Lethal Legacy Read Online Free Page B

advocate to reach the ER, “but
Tina’s in worse shape than we thought.”
    I pulled the rag from my pocket, pinching it on a
corner to hold it up. “The perp soaked this in something and knocked her out by
putting it over her nose and mouth.”
    “Nice save, Coop.” Mike stood and bent over the
counter, sniffing at the rag. “What’s your guess, Joe? Ether of some kind? Not
so noxious as that. Maybe chloroform?”
    Joe didn’t want to come closer. “If that’s what it
was, it’s enough to cause a fatal cardiac arrhythmia.”
    “That baby’s going straight to the lab, Coop.”
    “Tell the EMTs to bring her right in,” Joe said.
“Let’s get your girl worked up.”
    The three of us headed for the exit, past the
waiting area filled with anxious family members and friends, down the driveway
and onto the street. The driver had backed out of the bay to leave room for the
next arrival and double-parked on Madison Avenue.
    Jorge Vasquez was leaning against the side of the
red-and-white ambulance. Mercer waved at him as we approached, telling him to
move it in and unload the patient.
    Vasquez shrugged his shoulders.
    “Don’t give me that ‘not my job’ crap,” Mike said.
“Roll it.”
    “I’m empty, man,” Vasquez said, brushing his hands
against each other like he was dusting off crumbs. “The broad took off.”
    “Took off where?” I asked.
    “RMA, Ms. Cooper. I can’t be holding nobody
against her will.”
    Tina Barr had refused medical attention, despite
the ordeal she’d survived.
    “Which way’d she go?”
    “No sé,” Vasquez
said. “She told me she never wanted the cops called in the first place. Jumped
out the bus and said to tell you to leave her alone.”
    THREE

    “I still think we could have beat Tina to her
apartment,” Mike said, several hours later, as he sat across the desk from me.
    “To what end? For some reason, she never wanted
any of us involved in the first place. It was the neighbor—not Tina—who called
911.”
    “I don’t know. Should have scooped her up and made
her a material witness till we figured out what happened.”
    “No such thing as getting a material witness order
unless there’s a pending prosecution,” I said, continuing to make notes on a
legal pad, charting the chronology of a murder investigation we’d been working
on for several months. “You know that.”
    “Are you going to follow up with her now?”
    “I’m giving Tina a day to settle down. By then
she’ll realize the flashbacks and night sweats won’t go away by themselves. She
might even welcome the chance to talk about it.”
    We were in my office in the Sex Crimes Prosecution
Unit on the eighth floor of Manhattan’s Criminal Courthouse at nine-thirty on
Wednesday morning. Mike had brought me a third cup of coffee and took the lid
off after he set out his bagel on top of a file cabinet, using a manila folder
as a place mat.
    “How come Judge Moffett scheduled a hearing on the
Griggs case? You don’t even have an arrest yet.”
    We had been working on the rape-homicide of a
nineteen-year-old-girl named Kayesha Avon that had taken place almost eight
years earlier. The case had gone cold long ago, but the recent submission to
the databank of the DNA profile of a man named Jamal Griggs and the near match
that resulted had given Mike a reason to revive the investigation.
    “Jamal Griggs doesn’t like the idea that we’re so
interested in his family tree,” I said.
    Jamal and his brother Wesley, known to us as the
Weasel, had floated in and out of the criminal justice system for most of their
adult lives. Despite Jamal’s homicide conviction as a teenager—or maybe because
of it—he and Wesley had become part of the entourage that surrounded and sold
drugs to the crews of late thug rappers such as Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur.
    “I applied for a search warrant to get into the
California database to see what it tells us about Wesley’s DNA, and must have
struck a nerve.