Judging Time awm-3

by Leslie Glass

  "Another mystery, Emma. Look, I have to go. Does Jason know all of this?"

  Emma shook her head. "Merrill was afraid of Jason. She thought if he knew how unhappy she was, he'd try to get her into therapy. And she was right, he would have."

  Jason's face was stony cold as April came into his office and took a chair. "Any news?" he demanded.

  Hello and how are you, too. April looked around at the clocks that didn't chime. All that ticking every day would drive her nuts. It was exactly noon. Not even twenty-four hours had passed since she'd seen him last. Since then, however, she'd offended him and everybody else she knew. How many times did she have to say she was sorry for doing what she was paid to do. She cleared her throat, choking on repentance.

  "Look, I'm sorry about what happened last night. I didn't know Iriarte would act that way," she began.

  Jason didn't reply. His body was perfectly still.

  "If you wanted an apology, that was it." April crossed her legs and swiveled back and forth in Jason's analyzing chair. She wondered what it was like to be a patient, having to tell some doctor every single thought that popped into her head. She used to think that by virtue of his profession Jason could read her mind, but now she knew he couldn't. He didn't know she'd just had lunch with his wife.

  Jason didn't move. He was playing his waiting game. April knew how it worked because she often played it herself. Jason could make silence as deep and forbidding as the darkest tunnel full of scaly monsters. But April came from a culture that believed the tongue was the enemy of the neck. Better to keep mouth shut than say wrong thing and be hung from nearest tree.

  "So, what's on your mind?" She broke first.

  "A lot of things, April."

  "Want to tell me?"

  "Who can trust a cop?"

  April blinked. "Who can trust a shrink?"

  They sat in uncompanionable silence. Jason played with a piece of paper on his desk. The back of his hand brushed the desktop. "Why don't you fill me in."

  April watched a clock pendulum move back and forth. "It looks like Petersen died first," she said.

  "How do you know?"

  "The bloodstains on his coat. Merrill Liberty bled to death on his back. That means he had to go down first."

  Jason frowned. "What's the significance?"

  "Petersen may have died of a heart attack, but not from seeing Merrill assaulted. Merrill was struck in the throat, probably from the front because there were no bruises on her body to show she'd been restrained or grabbed from behind. Another thing is she bled a lot, but the wound was very small, very neatly done. It probably took several minutes for her to die."

  Jason coughed. "Why are you telling me this?"

  "Your friend may be a very cruel killer. Why did you ask me over, Jason? I'm really pressed for time." April watched him play with a piece of paper, watched the pendulum of the clock on his desk. The minutes ticked by. He didn't answer so she went on. "The toxicology reports came in on Tor Petersen. Turns out he was a big cocaine user, so was Merrill—there was cocaine in the trunk of Rick's car."

  "Do you know what kind of weapon killed Merrill?" Jason interrupted.

  "Some kind of pointed object. I get all the catalogs of knives you can send away for in the mail, and some you can't. There's a whole arsenal of deadly blades out there. But I haven't seen anything that fits the description of this murder weapon."

  "How about an ice pick?"

  April shook her head. "The ME measured. We measured. Too big, believe it or not."

  "Hmm. So you think Petersen died first. Was the cause of death related to complications of a drug overdose?"

  "The report says no."

  "They're still certain it was the heart?"

  "Yes, they say it's the heart."

  "But you're not sure."

  April hesitated. "I'm not convinced it was a natural. But I don't know how it could have been murder yet."

  "Okay. Was Merrill with him when he died?"

  "No, she'd gone into the kitchen to say good-night to the chef. She left the restaurant after Petersen. We're not sure if he was still alive when she came out."

  "So Merrill came out, possibly saw Tor die . . . then someone killed her with the only thing at hand."

  April nodded. "That's my personal opinion."

  "A double homicide, after al." Jason scratched his beard. "So, you don't think Merrill was killed in a jealous rage."

  "No, I don't think she was killed in a rage, but that doesn't mean your friend didn't kill her. It just means her death may have been an afterthought."

