Entombed (8 page)

"I lived between First
and Second back then, so I just walked east on Seventy-sixth Street."

"Did you talk to
anyone on the way?"

"No. I didn't see a
soul."

"What happened next?"

"My building's a
brownstone. I climbed the six steps with my key in my hand. I stopped
to unlock the door, and just as I opened it I felt this body on my
back-suddenly, out of nowhere."

She paused to compose
herself. "His left arm was around my neck and he was holding a really
sharp object-I couldn't see it but I could feel it sticking into my
neck. That was in his right hand. I-I froze. He was talking the whole
time, really softly. 'Don't scream and you won't get hurt. I don't want
to cut you. I just want your money.' He kept pushing me inside until he
could close the door behind us."

Jurors were slinking
down in their seats, all of them staring in Darra's direction. They
were fidgeting as they watched her try to calm herself. This would be
the hard part, I had warned her. Looking twenty-three strangers in the
eye and telling them the story of the most intimate assault one human
could commit upon another.

"What did he do next,
Darra?"

"I handed him my
pocketbook and he told me to keep walking. He pushed again, this time
toward the staircase, and told me to go upstairs." She stopped. "I
wouldn't move."

"Did he say anything
else?"

"Yes," she answered,
nodding her head. "'Go upstairs or I'll kill you.'"

She stopped to take a
breath and most of the jurors seemed to hold theirs.

"He dug the knife into
my neck then. I, um, we went up slowly, 'cause he wouldn't take his arm
away from my throat, and when we got to the landing at the top he
handed me back my bag and told me to take out my wallet so he could
count my money."

"What did you do?"

Darra looked away from
me and the jurors, toward the clock on the wall. "I was stupid enough
to believe that's what he wanted."

"Did you open your
wallet?"

"Sorry. Yes, I did."
Darra's head was down. "He slammed me into the wall and crushed my face
against it while he went through my wallet. He wasn't looking for
money-he never took a thing from me. He wanted my ID to see which
apartment I lived in, 2D- it was right on my license. He said it out
loud."

I waited for her to go
on.

"Then he dragged me by
my hair, still with the knife to my throat, up another flight and right
to my apartment door. He made me open the door."

She was trying to talk
even as the words got wrapped up in her tears. She was reliving the
events and getting to the worst moment.

"Take a deep breath,
Darra. Would you like to step outside?"

"I want to get this
over with, Ms. Cooper," she said, shaking her head. "He made me open
the door. I tried to beg him not to but he smacked my ear with the
handle of the knife. He closed the door behind us and told me to get on
the bed, and that's when he saw my fiancé."

"Where was your
fiancé?"

"We had a studio
apartment. Henry-Henry Tepper is his name. Henry was asleep in the bed,
right next to the door."

"What did the man do?"

"He made me stand
beside the bed, next to Henry," she said, now sitting on her hands and
looking up at me. "He put the knife next to my eye. Like this."

"For the record, Ms.
Goldswit is holding her finger against her left eye."

"Yeah, he was sticking
the knifepoint in my eyelid. He handed me something. I couldn't tell
what it was, 'cause my eyes were half closed. I looked down and it was
panty hose."

"What happened next?"
There weren't a lot of different ways to ask the questions that moved
the story along and elicited all the elements of the crime.

"'Wake him up,' he
said. I leaned over to touch Henry's arm and he woke up, sort of
groggy. The guy told him that if he moved a muscle, the knife was going
to go right into my eye." Darra leaned an elbow on the table and rested
her forehead in her hand.

"What did Henry-?"

"He didn't do
anything. He couldn't do anything. The guy made me tie his hands behind
his back. I tried to do it loose but it wouldn't have mattered. He
never took the knife away from my eye, so Henry never moved. Didn't say
a word."

