by Robin Cook
Lou nodded while looking back and forth between where the body had been found and the cartridge casings.
“And finally,” Phil said while motioning for them to follow him again. He walked over and put his hand on the old autopsy table. “This is where the dismemberment occurred.”
“A regular operating theater,” Lou commented. “That was handy for the killer.”
“I should say,” Phil responded. He pointed toward the cabinet filled with autopsy instruments. “He even had access to the proper tools. We’ve been able to determine which knives and saws were used.”
“Good work,” Lou said. He looked at Laurie and Jack. “You guys have any professional questions?”
“How did you determine the autopsy table had been used to take off the head and the hands?” Jack asked.
“We took the drain apart,” Phil said. “There was evidence in the trap.”
“Let’s see where the body was found,” Lou asked.
“No problem,” Phil said. He led them back across the pit, beyond where the body had been outlined on the floor, and through a single door into a short hallway. They passed a small, cluttered office, which Phil said was the diener’s. At the end of the hall, they came to a stout wooden door that looked as though it belonged in a butcher shop. It made a loud click when Phil opened it. A cool mist that reeked of formaldehyde billowed out to layer itself on the floor.
Both Laurie and Jack were familiar with the style of the room beyond. It was exactly like the anatomy cooler where the cadavers had been stored in medical school before being divvied out for dissection. On either side were rows of naked bodies hanging by tongs inserted into their ear canals and attached to a track in the ceiling.
“The victim’s body was on a gurney in the very back, covered by a sheet,” Phil said, pointing down the central aisle. “It’s a little hard to see the space from here. Want to go back?”
“I think I’ll pass,” Lou said. He turned around. “Cadaver coolers give me the creeps.”
“I’m impressed the body was found so quickly,” Jack said. “It looks to me like these other guys have been hanging around for years.”
Laurie rolled her eyes. It always amazed her that Jack found humor everywhere. “The murderer didn’t want the body found or identified,” she added.
“Let’s get up to Rousseau’s office,” Lou suggested.
Since it was a Saturday, the administration office area was mostly deserted. A uniformed police officer reading a copy of the Daily News jumped when he caught sight of the group, particularly Detective Lieutenant Soldano. Behind the officer was the closed door to Roger’s office. A piece of yellow crime-scene tape was stretched across the front.
“I trust that no one has been in here,” Lou said to the policeman.
“Not since you called this morning, Lieutenant.”
Lou nodded and pulled the tape off one side, but before he could open the door, a voice called out his name. Turning around, he saw a tall, lean man with movie-star good looks striding toward him with his hand outstretched. His sandy hair was streaked with gold and his face was tanned, which made his blue eyes seem that much bluer. It appeared as if he’d just returned from the Caribbean. Lou tensed.
“I’m Charles Kelly,” the man said, pumping Lou’s hand with unnecessary vigor, “president of the Manhattan General Hospital.”
Lou had tried to set up a meeting with him the previous day but had been rebuffed, as if it had been beneath the president’s dignity. If Lou had felt it had been imperative, he would have insisted, but as it was, he’d had other more pressing things to do.
“Sorry we were unable to connect yesterday,” Charles said. “It was a ghastly day, scheduling-wise.”
Lou nodded and noticed that Charles was casting a look at Laurie and then at Jack. Lou introduced them.
“I’m afraid I know Dr. Stapleton,” Charles said stiffly.
“Good recall!” Jack said. “That must have been a good eight years ago when I helped you guys out when you had all that trouble with those nasty germs.”
Charles looked back at Lou. “What are they doing here?” His tone was anything but hospitable.
“They’re helping me with my investigation.”
Charles nodded as if pondering Lou’s explanation. “I will let Dr. Bingham know they were here on Monday. Meanwhile, I wanted to introduce myself to you, Lieutenant, and say that I will avail you of any help we can provide.”
“Thank you,” Lou said. “I think we’re doing okay at the moment.”
“There is something I would like to ask of you.”
“Okay, shoot,” Lou said.
“With two unfortunate murders in as many days, I would like to ask you to be as discreet as possible, particularly about the gruesome details of the one discovered today. Furthermore, I would like to respectfully request that all information to be released goes through our public relations department. We have to think of the institution and limit the collateral damage.”
“I’m afraid a smidgen of the lurid facts have already gotten to the media,” Lou admitted. “I have no idea how it was leaked, but I was forced to give a mini–press conference. I can assure you that I did not give them any details. In an investigation like this, it is best not to do so.”
“That’s my opinion precisely,” Charles said, “although I imagine for different reasons. In any event, we appreciate any help that you can give us in this most unfortunate circumstance. Good luck with your investigation.”
“Thank you, sir,” Lou said.
Charles turned and went back into his office.
“What an ass,” Jack commented.
“I bet he went to Harvard,” Lou said enviously.
“Come on,” Laurie urged. “I’ve got to get back to the OCME.”
Lou opened the door and the three walked into Roger’s office.
