Max was back in my office fifteen minutes later.
“Do we have a plan?” she asked.
“I’ve split up my ‘to do’ list,” I said. “Can you handle half of it for me?”
“Sure.”
“Start with Streetwork. Ask them to report in to you twice a day, starting today, about how Lucy Jenner is responding to their efforts.”
“They’re not going to snitch on her, you know,” Max said. “They’re advocates and counselors and therapists who’ll be working with her.”
“I’m not looking for a snitch. I trust their work completely. But I want intel on whether Lucy’s cooperating with their efforts to get her on her feet, and trying to make sure she doesn’t go AWOL”
“What else?” Max said, nodding her head and writing everything down on a legal pad.
“I’m giving you the SOL laws to brief for me,” I said. “Statutes of limitations for prosecuting sexual abuse of an underage girl in Oregon, Utah, and Iowa for starters. The ages and requirements are likely to be different in every state.”
“Am I looking for forcible assaults or statutory?” Max asked.
“I still don’t have the details of each encounter yet, so you might as well search for both,” I said.
“Lucy was fourteen when she met Zachary Palmer?” Max asked.
“For the time being, with an entire legal staff surrounding us, let’s continue to refer to him as Jake.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s a unique situation and we’ll have to make up rules for this as we go along.”
“Fourteen?” she asked again.
“That’s what she says. But her aunt makes her out to be an unreliable storyteller, so I’ll spend a few hours today trying to run down some of her claims against him. The things she told me last night,” I said. “See if we can corroborate her recollections with dates of hearings and local news clips—so we can match up her whereabouts, her age at the time—all that kind of thing before we move on to hotel records. Start with information in the public domain before we try to get it some other way.”
“But suppose we need subpoenas? Who’s our go-to person for sign-offs on them or the use of government search engines and any expenses we incur?” Max said.
“Me.”
She squinted and looked me in the eye.
“No, really,” Max said.
“Battaglia’s dead and the front office is in complete turmoil. This is only my second day back at my desk, but it’s pretty obvious,” I said.
“You should be reporting to someone, Alex. It’s safer that way.”
“The special election is almost six months away, in April. All the executive assistants and super-titled special counsel designees are tripping over each other to sit closest to Paul Battaglia’s empty throne.”
Max had always been solidly in my corner.
“So who do you trust in this scramble for power in the pecking order above me?” I asked. “Pat McKinney?”
McKinney, the chief of the Trial Division, had a tortured history with me. Although technically higher up in the chain of command and above me in rank, he resented that Battaglia had urged me to skip over him to report directly to the DA. McKinney was sour and stubborn and would do almost anything to thwart an investigation I led.
“Never,” Max said.
I reeled off four other names to her.
“It’s kind of like the Seven Dwarfs in the inner sanctum,” she said, responding to my list. “Dopey, Lazy, Grumpy, and Dweeby.”
“Which one of them has ever handled a rape investigation?” I asked.
“Not one. But the weight of all this doesn’t fall on your back alone if things go terribly wrong, once you’ve run it up the ladder,” Max said.
“Things have gone terribly wrong for Lucy Jenner since she was fourteen,” I said. “There are so many loose rungs on that ladder in the executive wing at the moment that I’d rather take the hit and avoid it. Besides, I certainly don’t know if Lucy has every detail right—memories can occasionally take strange detours over time. But I believe the broad strokes of her story.”
Max just looked at me and nodded.
“Don’t worry,” I said with a smile. “You can always say ‘I told you so.’”
“I’m ready to run with this,” she said, turning to leave the room. “Pile on anything else you need.”
The day was a mix of the usual things—phone calls from detectives and witnesses wanting updates on their cases, meetings with assistants in the unit to help strategize about upcoming trials, helping Laura handle the flow of walk-ins who wanted interviews about assorted criminal events, and trying to get deeper into the facts of Lucy’s case.
Mercer showed up an hour after Max left the room. He brought me another large cup of black coffee and sat down across from me.
“How goes it?” he asked. “What do you know about Francie?”
“Quint Akers is running the show,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “He’s cutting me out of things because he thinks I’m mad.”
“Mad what? Mad at him?”
“Nope. Mad, as in unbalanced,” I said, blowing on the hot dark liquid. “You’ve been through this whole post-kidnapping thing with me, Mercer. Am I unbalanced?”
“You serious?”
“Dead serious.”
“Your hands are steady as the Rock of Gibraltar holding that cup of mud you’re about to drink,” Mercer said. “A month ago, you were trembling like a hummingbird.”
“I feel good,” I said. “I think people are sticking me with a label.”
“Prove them wrong. Take a slam-dunk case away from one of the kids and stand on your own two feet,” Mercer said. “Be top trial dog again.”
I poked my finger at the stack of Lucy’s paperwork on my desktop. “Stay with me on this one. I’d rather reestablish my bones with a gnarly mess like this case.”
“Always with you,” he said. “Find anything yet?”
I had the bag of items the police had taken from Lucy and vouchered. “Illinois driver’s license, with a Chicago address,” I said, handing it to him. “She lied about her date of birth on it. Makes herself twenty-two, two years younger than she is, according to the facts we know.”
“I wonder when that started,” Mercer said, jotting down the info on the license. “The lying about her age, I mean.”
“Will you try to get a birth certificate?” I asked. “If we make a statutory case, then everything relies on her age—down to the month and the day—since she was moving around from state to state in prep for Welly’s trial.”
“No problem. Public record, probably Illinois, right?”
“Probably,” I said. “And see if Kathy Crain is still an agent. She’ll be a critical witness in this, if she hasn’t been brainwashed by Jake along the way. I don’t want to make any contact with her yet, but we need to know who’s available if this picks up any speed.”
Our lists grew and grew throughout the next few hours, and we stopped only to eat the sandwiches we ordered in.
At three o’clock, Laura buzzed me on the intercom. “Line two, Alex. I’ve got Zachary Palmer.”
I froze for a second, looking like a deer in the headlights with all of the evidence of Palmer’s split personality laid out on my desk. Then I shrugged as I looked over at Mercer and picked up the phone.
“Alexandra Cooper,” I said.
“Madame Prosecutor. It’s Zach,” he said. “How are you doing?”
“All good. And you?”
“Top of my game,” Zach said.
“Glad to hear it. Are we still on for a drink?”
“Something’s come up that’s going to make me late,” he said. “Can we change it to dinner instead? Eight o’clock.”
“I can do that,” I said. “How about Patroon? It’s my favorite steak place, and they make a fine cocktail.”
“Good idea,” he said. “We can put a little bit of meat on you. Fatten you up, Alex.”
“Fatten me up? What, for the kill?”
“Oh yeah,” Zach said. “I’m just looking to slaughter you at the polls next April, if you go that far. That’s why I’m trying to rattle some of the skeletons in your closet now.”
I seemed to be surrounded by people who were counting the chinks in my armor, but I had every reason to believe that Zachary Palmer’s closet had more skeletons in it than my own.
“Rattle away, my friend,” I said. “Game on.”