Likely To Die

5

THE REST OF THE DAY PASSED QUICKLY AS I fielded the usual range of problems and inquiries from the young lawyers who worked with me in the unit. Sarah and I had spent the lunch hour in a conference room, eating salad and sipping Diet Coke, while we made lists of defendants and suspects who might warrant a close look during the Dogen murder investigation. Laura shielded me from all the nonessential phone calls, and I spent the last part of the day sorting through messages and returning those that could not wait until the next morning.

At six-thirty I shut off the lights, went down the hallway to tell the Chief of the Trial Division, Rod Squires, that I was on my way to the task force meeting, and left the building with my folder of case summaries to walk to the Jeep. I had missed most of the rush hour traffic so I sailed up First Avenue with no trouble, using the time to call my best friend, Nina Baum, and leave a voice mail recording on her office system at her law firm in Los Angeles, as I did almost every day.

I parked near the station house on East Fifty-first Street and entered the building, explaining the purpose of my visit and showing my identification to the cop at the desk, who nodded in response and pointed me in the direction of the staircase. I climbed the flight and as I pushed against the bar on the heavy metal door, it swung open onto the green-tiled hallway of the second floor. The locker rooms for the uniformed cops were to my right, the anticrime office straight ahead, but most of the working space on the floor was consumed by the detective squad room off to my left.

Walking into the headquarters of a breaking major homicide investigation was, as always, a chance to see the cream of the NYPD at its best. The energy level was electric as Peterson’s hand-chosen task force gathered and prepared for the briefing that would begin after the arrival of the big bosses within the hour. I glanced around the room to see who would be working the case with me, subconsciously rating them not only as investigators but as trial witnesses and testifiers. Whatever skills they brought to this part of the process would be compromised or enhanced by the quality of their paperwork and their ability to account for details like preserving the chain of custody and the proper methods of gathering minute traces of evidence, carefully accumulating clues, or sloppily overlooking significant leads.

The squad area was like a rabbit warren as I viewed it from within the doorway. More than twenty detectives were clustered around the twelve desks that filled one side of the room. On each desk stood a standard manual typewriter, a couple of telephones, a wire basket-empty now but about to begin to fill with reams of pink-papered police reports called Detective Division 5s. The computer age, I noticed, had made little impact on the day-to-day life of these officers. The two desks closest to the entrance were each manned by a glum-looking plainclothes cop, and it was obvious to me that they were two of the team of 17th Precinct squad members whose home had been taken over by the task force and who were shut out of the Dogen case-their natural turf-while relegated to handling all the usual business and public relations for the neighborhood. They looked on at the elite corps of interlopers like Cinderella must have looked at her stepsisters as they dressed for the ball.

To my right was a large holding pen-a jail cell furnished with only a long wooden bench, used to detain arrestees for the hours between an apprehension and the time the prisoner is taken down to Central Booking to begin the arraignment process. I was accustomed to seeing two or three men stretched out on the bench or the tile floor behind the locked bars when I arrived for a lineup or interrogation. I had never seen what I noticed tonight. There were eight men in and around the cell, which was wide open-some sitting, some reclining, one on the outside with his back against the bars, one pacing in and out of the entryway. They seemed from their filthy, mismatched clothes and unkempt appearance to be rejects from a homeless shelter. Nobody was watching them, and they didn’t appear to be in any particular distress.

At the desk in the far corner I could see the only other woman in the room. She was Anna Bartoldi, a mainstay of the Homicide Squad whom Peterson had no doubt assigned to supervise the detailed record keeping of what was bound to be a complicated investigation. Anna’s photographic memory, combined with her writing skills, would help the lieutenant track the hundreds of documents that would begin to be generated by the officers, whether working on the case or not, who would make note of statements given by witnesses or phoned in by well-meaning citizens, which would become the building blocks of evidence against the killer. Anna held a receiver to one ear and was writing in an oversized log that covered the desktops so I assumed she had already been running the tips hotline that had been announced just an hour earlier on the local news stations.

In the corridor behind Anna’s chair was the door to the office of the squad’s commander. Whoever he was, he had been displaced for the foreseeable future by Peterson, who would be under pressure to make an arrest in such a high-profile matter as speedily as possible.

Mercer Wallace, the biggest, blackest man in the room, was the first to notice my arrival as I let the door swing shut behind me and took off my coat and scarf. “Don’t look so surprised, Cooper,” he called to me, waving me in and bending his head toward the motley collection of strays in the holding pen. “Welcome to our Salvation Army outpost. C’mon aboard.”

