True Justice (Butch Karp-Marlene Ciampi Thriller, A, Band 12) - Softcover

Buch 12 von 29: Butch Karp and Marlene Ciampi

Tanenbaum, Robert K.

 
9781451607529: True Justice (Butch Karp-Marlene Ciampi Thriller, A, Band 12)
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1451607520 ISBN 13: 9781451607529
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2010

Inhaltsangabe

For Butch Karp, chief assistant district attorney for New York County, the nightmare begins when a shocking act of negligence results in the death of a newborn. Goaded by the media and the public's scream for blood, Karp's boss, D.A. Jack Keegan, orders the prosecution of the baby's fifteen-year-old Hispanic mother.

Butch's wife, Marlene Ciampi, is taking on an equally unspeakable tragedy following her recent return to law. With Butch and Marlene squaring off on opposite sides of an incendiary national debate, things couldn't get more tense...until an astonishing turn of events puts their daughter, Lucy, at the center of a horrifying crime. Drawn into a maelstrom of big-city politics and small-town values, Karp must struggle to salvage his self-respect, his career...even his life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robert K. Tanenbaum is the author of over thirty books and os one of the most successful prosecuting attorneys, having never lost a felony trial and convicting hundreds of violent criminals. He was a special prosecution consultant on the Hillside strangler case in Los Angeles and defended Amy Grossberg in her sensationalized baby death case. He was Assistant District Attorney in New York County in the office of legendary District Attorney Frank Hogan, where he ran the Homicide Bureau, served as Chief of the Criminal Courts, and was in charge of the DA’s legal staff training program. He served as Deputy Chief counsel for the Congressional Committee investigation into the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He also served two terms as mayor of Beverly Hills and taught Advanced Criminal Procedure for four years at Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California, Berkeley, and has conducted continuing legal education (CLE) seminars for practicing lawyers in California, New York, and Pennsylvania. Born in Brooklyn, New York, Tanenbaum attended the University of California at Berkeley on a basketball scholarship, where he earned a BA. He received his law degree (JD) from Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Visit RobertKTanenbaumBooks.com.

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Chapter One

A Salvadorean Chinese man wearing a red Hebrew National apron with a black-checked kefiya around his neck and a Yankees hat on his head -- in short, a typical New Yorker -- jaywalked across Tenth Avenue at Fifty-second Street, contemplating, like so many of his fellow citizens, a minor offense. He was a food vendor, the January dusk was closing in, and he wanted to dispose of the considerable trash that had collected on his cart after twelve hours of dispensing edible garbage. He was supposed to carry it back to the cart depot, but he was now about to deposit a fat plastic bag in one of the row of trash cans he knew was kept behind the pizza joint across the street. The commercial trash collectors of the city were still recovering from a week of snow and ice, though, and he discovered that the five cans in the alleyway off Fifty-second were full, with bulging black bags stacked around them. The man looked over his shoulder to see whether anyone was watching and lifted up one of the bags. His plan was to secrete his own modest contribution behind one of these stinking blimps. Instead, he froze, goggling, and stumbled backward, knocking over one of the trash cans. Someone else had obviously had the same idea, because a dead baby was lying on top of the trash bag he had uncovered. It was slaty-blue, faceup, the little face shriveled like an old vegetable. It was a boy, with the exaggerated genitals of the neonate, and its long, ropy umbilical cord dragged down into the shadows beneath the trash.

"What's happening?" said a voice in Spanish behind him. A kitchen worker in whites and a cheap black parka stood behind him. The vendor was speechless. The kitchen man said, "Hey, man, what're you doing, kicking over my...," and then he saw the baby, too.

"Oh, shit!" said the kitchen man.

"Oh, shit, is right," said the vendor. He spoke both Spanish and Cantonese and was thus able to converse with nearly every low-level food-service worker in the city.

The kitchen man looked at him narrowly. "You didn't put that baby there, did you?"

"What're you, crazy? I just come here to stash my garbage from the wagon. That baby's been here awhile. Look, it's all blue and stiff."

"Poor little bastard! It's a boy, too," said the kitchen man. "Hey, man, where're you going?"

The vendor had turned away and was starting back toward Fifty-second. He paused and said, "I got to get back to my wagon, man."

"Hey, but we got to call the cops."

"You got a green card, man?" asked the vendor.

"Yeah, I got a green card."

