Night Watch by Linda Fairstein Page B

thing, or he’ll lose the respect of the world.”
    “The world?” I asked. “Really? Well, I’m just a stay-at-home mom with three kids, so I don’t have much to say to the district attorney.”
    I knew from experience that that description of my life was likely to shut down our exchange. He leaned back in his seat and I rested my head against the window, closing my eyes again.
    I couldn’t help but think about Mercer and Mike, and whatthese last twenty-four hours had been like for them. Mercer Wallace, five years older than I and whip-smart, had earned the coveted gold shield with daring undercover exploits in his early days on the job, then continued to be promoted because of the brilliant detail work he had put into a series of homicide investigations.
    But like me, he didn’t thrive on murder cases. The department valued them as the most important crimes and the most elite units, but Mercer preferred the more sensitive matters of a special victims detective squad. He surprised the top brass years ago by asking for a transfer to the Manhattan unit that corresponded to my prosecutorial bureau, after solving a serial rape case involving more than seven teenage girls who’d been brutalized on East Harlem rooftops and in project stairwells.
    Mercer’s work, like mine, was a specialty that combined his investigative talents with a measure of compassion that allowed him to earn the trust of the most traumatized survivors—victims of sexual assault, domestic violence, and child abuse. The feature that Mike Chapman relied on most—no need to take up any time hand-holding the dead—was what made special victims work so satisfying to Mercer and me.
    Mercer’s mother died in childbirth, and he’d been raised in Queens by his father, Spencer, a mechanic for Delta Air Lines assigned to LaGuardia. He turned down a football scholarship at Michigan to join the NYPD. His second marriage was to Vickee Eaton, with whom he had a four-year-old son named Logan. There was as much heart in Mercer as his six-foot, six-inch frame could hold, and he had covered my back in court and on the street more times than I could count.
    My relationship with Mike Chapman was more complicated, both professionally and personally, in style and in substance. Mike’s father, Brian, had been one of the most decorated officers on the force throughout the twenty-six years he’d served. He raised his family—Mike had three older sisters—in the then working-class section of Yorkville in Manhattan. His great pride was his only son’ssuccess as a student whose knowledge of military history ranked him near the top of his class at Fordham University, guaranteeing the father that his son wouldn’t be risking his life every day on the city streets.
    But Brian suffered a massive coronary two days after turning in his gun and shield, and although Mike Chapman stayed on course to get his degree, he enrolled in the police academy immediately after graduation because he admired his father so deeply. Even in his rookie year he distinguished himself with arrests made in the drug-related Christmas Day massacre of a Colombian family in Washington Heights. His only interest was in working homicide, and he fast won a place in the Manhattan North squad, which was responsible for every murder case on the island above 59th Street.
    I met Mike my first year as a prosecutor. All the men and women who’d taught me the ropes—evaluating case merits and witness credibility, giving the job every ounce of one’s intellect and intuition, learning when it was essential to visit the scene of a crime and how to interrogate the vilest of criminal types—all of them required of us the most professional responses.
    Then I was introduced to the Chapman modus operandi. Mike trusted no one except the closest of his colleagues, had a sixth sense about people that was rarely off target, was able to keep an emotional distance from his victims and their families, and without ever