Likely To Die

2

SORRY, MA’AM, THERE’S NO PARKING IN front of the hospital.“

The uniformed cop was waving me away from the curb as I pulled in shortly before 7A.M., so I rolled down the window of my brand-new Grand Cherokee to explain my purpose and knock ten minutes off my arrival time by avoiding the multistory underground parking lot which was two blocks farther south.

Before I could speak, a gruff voice barked out at the young recruit and my head snapped around to see Chief McGraw slamming the door of his unmarked car. “Let her be, officer. Unless you want to find yourself walking a beat on Staten Island. Pull it in behind my driver, Alex, and stick your plate in the windshield. I assume we’re headed for the same place.”

Dammit. Danny McGraw was no happier to see me heading for a murder scene than I was to see him. Once police brass were on the location, they liked to tighten their control of the circumstances and not yield to direction from prosecutors. He’d probably berate Chapman for getting to me so early, preferring that we not learn about cases like this one until he had a complete opportunity to brief the Commissioner. I fished my laminated NYPD vehicle identification placard out of my tote and wedged it above the steering wheel facing out, announcing my presence as official police business. The numbered tags were harder to get than winning lottery tickets, and most of my fellow bureau chiefs considered them the best perk of our job.

I stepped out of the Jeep into a puddle of filthy slush and hustled to catch up with McGraw so that I could follow him through security and up to meet the detectives. The square badgers-cop slang for unarmed guards who stood watch at hospitals and department stores, movie theaters, and ball games-looked more alert than usual this morning, and were themselves flanked by real police at each information booth and elevator bank. Everyone we passed recognized the Chief of Detectives and greeted him formally as we strode quickly down the enormous central corridor of the medical center, through four sets of swinging double doors, until we were led by a detective I had never met before into the hallway marked Minuit Medical College.

McGraw was moving at twice his usual speed, which I guessed-from his repeated glances at the two-and-a-half-inch heels I was wearing-was an effort to leave me behind in his wake, so he’d have a few minutes alone with his lead detectives before I got my nose into things. But his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit was no match for the aerobics of my regular ballet lessons, and the Chief was so short of breath when we reached the med school elevators that I was tempted to suggest he stop off at cardiology on our way up to the neurosurgery department. Like a lot of his colleagues, McGraw didn’t remember that Ginger Rogers did all the same things Fred Astaire did in those great old movies-except that she did them going backwardand wearing heels the height of mine.

When the doors opened, the three of us got on and I pressed six. I tried to chat up the young detective and give his boss a chance to recover, but he was stone-faced and uninterested in offering any information while McGraw was in earshot. It was a relief to reach the floor and see the familiar faces of the Homicide Squad’s B team, one of the four units into which its workers were divided, gathered in the lounge. Shirt sleeves rolled up, fresh steno pads with notes scribbled on them in every hand, coffee cups scattered on each table surface, and bodies storing adrenaline to pump them through the days and nights that would inevitably follow-barring some lucky break in the case that might solve it sooner.

My arrival prompted a range of reactions from the guys. A few friendly salutations by name from those who were pals of mine or had worked other cases with me, a couple of grunts accompanied by “Hello, Counselor,” from those who were indifferent to my participation, and two who ignored me altogether.

McGraw’s robot whispered something into his ear and the pair continued on past the lounge to a door halfway down the hall, after the Chief signaled me to wait for him out here. George Zotos, a detective whose work I had respected for years, chuckled as he walked over to talk with me. “Chapman’s gonna have trouble sitting down when McGraw gets through with him. Last thing he wants here at this hour is a D.A.-and a dame, no less. The Commissioner’s been at a conference in Puerto Rico and is flying back ‘cause of this. Chief’s got to meet him at Kennedy at noon with every fact in hand, and preferably with a killer ID’d. Sit down, have some coffee, and I’ll go get Mike for you. He’ll bring you up to speed.”

He offered me his own brew, light with three sugars. I screwed up my nose at the sweet smell and asked if there were any containers of black around. George pointed to the cardboard box with half a dozen unopened cups in it and I found one with a B penciled on the lid, which was lukewarm but strong enough to get me started.

By the time McGraw let Chapman out of the room to find me, I had slugged down two of the cups, thumbed through the morning tabloids that had been left on a couch in the corner, and rehashed the basketball game with several of the men. I learned that the room the Chief had been taken to was the office of the deceased, where she had been slaughtered and left for dead, although she had not been found until many hours later. There were no obvious suspects and no easy leads, no trail of bloody footsteps heading to the laboratory of a mad scientist with a homicidal streak. This team was settling in for the long, tedious professional job that each of them loved, with assists to follow from the forensic crews in the medical examiner’s office and the criminalists who would pore over every fiber and substance placed in their steady hands.

