I smiled at him, reaching out and covering his hand with one of mine.
“Call it rookie luck. A kid on patrol heard screams, but they stopped so abruptly that he couldn’t find the location. Tanner apparently laid low for a couple of hours, hiding in one of those huge rock formations in the park till the cops scoured the area and cleared out. This kid asks his boss if he could stay on the scene for a while, guessing Tanner hadn’t made it far. Good instincts. And he asked for the K9 Unit to give him a dog to sniff around. The rookie eventually broke with the rules-let the dog off the leash to hunt on his own-and the animal actually rousted the rapist from his spot. The kid saw Tanner running down a grassy slope toward the river. Gave chase and caught up with a blood-spattered perp.”
“Sounds impressive,” I said. “The knife?”
“Yeah. Tanner dropped it during the chase.”
“They’ll get prints off it? Or submit it for touch D-?”
“You know what?” Mike said, straightening up and adjusting his tie as he walked to open the door. “They’ll do everything they’re supposed to without you breathing down their necks. They’re pros, kid. Just like you think you are. You get back to Mr. Estevez.”
“When do we celebrate? I mean, not us, but the team.”
“You do what you gotta do for the rest of the afternoon. A few of us will be lifting a glass to that rookie a little later this evening. You’ll be the first to know where.”
I headed for the door. “The lieutenant call you in on this today?”
“No, no. Mercer gave me the heads-up first, and the commissioner knew I had a keen interest in the motherfucker’s arrest.”
“So you’re still doing a midnight?”
“That’s what the loo tells me. Lets you get a good night’s sleep.”
“The weekend can’t come soon enough.”
“Scoot, Coop.”
One of the court officers was waiting for me in the hallway. Mike walked past us and we entered the courtroom. Fleming nodded at the captain to return the defendant from the small cell that held him during these proceedings to his place at counsel table.
Janet Fleming gaveled the group back to order and asked the clerk to put fourteen more citizens in the box. “And if I didn’t tell you earlier, folks, once you leave here tonight, there will be no tweeting, no Facebooking, no Instagramming your buddies about what goes on in here. For the forty dollars a day the state pays you, you get your train fare and your hot dog from the umbrella man in front of the building. No selfies with me or my staff. You don’t get to link in or friend me, understood?”
She rose again to project her voice to the entire room. “This is just to remind you that the unexpected interruption had absolutely nothing to do with the case at trial. You are not to speculate about anything you see or hear the parties do. The only evidence will come from that witness box, or from physical evidence and exhibits introduced during the trial,” she said, going on with the general instructions.
Fleming liked to control the voir dire of the panel as well. She would allow Moretti and me to ask a limited number of questions, but it wasn’t like the old days when a lawyer could free-form and inquire about magazine subscriptions or favorite television shows, hoping to glean a bias that would make a juror’s exclusion automatic.
After the judge finished forty-five minutes of questioning and entertaining three requests to be excused from the case, Fleming nodded to me for my turn. I carried an old green felt board, eighteen inches long, with two slotted tiers that held the summons for each of the individuals seated in front of me, so that I had their names and addresses at the ready. I rested it on the wooden flap that served as a mini podium attached to the side of the jury box.
“Good afternoon, Mr. Riley,” I said to the man in the first seat. An unemployed electrical engineer, he had tried in vain to have Fleming let him go. He didn’t answer me but stared straight ahead, determined-it seemed to me-to make himself unlikeable to Moretti and me so as not to make the cut.
The second juror was my age-thirty-eight-and a professor of women’s studies at Columbia College. I was quick with her, too, for the opposite reason. Human trafficking had become a hot-button issue with feminists and academics, and I had the gut instinct that she would be sympathetic to my victim, despite the witness’s history of prostitution. No need for me to open any doors for Moretti to slip in and knock her off.
Prospective juror number three was a challenge. An African-American male in his early thirties, he seemed affable and engaged in the proceedings, but a bit too eager to get the attention of the defendant, who looked over at the box from time to time. His black T-shirt featured a small logo of a pizza in the center of his chest, although I found the large neon green letters above it-EAT ME-to be not only off-putting but also totally inappropriate for the occasion.
“Mr. How-ton,” I said, phonetically breaking up the name that I read on the summons. It was spelled Houghton. “Am I pronouncing it correctly?”
“Nope. No, you’re not. My people say Huff-ton.”
Strike one for me.
“Could you tell us a little more about the work you do at Metropolitan Hospital?” He had his sneakered feet up against the wall of the jury box. His hands were clasped together and he was twiddling his thumbs somewhat nervously.
“I’m, like, a phlebotomist, you know?”
“So you’re trained to draw blood.”
“I’m in a tech program right now. I’m being trained,” Houghton said, looking over at Antonio Estevez. “I’m not quite Dracula yet.”
Estevez pulled back one side of his mouth in half a smile and Houghton laughed. Half of the prospective jurors laughed with him, at my expense.
Strike two for me.
“Is there anything you’ve heard so far that might make you uncomfortable sitting on a case of this nature?” I asked.
“Nah. You gotta prove what you gotta prove.”
“One of the charges here is that Mr. Estevez used force to compel a young woman to engage in acts of prostitution. You understand that?”
“I’m good.”
I walked toward the railing at the end of the well of the courtroom. “Do you know who Jason Voorhees is, Mr. Houghton?”
He sat up straight and dropped his feet to the floor. “You kidding me? Of course I do.”
Jurors number two and four looked at him, puzzled by either the question or his answer.
“Miss Cooper,” Judge Fleming said, glancing up from her notebook, “I hope you’re going somewhere with this.”
“I am, Your Honor.” I continued talking with Mr. Houghton. “And who is Jason Voorhees?”
“He’s the guy-the creepy one with that kind of full-face hockey mask-in the Friday the 13th movies.”
Gino Moretti was on his feet. “I’m going to object to this line of questioning, Your Honor.”
“What’s your point, Ms. Cooper?” the judge asked.
“We intend to present evidence that-”
“Wait a minute,” Moretti said, losing his cool. “May we approach? She can present her evidence when she’s got witnesses in the box.”
I wanted to give the prospective jurors a taste of the People’s case. Houghton, after his Dracula reference, seemed a likely candidate to know the horror-movie genre. I thought I could see whether anyone in the room would be freaked-out by a description of Estevez, whose victims claimed he wore the distinctive goalie mask, punctuated by holes and painted with red triangles-and wielded the same machete Jason did-when he threatened them to go to work for him. Better to find out they had weak stomachs now than midtrial.
“It’s not about the evidence, Judge. I’d like to-”
“I know what you’d like to do, Ms. Cooper. Don’t even think about it. Next question, please.”
“Mr. Houghton, is there anything about your familiarity with the fictional movie character Jason Voorhees that would prevent you from analyzing the facts in this case, independent of-”