Judging Time

31

Except for the security guard at the loading dock and

three or four scientists working late in the top-floor labs, the medical examiner's office building was shut down for the night. At 8:06, Rosa Washington emerged from the elevator. Without bothering to hit the light switches, she hurried down the murky hall to her office. She was wearing an immaculate green scrub suit, still starched and fresh, with matching booties over her sneakers. She had no surgical cap on her head or mask dangling around her neck. No footsteps sounded on the scuffed linoleum floor as she hurried along, absently rubbing her palms together.

No one looking at her would have been able to tell that Rosa felt anxious. Her sculpted features were frozen in their customary expression of unflappable serenity. She always had a set look on her face, the same one every day no matter who approached her with what request or question. The expression gave her the appearance of being on a higher plane than mere mortals, as if she could not be touched by earthly trouble. Some people thought she was arrogant and the distance she kept from the horrors of her job, attitude. Others were certain she was a deeply spiritual person, someone who reached beyond the grave to heaven itself with every dissection she made. And still others were convinced she was not very bright.

Rosa herself didn't care what people said about her. There had been so many speculations about so many aspects of her and her life for so many years she was no longer interested what the latest rumor about her entailed. Many years ago when she was just twelve, she had learned from a song—and from the death of the sixth-grade guinea pig (gutted with a kitchen knife while it was spending a school holiday with the family)—to hold her head up high and find a way of explaining the unexplainable. She also learned to keep walking in the direction she wanted to go no matter what happened. With such a strategy, she'd always been able to outdistance prejudice and envy.

Her office door was partly open. She saw the haven of her desk with its neat pile of files, and the desk lamp angled the way she'd left it hours ago, beaming light on her appointment book and her blotter. She rushed inside, ready to collapse in her desk chair, safe and exhausted after a long, demanding day.

"Hi, I'm glad I caught you. I was afraid you'd left."

The calm, soft voice came from behind her. Rosa whirled around, stifling a scream. "Sweet Jesus, you half scared me to death," she sputtered at the Chinese cop, who was sitting in a chair behind the door on the dark side of the room.

"What are you doing over there in the dark?" Rosa forced herself to slow down as she continued on to her desk. There, a quick check proved that her appointment book still had its rubberband holding it closed. But who knew what the cop would have looked through when she was in there ... for how long? Rosa hoisted the briefcase that had been sitting on the floor to the desktop and dropped the appointment book inside. She rubbed her hands together, then sniffed them for chemical smell. Without looking at the cop, she allowed herself to collapse in her chair, willing calm and peace into her troubled soul.

After a moment she let her eyes drift over to the cop. What was April Woo doing here? Rosa looked for an answer in the Asian features and failed; April's face was expressionless, as still and empty as that of a corpse recently deprived of life. Rosa didn't see such complete emptiness in the living very often. It felt eerie to her. It reminded Rosa of her mother, who'd been beaten nearly to death every Saturday night of her life by her husband, Rosa's father, without complaining, until Rosa stopped the attacks when she was twelve.

The images of the bruises on her mother's body, the dead look in her mother's eyes, the sound of her mother weeping while she was raped and the groans when she was kicked, punched, and slammed against the wall had always acted as the inspiration for Rosa's work. It was her mother's blank-faced pain that drove Rosa to look unflinchingly at the most horrible of human damage and decay, day after day, so she could tell the world how and when that damage had occurred. Rosa's mother used to tell Rosa the secret of survival was to whisper to herself, "I am still and free at my center."

Rosa took in the long slender skirt, the silk scarf, and the well-tailored jacket of the Chinese detective and wondered what kind she was. She'd known only two Chinese detectives. One had worked in Harlem and was terrified of the dead at any stage of decomposition. She considered him a wimp. The other had been fired for corruption. She didn't figure April for being scared or corrupt.

"So what are you doing here, Sergeant Woo?" she said, smiling and striving to speak as softly as April had.

April sighed. "It's been a long day. We've got trouble with this Liberty case. I need some help."

"I could use some help, too," Rosa said. "You know poor Malcolm is in the hospital."

"Still?" April adjusted her coat over the back of her chair.

It was clear to Rosa that she'd been there long enough to get comfortable. _.

"Yeah. His doctors can't find out what kind of pneumonia he has. We have better labs here." She snorted with disgust.

"You have a heavy load?"

Rosa glanced down at her hands, rubbed them quickly together. "Nothing I can't handle. How long have you been here?"

"Five minutes. The guard downstairs said you hadn't left yet, but he didn't know where you were. Not operating, by the look and smell of you."

Rosa's eyes caught the butt of April's gun sticking from the holster at her waist. "No, I always change after every procedure. Can't risk contamination, you know." She sniffed her hands again, couldn't seem to help it. They smelled bad.

"Yourself or the customers?"

Rosa smiled. "My patients, you could say. I'm a bit of a nut about cleanliness. Can't place too high a premium on every level of professionalism, you know." She rubbed her hands, wishing she could wash them again.

"So I've heard. That's why I'm here. Someone from your office called Petersen's widow this morning with information about Petersen's tox report. How come?"

Rosa shook her head. Her hair, hanging loose and unencumbered by a surgical cap, brushed her shoulders. "No one from here would ever give out information before the detectives on the case got it."

"Well, Mrs. Petersen said she was informed her husband died of a cocaine overdose. That was news to us."

"He didn't die of an overdose. The report did come in, and Petersen had high levels of cocaine in his blood and urine. It was even in his hair. But I could have told you that during the autopsy. You walked out before I finished. You missed the head, remember?"

"What did you find, a bullet in his brain?"

"Very funny, Woo."