She described how the
man made her undress and lie down next to Henry before he lowered his
pants and straddled her. There were never more than five seconds that
the blade of the knife was not next to her eyelid. When the attack was
completed, the rapist used more hosiery to tie Darra's hands and feet,
as well as tighten Henry's bonds. He ripped the telephone cord out of
the wall and walked out the door of the apartment.

It took more than ten
minutes before they could untie each other and pound on a neighbor's
door to ask her to call the police.

I needed to establish
that Darra had not recently had intercourse with Henry, to prove that
he was not the source of the seminal deposits recovered. Her testimony
ended with the hospital examination that yielded the sample for DNA
analysis, through which her assailant would ultimately be identified.

"Did you sustain any
injuries during the assault?"

"There were some
scrapes and superficial marks on my face and neck, where the knife was
poking me the whole time. Nothing that needed stitches or medical
treatment."

"The man who attacked
you, have you ever seen him again?"

"No, I have not."

"Thank you, Ms.
Goldswit. I have no further questions. If there are-"

I had tried to make
this clean and get out without irrelevant inquiries from jurors.

Two hands shot up to
make it clear I had not succeeded.

I walked down the
steps to juror number nine and he leaned over to ask me, "Where's
Henry? What happened to Henry?"

Henry Tepper was not
essential to my presentation, but since he had been an eyewitness to
the assault on Darra-and himself a victim-it was natural that jurors
would be curious about him. They didn't need to know that he had been
unable to handle the guilt of not being able to prevent his
fiancée from being raped- secondary victimization, as the
shrinks called it. They didn't need to know that he had broken their
engagement a month after the attack and moved back to Phoenix.

"When is the last time
you spoke with Mr. Tepper?"

"Last night. I called
him last night. I hadn't heard from him in a couple of years. He lives
in Arizona now."

The gentleman who
asked the question sat back, satisfied somehow to know that Henry was
out of town, and out of Darra's life.

Juror number eleven
was still waving frantically to me. I circled the front of the room to
take her question before putting it on the record. "Is it still rape,"
the elderly woman asked, "even if she didn't fight the man? I mean, he
didn't actually cut her with the knife, did he?"

It had been more than
twenty years since the last of the archaic legal requirements had been
stricken from the books. How is it that people still clung to these
medieval attitudes? Well into the 1980s the law in New York State had
demanded that sexual assault victims resist their attackers to the
utmost, even when confronted with deadly physical force. Too many women
were injured and killed resisting assailants who were armed and
stronger than their prey.

"After the testimony
is completed, I'm going to charge you on the specific elements of each
of the crimes. I'll give you the definitions of every term used in the
indictment." I would be telling this nitwit that the crime was
accomplished if the sexual act was compelled by physical force, present
here, or by the threat that placed either of the witnesses in fear of
immediate death or serious physical injury. How much worse could it get
than having a blade held against your eyelid, accompanied by threats to
kill? "I expect it will be clearer to you then."

"Thank you, Ms.
Goldswit. You may step out now."

The warden held open
the door and she walked out. Mercer was waiting for Darra in the
witness room. Like he had done dozens of other times over the years, he
would take her back to my office and close the door, calming and
reassuring her that those twelve minutes of discomfort would be worth
the price of nailing the miserable bastard once we had him in our
sights.

My next witness was
Marie Travis, the serologist who had done the laboratory examination on
the seminal fluid recovered from the body and bed linens of Darra
Goldswit.

I took her through her
training and credentials, and the duties she had performed for eight
years at the forensic biology lab of the medical examiner's office.

"Four years ago were
you assigned to the matter designated as the Manhattan Special Victims
Squad pattern number five?"

"Yes, I was."

"And included in that
group of investigations, is there the matter of Darra Goldswit, known
by a particular forensic biology number?"

"Yes. That case was FB
number 1334."

"Did you personally
conduct the testing in this case?"

"Yes."

"Did you receive a
rape evidence collection kit to examine in this matter?"

