“Cooper thinks the deceased was trying to talk to us.”
Kirschner’s eyes met mine as he nodded slightly, willing to consider the prospect. “I assume you’ve got crime scene photos to show what you’re thinking about, right?”
“Yeah. We should have a couple of sets by this evening, Doc. I’ll shoot ‘em down to you.”
“May I?” Kirschner reached across to pick up some of the autopsy Polaroids. He held them up close to his face looking for the detail he needed to refresh his memory. “Obviously, I’ll be able to show you this better when our own body shots are printed later today, but the blood pattern on her right index finger is consistent with your theory.
“Keep in mind, there was an awful lot of blood here, even on her hands and arms. I’ll get to that in a minute, when we talk about why she was untied. But thereis a different sort of coating on that finger, either from dragging herself through some of the pooled blood or-I guess it just never occurred to me-by intentionally putting her finger in the blood, like to draw something. I’d like to see your pictures before I jump to any conclusions that suggest she was writing.
“I’m surprised you’re such a doubter, Chapman. Wasn’t it you who had the case with me a couple of months ago? The guy who was shot six times in the back on a subway platform, but ran up two flights of stairs and onto the street ‘til he found a phone booth to make a call. Then he collapsed and died.”
“Yeah, ‘Lucky Louie’ Barsky, the loan shark. Last gasp for a phoner to his mother, to tell her she could live off whatever she could find in the shoe box marked ‘12D Black Croco Loafer’ on the third shelf of his bedroom closet. Lucky for him he survived to make the call. Unlucky for Mom, I was there with a search warrant before she could find a stepladder. His ex-girlfriend had ratted on him and knew where the dough was stashed. I guess miracles do happen, Doc.”
Mercer brought us back to Dogen’s killing. “So you think she was untiedafter the stabbing?”
“No bindings were found at the scene, isn’t that right? Only the gag. So after she was disabled-whether that was with the first couple of thrusts or after all of them-it would seem that he untied her then and moved her to the floor.”
Mike was seated at the table again, shaking his head back and forth. “So he rapes her while she’s unconscious and bleeding like a stuck pig from some, if not all, of these wounds?” He leaned back in his chair, then it dropped forward with a crashing noise under his weight as he pounded both of his fists on the table. “Can you believe that some perverted sicko gets sexually aroused by the sight of a bloody corpse? I’ll never understand your end of this business, Mercer, I swear it. How does a guy get it up after he’s mutilated and savaged a woman’s body? I swear, there should be a death penalty all its own for this kind of crime, and I’d be the executioner. Dammit.”
Kirschner’s even voice picked up the narrative. “What I’m about to say doesn’t make this crime any better, Mike, but perhaps your killer wasn’t as stimulated as he thought he might be. It’s pretty clear to me, the way Mike described the position of Dogen’s body, the removal of her underwear, and the lifting of her skirt to expose her genitals, that some kind of sexual assault was contemplated or attempted.
“But it wasn’t completed. No sign of seminal fluid, neither on the body nor within the vaginal vault. No sperm. I did swabbings of the vaginal and anal orifices, and you’ll get lab results on those, but I think we’ll come up with a negative.”
Mercer grimaced. “You thinking like I am?” he directed the question to me.
I was crestfallen, too. For the past few years, Mercer and I had come to rely on DNA evidence and its stunning genetic fingerprinting techniques to resolve a growing number of rape cases. Even when the victim survived the attack, as most do, and picked out her assailant in photo arrays and lineups, the reliability of DNA testing to confirm her identification had dramatically increased the success rate of prosecutions all over the country.
“I guess I was counting on evidence we’re not going to have,” I said, the dejection apparent in my tone. “I just assumed that we’d get seminal fluid and develop a print ready for comparison when we find our suspect.”
“That’s a luxury I don’t think we’re going to have in this case, Alex.”
“Any chance the guy used a condom, Doc? That’s why you’re not finding any semen?”