I knew most of the cops on the team, and chatted with those who had not been at the hospital this morning as I worked my way through the group to reach the desk at which Mercer had seated himself.

Wallace continued when I reached his post. “Peterson’s inside waiting for McGraw to get here. The Commissioner and McGraw did a stand-up on the evening news broadcast. The usual crap-urging the public to stay calm, asking for help. Mayor offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the conviction of the killer. Hotline started to ring immediately, everybody looking to give up their nearest and dearest for the money.”

I looked over Anna’s shoulder and saw that she was up to the forty-seventh entry in the tips book. Years ago she had given me the odds that only one in sixty calls usually had any relevance to the investigation, so it didn’t surprise me when she leaned her head back, rolled her eyes at me for dramatic effect, and went back to recording the notes that were most probably an exercise in futility. It would be the job of a couple of members of the team to follow through on every one of the messages no matter how far-fetched they seemed, because sandwiched in among them might be the real thing-a call from someone who knew the killer and was willing to sell his soul for the financial reward.

“Hey, Blondie, get your cash on the table. We’re up right after the commercial break.” Chapman’s voice boomed into the squad room as he emerged from the hallway adjacent to the lieutenant’s office, chewing a mouthful from the slice of pizza he held in one hand. “TV’s back here in the detectives’ locker room. Move it!”

Mercer pushed away from his desk and prodded me in the back. “Let’s go, Alex. My money’s on you. Besides, that’s where the food is, so we might as well humor him.”

I followed Mercer around the corner and down the corridor to its end. Rows of battered dark green lockers lined the walls of a twenty- by fifteen-foot room. The furnishings featured a Mr. Coffee machine, a vintage 1940s-style Amana refrigerator, a television set, and a large rectangular table that was covered with soda cans, three pizza boxes, a carton that at one time had held two dozen Dunkin‘ Donuts in a variety of flavors, and half-empty packages of nachos, pretzels, and assorted brands of cigarettes. The sole artwork displayed on the only wall without lockers was a centerfold from some old issue ofPenthouse, with a head shot of Janet Reno superimposed on the voluptuous body of the nineteen-year-old manicurist who had posed for the layout. I remembered that Reno had visited the precinct in late ’96 for a photo op when she delivered some of the Crime Bill money to the Police Commissioner and I chuckled at the fond memento that her visit had inspired.

“Category tonight is Famous Leaders, Coop. I’m going for fifty. Gonna start this investigation on an optimistic note.”

Chapman took the bill from his wallet and placed it on the table while reaching for another slice. He shoved the box across to me and I opened the lid for Mercer, noting that it was ice cold and covered with grease spots. “Damn, that stuff’s been sitting here since four o’clock this afternoon, girl. Pass. My fifty’s on the filly, Chapman.”

“Hold it, Mercer. This is his field,” I cautioned as he reached for his money. Chapman had majored in history at Fordham and it was one of the topics he could beat me at easily.

“You used to have balls, Cooper. What happened? Famous leaders-you read the newspaper every day-maybe it’s current, not old, news. If it’s some relative of Mercer’s heading a Tutsi tribe on the Dark Continent or the Baltic president of an abracadabra-stan that didn’t exist until three weeks ago, you’ll drop me in a heartbeat. Get it up, here’s Trebek.”

“I’m good for it. I left my wallet in the other room.”

Alex Trebek had just revealed the Final Jeopardy answer to his three contestants. I saw the name Medina Sidonia on the screen and was clueless.

Chapman was poker-faced, waiting for me to guess first. With all of the vocal authority I could muster, I gave him the question: “Who was the head of the Brooklyn faction of the Gambino family before John Gotti?”

“Bad answer,” he shot back at me, washing his pizza down with a jelly doughnut. “Señor Sidonia-a Spanish nobleman, by the way, and not a goombah, Miss Cooper-was the commander in chief of the Spanish Armada, leading the doomed sailors up the coast with the backup assistance of the land army of Alessandro Farnese, the Duke of Parma-”

“I guess I’m buying dinner,” I threw back over my shoulder as I walked away from Mercer and Mike, impressed anew with Mike’s almost encyclopedic knowledge of military history. “Sorry to take you down with me, Wallace. I owe you on that one. I’m going back out to talk to Anna.”

