“I think you know more than you’re telling me, Jean. I bet you heard what the guy said.”
She took a few more minutes to think, pulling her cell phone out of her pocket to look for messages. “Look, could I go soon? I’ve got to be home in time for dinner.”
“Or what, Jean? What will happen to you?” I said. “Lydia’s dead. You ought to think about what I’m asking you.”
“The guy must have been some kind of nut, Ms. Cooper,” Jean said. “He used to be in this animal group with Lydia. Like they were buddies, saving their monkeys and chimpanzees and baboons back in the spring. Then something switched off in him, like he was crazy.”
“Can you explain what you mean?”
“Only that he was yelling at her that night, during the baseball game. He told her he didn’t care about animals anymore. That it didn’t matter what scientists did to them, if they were cruel or not. That they weren’t people, so what was the difference.”
“But you said he had something else he wanted her to do for him, right?”
“Yeah. He kept saying he had a more important plan.”
“This is really good, Jean. You’re helping us out here,” I said. “And what did he say the plan was?”
“That’s the part I couldn’t hear, ’cause of the television being on and all that. Or maybe he was just being more quiet when he talked to Lydia about it. The walls are sort of paper-thin, so you can hear way more than you want to.”
“You must have picked up part of it, didn’t you?”
She shook her head back and forth, strongly indicating she didn’t.
“But you just called him a nut. You said he switched off like he was crazy.”
“I swear I’m not making this part up, Ms. Cooper. Okay? I’m going to say this to you, and you’re going to have to believe me,” Jean Jansen said. “The only part I heard after that was him saying he knew he was right because he heard voices.”
“Voices? I’m confused. There were other people in the room?”
“No, no. This guy was telling Lydia that she had to do what he told her because he was hearing voices inside his head. That someone was taking control of his mind, and he needed her to do whatever he ordered.”
Whether or not this visitor to the apartment was the killer, there had been a man with serious mental illness in Lydia Tsarlev’s life.
“Now I understand you, Jean. Of course I believe you,” I said. “Did you hear how Lydia responded to him?”
“Can we keep this between us, Ms. Cooper. Just this part?”
“I’d like to tell you yes, Jean. But that wouldn’t be very smart of me. It depends on what you say.”
Jean Jansen took a deep breath, then exhaled before she answered. “I never heard Lydia talking to him at all.”
“Even though the walls were so thin? C’mon, Jean.”
“You didn’t let me finish. She wasn’t speaking by the time he finished screeching at her. She was just crying. That’s exactly what I heard, Lydia crying.”
I gave Jean a few seconds to finish her description, but she seemed to be done.
“Did you-did you do anything then?”
“Yeah. I mean, my boyfriend listened to the whole thing, too,” Jean said sheepishly. “This is the part I don’t want everybody to know, ’cause like my boyfriend gets wild when he’s angry.”
“Let me hear it.”
Jean looked at me for reassurance but I could give her none. “Okay. He got up from the sofa and he went into Lydia’s bedroom. I mean, it wasn’t locked or anything. He just opened the door and went in.”
“So far so good, Jean. I don’t blame him.”
“I was right behind him, like trying to stop him. I could see Lydia all balled up on her bed, just sobbing like a baby.”
“Then what happened?”
“The guy kind of freaked out when he saw my boyfriend. He’s like six feet tall, much bigger than Lydia’s friend.”
“What did your boyfriend do?”
“He-um-he told the guy to get out. Told him to stop screaming at Lyd. The trouble started when the other guy said he never yelled at her. That it wasn’t him we’d heard.”
“Was that possible?”
“Oh, no. He was the one, all right. He told us-I was in the room trying to help Lydia get out of there and into the bathroom, so we could lock the door-he told us that there was another person inside him who was doing the yelling. I mean, how freaky is that?”
“Did he leave then?”
“Nope. He didn’t want to leave until he saw Lydia again, till he made sure she wasn’t going to bad-mouth him to us. That’s when it got physical.”
“How?”
“My boyfriend started pushing him out of the room. I could hear the commotion from inside the bathroom. They’re kind of scuffling, although the guy was too wiry, too small to put up much of a fight. He was almost out the door, I think, when my boyfriend told him that if he ever comes anywhere near my apartment again, he’d be a dead man.”
“That’s when he left?” I asked. “That’s the line you didn’t want me to tell anyone?”
“Part of it. I mean, it doesn’t look good now that Lydia’s been killed.”
“Did the guy ever come back?”
“Not that I know of. And she never mentioned him again.”
I smiled at Jean Jansen. “Then maybe your boyfriend did a good thing. Maybe that encounter has nothing to do with her murder.”
“But you can’t talk to my boyfriend about it, Ms. Cooper. You absolutely can’t.”
“Why not? He might know the name of Lydia’s friend or have some other detail.”
Jean looked me in the eye. “Because he’s already on probation.”
“For-?”
“You can’t draw him into a criminal investigation. The judge will have him violated.”
“What did he do, Jean?”
She didn’t answer me.
“Please tell me what your boyfriend did.” I said it more firmly this time.
“He assaulted me, Ms. Cooper. Three months ago, he got mad at me one night and beat me so bad my jaw had to be wired.”
I reached across the table to take her hand, but she pulled away. “I’m so sorry, Jean.”
“He’s got a criminal record longer than your arm. I’m not the first woman he’s attacked, either,” Jean said. “And he had a real thing about Lydia.”
“What kind of thing?”
“He came on to her one night, just a few weeks ago, before I got home. She told me about it the next day, which I thought was a bitchy thing for her to do. After that, he really was furious at her-for what she said to me. He had it in for her, that’s one thing I’m sure of. My boyfriend had no use for Lydia Tsarlev.”
THIRTY-TWO
“Get a policewoman in there to sit with her as soon as possible,” I said. Now it was my turn to pace in the confined area of Don Ledger’s office. I was talking to Rocco, Pug, Mike, and Mercer. “Find someone who’s had some DV experience and let her or him talk to Jean.”
There were officers in the SVU and in every precinct who’d been trained on the issues that make domestic violence such a sensitive category of crime. There was no sense in sending Jean home to face the fury of her dangerous boyfriend.
“And they need to monitor her calls. Mercer, maybe you can go back in and get the boyfriend’s name and run a rap sheet. She keeps checking her phone, expecting a call from him. I doubt he wanted her to open her mouth about this, but she took the leap. I don’t want him to get to her till we figure this out.”
“I can’t let her go home?” Rocco asked. “The guys promised her a ride back before they brought her in.”
“Call Safe Horizon,” I said, referring to the city’s best victim advocacy group. “They can put her up in Parrish House for a few nights. I don’t think it will take much doing to convince her she’ll be safer there than at home.”
The DV shelters the organization ran were state-of-the-art, meant to be actual apartments with civilized living space and amenities, and their locations were never disclosed.