“Unlikely, Mike. I mean, it’s entirely possible. But most of the time condoms leave substances in the victim’s body that we would detect at autopsy or in the lab. Whether it’s the lubricant or the spermicides, there’s-”
“Well, I mean, can you tell if she was even penetrated?”
“There’s no trauma, either vaginally or anally. Now, that doesn’t tell us much in and of itself about vaginal penetration.”
Mike didn’t have the experience with sexual assault cases that Mercer and I did, so I went on with the facts to which Kirschner had alluded. “More than two-thirds of adult women who are raped don’t sustain any kind of physical injury or trauma, Mike. Someone who’s sexually active isn’t likely to exhibit internal damage. The vaginal vault is pretty elastic, and if she was unconscious when the rapist penetrated, there’d be even less likelihood of meeting resistance.”
Kirschner was a step ahead of me. “What I find even more unusual, though, is that there was not a shred of any other trace evidence suggesting an attempt at a sexual encounter. If he had actually tried to penetrate, I would have expected to find some ofhis pubic hair in our combing of hers.”
A standard part of evidence collection in rape cases, as well as at autopsies, is a combing of the victim’s pubic hair. Frequently, the rapist’s own hair becomes entangled and left on the victim, and becomes another means of forensically linking a perpetrator to his prey.
“When you’ve got a rape, the crime sceneis the victim’s body. It’s the only crime for which that’s true. I’m convinced there is too little evidence here to believe our attacker committed a sexual assault.”
“So now all we gotta figure is what stopped him,” Mercer said. “Anything from getting scared off by noise in the hallway to losing his erection. Maybe Mike’s right in this case. If his intention was to rape Dogen, but he had to use more force than he had planned to subdue her, he might have been disgusted or simply unable to maintain an erection.”
“Don’t forget,” I added, “with a lot of the psychiatric types living in and under the medical center, you’re starting out with some candidates who are sexually dysfunctional even though their intention may have been to complete an assault. Are we back at square one, guys?”
“I hate to disappoint you, Alexandra, but I don’t think the solution to this crime is going to come frommy work ormy laboratory. Chapman knew as much about how Gemma Dogen died before he got here this morning as he does now. He just didn’t know where each of those knife wounds landed, internally, until we opened her up. I’m sorry I can’t give you any more help right now but your killer didn’t leave the kind of incriminating evidence we had all hoped for.
“If you find him before too much time goes by,” Kirschner said, turning to the two detectives, “his body and his clothing are likely to tell more of the story than Dogen’s. Whether or not she was able to scratch or bite or hit him, I have no idea. But he certainly must have left that room looking like he’d come from an abattoir. He’d have had more blood on him than anyone except a surgeon leaving the operating theater.”
Chet reminded us to forward the crime scene photos to him as soon as we had them, collected his Polaroids, and excused himself, noting that he had half an hour until he began his next procedure at three o’clock.
Mike, Mercer, and I gathered our belongings and walked out of the room. “I’m taking a pass on those sandwiches, Cooper. Want a cup of coffee across the street before we go on?” Mercer asked.
I had absolutely no appetite, either. “Sure, maybe it’ll take the chill off.” We walked back up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk.
“You taking C
oop over to see Dogen’s apartment?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ll be at Mid-Manhattan doing interviews. Coming by the station house later, kid?”
“What can I do to be useful? I’m still stunned by Chet’s findings. I was just counting on something that the lab could give us to move forward with by the weekend. I’ve got to give a speech at Julia Richman High School tonight.”
Mercer stepped off the curb to cross First Avenue. I turned back and flashed a grin at Chapman. “Why’d you ask? Do you need me, Mikey?”
“In your dreams, Blondie. In your dreams.”
10
BURGUNDY-SUITED DOORMEN FLANKED THE entrance to Gemma Dogen’s apartment building on Beekman Place, a short walk from the medical center complex. Wallace palmed his gold detective shield to the older of the two, on our left, who acknowledged his recognition by swinging back the large glass doors.
