NYPD Red 2 Read online

  He caught the number 1 downtown train and found a seat.

  Gideon blamed himself for his father’s death. Officially, it was an accident—one he was positive never would have happened if he had kept his promise. He was supposed to watch the Super Bowl on Dad’s new flat-screen, but two days before the game, he scored a pair of tickets on the forty-yard line, bailed out on his father, and flew down to Miami with Meredith.

  It was the best weekend of his life—until his mother called him at halftime. After two beers, Roy decided to adjust the satellite dish on the roof. Maybe it had been four beers, maybe six. It didn’t matter—a broken neck is a broken neck, and everybody said it was just as well that the fall killed him because he’d have been a vegetable anyway.

  Gideon was racked with guilt. He should have been the one up on that roof. He swore he’d do whatever he could to make it up to his mother. Finding Sherman Frye to buy the flower shop helped a lot. Sherman made his mother happy, and that made Gideon happy.

  He got off the train at the Chambers Street station, headed up West Broadway, then turned right on Duane Street toward the hottest bar in lower Manhattan—maybe even the entire borough.

  Two years ago, three middle-aged criminal lawyers decided they’d rather get people drunk than get them acquitted, so they opened a sprawling bar on Duane only two blocks from the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

  They christened it Don’t Judge Me, and it quickly became the unofficial watering hole of the legal profession—a mecca for hordes of thirsty young attorneys—one of the few places in New York where you could say you were a lawyer and nobody would roll their eyes.

  “Don’t judge me either,” Gideon said as he checked out his reflection in the frosted-glass window. The brass plaque on the front door read THE BAR NO LAWYER CAN PASS, and Gideon walked in.

  The place was jammed, but Meredith must have had her eyes glued to the door because he heard her yell “Gid!” over the rest of the racket. She stood and waved, and he worked his way to the table where she was commiserating with the team of lawyers who had just lost the biggest case of their young careers.

  Meredith, half-soused, completely devastated, but still beautiful, threw her arms around him. “I can’t believe we lost,” she said, not letting him go.

  “I am so sorry,” Gideon said, careful not to press his hips too close to her. Nothing says insensitive jerk like a guy with an erection trying to comfort a woman in pain.

  “It wasn’t you guys,” he said, wiping a drooping hank of red hair from her face and planting a gentle kiss on her forehead. “The jury just bought into the defense team’s bullshit.”

  She sat down, and Gideon took the chair between Meredith and her brother, Dave.

  “Bad night,” Dave said, pouring his best friend a beer from one of five pitchers on the table. “Real bad night for the justice system.”

  Chapter 25

  “You guys are way ahead of me,” Gideon said, picking up his beer. “I’ve got some catching up to do.” He took four big swallows of the cold, crisp brew, set the mug down hard on the table, and let Dave top it off.

  He scanned the room. The walls were peppered with TV sets, half of them tuned to Monday Night Football, the other half to Post Mortems, the popular CNN show that focused on the big legal news of the day. And in a bar filled with lawyers, nothing—not even the Hazmat Killer—was bigger than the Rachael O’Keefe case.

  O’Keefe was a twenty-nine-year-old single mom living on East 71st Street with her five-year-old daughter, Kimi. By day, she was a phlebotomist, collecting blood, urine, sputum, and other bodily fluids for a private diagnostic lab on the Upper West Side. Most nights, desperate to escape from the tedium of her life, she’d put Kimi to bed at 8:00 and at 9:00 go downstairs to the bar across the street.

  Kimi knew that if she woke up and needed anything, she could either speed-dial Rachael’s cell or just pick up the intercom and buzz the doorman, who would run over to the bar and get Mommy.

  Rachael knew it wasn’t the kind of parenting Dr. Spock would approve of, but screw him—the men she met on the job stayed only long enough to have her stick a needle in their arm and fill a few test tubes. Nights were the only time she had to get out and meet a decent guy—or at least some badass who could take her up to her bedroom and put a smile on her face.

