“So he was really sick after all,” Mike said.
“I walked this over to NYU Hospital,” Emma said. The great university medical center was just adjacent to the ME’s Office. “Talked to the top pulmonologist. He thinks it’s not lung cancer at all—a false positive on the X-rays and CT scans. That what we see on the screen is a very mild aspiration pneumonia.”
“Meaning what?”
“That a piece of food—or even saliva—went into Savage’s lungs instead of down the esophagus to his stomach. Common in older folks, more especially in men. It causes the irritation, the inflammatory lesions that are the infection you see in the images. They often masquerade as cancer.”
“No symptoms at all?” Mike asked.
“In a very mild case, he might have developed a fever—maybe not even for a day or two after he left Mayo. Had he not been so impatient, they would have caught it the next day. If we can find his local doctor here in town, Savage might have taken a short course of antibiotics, but that’s about it.”
“So nothing that was going to kill him?” I asked.
“A good aspiration pneumonia can certainly do that, but by the time it did, Wolf Savage wouldn’t have been walking around the city, going from work to his hotel. He’d have really been laid low, likely to have spiked a fever, maybe even become delirious and therefore oblivious to anyone around him.”
“But if he went to his doc here, when he got home from Mayo?”
“An antibiotic could knock it out in a normally healthy adult. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to set up an exit bag and all the drama that went with it just to do the job.”
“So you’re right back on the fence about how Wolf died?” I said. “We’ve actually got some facts that might have led him to suicide.”
“Did I say my morning ended with that diagnosis?” Emma said, digging her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. “Or do you want to see what I asked you to come back here for?”
“Too hot to handle in a text?” Mike said.
“Boiling hot,” Emma said, reaching for her laptop and removing the image of Wolf Savage’s lungs from the screen. “Fasten your seat belts.”
“Ready to roll.”
“You know it’s routine for us to enter the deceased’s DNA in the crime-scene databank.”
“Of course,” I said. Since the 1990s, the creation of two vastly different systems of DNA analysis had revolutionized the criminal-justice system. The one most familiar to the public through newspaper accounts and television shows is the one in which the genetic profiles of convicted offenders are entered into the databank. This ever-growing pool of felons and predators—more than ten million of them now—allows law-enforcement agencies to compare evidence in unsolved cases to the known criminals.
The databank to which the ME’s Office had access is for crime-scene evidence. They could input evidence from a variety of sources—whether unidentified remains or fluid on the clothing of a victim—to memorialize the evidence in hopes of an eventual match in the convicted offenders’ databank. Eventually, they could upload the results to the national CODIS system as well.
“I decided it would be smart—no matter what my decision is—to have some of Wolf Savage’s DNA in the system.”
“But you made a promise to the family not to autopsy yet,” I said, anxious about the conversations we’d just had with Reed and Hal.
“I’ve kept that promise, Alex. You know I would. But we had the plastic bag that was placed over the head of the deceased,” Emma said. “It came in with the body, of course. And I figured if we analyzed the bag for trace evidence—skin cells and such—it might help us resolve whether the man hurt himself, or had some help shuffling off his mortal coil.”
“That makes good sense.”
“There were several sets of fingerprints on the bag that Savage used. I’d expect that to be the case, even if he acted solo, because we don’t know where or from whom he got the bag. So I asked the lab to get me skin cells that had sloughed off onto it,” she said. “As well as salivary amylase.”
“You mean DNA from the point inside the bag where his saliva hit the plastic?” I said.
“Exactly. They worked up a profile for me—several profiles, actually—and we entered them into the crime-scene databank last night.”
“Several profiles?” Mike asked.
“Yes. Like I said, Savage isn’t likely to have been the only one who touched the bag, so we have a few other genetic prints to consider,” Emma said. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve got a known killer. It could just as easily be that someone handled the plastic before the day it came into the possession of the deceased.”
Mike sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the conference table.
“And here I thought you were going to declare this a homicide and solve it for me at the very same time,” he said. “I feel like I’m on a seesaw.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t solved anything at all,” Emma said. “I came back in from NYU an hour ago and found this report waiting for me on my desk. The biologist who got the results doesn’t even want to enter it into the computer system until we figure out the consequences.”
Emma Palmer came around behind Mike and me and put two pieces of paper side by side on the table between us. I had studied thousands of DNA analysis reports over the last decade when matching or excluding suspected sex offenders. I had learned the methodology so that I could present it to jurors clearly and withstand challenges by the most knowledgeable adversaries. I was familiar with the peaks and valleys, the alleles and chromosomes—every technical term that made this science so formidable, beyond any and all doubt.
“Who have we got here?” I said, looking from one page to the other. Most people thought DNA profiles printed out of a computer with passport photos attached, identifying the subjects of the search. That was a myth. All I could see were the loci—the points on each profile—that were identical to each other.
“Help me with this,” Mike said.
“It’s not a match,” I said. “Yes, you’ve got a lot of markers in common, but then you’ve got just as many more that don’t line up.”
“That’s Wolf Savage on the left,” Emma Parker said. “No question about that.”