This was the second reference to the mistake in an autopsy report made by the ME's office less than a year ago. The report was on a man who'd been a flier from a seventh-floor window. The ME's report, hers in fact, gave the fall as the cause of death. The police, however, had found bloodstains all over the room from which the man had fallen. They'd requested a second look at the body. Dr. Abraham performed the second autopsy. He found a bullet lodged in the man's skull. It turned out the gunshot wound, not the fall from the window, had killed him. Rosa's face registered no anger. She'd come to terms with that blunder.

"What I found, Sergeant, if you'd bothered to read my report, was a septum so badly damaged by cocaine use that had the man lived, he would have needed surgery fairly soon to prevent his nose from collapsing." Rosa reported this in her haughtiest voice.

"I have not seen your report, Doctor. It hasn't come in to our office yet. Are you saying now that Petersen died of a drug overdose?"

"I think I stated clearly enough in the death report that Petersen's cause of death was a perforated infarction. A massive heart attack to you." Rosa checked her watch. It was late. She wanted to end this and go home.

"Are you certain the perforation couldn't have been caused by something else?" The cop shifted suddenly to new ground with the soft voice of a practiced interrogator.

Air whooshed out of Rosa's mouth as anger finally overtook her and she furiously rejected the possibility. "Not a chance. Why do you suggest such a thing?"

"I don't know, maybe it was something Petersen's widow said that got me thinking, and this whole question of the cocaine. Could somebody have given him bad shit?"

"Bad shit? As far as I'm concerned, it's all bad shit. You have any idea how badly damaged that guy was? It was amazing he could still walk around." Rosa shook her head.

"The other thing is Petersen's widow stands to inherit something like a hundred million dollars on her husband's timely death. She had a strong motive, and if he was such a hopeless addict, maybe she helped him along."

Rosa laughed. "That ditz I saw on TV?"

"Money can be a pretty powerful motivator, don't you think?"

Rosa finally sank into her chair. "God, this is heavy. 1 don't know, maybe for some people. We each have our weakness. For Petersen it was the nose candy. He died because of it. For some people it's love of money, for others it's just love. What is it for you, Woo?"

April shook her head. "I wouldn't kill for anything, except to save a life."

"I didn't mean that. 1 meant what's your weakness?"

"Face," April replied without hesitation.

Rosa smiled. "Me, too. 1 don't like being dissed by anybody. So you now think you're working a homicide angle here. That would be a pretty big diss to me, you know. That would hurt pretty bad. 1 don't know how I'd handle that."

"It's just a thought," April murmured. "So, you don't think it's a possibility?"

"Aren't we friends? Don't you realize what it would do to me?"

"This isn't personal," April insisted. "1 have only the highest admiration for you. I'm not trying to do anything to you. 1 just want to find out why Merrill Liberty was killed."

"It seems clear enough to me and everyone else associated with the case that her husband murdered her."

"We haven't come up with a why. Without a why we don't have a strong case to prosecute."

"That's not my problem. That's your problem. The guy's taken off. They were friends; maybe he's a doper, too."

The cop shook her head.

"All 1 can say is Petersen was loaded with cocaine. The physical effort of running for a taxi, or even lifting his hand for one, would have been enough to overtax his heart. Seeing his lover assaulted could easily have caused the massive MI." Rosa tied it up neatly. What else could the cop want?

The cop sat in the dark, watching her like a cat. She shook her head some more. "It doesn't play. Ducci says the bloodstains indicate that Petersen died first."

"So what does all this have to do with me?" Rosa was illuminated by her desk lamp. Suddenly she felt at a disadvantage and moved the beam away from her face. She knew exactly what it had to do with her. The corrupt cop wanted to twist the facts. It happened all the time. But she wasn't going to let anybody cast doubt on her work.

"If Petersen died first, he might have been the target, and Merrill Liberty might have been an afterthought."

"He died of a heart attack. You saw his face. Blue," Rosa insisted.

"Any cyanide in his blood? That also would make him blue."

"Petersen died of natural causes, I'm sure of it."

"I know it seems that way, but maybe someone wanted it to look as if he died of natural causes."

"But how? How would it be done? This line of questioning is very upsetting to me. You're implying 1 could have made a mistake. It's not possible."

"You've made mistakes before," the cop said quietly. "Last time 1 believe it was kept quiet, and your ass was saved."

"This man died of natural causes, I'll stand by my word. I'll stake my career on it," Rosa hissed. "I'll stake your career' on it."

"Well, 1 hope neither of us has to." April Woo rose from the chair and picked up her coat. "Anyway, the widow will be happy you feel so strongly about it."

Blood rushed to Rosa's face at being questioned so blatantly, then suddenly dismissed. She was further insulted by the reference to Petersen's widow. What did she care about the widow? Rosa was taller than the cop by several inches. The Chinese woman was thin, didn't look as if she had much muscle. Rosa watched the small woman drape her coat over her shoulders. It was the office that occasionally made mistakes. She, Rosa, didn't make mistakes. Why should she have to justify herself to a dumb cop? Rosa wanted to say something about how vulnerable the medical examiner's office was with Dr. Abraham in the hospital, how dangerous it would be for the prosecutors, for the police, for everyone involved if doubts were raised about the reliability of an important autopsy report. There would be no case, no trial. The perpetrator of Merrill Liberty's homicide—the black bastard who was her husband—would get off. Abraham would lose his trust in her. It would be a disaster. But she didn't dare say anything more.

"Well, thanks for clearing this all up for me. I'll sleep a lot better tonight." April Woo gave the deputy medical examiner the fakest smile Rosa Washington had ever seen, and then the sergeant left the dark corner where she'd waited in ambush and swept out of the office with a wave of her hand. Rosa got up to wash April off her hands.