“You know,” Corey said, “there’s a serious weak point in the prosecution’s case. At the time the government building in White Plains was bombed, I—”
Elihu cut him off almost savagely. “You were never charged with that bombing, and I don’t want to hear anything more about it. At least not from your lips.”
Corey gazed at his attorney shrewdly. A breath lifted his tailored jacket. “As you wish. Perhaps you’re right.”
By the time Elihu stepped out of the state detention center, evening had sunk into night. He hurried north on Centre Street. Raindrops licked lightly at his face. He opened his umbrella. It wasn’t till Canal Street that he managed to find a phone with its armored, vandal-proof cord still intact.
He didn’t have exact change, so he dropped three dimes into the coin slot. It killed him to give Ma Bell the extra nickel. He tapped seven digits into the stainless-steel keypad.
A woman’s voice answered on the fifth ring. “Hello?” The tone was distinctly unwelcoming.
“Alicia? Dotson. Emergency. Can I come over?”
“I wish you wouldn’t. I have guests for dinner.”
“And you didn’t invite me?”
“You’re a rotten conversationalist, Dotson. You pontificate.”
“Alicia, be kind to an old bore. This will only take a moment.”
Seven minutes later Dotson Elihu, badly winded, rapped on a Chinese-red door on the fourth story of a loft building on lower Broadway. A tall, frowning woman let him in. With her bobbed black hair and hipless shimmy dress and jangling loops of ceramic beads, Alicia Mordaunt could have stepped out of a snapshot album of Jazz Age flappers.
“Well?”
He handed her the videotape. “Part of it’s been erased and I need to know what it was.”
She led him down the corridor, past drunken laughter into a workroom paneled in perforated gray industrial soundproofing. State-of-the-art electronic gear, computers, and monitors were stacked from floor to ceiling.
She slipped the tape into a VCR. Watching on a monitor, she fast-forwarded to the patch of snow. “They recorded TV static over the original signals. It’s either an accident or a very low-tech job. They obviously didn’t have a magnetic eraser.”
“Can you restore the signals they recorded over?”
“Let’s see.” She twisted dials and replayed. Ghost silhouettes flickered through the snow. Faint disembodied voices moaned beneath the white noise. “I may be able to pull up a degraded signal.”
“How soon?”
The man with the shaved head slipped a plastic bag over his left boot. Then another over his right boot. He knotted both bags securely.
Throwing open the door of the darkened Pontiac, he pushed the U.S. government mail sack halfway out. The warm night air, choked with exhaust, swirled up to greet him.
He climbed over the sack. Grunting and tugging, he pulled it the rest of the way out.
Now he waited, eyes scanning, double-checking the darkness. Droplets of drizzle floated down, dewing his forearms and face.
Trees in leaf blocked the view from West End Avenue. Across the Hudson River, a co-op tower sequined with windows pillared the New Jersey sky.
Behind him, tires sang on the roadway of the West Side Highway.
He bent and hefted the mail sack up over his left shoulder. The ground beneath his boots made a faint squishing sound. It had the consistency of rotting newsprint laid over decomposing animals.
He carried the sack ten feet to the fence of the Sixtieth Street Terminal Conrail yard. He set it on the ground and undid the steel fasteners. He slid the canvas down. It made a silken sound slipping away from the Glad double-thick plastic mesh-reinforced thirty-gallon trash bags.
Using the blade of a box cutter, he slashed through the belt of mover’s tape.
He peeled one black garbage bag up from her waist, over her torso, and off her head.
Sitting there still half-bagged on the damp ground, leaning against the fence, she had a wounded expression in her eyes. It could have been a plea for protection. It could have been an invitation to abuse.
He laid her down and yanked the other bag off her legs and feet. His surgical gloves squeaked. Gripping her around the waist, he turned her so she faced the chain link. He pushed her up. Her torso flopped forward into the barbed top rail.
A dog barked in the distance and another dog took up the refrain. The windows in the watchman’s building stayed dark. He nudged her farther. Gave a thrust. Wire twanged as she went over.
THIRTEEN
Thursday, September 19
Second day of trial
7:25 A.M.
L
IEUTENANT VINCE CARDOZO PULLED
his Honda to a stop outside the West 70th Street entrance to the Conrail yard. He propped his NYPD placard in the windshield.