  One Sunday night, something went wrong. According to Rachael, she came home at 2:00 a.m., fell into bed, and slept till 10:00. Kimi was usually awake by 6:30, so Rachael went to her room to see what was wrong.

  The little girl was gone. And so was Mookie, the stuffed pink monkey she slept with every night. At 10:04 that Monday morning, Rachael dialed 911, and within twenty-four hours, Kimi O’Keefe was the most sought-after missing person in America.

  Her body was found four days later in a landfill in Pennsylvania. She’d been smothered to death. There was no sign of the pink monkey, but the garbage pile she was found in was easily traced to the New York City sanitation truck that picked up at Kimi’s building on Monday morning.

  A month later, the DA charged Rachael with murder two.

  Gideon remembered the night Meredith was assigned to the case. She came bounding into his apartment, squealing with joy. “I got it! I got it! I’m on the O’Keefe team!”

  She wrapped her arms around him, and they fell to the sofa, kissing.

  “That’s fantastic,” he said when he came up for air. “You’re going to be a media star.”

  “Hardly,” Meredith said. “There are nine of us. I won’t even be in the courtroom. I’ll be locked up on the seventh floor sifting evidence—it’s mostly grunt work, but I do get to prep some of the witnesses. This is the biggest trial of my career, and if we win—”

  “When you win,” Gideon said. His hand found its way under her skirt and slowly, tantalizingly, made its way up her leg.

  Sex with Meredith was everything Gideon had dreamed of when he was a kid. He and Dave never told her the truth about Enzo Salvi’s murder, but in a weird way, Gideon always thought he had Enzo to thank for his good fortune.

  It took two years before Meredith attempted to have sex again. It was a disaster. Meredith assured the guy it wasn’t his fault, and then she made the mistake of telling him the truth. Instead of being empathetic, he put together beach party, booze, and sexy costume and came to a natural conclusion. She had been asking for it. The guy never actually said the words, but Meredith knew what he was thinking. After that, her sexual encounters were infrequent and unfulfilling.

  And then came New Year’s Eve 2009. Gideon and Meredith were at a party, dancing, when the ball dropped at midnight. He leaned in, pressed his lips to hers, and she kissed back. Their five-year age difference meant nothing to her at this point.

  “I trust you,” she said, kissing him with a ferocity and a passion that had been beaten out of her that night on the beach. Since then, the sex had been glorious. No shame, no guilt, and absolutely no “I love yous.”

  The first time Gideon said it, Meredith tossed it off. “Fifteen-yard penalty for violating the cardinal rule of friends with benefits—illegal use of the L-word.”

  That night, when she was on a high from being assigned to the biggest case of her life, Gideon tried it again. Lying on the floor, breathing heavily, surrounded by magazines from the overturned coffee table, Gideon, still deep inside her, whispered in her ear, “I love you.”

  He waited for her to remind him of the ground rules. And then he felt tears rolling down his cheek. Her tears.

  “I’m sorry I made you wait so long,” she said, lifting her head and lowering her lips to his. “I love you too.”

  Her body relaxed, and her breathing took on a familiar rhythm. “We’re going to win this case,” she said, drifting into sleep. “Right?”

  “Mmmm…,” he said, his eyes closed, his breathing in sync with hers. “You can’t lose.”

  Chapter 26

  “I don’t know why they’re running that shit on CNN,” Me
redith said halfway through her fourth margarita. “It should be on Comedy Central, because the whole fucking trial was a joke.”

  The other lawyers around the table raised their glasses in solidarity.

  “We had fifty witnesses who’d have gladly testified that Rachael O’Keefe was a barfly who would leave her daughter alone most nights,” Meredith said, playing to the partisan audience. “Our mistake was that we only called five of them to the stand. And then we only called three who testified that Rachael felt trapped by Kimi—that she’d sit at the bar swilling white wine and telling anybody who would listen that she wished the kid had never been born. A day and a half of testimony, and did the jury even hear any of it? Yes! They heard just enough to find her guilty of endangering the welfare of a child. The Bad Mommy verdict. That’s like finding O.J. guilty of getting blood all over the sidewalk and fining him for littering.”

