home, get comfortable they it’s gonna be a long evening and get yourself over to the t on office by seven, seven- thirty. Sound okay?” “Perfect. I’ll just go home and change, then be right there.; as Let me know if there’s anything you need.” rger “You got somebody who can work on a search warrant the for his mother’s place while you’re up with us? See if any est of his clothing, any of the women’s jewelry’s there?” her “No problem. I can phone it in when I’m over with you.
It’s all on the word processor in ECAB, our early case assessment bureau, where whoever was on duty could help me through the evening’s paperwork.
“And, Mercer? One more thing. Can you control your boss on this? No perp walk. Please, beg him for me. Not before the victims have a chance to see the line-up. Take him into the station house with a jacket over his head, will you?”
“You bet. See you later.”
Publicity on these cases could get out of control. Too often, police brass staged a scene taking a suspect in or out of the patrol car, resulting in the defendant’s face being plastered all over the local TV and newspapers. For those victims who saw the ‘perp walk’ before they got to view a formal line-up, it often meant that defense attorneys challenged the propriety of the identification process, and the victim was barred from pointing out her attacker at the trial.
We were too close to a great result to screw it up now.
I packed up all the supplies I would need to run the investigation from Mercer’s office, left Laura a note telling her I might be late in the morning depending on how long I had to be at the precinct throughout the night and called Rose Malone.
“Is Battaglia in?”
“He’s in a meeting, Alex. He’s got the governor’s Criminal Justice Coordinator in there. Do you want me to interrupt?”
“Nope. Just wanted him to be the first to know that we think we’ve got the Con Ed rapist. Tell him I’m going out on the case myself to do the line-ups and try to take a statement. He’ll get a complete briefing in the morning.”
“Congratulations, Alex. He’ll be really pleased. I’ll put you in his book for lunch. I’m sure he’ll want to hear all the details.”
“Thanks, Rose.” I hope I’m here in time for lunch. This kind of case could be an allnighter, by the time we round up the witnesses and get the video team up to the squad.
My last call was to the video technicians. For most of the history of police work, statements or admissions made by suspects in criminal cases were recorded by officers in their notepads. Then for several decades, our office used stenographers who accompanied us on call and took down, verbatim, the questions and answers of an interrogation, to read back to a jury at trial. For almost twenty years in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, we had developed a sophisticated unit of trained video professionals, who taped these critical sessions always with the knowledge and consent of the accused whenever a defendant was willing to participate.
This process eliminated the age-old complaint about police interrogations: that the cops coerced or beat the confessions out of the suspects. Instead, the video camera captured the entire scene. The defendant sitting calmly at a table in a detective’s office, unshackled and unharmed, often munching on a doughnut and drinking a Sprite while the prosecutor repeated the Miranda warnings and got his informed consent to go ahead without a lawyer present.
I can remember the first time I went out on call with irne a cameraman, incredulous that any criminal would agree to film a confession to a crime and have it permanently.stic recorded for use against him in the case. I read the guy his.5 as rights, showed him the camera, and explained its purpose. gger Instead of refusing to go forward, he sat up straight, r the combed his hair and reset his baseball cap neatly on his head for the movies, and spoke into the microphone as if her it was his finest moment in the spotlight. I think that jury finished its deliberations in about twenty minutes. Guilty.
Bob Bannion answered the phone in the tech office.
“Great, I never dreamed I’d be lucky enough to get you tonight,” I said when he picked up. Bannion had started the system for us and he was superb at his work. He was a pro, with a keen, dry sense of humor, which helped get you through a long night in a squad room. Bob was also on call for any homicides or major cases that occurred in the next twelve hours, so I was delighted to try and wrap him up first. I explained a bit about the job we would be working on so he knew what to expect.
“Anything else cooking, or can I ask you to meet me at Special Victims by nine tonight?”
“I’m just on my way to film a crime scene. Multiple homicide in Alphabet City,” the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where the streets were named avenues A, B, and C. “Looks like a couple of teens in a wild shoot-out. I No arrests yet and nothing even close for tonight, but Rod I asked me to do some interior shots of the apartment.” One of the valuable techniques Bob had developed was making videos of crime scenes as soon as they were discovered, so that there would be a permanent record of every detail in its place. The importance of objects or clues near a murder victim often did not become obvious until much later in the investigation, when detectives could refer back to their original relationship to the bodies or the evidence by looking at the video.
“When you’re done there, will you come on up to Eighty-second Street? They’ll be starting with the line-ups, so there’s no need to rush. I’ll beep you to call it off if he’s not talking. The guy’s a predicate, so maybe he’s smart enough to keep his mouth shut. Give me a call if you get anything hotter than this, okay?” Predicate felons criminals with records of convictions for serious offenses often were savvy enough not to make admissions that would help sink them before a jury.
I ran out the door and had jumped into a taxi by the time I got to the corner of Worth Street, prepared to creep along the Drive uptown at the height of rush hour to get to my apartment. I brushed past the doorman, skipped the mailbox, waited with several of the neighbors to get on the elevator, and was inside my bedroom and stripping off my work clothes in seconds. I changed into a pair of jeans, a tailored shirt, and a blazer for the long evening of sitting on coffee-littered desktops and making notes while propped against dusty file cabinets. No need for a pocketbook I clipped my beeper onto my belt and stuffed cash into my jacket so I could send out for food and soda for the crew working on the case throughout the course of the evening.
My turn-around time was less than twenty minutes. I thought about calling David’s office to see if he had studied the faxed version of Cordelia Jeffers’s letter, but when I looked at my watch and saw that it was a few minutes after seven o’clock, I didn’t want to risk calling just as Jed arrived to meet with him. Instead, I left a message on David’s home machine, explaining where I would be for most of the evening and that I would try to reach him orne if I had any free time at the station house.
I went back downstairs and out onto the street, grabbed a yellow cab and directed the driver across the Eighty-fifth Street transverse to Columbus Avenue, and got out at the corner of Eighty-second to walk the short distance to the Twentieth Precinct. The uniformed cop at the front desk stopped me as I entered the building, so I identified myself to him and walked up the two flights to the Special Victims Squad, which had come to feel like my second home during the past few years.
Every felony sexual assault that occurred on the island of Manhattan was referred to this little outpost of seasoned professionals.
When I reached the landing, I pushed open the heavy fire doors that separated the ugly brown-tiled stairwells from the dilapidated office space of the thirty-year-old squad.
The place was electric with the activity that accompanies a break in a major case. Detectives in every shape, size, and color had been pulled in from days off and borrowed from other details to help round up victims, witnesses, and the stand-ins or fillers needed to be the ringers in the line-up array with the defendant. Every shirtsleeve was rolled up, every collar was open, and the handful of ties I could see were unknotted and worn in the loose crisscross fashion on of the detective world. esti “Hey, Wallace, Cooper’s here,” I heard a guy I didn’t es as recognize call out in the direction of the sergeant’s office. 3gger Mercer appeared in the door frame and waved me;r the in. I started to offer my congratulations, but he talked best over me.
“The captain is really pissed off. Stay out of h her his way.”
“At me? What did I do? I just got here.”
“He did not like your order about the perp walk. Thinks you’re just doing that so that Battaglia can get the press release instead of the PD. He’s mad at me for letting you know about it so early didn’t want me to call you till we’d wrapped everything up tonight.”
