Killer Look

EIGHT

“Uncle Hal is demanding to see my boss,” Jeremy Mayers said, returning after stepping out to tell the family members that the decision about releasing Wolf Savage’s body would be delayed for two days. “So she wants to talk to you first.”

Emma Parker followed Jeremy into the conference room. She greeted Mike and me and apologized for the stained lab coat she was wearing, which carried the pungent odor of formalin into our windowless space from the autopsy theater she had apparently just left.

“Have you missed me that much, Chapman?” she said. “Or do you really think we have a second case of murder by staged suicide?”

“Both true, Dr. P,” Mike said. “That’s what I’m thinking right now. Only, the first job was done by total amateurs. I think we’re up against a real pro here.”

She was a handsome woman, in her mid-fifties, who looked more like a corporate executive than a pathologist spending her days teasing the truth out of the bodies of the dead.

“Sounds like there’s a lot more at stake in this instance,” she said.

“Big-time.”

“Set it up for me,” Emma said. Then she turned her attention to me. “Aren’t you supposed to be on leave?”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

“This is way more interesting than how I’ve been passing my time, Emma. Don’t shoot me down, please?”

She smiled at me and pointed at Mike to begin.

“I’m nowhere on this, Doc,” he said. “I got called in late, and to be honest with you, I’ve got some catching up to do.”

“You know an autopsy isn’t going to tell you very much in this kind of death.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Mike said. “But you let this body go and we’ve got no chance to get any of the tox screening that might prove valuable down the line.”

“What do you two mean?” I asked.

“A lot of the right-to-die organizations have been promoting this method of euthanasia in their writings in books and all over the Internet,” Emma said. “It’s not just the terminally ill who have been committing suicide this particular way. We’ve seen a significant number of cases in this office of individuals with psychiatric disorders-you know, people with auditory hallucinations and histories of repeated suicide attempts-as well as some who were substance abusers, who choose this manner of death.”

“When you say ‘this way,’ Emma-?”

“So the hardline suicides are just what you’d expect them to be, Alex. Gunshot wounds, which occasionally miss the mark, as you know. Hangings-painful and run the risk of being sloppy and slow. And overdoses. Also not always a successful method,” Emma said. “When the suicide-interest groups first got into this, their recommendations often included the use of a plastic bag over the head. Sometimes sleeping pills first, but then a bag.”

“An ‘exit bag,’” I said, repeating Mike’s words.

“Exactly.”

“What kind of bag?”

“Thanksgiving’s only a few weeks away,” Mike said. “You know those turkey-sized oven bags?”

“Tell me you’re just making a bad joke,” I said.

“He’s not, Alex,” the doctor kicked in.

“Or a thirty-gallon trash bag,” Mike said.

“The problem is,” Emma said, uncrossing her arms and sitting down at the table, “is that the bigger the bag, the longer it takes for the carbon dioxide to build up and the oxygen to run out. Panic sets in, and if the guy-or girl-hasn’t fallen asleep with pills, he’s usually ripping at the bag to breathe.”

“Because the will to live is so great,” I said.

“Or the dying is so uncomfortable. That’s why the inert-gas method became popular, especially in countries where suicide is legal.”

“I don’t get the difference,” I said. “I don’t know what the gas does. In fact, I don’t even know what an inert gas is.”

“Too much English lit and not enough science,” Mike said.

“Inert gases are things like nitrogen, argon, methane,” Emma said, “and helium. They don’t have any toxic effect-they’re also free of odor and taste-but what they do is dilute the body’s oxygen when they’re breathed in, especially with the head confined in a bag, usually closed with a Velcro kind of tape.”

“There’s no traumatic feeling of suffocation, Coop. And it’s wicked fast. The oxygen level in the blood drops dangerously low in a few seconds. Am I right, Doc?”

“Dead on. It only takes a few breaths of the gas, and I say your subject-call him your victim-would be gone in less than one minute.”

“But how would you know that?” I asked. “Somebody actually watches?”