  Meredith drained the last of her drink. Dave stood up and put his arm around his sister. “Time to sit down, sis.”

  She pulled away. “No. I’m still talking.”

  “How about you sit down, Dave,” Gideon said. “She’s had a rough couple of months. Let her talk it out.”

  Dave shook his head, but he didn’t argue. He went back to his chair.

  Gideon handed Meredith his beer. “Here you go, baby. Talk all you want.”

  “Okay, let’s pretend I’m Rachael O’Keefe,” she said, slurring her words. “It’s two in the morning, and I am totally shit-faced.”

  “I’m convinced,” Gideon yelled, and the group bellowed.

  “NYU Drama Club,” Meredith said, taking a little bow. “Where was I? Oh yeah, I’m staggering across the street to my apartment,” she continued, slipping back into her Rachael character. “I look in on my daughter—because even drunk mothers look in on their kids—and poor Kimi, left alone in the dark for four hours, is crying. Damn kid is always crying, I think, so I grab a pillow and put it over her face. I don’t want to kill her. I just want to shut her up. And I do. The kid stops crying. The silence feels so good that I hold the pillow there just a little longer. And then the kid stops breathing. Oops. I didn’t mean to do that. I didn’t mean to kill her.”

  Meredith stood up tall, smoothed out her skirt, and addressed the group. “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” she said. “Rachael O’Keefe may not have meant to kill her little girl, but once she crossed that line, she did mean to cover it up. Who else would have wrapped her up all nice and neat in a blanket and put her in a garbage bag? Who else could have snuck out through the service entrance and left Kimi’s body with fifty other garbage bags waiting for the morning trash? Bad Mommy? No. Rachael O’Keefe was always Bad Mommy. But that night, she became Killer Mommy.”

  “I’m convinced,” Gideon said. “I vote guilty.”

  “Thank you,” Meredith said, taking another slug of Gideon’s beer. “You, my handsome friend, should have been on the jury. You know what their problem was?”

  Gideon shrugged. “I’m going to go with brain damage.”

  Meredith laughed far louder and longer than the joke deserved. “No, the problem with that jury was that nobody actually saw Rachael O’Keefe murder her daughter. Twelve good men and true? More like twelve morons!”

  Another swig of beer. “I have a question for you,” she said to the group. “If you wake up one morning and your windows are wet and the sidewalks outside are wet, do you actually have to see or hear the rain to come to the inescapable conclusion that it rained last night?”

  Head shakes and catcalls of, “No!”

  “No,” Meredith repeated. “We didn’t have to see Rachael kill Kimi to know she did it. Nobody else was seen coming or going. Nobody else had access to the apartment. And most important, nobody else on the planet had a motive. Rachael O’Keefe murdered her daughter at two in the morning, waited eight hours until the body was inside the bowels of a garbage truck, then called the cops and reported her missing. The case was a slam fucking dunk. How the hell did we lose?”

  “That’s it,” Dave said to Gideon. “Enough. She’s just torturing herself.”

  Everyone knew how they lost. But nobody said a word. Nobody wanted Meredith to think they were blaming her.

  Dave stood up, put his arm around her again, and sat her down next to Gideon.

  “How the hell did we lose?” she said, burying her face in his chest. “How the hell did we lose?”

  And then, as if the CNN gods had heard the question, they popped the answer on the screen.

  The Warlock.

  Chapter 27

  One of the prosecution’s key witnesses was Audrey Yeager, an unmarried, middle-aged legal assistant who lived in the apartment next door to the O’Keefes. Meredith had prepped her for the trial, and to her amazement, she was invited to sit at the prosecutor’s table the day Yeager took the stand.

  Audrey delivered. She testified calmly and articulately that numerous times in the past she had heard Kimi crying at night and that despite what Rachael said, Kimi did not always call Rachael’s cell, or if she did, Rachael would not hurry home.