Two plainclothesmen were canvassing parked cars, writing down license plate numbers.
Across the street a dozen squad cars and unmarked cars were jammed nose-to-nose like a twenty-car smashup. The rotating beacon on an ambulance was flashing.
The usual crowd of rubberneckers had gathered, standing about, waiting for someone to tell them what all the fuss was. TV news trucks had started arriving and reporters and cameramen were trying to talk their way past the police cordon.
Cardozo showed his shield. The young-looking sergeant entered his name, shield number, and time of arrival in the crime scene log.
“Where is she?”
“Right over there, Lieutenant.” The sergeant pointed toward the steel-chain gate.
Crime scene tape and sawhorses cordoned off two hundred square yards inside and outside the rail yard. Detectives were poking hands and ballpoint pens and sticks and flashlights into every inch of the area, plastic-bagging anything that looked remotely like physical evidence. Forensic men crouched, scratching rocks with instruments that resembled dental probes. Photographers were snapping flash photos. Print technicians were pouring plaster of paris into footprints in the mud; others spray-gunned the chain-link fence with black powder and dusted with small brushes—not an easy job in the open air, with unpredictable breezes whipping off the Hudson River.
They had all done this job so many times before that there was nothing that needed saying or asking; they worked in grim silence, except for a detective with a tape measure, shouting out figures to another detective, who noted them on a sketch of the crime scene.
A stocky man with an almost bald head disengaged himself from the group and came forward. Cardozo recognized Lou Stein from Manhattan forensics.
“She’s over here, Vince.” Lou led him to the edge of the yard, where the crowd clustered thickest.
“What do we know?”
“Her badge says she’s Britta Bailey. All we need is you to give us the final word.”
Technicians and medical personnel made room for them. A body-bagged bundle the size of a huddled adult lay on a stretcher on the garbage-littered ground. Lou Stein’s gloved hand raised the black plastic flap.
Cardozo stared down into the face of a uniformed female police officer. A spike of ice drove through his lower intestine. The dove-colored eyes of Britta Bailey stared back at him.
“It’s Britta.” He wanted to close his eyes. “How long do you figure she’s been dead?”
“Rough estimate,” Lou said, “nine, ten hours.”
Dotson Elihu walked to the witness stand slowly, with a troubled expression. “Did you read Mickey Williams his Miranda rights?”
Tess diAngeli’s chair screeched. “Objection!”
“Sustained,” Judge Bernheim ruled. “Counselor, limit your questions to material raised in direct.”
“Sorry, your Honor.” Elihu’s eyes glided back to the witness. “Was Mickey Williams’s lawyer present when that tape was made?”
“Objection.”
“Overruled.”
“When those segments were taped,” Harkness Lamont said, “I don’t recall a lawyer on hand to represent Mr. Williams.”
“Mr. Lamont, can a prosecution be brought on the basis of a confession obtained in the absence of a lawyer representing the accused?”
The witness glanced toward Tess diAngeli. She made no move to object. “Only if the accused has waived his privilege.”
“And did Mickey Williams waive his privilege?”
“Objection,” diAngeli said. “Irrelevant.”
“Your Honor …” Elihu turned toward the bench. “It’s hardly irrelevant to the jury’s understanding of the government’s legal strategy and the selective nature of this prosecution.”
“Objection sustained,” Judge Bernheim said. “There is a proper time and proper way for the defense to raise that point.”
Elihu was silent for a moment. “If Mickey Williams did not waive his privilege, isn’t it a fact that no prosecution can ever be brought against him—even though he confessed to the very crimes of which you now accuse Dr. Lyle?”
“Objection.” DiAngeli leaped up. “Argumentative, hypothetical, repetitive.”
“Sustained, sustained, sustained.”
Elihu stood still a moment. “Why did you wait three weeks after the Briars’ deaths before you questioned Dr. Lyle?”
“Investigations sometimes move slowly.”
Elihu stepped back. An artist taking a longer view of his subject. “Did you subpoena Dr. Lyle before questioning him?”
“Of course not.” There was surprising venom in those three words. Something had broken through the assistant D.A.’s facade.
“Why do you say ‘of course not’ as though it should be obvious? It’s not obvious to me. And I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t one or two members of the jury it’s not so obvious to either.”