"Yes, that kit
contained vaginal swabs and slides prepared with samples taken from
sheets at the crime scene. Both items tested positive for the presence
of semen, from which I was able to extract a sperm cell fraction."

"Were you able to
determine a genetic profile from either of those samples?"

"Yes, from both of
them, actually."

"What determinations
did you make?"

"The DNA profile from
the victim's vaginal vault was identical to that from the sample on her
sheets."

"Did you compare that
profile to others then entered in your data bank?"

"Our data bank was
very small at that time, Ms. Cooper. We had just gone online several
months earlier. I entered the profile but got no matches at that
moment."

Darra's case was the
earliest strike, to our knowledge, of the Silk Stocking Rapist, just
weeks away from being lost to the statute of limitations.

"Did you undertake a
statistical analysis to determine the probability of that profile
appearing in the African-American population?"

"Yes, we knew from the
victim's physical description of the assailant that he was a black man.
We used the probability guidelines established by the National Research
Council."

"In the
African-American population, what are the odds of finding the exact
profile that you identified and matched on the two samples in Ms.
Goldswit's case?"

"We would find this,
Ms. Cooper, only once-one time-in ninety-five billion
African-Americans. We could put ninety-five billion men in one place,
if we had a big enough room, and only one of them will fit this genetic
profile."

Finding John Doe and
pulling him out of that enormous haystack was the only major obstacle
left in this operation.

I finished the
questions I needed to prove the scientific aspect of the case, linking
this crime scene evidence to the human phantom we were about to indict,
and followed Marie from the jury room. She knew her way out of the
courthouse, and I returned to read the definitions of the various crime
categories charged and ask the grand jurors to vote.

When I left the room
so they could deliberate, I found Mercer Wallace waiting at the
warden's desk. "Got your vote?"

"Give them five
minutes. The novelty of it will take them longer than usual."

"We've got a problem
at Kennedy Airport. You can wait the jury out or come with me," he
said, striding to the hallway.

"What-?"

"Annika Jelt's parents
just landed. They've never been more than twenty miles away from their
farm before. They don't have proper documentation and immigration won't
let them into the country."

9

We both had our gold
shields and identification badges in our hands, having been left by an
angry immigration officer to cool our heels-and our tempers-while she
fetched her supervisor.

"Put the hardware
away," the supervisor said when he joined us in the glass cubicle.
"Rules is rules and I don't break them for anybody."

I pointed across the
corridor to the middle-aged couple, sitting stone-faced on folding
wooden chairs like a pair of nineteenthcentury Ellis Island immigrants.
"Their daughter is in the intensive care unit of New York Hospital,
fighting for her life. We'll vouch for them, sign for them, deliver
them back here in a week. What more-?"

"Welcome to America,
post nine-eleven. I don't know who let them board without the papers
they need, but this is as far as they get on my turf."

"The Swedish consulate
arranged the whole thing. They were escorted onto the plane by an envoy
from the American embassy, who gave them a letter that was hand-signed
by the ambassador. He was promised by an NYPD captain that they'd be
met on this end by a Port Authority official who would arrange
everything from this point on."

"Maybe they can cut
corners in Stockholm, lady, but I call the shots at this airport. The
paperwork they got at the consulate is outdated."

Mercer was trying to
restrain me, taking the reins with his unflappable demeanor. "We can do
this your way, or we can do it the way the police commissioner just
recommended to me. The mayor drives out here with the key to the city
and a phalanx of reporters-and you continue to get in his way, or you
just bend the regulations a bit and let us get these nice folks on the
road."

We wrangled until
after six o'clock, when the shifts changed and a new supervisor
appeared. I had called the grand jury warden before the office closed
to confirm the indictment had been voted. Within the hour we were on
the Belt Parkway back to the city with our charges, who were more
frightened than exhausted. The English they had not spoken since high
school was basic enough for us to communicate, and I told them as much
as I could about their daughter's experience and the news of her great
recovery.