“Then whose profile is on the other piece of paper? It must be a relative of his, Emma,” I said, speeding through thoughts that a strong Y chromosome might prove a link to either Wolf’s son, Reed, or his brother, Hal. “Did you get this off the plastic bag?”
“That would almost make sense, Alex, wouldn’t it?” she asked, picking up the paper and flapping it in the air, grimacing as she walked to the head of the table. “But this is the genetic profile of the vic that was fished out of the East River two weeks ago. The young woman whose body has still not been claimed.”
Mike practically fell off his chair. “Tanya Root? You’re telling me there’s some kind of genetic link between her and Wolf Savage?”
“I’m willing to bet you, Mike, that Wolf Savage is actually her father.”
NINETEEN
“I could really use a cocktail,” I said to Mike, rubbing my forehead with my fingers.
We were all alone in the ME’s conference room, trying to figure out whom to tell—and in what order. Commissioner Scully? Lieutenant Peterson? The district attorney?
“I’m not sure I’m ready to deal with the stress once the department declares this a homicide.”
“No point getting pickled now, Coop. This is a morgue, not a day spa,” Mike said. “Think this through with me.”
“What’s there to think about? If you tell the lieutenant first, then you can continue to go about your business like a total professional. If you’re serious about letting Paul Battaglia in on this news right now, he’ll play it to suit whatever angle pleases him, including which reporter he graces with the leak.”
I had spent a decade being loyal to Paul Battaglia, trusting his integrity and believing that his oft-used campaign slogan—�
��You Can’t Play Politics with People’s Lives”—was actually a principle he embodied.
But I had learned some hard lessons about him not long before my abduction. Politics makes strange bedfellows, I know, but Battaglia should never have hooked up with the sleazy Harlem minister—the Rev. Hal Shipley—who was no better than a street thug.
The possibility that the DA could be bought or bribed loomed all too large in my mind.
“You just don’t want me to call Battaglia because he’ll be peeved that you’ve jumped into the middle of this mess while you’re on leave from the office.”
“I don’t care what you tell him, Mike. I think he’s sold his soul to the devil—to Shipley. I don’t know when I’ll be ready to go back to that office.”
I was struggling with how to handle my suspicions about Battaglia. I didn’t think I could face him without confronting him on his duplicity.
“C’mon, babe. Work with me,” Mike said, pacing up and down the long room. “Somebody kills Tanya Root, okay? Female, black, close to thirty years old. Nobody seems to miss her, want her, or care about her. She winds up laying on ice in a refrigerator next to a seventy-year-old white guy—millionaire type—who seems to be her biological father. Start there.”
“Chapman’s Rules of Homicide Investigations,” I said. “Volume One, Rule One: There’s no such thing as coincidence in a murder case.”
“Correct.”
“I’d start with the fact that whoever killed Tanya Root didn’t expect her to be found. The East River is not a river, right? It’s a tidal estuary. Tanya was supposed to sleep with the fishes forever, flushed out into the ocean beyond New York Harbor.”
“Check. The killer didn’t know her breast implants were immortal.”
“How come neither her half-sister, Lily, or her half-brother, Reed, made any mention of her?” I asked.
“Half?”
“Same father. Black mother, Mike. Start with the obvious,” I said. “Either they didn’t know of her existence or they figured we wouldn’t find out about her existence because she was permanently out of the picture.”
“Check that. Add Hal to the silent Savitskys.”
“Tanya’s a rough ten years younger than Lily. So it’s possible she’s the child of wife three or wife four,” I said. “You can’t rely on the hastily drawn-up obits for accuracy.”
“You don’t have to be married to have a kid, Coop.”
“Check that, too.” My mind was racing in a dozen different directions. “Had he abandoned her, like Lily? Did he acknowledge paternity or even know of her existence? You’ve got to reinterview everyone involved.”
“Triple-check.”
“Tanya described herself to the Brazilian plastic surgeon as a model.”
“Wishful thinking.”
“But maybe she was a model, or trying to be one. Maybe she was in contact with her father all along.”
“Hey, maybe Wolf’s the one who wanted her dead, Coop. Throw that into the mix. She might have been blackmailing him about their relationship.”
“Way too many unknowns,” I said.
“Someone kills Tanya. And her death is likely to have something to do with her father. Once we nailed an ID on her—assuming he happened to have still been alive at the time—we’d know to give him a hard look. Her death has something to do directly with Wolf Savage. That’s the trail I have to follow.”
He picked up his phone, checked the contact list, and pressed the number he was looking for.
“Who are you calling?” I asked.
“Jimmy North,” he said to me, then spoke into the phone. “It’s Chapman. We’ve got a development on Tanya Root. Can you meet me at the morgue?”
“Is he coming?”
“Yeah. And you’re going.”
“Where? I’m with you, right?”
“You’re going home, kid. Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars. Do not stop in at the Beach Café and test drive an afternoon Bloody Mary, much as you’d like to. Just go directly home. Can I trust you to do that?”