Wallace pointed me to the right, through the lobby and past an enormous display of forsythia and pussy willows that seemed to be rushing the season. We got on the elevator and Mercer pressed twelve.
“Damn,” he said as the doors opened onto a dim hallway made more oppressive by a heavy pattern of taupe flocked wallpaper. “I brought a camera in case you wanted any photos. Left it in the trunk. It’s the third door on the left-12C. Here are the keys, large one for the bottom lock. Let yourself in and I’ll be back up in five.”
I fingered the key chain as the doors pinched shut behind me. I hesitated while toying with the miniature replica of London’s Tower Bridge from which the two keys dangled, thinking I might be more comfortable entering Gemma’s home with Mercer than alone.
Grow up, I told myself. There are no ghosts inside and Mercer will be here within minutes.
I slipped the shorter key into the top lock, then turned the long Medeco one into the cylinder below. The knob seemed to stick for a minute before it cracked open, and I was startled at that exact moment by a noise behind me. I stepped on the threshold and looked over my shoulder to see only the swinging door at the service end of the hallway moving back and forth.
There were no voices and no other noise on the corridor and yet I could have sworn I saw someone’s face peeking out from behind the small porthole window there toward me. It was a creepy feeling, as though I were being watched, and I reassured myself that nosy neighbors were likely to be concerned about the strangers who were parading in and out of the dead woman’s home.
The entryway light switch was on the wall next to the front closet, so I flipped it up as I closed the door behind me.
My eyes swept around the large space. It was a postwar building with rooms of a generous size, spoiled by concrete ceilings that resembled a huge, upside-down vat of cottage cheese but saved by a floor-length wall of windows that looked over the expanse of the East River. Today the clouds hung dense and low and I could barely see beyond the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge and the traffic gliding toward La Guardia Airport.
Gemma Dogen’s taste was simple and stark. I moved through the living room, which appeared to have been furnished during a single stop at a low-cost, contemporary Scandinavian store. Every piece had sharp angles and lines; all fabrics were neutral in shade and slightly rough to the feel. I wished her the deep, rich colors and thick, soft materials of my own home, which enveloped and soothed me when I was ready to relax, kick my shoes off, and leave my professional world behind me at the end of a tough day.
I placed my coat over the back of one of the chairs at the dining table and turned into the short hallway that led to her bedroom. Antique British travel posters of Brighton, the Cotswolds, and Cambridge lined both sides of the wall leading into another sterile-looking chamber with its queen-sized bed.
If the photographs with which she surrounded herself were any evidence of her priorities, Gemma Dogen certainly liked her role in the academic community. She beamed from platforms and podia when she was dressed in her professorial garb. Flags flanking the stage settings showed her equally at home in England and in America and I silently applauded a woman of her accomplishment who had been such a brilliant success in a specialty dominated for so long by men.
The alarm clock next to her bed was still displaying the correct time. I pressed the little button on top to see at what hour Gemma scheduled her days to begin. It flashed a reading of 5:30A.M. and I admired even more the discipline that drove her out that early, especially these March mornings, to run along the riverside path before going to work. The harsh buzz of the front doorbell brought me out of my reverie and I headed back to let Mercer in.
“Who else you expecting?” he asked, ridiculing the fact that I had looked through the peephole before turning the knob.
“You know my mother’s rules, Mercer.” I supposed I’d been doing that peephole thing instinctively since I moved to Manhattan more than a decade earlier. “And someone was lurking around out there when I let myself in. Did you see anybody?”
“Not a soul, Miss Cooper. Carry on, girl.”
“Did you see the alarm clock?”
“Not that I remember. Anything significant?”
“Just worth checking out the time of her usual schedule. It was last set for 5:30A.M. -we should note it in case it helps backtrack if we get any closer to knowing the time of the assault.”
“Done.” Mercer opened his pad and scratched in some notes. “Now, your video guy took some film in here, and we had Crime Scene go over it, too. George Zotos has been pouring through a lot of the files. Seems like she didn’t entertain here much. Used this living room more like an office. That whole wall unit to the left is full of books, but the one on the right is all files and stuff from the med school.
