My desk phone rang and I answered it. “Alexandra Cooper.”
“Chapman.”
“How’s Francie?” I asked. “Where are you?”
“I’m at Bellevue,” Mike said. “She’s critical, Coop, but the docs are working on her like she’s the only ER admission tonight.”
“Look, Mike, I was telling Mercer that maybe she was attacked by—”
“Stick to the law,” he said. “There were no signs of injury to her head, and the marks on her legs and arms were from flailing because of the seizures—she got completely scraped up on the cement sidewalk. They’re doing every kind of brain scan and test imaginable.”
“Are you with her?”
“Back off, Coop. I rode in the ambulance, but she had no idea who she was or where she was, so forget about me,” Mike said. “And now she’s inside for all the tests.”
“But you’re staying with her?”
“The nurses want to know where her family is.”
“Her mother lives in Texas, in an assisted living facility with a full-time companion,” I said. “There isn’t much other family. See if you can get a Legal Aid supervisor to find her next-of-kin contact.”
Lucy was back, carrying a can of root beer and some red licorice from the vending machines. She knocked on my open door and I waved her in.
“I’ll get on it,” Mike said. “Are you making any progress?”
“A ton of it,” I said.
“How big of an apology can I expect?” he asked.
“Super-size,” I said. “Gotta go, though.”
Mercer walked to the door and closed it.
Lucy sat down again and started gnawing on a Twizzler. “How late are you going to keep me here?”
“Till I get the answers I need,” I said.
“You know this guy, don’t you?” she said.
“I’ve met him. I’m not close to him, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“What I’m worried about is that if I start doing this, and Jake finds out about it, and then you back off ’cause you know what a big deal he is,” Lucy said, “then I’m screwed.”
Mercer spoke, behind the girl. She didn’t turn her head to look at him. “There’s one place Alex has more power than anyone else,” he said, “and that’s the courtroom.”
She was staring me down. “You don’t have more power than the judge.”
“Depends on the judge,” I said. “But I don’t back down off cases, once I’ve made up my mind to take one. That’s why I’ll be so demanding of you when I start the questioning.”
“Demanding what?”
“There’s only one thing you can do wrong, Lucy, and that’s lie to me. No matter what I ask, you can give me an answer or you can tell me that there are specific things that you don’t remember, but if you lie to me—about the least little thing—our deal is done.”
“Little things?”
“Yes, because at the end of the case, when the jury gets instructions about how to decide on the evidence, the judge tells them that if they believe you lied about anything—anything at all—then they can discard all of your testimony. Not just the lie, even if you think it’s a meaningless part of things—but all of it.”
“Why would anyone lie if they were raped?” she asked.
“That’s a really good question, and Mercer and I wonder about it all the time,” I said. “People don’t usually lie about the crime but about some of the details leading up to it. Sometimes they minimize things they did with the bad guy—the man who raped them—because they figure I’ll think worse of them if I know everything they did.”
“Like what?” she said. “Tell me like what?”
“So many things,” I said. “It can be that they drank too much but don’t want me to know they did. Or that they did drugs with the guy, so they’re afraid I’ll have them arrested for smoking weed or snorting coke.”
“Would you?”
“No,” I said. “And sometimes it’s about something sexual that happened between them and the bad guys. Some girls don’t want me to think they made out with a man or took off some of their clothes, because they think I’ll get the idea that they wanted to have sex with him.”
Now Lucy was looking at me with greater interest. “So if I let somebody touch me—touch my breasts or something like that—it doesn’t mean I was asking to be raped, does it?”
“Not at all,” I said. “Not for a minute.”
“All right,” she said. “I think I understand. You can ask your questions.”
I took her back to the day she first met Zach Palmer, spitting distance away from here at 26 Federal Plaza.
“How long were you alone with Jake that time?”
“I’m not sure,” she said. “Probably fifteen or twenty minutes until Kathy came back with coffee.”
