Night Shift

Chapter 23

Wednesday, December 8, 7:08 a.m.

As Jack rode down 30th Street alongside the OCME, he saw something he didn’t expect. Once again, Lou Soldano’s black Chevy Malibu was parked between two ME Sprinter vans. Having seen him twice yesterday, he didn’t think he’d have the pleasure of seeing him again although Jack knew the supposed suicide of his detective’s wife was weighing on his mind.

After locking his bike in its usual location, he took the stairs heading up to the first floor. He’d arrived later than he had the day before, and in a completely different mindset. Lou’s advice about how he should handle the problematic issues on the home front had been spot-on.

Also affecting Jack’s mood was that he had a forensic case that engrossed him, and one that he was fully motivated to make significant progress resolving. Although it had only been twenty-four hours, he hoped both Maureen in Histology and John in Toxicology were going to come through. Of the two, John was the more questionable, which he fully recognized. At the same time, he was prepared to tell the man that he would be satisfied with a preliminary screen like he’d gotten from Naomi.

After passing the SIDS office, Jack entered the ID room, where Jennifer was again going through the night’s cases. As he expected from seeing the Chevy Malibu, Lou was there but fast asleep in one of the club chairs. Since Jack was arriving almost a half hour later than he had the day before, Vinnie was also already occupying the other club chair, hiding behind his newspaper. Most important, he’d already made the coffee in the common pot, and Jack immediately headed in its direction. He was eagerly anticipating a cup, as much for its warmth as for its stimulant effect. The bike ride that morning had been nippier than it had been the day before when it had been unseasonably springlike.

“I had in mind taking a paper day today,” he called out for Jennifer’s benefit as he poured the coffee. “Unless the lieutenant commander has other ideas.” A paper day in ME lingo meant a day spent completing previously autopsied cases by collating all the material, looking at the histology slides, and signing out death certificates. It was in lieu of doing any additional autopsies.

“Hallelujah!” Vinnie voiced with alacrity from behind his newspaper. Jack was forever making him start cases way before he’d had a chance to go over the sports pages and earlier than any other ME insisted on starting.

“Is that going to be a problem for you if I don’t take any cases?” Jack asked Jennifer while ignoring Vinnie. He added a bit of sugar and cream to his mug and began to stir.

“Not at all,” Jennifer said. “It looks like there’s only going to be dozen or so autopsies today. As far as I am concerned, you’re in the clear if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” he replied. “Any particularly interesting cases I’ll be missing?”

“No, except maybe the one Detective Soldano is here to observe.” She picked up one of the autopsy folders from the desk and held it aloft, thinking that Jack might want to see it. “I haven’t looked at it yet, but he did say before he fell asleep that he hoped you’d be the one doing it.”

Jack groaned. He was one hundred percent eager to get right back to work on Sue Passero’s case and had been since he’d woken up that morning. Overnight he’d given the whole complicated situation a lot of thought, and he’d come to one potentially meaningful conclusion. The fact that Ronnie Cavanaugh had described Sue as being cyanotic when he first found her in the garage and that the cyanosis had improved when he started his CPR made Jack mull carefully over the physiological details in extremis situations. With deadly heart attacks, it’s the heart that is struggling, but whatever blood the faltering organ is able to pump around the body is fully oxygenated because the lungs are functioning fine, at least initially, so the deceased’s coloration is generally rather normal or, if anything, pale. When cyanosis occurs and is evident, particularly in a woman of color where cyanosis is not as apparent as it is in a Caucasian person, it means the lungs are not doing their job oxygenating the blood. That’s what happens with an overdose, severe asthma, drowning, or even strangulation. Obviously, Sue did not have asthma and had not been strangled as there had been no bruising around the neck and, more important, the basic neck dissection he’d done had been normal. Of all the other possibilities, the most probable statistically was certainly an overdose despite how unlikely he’d originally thought it. What all this suggested to Jack was that he had to rethink the whole situation, particularly in regard to toxicology, which was surely going to provide the answer of the cause and manner of death. At this point, he was reasonably certain John was going to confirm the death was an overdose.

All these thoughts rocketed around inside his brain as he stared over at Jennifer, who was still holding up the folder. “What kind of case is it?” he asked hesitantly.

“I don’t really know,” Jennifer said. “It’s listed as a probable overdose by the MLI, which seems a little strange with Detective Soldano involved.”

Jack groaned again. Because of his friendship with Lou, he accepted that he didn’t have a lot of choice whether to do the case, especially if Lou asked him directly. But he wasn’t excited about it, and it wasn’t just because of his eagerness to get back to work on Sue’s case. There was also the issue that he’d done hundreds of overdose autopsies over the last several years, as there had been a virtual epidemic of them, meaning there was minimal forensic challenge. At the same time, if Lou was involved, there had to be a twist, and that idea intrigued Jack to a degree. Resigned and with coffee in hand, he walked over to the desk and took the folder from Jennifer.

Slipping out the contents, he rifled through it until he was able to come across the MLI’s workup. Like Sue Passero’s case, it had been written by Kevin Strauss. He was about to read the relatively short write-up when his eye caught the name at the top of the form. It was Cherine Gardener.

