Deadfall by Linda Fairstein
Every man’s life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another.
—Ernest Hemingway
ONE
I had stared at death before. I was way too familiar with the vagaries of murder.
I had seen it flex its muscles on the cracked pavement of New York City sidewalks and behind grimy stairwells in housing projects. I knew that doormen in the most expensive properties lining Central Park were often as powerless to stop it from entering the dwellings they guarded as the less fortunate who encountered it in random exchanges with strangers on the street.
I had comforted many of the shattered lives that murder left in its wake, and tried to do justice for them in a court of law for more than a dozen years.
But I had never held death in my arms until tonight. I had never cradled a killer’s prey against my body—a life extinguished in an instant—while the blood dripped out onto my chest and pooled in my lap until the police arrived to release me from death’s grip.
“You don’t have to stay in here, Ms. Cooper,” the older of the two uniformed cops said to me. “The medical examiner says you can wait in her office.”
“I’m good for now,” I said. “Thank you.”
“It’s not healthy,” he said. “What you’re doing, that is. Staring at a dead man.”
I was standing in the autopsy room at the morgue, about ten feet away from the body of the district attorney, less than an hour after he had taken two bullets to the head.
“I’m just— I’m just thinking, Officer. This is where I need to be at the moment.”
The younger cop was at the far end of the metal gurney, facing me, as expressionless and erect as a soldier of the Queen’s Guard at Buckingham Palace.
“Dr. Palmer’s got a change of clothes for you, ma’am. She thought you’d be more comfortable if you got out of those bloody things, after the Crime Scene guys take pictures of you.”
There wasn’t much left of Paul Battaglia’s skull. I didn’t have the best angle of vision to see it, leaning against the counter where some of the tools were laid out, but that fact was pretty clear to me.
I lifted the glass of Scotch to my face and ran it back and forth under my nose. Jeremy Mayers, counsel to the chief medical examiner, was a snob about his single malts. That trait, at a bar after hours, usually irked me. I was fine with a few shots of Dewar’s on the rocks. But in this cheerless space, reeking of formalin, the stronger concentration of my favorite amber liquid—without ice—helped me deal with the pervasive odor of death. Jeremy had poured me a snootful from his private stash.
“Did you hear me, Ms. Cooper?” the older cop said. “We can go down the hall and wait for the homicide team there.”
“Sorry,” I said, inhaling the peat-soaked flavor of Jeremy’s Lagavulin before I lowered the glass to my mouth and took a sip. “I did hear you. I’m not ready to go.”
“Just so you know we can, soon as you’re ready.”
“We? Aren’t you here to stand watch over the DA’s body?”
Paul Battaglia wasn’t a candidate to lie in state anywhere, but it would be tradition for an NYPD honor guard to be with the body until his burial.
“No, ma’am,” the officer said, pointing to his silent young comrade. “The kid’s got Battaglia tonight. I’ve got you.”
“Me?” That line got my attention. “What are you talking about?”
“I’ve got orders to stay with you, Ms. Cooper.”
I bridled at the suggestion. “I’m in the morgue. I’m a prosecutor who works with these docs and technicians every day. The dead man is my boss. I’ve got Detective Chapman here and a posse of detectives on the way,” I said. “I’m not in any danger.”
“Nobody said you were.”
“Then what did they tell you, Officer? Why have they got you glued to me? I’m not the suspect in this tragedy either.”
He shrugged off my comment and looked away from me.
“The district attorney fell into my arms when he was shot, do you understand that?” I had started to gesture with my hands, quickly catching myself so no Scotch would slosh over the rim of the drinking glass and be lost to me. “I didn’t kill him. I caught him.”
“Whatever you say, ma’am. Orders is orders.”
“Look, can you please go find Chapman and ask him to come here?” I said.
“Manhattan North Homicide? That Chapman?” the officer asked.
“Yeah. Mike. Tell Mike I need him, please.”
The officer looked at the rookie, who made eye contact with him and nodded.
“Don’t worry about leaving us,” I said to my anxious captor. “If I run, just send an APB to the nearest Laundromat. That’s about as far as I can get without being collared.”
The older man turned and left the room.
I took another sip to steel my nerves and walked closer to the gurney.
Paul Battaglia had hired me out of law school at the University of Virginia. He was a legendary figure in national prosecutorial circles, Manhattan’s elected district attorney for more than three decades. As one of the kids on his great legal staff—five hundred lawyers in all—I had idolized him.
Paul had been good to me from the outset, and I had risen quickly when he tapped me to lead the country’s pioneering Special Victims Unit at an unusually early stage in my career. With his complete backing, the lawyers in my unit had created innovative techniques to get more victims access to the courtroom and had fought vigorously for legislative reform.
When I reached the side of the district attorney, I put my hand on his outstretched palm. It was cold now, of course, and it didn’t respond to my touch, as I knew it wouldn’t. But I did it to make myself feel better—putting my fingers around his, offering some sign of affection in this steel-structured room, which was the most lifeless place I’d ever known.
“You can’t touch the body, ma’am,” the young cop said. “You shouldn’t do that.”
I nodded. “You’re right, Officer.”
My feelings about the district attorney had been less than generous throughout this past year, but despite my discomfort level about his integrity, I found myself welling up with tears. I gently patted the sleeve of Battaglia’s dark suit. “Good night, Paul,” I whispered. “Rest in peace.”
There would be no answers to the flood of questions that had overwhelmed me from the moment I had heard him call out my name in the late-night semidarkness and walk toward me—quite unexpectedly—up the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
I braced myself now to look at his face, or what was left of it, one more time. One of the bullets—the one that penetrated Battaglia’s skull and landed behind me, taking along bits of his brain—had blown an eye out as it exited. The other piece of lead presumably lodged in the bony cartilage of his cranium, maybe blocked by the base of the classic Roman nose that accented his patrician appearance.