Mercy General

8:30pm Sunday May 13th 2007


"I have the patient's records," Connie Rubirosa said for the fifteenth time. "Look. All you have to do is confirm them."

"And I told you," the registrar retorted, also for the fifteenth time, "Without a waiver from the patient, you aren't seeing anything, copy or not."

Connie opened her mouth to answer, and her phone rang. "We're not done," she said the registrar, and yanked it from her pocket. "Rubirosa."

"Connie, it's Mike."

"Mike, I haven't – "

"Let it go, Connie," he said. "How fast can you get back to the office?"

I am going to strangle you with your own tie, Connie thought. What she said was: "Thirty minutes."

"Call me when you're getting close," he said. "I'll meet you out front."

"What's up?"

"I'll tell you on the way," Cutter said, and hung up.

I am going to strangle you with your own tie and then borrow a tie from Omardi in Fraud and strangle you a second time.

Connie slipped her phone back in her pocket and looked back at the registrar. "We are done here, actually. Thank you for your time."

She couldn't really blame him for the pissed-off look he gave her.

She had a pissed-off look of her own for Mike Cutter when he met her on the steps of One Hogan Place. 'What's going on, Mike?"

He steered her back towards the curb. "We have a line on a possible witness."

"And you want me to go check it out?"

Cutter opened the door to the cab that stopped for his raised hand. "We're going to go check it out. Get in."

"Mike – "

He shut the door on her and jogged around the other side of the taxi to get in, telling the driver "193 Berkeley, Brooklyn." He pulled some folded pages from his pocket and leaned forward to offer them to the driver. "Here's a map."

Connie tried again. "Mike, who is this witness? Why does this take both of us?"

Cutter waited until the cab pulled out into the traffic. "Her name is Lisbeth Lyneham." He gave Connie a moment to search her memory. "Before she married Patrick Lyneham her name was Lisbeth McCoy."

"Jack's ex-wife?" If Mike wants her on the witness stand he must think she'll say Jack … dammit, did Cutter get something out of the divorce records? Did she make some allegation that he –

"Jack's sister," Cutter said. "She's his emergency contact in his personnel file. Which Colleen finally passed my request for to Arthur."

"And what does she have to do with the case?"

Cutter shot a glance at the driver, and then looked back at Connie. She nodded to show she understood his warning. Listening ears. She raised an eyebrow in reply: Dammit, Mike, give me something.

He leaned towards her and lowered his voice. "Connie, I need to hear what she has to say for myself. But I need your opinion of it, too."

"Because … ?"

"Because I think we both know my judgment hasn't been as reliable as it could be on this trial."

She liked him a little for making that admission, and for not looking away from her when he made it. "And what do you think she's going to tell you? That you need to hear?"

He did look away from her then, studying the view as they went over the bridge. "I had a law professor who used to say that motive was the most important part of any jury trial. Juries will ignore eyewitness accounts, forensics, if you don't give them a motive to sink their teeth into."

Connie nodded. "People need to hear a story that makes sense, that they can believe in. The why is the most important part of that."

"That's what I'm hoping Lisbeth Lyneham will tell me, Connie." Cutter turned back to her. "A story I can believe in."

Berkeley Place was one the few streets in Brooklyn streets that seemed to have resisted both gentrification and decay. The street was clean, the tiny squares of garden before each brownstone were tidy. The bicycle chained up in front of number 191 was a regular ten-speed and the cars parked in the street were neither brand new nor decrepit. Looking up and down the street, Connie could see a few of the residents enjoying the balmy spring evening on their front steps.

Cutter led the way up the steps to the door of Lisbeth Lyneham's house and knocked.

"Mrs Lyneham?" he said when a middle-aged woman with a shock of dark hair opened it. She nodded. "I'm Mike Cutter and this is Connie Rubirosa. We're from the District Attorney's — wait!" He stuck his foot in the door right before Lisbeth managed to close it. "Please, hear me out."

"You're the ones trying to lock Jack up on those false charges," Lisbeth Lyneham said. "I have nothing to say to you."

"We're trying to find the truth."

In that moment, the family resemblance was clear, even if Lisbeth was younger and softer around the mouth and eyes than Jack McCoy. They had the same nose and right at that moment, the McCoy family scowl was very much in evidence. "I read the papers, young man, even if Jack doesn't want me to come to the courthouse. The last thing you're interested in is the truth."

Cutter had the grace to flinch at that. "I thought I knew what it was. I swear to you, Mrs Lyneham, I didn't set out to prosecute an innocent man." He winced as she put her weight on the door and his foot took the burden. "Jack was acting like a guilty man. He wouldn't even let his lawyer put on a proper defense. I drew the natural conclusion. What was I supposed to think?"