“Shit!” Jack blurted. Like the previous day when he came across the name Susan Passero, his seeing the name Cherine Gardener was an utter shock. “Sorry for my outburst,” he added for Jennifer’s benefit. He even held up his hand as a kind of apology. He was rather old school when it came to expletives and frequently criticized mortuary techs who used colorful language. As loud and out of character as Jack’s utterance had been, even Vinnie lowered his Post to peer at him, dumbfounded.

“What’s wrong?” Jennifer asked. She was as surprised as Vinnie.

“I think I know this person,” he said. “God! Two days in a row.” His eyes scanned the page for identification details, learning that the deceased was a nurse at the Manhattan Memorial Hospital. Unfortunately, all that confirmed for Jack that the deceased was the Cherine Gardener he feared it to be.

“How did you know her?” Jennifer asked. “Another friend?”

“No, she wasn’t a friend,” Jack said, scanning the workup again as he spoke. “Curiously enough, I just met her yesterday afternoon for the first time. I can’t believe this. She was a nurse at the MMH who was supposed to call me sometime today, so we could get together to finish a conversation we were having about Passero’s case.”

“You met her at the MMH?” Jennifer questioned. She frowned.

“Yeah,” he said, trying to sound casual but covertly wincing as he realized he’d just made a regrettable faux pas by admitting he’d been out investigating. In an attempt to recover he added, “I stopped there briefly on my way home last night just to pick up some paperwork that was left for me.”

“And you happened to run into her?” Jennifer asked quizzically.

“That’s what happened,” Jack said, wincing yet again as his explanation sounded pathetic, even to him.

“Well, that’s quite a coincidence,” Jennifer said. She shrugged.

“It sure is,” Jack agreed quickly as he went back to Kevin’s workup. All he could do was hope his loose talk didn’t find its way to Laurie’s ears.

“Do you want to change your mind and do the case?” Jennifer asked.

He didn’t answer right away but waited until he’d reread the workup more carefully. “Sorry,” he said again when Jennifer’s question registered. “Yes, I guess I’m going to have to do the case whether I want to or not.”

“Fine and dandy,” Jennifer said. “But tell me, does reading the MLI’s workup give you an idea of why Detective Soldano is here?”

“Yes and no,” Jack said. “At least not entirely. It seems it wasn’t run of the mill.”

“How so?” Jennifer asked. In her experience, a case had to be significantly consequential for a lieutenant commander detective to be involved.

“Well,” he said while looking back at the workup to come up with a synopsis, “the patrolmen who responded to the original nine-one-one call ended up calling the precinct detectives and the crime scene unit following an unsuccessful attempt with the Narcan because the apartment was in shambles, as if there had been a struggle. Anyway, it was out of the ordinary.”

“Were there signs of a break-in?”

“Nope, no break-in, and a bag of white powder was found on the coffee table. More important, one of the building’s tenants said she heard what might have been a scream although she wasn’t entirely sure. What she was positive about was hearing crashing noises, explaining the apartment’s disarray and debris scattered about the living room. Another tenant said they saw a man leave the building who seemed to be in a hurry and who didn’t turn around when she called out to him. That’s it.”

“It sounds a bit suspicious,” Jennifer agreed. “But it still doesn’t explain why a detective of Detective Soldano’s rank is here to observe the autopsy.”

“That’s my feeling, too,” Jack said. “Luckily it’s going to be easy to find out, which I will do right now.”

With the reconstituted autopsy folder under his arm and his coffee mug in his hand, he walked over to Lou Soldano’s sleeping form and gave his shoulder a gentle shake. Jack had to do it a second time to get the man to lift his eyelids. When Lou finally did, it was obviously a struggle requiring quite an effort.

“Why can’t I sleep this soundly when I am at home?” Lou questioned. He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with the tips of his fingers hard enough to create squishing noises. When he was done, he sat up straighter and looked up at Jack, who had waited patiently. The whites of Lou’s eyes were beet red.

Jack held up the autopsy folder. “I heard you are here about this Cherine Gardener case, which confuses me. I read the MLI workup, and he signed it out as an overdose. What gives? Why are you interested? What’s up?”

“My gut tells me it wasn’t a run-of-the mill overdose,” Lou said. “Same with the responding detective who called me last night. But I have to confess up front, we homicide detectives, maybe me more than anyone else, are getting sick and tired of the uptick in homicides this pandemic is bringing to our fair city. Before the pandemic big strides had been made lowering the rate, but now it’s getting out of control, which we’re all taking as a personal insult. So maybe we are more sensitive than we should be, especially in a case like this where some rank amateur might be trying to camouflage his dirty work by making it look like an overdose. If that’s what we’re dealing with here, I want to know ASAP. Will you help?”

“When you ask so nicely, how can I say no?” Jack questioned as he playfully slapped Lou on top of his head with the autopsy folder. “Okay, but let’s get it over with so you can get your ass home and get some real sleep, and, more important, so I can get back to yesterday’s case.”

Walking over to Vinnie, who was still hidden behind his newspaper, Jack snapped the tabloid out of his hands and plopped the autopsy folder in his lap. “Let’s go, big guy! Let’s knock this one of the park.”

“I knew it was too good to be true that you’d be taking a paper day,” Vinnie whined. With a sudden lunge, he grabbed his paper back and then calmly pretended to go back to reading it. Jack snapped it away for the second time. On this occasion, he rolled it up into a tight tube and smacked Vinnie over the head with it before dropping it into his lap. Both laughed while Jennifer rolled her eyes.