  Jason made some angry noises. "Rick Liberty would not have murdered his wife as an afterthought. That's just not sound psychological reasoning. I don't think he would have killed her for any reason—but to kill as an afterthought, that's outrageous."

  "Jason, I may lose my job on this. The medical examiner found a natural cause of death, and I'm getting very unpopular with this line of—"

  "You think Merrill Liberty saw something when she came out of the restaurant that made someone want to kill her?"

  "Yes, and I need to talk to Liberty. I really need to find him."

  "I don't know where he is." Jason's face was stony once more.

  "You said that before."

  "It's still true. By the way, did they x-ray Petersen's body?"

  "Of course."

  "And were the X rays negative for foreign objects?"

  April started to sweat inside her sweater. "What are you getting at?"

  "Didn't you tell me that Petersen's cause of death was a pericardial tamponade?"

  "A what?"

  "Perforated heart sac. That's when bleeding in the pericardium stops the heart from beating. In a massive heart attack, the heart loses its rhythm and runs amok, causing an appearance of perforation to the pericardial sac. If the perforation occurs first, the results can be the same."

  April blinked. What?

  "This reminds me of a case I had when I was a resident," Jason mused.

  April watched the pendulum. Time was passing. She had to get moving. "Yeah?" she prompted, tapping her foot.

  Jason frowned, remembering. "It was a very disturbed woman. She was brought into ER again and again, having to have objects removed from her body. Once she shoved a lightbulb up her anus, another time a broken Coke bottle up her vagina. She inserted pieces of broken glass in her breasts. We kept patching her up. Then she started weaving bent carpet needles into her skin. One day, she shoved a coat hanger up under her rib cage. We could see it in the X ray. The wire went behind her lung, so it didn't collapse her lung. But it went in so far and was so close to the pericardial sac around her heart that the surgeons were afraid they'd cause a pericardial tamponade and kill her in their attempt to get it out."

  "Wow." April raised her hand to the place above her stomach where her rib cage flared out on both sides and there was a soft unprotected spot in the middle. It was the same place where Tor Petersen's corpse had a pimple. She felt a renewed respect for Jason. Even though he was an M.D., she had never thought of him as a real doctor.

  "And did they kill her getting it out?" she demanded.

  "No, they were first-rate surgeons."

  "Jesus," she muttered. "A coat hanger. Look, I've got to go."

  "Well, take this with you." Jason handed over the paper he'd been playing with. April read it. When she was finished, she swiveled back and forth, staring at the wall. "So Liberty's been corresponding with you on E-mail," she said finally.

  "Only twice. This is the second time."

  "What's this about giving Merrill's coat to Emma?"

  "I don't know, it's odd."

  It sure was. If he'd been wearing it and he was the killer, the coat would have traces of blood on it. April's scalp tingled. "Thanks." She hadn't thought of E-mail. She wasn't exactly sure how E-mail worked, but she figured with a warrant they could tap into the on-line system and trace the phone he was sending from. Jason probably didn't know that, though.


  "What did you tell Liberty?" she asked quickly.

  "I told him I'd talk to you."

  "Thank you for showing me this," she said again.

  "You said last night you don't have any evidence Liberty was the killer. No blood, no footprints. No witness who saw him on the scene. So you just want to talk to him, right?"

  April nodded, even though the picture had changed a bit since then.

  "What about your own suspicions, April? Why would anybody get in trouble for suspecting a double homicide instead of a single one in a very public case?"

  April flinched at the attack. "All right, what's on your mind? Do you want to negotiate Liberty's return?" She waved the E-mail in the air. "Is that what this is about?"

  Jason hesitated. "I'm not sure I trust the police."

  "You can trust me. I'm the police. We need him back, Jason. We need to talk to him."

  Jason looked down at the worn Oriental rug at his feet, then glanced at the clock. "Want to go out for a bite?"

  "Thanks, I've already eaten." April smiled. With your wife. "But I could sit with you."

