Blood Oath Read online

  ALSO BY LINDA FAIRSTEIN

  FICTION

  Deadfall

  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

  penguinrandomhouse.com

  Copyright © 2019 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 and the D colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Fairstein, Linda A., author.

  Title: Blood oath : a novel / Linda Fairstein.

  Description: New York : Dutton, [2019] | Series: An Alexandra Cooper novel | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018059290| ISBN 9781524743109 (hardback) | ISBN 9781524743116 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Cooper, Alexandra (Fictitious character)—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Mystery & Detective / General. | FICTION / Suspense. | GSAFD: Mystery fiction. | Suspense fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3556.A3654 B63 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018059290

  Map by David Cain

  Photographs on title page: Bridge of Sighs © 1938 by Horace Abrahams; New York’s Bridge of Sighs © 1905 by Interim Archives

  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_1

  FOR JESSE AUSUBEL

  Brilliant scientist, visionary leader, treasured friend

  And his colleagues at the Rockefeller University, who use their creativity and genius every day to make our world a better place

  CONTENTS

  Also by Linda Fairstein

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Map of New York City

  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

  Chapter Fifty-one

  Chapter Fifty-two

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Very few of us are what we seem.

  —Agatha Christie

  ONE

  “Back from the dead, are you, Ms. Cooper?” the judge bellowed from the bench as I let the courtroom door close behind me.

  I forced a smile and walked to the front row, taking a seat next to Helen Wyler, one of the young lawyers in the Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit.

  “What’s the matter?” Judge Corliss asked. “Cat got your tongue?”

  There were only twenty people in the large room. There was the law secretary assigned to Corliss, who was sitting beside him, scribbling notes in her log; the clerk, who was at his desk to the left, pretending to fumble with the day’s calendar; the stenographer, who had rested his hands at his side when Corliss started to yell; a defense attorney sitting at counsel table, looking over his shoulder and laughing at me; and the defendant himself—on trial for first-degree rape—fixated on the pretty face of the young law secretary who was working with the judge. The others, except for the jury and my colleague, Helen, had probably been corralled by the defense attorney to pretend to be family members interested in the outcome of the trial.

  I raised my hands to my sides, palms up, and just shrugged at Corliss.

  “Looks like I lose my bet, Alexandra,” the judge said, standing up on his raised platform and pulling back his black gown—hands on his hips—expecting everyone would admire his fit torso and his bespoke shirt with monogrammed cuffs. “You’re going to cost me fifty bucks.”

  “I’m so sorry, Alex,” Helen said, leaning closer to me as she whispered. “I didn’t want to bother you on your first day back in the office, but Corliss is totally trying to steamroll over me and I don’t have the experience to stand up to him.”

  “Pay attention to me,” Corliss said to me. “Not your sidekick. Ms. Wyler will get it right one of these days, with or without your help.”

  Now the defendant’s entourage was engaged, too, trying to figure out who I was and why the judge was spending time and energy on me.

  “Fifty large, Alexandra. I bet three of the other judges in the lunchroom you’d never set foot in this building again.”

  I poked Helen in the side so that she would get to her feet and address Corliss from her proper place, within the well of the courtroom.

  She stood and pushed through the low wooden gate, taking her place at counsel table.

  “May I have ten minutes with Ms. Cooper?” she asked.

  The defendant—a serial rapist who specialized in attacki
ng teenagers—put his head in his hands and groaned.

  “You can have ten, Ms. Wyler,” Corliss said, “so long as I get fifteen.”

  “The witness room is empty, Your Honor,” Helen said. “We’ll just go in there.”

  “I’m first,” Corliss said. He motioned to me with his forefinger, telling me to approach him so we could have a private conversation. “And you’ll stay right where you are, Ms. Wyler.”

  I ignored his summons and walked to the prosecution table, which was stacked high with trial folders and papers. Helen stepped back briskly, as though moving away from an out-of-control car coming in her direction.

  “Why the silent treatment, Alexandra?” Corliss asked.

  I turned to the stenographer, who had recorded the testimony at several of my trials. “Lenny, let’s go on the record, please.”

