Fury kac-17 Read online

  "Let's see…ah yes, here it is, 'He told the police that when he saw the victim about midnight, she appeared "disheveled and in tears" and that 'only after coaxing did the victim tell him she'd been raped.'"

  "Did the witness know her previously?" asked another of the assistant district attorneys, probably to prove that he'd been paying attention to the previous discussion.

  Rachman shook her head. "No, they're not even in the same department. And…," she said, pausing to look at Kipman, "the police interviewed her friends and acquaintances, and none have ever seen or heard of Mr. Vanders. In fact, he's something of a geek, if I may use that term, with no known girlfriends. But if you saw Ms. Ryder, you'd realize that he's not remotely her type. A real beauty, in other words, and knows it."

  "There's semen on the blouse?" another ADA asked and chuckled self-consciously. "Will he make a Bill Clinton defense and say he 'never had sex with that woman'?"

  Rachman laughed just as falsely. "I guess there's a similarity. We believe this asshole wiped himself off on her blouse when he was finished."

  "But no semen found in her?"

  "The victim reported that the perp used a condom."

  "What's the perp, this Michalik, say?"

  Rachman looked disgusted. "Oh, the usual. It was her fault. She started the flirting-as if a twenty-five-year-old college coed has this irresistible power over an admittedly handsome, forty-five-year-old poetry professor with a nifty European accent.

  "What is true is that this was a guy who could control what happened to the rest of her life. He not only was her adviser, with the power to accept or reject her master's thesis, he also sat on the board that approved which students would be accepted into the doctoral program. Of course, he claims that she only brought these charges after he refused to give her a free pass on the thesis and sponsor her for the doctoral program."

  Rachman shook her head again. "It always amazes me how these guys expect us to believe these stories-like a woman would use rape charges to blackmail a college professor so that she wouldn't have to write her thesis paper." She looked around the table with a "can you believe this shit" smile on her face, but froze when she saw Kipman adjust his glasses and prepare to read from a document.

  "It says in this report that the complainant did not go to university officials until nearly 3 PM the next day," he said. "Why is that?"

  Rachman's eyes glittered with hate. "You want to tell me what you're doing with reports from my office?"

  Kipman didn't blink. "I believe that you're aware that one of my functions is prior review of questionable cases before we make formal charges. In light of the recent reversal on the case we just discussed, I thought it might be a good idea to look over another alleged case of acquaintance rape."

  "So you're checking up on me," Rachman hissed.

  Karp cleared his throat. "Don't look at it that way, Rachel. It's just that sometimes two sets of eyes are better than one. This is not a reflection on your abilities as a prosecutor; we are all aware of your excellent work in the courtroom. However, if we are going to convict people in this office, I want to make sure we do it the right way so that they remain convicted. So what about Harry's question regarding the nearly seventeen hours between the alleged assault and the victim reporting it?"

  "Well, I thought I'd covered that." Rachman sulked.

  "Humor me," Karp responded.

  "The victim was worried that reporting the rape would ruin her chances of getting her thesis accepted and moving on to the doctoral program-essentially all those years spent pursuing her education would be meaningless. Apparently this Michalik had a great deal of pull in the department-he's like the god of Russian poetry-which I probably don't need to point out is a very male-dominated gang. She was afraid that no one would believe her story. She didn't know that an investigator would find that glass of beer or the existence of the roofies. He could just claim the act was consensual and she'd be out of the department and out of a career."

  "Then why did she come forward at all?" Kipman asked.

  "She went to his office that afternoon to demand an apology. But he made it clear that he expected her to perform at his whim-essentially, she would be his sex slave for as long as she remained at the school. She was so repulsed by his behavior and the thought that he might be doing this to other female students that she felt she had a duty to report his behavior."

  Kipman looked back down at the file. "I'm looking at her first interview with the police. It's pretty extensive, but nowhere does she say that she asked Michalik to stop what he was doing." He turned to another page. "And according to the doctor who examined Michalik following his arrest, there were no wounds as if she tried to fight him off."

  Rachman rolled her eyes. "Again, I repeat myself here, but she was drugged, and when she woke up, she was tied to the couch. How was she supposed to fight him off?"

  "What about the reports in the newspapers that the complainant may be mentally unstable?" Kipman asked.

  They all knew that he was referring to a story in the New York Post that quoted a former roommate, who said that six months before the incident with Michalik, Ryder had been admitted to Bellevue Hospital after police decided that she was "a danger to herself and others," and that-according to another acquaintance-had a few months later been taken to the hospital again following a drug overdose. "I believe the story said something about this being in reaction to splitting up with her boyfriend at the time, a member of the New York Rangers, if I remember correctly."

  "Oh puhleeeze," Rachman said, rolling her eyes. "Since when are medical records not related to the case in question relevant? What's going on here? Have I suddenly been transported back into the Dark Ages of Jurisprudence when every slimy defense attorney got to paint the victim as a whore for wearing short skirts, or because she had consensual sex with one man before being raped by another?" She glared at Kipman. "Let's just go back to the days when anyone who wasn't a virgin wrapped in a burlap sack was a slut who got what she deserved. The shield laws were invented for just that sort of misogynist mindset."