I emerged from the locker room to see Chief McGraw standing in the open doorway of Peterson’s office. The lieutenant had an old wooden easel next to his desk, on which was propped a large sketch pad opened to the first sheet on which someone had neatly lettered “ Mid-Manhattan Hospital.” McGraw was suggesting that they go into the back for the briefing, so he could see how the story was playing on New York 1, a local TV station that repeated the news headlines every half-hour.

Mercer had stopped short behind me, whispering in my ear: “McGraw has probably only seen himself on the tube six or seven times since the press conference an hour ago, but he never seems to get enough, does he?”

As the two of them came out, Peterson signaled to us to go back inside the locker room, handing the easel to Mercer, while he walked to the edge of the squad room and called out the names of the three other men he wanted in attendance for the briefing. Since McGraw was ignoring my presence, I walked on in ahead to make sure that Mike wasn’t standing in front of the tube doing his imitation of the Chief. He was watching the newscast, which was running with a print of the next morning’s tabloid headlines over the familiar image of the entrance to the hospital:MAYHEM AT MID-MANHATTAN. Reporters were clustered around the mayor as he decried the fate of Gemma Dogen and affirmed his confidence in the city’s medical centers.

“Wait ‘til superdick finds out he didn’t get any air time,” Chapman chuckled. “He hates getting bumped by the mayor.”

“Maybe you’ll want to tell him yourself. He’s about five steps behind us,” I cautioned.

Mercer followed after me and set up the easel. He flipped over the top sheet and revealed the first in a series of sketches that one of the police artists had already prepared with a layout of the hospital buildings in order to familiarize the bosses with the territory. Though the rough diagram didn’t show it, we all knew the complex had a larger population than half of the towns and villages in the entire country. There were dozens of entrances and exits to streets, garages, and other structures; there were miles of corridors lined with offices, laboratories, storage rooms, and surgical theaters; and thousands worked in, visited, or used its facilities every day of the year.

Lieutenant Peterson led McGraw into the crowded area in the back of the locker room, followed by three detectives from the task force. They were the ones who had spent the day starting the groundwork at the hospital, patiently speaking to witness after witness to see whether anyone had seen or heard anything unusual during the preceding day or night. Peterson shoved his glasses on top of his head, told us all to take our seats around the table, and directed Mercer to begin with what he had learned about the deceased. Chief McGraw stood off to the side, arms folded and cigarette dangling from the corner of his tightly pursed lips, positioned so he could see each of us as well as the TV screen, which had been muted but continued to replay the frenzied scene in front of the medical center.

Laura had sent me off with a standard D.A. Office’s homicide Redweld, the rust-colored accordion folder that would expand and then multiply quickly throughout the course of this kind of investigation. I removed the legal pads she had placed inside-several blank and two filled with the notes Sarah and I had assembled during the day for this meeting-while each of the cops opened the pocket-sized steno pads that would be their lifelines to the case. We would all be taking notes as Mercer began to speak.

“Gemma Dogen. As you know, gentlemen, the doctor was fifty-eight years old, white, a fitness nut, and a real loner. She’s a Brit, born and raised in a small town on the Kent coast called Broadstairs. Got all her degrees in England and moved here about ten years ago with an invitation to join the neurosurgery department, and eventually took it over. Quite a plum for a woman doc. Add to that the distinction of an endowed chair at the medical college. Well respected as an academic, not only a practitioner. Divorced before coming over here. No kids. The husband, Geoffrey Dogen, is out of the picture. Also a physician; met Gemma in medical school. Remarried in ‘91, and his young bride has him trekking in the Himalayas this very week. They live in London and from some of the letters I found in Dogen’s apartment, still have a pretty nice relationship. He’s due back next week, so we’ll need to talk to him and see what he knows about her personal life, but he’s certainly not a suspect.”

The Chief wasn’t engaged yet. His eyes were still fixed on the tube and as usual he seemed oblivious to the fact that the cigarette in his mouth had burned so far down that it was about to be extinguished by his saliva. Then he would automatically reach into his pack and light up the next one, as we had all seen him do thousands of times.

Wallace continued. “Dogen lived on Beekman Place, walking distance from the hospital. Doorman building, high rent, large one-bedroom with a terrace overlooking the river. George Zotos is still over there now. There’s tons of papers to go through. Lady was like a real pack rat with her files, so it’s hard to tell if there’ll be anything useful or not. But it’s the same as her office-not a lot of signs of a personal life. Most of the photos are old family shots from her childhood or pictures of herself getting degrees and awards.”

