explained it all.
“Then he was back this morning. I’m telling you I never got my mail so early as this week. He’s got a box for me, no return label. So he tells me it looks suspicious. I see it’s got a postmark from Philly, and I know it’s my cousin Muriel, sending me the sucking candies I like. She never puts a return address in case there’s not enough postage on it, she doesn’t want it coming back to her. Wants me to pay it. But no, Oscar says he has to search me and then see the candy for himself. This time, he puts his hand inside my blouse and actually touches my breast. Can you believe it? I smacked him across the face and stepped inside and bolted the door. Never even got the candy.”
I asked some more questions and told Miss Firkin that I would like her to wait in our reception area while I called the Post Office.
“I already did that, Miss Cooper. No new rules. Oscar was full of baloney thought he had an easy mark, just ‘cause I like my packages. They don’t have any new rules like that.”
I hadn’t thought they were actually new rules, but I did want to check to see if Oscar was, in fact, an employee of the United States Government. Laura got Angela a seat down the hall and a cold drink, and I made my calls.
Yes, there was an Oscar Lanier and indeed that was his postal route, although he was only a probationary worker at the moment. Just to satisfy my curiosity, I punched his name into the criminal justice computer network AJIS and within seconds, got the response that Lanier had a misdemeanor conviction earlier this year in Queens County. Not surprisingly, it was for sexual abuse.
My next call was to the head of the Special Victims Bureau in the Queens District Attorney’s Office. I explained the story and asked her to tell me what the case was about.
Fifteen minutes later, she called back to let me know that Oscar’s previous job had been as an airport security guard ttorney pert on mestic ises as Jogger her the jghest ith her at JFK. He was arrested after several women passengers complained that he took them out of line, into his office, and tried to do a body cavity search, looking for smuggled drugs. Fired, convicted, and rehired by the United States Post Office, all within the last six months. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.
I brought Angela back in, reassured her that this particular postman would not ring a third time, and told her that I would assign a female detective to work with her on the case. After she left, I made the necessary calls to arrange a temporary suspension of Lanier while we investigated the matter. It was almost five o’clock by the time I finished those details and attended to the rest of the paperwork on my desk.
Mark Acciano called to say that the judge would keep his jury only until ten this evening, and if there was no verdict by that time, he’d declare a mistrial. I tried to shore up his spirits, and told him I’d stick it out with him as long as there were no developments on the Montvale case.
Laura asked if she could leave a bit early to go to the dentist, and I told her I would get the phones myself. I sat at my desk, going through the pile of mail that had come with the afternoon delivery. Two demands for letters advising the Parole Board what position our office would take on cases coming before them next month, one request to lecture to a women’s group at a college in Pennsylvania, and several offers to test software programs designed to expedite the preparation of lawyer’s briefs were on the top of the stack.
Wedged in between the legal-sized envelopes that I had been opening was a small letter that appeared to be a personal note. It was stamped but had no postmark, and I guessed that it had been delivered by hand. I slit it open with the narrow point of a pair of desk scissors and unfolded the page of single-spaced typed correspondence.
It began with the salutation “My dearest Alexandra,” and my eye flipped immediately to the bottom of the paper to see the closing that was identical to the one on the papers Isabella had received: “Best ever, Cordelia Jeffers, Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine.”
My thoughts scattered in a dozen directions. I was mad at myself for touching the letter and envelope, which may have yielded fingerprints if I had not smudged them; I wanted to have Mike or David or anyone else who knew the case sitting beside me as I read through the text; I wondered whether to march directly into Battaglia’s office and tell him I was in over my head; and yet I couldn’t stop myself from reading on.
My dearest Alexandra, I debated about sending this to you at your office or your fancy apartment, but I didn’t know if you’d notice it at home among the dozens of yellow roses that our mutual friend continues to waste his money on.
Sometimes, my clever girl, your actions do surprise me. Didn’t you find it degrading, and I do mean thoroughly humiliating, to have him leaping into bed with that vacant slut, that Cleopatra-like whore you were stupid enough to befriend? And yet, thereafter you remained so desperate for his companionship that you accept rides in his limousine and let him try to wheedle his way back into your good graces. Deny him the help he seeks, he needs it not.
Like her before you, you will be shocked to find that the woman he truly loves is not your equal not in physical appearance, not social status or material wealth, not even in professional recognition in her chosen field.
As you know, women do crazy things in the name of love, and crazier still when they sense the beloved slipping away, becoming ambivalent. orne Wasn’t it the immortal Bard who said “One may crt on smile and smile and be a villain?” Keep that in mind estic and yield not to temptation. es as Best ever, ogge Cordelia Jeffers;r the Fellow, Royal Academy of Medicine lies h her I read it three times to try to make it make sense. How did this woman, this person, know the things she talked about in the letter? The yellow roses, my short ride across town in Jed’s limo, his pleas for help these last few days, his betrayal of me with Isabella. I surely didn’t believe in psychics, but could I have been unaware that someone was actually following me wherever I went? Not possible.
Then that paragraph that mirrors one in Isabella’s letter, referring to the woman Jed really loves. Again, I was completely puzzled by its meaning.
Who was the beloved that Jed was slipping away from?
Who was he becoming ambivalent about? Could this possibly be his ex-wife, now bitter about their estrangement?
I had never even suggested that to Chapman. All I knew about her was that like many other women, she was unhappy in marriage and unhappier still in divorce. Why hadn’t I asked more questions about her? I called the guard at the security desk to see if he remembered anyone leaving an envelope with him earlier in the day. He reminded me that the shifts had changed at four o’clock, when he had come on duty, and nothing except deliveries from Police Headquarters had been dropped at his station. I’d have to check with the day shift tomorrow morning.
Mike Chapman and David Mitchell needed to know about this letter at once. I called David’s office and got the answering machine. I left a message, expecting that he would pick it up soon, since he was supposed to be there to meet Jed sometime within the next two hours, and I told him I would fax a copy of the letter to him before I left the office.
I tried Mike but he wasn’t at the squad yet, so I hung up and walked down the hall to use the fax machine outside of Rod’s conference room. As I walked back to my desk, I could hear the phone ringing and I ran to pick it up.
“We popped the motherfucker, Coop. We’re in business.”
“Mercer? How’d you do it?”
“Seems like the last thing he did before he left prison was get himself an ATM card. A Metro Bank cash card. I got that info from the prison this morning. I called the bank and told them to stop the card, figuring he had to get cash if he was gonna be on the run. He tried three machines, got a ”Card not valid“ printout. Picked up the courtesy phone and called the bank hot line. The branch manager told him to come in at four-thirty, after the regular banking was closed at our direction that there must have been a defect in the card.
Manager called me back, and a few of us from the squad kept that appointment with him. It gives new meaning to the word “surprise.”
“That is fantastic. Where are you now?”
“Still at the bank. Listen, take your time. We’ll take him back over to my office and process him.” Photographs, fingerprints, palm prints, background information.
“The boss’ll start assigning guys to call the victims and pick ‘em up for the line-ups. I’ll chat him up, nice and easy, see if he wants to talk to my favorite prosecutor, tell her why he likes to do this shit to women. You go
