Cure

15

March 25, 2010

Thursday, 6:22 p.m.

Sitting in the back of what looked to her like a brand-new yellow cab, Laurie found herself silently counting off the street numbers as she and Jack sped northward on Central Park West. Passing the Museum of Natural History and then 86th Street, her excitement took another quantum leap. She could feel her pulse quickening; she was that excited. Though Jack sat next to her, carrying on about how he and Lou had confirmed the findings of the autopsy on their gunshot victim, she couldn’t concentrate on what he was saying; she was too excited about seeing JJ. She let Jack drone on, since he did not seem to mind that she’d stopped giving him any feedback whatsoever about a mile or so earlier.

“What was the number again on One hundred and sixth?” the driver inquired.

Laurie blurted out the number, interrupting Jack in midsentence.

“Are you listening to me?” Jack asked as Laurie strained forward to look through the plastic divider and the front windshield as their street rapidly approached. It wasn’t until the cabbie turned left that she settled back.

“Did you hear me?” Jack questioned.

“No,” Laurie admitted. To the right was the small playground that Jack had had renovated ten years earlier, adding outdoor lights to the basketball court, where there was currently a game in progress. He’d also restored the children’s section, adding slides, swings, and a large sandbox.

“I asked you if you’d been listening to me.”

“Should I lie or tell the truth?”

“Lie so I don’t get my feelings hurt.”

“Do you mind paying?” Laurie said as the taxi cruised to the curb in front of their renovated brownstone. Laurie had the door open before the vehicle was totally stopped. With bag in hand, she dashed up the stoop and inside. Without even removing her coat, she rushed up the stairs to the second-floor kitchen.

Leticia had heard the front door open, and picking up JJ, she met Laurie as Laurie topped the stairs. Leticia was an attractive, athletic African-American woman in her mid-twenties with a soft cloud of dark hair. She was rarely without a trace of a wry smile and refused, as a matter of principle, not to suffer fools. As a cousin of Warren Wilson, Jack’s basketball buddy, she shared the family trait of a well-sculpted body, which was shown off to great effect with tight jeans and form-fitting tops. Unsure about pursuing her graduate studies after recently completing college, Warren had suggested she consider working as a nanny for Jack and Laurie.

“Hey, little guy,” Laurie crooned as she reached out to take the infant. But as eager as she was, she caught the child unaware, and JJ responded by turning back to Leticia and grabbing on fiercely. He cried as Laurie and Leticia peeled his little fingers away from Leticia’s neck.

Almost immediately JJ recognized his mother and quieted, but the damage had been done. Laurie felt rejected, at least for a few minutes until rationality prevailed. At that point, Laurie’s response was more embarrassment than hurt feelings.

By the time Jack came up the stairs, the women were laughing about the incident. He listened while Leticia apologized for being put off by Laurie’s multiple phone calls. “Every time you called it was somehow at the worst possible moment,” she explained, “like when I had him in the bath. I had to rush to get him out, which he clearly did not want to do and resisted, then I had to get him dried and wrapped in a towel before getting to the phone.”

“I’ll be better tomorrow, I promise,” Laurie said. “Clearly the separation has been worse for me than for him.”

“I think that has been the case, I’m afraid,” Leticia agreed. “He’s been a true delight all day. He loved being in the park.”

Jack tried to take JJ from Laurie, and JJ clutched Laurie this time. Both women found themselves laughing as Jack gave up, confused at the laughter. Jack raised his hands in surrender and said to the child, “Okay, you can have your mommy to yourself for now, but my turn’s coming later.” He said good-bye to Leticia, adding that he was heading out to play basketball with her cousin. With a squeeze of Laurie’s shoulder, he climbed the stairs to get into his basketball gear.

“They play most every night,” Laurie explained.

After talking about JJ’s day a little more and agreeing on the time for Leticia to arrive in the morning, Leticia took her leave. “He’s a doll,” she said just before giving JJ a wave and departing.

With Jack outside, Laurie played with JJ for almost an hour before putting him in his bouncy chair while she put together a light supper for Jack and herself. With the time constraint it was just going to be a salad with cheese and bread. Then she put JJ down in his crib, sitting in the rocking chair next to him. She was happy he went to sleep more easily than usual, reinforcing what she now knew: The day had been easier for him than it had for her.

After their repast, Jack and Laurie retired to their combined study. Jack wanted to skim one of their general forensic texts to brush up on gunshot wounds, while Laurie booted up her computer and put in one of the subway security tapes. She had no idea what to expect. Next to the computer she put the John Doe’s three photographs.

