I was leaning against the side of the enormous courthouse, beneath the shadows of the Bridge of Sighs.
“Compose yourself, girl,” Mercer said. “What makes you think you can put out every fire, no matter what the cause?”
“I’m counting on the medics to deal with that end of things,” I said. “I wanted to go with her, just to hold her hand. Give her some comfort.”
I knew what it was like to be alone when the darkness of some unforeseen trauma envelops you.
“I’ll bet you she was walking to Forlini’s, to my little party,” I said. “She probably just finished up in court and was on her way over.”
“Those convulsions would have happened to her no matter where she was headed, don’t you think?” Mercer said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket to pass to me. “Has she been ill?”
“No. Nothing wrong with Francie. She ran a 5K race in Central Park last week,” I said, “and before that she flew overseas to go to that conference at Oxford on gun violence. I was supposed to debate her there. She said the best thing about my—my, uh, situation—was that I couldn’t show up and butt heads with her.”
I blew my nose into Mercer’s handkerchief and wiped my eyes.
“Text Mike, please, to keep in touch with you while I’m interviewing Lucy,” I said.
“That’s one thing he doesn’t need to be told.”
I looked overhead at what was known as the Bridge of Sighs, the covered walkway with iron bars on its small windows that connected the criminal courthouse to the Tombs. Those criminals not set free—as Lucy Jenner had been—were condemned to cross that bridge to be taken to their cells in the city prison.
“What if it’s a head injury?” I said, still staring up at the old structure, built nearly a century ago and named for its counterpart, the Venetian Bridge of Sighs, which was built in 1600. “What if Francie was mugged or assaulted here? Every kind of scumbag hangs around the courthouse after release, looking to score.”
“Trust the docs on this one,” Mercer said, encouraging me to move along. “The EMTs weren’t looking for injury. They were just trying to stabilize her. Keep her airways open.”
“But right here, at this spot,” I said. “Isn’t that ironic?”
“How so?” Mercer said. He towered over me at six feet four inches, leaning his head back to see where my finger was pointing.
“Bridge of Sighs,” I said. “You know, Venice?”
“Yeah. The limestone arch that crosses the Rio di Palazzo—”
“Separating the convicts from the Doge’s Palace,” I said. “Condemned prisoners sighed as they took their last look at Venice through the stone grillwork of the bridge.”
“And when this courthouse was built,” Mercer said, “the skybridge you’re looking at was named for its Venetian ancestor. Before the state began to use the electric chair, there was a gallows right here at the Tombs. This really was the last bit of earth the condemned men saw.”
I squinted at him. “C’mon. A gallows, in nineteenth-century Manhattan?”
“At least fifty prisoners were hung right here where we’re standing. Executed beneath the Bridge of Sighs. Maybe that’ll get you moving along on your way.”
I started to walk toward Hogan Place, the entrance to the DA’s office, following a step or two behind Mercer.
“You should have a team from Major Case check on who Francie’s clients were, especially today and tonight,” I said. “Maybe someone she represented didn’t expect to do the bridge walk, didn’t expect to be kept in the slammer. Could be an unhappy thug or cohort who followed Francie out of the courthouse as payback.”
“Did that shrink put you on psychotropic meds?” Mercer asked, cocking his head to look at me. “Your imagination is more vivid than ever.”
“No drugs,” I said, laughing at him. “I told her the only thing that brought on panic attacks anymore was the thought of no Dewar’s at the end of my workday. And that soothing drink is contraindicated for drugs.”
“Let’s wait and get ourselves a diagnosis on Francie, and that will tell us whether it’s a police matter or not.”
Mercer put his gun on the table next to the metal detector, and the security guard waved us both through.
The building was usually still after eight o’clock. Lawyers hunched over their desks planning the next day’s cross-examination, detectives being prepped for testifying at hearings or trials, paralegals helping with research on issues that had arisen during the day. The hallways were long, dark, and airless. The late-night work was often intense, and the quiet hung heavily throughout the corridors.
We got off the elevator on the eighth floor and headed for my office.
I turned the corner and was surprised to see Lucy Jenner standing behind my desk. The top drawer was open and she withdrew her hand from it the second she caught sight of me.
“What are you doing?” I asked, shocked that the young woman would be brazen enough to go through my things. “Where’s Kerry?”
“Bathroom, I guess,” Lucy said, without a hint of embarrassment, as she slid the drawer back into place.
