High Chicago

CHAPTER 17

The Office of the Chief Coroner was located behind police headquarters on Grenville Street, in the same building that housed the Centre of Forensic Sciences. The phone was ringing at reception just as I arrived. The receptionist gave me the one finger/one minute sign, said "Uh-huh" a few times and jotted a few notes down on a pink telephone slip. She said, "All right then. You have a nice day too," hung up and smiled at me. I showed her my ID and told her Detective Sergeant Hollinger might have called on my behalf.

"Well, isn't your timing perfect," she said. "That was her calling. And a Marilyn Cantor called as well. Have a seat and I'll check which coroner handled the post-mortem exam."

I sat in a grey padded chair, under a framed motto that said, "We speak for the dead to protect the living." I was afraid to even look at the magazines on the table. What would be on display: Canadian Autopsy? Bone Saw Monthly? Better Hose and Table?

About ten minutes passed before the door opened and a tall, white-haired man in his sixties peered down at me. He had a smooth, kindly looking face and a firm handshake. "I'm Brian Morrison. I understand you have a question about one of our cases."

"A young woman named Maya Cantor."

"Normally, we require an access to information request to disclose the results of a post-mortem exam," he said. "But I spoke to the mother of the girl just now. And I understand a homicide detective called as well."

"Will that suffice?"

"I asked Mrs. Cantor to fax a signed request. Meantime, come on back and we'll see what we can do."

He led me through a quiet, carpeted hallway to an office that was too small and too hot for comfort. The bookshelves were packed so tightly with binders and books that he probably couldn't have squeezed one more sheet of paper into them. Piles of papers were stacked knee-high around the perimeter of the room. A human skeleton hung from a planter's hook in the ceiling, twisting ever so slowly in the current of air coming from the HVAC system.

Dr. Morrison opened a file cabinet and thumbed through files beginning with the letter C. "One day," he said, "this will all be computerized. Until then, the floors shall groan under the weight of all this paper. Ah, here we are. Cantor, Maya Arielle. Lovely name. Lovely young woman, as I recall. Or was before the fall. So unfortunate. So young to have taken her own life. You have to wonder what goes through their minds these days. One would think they'd find the world as exciting a place as we did in our twenties."

Personally, my world had been too exciting at that age. I was twenty-three, just a year older than Maya, when Dalia was killed by a Hezbollah rocket. Twenty-three when I enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces in a misguided search for revenge.

"What was your question, Mr. Geller?"

"Was there anything to suggest a finding other than suicide?"

He frowned. "Well, we discounted accidental death from the start. Her tox results showed the presence of alcohol, but she was well below the legal limit of impairment. And given the height of the balcony wall, it didn't seem possible that she could have fallen over. So the question then became suicide or homicide."

"How do you make that determination?"

"We look at several things. The injury pattern, of course. Placement of the body in relation to the takeoff point. Presence of a note or other communications at the scene."

"You examined her apartment?"

"The Coroner's Act gives us that authority. There was no note found in this case. No signs that violence or any sort of struggle took place."

"What about her injuries?"

"You have to understand, when a body falls from that height, the trauma of the impact is so severe, so widespread, that it's almost impossible to determine whether there were ante-mortem injuries. But there has been some notable research in the field of kinetic motion analysis of late."

"In what?"

"In layman's terms, how variables such as height and velocity at takeoff determine where a body ought to land in relation to a building, bridge or what have you. If you give me a moment or two to call it up, we can review things from that point of view."

He tapped away at his keyboard for a few minutes then said, "Ah."

"Ah?"

He swivelled his monitor toward me. The screen showed a number of parabolas and bell-shaped curves. I looked hard at them-I really did-but they meant nothing to me. That's what I get for sleeping through high school math, when the only bell-shaped curves that interested me were the ones under Sandy Braverman's sweater.

"Rather ingenious, this study," Dr. Morrison said. "They employed trained gymnasts, divers and athletes to establish the values we use to determine whether a victim simply stepped off into thin air, jumped from a standing position, took a running jump or executed a swan dive, as it were."

"And?"

"In Ms. Cantor's case, given the distance from the building and the position of her body, we know she didn't step off and she didn't jump feet first."

"She dove."

"Yes. Not with a running jump, of course. The waist-high balcony would have precluded that. But she did land a considerable distance from the building."

"So she could have been thrown off?"

"No one could say that with any certainty. A lot of this research-and perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier-was done with divers landing in water. They tended to hit the surface head first or feet first. With actual jumpers, another part of the body may hit the ground first, which influences the distance from the building itself. In Ms. Cantor's case, the distance wasn't conclusive either way."

"Hypothetically, then."

"You have to understand, Mr. Geller, that this office has been through a very difficult time since the revelations of the Pappas Commission. We're rather loath to speculate on anything that can't be proved."

Just a few months ago, Justice James Pappas had been asked to investigate how one rogue pathologist with an agenda of his own had been responsible for dozens of people being accused of killing children in their care, when in fact the deaths had been of natural causes. Some had lost custody of their children while under investigation; some had been convicted of homicide and served hard time before their cases were reopened.

"Let me rephrase it then," I said. "Is it possible, given the position of her body and the distance from the building, that she could have been thrown or pushed off her balcony?"

"I think I can grant you that much."