when he embraced me at the door. “I don’t want to hear anyone else’s spin on the day, okay?”
I stripped my blood-soaked clothes off right there in the hallway and stood naked, offering them to him with both hands. “Take these to the incinerator and just throw them down the chute, would you please? I’m going to take a bath. I don’t suppose you have anything that passes for bubbles here, do you?”
“No, but the bar’s still open,” he said, kissing the tip of my nose. “If I can see through the steam, I’ll bring you in a drink as soon as I’ve dumped these.”
I soaked in the tub while Jake sat on the floor beside me, sipping his drink while I tasted mine. I told him how Mercer and I had walked into the trap that had been so carefully laid for us at the exhibit, and how terrified I had been at the thought of losing Mercer. Jake didn’t interrupt at all as I went on and on, stepping from the tub into the bath sheet that he wrapped around me; then I shivered for the first time in days as I tied the belt of his white terry robe on my waist and sat on the edge of the bed to call my mother and let her know that I was okay.
I stared into the masked face of our gunman-seeing nothing-for what seemed like hours, until I finally fell asleep on my side, with Jake’s arm resting on my shoulder.
At seven forty-five I was ready to leave for the office. “What’s your day like today?” I asked Jake, watching him knot his tie and ready himself for the crosstown ride to the NBC offices at Rockefeller Center.
“Kind of like yours, in the sense that I won’t really know until I get there. I’m supposed to be covering the secretary of state’s speech at the U.N. Do I have to worry about
“Battaglia has me under lock and key. So, your beeper will call my beeper?”
“Count on it. See you tonight.”
I was out the door and down the FDR Drive with my armed escorts. The early arrival gave me time to catch up on the matters that had come in on Friday, when I had stolen the day to get away to the Vineyard. I checked my appointment book. One of the assistants had asked me to pencil in a re-interview at ten with her witness in a domestic violence case.
That gave me a couple of hours to return phone messages and speak with friends. As my colleagues began to arrive, many dropped by my office to see how I was, express their concern, and ask about Mercer, having heard accounts of the shooting on last evening’s news. I finally shut my door to avoid a visit from Pat McKinney. There was enough salt in my emotional wounds without his venom added.
At ten fifteen I called Maggie to check whether her witness had arrived.
“She just called to cancel. Her husband offered to take her on a cruise over Labor Day weekend. She’d like to come see you when she gets back in two weeks. Guess she isn’t quite as frightened of him as I thought.”
That freed up another hour of the morning, or so I thought until Laura buzzed to say that one of the young lawyers from Trial Bureau 60 had been sent to discuss a new case with me. I opened my door and found Craig Tompkins waiting outside.
“Something different, at least for me. The intake supervisor thought you might have some ideas about how to charge this.”
“What have you got?”
“The security guards over at the Javits Center are holding a guy, but I’m not sure they’ve got a crime to arrest him for.”
“What did he do?” The Javits building was the city’s convention hall and regularly the scene of large group meetings, trade association gatherings, and exhibitions.
“He signed up to attend this week’s Trekkies reunion. Seems to have spent all day yesterday riding up and down the escalators, from floor to floor. Kind of got the guards’ attention ’cause he was sort of goofy looking, carrying around a big gym bag the whole time, but never actually went into any of the lectures or conference rooms. When he came back in this morning, the head of security took a few rides up the escalator, right behind the guy.
“This jerk’s got a video camera hidden in the bag. What he does is wait for a girl in a short dress to get on in front of him, then he rides up behind her, holding the camera so it shoots the view up her skirt. A thrill a minute, I guess.”
“So what did they do with him?”
“Arrested him for harassment. Confiscated the gym bag and the video camera.”
“Sounds right to me. What’s the problem?”
“Well, they don’t have any victims.”
“What about the women he was filming?” In order to make out the charge of harassment, there would have to be people who would claim that the amateur moviemaker’s conduct had annoyed or alarmed them.
“None of them ever realized what he was doing. They each just stepped off the escalator at the end of the ride, unaware that they had been immortalized on film. Then the security guys played back the videotape. Thighs, knees, lots of underwear-but nobody is recognizable from the angle of the shots. No way to figure out who they are.”
I thought for a minute. “How about trespass? That he was unauthorized to be in the center.”
“Won’t work either. He paid full price for admission and that entitles him to be in the facility.”
“Did he make any statements? Admissions?”
“Yeah, he gave it all right up. Married businessman from Connecticut, works for a public utility company there. Started doing this a year ago, just ’cause it turns him on.”
“Talk about arrested development. Guess he never got past the sixth grade.”
“Now he says he can sell them to a Web site. It’s called U.S. Videos-only, the initials stand for ‘Up-Skirt.’ Lots of videocam voyeurs, he claims. Cops checked it out. Each tape sells for forty bucks.”
“And that’s exactly what’s on ’em?” I asked incredulously. “I’m not sure there’s anything criminal to charge him with. Let me call Mark.” The usual response for any of us in the Trial Division when we were stuck on legal issues a lot thornier than this was to reach out for the head of the Appeals Bureau, our in-house lawman. We waited for his callback, which confirmed that there was no recourse in the criminal justice system for the Trekkie’s actions. Craig used my phone to tell the Javits security force to let the guy go. The Internet was creating more opportunities for perverts than most of us had imagined, and law enforcement agencies were less aggressive than the cyber-geeks in coming up with solutions.
Mike called from Mercer’s room at eleven thirty. “Forget those surgeons you saw yesterday. There’s a lady doc here today, and a posse of very attentive nurses, and I think Mercer Wallace is really on the mend.
“I’m gonna scoot up to the squad at one. The pain medication makes Mercer pretty sleepy. His father wants to sit with him this afternoon. Varelli’s assistant is going to come in for an interview. Wanna be there?”
“Absolutely.”
“I’ll swing by and pick you up, since I’m so close to your office,” Mike said. “Then I can bring you back here to the hospital tonight. The D.A.’s Squad can take over your chauffeuring duties from that point on.”
I called the Special Victims Unit to see who would inherit the day-to-day work on the West Side rapist matter and was relieved to hear it was in the capable hands of two veteran detectives who had worked with Mercer for years.
Then I stopped at Rose Malone’s desk so that she could see that I was physically unharmed and tell Battaglia that Mercer’s shooting had not unhinged me completely. Now that I was an eyewitness to the attempted murder of a police officer, I knew that the district attorney would assign another prosecutor to take over at least that part of the inquiry, just in case the crime was unrelated to our probe of Denise Caxton’s killing.
“Would you ask Paul to let me have a say in who McKinney assigns to Mercer’s shooting?” I asked Rose when she told me that Battaglia had just gone to lunch.
“Sure. I know he won’t get to it today. He’s got to polish up a speech he’s giving tonight, and I don’t think he’ll have time to speak to Pat McKinney,” she said, looking through the crammed schedule sheet that she kept on top of her desk.
“Great. If he wants me for anything, I’ll be up at Manhattan North.”
When I reached Laura’s office to pick up my case folder and wait for Chapman, she told me to call Marjie Fishman, my counterpart in the Queens District Attorney’s Office.
“Are you okay?” Marjie began the conversation.
I assured her that I was and gave her the update on Mercer’s condition.
“You don’t have any racetracks in Manhattan, do you?”
