The Deadhouse (5 page)

"It was Paul's decision not to be involved in such a risky plan, and
I think he was entirely right about it."

"That's what you get for not going up the chain of command, Alex. I
would have backed you on that one. Our squad wouldn't have let her walk
away yesterday afternoon without taking better care of her, tucking her
in at home, making sure she was safe and sound. Next time, check with
me first. I can often be more flexible than Battaglia. And Lola Dakota
would be alive." He slapped his hand against the back of Laura's chair
and walked away toward his office at the end of the hall.

The phone rang and I picked it up as I sat down to turn on my
computer. Rose Malone, Battaglia's executive assistant, was calling to
tell me that he was on his way downtown and wanted to see me as soon as
he got in. That gave me half an hour to try to get the Jersey
prosecutors to bring me up to speed on what they had learned during the
night. The one answer Battaglia didn't like getting too often was "I
don't know, boss."

I dialed the number for my counterpart in Sinnelesi's office and
left a message in his voice mail to call me back as soon as possible.
How did the case against Kralovic look? Exactly what time did Dakota
leave her sister's home? How did she travel into Manhattan? What kind
of mood was she in? Who saw her last? Battaglia was likely to ask me
what she'd had for breakfast, too, and whether or not she had cleaned
her plate. There wasn't anything about her last days on earth that he
wouldn't expect me to detail for him as soon as he got into the office.

"Have a minute for me?" Jody Soellner was standing tentatively in my
doorway, and I waved her in. Her arms were loaded with notepads, a copy
of the penal law, and what looked like an NYPD evidence envelope. "I'm
on my way to the grand jury to put in that case I picked up last
weekend. The guy who broke into the apartment on West Twenty-third
Street and raped the babysitter who was watching the three kids.
Remember the facts?"

I told her I did.

"The victim just showed me two of her fingers. When the perp put
down his knife on the bed, she tried to roll off, away from him. But he
pulled her by the arm and bit down hard." Jody held up her left hand
and grabbed her own middle and ring fingers. "She was back at Roosevelt
Hospital for her follow-up yesterday and the doctor confirmed that she
had two severed nerves. Can I charge an extra assault count—you know,
that the perp's teeth are a dangerous instrument?"

"Good try. Unfortunately, the court of appeals disagrees with you. I
think the case is
People
versus
Owusu,
a couple
of years back. The distinguished jurists said it's different from
upping the ante by bringing a weapon along to assist the bad guy in his
criminal endeavor. His teeth come with him naturally—they're not
'dangerous instruments' and you can't get the extra charge, even though
I like your creative thinking. What's in the brown folder?"

Jody unclasped the catch and withdrew a plastic package covered in
black ink with a voucher number and case identification. When she
flipped it over to the clear side and held it up to show me, I could
see the carving knife with the ten-inch blade. This victim was lucky.
The jurors wouldn't even need to wait to hear the definition of
forcible compulsion before they voted a true bill.

"Be sure and give Laura a copy of the indictment as soon as you file
it."

I e-mailed instructions to Maxine, my paralegal, to pull the Dakota
papers as soon as she got in. Reporters would soon be calling to get
whichever facts about the case history were public record in order to
reconstruct the story behind yesterday's events. I pushed aside the
notes on the hearing for which I was trying to prepare, jotting down a
Post-it reminder to take the whole file home for the weekend and work
on it there, when I could better concentrate on the issues.

Battaglia had a speed-dial number that rang directly on my console,
bypassing both of our secretaries. Usually, I jumped out of my seat
when I heard its distinctive ring, but this morning Rose had helped me
with an estimate of his arrival time. I greeted him and told him that I
would be in immediately to brief him on the Dakota case.

"Save it till this afternoon. The governor just called. He's on his
way to the World Trade Center and wants to stop in to talk about the DA
Association's proposed legislation package for the January session. You
got anything that can't wait, or is it as straightforward as the papers
make it appear?"