  "Fine." He made a gesture with his hand for her to get up and get out of there. She did, figuring that for some reason of his own Jason had decided to forgive her.

  37

  At 3:31 P.M., Rosa Washington was alone in the women's room on the second floor. About twenty minutes earlier she'd finished doing the autopsy of a homeless woman who'd died of exposure in a doorway of a vacant building and gone unnoticed for some four days. Rosa had finished up, showered, and changed her clothes, but now she was on another floor, washing her hands again.

  For her, the hardest thing about her job was the smell of the dead. She washed and washed, particularly her hands, but never felt cleansed of the stink. Nothing else about the dead traveled home with her. Not the colors—the greens and purples and blacks of skin stretched to the bursting point, the body fluids that streamed out like an endless polluted river, or the texture of tissue and fat so long dead it had turned into tallow. Neither was she much distressed by half-rotted corpses dressed in the rankest rags, or mummified babies. She attacked each former being with the same zeal, proud of what she could reveal about them from their remains.

  She met the larva that was laid by flies in the eyes and mouths of corpses within minutes of death with particularly avid interest. She actually thought of the puffy maggots that emerged from the larval stage to begin feasting only a few hours later as her friends. The maggots reproduced rapidly. By calculating the number of generations thronging into the soft, wet, open places on a corpse, Rosa could count the hours and days since death occurred. The maggots were only one of many clues and signposts that helped pinpoint time of death. The hours since life stopped and the decomposition of body tissues began could also be estimated by the body's temperature falling to that of the surrounding environment, by the patterns of reds and purples on the skin that showed how the blood settled in the body, and many other ways.

  There was always a great hurry to establish the time of death. Among the myriad revelations provided by an autopsy, the law cared the most about how and when the person had died and who he was if they didn't already know. An autopsy took from two to six hours, depending on who was doing it and how careful a job the medical examiner did. If the medical examiner's office was overwhelmed with bodies, Rosa could do an autopsy in two hours flat. She was especially proud of the six she'd done in a particularly active summer weekend back in '92.

  The only hard part for her was living with the intensity of the smell. It was impossible to describe the stench of the dead, the way it invaded a space, penetrated every porous surface, and persisted despite all efforts to eradicate it.

  Rosa dried her hands afld glanced at herself in the mirror. She didn't look like a regal African beauty now. Her hair was wispy and wild. Her eyes were red in a face that wore no makeup and offered no other relief from gloom. Oddly, she felt bereft, almost as if she'd just lost her best friend. But she knew that no friend of hers had died. She looked tired, sad, almost beaten. And this enraged her, for she was a success, not a failure. She was one of the world's winners. Her face, beautiful by anyone's standards, told her so. Her education and status in life told her so. But her face also told her she suddenly felt insecure, even frightened for the first time in her career, and she didn't like the feeling.

  More than 111 hours had passed since she'd responded to the 911 call and seen Merrill Liberty and Tor Petersen lying blood-soaked in a puddle outside

  Liberty's restaurant. For male corpses she had no pity. For Petersen she had felt no pity. But the death of the Liberty woman unnerved her. Merrill Liberty had died only minutes before Rosa's arrival. Her blood was still steaming in the cold when Rosa squatted beside her. That's how close to life she'd been. Rosa almost felt contaminated by the evil of the woman's death.

  Rosa had not expected to be lucky enough to do either of the autopsies. Like many medical examin-ers—those earthly revealers of the sins and secrets of the formerly living—Abraham was a showman. He had to do all the big cases himself. He might not have given in to her pleas if the mayor and the police commissioner—best buddies now that the homicide numbers were way down in New York—had not insisted on getting the autopsies of the two VIPs done immediately, if not sooner. And because no other medical examiner was available, Rosa had done them. Both of them.