  "That's crap," Kipman retorted in his classic frustration-driven staccato.

  Karp had to look down quickly so that Rachman wouldn't see the smile that had forced itself onto his face. He wasn't smiling about the case, but it always amused him when Kipman swore. It just didn't seem natural.

  "Shield laws were developed for cases where strangers snatch the victims off the streets and rape them, and there is no doubt that crimes were committed," Kipman said. "Then a victim's sexual history or dress or mental state would not be relevant. They were not, however, created with acquaintance rape in mind, where there is a question not just of guilt but whether a crime even occurred. Which, by the way, is why victim is an inappropriate term for complainant at this stage of the game. Therefore, our first duty is to determine if there even was a crime-or whether the law is being used to further someone's agenda. In these instances, it is in the interest of justice that we weigh the complainant's sexual and mental history to see if it is relevant to establishing the truth. As much as sex has been used to control and debase women, it would not be the first time that a woman has used an accusation of rape to ruin the life and reputation of a man."

  "Oh, my God," Rachman replied. "As if a woman would put herself through all the torment that a rape trial involves to get even. Studies show that less than 5 percent of rape allegations are manufactured, and most of those are dropped before charges are brought. In this case, we have a ton of physical and circumstantial evidence supporting the victim's story. And since you're reading the reports, you might note that Michalik first told police that-like Clinton-he didn't have sexual contact with the victim. If that's so, how did his semen get on her blouse?"

  Kipman didn't answer right away, so Karp decided it was a good time to wind this discussion down. "Good point, Rachel," he said. "And good questions, Harry, the sort of thing your people will have to deal with, Rachel, when the defense gets a look at thi
s stuff. But let's remember that it's Harry's job to make sure that we've crossed the t's and dotted the i's before we go forward. I'd like us to follow up on these reports in the newspapers, as well as the timing issue. Come back next week and we'll discuss filing charges."

  "Bullshit!" Rachman exploded. The other attorneys around the table let their mouths hang open in embarrassed silence. "I was going to file this afternoon. I…well, I sort of alerted the press…"

  "What!" Karp exclaimed, fighting a sudden urge to strangle Rachman. Unable to look at her for the moment without staring daggers, he looked instead at the others. "Now listen to me all of you, because I'm only going to say this once: This office will not go forward with charges unless we are 100 percent-no, make that 1,000 percent-certain that we can establish factual guilt and have legally admissible evidence to convict beyond a reasonable doubt to a moral certainty. A defense attorney's obligation is to zealously defend his client; ours is to establish the truth."

  Finally Karp felt he could look at Rachman without spitting, but the famous Karp glare drained the color from her face nonetheless. "The complainant's sexual and mental history might not be relevant in the courtroom-that's for a judge to decide and a hearing is where you make your arguments that they're not-but they are damn relevant to her credibility with this office and whether we have established that moral certainty I just referred to before we go forward with a case. Furthermore, we do not try our cases in the media. Under no circumstances do we give them a heads-up on impending charges without clearing it through me, and I'll tell you right now that 99.9 percent of the time, my answer will be no. Do I make myself clear to all of you?"

  There was a murmur of assents but he couldn't tell if Rachman's had been one of them, as she kept her face down, staring at the floor. He decided to deal with it later and said, "Okay, let's move on."

  They got through the rest of the meeting with no further outbursts. There was the usual assortment of robberies, assaults, and murders, only one of which really stood out. A man of apparently Middle Eastern descent had been murdered in Central Park and his severed head placed on the spiked fence that ran around the Conservatory Gardens.

  "I say apparently Middle Eastern," the head of homicide said,

  "because that's what our forensic people are guessing. The body hasn't been found, and we haven't been able to identify him. The police are treating it as a hate crime, possibly motivated by revenge tied to the execution murders of Americans in Iraq by Al Qaeda, because of the decapitation aspect. So far there isn't much else to go on either. Nobody saw anything, even though it's a fairly well-traveled area, even at night. Oh, there was one clue-Rev. 6:2."

  "Revelations 6:2," Kipman said, "from the Bible…the riders of the Apocalypse prophecy that begins, 'And I looked, and behold, a white horse, and he who sat on it had a bow; and a crown was given to him, and he went out conquering and to conquer…'"

  As Kipman recited the verse, Karp felt his stomach knot. One of the witnesses to the murder of a rap star that past summer was a former professor of English, Edward Treacher, who wandered the streets as a homeless bum quoting from the Bible. He'd also been connected to David Grale, which is what caused the pain in his gut. Grale's dead, he told himself, but he could not stop an involuntary shiver at the thought.

  "Anyway, why I bring it up now is that the Muslim community is all over the cops to catch the killer," the head of homicide said. "And I got a call from them yesterday-the Muslims, not the cops-wanting to know why we were dragging our feet. I had to explain that we needed a suspect before we could press charges. What did they want us to do, prosecute a ghost?"

  Again, Karp felt chilled. Get ahold of yourself, Butch old boy, he thought, you're starting to think like Lucy…ghosts and talking saints.