"Well, you call the cops, then," said the vendor, and walked off.

What followed had happened well over a thousand times in the previous year, and already twenty in the current one, the digestion of a dead human by the bureaucracy established for that purpose. The police arrived, two patrolmen, who secured the crime scene and took an initial report from the kitchen man. Then the crime scene unit arrived in its van and examined the dead baby and its surround for clues. The baby was lying on some paper toweling, and they bagged that. Then the patrol sergeant arrived, and an ambulance from Bellevue, and shortly after that two detectives from the unit assigned to Midtown South. These looked at the baby and the scene and asked questions and found the Chinese Salvadorean vendor and yelled at him a little. Then the ambo took the dead baby away to the morgue. The next morning, an assistant medical examiner autopsied Baby Boy Doe Number One and discovered that it had died of exposure. Since exposing a baby to January weather in New York falls under the section of the homicide statute having to do with death resulting from a depraved indifference to human life, the death was ruled a homicide. The District Attorney's Office for the County of New York -- that is, the isle of Manhattan -- was duly notified, and thus it came, but only modestly, into the cognizance of the district attorney's chief assistant by means of a pair of lines on a computer printout. This printout was generated by the complaint bureau, an organization that was to the district attorney's office as the little ovoid plastic tube on the top is to the Cuisinart. The lines for Baby Boy Doe Number One indicated that this was a fresh case, that no arrests had been made on it. The chief assistant's name was Roger Karp, called Butch by everyone except his aged aunt Sophie.

Karp's eye moved on to the seventeen other people who had been killed in Manhattan since the beginning of the year. In ten of these, an arrest had been made, and these were naturally of greater interest to him. Karp had been doing this work for over twenty years. He had been a famous homicide prosecutor, and then the chief of the homicide bureau, and now he was the chief assistant district attorney, the operational head of the entire organization. He had not, he hoped, become callous, but he had a lot to do. The murder rate had risen rocketlike in recent years in pace with the citywide crack epidemic, and one more dead baby did not appear just then as pressing a matter as the legions of teenagers then roaming New York with heavy semiautomatic weapons. But he did not forget it, not entirely. Not forgetting the slain of Manhattan was one of his major talents.

That was the first dead baby. The second dead baby was found two days later, on January 12, by a track worker on the Broadway line, just south of the Ninety-sixth Street station. It was wrapped in newspapers and stuffed in a supermarket shopping bag. The complexion of the first dead baby suggested it was Hispanic, and this one was a girl and black. The track worker had called the cops immediately. A different team of detectives arrived, and another crime scene unit arrived, who collected and tagged the newspaper wrapping and the grocery bag. Service on the Broadway line was delayed for several hours, as a result of which the second dead baby created somewhat more of a media stir than the first one had. On autopsy, the second dead baby proved to have been smothered, and thus after the usual grinding, Baby Girl Doe Number One also appeared as a homicide line on Karp's daily computer printout, along with the four other people who had been killed (all drug-related shootings) since the last time he had looked. Baby Girl Doe Number One attracted rather more of his attention than her predecessor. Karp was not a political creature -- far from it. Still, Karp understood that the New York DA's office existed in a corrosive bath of media attention, and two murdered babies in a week was perhaps unusual even for the Big Apple. He paused and made a note to give his boss, DA Jack Keegan, a heads-up, so that he would be prepared for any questions should one of the city's many journalists choose to do a bleeding-heart piece.

That note proved, in the event, somewhat de trop, because on January 17, the third dead baby appeared. The third dead baby was different, and different for reasons peculiar to New York. On the late afternoon of that day, a young man named Raul Jimenez, a communications student at the Tisch School of New York University, was walking along 112th Street near Lexington Avenue. He was working on a school assignment, which was to make a three-minute video on "animals in the city." Jimenez had grown up in this neighborhood, had avoided, more or less, the drugs, gangs, and cops, and was now rising, but rising, he felt, with an edge. The other kids were going to do pigeons, puppies, and squirrels, he figured, while he was going to do bad dogs. It had lately become fashionable among the guapos on the street to keep large, nasty dogs, pit bulls or ridgebacks or rotties. Given the average life span of this class of person, and their average level of responsibility, many of their pets were abandoned, scavenging in garbage for food, menacing people, and usually ending up...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2010
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1451607520
ISBN 13 
9781451607529
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande

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