Free Entombed by Linda Fairstein Page A

left the room
so they could deliberate, I found Mercer Wallace waiting at the
warden's desk. "Got your vote?"
    "Give them five
minutes. The novelty of it will take them longer than usual."
    "We've got a problem
at Kennedy Airport. You can wait the jury out or come with me," he
said, striding to the hallway.
    "What-?"
    "Annika Jelt's parents
just landed. They've never been more than twenty miles away from their
farm before. They don't have proper documentation and immigration won't
let them into the country."

    9
    We both had our gold
shields and identification badges in our hands, having been left by an
angry immigration officer to cool our heels-and our tempers-while she
fetched her supervisor.
    "Put the hardware
away," the supervisor said when he joined us in the glass cubicle.
"Rules is rules and I don't break them for anybody."
    I pointed across the
corridor to the middle-aged couple, sitting stone-faced on folding
wooden chairs like a pair of nineteenthcentury Ellis Island immigrants.
"Their daughter is in the intensive care unit of New York Hospital,
fighting for her life. We'll vouch for them, sign for them, deliver
them back here in a week. What more-?"
    "Welcome to America,
post nine-eleven. I don't know who let them board without the papers
they need, but this is as far as they get on my turf."
    "The Swedish consulate
arranged the whole thing. They were escorted onto the plane by an envoy
from the American embassy, who gave them a letter that was hand-signed
by the ambassador. He was promised by an NYPD captain that they'd be
met on this end by a Port Authority official who would arrange
everything from this point on."
    "Maybe they can cut
corners in Stockholm, lady, but I call the shots at this airport. The
paperwork they got at the consulate is outdated."
    Mercer was trying to
restrain me, taking the reins with his unflappable demeanor. "We can do
this your way, or we can do it the way the police commissioner just
recommended to me. The mayor drives out here with the key to the city
and a phalanx of reporters-and you continue to get in his way, or you
just bend the regulations a bit and let us get these nice folks on the
road."
    We wrangled until
after six o'clock, when the shifts changed and a new supervisor
appeared. I had called the grand jury warden before the office closed
to confirm the indictment had been voted. Within the hour we were on
the Belt Parkway back to the city with our charges, who were more
frightened than exhausted. The English they had not spoken since high
school was basic enough for us to communicate, and I told them as much
as I could about their daughter's experience and the news of her great
recovery.
    Mercer entered
Manhattan through the Midtown Tunnel. "Let me out on First Avenue. I'll
catch up with Mike and Andy Dorfman at the morgue."
    I knew the nurses
would not allow all of us into Annika's tiny room, and that it was more
important for Mercer to be present at the parents' reunion with their
child, in case there was any further conversation about the facts of
the attack. For me, it would be less stressful, less emotional, to
watch the processing of the skeletal remains. Without flesh and blood,
the bones seemed too far removed from anyone with whom I could identify.
    I had never been in
Andy's cubicle in the basement of the medical examiner's office.
    The familiar odor of
formalin wafted through the dim hallways, and empty steel gurneys lined
the walls, waiting for their lifeless loads.
    No need to look for
room numbers. I could hear Alex Trebek's voice as I passed an open
door. Andy was hunched over the left femur of the skeleton, while Mike
sat in a chair with his feet on the desk, noshing on a bag of pretzels
and looking at the small portable television set on a bookshelf across
the room.
    "European Literature.
You're just in time."
    Our usual bet was
twenty dollars. "Double or nothing," I said. This was one of my few
areas of strength against Mike's concentration on military