Deadfall Read online

  ALSO BY LINDA FAIRSTEIN

  FICTION

  Killer Look

  Devil’s Bridge

  Terminal City

  Death Angel

  Night Watch

  Silent Mercy

  Hell Gate

  Lethal Legacy

  Killer Heat

  Bad Blood

  Death Dance

  Entombed

  The Kills

  The Bone Vault

  The Deadhouse

  Cold Hit

  Likely to Die

  Final Jeopardy

  NONFICTION

  Sexual Violence: Our War Against Rape

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street

  New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2017 by Fairstein Enterprises LLC

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  DUTTON is a registered trademark and the D colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fairstein, Linda A., author.

  Title: Deadfall / Linda Fairstein.

  Description: New York, New York : Dutton, [2017]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017020665 | ISBN 9781101984048 (hardback) | ISBN 9781101984055 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.A3654 D38 2017 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020665

  Map by David Cain

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_2

  To the women who were

  CAROLYN KEENE

  You set my course

  CONTENTS

  Also by Linda Fairstein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  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 off
icer 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.

  I walked slowly, circling the gurney, which caused the rookie cop to begin to fidget.

  “Don’t worry. I won’t touch him again,” I said to the kid. “I’ve worked for the man for a long time. I can’t believe this has happened to him.”

  I couldn’t believe it had happened to me, either, but that was a rather self-serving observation, of no importance to anyone else.

  Paul Battaglia’s body was part of the crime scene, which stretched from Fifth Avenue, where the shooter had leaned out a car window to fire at—well, presumably at the district attorney—to the museum entrance, several yards from where I had been standing.

  The blasts had been so powerful that when Battaglia was struck and fell forward, he was lifted out of one of his shoes. The black-laced wing tip was still on his right foot, but his left foot, covered in a dark gray sock with black dots, rested on the gurney as though he had started the process of undressing for the night.

  The strong odor of formalin in the room—already coating my hair and clothing, as it always did—made me cough. I finished my circumnavigation of the body and returned to my post against the counter, sticking my nose into the glass of Scotch to steady myself.

  I kept thinking of things I wanted to know, but I wouldn’t get any answers from the man on the table.

  “Officer,” I said, walking back over to the gurney and leaning against the left side of it. “I wonder if you can tell me—has anyone else from my office been here to see Mr. Battaglia yet? I mean before I came in.”

  “Don’t know, Ms. Cooper. I got pulled off scooter patrol in the precinct to be here, like half an hour ago. I relieved the cops who rode with the morgue van to bring the DA down.”

  One of the city’s great columnists—often quoted to us by Battaglia—once said, “Never kill anyone in a landmark location.” First, because you make yourself instantly notorious for media purposes, and second, because the site itself was always compromised by a crush of onlookers.

  I had never seen a body removed from a crime scene faster than Paul Battaglia was carted off from in front of the Met. The Costume Institute gala had ended a short time before—with hundreds of well-dressed fashion industry elites filling the sidewalks to find black cars and Ubers—and in a city that never sleeps, the museum’s Fifth Avenue venue on the eastern perimeter of Central Park was always a magnet for rubberneckers, day or night.

  Mike Chapman had pulled me back into the museum—security made a path for us—and out through a basement door for the ride down here to the morgue. The corpse made better time than we did.

  “Ms. Cooper, ma’am,” the rookie said. “You’re leaning against the gurney.”

  “It’s just my hand on the metal rim, Officer.” I couldn’t stop looking at the still figure that had been so very alive two hours earlier.

  “There’s blood all over your outfit, Ms. Cooper. You don’t want to be contaminating the DA’s clothing, do you?”

  “It’s dry, Officer. I promise you that,” I said, looking down at the stained front of my borrowed sweatshirt and leggings.

  “Still, it could fleck off and—”

  “You’re right,” I said, taking two steps back, clasping my glass with both hands.

  “I don’t mean to put you off, ma’am,” the officer said, eyes face forward again. “You mind my asking what he was like?”

  “Paul Battaglia? Most people would say he was the best in the business.”

  For me, his character was much more complicated. He had been district attorney longer than most New Yorkers could remember. His campaign slogan—from his first run through eight terms—had been YOU CAN’T PLAY POLITICS WITH PEOPLE’S LIVES. But he had lost sight of that sentiment somewhere along the way and was more adept at using people for political purposes than Machiavelli had been.

  “This must be so difficult for you,” the cop said.

  “It is.” But not for the reasons he or anyone who wasn’t close to me would think. I had once been so devoted to Battaglia that I never looked for flaws, or I had been blind enough that I hadn’t seen them. Much more recently, I had become disillusioned with the man. I distrusted some of his alliances with corrupt figures among the city’
s satellite players, just as he had taken to undermining and second-guessing many of my investigative tactics.

  It was difficult for me because Paul Battaglia and I had unfinished business, and now there were things that we could never resolve.

  I bowed my head and looked again. There was just a slight indentation in the skin on the fourth finger of his left hand where Battaglia had once worn a wedding ring. For reasons unknown to me, he had taken it off months ago.

  I lifted the drinking glass and placed it against my forehead. Had it been my usual cocktail, with ice, it would have refreshed me and anesthetized my pounding headache. But this motion was just a senseless habit that was no help to me at all.

  The door opened and closed behind me. I didn’t look up.

  “How’s the old man doing, Coop?” Mike said. “You making sure he’s still dead?”

  The comment took the rookie by surprise. His eyebrows rose and his expression changed. It was obvious he’d never met Mike Chapman before.

  “Actually, I’m making sure that if Battaglia has a glimmer of life in him and has anything left to say, he says it to me.”

  “Unanswered questions,” Mike said. “I know you don’t like ’em, Coop, but very few people check out leaving a tidy package behind for their heirs, professional or personal—especially when the Grim Reaper shows up out of the blue like this.”

  “Why the hell was he rushing up the museum steps, after midnight, saying he had to talk to me?” I asked.

  “To rip you a new one.”

  “Now, what makes you think that?” I said, turning to face Mike. “That’s stooping lower than I would go.”

  “Really? I’ll have to reset the bar a little higher. I thought you were as low as you could possibly get,” Mike said. “’Cause all Battaglia’s done lately is criticize you. Here you are, on a leave of absence, and you disobey all his orders to stay out of a case. Instead, you bring it to a head in front of an audience—”

  “I didn’t do anything to make the case break last night.”

  “Don’t whine, Coop. It doesn’t become you,” he said. “Break it you did, with the police commissioner doing an instant presser at the museum, without waiting for the district attorney, and crediting you for your involvement too. Maybe Battaglia was charging up to butt heads with you again.”