McGraw’s mouth opened to exchange cigarettes. “Find any neighbors or doormen with gossip?”

“Guy on the door confirms the erratic schedule. Back and forth to the hospital, lots of airport trips, jogging along the river early in the morning and often around sundown. Very few visitors. Occasionally, some sleep-over parties with a guy-with different guys, actually-but no names that he could remember. And so far, next-door neighbors were no help at all. One couple just moved in two months ago, the ones on the other side weren’t home all day, and the building canvass is still going on.”

Mercer flipped his pad to the next page. “We started the location check, Loo-looking for other crimes in the medical center itself, but I’m not going to have computer results on all that ‘til sometime tomorrow. Alex probably knows more about those things than I do at this point.

“On the professional side, we’ve got all her colleagues lined up for interviews the rest of this week. Neurosurgery’s a really small department-we’ll get through most of them by the weekend. The short version we’re getting is, she was no Mother Teresa but didn’t seem to have any obvious enemies, either. A tough taskmaster, but she’d have to be-it’s a specialty where a nanofraction of a millimeter is the difference between a patient’s life and death.

“My other piece was checking for similar cases in major cities on the East Coast. Washington Metro had two docs shot and killed in parking lots leaving their offices, a month apart. Both males, both seemed to be robberies, looking for drugs and prescription pads. Bullets match. No suspects. One of Philly’s private hospitals had a patient-get this, a quadriplegic-raped by a junkie who broke in during the night to steal hypodermic needles, but he was caught by a nurse on rounds before he dismounted. The Boston cops didn’t know of anything, but I expect a call back in a day or two. That’s all I’ve got for you, Chief.”

McGraw grunted and Peterson nodded to Chapman to move to the easel. Mercer joined me at the table while Mike rose to speak.

He picked up the black marker that hung on a string from the top of the sketch pad, humming the theme music from theTwilight Zone TV show and launching into his best imitation of Rod Serling. “Good evening. You are about to enter a new dimension, Chief McGraw-a place where the sick and tired come for balm, the wounded to be made whole, the lame to walk again. What do we find instead? The Mid-Manhattan Zone.” Serling became Chapman again. “A space invaded by every frigging lunatic who’s been let go from Bellevue and Creedmoor and Manhattan State and all the other psych wards you could think of, living in the hallways and bathrooms and basements of this hospital like they’re paying guests at the Pierre.”

Wallace whispered to me, “He’s got the Chief’s attention now, Cooper. Hold on to your seat.”

McGraw shifted his focus onto Mike and lit up another Camel.

“Sorry, Chief, but it’s really a disgrace. By the time we get done with this case, none of us is ever gonna close our eyes in a hospital again. The place is the size of a small city, without a single real cop in its borders, and it’s a frigging security nightmare of the first frigging order.”

“All right, Mike,” Peterson interrupted. “Clean it up.” I knew he hated it when his guys cursed in front of women.

“Don’t worry about Cooper, Loo. Her friends from Wellesley tell me she spent junior year abroad-at the Marine training camp on Parris Island. Don’t blush for their benefit, Blondie-you got a bad mouth.”

No point even protesting. Truth, as they tell us in law school, is an absolute defense. Chapman was clowning like Charlie Brown, and the Coasters were right-some day he’d get caught.

“Okay, back to the crime scene. Like the lieutenant suggested, I spent a couple of hours touring the place with the director of the hospital, William Dietrich. Every one of us in this room has been to that complex, every one of us in this room has visited a patient or had an appointment or interviewed a witness in one of those buildings. I’m telling you I saw things there today that would scare the living daylights out of you and make you long for the days when doctors made house calls.

“Let’s start with the setup. You all know the basics of this sketch. The main entrance on Forty-eighth Street is the easiest access to Mid-Manhattan. That’s eight sets of double doors right off the street, into the so-called private part of the hospital. It’s a state-of-the-art facility that holds one thousand five hundred and sixty-four beds stretching up over twenty-six flights. I can give you a breakdown of all the floors into medical and surgical departments when you’re ready for that kind of detail. That entrance hall is a bit smaller than the main lobby at Penn Station, and about as attractively populated.”

“What kind of security, Mike?” the lieutenant asked.

“Security? That’s really using the term loosely, boss. Square badges. You might as well have my mother sitting at the information desk handing out passes while she watches her soaps. We’re talking unlicensed, untrained, and unqualified for any kind of serious caretaking.”

