Second Honeymoon

Chapter 47

THE PATHOLOGIST DIDN’T even bother to look up from his lunch. “You’re a friend of Larry’s, right?” he asked me.

Truth be told, I didn’t know Larry from Adam or the man in the moon, but I did know the woman with the Joint Terrorism Task Force who worked with Larry at the New York Port Authority, whose brother at the NYPD forensics lab was a friend of the guy in the Queens medical examiner’s office sitting before me at his desk with a diet peach Snapple in one hand and a half-eaten ham sandwich on rye in the other.

Call it six degrees of O’Hara needs a favor.

All starting with two words I saw on the television perched above the counter at the Heavenly Diner.

A CNN reporter was standing outside Kennedy Airport. The sound was muted, but the headline in big white type above the news crawl was screaming, at least to me. NEWLYWEDS DEAD.

As soon as I hung up with Joe, I immediately began calling in favors from my days with the NYPD. I needed details. I needed access.

Maybe these honeymooners dying so soon on the heels of the Breslows was nothing more than a coincidence, but as I learned the gruesome details of what happened at that Delta terminal, it was easy to think otherwise.

The hard part would be getting confirmation. Fast.

The totally uninterested pathologist—officially the deputy chief medical examiner—finally looked up at me in his cramped office in Queens. His name was Dr. Dimitri Papenziekas, and he was a Greek with a Noo Yawk attitude. “Hey, I’m not freakin’ Superman,” he informed me.

Yeah, and I’m not the Green Hornet. So now that we have that settled…

“How fast?” I asked. “That’s all I need to know.”

How fast could he complete a test to determine if cyclosarin was present in the airport couple’s bodies?

“Tomorrow afternoon,” he said.

“How about tonight?”

How about you go screw yourself? said his expression. And that was screw spelled with an f, by the way.

“Okay, okay…make it tomorrow morning,” I said as if I were the one doing him the favor.

Dimitri took a bite of the ham sandwich, his head bobbing in thought as he chewed.

“Fine, tomorrow morning,” he said. Then he wagged his finger. “Just don’t be one of those guys who call me in a few hours to see how it’s going. That’s when I really take my time.”

“Yeah, I hate those guys,” I said. “Those guys are dicks.”

Christ, good thing he said that. I would’ve called him for sure. That would’ve gone over well, huh, O’Hara? Like a fart in a crowded elevator.

No, the next morning was okay. I didn’t need to press him. Besides, more important than the “when” was the “who,” as in, Who else would know he was doing me this favor? No one, I hoped.

“So this is just between the two of us, right?” I asked, wanting to make sure.

“That’s what Tiger Woods said,” he shot back.

He laughed while I wondered if that was actually a yes or a no. Finally, he assured me that I had nothing to worry about. No one would know.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Don’t sweat it. Any friend of Larry’s is a friend of mine,” he said. Then, of all things, Dimitri winked. “And if you actually ever meet Larry, you can tell him I said so.”