  “Who’s giving the orders in here? Somebody make you a judge while I wasn’t looking?” Corliss asked. “Lenny, why don’t you go help yourself to a cup of coffee?”

  When Lenny stood up to leave the room, I turned my back to the bench and started to retrace my steps.

  “Whoa, whoa!” Corliss said. “Let’s slow this down, Alexandra.”

  Raymond Santiago looked up, leaning over past his lawyer to check out the minor commotion. His right hand moved instinctively to his groin, where he seemed to like to keep it most of the time, when he wasn’t stalking his victims. What Santiago’s lawyer referred to as his client’s hypersexuality was likely to be on constant display for the jury.

  I swiveled again. “I’m happy to talk to you, Your Honor,” I said. “I want everything we say to be on the record. That’s why I didn’t answer when you first called out to me.”

  “Stick around, Lenny,” Judge Corliss said, motioning to the stenographer to sit. “Ms. Cooper wants on the record, we’ll give her on the record. Like I was saying, she’s just back from—”

  “I wasn’t dead, Your Honor,” I said, smiling at him. “Sorry to disappoint, but I wasn’t even on life support.”

  The Honorable Bud Corliss liked to bully young assistants like Helen Wyler. He would shut down the stenographer and launch verbal arrows at the prosecutors, each one tipped with a poisonous comment about his or her skills. Sometimes, if his target was an attractive young woman, he’d add a remark about her anatomy. Then, if she chose to complain to a superior about the comment, there were no traces of Corliss’s bad behavior in the transcript.

  “I guess you really dodged a bullet, in the most literal sense,” he said, sitting in his high-back leather chair and adjusting his gold cuff links. “I mean, the night your late lamented boss was shot in the head just a few feet away from you—dodging that bullet.”

  This was a conversation I didn’t want to have in front of strangers—no less a perp charged with seventeen counts of rape and aggravated sexual assault.

  “Strike that word ‘lamented,’” Corliss said to Lenny, editing his own remarks. “Not everybody got broken up about the forced retirement of Paul Battaglia after a few too many terms in office, did they, Alexandra?”

  “The district attorney mentored me, Your Honor,” I said. “He put me in charge of the Special Victims Bureau a dozen years ago. I had nothing but respect for the man.”

  “Let me ask you something,” he said, leaning forward and putting both elbows on his blotter. “I have a few questions about what happened that—”

  “Judge Corliss, this is neither the time nor place,” I said. “You’ve got jurors waiting for the testimony to resume, my colleague is anxious to complete the People’s case by the end of the week, and the defendant—well . . .”

  “What about him?”

  “Mr. Santiago probably needs to get some medical attention for that itch in his groin he keeps scratching throughout our conversation,” I said. “This might be a good time to give him a short restroom break and throw him some calamine lotion before I have Ms. Wyler add in a count of masturbating in a public place.”

  “Good to know you haven’t lost your sense of humor, Alexandra,” Corliss said as Santiago’s inexperienced court-appointed lawyer struggled to find grounds for an objection. “Ten-minute break, ladies and gentlemen. Let’s clear the courtroom.”

  Court officers handcuffed the prisoner and took him out to the holding pen that serviced the thirteenth-floor trial rooms. His hangers-on—impervious to my comments—wandered out into the large corridor that ran the entire length of the enormous building.

  I sat at counsel table with Helen Wyler. “What do you need?”

  “I’ve made a terrible mistake, Alex,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll get my first two victims back here if Corliss declares a mistrial.”

  “What have you done?” I asked.

  “The fifteen-year-old who testified Friday—the one who was raped on the rooftop at Taft Houses?” Helen said.

  “Yes, I remember.” I knew the case well. Helen had indicted it before my leave had started almost three months earlier—after an incident that was unrelated to the murder of the district attorney.

  “On cross this morning, she admitted texting me six or seven times before the trial began,” Helen said, slouching lower in her chair.

  “Did she?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, she did.”

  “But you didn’t turn the texts over to the defense?”

  I could see Corliss out of the corners of my eyes, pacing back and forth, trying to catch a fragment of our conversation.