While Laurie hesitated just over the threshold, Lou and Jack went directly over to Roger’s desk. Laurie’s eyes slowly traversed the room. Being in Roger’s space brought back the enormity of her loss. She’d been acquainted with him for only five weeks, and she knew deep down that she really didn’t know him, yet she’d liked him and perhaps even loved him. She’d felt intuitively that he was a good person and had been generous to her at a time when she was needy. In some respects, she might have even taken advantage of him to a degree, which caused her a twinge of guilt.
“Laurie, come over here!” Lou called.
Laurie started across the room, but stopped when her cell phone jangled in her coat pocket. It was the OCME operator with the message that a police custody case had come in. Laurie assured her that she’d be back within the hour and asked the operator to tell Marvin to start setting up. Deaths in police custody were politically notorious, and this was certainly one that she’d have to post rather than wait until Monday.
“Looks like we’ve got a lot of material here,” Lou said when Laurie joined him and Jack. “These sheets might be the most important. They’ve even got stars next to the names.” He handed the sheets to Jack, who scanned them before handing them on to Laurie. They were the credentialing records for Dr. José Cabreo and Dr. Motilal Najah.
Laurie read through both. “The timing of Najah’s transfer and the fact that he apparently favored the night shift are suspicious, to say the least.”
“I’m wondering why the record of his arrest isn’t on there,” Lou questioned. “That’s important for someone handling controlled substances. I mean, it would have to have been on his DEA application.”
Laurie shrugged.
“Here’s another list that Rousseau put on star on,” Lou said. “It’s people who transferred from Saint Francis to the General between mid-November and mid-January.”
Jack glanced at it and handed it to Laurie.
Laurie read down the list of seven names, noting which department in the hospital they worked. “All these people would easily have access to patients, especially on the night shift.”
&nbs
p; Lou nodded. “We’ve got our work cut out for us. It’s almost too much. Here’s a list of eight docs that got kicked off the General’s staff over the last six months. I imagine one of them could be a deranged oddball who’d like to get back at AmeriCare somehow.”
“That sounds familiar,” Jack said. “Maybe you should add me to that list.”
“I’m going to have to get a whole team to start working on all this,” Lou said. “If Najah isn’t our man, then we’ll be looking at interviewing the lot. Hmmm. What’s this, I wonder?” Lou held up a CD that was on top of several of the lists.
“Let’s check it out,” Laurie said. She took the CD and booted up Roger’s computer by quickly typing in his password, which caused Jack’s eyebrows to rise. Laurie caught the reaction but opted to ignore it.
The CD turned out to be the digital hospital records of all the cases in her series, including those from St. Francis. She guessed that Roger had gotten the St. Francis data when he’d gone over to get the employee records. Laurie explained to Lou what it was and asked if she could take it with her back to the OCME. It might help her when she went over the charts.
Lou thought for a moment. “Can you make a copy?”
Laurie located the computer’s CD burner and made herself a copy.
“Actually, I wouldn’t mind having copies of all this printed material as well,” Laurie said after she thought about it. “Later this afternoon, I’ll have time to go over it all, and maybe I’ll have some helpful ideas. I’m sure there’s a copy machine somewhere close by.”
“Not a problem,” Lou said. “With this much material, we can use all the help we can get.”
The copy machine was just outside Roger’s office, and Laurie made copies of all Roger’s lists. When she was finished, she told Lou and Jack that she was heading back to the OCME.
“Do you want me to go back with you?” Jack asked. “I mean, I’ll even take call if you want to go home.”
“I’ll be fine,” Laurie assured him. “I’d rather stay busy than sit around in my apartment. You’re welcome to come, but it’s up to you.”
Jack looked at Lou. “What’s your plan?”
“I want to interview the man who found the body,” Lou said. “Then I want to meet this Najah, and check to see if we lucked out obtaining his gun. It might be that just reminding him of the science of ballistics might make him spill the beans, and wouldn’t that be nice.”
“Mind if I hang with you for a while?” Jack asked. “I’d like to meet Dr. Najah myself.”
“Be my guest.”
Jack turned to Laurie. “I’ll be over. I’ll even help you with that police custody case if you’d like.”
“It’s not going to be a problem,” Laurie said. “I’ll see you when I see you, but thanks for coming in and doing the case that you did. I really mean that.”
Laurie gave each man a hug and lingered a little longer with Jack. She even gave his arm an added squeeze before walking out.
Prior to leaving the hospital administration area, Laurie took a detour into the ladies’ room. Balancing Roger’s lists and the CD on the edge of the washbasin, Laurie went into the stall. While she relieved herself, her mind flip-flopped from Roger’s untimely demise to those of the two teenagers, whose innocent mischief had caused their deaths. It reminded her that humans, like all living organisms large and small, were always precariously poised on the edge of the abyss.
Preoccupied with such thoughts, Laurie used a small, folded wad of toilet tissue to wipe herself. As she was about to drop the paper in the toilet, she noticed something abnormal. There was a tiny bit of blood. She was spotting!
Laurie instinctively recoiled from the implications. It was only a minute amount of blood, yet as far as she could remember, any bleeding wasn’t a good sign during a pregnancy, especially so early. At the same time, the limited exposure she’d had to obstetrics as a medical student had long since faded in her memory, so she didn’t want to jump to conclusions.
