"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 this 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.