“Take me home, then,” I said, glancing back over my shoulder at Battaglia. “Just take me home.”
“That’s a trick not even Houdini could pull off,” Mike said. “No disappearing acts, according to Commissioner Scully.”
I stepped forward to press myself against Mike’s chest and feel his arms around me. He pulled back faster than I could get to him. “But—”
“Let’s have you photographed in this getup before we hand over your clothing to the detectives.”
“You saw everything I did, Mike,” I said. “You talk to the guys tonight. They can interview me tomorrow.”
“Any witness ever said that to you, Madame Prosecutor, and you’d start waterboarding her on the spot.”
“I’m so tired, Mike. I’m so sick to my gut and frightened and confused,” I said. Then I swiveled in place to take another look at the late Paul Battaglia. “And there’s a part of me that feels really guilty about this.”
The rookie cop turned to look at me.
“You didn’t hear that, kid,” Mike said, shaking his finger at the young officer. “She’s not talking guilt as a matter of law.”
“I feel—”
“No more running off at the mouth, Coop. You didn’t fire the gun, okay, did you? That’s guilt with a capital G. We don’t know what the fuck was going on with the district attorney.”
“Nothing good, Mike. You know that for sure. Whatever it is, it got him killed.”
“C’mon. Crime Scene needs photos of you in your Halloween costume. Then you’ve got to answer some questions.”
“Who’s handling the investigation?” I asked, walking slowly toward the door.
“The mayor’s putting a task force together with Scully,” Mike said. “A new guy from Brooklyn South Homicide—”
“New? He’s cutting his teeth on the murder of the Manhattan DA?”
“New because it can’t be anyone who knows either one of us, Coop. Also, some broad just assigned to Major Case a couple of weeks back. And a task force designation because they have to throw in a few feds for the white-collar cases Battaglia was working with the US attorney.”
“That means I’ve got to relive my tortured history with the man,” I said, thinking about the details that would be gathered in the detective division reports, known as DD5s. “Every DD5 and interview will be public record when his killer goes to trial.”
“You’re always looking at the dark clouds, Alexandra Cooper,” Mike said, holding the door open for me.
“I’m in a morgue, Mike, in the middle of the night, next to the body of the man who trained me to be what I am today.”
“He sniped at you pretty good too. He had you in his sights these last few months and he nipped at your heels whenever he could,” Mike said. “Mortui non mordant.”
“Save your parochial school Latin for the funeral mass. It’s lost on me.”
“That’s not from the nuns, Coop. Think Robert Louis Stevenson. Treasure Island,” Mike said. He cocked his finger and thumb and fired an imaginary bullet at the corpse. “It’s your chance to get back on your feet.”
I repeated the three Latin words. “Mortui non mordant?”
“Could be your lucky day, Coop,” Mike said. “It means ‘Dead men don’t bite.’”
TWO
I stood against a plain white wall in one of the conference rooms while Hal Sherman took a set of photographs for the case detectives. The first few were full frontal of me in the bloody sweatshirt and leggings. Then I was directed to hold both arms out at shoulder height, so the full pattern of spatter and stains was visible. Next there were close-ups of my face from every angle, which must have resembled mug shots of a felonious homeless woman. I turned to each side, as Hal asked me to do, before I posed with my back to the camera.
“Good to go, Alex,” Hal said, leaning over the long table to make notes. “Give me a scrip of the items, please. Manufacturer and size.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “They’re not mine.”
“Whose, then?” he asked.
“Mike and I were at the Met. I was dressed up for that fashion show at the start of the evening,” I said, “till I got into a bit of a wrestling match.”
“Oh, yeah. Our other team covered that mess,” Hal said. “You lose your ball gown there, Cinderella?”
“Traded it in for a hairdresser’s sweatshirt and these leggings from a model. I think there’s blood on my sandals, too, Hal.”
“We’ll take it all, Alex. Dr. Palmer left some of her jogging clothes in the bathroom for you. I’ll bag what you’re wearing and you can get on with the business at hand.”
I headed for the door—the restroom was between Palmer’s office and the conference room—then turned back to Hal. “This guy from Brooklyn South who’s the lead dog, do you know him?” I asked.
“Jaxon Stern? Fresh out of Internal Affairs,” Hal said. “Yeah, I know him. Homicide is his reward for squealing on cops for three years in IAB.”
“What’s he like, other than that? I mean, is he up to a case as big as this?”
“Smart enough. Good detail man, which sometimes causes him to lose the larger picture,” Hal said. “Dogged. Bit of an attitude. Humorless.”
“That won’t last long around Mike,” I said. “We’ll be okay in this, I guess. I’m so used to working with teams of guys I know and trust.”
“You’ll get to know him pretty fast, Coop,” Hal said. “He’s a full-on prick. Don’t let anything come out of your mouth that you’ll regret saying later on.”
I closed the restroom door behind me. What had I done to draw a full-on prick when I found myself dead center in an NYPD investigation?
I took off the sweatshirt and leggings, careful to keep them separate from each other so there was no cross-contamination of evidence. Palmer had been thoughtful enough to give me a new pair of underwear—the kind kept in emergency rooms so that rape victims who had to give up their clothing for testing could go home with clean panties. I folded my own so that Crime Scene could voucher them, in case any blood had seeped through the outer garments.
When I stepped over to the sink and checked myself out in the mirror, I saw that my face was worse than an image from a horror movie.
My skin was ghostly pale, smudged with dirt and blood and in all likelihood a bit of Battaglia’s gray matter. My hair was so disheveled it looked like a circus clown’s fright wig. It was matted and snarled, and some kind of foreign residue had nested there.
My eyes were bloodshot, and although I had teared up in the autopsy room, I didn’t remember until now that I had cried all the way downtown in Mike’s car. My thoughts were running out of sequence, and I knew too well how trauma could make that happen.
I squeezed the container and filled my hands with liquid soap, running the water to get it hot at the same time. Then I dipped my head down and scrubbed my face for at least two minutes.
I looked up, noted a slight improvement, but didn’t feel any cleaner than when I started.