“Yes. Yes, they’ve been observed,” Emma said. “There have been studies out of places like Switzerland, where assisted suicides are legal if they’re not done for what the law there calls ‘selfish motives.’”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “like if one of your relatives had a fortune and was planning to cut you out of his will, then you wouldn’t be allowed to kill him.”

“In two of the reported cases of observed deaths using helium and a plastic bag over the head,” Emma said, “the time from inhalation of the gas to loss of consciousness was ten to twelve seconds. And no attempts at self-rescue, either. Not the half hour of thrashing around in a trash bag.”

“Both speedy and reliable,” I said.

“So much so that last year the governor of Oklahoma signed a bill allowing nitrogen asphyxiation-which works the same way as helium inhalation-as an alternative execution method in capital cases.”

Mike did a thumbs-up. “Gotta love me a trendy way to knock out the bad guys. Kill them with kindness.”

“That’s part of the reason Mike’s so on top of this. Helium inhalation suicides have shown a striking increase in the last few years,” Emma said. “It’s a brilliant-almost foolproof-way to conceal a homicide.”

I nodded in Mike’s direction.

“There’s an absence of specific findings at autopsy, though,” she said. “That’s why Mike has to do the heavy lifting here.”

“How so?” I asked.

“There are no visible signs on Wolf Savage’s body that anything violent happened or any kind of struggle occurred,” Emma said. “I’ve done an external, head to toe, and there aren’t even the self-scratches of someone trying to get the bag off his head and neck. That’s completely consistent with this method of suicide, so it wouldn’t signal anything to me.”

“But normally you’d do an autopsy, wouldn’t you?”

“Required by law, Madame Prosecutor.”

“Would one be useful?”

“Could be,” Emma said in a noncommittal manner. “Oxycontin on the bedside table.”

“There!” I said. “Isn’t there a doctor’s name on the prescription?”

“You’re behind the times, Coop,” Mike said. “The good, old Oxy isn’t made in the States anymore. That bottle in the room was mail order from Canada. No way to trace it back.”

“What’s the difference between Canadian Oxy and ours?”

“The reason that there was such an epidemic of abuse when Oxy was first introduced is that its active ingredient-oxycodone-was such a powerful painkiller that it was made for slow-acting release, to keep a patient sedated overnight,” Emma said. “But it was such a fine powder that addicts just crushed it and got all the effects, along with a swift high, in just minutes.”

“So the FDA changed the composition of the drug,” Mike said. “Now, it simply turns to a gummy mush if you try to crush it up to avoid the slow time-release. That’s why the addicts have dropped Oxy in favor of a return to heroin. The other case the doc and I had was traditional horse as the sedating drug. The vic was an addict, so it was easy to cover up the homicide after he got himself high. Then they bagged him.”

“But you’ll find Oxy in the tox study,” I said. “If Wolf ingested that first.”

“We will,” Emma said.

“And disease. The autopsy will tell you what he thought was going to kill him, if someone didn’t help him find his own way to the grave.”

“Look, Alex. If Savage had an internist who called me tonight and told me that there was a diagnosis given to the man a month ago, or a week ago, that he was facing down a terminal cancer or heart disease that’s on the verge of killing him-and if the same physician had the scans and images to support the diagnosis-I might bend to the request of relatives on a religious basis to just let the body go.”

“So how do you help Emma resolve this, Mike?” I asked.

“She doesn’t have any info from a doctor yet about Wolf’s health, for one thing,” Mike said. “I’m not the only one looking for a guy to have a reason to kill himself. And I get to go back to the Silver Needle. Everything’s still in place, except for the body. I get to study the scene.”

“How did you break the other case you two had that was like this?”

“One witness too many, Coop. The dead guy’s girlfriend betrayed him. The kid was a student at NYU, but a full-on heroin addict. He was into the dealer for thousands of dollars, and sleeping with the dealer’s girl. She snitched on him and set him up.”

“Ugly.”

