“Who died?” I asked, walking past Laura’s empty desk into my office.
Three prosecutors were standing behind the chair in which the head of our Cybercrimes Division, Aaron Byrne was seated. Drew Poser and another detective were in front of the desk, stacking case folders in piles. They each looked like there was a corpse on display in the middle of the table.
“We’re gathered here trying to save your ass,” Ryan Blackmer said. He was standing between Nan Toth and Catherine Dashfer, all three senior prosecutors from my unit. “But if it takes mouth-to-mouth to get your career back on track, I’ve got other plans for the night.”
“The mere thought of that image inspires me to breathe deeply on my own, Ryan,” I said. “How does it look?”
“Not as bad as I feared originally,” Aaron Byrne said. He was more skilled with computer navigation than any lawyer I knew.
“What did Aponte get?”
“First of all, her name isn’t Josie Aponte, okay? A heavy dose of identity theft from a criminal justice student at John Jay College got her in the door of our hiring office.” Byrne was studying my computer screen and typing as fast as his fingers could go.
“So who is she?”
Catherine raised a finger to her lips. “Shh. Let Aaron work.”
“Laura gave you my password?”
“A monkey could have gotten through that,” Aaron said. “Nothing more creative than your law school initials and the year you graduated occurred to you?”
The University of Virginia—UVA—had been easy to remember after a dozen other changes over the years. I had gone through the initials of my fiancé, Adam Nyman, who’d been killed in a car crash the night before our Vineyard wedding, and an assortment of significant dates in my life but had recently returned to the initials of my alma mater as the key to unlock my data.
“In fact, Alex has been looking for a monkey on Match.com,” Ryan said. “Gave up her ‘prosecutes perps’ nickname for ‘lonely lady lawyer.’ Once she knocks off Estevez she can go with ‘my pimp’s a chimp.’”
“Well, I’ve changed all the password info for you,” Aaron said, taking one hand off the keyboard to hand me a Post-it note with a series of hieroglyphics scribbled on it. “Secure it. Learn it. Eyes only for you and Laura.”
“In fact, Chapman says Alex sometimes confuses that long prehensile monkey tail with another organ that—”
“Who cares what Chapman says, Ryan?” I snapped. “What’s Aponte’s real name and how much of my case information is compromised?”
“We don’t know who she is yet,” Drew said.
“She had to be fingerprinted to get this job,” I said.
“You don’t think Estevez would try to embed a mole who’d be roadblocked before she got her toe in the door, do you? His mole has no criminal record. He’s smart.”
“Smarter than I am; that’s for sure.”
“Amen to that,” Ryan said. “Your Wellesley degree with a major in English lit is taking a backseat to Antonio Estevez and his street cred.”
“So this girl—whoever she is,” I said, “has no rap sheet, but she has the balls to take on this assignment. What’d she get?”
Aaron Byrne leaned into my screen. “You’re screwed on Estevez. She copied everything in that folder.”
“Damn. Damn it.” I was walking in circles, furious at myself for enabling this breach because of the obvious password I’d chosen. “It’s on my head now if anything happens to Tiffany and those other young women.”
Nan raised a hand at me. “Calm down. Tiffany’s under control and we’ll find everyone else before his posse does. It’s more important that you work with Aaron to identify the cases that might have been in the same portal.”
“Go through these folders with me, Alex,” Drew said, passing the top three to me.
“I thought the FBI claimed this setup was foolproof,” I said, taking them from him.
“Technically it is,” Catherine said. “Except for human error.”
The feds’ cyberteam had devised a special computer system for our office, in recognition of the fact that hundreds of thousands of case files had to be managed independently of one another. Too many people had access to computer stations—legal and support staff, civilian investigators and cops—that were spread out in both of the large city buildings we inhabited. The sheer volume of DANY employees put a lot of information at risk.
People of the State of New York v. Andrew Kreston.
I focused on the name on the manila folder, first in a tall stack of cases awaiting trial or reassignment to another unit member. Each of the files contained at least one count of sexual assault. Some had top charges of murder in the first degree, while others referenced surviving victims who had been subjected to just about every kind of abuse one might imagine.
“Kreston,” I said, trying to think of the way I had structured my virtual storage cabinet. “Sodomy first degree. Male victim. Drugged and assaulted. No connection to Estevez.”
“Legal issues,” Aaron said. “Any overlap?”
“None whatsoever.”
“Looks like you’ve got it firewalled. Should be fine.”
“Second one is Harry Wiggins. Serial rapist. Four victims, all strangers. Housing projects on the Lower East Side. Nothing to do with trafficking.”
I put that folder to the side and looked at the third one. “Jamil Jenners. Attempted murder, attempted rape. Choked a woman till she lost consciousness. She was coming out of the restroom in a Chelsea club.”
“Clean and clear,” Aaron said.
I reached over for the Wiggins case.
“Go back a step,” I said, unhooking the red string from the back of the folder and pulling out the papers.
