He looked to the open door, walked over, and shut it.
“Between you and me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“That obviously means Mike Chapman, too, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” I said.
“Okay, Alexandra. So, the car was stolen, as you’ve probably figured.”
“Yeah. You’ve found it?”
“You bet,” Prescott said. “They abandoned it six blocks away. Stole it in Harlem, on a side street without a camera. They probably weren’t inside the car for more than ten minutes.”
“Wiped clean?”
“These are professionals, Alexandra.”
“I don’t know what their experience is as car thieves,” I said, “but the guy with his arm out the window was clearly a sharpshooter.”
“The Fifth Avenue camera closest to the Met got an image. Both men wore ski masks and gloves. The photos are being enlarged but they’re pretty worthless.”
“What do you know about the gun?” I asked.
“Start with the bullets,” he said. “Twenty-two caliber. We’ll know more about the weapon once the photo is enhanced. Stern thinks it’s a Ruger, a really reliable gun. With a suppressor.”
There must have been a silencer, but the shots had sounded like cannon fire to me.
“His bodyguard, James. Who was driving him last night?” I asked. The DA had an NYPD detective assigned 24/7. “Where was he when Battaglia was coming up the steps?”
“Parked opposite the museum, just off Fifth Avenue,” Prescott said. “The car was pointed eastbound. The DA had told the guy to wait there, that he just needed five minutes with you.”
“But the shots?”
“He heard them. Jumped out of the car and ran up to do what he could for your boss,” he said. “Don’t you remember seeing him?”
“Actually,” I said, “I don’t.”
I didn’t remember much beyond the fact of the dead man pinning me against the museum steps.
Bart Fisher knocked on the door before he opened it. “Ms. Cooper, this is Ella.”
I stood up and walked over to her. “Hi, I’m Alex Cooper. We’ve spoken on the phone several times.”
“Yes,” she said. She flashed the first genuine smile I’d seen in hours.
“You’re my keeper?” I asked.
“Well, I—” she said, looking at Prescott.
“That’s okay. I just need to freshen up,” I said.
We walked down the hall together and Ella let me go into the bathroom by myself. Once done, I ran cold water into the sink and splashed it on my face, two or three times.
Then I spread my legs and stood back from the tiled wall, pressing my arms against it to brace myself, as though stretching before a run. Everything ached—my limbs and my back and my eyes and most of all my brain. But this was only the beginning, and I knew that.
Ella walked me back to the conference room and I took my seat.
“Have you talked to Amy Battaglia?” I asked, as Prescott and Fisher sat back down.
“Briefly,” he said.
“Mike said she’s got it in for me.”
Prescott didn’t respond.
“You’re not swayed by that nonsense, are you?” I asked.
He grimaced.
“I noticed Paul wasn’t wearing his wedding ring,” I said.
“Noticed when?”
“In the morgue. Before Amy got there,” I said. “You better check into what was going on between them.”
“Please, Alexandra, that doesn’t become you.”
“Paul liked me. He didn’t like or trust that many people, but he used to like me a lot,” I said. “You want to talk about friction? There were days he hated you. We all knew that.”
“You’re in the gutter with this kind of talk,” he said, blowing me off with a wave of his hand. “There’s always tension between a federal prosecutor and the DA.”
That fact was true. Battaglia hated the jurisdictional confines of his territory—the island of Manhattan. He had overreached his hand to pull in fraud cases involving foreign banks that had branches in the city or corporate tax evaders who shipped million-dollar paintings from an address in New York to a second home, only to return the art to their apartments. He had feuded publicly with every United States attorney, fighting for the same high-profile cases, since Rudy Giuliani had grandstanded by locking up Wall Street executives on the courthouse steps.
“He hated your political ambition,” I said to Prescott. “Hated it.”
Agent Fisher seemed to be twitching as I took the US attorney on.
“C’mon, Alexandra. Let it alone.”
“He’s probably rolling over in his refrigerated box right now to think that you’re the one who is going to be handling his murder investigation,” I said, getting myself more wound up by the minute. “He wanted to be a US senator more than he wanted to breathe fresh air, and here you are, positioning yourself for the big run in two years.”
“Are you done?” Prescott asked.
“He hated you for that, too. For stepping on his prosecutorial toes with your pre-indictment press conferences and for thinking you could elbow your way into Congress.”
Prescott stood up again. “Anytime you’re ready to go forward, Alexandra, though I have to compliment you on deflecting the subject so handily,” he said. “It was you Paul was hustling to confront on the steps of the Met, not I.”
“Who said anything about a confrontation?” I asked.
“Detective Stern said your last conversation with Paul didn’t go all that well.”
“There’s a light-year between that fact and the idea that I lured the man to his death.”
“So talk to me about what cases he was interested in, Alexandra,” James said, leaning in toward me as he took his seat again. “Calm yourself down. Give me some direction here.”
My stomach was roiling. No matter where my thoughts headed, there was nothing calming on any front.
“I can’t think of anything helpful right now,” I said. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“You’ve sent a lot of scum to prison,” he said. “You and Paul both made enemies easily.”
“Most of my offenders are lone wolves. They’re rapists, James. They usually operate solo.”
“But they still hold grudges.”
“Yes, and the office has just been through a thorough search of everyone I’ve convicted or busted or even annoyed in the last decade,” I said. “My—my kidnapping had the DA, my SVU legal team, the whole detective division, and the commissioner himself going over my entire body of work.”
“What did you learn?” he asked, with that earnest look on his face.
“Me? I’m the one who was out of the loop. Five days with my captors,” I said. “Ask Catherine Dashfer, who took over for me. Ask Pat McKinney, the chief of the trial division. I was missing in action.”
“Ultimately, the abduction wasn’t about you, Alex,” Prescott said. “Am I right?”
I swallowed hard. “Dead right. Not about me and not about Paul Battaglia.”
“So, this case that just—well, just unraveled at the Met last night, is the suspect on the loose a problem?” Prescott was making his list on a legal pad.
“Most fugitives are, don’t you think?”
“I meant for Paul,” Prescott said. “There was an international angle to the murder, wasn’t there?”