Cure

20

March 26, 2010

Friday, 9:40 a.m.

The floater had taken more time than Laurie had originally imagined, because the autopsy required tracing more than a dozen bullet tracks through the victim’s body, the majority through the chest and abdomen. Most had hit against bone and were diverted, but some had pierced the body through and through.

About midway through the case, Lou had decided he’d learned all he was going to learn and left. So it was Laurie and Vinnie who had slogged through, painstakingly following each shot and gathering bullets and bullet fragments as they progressed.

At first Laurie had tried to bring Vinnie out of his apparent funk by actively attempting to get him to participate in the dissection, but she eventually gave up. Instead, with the part of her brain she didn’t need to devote to the physical work, she tried to imagine how the previous day’s case could be related to the case she was doing. Could it be some sort of vengeance killing? There was no way to know. Besides, Laurie was the first to question whether there was a relationship or not, and she found herself progressively eager to find out. What was going to make her more confident was to study the photo she’d made and view the security tape again, holding a photo of the current case to compare. Even then she knew she probably was not going to be one hundred percent certain but maybe certain enough to question its potential meaning. Laurie thought seriously that one of the pursuers in the security tapes she’d watched at home was the man she was autopsying at that very moment. But she was being realistic. It was never that easy to identify people, especially looking at a photo or a film of a live person as compared to a corpse that had been floating around in the river.

The one thing Laurie was particularly thankful for was Jack’s sensitivity. She knew he knew that it had to be the security tapes where she’d seen the floater, but he didn’t push her on the issue. Instead, he’d respected her wish to do the legwork on her own and gain professional confidence by going so.

“Thank you for helping me on this case,” Laurie said to Vinnie, preparing to help him lift the body onto the gurney. “I’m sorry it was so long.”

“No problem,” Vinnie answered, but without emotion.

“Now I want to ask another favor.”

Vinnie looked expectantly at Laurie without speaking.

“If there’s a table available, I’d like you to bring out my unidentified case from yesterday. I want to repeat the external exam.”

Vinnie didn’t respond.

“Did you hear me?” Laurie questioned with a hint of pique. She was now certain he was not acting like himself. He was even avoiding eye contact.

“I heard you,” Vinnie said. “When there’s a table available, I’ll bring it out.”

“On three,” Laurie said, holding the floater’s ankles. She then counted, and together they shifted the corpse off the table and onto the gurney. She then walked away without another comment.

Laurie stopped by Jack’s table on her way out. “It looks like you’ve got a child,” Laurie said. She hung back and avoided looking directly at the preteen girl’s face. Children, particularly infants, were always difficult for Laurie, despite her active attempt to be professional and to keep emotion from her work.

“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack said. “And a rather heartbreaking case as well, so to speak. Do you want to hear?”

“I suppose,” Laurie said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Jack picked up the child’s heart from a tray and opened the edges of a slice he’d made to view a porcine aortic valve replacement. “A suture became loose after the initially successful replacement and got tangled in the valve. One suture out of a hundred! It’s a tragedy for everybody: the surgeon, the parents, but of course, mostly for the child.”

“I hope that surgeon can learn from his or her mistake.”

“That’s the hope,” Jack said. “He’s certainly going to hear about it. Are you off to work on yesterday’s case?”

“I am,” Laurie said.

“Good luck!”

“Thanks for not pushing me earlier to explain myself.”

“You’re welcome. But I’m getting awfully curious and want to hear about what you’ve got by the end of today. I’m assuming your watching the security tapes last night was a lot more fruitful than I had imagined.”

“They were interesting,” Laurie teased. “On another subject, Vinnie is not acting at all like himself today.”

“Really? That sounds very unlike Vinnie. I did notice he called me Dr. Stapleton when I stopped at your table. It’s usually something a lot more derisive.”

“Maybe it’s me, as I did deliberately hijack him this morning. But I did give him the option to wait and work with you.”

“Thanks for the tip,” Jack said as Laurie moved on.

Laurie removed her Tyvek coveralls in the locker room and disposed of them before heading upstairs in her scrubs. The first stop was Sergeant Murphy’s office, where she turned over the information she had involving the pickpocket episode seen on the security tape. Then she asked about John Doe.

“I haven’t heard a damn thing about your case from yesterday,” the sergeant confessed. “But I expect to hear something today. If I don’t, I’ll give Missing Persons a call myself. If they’d received any calls about a missing Asian male, they would have let me know.”

