Deadfall

“I’ll double down on him, but with a reminder about not being so trusting next time someone comes along and wants my belongings.”

“TARU has the phone,” Stern said to Prescott, “but they downloaded the voice messages for you.”

I pulled my chair in. TARU detectives had edited in the times of the calls.

“Eight oh two p.m.,” the NYPD tech guru said. Then the DA’s voice. “Alex? It’s Paul. Sorry to disturb you at dinnertime but there’s some urgency to this. Call me on my cell as soon as you pick this up.”

“Eight twenty-two p.m.” A new voice. “Alex, it’s me.” It was my friend Joan Stafford. “I can’t believe my mother loaned you her pearls. She really does like you more than she likes me. Have fun at Dendur.”

“Nine thirty-six p.m.” Paul Battaglia again. “Where the hell are you? You’ve picked a bad time to play hard to get, Alex. You have exactly what I need and you know it. You want me to come to you? I may just do that.”

If you were buying into the deadfall theory, then you would think I had heard this message during the course of the evening. You’d think I was a siren, luring the district attorney toward the rocks.

“I don’t know what he’s talking about,” I said. I spoke too quickly and too soon. “You know I didn’t have my phone with me. I didn’t know Paul was looking for me.”

Prescott stopped the audio. “You could have picked them up remotely, Alexandra.”

“Wouldn’t TARU know that?” I asked Stern, looking to him for backup in my desperation. “They’d be able to tell that the messages had never been played before they got the phone this afternoon, wouldn’t they?”

Stern’s gaze was glacial. He didn’t bother to respond.

Prescott pressed the Start button.

“Ten fourteen p.m.” Static on the line. Maybe an overseas call. “Alex? I’m just checking in to see how you’re doing, baby. Call us tomorrow, will you?”

I bit down on my lip. My mother, from my parents’ home in the Caribbean. The only person in the world who could still call me “baby.” They’d been thunderstruck by my kidnapping and rarely went two days now without wanting to hear my voice.

That message summoned up every emotion in me that could possibly interfere with my focus. I needed to shake it off as fast as possible.

“Ten twenty-three p.m.” This would likely be Battaglia’s third call. I held on to the arms of the chair as though I was flying through turbulence. “Jesus Christ, Alex. I’ve got the ten-o’clock news on, ready to turn out the lights for the night, and I can see you’re in the middle of that goddamn mess at the museum. You don’t listen to anything I tell you to do—not even the fact that you were instructed to keep your nose out of investigations.”

Battaglia must have stopped to turn up the volume on his television, because the background noise got louder and he paused before going on.

“I’ll meet you, Alex. Don’t you dare leave the museum before I get there. You and our mutual friend think you’re having a private get-together? Think again. I need to know everything you found out about Diana. There are lives on the line, Alex. Human lives.”

Prescott’s eyes were boring a hole through my face.

Battaglia started up again. “Diana is none of your business. Got that, dammit? Got that?”

The call ended abruptly. Battaglia still had a landline and he slammed the mouthpiece into the receiver when he was done.

“I’m going to ask you again, Alexandra,” Prescott said, clicking the Stop button. “Who is Diana?”

I was white-knuckled, clutching the arms of the chair.

“Did you hear Paul? Did you hear him demand that you tell him what you know about Diana?”

“How many times are you going to ask me?” I said. “The answer will always be the same. That’s exactly what I would have said to the district attorney if I’d had my phone in my hand when he called.”

“Were you at the Met for business, Alexandra?”

I couldn’t think of how to answer the question.

“Yes or no? Simple enough.”

“Not officially. I wasn’t there as an assistant district attorney,” I said.

“Because Battaglia put you on leave, am I right?”

I nodded.

“But you decided to go rogue at some point and work on a murder case,” Prescott said. “That’s why the DA was so surprised to turn on the news and see you in the middle of a crime scene. Because you put yourself on the very notorious murder case of Wolf Savage.”

“It wasn’t notorious when I was asked to help out with it.”

“Asked by Paul Battaglia?” he said.

I shook my head. “No.”

“By whom, then?”

“The daughter of the deceased,” I said. “She was a childhood friend.”

Prescott kept coming at me, turning the screws, not giving me a second between questions.

“Diana?” he asked. “Is her name Diana?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Is she the mutual friend that Paul was talking about?”

I took a deep breath.

“Wolf Savage’s daughter? No. Of course not,” I said, more as a reminder to myself than an answer to Prescott. “Paul never met her. She was just an acquaintance of mine, from childhood.”

“Who, then?” he asked. “Mike Chapman?”

“Mike was there. So was Mercer Wallace,” I said. “So were lots of cops and ex-cops the DA knows who work for Citadel Security. I wouldn’t think any of them was the mutual friend Paul was referring to.”

Mutual friend, I said to myself over again, mentally scanning the rows of guests who had been part of the social setting at the Temple of Dendur. I couldn’t think of one.

“Surely the list of attendees is in today’s paper,” I said. “If you let me look through the names, maybe I’ll think of someone who fits that description. A mutual friend of ours, I mean.”

“Do that on your own time,” Prescott said. “Whose lives were on the line, Alexandra?”

“I—I didn’t think anyone was in danger,” I said. “I—we had just broken a case, and the killer—uh—one of the killers was in custody.”

“That’s a tell, Chief,” Detective Stern said. “You get close to a nerve and Cooper starts with that stammering bullshit.”

Prescott didn’t say a word.

“She knows something she’s not saying,” Stern said.

“Paul Battaglia’s life was obviously in danger,” Prescott said. “You must have known that.”

“I’m done, James,” I said. “I’m all out of gas. You want something from me that I just don’t have to give you. Had I known the DA’s life was at risk while I was in the company of the best homicide detective you’ll ever meet, the man would still be alive. We’d never have let Battaglia get in the crosshairs of a killer.”

Prescott didn’t try to stop me when I got to my feet.

“I’m tired of being badgered all night and day. I’m so out of here now,” I said. “Let me know when you have something constructive for me to do.”

“You want me to call Chapman for you?” Prescott said. “I assume he’s downstairs, waiting to take you home.”

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