  “The texts weren’t significant to the case facts, Alex,” Helen said to me, stopping to bite her lip. “Graciela was just asking if she had to see Santiago in the courtroom and about how terrified she was to be within twenty feet of him. That kind of stuff.”

  The perp had grabbed the girl as she got off an elevator to go to her home in the projects, holding a knife to her neck to force her to the roof, where he raped her repeatedly for almost two hours.

  “That kind of stuff, as you call it,” I said, as calmly as I could, “is still Rosario Material. The defense is entitled to every one of those texts, Helen. You know that as well as I do.”

  “They got away from me,” she said. “They were coming in at all hours of the night and somehow they just got away from me.”

  “So you didn’t print them out?” I asked. “You didn’t save them?”

  “Graciela’s emails, yes. The defense has them all. Her texts—well, I just forgot.”

  The New York Court of Appeals had mandated the disclosure of all of a prosecution witness’s prior recorded statements in a ruling in the Rosario case, many decades ago. Each new form of social media ratcheted up the number of ways a nervous witness could communicate.

  “Corliss knows?” I asked.

  “Yes, because of her answers on cross,” Helen said. “He’s threatening to strike all of Graciela’s testimony. Maybe even declare a mistrial. I’m screwed if he does that. She’ll never go through this again.”

  “How much time has he given you?”

  “Until tomorrow morning,” Helen said, avoiding eye contact with me and lifting her head to stare at the light fixtures on the ceiling. “But that won’t help because they don’t exist. I deleted them.”

  “Have you tried TARU?” I asked, putting my hand on hers, which was on top of a pile of her notes. “They’re wizards.”

  The NYPD’s Technical Assistance Response Unit was a small, elite force of detectives responsible for all investigative tech support and the most complex computer forensics.

  Helen shook her head. “I was too embarrassed to tell the SVU detectives last night. I just assumed it was a lost cause once I hit Delete. I’ve never worked a matter with TARU.”

  “Focus on your case,” I said, standing up. “Where’s your phone?”

  “Top desk drawer.”

  “It won’t be there when you get downstairs, but you’ll hav
e it back tonight,” I said. “These TARU guys can retrieve stuff that’s gone off into the Twilight Zone. Nothing ever gets fatally lost in the ether. Tell Corliss you’ll have what he wants by morning.”

  “Shouldn’t I ask for an adjournment?”

  “Call your next witness, Helen,” I said. “Raymond Santiago has preyed on young girls for the last time. Just don’t let Corliss beat you down along the way.”

  I stepped away from her and waved to Corliss. “Thanks for giving me the time.”

  “Now I get my fifteen with you,” he said, tucking his thumbs into the front of his leather belt, the sides of his robe pushed back, and striding down the three steps from his bench to walk to his robing room. “C’mon, Alexandra.”

  Helen Wyler was on her feet, apologizing to me for putting me in the judge’s scope.

  “It’s okay. But don’t you ever do what I’m about to do,” I said. “The man’s a pig. Don’t let him bully you into being alone with him.”

  “But you—”

  “I had my first felony trial in front of Corliss a dozen years ago,” I said. “My entire team were guys—really good guys. You’ve met them all. My knees used to wobble when he demanded that I come into his robing room to discuss a plea deal or a procedural issue. So my pals swore that if I ever walked out with any of the judge’s dandruff on my suit, they’d know I’d been too close to him and they’d take him down.”

  Helen laughed.

  “Thanks for your concern,” I said, “but at this stage in our relationship, Corliss doesn’t have any real interest in me—and he certainly lacks the balls to take me on.”

  I followed him into the small cubicle behind the courtroom. There was a wooden chair and desk and two more chairs for visitors. Bud Corliss was staring out the window, looking down at the traffic on Centre Street.

  “You’ve had a rough autumn,” he said, his back to me. “First the kidnapping, and then the shock of witnessing Battaglia’s murder.”

  “It was a pretty miserable couple of months, but I’m back on my feet, Judge,” I said. “And I didn’t mean to be rude when I came into your courtroom, but I just wasn’t ready to throw this all out in front of Santiago and his crew.”