? You
come up with something I'm not aware of?"

"I've got a DNA
profile. I have five women-"

"What, from four years
ago?"

You can interrupt me
but you can't shut me down. "I said we've got five women whose cases
were matched up to each other's by the serology lab and four more
victims of attempts that scream his MO loud and clear, even without a
trace of physical evidence. Now we have a fresh hit."

Paul Battaglia turned
away from me and took a step toward the door. "So I'm supposed to tell
the press that this maniac is back on the loose, and I've decided to
indict some indecipherable genetic markers to make the public feel
safe? Come back to me when Mercer has someone in handcuffs. Give me a
name, a date of birth, and a mug shot I can plaster all over the
newspapers. Am I right, Detective?"

The expression on
Mercer's face was obscured by Battaglia's cigar smoke.

"I'd like your
permission to indict him."

"Indict who, Alex?"

"John Doe. I want to
charge this rapist as John Doe. Would you just stay here long enough to
listen to what we've put together?" What I really wanted to tell him
was not to be so dismissive of me without letting me make my case, but
even after running his sex crimes prosecution unit for almost ten
years, there were some lines I couldn't cross with Paul Battaglia.

"You've done this
before, haven't you? Why do you need me-"

"I'm not wasting your
time, Paul. We've only done it twice here, on cases that didn't have
any ink. No press coverage. Sort of slipped it under the radar screen."

It had been a risky
move the first time I decided to indict a rapist when all we knew about
his identification was the unique combination of alleles that made up
his DNA profile. No flesh-and-blood image to go with it, no clue what
his name was or where to find him. I wasn't even sure Battaglia had
been aware that I'd tried the novel approach.

"Once the commissioner
goes public tonight with the fact that the Silk Stocking Rapist is
back, you'll have the entire Upper East Side squeezing you for a
solution."

I had his attention
now. Maybe Battaglia's election campaign slogan assured Manhattan's
citizens that you can't play politics with people's lives, but he would
again be on the ballot in November and vulnerable to concerns about
every spike in violent crime statistics.

He leaned against the
doorframe and talked out of the side of his mouth, his cigar wedged
firmly in the center. "What advantage does it give me, this John Doe
indictment?"

"Two things. This new
case isn't the issue. But the older attacks took place more than four
years ago. If we don't get the guy soon, the statute of limitations
runs out on those and he can't be charged for any of the cases."

Unlike murder, which
could be prosecuted whenever the killer was caught, sexual assault
cases in New York had to be brought within five years of the occurrence
of the crime, barring special circumstances that the courts had
recently allowed.

"So by charging him
now, this, uh, this-"

"This John Doe, whose
genetic profile we literally spell out in place of the defendant's name
on the front of the indictment, has a combination of DNA alleles that
the chief serologist is going to tell you is expected to be found in
only one in a trillion African- American men. Once the squad puts a
face and name to this evidence, I promise you we'll get a conviction on
all counts."

Mercer's back was
against a row of file cabinets in my crowded office. His soft, deep
voice added the latest news from the NYPD's press office. "The
commissioner's called a conference for seven o'clock. He's releasing
the composite sketch from the last reign of terror. This new victim
won't be able to work with the artist for days, but we don't have to
worry about that with the match Thaler gave us. All of the women from
four years ago signed off on the accuracy of the sketch back then. Same
face as last time, same skills."

"When we get him, we
make sure he never sees daylight again," I said. "He goes away for this
case and anything else that he does from this point on. And trust me,
Paul, he isn't stopping with Annika Jelt."

Mercer agreed with me.
"He's way too frenzied now. Coop's plan gets him for every attack the
first time he was in town. We beat the statute and ask for a sentence
of life imprisonment-plus how's another two hundred fifty years for
good measure?"

"Annika's mother and
father are flying in from Sweden tomorrow. All she wants to do is go
home, and all her parents want is to get her out of big, bad Gotham
City. I've got to take her testimony as soon as she's able to move from
the hospital bed."

"What else? You said
there were two advantages to indicting Mr. Doe."

"We enter the profile
in the data bank. Upload it to CODIS." The Combined DNA Index System
collected results from both convicted offender databases and unsolved
casework from every contributing lab in the country. Our evidence was
routinely transmitted to Albany as well as to the federal system.

Battaglia shifted his
position and chewed the cigar over to the corner of his mouth. "Why
isn't it already in CODIS from the time the old cases were tested?"

Mercer spoke. "We
weren't linked to the feds when the first cases occurred."

"And the profile had
to be reworked, Paul. Four years ago, DNA matches were declared with as
few as eight loci in common. Now we can't upload a sample unless we've
got a thirteen-loci hit."

The reason that DNA
had become such a critical tool in identifying individuals is because
no two people, with the exception of identical twins, have the same
genetic fingerprint. Lab analysis doesn't look at all of a person's
DNA, because more than 95 percent of it is exactly the same among every
human on earth-two arms, two legs, one head, and so on. What makes us
unique is the area of DNA within our chromosomes that is different, and
that's called a locus, or location. The more loci that are compared in
the laboratory, the more valid the DNA match.

"I assume you hope to
find something if you put this information in CODIS. What good is it if
it doesn't tell you who he is?"

"Maybe we learn where
he's been. I'd settle for that, for starters. Cold hits on serial rape
patterns in other cities, a connection to a relative, or a jurisdiction
he relocated to for a few years. Rapists this successful don't go
dormant, Paul. If he wasn't in jail somewhere-which CODIS also finds
out for us-then you can bet he was committing these crimes on somebody
else's watch. Maybe the national data bank will tell us where."

I could see the frown
lines setting in on Battaglia's face. "So if I follow the
commissioner's press conference with one of my own next week-the day
you get your first grand jury filing-telling them about my idea to
indict the DNA of this monster, you'll give me a briefing on all this,
right? Loci and alleles and the rest of the scientific lingo. I'll be
able to handle questions on this, in English?"

He was a very quick
study. Half an hour in his office before the press corps arrived and
the district attorney would be explaining the process of polymerase
chain reaction testing and short tandem repeats to them as well as the
best serologists would do it on the witness stand at trial.

"This John Doe
business stands up on appeal?" he asked.

It was still a
controversial technique, used first on a serial pedophile case in
Milwaukee and not yet litigated before our appellate jurists. "Our
cases were both pleas. It hasn't been tested yet in New York. But the
higher courts in Wisconsin, California, and Texas have all upheld it."

"Yeah, well, those
judges won't be close enough to this courthouse to see the egg on my
face if there's a screwup at 100 Centre Street, will they? You got law
for me to read?"

It didn't pay to try
to put anything past Battaglia. "I'll give you cases, but yes-there's a
slight distinction."

He started to shake
his head at me.

"We're solid, Paul.
Really. Those other states don't have grand jury systems, so they don't
have to go forward by way of indictment. The prosecutors simply issued
warrants with sworn affidavits from witnesses and lab techs. It's not
that the law is different, it's just an easier way for their lawyers to
proceed. Think of it like this, boss. You can announce that you're the
first district attorney in the country to do John Doe DNA indictments."

He liked being first
at everything. Creating specialized investigative units, taking down
international banking firms that no other government agency dared
touch, putting deadly drug cartels out of business-originality was a
hallmark of his prosecutorial style.