“Whew, Blondie,” we could all hear Chapman exclaim as he started back up the hallway to the lounge, “the sight of you first thing in the morning turned that man into a beast. There’s no accounting for taste, huh?”

Chapman was in his element. While I would spend parts of every day wallowing in the emotional aspects of this woman’s loss and wondering who would miss and mourn for her, Mike was ready for the chase. He liked working the murders because he didn’t have a breathing victim to worry about-while aiding the recovery process of such a victim was the feature I valued most about dealing with survivors of sexual assault. It was so much more rewarding than homicide cases, where all we could hope to do was avenge the death of the deceased by caging up a killer who would spend his empty days testing the weaknesses of the system. Without any means of restoring the human life that had been lost, there could be no such thing as justice.

I watched Mike walk toward us, pleased that whatever McGraw had said to him had not wiped that trademark grin off his face. His shock of black hair was uncharacteristically messy, a sign that what he had seen during the night had disturbed him. I knew, even though he wasn’t aware of it himself, that he ran his fingers through his hair constantly when something upset him more than usual. His navy blazer and jeans, the dress style he had adopted while at Fordham College fifteen years earlier, were the equivalent of a uniform for Chapman and set him apart from most of the brown- and gray-suited members of the elite Homicide Squad.

“Let’s sit over in that corner so I can tell you what I got here,” he gestured to me, hoping for a bit of privacy within the open area of the lounge. “D’you hear any news this morning? This break on the air yet?”

“I had WINS on the radio on my way over here. Not a thing. The garbage strike and union negotiations are still the lead story. Followed by the price tag on Princess Di’s latest gift from that Saudi prince.”

“That’ll give us a few hours. You get video?”

“Sure. Bannion will be here himself to do it.” I had called the head of our technical unit at home to make certain we’d get the best job done. “He promised to be here by eight.”

“Here’s what we got. Gemma Dogen-female, Caucasian.” Mike was flipping his steno pad to the front page, but didn’t need to look at his notes for the basics. “Fifty-eight years old, but I gotta tell you,” Chapman editorializing now, “that was a good-looking old lady-”

“Fifty-eight isn’t exactly old, Mikey.”

“Well, she was no cupcake, kid. When I think sex crime, I think a young, attractive woman who gets-”

“That’s one of your problems: you think with your own personal, private parts. And they’re probably no bigger than your brain.” Rape cases, especially when the assailant is a stranger, rarely have anything to do with sexual acts as we know them in consensual settings. It’s a hideously violent crime in which sex is the weapon chosen by the offender to control, degrade, and humiliate his victim. Mike knew all of that as well as I did.

“Anyway, she was a very fit, very strong fifty-eight-year-old who put up a good struggle. Medical doctor. Divorced, no kids.”

“Who’s the ex and where is he?”

“As soon as somebody tells me, I’ll let you know. I’ve only been on this a few hours more than you and we didn’t get a lot of help in the middle of the night. Most of her colleagues and the staff have just started coming into the building during the past hour so I expect to get some more answers soon.”

I nodded as Mike went on talking. “From the scene in her office, the personal side looks pretty sterile. No family photos, no dog or cat snapshots, no handmade needlepoint pillows with cute proverbs and initials. Just rows of textbooks, dozens of file drawers with X rays and medical records, about thirty plastic models of the brain-and what used to be a fairly attractive Oriental rug that’s now bathed in blood.”

“Who found her?”

“Night watchman was going around just before twelve, last check of the floor. He’d been through that corridor twice earlier and heard nothing. This time, he said there was a moaning sound. He’s got a master key, opened Dr. Dogen’s door, and called 911, right after he threw up-fortunately for the guys from Crime Scene, in the hallway.”

“She was still alive?”

“Using that term very loosely, kid. Body was like Swiss cheese-lost most of her blood. I’d bet she was unconscious when the killer left her. Could have been lying there for hours, then got a last spurt of oxygen good for a few gasps, which is what the guard heard. Doctors came running up from the ER and tried to hook her up to life support and get her into surgery to inflate the lung and size up the internal damage but she was too far gone for that. Nothing could have saved her. ‘Likely to die’ was a gross understatement of Dr. Dogen’s condition.”

“ME give you a time the stabbing occurred?”