He went on. “There aren’t very many of them, either, considering the volume of the traffic passing in and out every day and night. And most of them, when you watch like I did today, stop the old ladies and benign-looking visitors they can safely harass, and let the ones who look like they would cause trouble walk on through without a challenge.

“That’s just the front. There are doors to the street on every side of the main building. They’re only supposed to be used as exits, so they’re locked from the outside. But if you happen to be standing nearby when someone walks out, you can just help yourself right inside and there’s no one there to stop you. Then there’s another bank of doors off the rear, facing the parking area. It’s designed to be just for employees, but there’s not much to get in the way of any passerby who saw an opening and took it.”

McGraw pushed Chapman along. “What about the medical college, where she was killed?”

“ Minuit Medical College, built in 1956 and endowed by the heirs of Peter Minuit, director general of New Netherlands and the man who stole Manhattan from the Indians for twenty-four bucks.” Chapman started drawing arrows from the main building to the sketch of the modern tower that housed the medical school.

“A masterpiece of modern architecture, Chief, and not only is it connected to Mid-Manhattan by a number of hallways and elevators on every floor but also, unbeknownst to me before today, by the series of underground tunnels built in the days when your cronies thought that bomb shelters would save us all in a nuclear disaster. The medical school is a child of the fifties-it was supposed to be a central headquarters in case of an atomic bomb blast in the city-and there’s underpasses and mole holes that could probably stretch to China if you laid ‘em end to end.”

“What’s in them?” Peterson queried Mike.

“Wrong, Loo.Who’s in them, not what. You see those skels out in the pens in the squad room? Those tunnels and rattraps are lived in by hundreds of homeless people. We walked through there this morning-you got sad old men just curled up along the wall asleep, you got junkies with crack vials littered all over the place, you got a girls’ dorm with bag ladies who are dressed like they used to be Rockettes sitting around talking to themselves. In one stretch of roadway, I saw three guys I locked up in ‘94 during a drug sweep and I think the old fat man wearing a silver lamé jumpsuit who was urinating in a corner when we walked by might actually have been Elvis-I’m not sure.”

“Chapman,” the Chief asked, “any sign they get up into the hospital buildings?”

“Every sign. Half of them are dressed in doctor’s scrubs or lab coats-obviously stolen from the floors. They’ve got trays with remains of patient’s meals and empty bottles of prescription pills. They use bedpans for pillows and rubber gloves for warmth. I wasn’t kidding, you open your eyes at night, in that private room your insurance company is dishing out a thousand dollars for, and you gotta see most of these creatures roaming around the hallways. It would either cure you or kill you, no question about it.”

Mike flipped the chart to the next sheet, bringing his marker from the top corner to the middle of the page.

“And don’t forget the third piece of this puzzle, guys. We haven’t yet mentioned the friendly folks at Stuyvesant Psychiatric Center, located just to the south of Mid-Manhattan and, of course, you guessed it-linked to both other buildings on every level above ground and below.”

Wallace whispered to me again, trying to suppress a smile. “He’s about to do Nicholson now-he’s going into theCuckoo’s Nest mode. McGraw’ll go bat-shit.”

Mike was off and running with his next imitation, leading us on his morning tour through all nine hundred and forty-six beds in the psych hospital. He described the patients and their varying degrees of confinement, from the locked wards that held the prisoners declared incompetent while awaiting trial, through the straitjacketed screamers, to the quiet malingerers and psychotic lifers who, by virtue of their familiarity and long-term residence, had more freedom to walk around most of the day.

Peterson tried to make him be serious again. “Don’t tell me these patients aren’t supervised?”

“The most severely ill certainly are, but there are some regulars who seem to have the run of the place.”

“Meaning in and out of the building, into the rest of the Center?”

“Nothing to stop them, Loo. Just put on their slippers and shuffle off down the hall.”

“Past the square badges?”

“Loo, I’m telling you, if one of them walked up to the security guards I talked to today and said, ‘Hi, my name is Jeffrey Dahmer and I’m hungry,’ these morons would give him a pass and direct him to the adolescent clinic.”

McGraw was incredulous. “Jesus, this place was a felony waiting to happen. It’s amazing this is the first.”

“Not so fast, Chief. Cooper’s got a few surprises for you, just to open the field a little wider. If you don’t thinkI have enough suspects to keep us busy, Nurse Ratchett’ll give you something else to worry about. I think we’ve got our best shot of finding our killer among the walking wounded of the underground, but Alex has a few stories that suggest we keep our options open.”