  But now she felt besieged by enemies. Potential trouble was everywhere. People wanted her to lose her job, and her job was everything to her. It wouldn't be so hard to destroy her, for there was no doubt that things happened when everybody was so damned pressed for time. Procedures went wrong. Tests went wrong. Nobody understood how understaffed they were now that the city had forced so many people to take early retirement. No one knew how hard it was to replace even one or two competent people, much less four or five. Their staff was cut . to the bone. Rosa sniffed her fingers. They smelled of soap, but she lingered in the bathroom to wash them again anyway. It was winter, the worst time for her hands. Already her skin was brittle and dry, not moist and soft as it should be.

  After she opened the corpses up, Rosa did not know everything about how their former owners had lived, but she knew far more than they ever had. She could tell by a person's bones and muscles how they'd

  walked, held their tools, even what tools they'd used. She knew their filthy habits by the condition of their organs, the discoloration on their skin. She could see the damage done. She knew about their sexual preferences and what illnesses they'd had, and maybe didn't even know they'd had. Rosa knew whether they'd gone to the doctor and the dentist, whether they'd played tennis or golf, or nothing at al. She knew how well they'd eaten, when they'd eaten last, and often what it had been.

  The doctor with the most intimate physical knowledge of a person's life was the doctor who examined him when that life was over. Rosa was proud of the specialty no matter who made jokes about how medical examiners were forced into the specialty because they were not good enough to treat the living, and worse in her case, she wouldn't be even a medical examiner but for affirmative action. She knew people said that. It hurt her even now.

  From time to time (okay, maybe a hundred times a year) people told her she was too sensitive. As if she shouldn't mind a dumb cop's accusing her of missing a cause of death, as if she shouldn't think the color of her skin was the reason the dumb cop had suggested it. But how could she not make the leap to race being at the bottom of every problem when she couldn't even walk into a department store without a security guard's eyeing her nervously. Sometimes they even followed her around right up to the moment she produced her credit card, thinking every second she was in the store that she was there not to buy, but to steal. Just because her skin wasn't white. Sure, she was too sensitive.

  Sometimes Rosa liked to bug those security guards just a little by carrying an item around before she finally paid for it or putting it down and walking away. She liked to tease them with their own
doubts about her honesty. But she did not really want anyone to challenge and hurt her, and always had her credit card in her hand just in case.

  The truth was she'd done a damn good job on Petersen. The best. But she couldn't help feeling threatened by April Woo anyway. She thought of Petersen's nose so badly damaged from cocaine. It made her furious. He'd been white, rich, and just as stupid and sick as the poorest street kid. The man deserved to die.

  Rosa ran her fingers through her hair but didn't stop to comb it back in place. She was going to put a surgical cap over her head and didn't give a damn, anyway. Absently, she washed her hands one last time, soaping well past her wrists. She rinsed, then cursed quietly because she'd already used the last of the towels. She was shaking her hands dry when the bathroom door opened and April Woo came in. The cop put her purse down on the next sink and, smelling like a mandarin orange, she took out a lipstick and refreshed her lips.

  Rattled by the person she suspected of trying to destroy her, Rosa frowned into the mirror.

  Woo put the lipstick away in her purse and smiled at Rosa's image in the mirror. "Hi, Rosa, I'm glad I caught up with you."

  "You came here looking for me?" Rosa's tired eyes ignited.

  "Yes, I wanted to apologize for last night."

  "You followed me into the ladies' room to apologize?" she said sharply. "Is that your normal procedure, Sergeant, to trap your suspects on the can?"

  "Uh, I'll apologize in your office if you'd prefer."

  "I have an autopsy to perform," Rosa said coldly. She turned her back to the mirror and leaned against the sink, her heart beating. I didn't do anything wrong, she told herself. Why panic like this?

  "Anywhere you'd like," the cop said.

  "I don't think you're here to apologize." Rosa surveyed the dangerous adversary. The cop's lips were red. She wore a short red jacket over a black skirt buttoned from the waist to the knee. At her waist was a automatic. Rosa knew firsthand how much damage those guns could do. At April's knee, her skirt flared open to reveal her legs.