“I still don’t think you should waste your time on that,” Jack said.

“Of course you don’t,” Laurie responded, thinking of the threatening note for the first time since she’d stuck it into the center drawer of her desk. “Why? Do you think it’s too dangerous?” She turned to face Jack.

“‘Dangerous’?” Jack questioned with confusion. “Why dangerous? My point is that nothing you can find in there would change how you finish the case. You’re still going to look carefully at the brain, even if you don’t confirm whether there was a seizure or not.”

“Oh, really?” Laurie questioned superciliously, clicking on the DVD drive.

“Suit yourself,” Jack said, turning back to his own business. If she wanted to waste her time, so be it, he thought.

The first screen Laurie encountered was a menu with the recording cameras arranged in numerical order, one through nine. Clicking on number one, the action came on immediately. The quality of the video wasn’t great; the wide angle created definite distortion, and the image was as grainy as she feared. On top of that, it ran at double speed. When she slowed it down, it was better but still hardly optimum. “I’m going into the family room,” Laurie said. “I’m going to try the HDTV and see it if helps.”

“Good luck,” Jack said distractedly.

In the family room, Laurie inserted the disk into the DVD player. With the TV, she was pleased that the quality seemed better. With the photos on the couch next to her, she lifted her feet onto the coffee table and watched for twenty minutes. It was as boring as expected, people silently boarding the train or getting off. Then she caught something interesting. She watched as a teen dressed in oversized clothing, his pants’ crotch between his knees, purposefully bump into a middle-aged man reading a newspaper. At the same time the man’s wallet came out of his pocket with such speed Laurie had to stop the tape, back it up, and run it forward frame by frame.

“My goodness,” Laurie said, and called Jack to watch the sequence. He was as impressed as she had been.

“What should I do?” Laurie asked.

“I don’t want to sound like a cynic, but even if you report it, I don’t think anything will come of it. The NYPD is swamped with much more serious issues.”

Laurie noted the time indicated on the screen and wrote it and the camera number on the back of one of her case’s photos. She thought she’d give it to Murphy in the morning and let him decide.

Finishing up on camera number one, Laurie decided to skip to camera number four, hoping that the numbering of the cameras was sequential on the platform, meaning number four would be near the platform’s center, where Robert Delacroix thought he’d been. Camera number one had shown the northern tunnel entrance.

Only a few minutes into camera number four, Jack appeared at the door to the family room and got her attention. “I’m going to read in bed.”

“Okay, dear,” Laurie said, stopping her tape. She knew full well that Jack’s idea of reading in bed was to fall asleep within a page or two. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Jack smiled at her, knowing she was right. In response, he came to the couch, bent over, and gave her a kiss on the lips. “Don’t stay up to all hours watching this stuff,” he said. “I’ll never get you out of bed in the morning.”

“I’ll just watch a little more,” Laurie promised, with good intentions.

When she finished camera four she clicked on camera five. She watched for several minutes until she realized with a start that she’d been asleep. The silent stream of people in and out of the trains was mesmerizing. Since she had no idea when she’d fallen asleep, she reversed the video back to the beginning, recognizing that if she didn’t she might risk missing what she hoped to find.

Struggling to stay awake at least until the end of camera five, she suddenly did a double take. Not quite in the middle of the screen was the man she was looking for. At least she thought so. Quickly she pressed pause on the remote to freeze the scene. At that moment the man was looking back over his shoulder and up the stairs that he’d apparently just descended, although she’d not recognized him until he’d gotten close to the edge of the platform. Picking up the photos of the corpse, she compared them. She was reasonably confident she was correct and the man in the photos and on the screen was the same individual. Though she couldn’t be a hundred percent certain because of the camera angle, the time stamp worked: It was several minutes before the 911 call. Laurie carefully reversed the image and watched the man retreat up the stairs backward. Even watching it frame by frame, she sensed the man was running as he bumped into other people, who were obviously moving more slowly than he was. Checking the other side of the image, she could see that the track was still clear; the train had not yet arrived.

Laurie continued reversing the video frame by frame until the man disappeared from view. The only thing she’d learned was that the man was carrying a canvas bag of some sort. Sitting back in her seat, she allowed the video to run forward at normal speed. The man was indeed running. “He definitely doesn’t want to miss the train,” Laurie said to herself out loud as she watched the man collide into people. At normal speed the collisions appeared more jarring than when viewed frame by frame.