“There isn’t any money in my desk,” I said, angry that someone we were trying to help would take advantage of me. But it had happened so many times before that I had learned to use the drawers as they were intended—for pens, papers, and legal pads, not my wallet. “There’s nothing of value.”
“I was looking for a key,” Lucy said, answering me but staring at Mercer. “Who’s he?”
“Stick with the key for a minute,” I said. “A key to what?”
“Ms. O’Donnell said you got my stuff back. My cash and my personal stuff,” Lucy said. “I need to have those things before I leave.”
“Kerry told you where they are?”
“Nope. But the paralegal who brought them from police headquarters told us that she locked them in Laura’s desk.”
“What do you mean by ‘told us’? Told you?”
“Well, I overheard them talking to each other,” Lucy said. “I want my things and I want to go to this Streetwork place where you said I can live for a while.”
“That’s half the deal,” I said. “Let’s switch places and you sit down over here. We haven’t finished talking, you and I. I made good on my part.”
Kerry came back in the room. “Everything okay?”
“Thanks, Kerry,” I said. “Lucy’s been on a scavenger hunt for the key to Laura’s desk.”
Kerry reached into her pants pocket and pulled out the key, handing it to Mercer, who was closer to her than I was. “You’ve got really good hearing, Lucy Jenner, if you picked up on that conversation. And I’d stay out of Ms. Cooper’s drawers. She keeps a mousetrap in the second one on the left. The last witness who tried to look for something that didn’t belong to her had her finger snapped in half.”
Lucy Jenner stared at me with new respect. “You did that to someone?”
Kerry answered instead of me. “That’s the third time it worked on nosy witnesses. Two teenage girls—just a month apart from each other—got their digits crushed down to the knuckles. But they reattached the top joint of the most recent one at Bellevue. So you just sit down and do whatever Ms. Cooper tells you to do. She doesn’t suffer fools—or dissemblers—”
“Dissemblers?” Lucy asked. “What’s that?”
“Thanks for all the time, Kerry,” I said to her as she backed out of the room with a wave. “The mousetraps with those little steel teeth on the clamps work so much better than flypaper, don’t you think?”
“What’s a dissembler?” Lucy asked again.
“Don’t worry,” I said, forcing a smile. “It’s not what you are. It’s late. It’s late for all of us, so why don’t we get started?”
“I asked you who this man is and you didn’t answer me,” Lucy said.
“Here I was, silly enough to think that if I got your warrant dismissed and set you free of the criminal justice system, you might warm up to me a little bit and appreciate that we’re going to help you,” I said, pulling out my chair and taking my position behind my desk. “All of us. This is Mercer Wallace. He’s the best Special Victims detective I’ve ever worked with, and he’s one of my closest friends.”
“Did you really think that by bringing a black man in to question me instead of that Chapman cop, I’d fall for it?”
“Mercer’s here because I need a partner on every case,” I said, trying to keep my temper in check. “I’m bringing in the best SVU cop in the business, and that has nothing to do with his race. Now, sit up and let’s get to work.”
Lucy shuffled in her chair and played with the buttons on the cuffs of the new shirt she was wearing.
“I’ve had a lot of hours to think about what I said to you this morning,” she said. “You know, about what happened to me.”
“I’m sure you have,” I said. “You’ve had time to rest and clean up and get some new clothes—and lots of time to think, to pull yourself together for me. I’m ready to get this done.”
Lucy looked down and fingered the material of her shirt and pants. “Can I keep the clothes you bought me?”
She wasn’t my first witness to seem to be as interested in the new things—free threads—as she was in the business at hand.
“Compliments of the City of New York,” I said. “Are you comfortable now? What I want you to do is trust me. I’d like you to start back all those years ago and tell me the story of what happened to you.”
Lucy glanced around to look at Mercer, who had taken a seat behind her, near the door.
“Pretend he isn’t even here,” I said. “Mercer’s just an observer.”
He was there to back me up on every detail that Lucy was about to reveal. Mercer was protection for me at this point.
“I’m going to ask all the questions for now,” I said. “So if there is anything you want to know before we begin, anything that will make you more comfortable, you can ask them right now.”
Lucy wiped her hand back and forth across her mouth. “My things. Can I have them?”
“When we’re done,” I said. I was trying to find the perfect pitch for the tone of my interrogation, somewhere between firm—helped in that regard by Kerry’s anecdote about the mousetraps—and compassionate.
Lucy Jenner pouted.
“The best I can figure, the man who took advantage of you was involved after Buster and Austin were killed, am I right?”