"I've made all the calls to get details on what happened during the
past twenty-four hours, and I'm waiting for Jersey to get back to me.
Chapman and I were both pretty skeptical about the accidental death
theory last night, but I've got nothing unusual to give you yet."

"Keep it that way, if you can. The last thing I want for Christmas
is a high-profile case that sets me up as Sinnelesi's whipping

boy."

"No problem," I promised him, and kept my word for almost two hours.

Chapman sounded groggy when Laura put through his eleven o'clock
phone call. "The news from both ends is bad."

"Hey, you're supposed to be sleeping. How can anything bad have
happened?"

"Peterson just woke me up with the results of the inventory that
some of the guys have been doing. You know all those shoe boxes in
Lola's apartment? Well, she didn't share your fetish for high heels,
slinky sandals, and velvet slippers. A few of those cardboards have
some worn-down leather pumps, most are crammed with index cards that
look like notes or research for a project, and two tired old boxes are
stuffed full of cash."

"Like savings for a rainy day?"

"Like a stash for the monsoon season, Coop. Not kosher."

"Glad I wasn't on the scene for that discovery. What else?"

"And then there's the latest word from the ME's office. Autopsy
won't happen until the end of the day, but Dr. Kestenbaum has already
noted a few things that don't make him happy. Like some hairs—not
Lola's—that she had gripped in her tight little fist, and, more to the
point, lots of petechial hemorrhages in her eyes."

I knew the significance of the findings before Chapman went on. The
tiny red pinpoints were the classic forensic hallmarks of strangulation.

"Kestenbaum thinks she actually struggled with her attacker while he
choked her to death. Then he rolled her into the elevator shaft to make
it look accidental. Fasten your seat belt, Coop, while he takes a close
look at Lola's innards. He's just getting ready to declare this case a
homicide."

5

I called Sylvia Foote. She was not an easy person to reach.

"She'll be in meetings all afternoon," her secretary said. "I don't
think she'll be returning any calls until the beginning of the week."

"Tell her it's about Lola Dakota. About the murder of Lola Dakota."

"Murder?" she asked, taking down my number.

By the time I had left a similar message with Rose Malone for
Battaglia, Sylvia Foote was on the line.

"Miss Cooper, my secretary just repeated your conversation to me."
Foote was in her late sixties—humorless, rigid, and entirely protective
of the administration's concerns. "I need to tell my president about
this immediately. I'd like you to answer some questions for me."

"And I'd like
you
to answer some questions for us."
"Perhaps we can schedule an appointment for the end of next week."

I knew that the Jersey prosecutors would move in as quickly as
possible, looking for clues that would connect Ivan Kralovic to Lola's
death. If, in fact, Dakota had been murdered in Manhattan, then
Sinnelesi would have no jurisdiction here. But if he wanted to keep his
name in the headlines, as Battaglia figured, Sinnelesi would argue that
he had a duty to investigate whether Lola had been kidnapped from his
side of the river and follow the trail to our doorstep.

By Monday, New Jersey police might already be swarming around the
King's College campus and Lola's apartment building, scouring students
and neighbors for information, gossip, and potential witnesses.

"I think we need to talk this afternoon. One of the detectives can
bring me up to your office."

"I simply don't have time to do that."

"Don't have time?" A prominent member of the university family was
dead, and I was only hours away from formal confirmation that we were
dealing with a homicide, but Sylvia Foote was stonewalling me already.
"I'll be up at your office by two o'clock."

"I'm sorry I won't be here to discuss this with you today."

"In that case, I'll start with the students over in the political—"

"We'd prefer that the students are not involved in this."

Where was Chapman when I needed him? He'd be telling Foote that
either she could play hardball with him or do this the nice way. He'd
be up there with grand jury subpoenas that she could ignore at her own
risk, or she could cooperate and be treated like a lady. And the first
time she looked down her long crooked nose at him and attempted to
dismiss him with an arrogant order to leave, he'd stick out the
subpoena and tell the sour old bag to take it.