The man pressed into the crowds on the platform, clearly irritating people as he did so. One man even grabbed the Asian man’s arm, but he yanked it from the stranger’s grip and pressed on, continually glancing over his shoulder as if being chased.

“He is being chased!” Laurie blurted, leaning forward again. Two more Asian men had come down the stairs, and like the first one, they forced their way into the crowd with one of them holding an umbrella, the other empty-handed. As Laurie watched, the two pursuing men reached the other man just as the subway charged into the station. At that point, Laurie could just barely see the men of interest, as they were all shorter than the other commuters pressed up against them. For the next few moments there was little movement as the people exiting the train confronted those entering. Finally movement returned to the crowd, and when it did, Laurie could see that the man with the bag was seizing, or at least it looked like he was seizing while still standing upright, his head rapidly and rhythmically fully extending, then relaxing. As people began boarding the train and the crowd slowly thinned, Laurie watched the two men lay the stricken man down on the platform. By this time there was no convulsive activity, and the bag the first was carrying was now in the possession of one of the others. Laurie also recognized that the two men could easily have taken the man’s wallet while they had been holding him upright, to explain why he did not have one when he arrived at the ER.

“My word,” Laurie said out loud. “It was a robbery!” She continued to watch as people continued to pass around and over the supine body. She was amazed by the demonstration of how dispassionate New Yorkers could be. The only positive reaction was a man at the door to the train, who was placing his cell phone to his ear, making Laurie wonder if it was Robert Delacroix. She shifted her attention to the two Asian men as they calmly walked out of sight.

Laurie stopped the video. Running into the master bedroom, she wanted to get Jack. She wanted him to see the video, even though she knew what he was going to say: “Okay, it was an apparent robbery, but maybe it wasn’t. Maybe the bag belongs to one of the two who took it. The key thing is that the autopsy was negative.”

Coming into the bedroom, Laurie pulled up short. As usual, when Jack said he was going to read in bed, he was already fast asleep. The heavy textbook he’d brought into the room was open and lying across his chest. Carefully, Laurie lifted it off and placed it on the side table. Then she turned off his bedside light. It was a ritual that occurred almost every night. Unlike Laurie, Jack had no difficulty whatsoever falling asleep or getting up in the morning, two activities that had always been difficult for her.

Back in the family room, Laurie took the disk from the DVD player and retreated into the study. There she put it back into the computer, went to camera five, and scanned through the file until she found the best frame of the second two men, then printed out a copy. Looking at the two thieves, she totally changed her mind about the case. Initially she’d been disappointed that her first case was an unidentified natural death, and totally pathology free to boot — hardly a case to challenge her competency. Now her perseverance was proving it to be much more interesting than anyone expected, especially herself.

Laurie began to feel the old excitement she used to feel when figuring out complicated and different cases, and she actually couldn’t wait to get into the office in the morning and get the lab results and histology slides. The truth of the matter was that her intuition, which she’d worried might have abandoned her during her leave, was back and strongly suggesting that there were surprises ahead. Her plan was not to reveal what she’d learned from the security tapes until she figured out what had killed the man. Laurie knew that by law, perpetrators of crimes have to assume responsibility of the health of the people they victimize: If a person has a heart attack and dies while running from a thief, it is considered a homicide, not a natural death, and the thief will be tried and punished accordingly. Laurie knew she was now dealing with a definite homicide, changing the case from boring to engaging, at least that’s what she thought as she packed away the photos and the disk in her bag she carried back and forth from work.

The next job was to try to fall asleep — a trick for her, given the new development she’d discovered with the security tapes. On top of that was the realistic concern about JJ possibly waking up. Sometimes Laurie wished she did not need sleep, believing she’d be content to read during the night. But every morning, no matter what, she felt exhausted during the first hour or so and recognized what the reality was.

After checking on JJ, who was fast asleep, Laurie got herself ready for bed. When she at last climbed between the sheets and turned out the light, she reflected on the day. In hindsight it had not been entirely smooth. In fact, it had been rather bumpy. She’d missed JJ, as all her calls home reflected, and she’d been hurt when he’d seemingly rejected her, suggesting a definite vulnerability. On the work side, her case initially had not totally reassured her of her sense of competency, but that seemed to be changing with her evening’s discoveries. When all was said and done, she recognized she very much liked her job and felt reasonably sure she could be both a medical examiner and a mother, and do equal justice to both.