“Did you know his real name?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” she said. “It was all Mr. Palmer this and Zach that, depending on how well people knew him. They all wanted me to understand what a big deal he was, so I’d appreciate what he was doing for me, I guess.”
“When you were alone with him—while Kathy went out—did he discuss the case with you?”
Lucy shook her head in the negative. “Nope. Not ever when we were alone, other than to ask me if I was scared about getting shot, like Austin and Buster did,” she said. “He just started then by telling me he needed to know everything there was to know about me—even the most personal stuff—which seemed kind of nasty.”
“Actually, Lucy,” I said, “I do the same thing. I like to tell my witnesses that I need to know as much about them as the very best defense attorney—the person representing the man on trial—could find out if he hired a private eye.”
She sneered at me. “Why do you guys say that?”
“Because we can’t have any surprises when you’re on the witness stand at the trial and I’m behind the prosecutor’s desk in the well of the courtroom, twenty feet away from you. By then it’s too late for me to prevent the other side from asking questions that have nothing to do with your case.”
She seemed to be focusing on my words, trying to absorb them.
“So in that first meeting, did he tell you why he wanted you to call him Jake, instead of his proper name?” I asked.
“He told me that our relationship was going to be different than that of all the other agents and cops,” Lucy said. “That he would ask me about things that no one else needed to know, so he promised to keep any secrets I had to himself and not to share them with others or make them part of the case file.”
“Secrets from Kathy Crain, too?” I asked.
“Especially her,” Lucy said. “Jake said Kathy told him she had taken the place of my mother, and he knew that every teenage girl likes to keep secrets from her mother.”
“Pretty savvy of him,” I said. “That’s not a crazy view of a typical mother-daughter dynamic. What else happened in that first meeting?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, looking away.
I wanted to prod her memory a bit, without leading her. “Did he ask you personal questions?”
“I don’t remember,” Lucy said, expressing her annoyance with me. “You can’t expect me to remember everything he said to me.”
“You’re absolutely right. I’m just trying to figure out when you say you’re not sure, if it means you actually don’t remember or you’re just not ready to tell me something yet.”
“Is it okay not to remember something?”
“Sure it is,” I said. “A lot of this happened a very long time ago. But the more I make you go over things again and again, the more details that will come back to you.”
Memories were likely to flood back in, whether Lucy wanted them to or not. Mercer and I knew how many painful episodes were repressed by survivors, and yet the imprint of the criminal behavior was so dominant that it didn’t take much to bring them back to the surface.
“When Jake was alone with you in the FBI offices, did he touch you?” I asked, speaking calmly, in a soft voice.
She thought for twenty seconds.
“Like, in a bad way?” she asked.
“In any way,” I said. I’d be the judge of what was good touch and what was bad.
“I mean, he hugged me,” Lucy said. “That’s all. He asked me a bunch of questions about Austin and Buster—how close we were to each other and general stuff like that.”
Mercer and the guys in my unit had hugged women, too—sometimes to comfort them, sometimes in celebration after a trial victory. But the Me Too movement had made us more careful about the way we interfaced with our victims. There would be no more hugging from this point on.
“How close were you to Austin and Buster?”
“Jake wanted to know if I’d ever had sex with either one of them,” she said, her annoyance on full display. “He said that would come out at the trial if I had, so he wanted to start with that information, to see whether I’d trust him with it.”
“What did you tell him?” I asked.
“They were just my friends, those guys. No, I’d never had sex with them,” Lucy said. “I was fourteen years old. I’d never had sex with anyone.”
“You told that to Jake?” I said. “Just like you’re telling me now?”
“Maybe I used different words, but that’s what I said.”
“And did he respond?” I asked.
“That’s when he pulled me toward him and hugged me,” Lucy said. “Nothing bad, I swear it. Just like a big bear hug. That’s when he said we were going to do fine together. ‘The prosecutor who’d never yet lost a case to a jury,’ Jake said to me, ‘and the truth-telling virgin with hazel eyes.’”