“I’d say she’s got a copy of pretty much everything that’s on your computer. Maybe that’s what she wanted to communicate to your perp,” Poser said. “All I can tell you, Alex, is you’ve got no secrets now.”
FOUR
It was four fifteen when Drew Poser and three of the court officers from Part 53 walked me down the quiet corridor to the private elevator, tucked in the southeast corner of the courthouse and accessed by a key distributed only to judges, security staff, and the district attorney himself.
“I’ll take her from here,” Poser said.
“What was the adjourned date?” I asked, unable to concentrate on anything but the information on my computer that now made so many people vulnerable to the Estevez crew.
“You got a month, Ms. Cooper,” one of the officers said. “Judge Torres, November twentieth.”
“Can you believe this, Drew?” I said as the doors closed. “You know how much work we’ve got in front of us now? Victims to call, detectives to warn. God knows what’s on there.”
“Aponte won’t get far. Special Victims is pulling all their guys off the street to concentrate on finding her before she can spread the word.”
The doors opened onto the anteroom at the rear of District Attorney Paul Battaglia’s office. He had been the elected prosecutor of New York County for so many terms that the physical space had been overrun by awards from every civic group in the city, hanging on walls and leaning against bookcases. The strong odor of the Cohibas that he smoked from the crack of dawn till he closed his eyes at night infused every inch of territory he occupied.
“Laura said to tell you that Battaglia wants you,” Poser said, steering me away from the exit door to the hallway and toward the DA’s inner sanctum. He knocked and I heard Battaglia call for me to come in. Drew Poser opened the door but backed off and was gone.
“You ought to be beaming about Raymond Tanner’s arrest,” the DA said as I crossed the enormous room to get to his desk, “but instead you look like the bottom fell out.”
“It did. We had to adjourn my trial just now. Antonio Estevez.”
“Damn. I’ve got that human-trafficking keynote for the White House conference in three weeks. I wanted to go in with a hot verdict. What did you do that for?” Battaglia’s annoyance was palpable. He bit into the half-smoked cigar as he talked to me.
“It wasn’t entirely my doing.”
Why wasn’t I surprised that none of my colleagues had come in to the district attorney to tell him that there had been a serious breach of security? No one liked delivering bad news to him. He was the kind of recipient who delighted in shooting the messenger.
“What happened to Fleming?”
“Not her fault, either,” I said, telling him an abbreviated version of the story.
“Who’s responsible for hiring the Aponte girl? How did she pass a background investigation?” He reached for his phone to ensure that heads would start to roll.
“The squad is on it, Paul. The story isn’t even an hour old. Let me get facts for you.”
“Get me names. That’s the surest way to get facts.” Battaglia was a man who held a grudge. There were political enemies he was proud of telling me he had despised for decades, though he often couldn’t recall what had occasioned the hatred.
“I’ve got to go see what else was cherry-picked off my computer,” I said.
“The Tanner arrest is good news, Alex. I had the local reporters in here a little while ago. They want a couple of lines from you, but I told them I’m not letting you talk. Any problem with that?”
“None, thanks. That’s just the way it should be. And I’ll give you all the news on Estevez as the cops work it through.”
“Your computer files-did she get everything?”
“I’m about to find out. I was under the impression that each case entered into my system has its own security code. I’m praying that she only got into Estevez’s file. It’s bad enough with the number of victims in his case-finding them, relocating them, making them safe,” I said. “Keeping them under our wing so they’ll show up for trial. If she got anything else off my machine, I might as well disappear for a month.”
Battaglia removed the cigar from his mouth and blew smoke rings in my direction. “There have actually been times I’d have liked to make that happen to you. Right now isn’t one of them.”
I made my way to the front door to let myself out.
“That memo I gave you during my last campaign, Alex,” Battaglia said, slowing me down.
“Which one?” I asked. The legal staff tried to keep a Chinese wall between the DA’s politics and office business. I thought it safest to take the route of short-term memory loss. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Reverend Hal. And you know exactly what I mean. Reverend Hal and his Church of the Perpetual Scam.”
The ill-tempered Harlem pastor had courted Battaglia and volunteered to support him in the most recent election, in exchange for this office looking the other way on a financial transaction with money stolen from tithed sums of parishioners.
I had been led to believe Battaglia had refused the offer, especially since it had been made shortly after an underage worshipper had come forward to my unit to report inappropriate sexual advances by Reverend Hal.
“I had no case against Shipley, Paul.” It was my practice to keep every file my unit had ever created, because of the recidivist nature of the crime. I’d even had victims who’d come back a second time. But I didn’t want the wrath of Paul Battaglia on my back just yet. “I’m sure Laura wiped the slate clean on your memo.”
I didn’t have the slightest idea what the personal transaction between Shipley and Battaglia had actually been. I assumed, at worst, that the DA had planted his memo with me as a form of future insurance of his good intentions.
“Let me know what you find. You put me in any kind of embarrassing situation publicly, Alex, and you can be sure I’ll hang you out to dry. You’ll wish you had disappeared before I had the chance to get back to you.”
FIVE
“Who died?” I asked, walking past Laura’s empty desk into my office.
Three prosecutors were standing behind the chair in which the head of our Cybercrimes Division, Aaron Byrne was seated. Drew Poser and another detective were in front of the desk, stacking case folders in piles. They each looked like there was a corpse on display in the middle of the table.
“We’re gathered here trying to save your ass,” Ryan Blackmer said. He was standing between Nan Toth and Catherine Dashfer, all three senior prosecutors from my unit. “But if it takes mouth-to-mouth to get your career back on track, I’ve got other plans for the night.”
“The mere thought of that image inspires me to breathe deeply on my own, Ryan,” I said. “How does it look?”
“Not as bad as I feared originally,” Aaron Byrne said. He was more skilled with computer navigation than any lawyer I knew.
“What did Aponte get?”
“First of all, her name isn’t Josie Aponte, okay? A heavy dose of identity theft from a criminal justice student at John Jay College got her in the door of our hiring office.” Byrne was studying my computer screen and typing as fast as his fingers could go.
“So who is she?”
Catherine raised a finger to her lips. “Shh. Let Aaron work.”
“Laura gave you my password?”
“A monkey could have gotten through that,” Aaron said. “Nothing more creative than your law school initials and the year you graduated occurred to you?”
The University of Virginia-UVA-had been easy to remember after a dozen other changes over the years. I had gone through the initials of my fiancé, Adam Nyman, who’d been killed in a car crash the night before our Vineyard wedding, and an assortment of significant dates in my life but had recently returned to the initials of my alma mater as the key to unlock my data.