The Chemistry of Death

Chapter 14

Vivian’s stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten all day. At this rate, she’d starve before she penetrated the bureaucracy far enough to get the subway accident reports. Nodding knowingly, future supplicants would walk by her dried husk stretched out on nondescript gray carpet. Death by referral. The fact that it was Friday only made things worse — everyone was already gone.

She’d tried to find the right department by calling ahead, but she’d still been shunted from room to room at the Metropolitan Transit Agency. The most boring game of tag ever — nobody was ever it. She kicked her feet against the bland carpet and knocked on another door.

“Yo!” called out a young-sounding male voice.

That was new. Everyone else Vivian had talked to was her mother’s age. Maybe she’d meet someone who still thought customer service was more fun than customer obstruction. A girl could hope.

She went inside. The back of a giant computer monitor confronted her. Otherwise, the room looked empty. She peered around the edge of the monitor to see a young man sitting in an orange ergonomic chair. His bright red hair had a wave in front like a cartoon character. His hair clashed with the crushed velvet purple jacket he wore over a green shirt. He vibrated against the background of steel-gray carpet, dark-gray desk, and a black and white picture of a whale on the wall.

Vivian introduced herself and explained she was there to look through the MTA accident reports.

“I’m Mortimer,” he said. “And you have to file a Freedom of Information Act request.”

“That takes weeks to process.” Six to eight, she’d heard.

Mortimer ran his hand across the sides of his hair. It was lacquered with hairspray and made a rustling sound. “Better start now.”

“What if we pretend that I filed one of those weeks ago, and I’m picking it up?”

“What if we pretend that you didn’t ask me that?” He already sounded like a bureaucratic lifer. So young to be so obstructionist.

“I’m interested in suicides,” she said. “Or accidents that might have been suicides.”

“You a reporter?” He rested his elbows on this desk. “The subways are practically the safest places in New York. You’re more likely to die in a McDonalds. Eating that crap is a slow suicide. Do a piece on that.”

“Do you have the statistics?” she asked.

“On red meat?”

“On the number of suicides and accidents in the New York subway system, say in the past ten years?”

“Why ten years? Why not twenty?”

She shrugged. “Twenty then. I think there’s been a murder, maybe more than one.”

“Someone pushing people in front of trains?” Mortimer’s hair bobbed when he shook his head. “We’d know. The stations have surveillance cameras.”

“What about the tunnels between stations?” she asked.

“Why would anyone be between stations?”

“Maybe to push young women in front of subway trains.” Although she had no evidence, there was no point in telling him that.

“Why would the women go? This is New York. They’re smarter than that.”

“Why not look and see? I won’t take any notes if you don’t want me to. And I won’t tell anyone where I got the information.”

He folded his arms. “Are you really a reporter?”

“Why?”

“As a reporter, you have to protect your sources, so you would be bound not to rat me out if you printed a story.”

“Then let’s say I’m a reporter.”

“That doesn’t mean you are.” He fidgeted with his purple lapel. “Do you have a recording device?”

She gave him her friendliest smile. “It’s illegal to record a conversation without consent in New York. Any reporter knows that.”

He studied her face, then shook his head. “I’m not allowed to show you any files without the correct forms.”

“If I’m right,” she said, “lots of women died and more might die in the time it takes to wait on those forms. Do you want that on your conscience: ‘I let women die because the paperwork wasn’t in order?’”

“How about: ‘I lost my job because I illegally released documents?’”

“Do you know that most people who are hit by subway trains don’t die right away?” She was winging it. “They lie there in terrible pain with broken bones poking through their skin, their insides jumbled into a milkshake.”

He tightened his lips.

“What if there’s someone out there who gets off on that? Someone who lures women into the tunnels, pushes them in front of trains where there are no cameras, then watches them die? I have evidence that this has happened to at least three women.” If the lipsticks were evidence of any such thing.

“Why don’t you go to the police, not to me?”

“I tried them first,” she said. “And I have to prove there’s been foul play, that there’s been a pattern. If we can’t find a pattern, maybe I’m wrong. If we can, you can save lives, right here from your desk.”

He didn’t say anything for a minute. She let him think. He looked like he’d make the right decision. Eventually, he stood, walked past her, and closed the door. “I’m on break.”

She wasn’t sure where he was going with that. “Are you?”

“I can look things up on my breaks, so long as they’re not confidential, which this isn’t really. I can’t give you print outs.”

Vivian hefted her phone. “I’ll take pictures.”

“Let’s start with accidents with fatalities.” He clicked away. “It says five hundred and seventy-two people have died since 2000. Let’s use that as a range.”

“Women?” she asked.

“Why just women?”

“A purse and lipstick have been found, and the victim who started me down this path was a woman.”

“Right.” He tapped away. “About three hundred and eighty-seven of those were women.”

Vivian groaned inwardly. “That’s a lot. Let’s see if he’s got a type. Eliminate women over fifty and under eighteen.”

He did. “We’ve got three hundred and sixty-two.”

Vivian did the math in her head. “That’s about twenty-four a year.”

He scanned the headers. “I’ll eliminate women who died in well-documented accidents, like retrieving a dropped object off the tracks. We can leave those out, right?”

“Right.” She peered around the edge of the monitor. His long, white fingers flew across the keyboard, and his blue eyes darted back and forth as he read. He reminded her a little of Tesla.

“Eighty-five.” He started bringing up reports, one after another on his screen. “At Penn Station. At Fulton Street.”

“Let’s get rid of those that happened at a station, and see what’s left.”

A few minutes later, they were down to ten victims, all in the last five years. The latest one was Sandra Haines.

“How’s that?” Mortimer asked.

Vivian searched for the woman who had died before Haines — Rita Blaskowitz. She was in her mid-twenties and blond. With her wide-blue eyes and even features, she looked eerily similar to Sandra Haines.

Mortimer was already searching for the others. He tiled his monitor into ten squares and overlapped the pictures under the names. The women were blond, young, and pretty. Vivian felt nauseous.

“They look like sisters.” Mortimer’s pale face whitened another shade. “That’s your pattern.”

Vivian had hoped Tesla was wrong, that a rat with a lipstick fetish had buried those lipsticks, and Sandra Haines’s death was a tragic accident. She no longer had that hope.

Mortimer maximized each window so she could get a good picture, with details about the date and location of death, names and addresses of next of kin. She snapped a picture of each woman’s face before taking a picture of the report detailing how she’d died.

“What will you do with this?” he asked.

“Take it to the police,” she said. “It’ll be a tough sell.”

“It sure looks like someone prefers blondes,” he said. “The fact that they all look so much alike has to mean something.”

“None of these women were listed as murdered, and the reports say they were alone when the train hit them.”

“Bullshit.” Mortimer tapped picture after picture. “You mean to tell me there isn’t a link?”

“I don’t mean to tell you anything,” Vivian said. “Except thank you for getting me this information.”

“I feel like a jerk for not helping you right away,” he said. “I mean, wow.”

He stood and gestured to his chair. She sat and read through the Blaskowitz file. The woman had died less than a week before Sandra Haines. On a hunch, Vivian checked the other dates of death. Two women died every October, like clockwork. Each of the women in the pair died within a week of each other.

“He kills them in pairs,” she whispered. “Every October. Like turkeys.”

“Turkeys?”

“Doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “October is turkey hunting season in New York.”

Mortimer leaned over her and pressed a complicated set of keys.

“What’s that for?”

“I’m printing you the reports,” he said. “You can send the police back to me if you want.”

“Won’t you get in trouble?”

“Not as much trouble as these women did.”