Aaron Byrne stopped typing and looked up at me. “I thought you said not related.”
“The cases have nothing to do with each other. But both of them involved a motion to consolidate the counts in order to try the defendant for all his victims at once. Gino Moretti opposed it successfully, and the lawyer for Wiggins tried the same tactic, too, without a shot.”
“You mean you used the identical motion papers in both instances?”
“I’m trying to think,” I said, pulling on strands of my hair. “It was three months ago.”
Everyone was staring at me.
“I’m just not sure, but it’s possible.”
Catherine picked up my phone. “Is there a speed dial to Special Victims?”
“The second button.”
“Is your travel agent on speed dial, too?” Ryan asked. “One way to Afghanistan. Leaving tonight.”
“Take it.” I handed the folder to Ryan. “You’ve always wanted this one. The Post will give you front-page ink if you nail this guy. I’m nauseous even thinking about the possibility that someone like Estevez knows where to find these good people.”
I could hear the clacking keys of the computer as Aaron Byrne tried to figure if the case had been stolen by the Aponte impostor.
“All good here, Alex,” Aaron said. “You only used a blank template for your motion for joinder. You used language and names specific to each case, so there’s no hole in the wall.”
Ryan pushed the folder back in my direction.
I shook my head. “Keep it. Estevez has been put over for a month. Get Wiggins in front of a jury as soon as you can.”
Drew Poser kept passing folders to me while I racked my brain to think of common features between and among the cases.
When we finished scouring the two piles on the desktop, Catherine began to read through the index cards boxed on the far corner of my desk. They contained the hundreds of names of defendants indicted by other lawyers in the unit.
I perched myself on the arm of one of the chairs and rubbed my forehead. “I approved all of these grand jury actions at the time they were submitted, but you’ll have to refresh me on some of them. There are so many.”
“Okay,” she said when I gave her a blank look after the sixth or seventh name. “Wanda Evins. You must know this. The mother who brought her fifteen-year-old daughter to New York from Kansas City to set her up for business during the Super Bowl last year.”
I closed my eyes. “Check that one, Aaron.”
“She was pimping her kid?” he asked.
“I’m sure I cross-referenced this with Estevez. It actually fit the trafficking laws.”
“Yes,” Nan said, “but mother and child are tucked away at home in Kansas. I’ll get the screening sheet and call to check on them.”
“Go back to what you said to me in the courtroom, Drew.”
“About what?”
I stepped out of my heels and ran my stockinged feet across the ratty carpet. “My secrets. You said that all my secrets are gone.”
“Well, I was just—”
“What did you mean?”
“Nothing, really.”
“He meant that a lot of your personal information wasn’t well protected, Alex,” Aaron Byrne said. “Yeah, Wanda Evins is a hit.”
“I’m on it,” Nan said. “I’ll cover them.”
“All the stuff in your Word files isn’t secure, in the way most of the case folders seem to be. Like, here’s a bunch of letters.”
“You keep personal correspondence on here?” Ryan asked.
“No. No, I don’t.”
“Letters to the Bar Association, looks like some to a few of your victims, recommendations for a couple of guys who left the office this year. By the way, the one to the City Bar has got your home address on it, Alex.”
“That’s where they bill me.”
“What’s the difference?” Drew Poser asked. “Everything anyone wants to know about people is on the web. I’m sure Alex’s phone, her e-mail, her contacts, her shoe size—it’s all out there.”
“Then why did you make the crack about my secrets? What do you think I’ve got to conceal?”
“Your thin skin, for one thing,” Ryan said. “You want everybody to think you’ve got the hide of an elephant when you’re soft as a marshmallow inside.”
“I’m just drained. It’s been a lousy day.”
There was nothing personal on my office computer, I reassured myself. My texts and e-mails were a different thing. They wouldn’t make good reading for strangers.
“What the hell is this?” Aaron said, throwing his hands up in the air like the keyboard was toxic. “Why in God’s name are you mentioned in a letter from the district attorney himself to Reverend Hal Shipley? It sounds like Battaglia took money from that Jheri-curled dirtbag, and then you dropped a case against him?”
“I didn’t have any case—and no, I wasn’t aware I was cc’d on any correspondence,” I said, looking from one friend’s face to another as I started to pace across the room. “Are we going blood oath for a moment? Cone of silence? ’Cause the DA is going to have my head on this.”
“Have your head on what?” Nan asked. “Or is this the cue for me to say I’ve got to be going?”
“Don’t leave me now.”
“What’s the story, Alex?” Aaron said. “What’s this about?”
“There should be a memo there from Battaglia to me. About the reverend.”
“Got it. There’s the memo and then there’s also this letter. Maybe Rose Malone,” Aaron said, talking about Battaglia’s executive assistant, “sent a copy to Laura, since it mentions you, and Laura downloaded it to your documents.”
“I swear I never saw any letter.”
“I’ll print it. You’d better read it before it goes viral.”
