The doorman rang my intercom shortly before seven-thirty on Wednesday morning to tell me that Dr. Mitchell was on his way upstairs and would like me to meet him in his apartment in five minutes. I had been up for almost an hour, getting ready to go to work and browsing through the Times for what seemed like the first day in more than a week. It helped greatly to put my personal situation in perspective to read that there had been yet another Ebola virus outbreak in Central Africa, a new Serbian uprising in a part of the Balkans I’d never heard of, and a recent discovery of mass graves containing hundreds of unidentified bodies in Guatemala. Humphrey Bogart was right: my problems don’t amount to a hill of beans in a world as full of trouble as this one.
David was just unleashing Prozac after their walk when I opened the door to his apartment. The dog greeted me warmly and we played tug-of-war with her chewed-up rawhide toy while David went into the kitchen to get the pot of coffee he had set up before going out to run. She nosed her way into my hand and invited me to rub behind her soft ears, and I was grateful for her early-morning display of affection.
We sat at David’s dining-room table and I spread out some of the papers for him to see. I began by summarizing the events of the week and trying to give him an objective overview of the cast of characters that was developing. As David studied the letters of Dr. Cordelia Jeffers, I glanced around the apartment, amused at the contrast in our decors.
Mine was as utterly feminine as his was masculine, with every surface here bathed in brown, except those that were beige or tan. He had been a bachelor for too long and I instinctively began redecorating in my mind’s eye as I waited for some kind of response to Isabella’s bizarre correspondence.
“I suppose the police have checked this woman’s credentials with the Brits.”
“I haven’t heard any results on that yet.”
“I did some work with the president of the Academy when I was at Ditchley last year. I can call him today and try to get some information, but from the looks of these letters, I’d guess she’s a fraud. This just seems like a lot of gibberish to me. Dr. Jeffers may be a bit senile and dotty, or else she’s taken on the traits of one of her patients. She sounds more like someone in need of treatment than a physician. Can I hold on to these letters?“
I shouldn’t even be showing them to anyone, I reminded myself.
“They’re my only copy, David. I’ll Xerox them at the office and get a set to you tonight, after I tell Chapman to get the lieutenant’s permission to consult a shrink.
“But it would be great if you make the call to find out where this woman is and what kind of practice she has. Then we can interview her about Isabella.”
“I’ll do that as soon as I get to the office, before they close shop in London for the evening. We’ll talk tonight?”
“Yeah. Why don’t you call me. I can promise you won’t be interrupting anything.”
I hailed a yellow cab on the corner of Third Avenue and directed the driver to take me to the Criminal Court Building by way of the FDR Drive.
“Know where the courthouse is?”
“Yeah.”
Always a bad sign, it usually meant that the driver had a criminal record.
“You a lawyer?” he asked, looking me over through the rearview mirror.
Most cabbies asked that question when they picked me up or dropped me off in front of the building, hoping for free advice about their immigration status, moving violations, or arrests for assault.
“No. I’m going to court to testify. I was raped.” A surefire way to end the conversation and allow me to finish perusing the paper the rest of the way downtown, as the driver took another peek in the mirror to see what one of those looked like.
I was later than usual so the elevators and hallways were bustling with prosecutors and witnesses. A heavyset uniformed cop, pushing retirement age, stepped out of my way as I turned into the eighth-floor corridor.
“Hey, Miss Cooper. How ya doin‘?
“Remember me? I had that rape case with you in ‘92.”
“Nice to see you. Sure.” I had only talked to a thousand or more cops about a thousand or more rape cases since then.
Give me a hint.
Laura was at her desk when I walked in.
“You don’t want to know who’s been calling, I guess.”
“Not if it’s more of the same from Jed.”
“Okay. There were a few others. Mercer just called. Said he was going out in the field and he’d try you again when he got back. They had a 911 call, something to do with the Con Ed rapist. Not a new case, just a possible suspect. Sarah needs to speak to you she’s got a question about a search warrant. And Elaine called from Escada. The suit you ordered came in. Can you get to the store to try it on?”
“Just ship it. I’ll never get there.”
I started working on my third cup of coffee, called Sarah and several of the other assistants who had e-mailed for help, then spent some time responding to some of the mail that had accumulated on my desk. When I finished, I told Laura I’d be upstairs watching one of the newer members of the unit deliver his first summation. I took a legal pad and went to the trial part on the fifteenth floor, where I sat in the rear of the room to make notes for the critique I would do after the verdict came in on the case.
For the better part of an hour I listened to the defense attorney drone on about his version of the facts of the case. It was a date rape and therefore automatically – a difficult trial. Sarah and I had prepared our newest recruit, Mark Acciano, for the problems he would have to confront before the jury. Most people considered this kind of case far less serious than stranger rapes, and trying to educate jurors during the course of the trial – if the ones with that attitude had not been identified and dismissed during the jury selection process – was next to impossible.
Unlike cases in which victims were attacked by armed assailants they had never seen before, the typical date rape involved two people who were together because they liked each other, and wanted to be in each other’s company. Many psychologists called them ‘confidence rapes because they occurred when a woman placed her trust in someone she felt she would be secure with, who then betrayed that reliance. While jurors tend to empathize with women who are raped by strangers, they are much tougher in these date cases, in which defense attorneys try to blame the victims for their participation in the events leading up to the sexual acts. The typical strategy is to attack the victim for every aspect of her lifestyle, from her manner of dress to her alcohol or drug use to her initial attraction – to the defendant that must have meant that she ’asked for it.“ They were ugly cases to try.
When the defense attorney sat down, Mark rose to make his closing argument. First, he marshaled all the evidence in the case, detailing every word and act that the complaining witness had described about her assailant during the course of the several hours he spent in her apartment when they had returned there after a dinner date. Mark was candid about the weak spots – how much liquor she had consumed, how much foreplay she had consented to but firm about the fact that neither of those factors gave the defendant a license to force her her to have intercourse with him. As Sarah and I had coached, he was graphic and emphatic about the defendant’s threats, and about the force with which he had restrained his prey when she had tried to resist and escape his attack.
The victim’s outcry had been prompt, which is somewhat unusual in many date rape cases when women are conflicted about whether to report the crime, fearful of not being believed. The medical record was a useful tool in this case, and Mark took the jury through it carefully. The finger marks on the young woman’s wrists and inner thighs corroborated her story about the defendant’s application of pressure – no, she hadn’t been beaten and bruised, but she had been held down against her will, and these marks did not support his story of tender lovemaking.
The internal exam had revealed redness and swelling in the vaginal vault, with several very minor abrasions noted on the accompanying diagram, again inconsistent with the protection afforded by lubrication during consensual sex.
I was impressed with the construction of Mark’s argument, and with the manner in which he made the jury confront the unpleasant details that established the elements of the crime. These were cases that had little to do with the business of a police investigation, but rather rose and fell based on the candor and credibility of the