Laurie thanked the sergeant before climbing a flight of stairs and dropping in on Hank Monroe, the director of identification in the anthropology department. Laurie knocked on the closed door. It seemed that Hank, in contrast to most everyone else, preferred his privacy.

Hank Monroe was no more help than Sergeant Murphy had been, saying that the Missing Persons Squad had admitted they had yet to run the victim’s fingerprints on any local database, much less on the state or federal level. “As I believe I told you yesterday, they usually wait at least twenty-four hours or so, because the vast number of cases are solved by someone calling in within that time period. But as soon as I hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.”

From the director of identification’s office, Laurie went up to toxicology and stopped in to see John DeVries. “So far the screen for drugs, poisons, or toxins has shown absolutely nothing,” John said with an apologetic tone. “I’m sorry. You did get the essentially negative blood alcohol, didn’t you?”

“I did,” Laurie said. “And I appreciate you making the effort to do it so quickly.”

“We’re happy to help,” John said in his new persona. “But I want to emphasize that just because the toxicology screen is so far negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is none present. With some of the more potent agents, so little is needed to kill someone that the only way to identify it is to look for it specifically. What I’m trying to suggest is that if you have any reason to suspect a specific agent, you have to tell us, and we’ll specially look for it. Even then we can’t guarantee success, even with the trick of running the sample through the mass spec twice.”

“I understand,” Laurie said, and she did. She had been involved in several poisonings over the years. One had involved finding the agent at the crime scene, the other by discovering evidence that the perpetrator had purchased the material. But in her current case, neither of those opportunities was available.

“We’re not totally finished,” John added. “If we find something, I’ll be sure to give you a call.”

Next Laurie went down to the fourth floor and entered the histology lab, bracing herself for Maureen O’Conner’s invariable humor. She was not disappointed, nor was she disappointed about getting her slides overnight. As usual, Maureen came through with both.

Descending yet another floor, Laurie entered her office, eager to get to work. In order not to be bothered, she shut her door, which she rarely did. Next she deposited the tray of histology slides next to her microscope and turned on her monitor.

Her final act of preparing to get to work was to take out her cell phone and give Leticia a call. She actually felt proud of the fact that she’d resisted calling until almost ten. She thought it showed marked restraint, at least in comparison to the previous day. Leticia agreed.

“I’m surprised you didn’t call earlier,” Leticia said teasingly when she first answered.

“I’m surprised myself. How are things going?”

“Couldn’t be better. We’re staying in this morning, then going out to the park this afternoon. The sun is supposed to come out after noon.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Laurie said. While she had been talking to Leticia, she’d gotten out the photo she’d made from the security tapes and compared it to the photo in the new case file. It seemed that there was a definite resemblance between the man she’d just autopsied and one of the men in the photo. Actually, more than she expected.

After hanging up with Leticia, Laurie got the two security disks out of her bag and slipped the first into the DVD drawer. Then she put the photograph of the floater next to the monitor to make it easy to compare. With her mouse, she advanced the DVD to the appropriate time and pressed play.

The image was from camera five, and the timing was that of the victim rushing down the stairs to the subway platform. Within seconds, the two pursuing men appeared at the top of the stairs. At that point, Laurie stopped the action and then moved it forward frame by frame. As the action advanced and the men became larger and larger, Laurie alternately got a good view of first one and then the other. Although the two men resembled each other in terms of size and dress, one had a more or less full, oval face, while the other’s was lean and narrow. Of course, the more obvious difference was that the thinner man was carrying an umbrella, while the full-faced one was not.

Laurie advanced the frames until she had the best view of the full-faced man, as it was clear the man she’d just autopsied also had a full, oval face. At that point, with the security tape halted, she picked up the photo of the tattooed gentleman in the cooler and put them side by side.

For several minutes Laurie stared alternately at the photo and the image on her monitor. In a sense, she was disappointed. From the initial comparison using the photo she’d made at home and the photo taken at OCME, she’d been optimistic and had counted on the identification being easy: It was going to be either a yes or a no. She hadn’t expected a maybe, which seemed to be the situation. It was close. Alternately she looked at photos and then at the monitor image, again advancing the monitor image a frame at a time.