No answer.
“What I mean is, I won’t make you go through all of that again at this point in time, okay?” I wanted to lower the emotional content of the interview. “You choose the way you want to tell the story. I want you to try to relax. I’m not taking any steps until you’re one hundred percent on board.”
Lucy’s chest started heaving. It was obvious she was getting upset, and she refused to make eye contact with me.
“I can’t do it,” she said, looking down at some place on the floor between my desk and her feet. “I thought I could, Ms. Cooper, but I just can’t. Not because I don’t want to, but I just can’t.”
“This morning you said you had told people five years ago, when you were here in the city. People who didn’t believe you and didn’t do anything about it.”
Now Lucy had twisted her head to the side and was gnawing at a hangnail.
“I didn’t say that,” Lucy said. “I told you I tried.”
“Tried what?”
“Tried to tell people.”
I knew she had said that she had told people. Now she was backing off from that statement, proving my need to have Mercer present.
“Like I said to you then, Lucy, try me.” I was leaning in toward her, trying to make the conversation as easy and intimate as I could.
Her chest heaved again as she exhaled and wiped a tear from her eye. “I can’t do it, Ms. Cooper. I can’t do it now for the same reason I couldn’t do it then.”
“Sure you can,” I said. “These are different times—you said that yourself—and I’m here to work my tail off getting some kind of justice for you. You’ve come through so much in your young life that even though I’ve known you for just a few hours, I don’t think there’s much you can’t do. What’s the reason you’re saying that?”
I pulled a Kleenex—a staple of my trade—from the box on my desk and passed it to her.
“Please, Lucy. Give me the reason.”
She wiped her eyes and her cheeks and balled up the tissue in her fist.
“If anything worse happens to me than what I’ve been through,” she said, “I won’t be able to take it.”
“Don’t talk that way, Lucy. Let’s see what we can do—together,” I said, curious that she was worried about something bad that could happen—something she didn’t have the fortitude to endure. “Have you ever tried to hurt yourself?”
She was still sniffling as she pulled up one of the cuffs and showed me the scars of several marks where she had cut herself on her inner wrist.
I had seen scores of self-inflicted cuts on young women. These, like many others, looked superficial. They looked like an effort to call attention to herself, but not really to endanger her.
“If you trust me—and Mercer—there’ll be nothing anyone can do to hurt you. Do you understand that?”
“I understand what you’re saying, Ms. Cooper,” Lucy said. “That doesn’t mean I believe it.”
“Who are you afraid of?” I asked. “The man who hurt you?”
“Yeah. Exactly. The man who raped me. He didn’t just hurt me, he raped me.”
I had been waiting for Lucy to use that word. Rape. She hadn’t said it earlier in the day, and though it seemed to me to be the issue, she needed to speak it out loud and not have me guess at it.
“We put rapists in prison, Lucy. That’s what Mercer and I do.”
She had shredded the tissue in her hand, so I gave her two more.
“The reason I’ve never been able to tell anyone is that the man—my rapist,” Lucy said, catching her breath, “my rapist threatened that if I ever said anything about what happened, he’d personally make sure he’d find me and find a way to break my spirit. To break me completely—whatever was left of me.”
I tightened my lips and tried to find the right approach to reach her. “Whoever he is, Lucy, he can’t be that powerful. Nobody is. You’re got strength and courage you’re not even aware you have.”
Lucy pushed her chair back. She was defiant now. “He is powerful, Ms. Cooper. And beyond that, he made me swear not to tell.”
“He obviously made you do a lot of things you didn’t want to do,” I said. “You were a kid, Lucy. Don’t be afraid now of things that scared you then. Swearing to a rapist that you’d protect his secret is not a pledge you have to keep. Bring him to justice and I promise you that not even he can break your spirit.”
“It was more than a pledge I made to him,” Lucy said, hesitating for several seconds. “It was an oath. He said it was every bit as sacred as a religious rite—a promise to God.”
“But, Lucy—” I started to say.
“He had a razor blade, Ms. Cooper. He cut his hand with it,” she said, “and then he cut mine.”
This time when she offered her hand to me, she opened her fist and showed me her palm. There was a scar across it, from the base of her index finger to the opposite corner where the palm joined with the top of her wrist.
“He mixed our blood together and made me swear never to tell,” Lucy said, rubbing her palm.
“I don’t know what will happen to me if I break that pledge, she said, pausing again. “It was a blood oath.”