“I can help with—”
“This investigation is going to take off now. The lieutenant won’t want me babysitting the rest of the day, okay? I need to be at the offices of Savage’s lawyer before the family comes out of the meeting about his estate. Jimmy and I have to separate the players and pin them each to the wall like they were butterflies stuck into Styrofoam.”
“You’re mad at them now,” I said. “That won’t help, Mike.”
“They’re a greedy bunch of self-serving liars. Then we’ve got the housekeeper who disappeared on us—and the other one who was hoping Wolf would help her. I’m back to square one.”
The door opened and Emma Parker came in, wearing her sternest Chief Medical Examiner face. “I’ve just gone over those results with the two senior forensic biologists. No mistake about it.”
“Paternity confirmed?”
“Yes, Mike. You’d better get your ducks in a row. I’ve got to call the Savage family. I’m declaring Wolf Savage’s death a homicide. There’ll be an autopsy conducted tomorrow morning.”
TWENTY
I walked up the steps to the main entrance of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue at Eighty-Second Street. No matter how many times I had made the climb since my childhood, the elegance of the century-old building never failed to impress me. Its grand facade capped the setting on the edge of Central Park, long called the Gold Coast of Manhattan because of the mansions that had lined it in the city’s gilded age.
I had stopped at the Beach Café on Second Avenue on my way home from the morgue. I’d promised Mike that I wouldn’t do a Bloody Mary, but I needed a glass of wine with my chef’s salad. The second glass relaxed me even more.
When I got to my apartment, I was restless and agitated. I couldn’t focus on a book or newspaper, all my friends were either at work or with their kids, and I hated being ejected from the investigation.
It was that restlessness that propelled me to get out of the apartment and walk uptown to the museum. I wasn’t the least bit interested in culture at the moment, but I figured someone had to be setting up the Wolf Savage exhibition.
My membership card got me in the front door. I passed through the enormous Great Hall and made my way down the staircase to the newly renovated Anna Wintour Costume Center.
It was four o’clock and the doors were wide open. Two men high up on ladders were just inside the foyer, draping a black bunting over the large sign that announced the special exhibit: SAVAGE STYLE.
“Sorry, miss, but we’re closed at the moment. We’re doing an install for the show that opens on Monday,” one of the men said to me.
“Thanks very much. I’m not here to see the exhibit. I’m a friend of the family, actually,” I said, playing on my long association with Lily. “I live nearby. I just thought I might wander through and, you know—well—reflect a bit.”
“Not a problem. We clear all the galleries in an hour.”
“Understood.”
The rooms were darkened, with spots down-lighting the classic clothing, representing five continents over centuries of their manner of dress. I picked up a brochure from the front table, which described the 1946 merger of the once independent Museum of Costume Art with the Met, and its later elevation to an actual curatorial department.
The front gallery was exactly as I remembered it, with a permanent display of some of the 35,000 items and accessories that made up a historical record of fashionable lives since the fifteenth century.
There was no one at work as I strolled through the hall, past the 1850s British court dress crafted in exquisite blue silk with gold metallic-thread trim, the military uniform worn by a soldier in the Spanish-American War, and the sexy-looking pair of silk stockings from 1920.
I turned the corner to enter the second gallery and ran into two women fussing over a mannequin. This was definitely Wolf Savage’s turf, as I glanced around at the other wooden figures in the space.
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“Need help?” one of them asked.
“Just looking.”
“Didn’t the guys out front tell you we’re closed?”
“Yes, but I—well, it’s an old family connection to Mr. Savage and I—”
“Oh, that’s all right then,” she said. “We work for the museum, but someone from his staff is in the next gallery. Just keep going.”
I didn’t see anyone in the third room. The lighting was dim and the space was tightly packed with decades of Wolf Savage designs.
You could trace the evolution of his work simply by looking at the level of sophistication and the more luxe fabrics that he began to use over time.
The sportswear that had first put WolfWear on the map was on show at the front of the room. It was playful and accessible, a very colorful mix of clothing that must have had a modest price point and broad appeal.
Mounted on a shelf on the wall to my right was his signature design WolfPak, a striking cross-body bag made first in denim, for $25, in the 1970s. Framed beside the prototype was the model of the bag featured last year on the cover of W magazine—in green alligator with a $5,000 price tag.
I stopped to admire an enlarged photograph of Savage himself, on the cover of Paris Match ten years ago, marking his triumph at Parisian Fashion Week. Beneath the smiling face of the designer, as he was exiting the Musée d’Orsay with a stunning woman on his arm, was the headline: COUP DE LOUP … the coup of the wolf.
“Are you lost, or didn’t you get the message that these galleries aren’t open?”
I heard the voice but didn’t see the speaker.
“Excuse me?”
“Down here, luv,” she said. “Try not to step on me, please.”
She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, pulling her head out from beneath the full skirt of a ball gown that she was adjusting in some way.
“No worries,” I said, smiling at her. “I’m Alex. Alex Cooper.”
“Is that supposed to mean something to me?” she said. “Because it doesn’t.”
She was a very attractive young woman, a few years younger than me, I guessed. Very slender with long limbs, short spiky auburn hair, and a gamine look about her.
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