“It should be obvious,” the witness said evenly, “from the fact that there was no attorney present. If we had subpoenaed Corey Lyle, he would have had an attorney with him.”
“And wasn’t that the last thing you wanted?”
“I have no particular wants in that area.”
“Was Dr. Lyle under arrest when you questioned him?”
“No.”
“Then how did he happen to be in the police station? Did he just walk in?”
“So far as I know, yes. He said he wanted to talk with the attorney who had questioned Mr. Williams. Who happened to be me.”
“But Dr. Lyle didn’t say why he wanted this talk? He didn’t say, ‘I have come to confess to the crime that Mickey Williams committed’?”
“No, Corey Lyle did not say he had come to confess to any crime. Not at first. Not in so many words.”
“The locale on that tape, what I could see of it, didn’t look like a precinct. Was it a hotel?”
“The Gotham Squire Inn.”
Elihu crossed to the defense table. He picked up a stack of what looked like room service orders. “And while you and Dr. Lyle were at this hotel, did you happen to order … drinks?”
The witness glanced at the papers in Elihu’s hand and then at the prosecutor. “We did.”
“How many drinks did you see the defendant consume?”
“I believe he had eighteen Scotch and sodas over a ten-hour period. Which surprised me because I’d heard he was religious and I’d have thought liquor was against his convictions.”
“Is Benedictine against the pope’s convictions, Mr. Lamont?”
“Objection.”
“Sustained.”
Elihu fanned through the stack of papers. “Did you succeed in getting a formal confession out of Dr. Lyle?”
“As the videotape shows, he gave us good grounds for charging him with murder.”
“In other words, even after you’d been drinking all night with Dr. Lyle, you still couldn’t get a confession out of him—not even a drunken one.
Then why in God’s name charge him, when you already have a clear confession from Mickey Williams
?”
Lamont pulled back in the chair. “Because—in the first place—Corey Lyle admitted to being an accessory before the fact, which is legally the same as committing the crime himself. And in the second place, Mr. Williams’s confession did not tell the whole story.”
“Now let me get this straight. Was Mr. Williams holding back information?”
“Mr. Williams didn’t have full knowledge of the circumstances or of his acts.”
“Mickey Williams didn’t have full knowledge of his
own acts
? On the snippets of tape that the prosecution has allowed us to see, he tells you he deliberately murdered two human beings. Are you saying Mickey Williams was
lying
?”
“No, I am not saying he was lying.”
“Are you saying his testimony is a delusion?”
“No, I am not saying that.”
“If Mickey Williams’s testimony is not a lie, not a delusion …” Elihu’s hands clamped back on to the brass railing. “Then why, sir, isn’t
he
being prosecuted for his acts?”
“The reason we’re not prosecuting Mickey Williams is that at the time of the murders, he was hypnotized.”
A flurry passed through the courtroom.
From the expression on Elihu’s face, it was obvious he had not expected the answer. “Your Honor, for the moment I have no further questions of this witness, but in view of the videotaped record of his astonishing professional misconduct—”
“Objection to that characterization!” DiAngeli cried. “Mr. Lamont is not on trial!”
Elihu wheeled around. “After today he sure as hell ought to be!”
“Objection, prejudicial!”
“Look, let’s keep on track,” Judge Bernheim said. “Mr. Elihu, kindly moderate your tone. You said you have no further questions of this witness?”
“Not at this point, Your Honor.” Elihu glowered at Harkness Lamont. “But the defense will be recalling him as a hostile witness.”
Vince Cardozo leaned back in his swivel chair, one foot propped on an open desk drawer, and studied Sergeant Britta Bailey’s two notebooks. She had been carrying both of them in her jacket at the time of her death.
When he opened the newer one, a small piece of yellowed newsprint, neatly scissored, fell out.
Virgo Aug. 23–Sep. 22:
Look beyond immediate boundaries in love, creative endeavor, finance; present appearance of chaos masks future security.
He wondered why the hell Britta would have kept an ancient magazine horoscope. He turned it over. The other side was a black-and-white photograph of Mickey Williams, grinning and healthy, looking very much the football bruiser in his business suit. Only a portion of the caption had survived Britta’s scissors:
MICKEY WILLIAMS, FORMER STAR HOUSTON OILERS RUNNING