“If any of this correspondence goes viral, I might as well be looking for work,” I said. My palms were breaking into a sweat. “My piece of it was simple. We had a vic who claimed a statutory case against Shipley. Mercer worked it to the bone and couldn’t get it to stick. Girl has a psych history and liked being around the celebrity—”
“He counts as a celebrity?” Ryan said.
“She’s fifteen. Even you’d count as a celebrity to her with a triple-homicide jury verdict under your belt. Her mother dragged her to a few of Hal’s rallies. Mercer thinks it was all an attempt at blackmailing him that backfired.”
“Do you know anything about a fraud investigation against Hal?” Aaron asked.
I put my head in my hand and exhaled. I couldn’t tell them the little I knew about the tithing improprieties or Battaglia would kill me. That was still a confidential investigation. “Nan,” I asked, “would you do me a favor and call Rose? Ask whether Battaglia has left for the day? I might as well do something to earn the hangover I’m going to buy myself tonight.”
“If you do that, Nan,” Aaron said, “you should also ask Rose if she’s the one who copied Alex on this letter.”
“Please don’t. Not yet,” I said. “I promised the DA I wouldn’t breathe a word of his contact from Shipley. Just see if he’s still here.”
The printer powered up and churned out two pages, which I picked up from the tray.
I faced the wall as I skimmed them.
“Jesus,” I said, starting to read the document again. “This letter thanks the reverend for his contribution, but Battaglia told me he didn’t take any money from Shipley.”
“Could be a contribution of another kind,” Catherine said.
“Who would want anything of any kind from him?” I spoke the words and then stopped in my tracks. “I don’t understand Battaglia at all.”
“What is it?” Nan asked, walking back in from Laura’s desk to tell us that Battaglia had left the office at five thirty, more than half an hour earlier.
“It’s four paragraphs long. It’s—it’s dated about three weeks before I dismissed the statutory case against Shipley. Right after the DA thanks Hal, he tells him in this letter that ‘my chief of the Special Victims Unit,’” I said, hanging imaginary quotation marks in the air, “‘says you have nothing to worry about in regard to the malicious stories being circulated about you.’”
“You must have known Battaglia traded on that kind of information,” Drew Poser said.
“No, I did not. Certainly not in a pending investigation. It’s totally improper. Two weeks before the dismissal I still had no idea whether I had a real case or a psycho teen. This makes it look like the DA was in fact doing favors for Hal Shipley and dragging me into the deal.”
“What do you think this means?” Catherine said.
“Nothing good,” I said. “At the very least, he was trying to curry favor with the devil.”
“But the boss never micromanages your cases.”
“Exactly. And, Aaron, what does it say in my files about a fraud investigation?” Now that I’d read the letter, I knew there was no point in keeping the little I knew about Battaglia’s dealings with Shipley a secret from them. These were my closest professional allies.
“Give me a minute. There’s a link here,” he said to me. “That doesn’t ring any bells?”
“Yeah, there’s a slight tinkling. Just tell us.”
“The letter in your documents folder kicks over to the white-collar division. Looks like there’s a tax fraud allegation that’s been opened into the reverend’s nonprofit profit center.”
The tithing scam was about to come out in the open, way before Battaglia was ready for anyone to know about it. It was as though someone was trying to plant the seed in that division that Shipley indeed had the protection of the district attorney.
“So that’s my fault, too? I’m unleashing this monster and, on top of it, I’m going to take the fall for Battaglia’s double-dealing?”
“Hold tight,” Aaron said. “The fog is lifting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the letter from District Attorney Paul Battaglia to the Reverend Hal Shipley was just dumped onto your computer today. Not months ago, at the time it was written.”
“What?” I said. “Maybe I should ask Rose why she did that after all.”
“It wasn’t Rose,” Aaron Byrne said.
“Who, then?”
“This letter was uploaded to you—and filed by Laura around noon, with your documents—by Josie Aponte. Or whoever it was who stole the Antonio Estevez file.”
We were all trying to connect the dots at once.
“What you’re telling us,” I said, “is that there is some kind of connection between Estevez, a world-class sex trafficker—”
Detective Drew Poser finished my sentence. “And the Reverend Hal Shipley, who’s a world-class pimp in every sense of the word.”
“Aaron,” I said, aware that more than half of what the white-collar lawyers dealt with was Internet crimes, “you know everyone in the fraud division. Will you nail that piece of it for me as discreetly as you can? We need to know as much about this as possible or you’ll be drawn into the quicksand with me.”
“Starting right now,” he said, pushing back from my desk. “Be back to you by morning. All you have to do is figure out the link between Estevez and Shipley.”
“Well, if there is one,” I said, “why would Estevez want to do anything to discredit Shipley? It might cause his flock to think twice about giving to him.”
“Nothing has ever made Shipley’s people second-guess him, Alex. They seem to like the scoundrel side of the reverend.”
“Whatever the link,” Drew said, “it’s pretty obvious Estevez and Shipley have the same goal. Looks like they’ve got a plan to bring you down, Alexandra Cooper.”