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Izzy should rest in peace she's a greedy little bitch."
14
"Want to grab some coffee before I go downtown to my office?" I said to Mike.
"Nah. I'll go up to the squad and put in a few hours."
"So how come you didn't ask him about the monitors in his apartment?"
"He was holding your hand, not mine. I thought you'd get to it. That's not
homicide work, that's some kind of Peeping Tom stuff, right up your alley."
Mike was a detail guy. It was rare for him to let a single fact slip from his
grasp. It was even more unusual for him to turn down my offer of a free
breakfast.
"Are you going to talk to Mona?" I asked.
"About what? Right now all I'm interested in is who else saw Natalya Galinova
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before she disappeared and why her personal life seemed to be in such
turmoil."
"I'll be in my office if you want anything," I said, hailing a Yellow Cab on
the corner of Tenth Avenue and 59th Street.
It was only eight fifteen when I bought two cups of black coffee from the cart
on the corner of the Hogan Place entrance to the court-house. I scanned my
I.D. card and pushed through the turnstile, greeting the cop whose fixed post
was security in the cramped lobby of the District Attorney's Office.
The eighth-floor corridor was still empty when I pushed open the anteroom
door, passing my secretary's desk and turning on the lights in my office. I
had left hurriedly on Friday evening to get to work with Mercer on the Jean
Eakens case up at the Special Victims Squad. The case memos and screening
sheets from the forty senior assistants who worked in my unit were still
scattered on my desktop for review and response, so I spent time making
comments on them until the phones started ringing at nine.
Half of the morning was occupied with phone calls to press for special
attention to the new cases. I needed the toxicologist to do the routine drug
screening in the Eakens case, but also to be aware that Xanax had been
recovered from the doctor's kitchen counter. I begged the chief serologist to
rush the DNA profile from the blood on the teeth of the dog who saved his
owner from a rape in Riverside Park. A match to a known felon would launch a
search that might prevent other women from being victimized.
I had no official role in the death investigation of Natalya Galinova, but
knew that Mike could navigate the most professional medical examiner's office
in the country with a skill that would produce the best results possible in a
timely fashion.
At eleven, after I had set my secretary, Laura, to work on some
correspondence, I walked across the hall to the executive wing, to see whether
Rose Malone, the district attorney's assistant, could fit me into his
schedule. I waited through a series of phone calls from the governor and
several lesser public officials before I was summoned into the large office
from which Paul Battaglia supervised the work of the six hundred lawyers on
his staff.
There wasn't an hour of the day or night that Battaglia was without a cigar
stub in his mouth. He could talk straight for thirty minutes without hobbling
the unlit Cohiba that was stuck to his lips, and when he was actually smoking,
as he was now, he would remove it occasionally to waft a ribbon of smoke in my
direction.
"Good morning, Paul. Thanks for giving me some time. There are a couple of new
cases that are likely to get some ink, that I thought you'd want to know
about."
"Like what?" he asked, drawing back one side of his lipand speaking out of the
corner of his mouth.
"Like a physician who drugged two women in order to rape them. Canadian
tourists."
The press always played up the foreign element in crime stories. Politicians
hated any mentions that might scare people away from the city's most
profitable industry. "And the good news is that we finally have DNA from the
Riverside rapist, so we're likely to have a profile to put in the databank by
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midweek."
I expected his usual barrage of precise questions about the pedigree of the
doctor who'd been arrested or the breed of the heroic dog. "You think I think
that's why you're in here to see me?"
I blushed and that drew a wide smile around the cigar clenched in his teeth.
"The commissioner called me about the Galinova woman. He seems to know that
you were up at the crime scene." [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]