The Bone Vault - Linda Fairstein by Linda Fairstein Read Free Book Online

needle."

    I kneeled beside her chair and tried to make contact with her moist eyes. "Felix was wrong. It's against the law for a man as old as he is to have sex with you. That's a crime. We can still punish him for that. But if he didn't have a knife, Angel, then you're making up an entirely different kind of crime. If you made a mistake by starting that story and you got in over your head without meaning to, then tell us the truthnow before you dig yourself in any deeper."

    I grabbed a legal pad off my desk and told Laura to hold everything while I went over to see the district attorney.

    My identification tag released the security lock on the door to Battaglia's inner sanctum. The chief assistant was refilling his coffee mug as I walked past him. Rose Malone, the DA's executive assistant, had the phone wedged between her shoulder and her left ear, working at the computer as she waved me into the boss's suite. I tried to stall long enough for her to get off, so that I could get a reading on his mood, but she gave no sign of ending the call quickly.

    I had practiced my approach several times on my way down to the office in the cab. A casual "By the way, I thought you'd want to hear what happened to me at the museum last night" wouldn't work. I was confident Battaglia would back my shipyard decision if it was presented as an homage to his style, and smiled in anticipation of his reaction as I pushed open his door.

    The first thing I saw was the smirk on Pat McKinney's face. He was standing, arms akimbo, between Battaglia and me, and I knew before a word was spoken that he had gotten wind of last night's maneuvers. The deputy chief of the trial division and my most driven in-house adversary, McKinney would have delighted in pitching this to the boss as a political embarrassment.

    "I knew you and Chapman were movie buffs, Alex, butThe Mummy Returns meetsInvasion of the Body Snatchers wouldn't even rate buttered popcorn in my house." No point asking him how he knew. He'd be only too happy to regurgitate the details. His fingers tapped excitedly on the conference table behind him and his mild overbite looked like it had grown into fangs overnight.

    "Paul, I'd like to--"

    But Battaglia seemed content to let McKinney play out his hand. "Your pal Chapman was a bit out of control last night. Tried to push the Crime Scene Unit to drag themselves down to the ME's office to take photos in the middle of cleaning up a job at a triple homicide in Midtown. Chief of D's had to call me at three-thirty in the morning to referee the decision."

    I had no idea that some other sensational crime had occurred after midnight.

    "Jeez. And I know how you hate to be bothered at home about anything job-related." More than half the legal staff of six hundred lawyers were on felony call at any given point in time, and all of the supervisors knew that being beeped and contacted twenty-four hours a day came with the territory. Most of us welcomed the opportunity to have input on case actions that would affect the way they would later move forward through the system. McKinney was an exception to the rule. He lived without an answering machine, didn't give out his beeper number, and punished all but his handful of pets who dared to find him once he left his office.

    "I hated having to say no to something you were working on, Alex. But we had a real serious investigation going on, not some cute publicity stunt." Battaglia usually couldn't stand that kind of bickering. There was no point defending my actions in front of McKinney. But I had insisted that Chapman get the sarcophagus photographed before it was removed from the back of the truck at the morgue and was incredulous that my own colleague had prevented such critical documentation of the findings.

    "Paul, may I talk to you about this alone?"

    "Not until I return the phone calls I've got here." He flapped a stack of messages at me. "I'm trying to understand why the press found out this happened