''To be, or not to be: that is the question.''
'Wrong play,' I said. 'Look, is there-'
''There's the rub-that sleep of death-the shuffling off of this mortal coil,'' Mike said, doing his Hamlet with a vodka gimlet in one hand. 'Hate to do this to you, Jake, but the next dance is mine. It's the kills again. Always the kills.'
'What? Make sense for a change, Mike. Stop joking with me,' I said.
'There's been another homicide.'
He downed his drink and stepped to the bar to replace his glass.
'Not Dulles?' I covered my hand with my mouth, relieved to see Mike shaking his head as he swallowed.
'This one's going to hit you hard, Coop. C'mon with me-I'm on my way to the First Precinct,' he said, reaching out and taking me by the hand. 'Paige Vallis has been murdered.'
16
I couldn't grasp the fact that Paige Vallis was dead. And I couldn't stop thinking that Andrew Tripping had the best reason to kill her.
Mike led me up the two flights of stairs to the squad room. I assumed from the somber-faced team of detectives who greeted me that they knew how personally shattered I would be by the death of my own witness.
Over and over again, I played in my mind the words that Judge Moffett had said at the start of Andrew Tripping's trial:
He hasn't killed anyone, I had thought. Not that I could prove.
The questions I had thrown at Mike on the long ride down to the southernmost station house on the island of Manhattan, none of which he could answer, were the things we started with now.
'Do we have a time of death on this?' I asked, after saying hello to some of the guys I recognized and had worked with before. No one answered.
'Who's in charge here?' Mike asked.
We were out of his territory now, on the turf of the Manhattan South Homicide Squad. There wasn't a man in the room who took pleasure in being second-guessed by a colleague from the north, or a prosecutor in a black couture dress and peau-de-soie shoes with three-inch heels.
'Yo, Squeeks. You the man?' Mike said, pointing to a guy who was hanging up a phone on a desk in the rear of the room.
Will Squeekist had been a detective in Narcotics for five years before a recent promotion to Homicide. The nickname that Mike had given him when they were in the academy years earlier had stuck, and fit the small- framed man with a high-pitched voice.
'Come on back here. Let's get started,' Squeeks called out to us. 'Hey, Alex, how you been?'
'Doing fine until this news.'
'Sit down,' he said, stepping away from his desk chair and turning it over to me. Space was at a premium in the outdated old squad rooms of most precincts.
'No, thanks. Stay where you are,' I said, refusing the offer.
'I need to have my back to the guys while I say a couple of things to you. Get something off my chest. Do me a favor and sit down.'
Squeeks went around the desk so that he could talk directly into my face. 'Sorry about the frigid greeting, Alex. A couple of them have a problem with this.'
'With what?' What I had thought was empathy was something else altogether.
'We understand the deceased was a witness of yours. Paige Vallis. That right?'
'Yes. What's the problem?'
Squeeks paused. 'I mean, they want to know why she didn't have any kind of protection, any-'
Mike jumped to my defense. 'What are you, nuts? This broad's a complaining witness in a garden-variety sexual assault case. She was-'
I was steamed, too. 'There's no such thing as a 'garden-variety' rape, Mike. Let me handle this myself. What do you guys think this is-Hollywood? When's the last time you know a witness who's been guarded during a trial in Manhattan Supreme Court? We've got forty felony cases going every day, and witnesses walk in and out of the place like it's an ordinary office building. This isn't a mob case, there's no drug cartel connection, Tripping wasn't a gunrunner or a Mafia kingpin. Who's the asshole who's blaming
I came around from behind the desk and started for the group of detectives huddled between the coffee machine and the door to the lieutenant's office. Mike grabbed me by the arm and tried to hold me in place, but I shook loose.
'She feels like shit already, Squeeks,' Mike said. 'The broad is dead. What was Coop supposed to do different?'
'Could have let the Terrorist Task Force know what was going on,' he answered.
I stopped in my tracks and turned back. 'What?'
'A couple of the guys are just saying you could have told the task force your witness was at risk because of her background,' Squeeks said.
'Well, I'd have to know about it first in order to tell them, wouldn't I? The defendant claimed a lot of things that turned out not to be true. There's no middle ground with you guys. I ask you to go to the mats in order to get me evidence for my cases and you tell me there's no manpower to do it, or that no one will authorize the overtime. Now you're accusing me of not seeing conspiracies where I don't believe they exist-like the task force would have taken this schizophrenic wanna-be spy seriously if I had thought to call them? That's a load of crap.'
'Not Andrew Tripping. I don't mean him.'
'Exactly who do you mean, Squeeks? I'm running clean out of guesses.'
'The terrorist. The guy she killed down in Virginia.'
Mike was sitting on the edge of the desk. 'Who'd she kill?'
'Let's back up a few steps,' I said. 'I know she accidentally killed a man, and I thought she had told me everything I needed to know. You obviously know more about that incident than I do.'
'That's unusual, Alex. The guys who've worked with you,' Squeeks said, cocking his thumb over his shoulder to point behind him, 'they say you know more about your victims than they know about themselves. Say you don't go to trial until you've pulled every last ounce of information out of them.'
'That's the truth,' Mike said. 'Get your hands off your hips, blondie, and lighten up. That's a good thing.'
'They figure you're aware of all this, Alex.'
I raised both arms in bewilderment and shook my head at Squeeks.
He went on. 'After we found the body, we ran her. Just a name check, not even fingerprints. That's routine. Never expected to get anything-and bingo-came back with a homicide arrest down in Fairfax.'
'I know that. I spoke to the DA there myself,' I said. 'He gave me the whole file. There was nothing in it about a terrorist.'
'Maybe someone sanitized the file,' Mike said. 'Can you show them what you've got, Coop?'
'Drive me over to my office and I'll get the whole thing. What I thought I had was a copy of the original court papers. You can see the entire record,' I said to Squeeks.
I picked up the phone on the desk and dialed Battaglia's home number. 'Paul? Sorry to wake you. I've got some very tough news,' I said, telling him about the murder of Paige Vallis, which would certainly be Sunday morning's headlines in a few hours.
'And I need a couple of things from you. Right now, if you can. There's a prosecutor in Virginia who gave me information on an old case. There's a chance his boss made him purge some details from it,' I said, asking him to place an emergency call to the district attorney in Fairfax, to grease the wheels to get the real story.
'One more thing. Your contact at the CIA? Would you call and ask them for information on an agent called