"Jack should never have been charged," Connie said past Cutter's shoulder, and ignored the glare he shot her. "But he insisted on it, Mrs Lyneham, did he tell you that?"

The McCoy family scowl, the McCoy family set jaw. "And now you come around here, at this time of night, and expect me to believe you've had a change of heart?"

"I asked Jack tonight why he'd almost let me railroad him straight to a conviction and he walked out. I asked his lawyer and she told me about her father driving drunk. Because, she said, what happens to your family when you're growing up makes a difference to who you are. Because you can blame yourself for things that aren't your fault. Mrs Lyneham. You know what she meant, don't you? You know what it is that Jack won't tell me."

Connie put the pieces together then. She bet Cutter had done so too, had done so long before he'd decided that Lisbeth Lyneham's home was on their evening itinerary. He wanted confirmation of his hunch before he decided what to do about it. And quite possibly, having failed to get a win against Jack McCoy or Regan Markham on the topic, he's hell-bent on forcing at least one person tonight to talk.

There were a lot of things Connie liked about Mike Cutter, but his driving need to win, the way he treated every interaction like an Olympic final, got extremely tiring after a while.

Mrs Lyneham had stopped trying to crush Cutter's foot with the door, but she was still frowning. "And I should talk to you when my brother won't? If you've realized Jack isn't guilty, drop the charges!"

"That would clear him before the criminal court, Mrs Lyneham, not the court of public opinion."

She snorted, exactly the same scoffing sound Jack McCoy made when a defendant's lawyer offered to plead to assault on a murder charge. "As if Jack cared what people think of him."

"I think he does care a little bit, Mrs Lyneham, or I wouldn't need to be here, would I? He cares what people think of him, because those people end up on juries. Now I have a way to give his lawyer the chance to prove to the whole world he's an innocent man, but it's going to make me look very bad. It will probably end my own career. At the very least it'll put a serious crimp in it. Before I do that, I need to know — why, when a woman accused Jack McCoy of beating her bloody, did he all but put up his hands and say 'you've got me dead to rights'?"

There was a long silence. "You're really going to try and help him?"

"That depends on whether or not you can help me," Cutter said.

Another long silence, and then Mrs Lyneham stepped back from the door. "You'd better come in," she said.

Cutter and Connie followed her down the hall to the kitchen. Mrs Lyneham took a seat at the kitchen table and Connie joined her. Cutter leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets.

"Mrs Lyneham," Connie said, when the other women didn't seem to be about to speak. Cutter straightened a little, opened his mouth, and Connie lifted a hand. He subsided. "A few years ago, I notice that my little sister was wearing a lot more makeup some days. She's always had great skin, but she was caking on the foundation and the powder, so much that her clothes were always covered in this white dust, because every time she smiled or spoke some of her makeup would crack and drift down. Except I noticed around then that she was smiling a lot less that she used to."

Lisbeth Lyneham nodded.

"It took a while for her to admit it," Connie said. "She didn't want to talk about it, with anyone. She was ashamed of it. He told her it was her fault and part of her believed him."

"It wasn't," Mrs Lyneham said.

"I know. And now she knows. And he's in jail." She paused. "But your father never went to jail, did he?"

"Hardly." Mrs Lyneham locked her hands together, a grip so tight her knuckles went white. "He was a cop. What would have been the point of reporting him?"

"Even these days it'd be hard," Cutter said. "Back then …"

"Back then it was a family matter," Mrs Lyneham said bitterly. "We lied about it, mostly. Our mother walked into a lot of doors. Jack fell off his bike. Once or twice there was no way to pretend it was an accident because … because the ambulance had to come. Mrs McCoy, what did you do to provoke him, they asked her the first time."

"I know Jack's Irish temper," Cutter said. "He swung back, didn't he, Mrs Lyneham?"

She shook her head. "I used to wish he would, and god forgive me for it. I thought maybe it would have made the S.O.B. more cautious. But Jack wouldn't. He'd make himself the target — dated a Polish girl for a while, the most peaceful month I think my mother had since the day she married. But he wouldn't fight back. Not once. That's how I know he's innocent, Mr Cutter. Not because he's family, he and I both know that counts for nothing. But because hitting a woman would make him his father's son, and Jack would step off the Brooklyn Bridge before that happened. And I'd hold his coat while he did. He said he was never going to look in the mirror and see the old man's face."

Cutter rocked back on his heels and looked down at his feet. "Until ten days ago, when he did."

"Or thought he did," Connie said. "Mike, those questions Regan asked Dr Rodgers about GHB …"

He nodded. "And now we know her theory of the crime, and it's not the same crime we're prosecuting."

"Are you going to help him, Mr Cutter?" Lisbeth Lyneham asked. "Are you going to help my brother?"

.oOo.


A/N: Connie mentions her sister's abusive relationship in "Captive".