Bad Blood by Linda Fairstein

shaking it as though she had never thought of any of these things. “Why don’t they despise Brendan as much as I do? He’s the one who was unfaithful to Amanda, lots of times.”
    Kate knew that I had other evidence of the defendant’s philandering. But I certainly hadn’t needed her to make that point so dramatically and so personally before the jury.
    “And what do you get?” Mike asked, anticipating the next morning’s tabloid take on my first witness. “The Park Avenue Neighborhood Association Desperate Housewife of the Year award? You’ve cratered our whole case. There’s not a word you said today that the jury’ll give any weight to.”
    Mike’s beeper went off and he opened the door to step out into the hallway.
    I could hear Kate Meade draw breath. “You mean I’ve done this for nothing? I’ve — I’ve exposed myself to all this public humiliation for no reason?”
    “You have something more serious to think about right now,” I said. “We’ve got to get you out of here by the back door so the photographers don’t ambush you. My paralegal will get police officers to take you home.”
    “Photographers waiting for me? Why in the world would they—” The answer seemed to hit her as soon as she formed the question. She stood up and walked toward me. “You’ve got to come with me, Ms. Cooper. I can’t face my family alone.”
    “I’m due back in court in forty-five minutes. I won’t be able to help you with this. I’m a prosecutor, Kate, not a social worker.”
    “I’ll take you. I’ll stay till your husband gets home,” Mercer said. He had worked in the Special Victims Unit for almost ten years, one of the only African-American detectives in the NYPD to hold the rank of first grade. Like me, he thrived on the highly charged emotional connections in this category of crimes, which required extra sensitivity on the part of the investigator. Mike Chapman, on the other hand, worked best when there was no one to hand-hold, when the cold, hard facts were teased out of the victim’s remains and the physical evidence. He loved being a homicide cop.
    Kate Meade tugged on Mercer’s sleeve like a child hoping not to get lost in a crowd. “You’ve got to make sure there are no pictures in the newspapers.”
    “I’ll allow Detective Wallace to take you home, Mrs. Meade. But only on the condition that you tell him every detail — I don’t care how intimate, I don’t care how embarrassing — about what went on between you and your friend Brendan. By the time I see Mercer later tonight, if there is anything Lem Howell knows about you that I don’t, there’ll be hell to pay.”
    I turned on my heels to go back to my office to wait for Jerry Genco.
    “Slow down,” Mike said, pulling me into the alcove next to the conference room. “Do me a favor — don’t buy any lottery tickets today.”
    “Now what? Genco’s stuck in traffic?”
    “Someone got to Marley.”
    “How? What do you mean? He’s on Rikers Island.” Mike had come up with a witness, a thirty-
two-year-old burglar from the island of Jamaica who was awaiting trial on a string of break-ins when Amanda Quillian was murdered.
    “Got out of jail free. Went directly to the operating room at Bellevue Hospital.”
    “What for?” It had taken me weeks to negotiate a cooperation agreement with Marley’s lawyer, whose client would testify that six months before Amanda’s murder, Brendan Quillian had offered him twenty thousand dollars to kill his wife.
    “Snitch fever.”
    The only prisoners lower on the totem pole than pedophiles were rats. “He’s sick?”
    “You would be, too, if someone stuck a shiv between your fifth and sixth thoracic vertebrae while you were working out in the yard.”
    “You think it’s related to the case? Will he live?”
    “It’s all about the case. Count on it. Critical but stable.”
    I shook my head and continued on my way. “Yeah, maybe it’s just a jailhouse—”
    “I mean they cut