“We’ve been over a lot of it. Take your time, I’ll be here with you. Let me know if you want a picture of anything.”
I started back to the kitchen. Like mine, its shelves and cupboards were pretty bare. The standard upscale equipment-Cuisinart, Calphalon pots and pans, Henckel knives, and an imported espresso machine-all looked pitifully underutilized. This was the Gemma Dogen I could relate to.
“We’ve been through there, Coop. Zotos inventoried the fridge but then threw everything out. Skim milk, carrots, head of lettuce. You’re welcome to look, but it won’t tell you much.”
I walked back into the bedroom and sat in the armchair that was adjacent to Gemma’s bedside table. The bed was neatly made up and the spread was pulled tight without a crease. Either she had arisen at her usual time and straightened up after her jog or she had never gotten home during the night to go to sleep.
I picked up the book from the bedside table-a slim volume on spinal cord injuries, just published by Johns Hopkins University Press, which seemed as depressing as the task ahead of us. I looked at the pages that Gemma had dog-eared and underlined but they meant nothing to me and I replaced it under the lamp.
Closet doors were on runners, which I slid back to look at the way she presented herself to her world. On one side were dark suits with no trim or detail, utilitarian but not of any style. The other end was mostly casual gear-an assortment of khaki slacks, simple cotton shirts, and jackets. Running shoes and sneakers of every variety and condition covered the closet floor. Several pairs of solid English walking pumps must have carried her through her professional appointments. Sensible, my mother called them, but unexciting. A few white lab coats, cleaned and starched, hung between the business and the play clothes. My hand reached for the sleeve of a navy wool suit. I wondered if anyone had claimed Gemma’s body from the morgue and thought of taking an outfit for her burial.
I went back into the living room. Mercer stood up from the chair at Dogen’s desk, where he had been looking through some of the manila files that lay on top, and offered the seat to me.
“Here’s the mail that was left for her today. Doorman gave it to me on my way back up. Bills for Con Ed and cable TV, statement from Chase Bank, and a postcard from her ex on his trip to the Himalayas. Read it-looks like he expected to see her in England
in a couple of weeks. Medical symposium at the University of London. Take that with us to give to Peterson, okay?”
“Fine.” I looked it over, pleased that she had such a civilized relationship with Geoffrey that he actually expressed pleasure at the idea of seeing her soon. Most of my friends didn’t enjoy that status with their exes, a thought that had me smiling until I caught myself with the sad realization that Geoffrey might not yet even know Gemma’s monstrous fate.
Mercer moved over to study the bookshelf wall. With his usual eye for detail, he started listing titles and descriptions as I opened desk drawers to flip through agendas and calendars.
“This lady was serious, Cooper. Very little here that isn’t medical or strictly business. Small collection of classics, kind of stuff you like. George Eliot, Thomas Hardy. Then you move to the CDs. Lots of German opera, plenty of Bach. Can you imagine a music collection without a single piece of jazz or even one Motown disc? Too whitebread for me, girl.”
“I don’t think I noticed, Mercer. Is there a computer in her office?” I was surprised not to find one in the apartment.
“Yeah, they’re working on downloading that, too. She didn’t keep one here, which is why it wouldn’t have been unusual to see her in the med school office so late. When we were there yesterday morning, practically everyone we spoke to said Dogen liked to do her writing late at night, when it was really quiet over there. Unfortunately, anyone who knew her knew that.”
I slid the chair over to the wall opposite the one Mercer was facing. The lower half of the cabinets were file drawers, each hung with legal-size Pendaflex folders. Some were divided by color and all were split up by year. Beyond that, I could make no particular sense of the order or subject matter. Like Mercer, I held onto my legal pad and tried to make notes about what categories the documents covered.
“For such a logical lady, some of this makes no sense. I can’t imagine her system for finding stuff. She’s got scores of folders on ‘Professional Ethics’-”
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