"Not involved? It would be lovely if nobody had to be involved, and
even nicer if Lola Dakota was alive. That's simply not one of your
choices. We're going to have to sit down with you and go over
everything that will need to be done, identify every individual we'll
need to interview and each document we'll need to access."

Laura walked into my office and placed a slip of paper on my desk as
I listened to Foote drone on:
Mickey Diamond is on your other
line. He's looking for confirmation that Dakota's death has been
declared a homicide by the ME.
I shook my head in the negative
and mouthed back to her to get rid of him.

"I've already got the
Post
calling me," I tell Sylvia.
"Somebody's leaked the story to the press and the autopsy hasn't even
been started yet. You'd better give some thought to how the students—
and their parents back home in Missouri and Montana—are going to react
to news of a murder in your comfortable little community. It's going to
get their attention a lot more quickly than the obituary page did." How
would Chapman punctuate that point? "Especially if word gets out that
the president's office is stalling our investigation."

Foote was silent. I expected that she was balancing the reality of
what I was saying against the bet that her old friend Paul Battaglia
would not approve of my heavy-handed style. But she was also smart
enough to know that he would back me in my effort to get to the campus
before Sinnelesi's troops arrived on the scene.

"My office is in the new King's College building on Claremont
Avenue, half a block in from 116th Street. Did you say you could be
here by two?"

I phoned Chapman and told him that since I'd left my Jeep at the
office the night before, I would swing by to get him in front of his
place and head uptown to interview Foote. I told Laura to beep me if
any urgent calls came in, and that I would check with her for messages
when the meeting was over. The ice was still caked thick on the
windshield, and I struggled with the scraper as the defroster worked
slowly to melt it.

Chapman was standing in front of the coffee shop next to his
apartment building on First Avenue. His only concession to the bitter
cold was the fact that he wore a trench coat over the navy blazer that
he had adopted as his uniform once he had been assigned to the
detective bureau. His black hair was blowing wildly in the wind, and he
kept reaching up with his hand to chase it. He opened the passenger
door and got in. "So what else do I need to know about Columbia beside
the fact that its football team sucks?"

"You'll drive Foote crazy if you don't keep it straight that Dakota
was teaching at King's College when she died, not at Columbia. They'll
be very jumpy about that. They use some of the same facilities, and
students enrolled in either school can take courses at the other, but
they are entirely separate institutions."

I had spent a lot of time in Manhattan during my undergraduate
years. My best friend and roommate at Wellesley, Nina Baum, met her
husband, Gabe, when we were sophomores. He was a junior at Columbia,
and I had often accompanied Nina when she came to the city to spend a
weekend with Gabe.

As we drove uptown, I tried to fill Mike in on the bits of college
history that I remembered. Columbia was founded in 1754, by royal
charter of King George II of England, and its original name was King's
College—the name recently adopted by the experimental school that
carved out a piece of the neighborhood for itself at the start of the
new millennium. The university's first building was situated adjacent
to Trinity Church on lower Broadway, and some of its earliest students
included the first chief justice of the United States, John Jay, and
the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. The
institution closed down during the American Revolution, and when it
reopened eight years later, it had shed its imperial name in favor of
"Columbia," the personification of the American determination for
independence.

By 1850, the college had moved to Madison Avenue at Forty-ninth
Street, shaping itself into a modern university by the addition of a
law school to its undergraduate and medical faculties. In 1897, the
campus was moved to its current site in Morningside Heights at Broadway
and 116th Street; this academic village— modeled on the idea of an
Athenian agora—represented the largest single collection of buildings
designed by the great architectural firm of McKim, Mead and White.

"What's with this experimental school thing?"

"I only know what I've read in the news. King's is an effort to set
up an alternative educational model, drawing from a few of the stars of
the Columbia teaching staff, but trying to structure a fresh view of
the process. It borrows some of the stature of the Ivy League
reputation, but it's been spun off on its own, free and clear of the
mother university."