  “There were nights when I could hear the poor little girl sobbing for hours,” Audrey told the court. “It would start before I went to sleep, and then it would ebb and flow, from audible moans to soft whimpering, but because her bedroom was directly opposite my living room, I could hear everything clearly. It was very painful.”

  Her testimony was decisive. It painted a picture of Rachael O’Keefe as a sadly neglectful mother who would abandon her child night after night. Rachael’s claim that she was just a short phone call away was riddled with holes. The reality, the prosecution maintained, was that most nights Rachael came home drunk and then was faced with having to calm down a hysterical child. But on that fateful Sunday night, Rachael didn’t have the patience or the desire to comfort her daughter. She was overwhelmed by the burden of motherhood, and in her drunken state she put a pillow over Kimi’s head in an effort to silence her.

  It may not have been premeditated, but the intent to kill was without question. Murder two.

  And then Dennis Woloch stepped up to the plate. Woloch was a legend. A defense attorney who consistently snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. A columnist from the Daily News once wrote that “Woloch has such an uncanny ability to cast a spell over juries that he should change his name to Warlock.”

  The moniker stuck, and Woloch reveled in it. By the time he turned forty, he took on only two kinds of clients—those with deep pockets who could add to his fortune and lost causes like Rachael O’Keefe who could add to his reputation.

  “Ms. Yeager,” he said as he ambled over to the witness, “let’s start with full disclosure. We know one another, do we not?”

  “Yes, sir,” Audrey said.

  “You work as a legal assistant for one of my colleagues, and we’ve met on numerous occasions,” he said, smiling.

  “Yes, sir,” she repeated.

  “Do you have any idea what I think of you?”

  She cringed. “No, sir.”

  “Well then, let me go on record. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury,” he boomed, “this woman is an absolute sweetheart. She’s as caring and kindhearted and compassionate as they come.”

  Some of the jurors smiled. All looked puzzled. Why would the defense attorney give a glowing character reference to the prosecution’s star witness?

  Meredith didn’t know either, but her mouth immediately went tinny, and her gastrointestinal system started to churn.

  “Audrey,” the Warlock said, “it must have been very difficult for you to listen to that poor child cry night after night.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said.

  Meredith nodded. Just answer the question. Don’t volunteer anything.

  “Did you ever talk to her mother about it?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “It wasn’t my place.”

  “Understandable,” Woloch said. “Who among us wants to confront their
neighbor and correct them on their parenting skills? You agree?”

  Audrey nodded.

  “So you just let poor little Kimi cry her eyes out night after night,” he said.

  Yeager didn’t say a word. She sat there, stone-faced.

  “I’m sorry,” Woloch said. “I didn’t hear your response. Maybe it’s because I just made a blanket statement. Let me rephrase it as a question. Did you, Ms. Yeager, let Kimi O’Keefe, alone and afraid, cry her little heart out for hours on end while her pitiful excuse for a parent sat on a bar stool getting blotto, hoping she could find anyone in a pair of pants who would come upstairs and bang the crap out of her?”

  “Objection!” the prosecutor yelled. “Badgering the witness.”

  “Sustained,” the judge responded quickly. “Mr. Woloch, I will let you pursue this line of questioning, but I expect you to clean up your act and treat this witness more civilly.”

  “My apologies to the court,” Woloch said. “And to Ms. Yeager. Audrey, I know you. You are made up of all those sterling character traits I described to the jury, and while I can believe you never spoke to Ms. O’Keefe about her substandard parenting, I cannot imagine you let that little girl suffer without doing something—anything—to help. Am I right?”

  “Yes.”

  Meredith sat there, heart pounding, sweat coming out of every pore.

  “Tell the jury what you did to help Kimi,” Woloch said.

  “One night I rang the bell,” Yeager said. “I told her it was Audrey from next door. She knew me a little, and she opened the door. I went inside, and I calmed her down.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Oh, I’d read her a book, or we’d sing songs, or sometimes we’d play with her Barbies. We had lots of things we liked to do.”

  “So you visited Kimi more than once.”

  “Yes.”

  “More than five times?”

  “Yes.”

  “More than ten?”