“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.”
6
YOU KNOW HOW I HATE TO START OFF BY agreeing with Chapman, but most days it really does look like the inmates are running the asylum,“ I commented as I turned to my padful of case notes, ”and with a good number of problems contributed by some of the staff, too.“
“Chief,” Peterson said by way of explanation to McGraw, who was not used to prosecutors playing a role in a police briefing, “I asked Alex to round up all the sexual assault cases she’s had in any of our hospitals during the last couple of years. My guys wouldn’t know about anything that wasn’t a homicide, so I thought it might be useful ‘cause of the way Dogen got it in this case.”
“Sarah and I pulled everything we could think of, but it’s just a sampling. Any of your loved ones thinking about elective surgery in the near future, try the Animal Medical Center or a visiting nurse service-these big hospitals could kill you. I’ll start close to home.
“Here at Mid-Manhattan we’ve got a few open investigations. The 17th Squad just locked up a janitor who’s only worked in the place for three months. He likes to slip into a white lab coat, look for rooms with women patients who don’t speak English-they don’t seem to question his presence, probably because they can’t. The women assume he’s a doctor, so when he pulls back the covers and starts to do a vaginal exam they submit to it. His name’s Arthur Chelenko-arrested and fired two weeks ago. Only then did Personnel get a record check. He was fired from Bronx Samaritan last year for doing exactly the same thing. Just lied on his résumé-no one checked it out-and he’s back here in business again.”
“In jail?”
“No. He made bail-he’s out pending indictment and trial.”
McCabe, Losenti, and Ramirez-the three detectives who’d get stuck with doing the legwork-were taking down all the information and I passed them copies of Chelenko’s rap sheet, with his address and pedigree information.
“Any history of violence?” Wallace asked.
“Not according to his sheet. But, of course, we’ve got to factor in the grudge motive, or the possibility of a frenzied response if his intention was a sexual assault and Dogen struggled with him.
“Then there’s Roger Mistral. Anesthesiologist. Got a heads-up from the D.A.‘s office in Bergen County, New Jersey, when they heard about the murder on the morning news. They convicted Dr. Mistral of rape last month-found him in an empty operating room having intercourse with a patient he’d resedated with a horse tranquilizer after she came out of surgery for a foot injury.”
“What does that have to do with Mid-Manhattan?”
“Maybe nothing. We’re checking his records, too, though. Would you believe that the state licensing people here in New York, the Office of Professional Discipline, issued a ruling right after the jury verdict that his conviction won’t be final until he’s sentenced in May? Well, they did. So he’s still allowed to be doing per diem work anywhere on this side of the Hudson River for another six weeks.”
McGraw asked if we knew his whereabouts for the past forty-eight hours. “Can he account for his time since Monday night, when Dogen was back in town?”
“Nobody’s talked to him yet,” I ventured in response. “His wife kicked him out after the Jersey trial so we don’t have a current address on him. Rumor has it that he sleeps on an examining table in one of the X-ray rooms in whatever hospital he’s spending his time in ‘cause he’s too cheap to spring for a hotel. Somebody from the team will have to talk to him when he shows up for duty tomorrow. We’re checking all the local staff.”
“Talk to him?” Chapman broke in. “I’d like to beat the crap out of him. The only difference between what he did to an anesthetized patient and necrophilia is that the body was still warm. What the hell is that kind of thing all about?”
“Come to my lecture for the Lenox Hill Debs tomorrow night, I’ll try to explain it. Now, Sarah Brenner has an active one. She’s got a complaint about an attending ob-gyn. He’s a world-renowned fertility expert with an office on Fifth Avenue. He’s got privileges at Mid-Manhattan, as well as three other East Side hospitals, so he’s in a
nd out of here all the time. No record-name’s Lars Ericson. Victim claims he raped her when she came into town from New Hampshire last month.”
“Has he been collared yet?”
“Not-”
McGraw barked at me. “What are you waiting for?”
“Well, Chief, the victim suffers from multiple personality disorder-she’s thirty or forty different women, depending on what day of the week you talk to her. It seems that two or three of her personalities wanted to have sex with Dr. Ericson, but at least one of the others didn’t want to consent. Sarah’s trying to figure out which one made the complaint.”
Wallace passed behind me to grab a soda out of the refrigerator, whispering as he bent over, “Welcome to the wacky world of sex crimes. This should be an eye-opener for the Chief.”
McGraw wasn’t amused.
“Then we have our stalker: Mohammed Melin. Remember De Niro inTaxi Driver? Well, this guy makes him look easy. Melin drives a yellow. Owns a medallion. Seems he had some kind of prostate infection, so he showed up in the emergency room here late one night. A young resident treated him-she’s a very good doctor, and she’s lovely as well. Examined him, prescribed some medication, and simply rubbed a little salve onto his penis-fifteen minutes of tender loving care and she hasn’t been able to get rid of him ever since that encounter.”
“Actually, Chief, that’s how it started with Coop and me,” Chapman interjected. “One stroke and I’ve been following her like a slave for ten years. Love reallyis a many-splendored thing.”
I ignored him and went on with my litany. “Now Mohammed waits outside the hospital in his cab whenever he’s in the area. Elena Kingsland-she’s the doctor-finishes a shift, walks out of the hospital exhausted in the middle of the night. She steps off the curb to hail a cab and there’s Mohammed. No charges against him yet, if you can imagine it-just sitting in his taxi on a public street, not doing anything to anybody according to the Penal Law. Twice he’s been caught in the hospital, roaming around trying to find Kingsland at 3 or 4A.M. Those arrests for trespass have been misdemeanors, so he’s been walked in and out of the system both times. We’ve been trying to work him up for something more serious. Finally found a welfare fraud and we now have a warrant for his arrest on that case, but he hasn’t been around in at least three weeks.”
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