“Your thin skin, for one thing,” Ryan said. “You want everybody to think you’ve got the hide of an elephant when you’re soft as a marshmallow inside.”
“I’m just drained. It’s been a lousy day.”
There was nothing personal on my office computer, I reassured myself. My texts and e-mails were a different thing. They wouldn’t make good reading for strangers.
“What the hell is this?” Aaron said, throwing his hands up in the air like the keyboard was toxic. “Why in God’s name are you mentioned in a letter from the district attorney himself to Reverend Hal Shipley? It sounds like Battaglia took money from that Jheri-curled dirtbag, and then you dropped a case against him?”
“I didn’t have any case-and no, I wasn’t aware I was cc’d on any correspondence,” I said, looking from one friend’s face to another as I started to pace across the room. “Are we going blood oath for a moment? Cone of silence? ’Cause the DA is going to have my head on this.”
“Have your head on what?” Nan asked. “Or is this the cue for me to say I’ve got to be going?”
“Don’t leave me now.”
“What’s the story, Alex?” Aaron said. “What’s this about?”
“There should be a memo there from Battaglia to me. About the reverend.”
“Got it. There’s the memo and then there’s also this letter. Maybe Rose Malone,” Aaron said, talking about Battaglia’s executive assistant, “sent a copy to Laura, since it mentions you, and Laura downloaded it to your documents.”
“I swear I never saw any letter.”
“I’ll print it. You’d better read it before it goes viral.”
“If any of this correspondence goes viral, I might as well be looking for work,” I said. My palms were breaking into a sweat. “My piece of it was simple. We had a vic who claimed a statutory case against Shipley. Mercer worked it to the bone and couldn’t get it to stick. Girl has a psych history and liked being around the celebrity-”
“He counts as a celebrity?” Ryan said.
“She’s fifteen. Even you’d count as a celebrity to her with a triple-homicide jury verdict under your belt. Her mother dragged her to a few of Hal’s rallies. Mercer thinks it was all an attempt at blackmailing him that backfired.”
“Do you know anything about a fraud investigation against Hal?” Aaron asked.
I put my head in my hand and exhaled. I couldn’t tell them the little I knew about the tithing improprieties or Battaglia would kill me. That was still a confidential investigation. “Nan,” I asked, “would you do me a favor and call Rose? Ask whether Battaglia has left for the day? I might as well do something to earn the hangover I’m going to buy myself tonight.”
“If you do that, Nan,” Aaron said, “you should also ask Rose if she’s the one who copied Alex on this letter.”
“Please don’t. Not yet,” I said. “I promised the DA I wouldn’t breathe a word of his contact from Shipley. Just see if he’s still here.”
The printer powered up and churned out two pages, which I picked up from the tray.
I faced the wall as I skimmed them.
“Jesus,” I said, starting to read the document again. “This letter thanks the reverend for his contribution, but Battaglia told me he didn’t take any money from Shipley.”
“Could be a contribution of another kind,” Catherine said.
“Who would want anything of any kind from him?” I spoke the words and then stopped in my tracks. “I don’t understand Battaglia at all.”
“What is it?” Nan asked, walking back in from Laura’s desk to tell us that Battaglia had left the office at five thirty, more than half an hour earlier.
“It’s four paragraphs long. It’s-it’s dated about three weeks before I dismissed the statutory case against Shipley. Right after the DA thanks Hal, he tells him in this letter that ‘my chief of the Special Victims Unit,’” I said, hanging imaginary quotation marks in the air, “‘says you have nothing to worry about in regard to the malicious stories being circulated about you.’”
“You must have known Battaglia traded on that kind of information,” Drew Poser said.
“No, I did not. Certainly not in a pending investigation. It’s totally improper. Two weeks before the dismissal I still had no idea whether I had a real case or a psycho teen. This makes it look like the DA was in fact doing favors for Hal Shipley and dragging me into the deal.”
“What do you think this means?” Catherine said.
“Nothing good,” I said. “At the very least, he was trying to curry favor with the devil.”
“But the boss never micromanages your cases.”
“Exactly. And, Aaron, what does it say in my files about a fraud investigation?” Now that I’d read the letter, I knew there was no point in keeping the little I knew about Battaglia’s dealings with Shipley a secret from them. These were my closest professional allies.
“Give me a minute. There’s a link here,” he said to me. “That doesn’t ring any bells?”
“Yeah, there’s a slight tinkling. Just tell us.”
“The letter in your documents folder kicks over to the white-collar division. Looks like there’s a tax fraud allegation that’s been opened into the reverend’s nonprofit profit center.”
The tithing scam was about to come out in the open, way before Battaglia was ready for anyone to know about it. It was as though someone was trying to plant the seed in that division that Shipley indeed had the protection of the district attorney.
“So that’s my fault, too? I’m unleashing this monster and, on top of it, I’m going to take the fall for Battaglia’s double-dealing?”
“Hold tight,” Aaron said. “The fog is lifting.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that the letter from District Attorney Paul Battaglia to the Reverend Hal Shipley was just dumped onto your computer today. Not months ago, at the time it was written.”
“What?” I said. “Maybe I should ask Rose why she did that after all.”
“It wasn’t Rose,” Aaron Byrne said.
“Who, then?”
“This letter was uploaded to you-and filed by Laura around noon, with your documents-by Josie Aponte. Or whoever it was who stole the Antonio Estevez file.”
We were all trying to connect the dots at once.
“What you’re telling us,” I said, “is that there is some kind of connection between Estevez, a world-class sex trafficker-”
Detective Drew Poser finished my sentence. “And the Reverend Hal Shipley, who’s a world-class pimp in every sense of the word.”
“Aaron,” I said, aware that more than half of what the white-collar lawyers dealt with was Internet crimes, “you know everyone in the fraud division. Will you nail that piece of it for me as discreetly as you can? We need to know as much about this as possible or you’ll be drawn into the quicksand with me.”
“Starting right now,” he said, pushing back from my desk. “Be back to you by morning. All you have to do is figure out the link between Estevez and Shipley.”
“Well, if there is one,” I said, “why would Estevez want to do anything to discredit Shipley? It might cause his flock to think twice about giving to him.”
“Nothing has ever made Shipley’s people second-guess him, Alex. They seem to like the scoundrel side of the reverend.”
“Whatever the link,” Drew said, “it’s pretty obvious Estevez and Shipley have the same goal. Looks like they’ve got a plan to bring you down, Alexandra Cooper.”
SIX
“Let’s knock off,” Aaron said. “What’s your day like tomorrow? That’s Thursday, right?”
“Right. It’s only six forty-five. Why don’t we keep at it?” I asked.
“Your witnesses are all accounted for,” Drew said. “And your trial is adjourned, so you’re wide-open tomorrow, to answer Aaron’s question.”
“What’s your rush?”