Silent Mercy by Linda Fairstein Read Free Book Online

Fordham, Brian Chapman died of a massive coronary. Mike honored his promise to get his degree but immediately enrolled in the Police Academy to follow his passion, to shadow the steps of the man he most revered. Six months older than I—thirty-eight—Mike’s bachelor existence had only once been threatened by a serious romance, which ended in the accidental death of the young architect to whom he’d been engaged.
    “You got a dish of ice cream? Chocolate, two scoops?” Mike called out to the waiter. Then to Mercer, “So how did Abyssinians get involved with New York City Baptists?”
    “Goes back two hundred years, right down near the courthouse. Way before we were known as black or African American, seems the Negroes didn’t like being segregated—forced to sit apart—while they were worshipping in God’s house. It was a bunch of rich Ethiopian merchants who broke away from the First Baptist Church, way down on Worth Street, to start this one.”
    “Where do you begin to look for a woman’s head?” I asked.
    “She’s fixated on that, Mercer.” Mike was starting to soften his frozen dessert by swirling the spoon around and around the dish. “Coop’s not going to be happy until we have all the body parts.”
    “Don’t play with your food,” I said.
    “They teach you that at Wellesley, Miss Manners?”
    I was the most incongruous part of our trio. My parents’ middleclass existence changed radically during my childhood when my father, a cardiologist, and his research partner invented a half-inch piece of plastic tubing that was used in almost every open-heart surgical procedure worldwide for nearly two decades thereafter. We moved to Harrison, an upscale suburb in Westchester County, and my parents were able to provide my brothers and me with the best educational opportunities available—for me, at Wellesley, where I majored in English literature before getting my JD degree at the University of Virginia School of Law.
    They fostered my interest in public service and were pleased that I found such fulfillment in my work as an advocate for women and children who’d been victims of intimate violence. The Manhattan District Attorney’s Office was the premier prosecutorial model in the country, and I had thrived there under the leadership of Paul Battaglia and his hand-chosen staff of dedicated lawyers.
    If my work seemed depressing to some, they had no understanding of how uplifting it was to help this long-underserved population triumph in the courtroom. In just the past thirty years and through the diligence of those who came before me, archaic laws that treated women as chattel were abolished, investigative techniques had been developed to match forensic advances, and the application of DNA technology to law enforcement methods had revolutionized the criminal justice system.
    “You know what I learned at Wellesley, Mike?” I smiled at his ability to bring humor to the most dire situations. “If you’ve been out all night with a guy, and he’s about to ask you to pay for his meal, you ought to find someone else to take you home. Ready to go, Mercer?”
    “Even when the sucker who’s had you out with him doesn’t even bother to try to jump your bones?” Mike asked. “That’s a sorry situation, kid. What’s today, anyway?”
    “Wednesday. Soon as the sun comes up, it’ll be Wednesday.”
    “Put it on my tab, Coop. I’ll catch up to you on payday.”
    “By my count, you’re about three years of payday overdue, Mike. You’ll be at the autopsy?” Mercer asked.
    “Yeah. Late this afternoon.”
    “Could you tell anything about the killer from looking at the neck injuries?” I asked.
    “Other than that he meant what he was doing, what is it you want to know?” Mike asked.
    “The obvious questions. Do you think it was done by a surgeon, or by a butcher? You know, someone skilled anatomically?”
    “Don’t go all Jack the Ripper on me, Coop. Somebody whacked off the poor broad’s