Bad blood

36

“Don’t defend the guy, Jerry. How did a doc miss the kid’s pregnancy, can you explain that to me? That fact could have changed the way the entire case shook out. Maybe it gave somebody a motive, maybe it gave-”

“Don’t fly off the handle, Mike. It wouldn’t have been easy to see. I’d say the fetus wasn’t even three months yet-probably just a bit over two. The uterus is barely enlarged. Here-you can see the incision he made-will you look at this, please?” Jerry said. “The pathologist made one cut from front to back-right here-so he didn’t see all of the uterus, any more than I did when I made mine. The place where he sliced? There was nothing to show it.”

“Why the hell not?”

“Since there was no trauma to the vaginal vault, no signs of a sexual assault at autopsy, a superficial visual of the reproductive organs would be all most docs would have done. Not uncommon. This was a sixteen-year-old girl-eight, maybe nine weeks pregnant. If nobody brought that piece of information in as part of her history, most pathologists doing the postmortem on an asphyxial death might have missed it.”

Mike’s argument with Jerry Genco faded to background noise. My thoughts were somewhere else.

I was trying to put together what I remembered of the time frame during which Bex Hassett’s life had spun so terribly out of control. How much earlier was it that her father had died? When had she started spending all that time away from home? Who was in the pack she was hanging with in Pelham Bay Park? What had caused her to turn against her friend Trish Quillian? Had anyone realized she’d been impregnated just a couple of months before her death?

“I wonder how religious the family was. What if Mrs. Hassett knew her daughter was pregnant and threw her out of the house?” I asked. “Parents have done that with girls who embarrassed them-more often than you think.”

“You’re a bit tardy with that thought, Coop. About six months too late to ask Mama, according to the headstone on her grave.”

“Maybe Bobby knew. Maybe the brothers had some idea. What if that’s why he didn’t want the exhumation done?”

Mike’s eyes narrowed as he considered the idea. “Guess I’ll have to talk to him again. Put him back on the list, after I’m done with Trish Quillian.”

“You think it throws Reuben DeSoto-the original suspect-back in the mix? What if she’d been sleeping with him and told him he was the father of the baby? He’d have no reason to rape her then-but they might have argued about it. Maybe he did kill her.”

“That whole gang she was running with in the park? I guess we’ll have to see if we can scare up any of those guys.”

Jerry Genco was ready to get us out of his hair. “Odds are this had nothing to do with the girl’s death. You know the numbers on teen pregnancy in this country? It’s a staggering figure. She had a high-risk lifestyle, this Hassett kid. We see it all too frequently here. Quite sad, really.”

The arguments I had made to Judge Gertz about my motion to use an expert on interpersonal violence in Brendan Quillian’s trial were triggered now by Genco’s dismissal of the relevance of this murder victim’s pregnancy.

“The leading cause of death for pregnant women in America is homicide,” I said.

Genco was labeling his specimens for storage. “Yeah, I guess that’s right.”

“Pregnancy-like separation-is one of the two most dangerous times for women in a bad relationship,” I went on. “Most of them are killed by the men they’d been intimate with-I hesitate to use the word lover. You know that, too.”

“And one of the most common causes of death in those circumstances is strangulation,” Mike said, looking at me a bit less skeptically.

“So if somebody knew Rebecca Hassett was pregnant, and that somebody wasn’t happy about it, maybe it gives us a new suspect.”

“Well, I’ll be the first to tell you if I was wrong about the insignificance of this-this pregnancy. I’ll call you tomorrow to see if I can give you two any direction,” Jerry Genco said. “Maybe we can help figure the paternity. We’ll have a preliminary on the DNA of the fetal tissue in twenty-four hours.”