  When the meeting was adjourned, Rachman slammed her briefcase shut and stormed out of the room before anyone else had even risen from the table. The other attorneys glanced quickly at Karp to see his reaction, but he kept his face neutral.

  Out in the hall, Rachman swore, "Goddamn men." She felt like crying as she marched off toward her office. But that would give the bastards what they want, she thought. At heart they're all just a bunch of animals. Sticking together in their Brotherhood of the Penis.

  11

  Friday, December 17

  "Did you get a load of some of the looks we got when we came in?" Murrow said, peering back anxiously over his shoulder as if he expected an assassin to come running up from behind them. "You'd have thought we were attending a convention for the guys you've sent to Attica instead of a meet-and-greet at the Police Benevolent Association."

  "Yeah, boss, you're not very popular with these guys right now," Clay Fulton said, only he was smiling. His boss had never been the sort who worried about his popularity; in fact, there were times when those closest to him wondered if he went out of his way to be unpopular. Fulton was handpicked by Karp to be chief of the NYPD detectives who were assigned to the DAO as investigators.

  "Gots 'em right where I wants 'em," Karp said, returning the smile while clapping Murrow on the shoulder. The event had been set up months before as a "meet the candidate." The night before, however, Dick Torrisi had called and warned him to expect a cool, even hostile, reception.

  "The word making the rounds is that you're letting the actions of a few bad apples slant the way you view the NYPD as a whole," Torrisi said. "It seems pretty orchestrated, but I'm not sure who's throwing the wood on the fire and it's pervasive from the union leadership on down."

  Butch had thanked him for the heads-up but assured him that he was still planning on attending. The "few bad apples" was a reference to two fairly recent, but separate, cases against cops that he'd been directly involved in. The first had been the successful prosecution of two cops who'd gunned down a Jamaican immigrant they'd believed to be selling drugs. They'd tried to justify the shooting by claiming that the deceased grappled with them and seized one of their guns. But with the help of a forensic gunshot-wound expert, Karp proved that the killing couldn't have happened the way the cops had described it, and they'd been convicted of murder.

  The second wasn't about one or two bad apples but a whole bushel-Andrew Kane's so-called Irish Gang. They were a half-dozen or so Irish-Catholic cops who'd been recruited by Kane to do some of his dirty work-such as killing a drug dealer-under the pretext that the orders came from the archbishop, who was using them to do "God's work." However, in reality, they were helping Kane expand and control his criminal empire through the coercion and murder of rivals.

  Some of them were now dead, killed in a Central Park gunfight that still played out in Karp's head like a scene from one of the favorite movies of his Brooklyn childhood, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. In some ways, it didn't seem real, as if he'd been acting out a part in a play, except for the dead bodies and the fear that still haunted his sleep that Marlene had been killed.

  Arriving at the PBA building, they'd walked into the main meeting room and all conversations had stopped. Eyes followed them to the corner where several minor union officials were conferring with the union president, Edward Ewen. They returned his handshake as perfunctorily as possible.

  Personally, Karp had the utmost respect for the NYPD, especially after 9/11. They worked a hard, dangerous job, and he believed that it was the best big-city police force in the world. By and large, its members were fine, upstanding men who carried the torch of justice like latter-day knights. But it never ceased to amaze him the way they circled the wagons if one of their number was threatened, even if they personally thought the cop was a scumbag. It was always the NYPD on one side, everybody else on the other.

  "Now remember," Murrow said a few minutes later as they stood in the wings offstage waiting for Karp to be introduced. "We're here to win their hearts and minds. You have your speech?"

  Karp held up the set of notecards prepared for him by his assistant. It was what Murrow called his "law and order" speech, meant
to appeal to any cop's heart. More support for the police. More officers. Better technology.

  Ewen finally walked to the podium and with little in the way of an introduction asked Karp to take the stage. There was a smattering of applause but the boos and hisses were louder. He handed the notecards to a startled Murrow. "Here," he said, "I've changed my mind."

  "Butch?" Murrow pleaded as Karp walked out onto the stage. "Butch, let's talk. What are you going to say, Butch?"

  "I don't think he's listening," Fulton said, positioning himself where he could reach Karp if something went wrong. He had his own handpicked guys in the audience, even though it was unlikely that someone would go so far as to try to hurt his boss-at least in a public place. But he wasn't the sort to take chances, and heck, the PBA was probably the most heavily armed group Butch would talk to before the election.

  "No," Murrow shook his head sadly. "He never does."

  Out at the podium, Karp looked over the crowd-a lot of guys sitting with their arms crossed and slouched in their seats.

  "Okay, let me propose a compromise," he began. "I left my notecards for the planned dog-and-pony show over there with my colleague, so you're not going to have to listen to political bullshit."

  "We already are," came a voice with a thick Bronx accent from the back of the auditorium.

  "Yeah, maybe," Karp agreed, "but in exchange for not throwing a bunch of campaign rhetoric at you-though I think some of the issues I was going to talk about are pretty important to you guys-I'm asking you to hear me out and make up your minds as men and women of integrity. The New York Police Department and the New York District Attorney's Office are like a married couple-"

  "I want a divorce," a woman officer shouted, to general laughter.