Still not certain, perhaps due to the dark glasses, Laurie quickly advanced the security tape to camera six and went to the same time sequence as she’d been on camera five. From that angle, something she’d not seen on camera five appeared. The man had a mole about the size of a dime on his right temple. It wasn’t particularly obvious, but it was definitely there, no doubt about it. Checking the photograph of the right profile on the photo, there it was as well! Laurie was reasonably confident that the two people were one and the same!

She sat back in her chair, amazed at the coincidence. Then she sat forward again and continued watching the tape from the sixth camera to the point where the train pulled into the station. Although it was not easy to make out because of the crowd surging forward toward the arriving train, Laurie tried to see exactly what happened when the two pursuers reached the victim. She could not see any of their hands, but quickly the two men seemed to be supporting the victim while the victim appeared to be convulsing. It was very fast, only a couple of frames. What wasn’t clear was whether the pursuers caused the victim to convulse or it was spontaneous, like a heart attack or stroke.

Laurie sat back in her chair again, watching the rapid denouement with the pursuers laying the now unconscious man onto the platform, having already stripped him of his bag and presumably his wallet. On this viewing, Laurie also saw something else she hadn’t made note of the previous evening: how the oval-faced man, after relieving the victim of his belongings, carefully picked up the umbrella and opened it about halfway before closing it again. The impression was that it took some force to get it closed. The thought that immediately came to Laurie’s mind was that the umbrella was being cocked like an air rifle.

Halting the security tape, Laurie was about to view the same sequence from the vantage point of some of the other cameras when a specific remembrance flashed through her mind. It was about a famous forensic case that she’d heard about in a lecture when she was a resident in forensic pathology. It involved the assassination in London of a diplomat from an Iron Curtain country she couldn’t remember. It was carried out with the help of an air gun cleverly hidden by the KGB within an umbrella.

Putting down the photos that she was still holding, Laurie went online and did a quick search, and within seconds she was reading about Georgi Ivanov Markov, a rather famous Bulgarian at the time, who had indeed been murdered with a KGB-manufactured pellet gun hidden within the shaft of an umbrella. Most important, Laurie learned that the substance involved was ricin, a remarkably toxic protein derived from castor beans.

Going back to the Web, Laurie looked up ricin, particularly interested in the symptoms associated with ricin poisoning. Immediately she could tell that her case of the previous day could not have been a copycat of the Markov incident, at least not with ricin, as ricin caused gastrointestinal symptoms, and the symptoms developed over hours, not instantaneously, as with her case. As far as the delivery aspect, however, meaning a pellet gun in an umbrella, that was a definite possibility. Laurie was now eager to repeat the external exams.

Why she hadn’t done a better external exam at the time, even if Southgate had supposedly done it and reputedly had called it negative, she didn’t know. In fact, from her current vantage point she was embarrassed she hadn’t done her own. Not long into the autopsy, her intuition was telling her it had not been a natural death, as there was no pathology at all: none! The challenge now was to prove her intuition was correct: whether there was a tiny entrance wound that he’d received through his clothing.

Laurie picked up the phone and called Vinnie’s cell. She and most people at OCME had been finding that using personal cell phones was significantly more efficient than using the regular internal phone lines. She wondered if Vinnie’s mood had improved. He answered after the first ring.

“How about my Asian John Doe?” Laurie asked. “Is he ready for another look?”

“A table is just opening up,” Vinnie said. “It should be within a half-hour or so.”

“Terrific! Should I just come down in a half-hour, or do you want to give me a call?”

“If you don’t mind, I’ll have Marvin give you a call,” Vinnie said, continuing to suffer guilt about his very real fears of having been caught in an untenable situation where he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he went to Laurie and took responsibility for sending her the threatening note and tried to convince her about what to do, he and/or his family, particularly his girls, would surely be harassed if not killed. If he didn’t do anything and Laurie didn’t heed the message, she could be killed. The situation was driving him to distraction. “He’s available now, and I know you guys like to work together.”

“Suit yourself!” Laurie said, finally truly irritated. It seemed to her that Vinnie had been trying to provoke her all morning, and now he’d succeeded.

Calming herself down, Laurie turned to the histology slides. Until she’d viewed all of them, particularly the sections involving the brain and the heart, and found nothing, there was still a slight chance yesterday’s case was a natural death, despite her intuition to the contrary. Last night she’d become excited over the case. Now she was really excited with the added intrigue that she had both the victim and the killer, meaning the case might very well represent war between two organized-crime organizations just as Lou had feared, since at least one of the victims was most likely a Yakuza member.