Death Dance by Linda Fairstein

favorite watering holes on Second Avenue.
    Giuliano hadn't seen Mike in two months. He embraced him
enthusiastically and led us to the first table in the corner, ignoring
all the couples with nine o'clock reservations who were piled deep at
the bar.
    Adolfo took the drink order and uncorked a bottle of
Tignanello that Giuliano sent over with his compliments. Each of us was
familiar with the sophisticated menu that was the restaurant's famous
fare but opted for the delicious comfort food that was Primola's
Saturday-night special—an appetizer portion of fried zucchini
along with three orders of spaghetti and meatballs.
    No matter how tired I was from the work of the last
twenty-four hours, I could feel myself come alive again in the
reuniting of our trio. Family and close friends have provided my
emotional sanctuary during years of prosecuting intimate violence for
which no formal education could have prepared me. The women I had lived
with at Wellesley, my study group from law school at the University of
Virginia, and the colleagues with whom I stood shoulder to shoulder in
the trenches of the criminal courthouse at 100 Centre Street all played
a role in maintaining my faith in the goodness of humankind.
    But no professional relationship had been forged that compared
to my friendship with Mike and Mercer. They had seen the darkest side
of man's nature, regularly witnessing the taking of lives by killers
motivated by greed, lust, and every other deadly sin. They had helped
nourish victims back to stability after the trauma of the most
personally invasive violence imaginable. And they understood the
meaning of loyalty in ways I had trouble expressing to people who
couldn't fathom why each one of us derived such satisfaction in
restoring dignity to those who'd been attacked or to their survivors.
    Mercer's beeper went off while we were gnawing on thin strips
of zucchini and enjoying our wine. He stepped out on the sidewalk to
return the call.
    "If you're gonna try to ruin my dinner with new business,"
Mike said when he sat down again, "get yourselves another table for
two."
    Mercer smiled at me and lifted his glass. "We're one step
closer to nailing the Riverside rapist."
    "Another attack?"
    Joggers who ran the pathway in the slice of parkland along
Riverside Drive had been battling an assailant who hid himself in the
thick bushes that had started to bloom in March, lying in wait for
women who exercised alone. Police expected that the man had some kind
of sexual dysfunction, since he had not ejaculated in any of the cases.
Lacking a ANA profile of the attacker, we had been unable to search
databanks for convicted offenders or links to other unsolved crimes.
    "Not quite," Mercer said. "This one was running with her dog,
a small mixed-breed special she rescued from the pound. The perp
tackled her to the ground and started to tear off her shorts but the
mutt wrapped his mouth around the guy's wrist till he pulled free. I've
got to go over to the hospital to interview her."
    "You want me to come with you?"
    "Stay here with Mike. This one will be easy."
    "Your man get away again?"
    Mercer smiled. "For the moment. But they've got the dog down
at the ME's office. Docs are swabbing his teeth. There's still enough
of the perp's blood on his canines for a DNA profile this time."

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10

     
    Mike and I both lived on the Upper East Side in circumstances
as different as our backgrounds. He referred to his tiny, dark
fifth-floor walkup on York Avenue as "the coffin," while I lived on the
twentieth floor of a high-rise, in a large sunlit apartment with
twenty-four-hour doormen who enabled me to separate myself from the
day's demons when I settled in at home.
    There was a comfortable chill in the early-spring night when
we left Primola, and Mike offered to walk me the few short blocks north
to my building.
    When I tried to bring the conversation back to the subject of
Valerie, he countered by asking questions about my personal life.
    "So