“What do you think this is, the movies? After the autopsy, and after I interview the coworkers and friends and neighbors who tell me when they last saw Gemma and spoke with her, and after I tell the pathologist that I’ve narrowed the killer’s window of opportunity down to fifteen minutes on the day the good doctor disappeared, he’ll look me in the eye with great sincerity and give me exactly the time I just spoon-fed to him.”

A single professional woman, no children, no pets, no one to depend on her for contact. I tried to push any personal comparisons out of my mind and concentrate on the facts Mike was feeding me, but I kept bringing up the image of my own corpse, lying behind a locked door on the eighth-floor corridor of the District Attorney’s Office, with people passing by it all day and nobody checking on whether anyone was inside. Was it possible?

“You think she could have been in that room all day and not a soul knew about it or looked for her? That’s really gruesome.”

“Alex, she had a schedule just like the one you try to keep. She’s lucky her right hand and left hand showed up in the operating room on the same day. She taught at the medical school, did surgery next door in the hospital, lectured all over the world, consulted in major cases wherever she was called in, and in her spare time had the government fly her over to war zones like Bosnia and Rwanda for trauma work, like for charity-and that’s just the stuff I can scan from the date book on top of her desk for the month of March.”

“What was her schedule yesterday?”

“I had the dean of the medical school check it out for us when I woke him up. Dogen had been out of town over the weekend and had been expected back in the city sometime on Monday. But she wasn’t due at the hospital until eight o’clock Tuesday morning-yesterday-when she had been invited to participate in a surgical procedure by a colleague. Everybody on the team had scrubbed and was in the OR, the patient was anesthetized and had his head shaved and was waiting-and they got this amphitheater where all the med students can watch-”

“I know, it’s a very prestigious teaching hospital.”

“Well, she just never showed up. The surgeon, Bob Spector, sent one of the nurses out to call. Got the answering machine, which was still playing the message that Dogen was out of town. Spector just picked out a couple of the young residents or attendings from the peanut gallery to work with him, bitched about Gemma and her overambitious schedule, and went right on drilling a hole through the middle of some guy’s cerebellum.”

“That will teach me to call Laura more regularly and let her know my whereabouts,” I mumbled aloud. Too often I put myself “in the field,” while I raced from the Police Academy to a squad room to the rape crisis counseling unit at a hospital, squeezing in lunch with a girlfriend along the way. There were days when Laura, my secretary, had a hard time keeping up with me and figuring out where I was.

“What are you daydreaming about, Blondie? If you’re missing too long the judge just tells somebody to check the dressing room in the lingerie department at Saks-probably find you strangled by whoever didn’t get to the sale items as fast as you did. Whoops-turn around and wave good-bye to McGraw.”

The Chief was making his way back to the elevator, pausing long enough to call out to Chapman, “Show Miss Cooper around, Mike, then let her get on down to her office to get to work. I’m sure she’s got things to do today.”

“Let’s go. Did you catch the question last night?”

Mike was referring to the Final Jeopardy question on the quiz show to which both of us shared an addiction. “No, I was on my way to the Garden for the game.”

“Gotcha, then. Category was transportation. How much would you have bet?”

“Twenty bucks.” Our habit was passing ten dollars back and forth every few days, since we had different strengths and weaknesses, but this didn’t sound like too esoteric-or religious-a topic.

“Okay, the answer is, the U.S. airport that handles the greatest volume of cargo in the country every day of the year.”

Just my luck, a trick question. It couldn’t be O’Hare because that would be too obvious, and it specified cargo, not passengers. I was running all the major cities through my mind as we walked down the hall toward Dogen’s office.

“Time’s up. Got a guess?”

“ Miami?” I asked tentatively, thinking of all the kilos of drugs that passed through there on a daily basis but knowing that the show’s creators weren’t apt to be banking on contraband.

“Wrong, Miss Cooper. Would you believe Memphis? It’s where all the Federal Express planes go and get rerouted to whatever their final destination is. Interesting, huh? Pay up, kid.”

“Why? Did you get it right?”

“Nope. But that isn’t the issue inour bet, is it?”

Mike knocked on the heavy wooden door with its elegant gold stenciled lettering that spelled out Dogen’s full name and title. Mercer Wallace swung it open and I reeled at the sight of the light blue carpet drenched in so much human blood. It was incredible that she could have had a single drop left in her veins, much less the strength to have tried to drag herself out of harm’s way as she obviously had. It was moments before I could look up, and it would be days before I could get that shade of deep scarlet out of my mind’s eye.