“She thought she could handle watching him die after she got him high for the last time, but she was the weakest link,” Mike said. “We broke her on the second interview.”

“That was luck, having a witness to the murder.”

“This time, I know the helium got into Wolf’s hotel room concealed in the bottom of a hand truck that came right out of 520 Seventh Avenue, where his main office is.”

“You mean those carts that have clothes hanging on them-the ones that are all over the streets and sidewalks throughout the Garment District?”

“Yeah. There were dresses hanging from the rack, so it looked like every other cart. The canisters were in the well on the bottom. That was one of the first things the cops checked out yesterday. But nobody bothered to track the helium-or the hand truck-back to its source within the office building.”

“Someone must have seen who delivered the cart,” I said.

“All I got, Coop, is that it was two young men. One tall, one medium height. Nothing remarkable about them,” Mike said.

“Just so we’re clear,” Emma Parker said, pushing back from the table. “I’ll stay in touch with you, Mike. The minute the family comes up with medical information, I’ll give you a call.”

“I’ll let you know if I get lucky at the hotel,” Mike said. “And tomorrow I’ll knock on doors at the Savage offices.”

“Forty-eight hours, right? Is that a deal?”

“Deal,” Mike said.

“Stay close to him this time, Alex,” Emma said, winking at me as she headed for the door. “We don’t need you disappearing again.”

“I think she’s had her outing for the day, Doc. Might be time to put her back in her cage,” Mike said, tousling my hair as he walked behind me.

I didn’t like that image. I flashed back to the dark, dank space in which I’d been held. But I was learning to keep my reactions-or as Mike would call them, overreactions-to myself.

“She knows more about the fashion world than you do, Mike. Alex might come in handy while you try to sort this out,” Emma said. “She asks good questions.”

“Yeah, like I’m supposed to be the answer man?”

“Seems to be working for you just fine, Detective Chapman.”

“Here’s a question for you, Emma,” I said. “Has it ever happened, in your experience, that somebody walks in here to actually try to prevent you from doing an autopsy of the deceased, and then turns out to be the murderer? I mean, it just seems so over-the-top obvious.”

“Actually, Alex, it’s been done. Maybe not the smartest tack to take, but perhaps these two relatives didn’t know Wolf’s daughter-what’s her name? Lily?-was back in the picture,” Emma said. “Maybe they didn’t think they would meet with any resistance here.”

“Slow down, you two,” Mike said. “You don’t even know who’s driving this bus. Is it Uncle Hal alone? Or is it Reed? Or are they just stooges doing what someone else has suggested? I’m not saying either one of them is the killer. It’s just that once you let the body go, we’ve lost any chance of getting what we get on the autopsy table.”

“Nobody’s even heard what’s in Wolf Savage’s will yet, have they?” Jeremy asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Mike said. “That should tell us something.”

“How do you know about that?” I asked.

“That’s what the lieutenant from Manhattan South told Peterson.”

“To your point, Alex, it’s not only against Jewish law to perform autopsies,” Emma said. “It’s forbidden in Islam, too. And Christian Scientists prefer they aren’t done. But it always gives me pause when people come in to oppose the procedure and are looking to fly the body out of the country the next day.”

“We’ve had this scenario scores of times,” Jeremy said. “I’ve got to say the objections are usually legit, but we’ve had our share of bodies spirited out of here, only to have exhumations ordered by a court later on. Pretty hard to enforce when they’re overseas.”

I thought of a case that Mike and I had worked together, which involved the exhumation of a teenage girl for an autopsy in a room right down the hall, years after her death. Nothing that I ever wanted to see again.

I put my elbows on the table and pressed my fingers against my forehead, rubbing it to ease the headache that was coming on. “I wish I had never taken Lily’s call,” I said. “Maybe she’s the bad guy in all this. Maybe she’s just using me as the way to get back at her father. Maybe she’s-”

“Let’s not rush to judgment, kid. These days you’re good at seeing ghosts where there aren’t any.”