Why does something like this always have to happen on a weekend? Laurie silently lamented. She’d like to ask Laura Riley the significance but was reluctant to call her on a Saturday. Laurie took a fresh piece of toilet tissue and again blotted herself. The blood didn’t reappear, which provided a bit of consolation, yet combining the fact that there had been any blood with the right lower quadrant discomfort she’d been having lately seemed inauspicious at best.
Out at the sink, while she was washing her hands, Laurie looked at herself in the mirror. The last few nights of restless sleep had taken their toll. Although hardly in Janice’s league, her eyes had dark circles and looked tired, and her face was drawn. She had a bad feeling that she might be facing yet another upheaval and prayed that if it were to happen, she’d find the emotional reserve to deal with it.
nineteen
IT DIDN’T TAKE LAURIE AS long as she’d feared to get back to the OCME, but once again, the ride in the taxi markedly aggravated her abdominal distress. Marvin had been waiting for her, and she immediately posted the police custody case, which turned out to be therapeutic. By the time she finished the autopsy, the pain had vanished and in its stead was a vague sensation of pressure. As she changed out of her scrubs, she pressed the area with her fingers. In contrast to what had happened that morning, palpating the area made it feel worse. As confused as ever, she went into the toilet stall to see if she was spotting, but she wasn’t.
Laurie went up to her office and stared at her phone. Once again, she thought about calling Laura Riley but had the same reluctance. She didn’t even know the woman, and she hated to start out the relationship by bothering her on a weekend with a problem that could probably wait until Monday. After all, Laurie had been having the symptoms for a number of days. The sudden appearance of the few drops of blood was the only aspect that was truly different, and that seemingly had stopped.
Annoyed with herself for her indecisiveness, Laurie switched to thinking about calling Calvin. She could update him on Roger and give him a heads-up on the police custody case. She’d found extensive trauma to the prisoner’s larynx, with the implication that excessive force had been used. Such cases were invariably politically challenging and Calvin would need to be apprised. Yet there was no apparent pressure from the media, and the toxicology had yet to be done. Laurie decided it could all wait until Monday unless Calvin took it upon himself to call.
Instead of making any phone calls, Laurie decided to spend some serious time with the charts from Queens and then Roger’s lists. She felt she owed it to him, since he had, in a way, sadly given his life for the cause.
The first thing that she noticed was that the St. Francis charts were significantly different from the General’s. Whereas the Manhattan General was a tertiary teaching hospital, St. Francis was a mere community institution. There were no interns or residents writing notes, so the charts were much skimpier. Even the attending doctor’s notes and the nurses’ notes were shorter, which made them much easier to go through.
As she expected from having read the forensic investigators’ reports on each of the cases, the demographics matched those of the General. The victims were all relatively youthful, and had died within twenty-four hours of elective surgery. They were also all healthy, compounding the tragedy.
Laurie then remembered Roger saying that he’d discovered that the General cases were all relatively recent subscribers to AmeriCare. Turning to the biographical data section of the chart she was currently examining, Laurie saw that it was the same. She quickly checked the other five Queens charts. All of the patients had been AmeriCare subscribers for less than a year. Two of them had been subscribers for only two months.
Laurie pondered this curious fact and wondered if it was significant. She didn’t know, but she took out a ruled pad of paper and wrote: all victims recent AmeriCare subscribers. Beneath that, she wrote: all victims within twenty-four hours of anesthesia; all victims on IV’s; all victims young to middle-aged; all victims healthy.
Laurie looked at her list and tried to think of any other ways the victims had been related. Nothing came to mind, so she put the pad aside and went back to the charts. Although she knew the General cases had occurred in various parts of the hospital with many on the surgical floor, she didn’t know about the Queens cases. Quickly, she determined that it was similar, with cases spread around the hospital.
Since the Queens charts were considerably thinner, Laurie was more tempted to look at every page, and with one chart, she found herself even reading the admission orders, which were standardized on a printed form. They described prepping the operative site, proscribing anything by mouth after midnight, and various routine laboratory studies. As Laurie’s eyes ran down the list, she stopped on a test she didn’t recognize. It was grouped with blood tests, so she assumed it was a blood test. It was called MASNP. She’d never heard of a test called MASNP. She wondered if NP stood for nuclear protein, but if it did, what did MAS stand for? She didn’t know, but if she was right about the meaning of NP, then the test might be some kind of immunological screen.
Switching to the back of the chart where all the laboratory test results were appended, Laurie searched for the result. She didn’t find it. Although she found all the other test results, there was no MASNP result.
With her curiosity piqued, Laurie looked in the other Queens charts. Each one had an order for an MASNP, but no result. It was exactly the same with the charts from General: Each chart had the order, but no results.
Laurie reached for her ruled pad and wrote: All victims had an MASNP ordered but no MASNP result; what’s an MASNP?
Thinking about laboratory tests reminded Laurie of the short run of EKG in Sobczyk’s chart taken by the resuscitation team. She shuffled through the charts until she found the right one. It was easy, since it still had her ruler sticking out. Laurie opened the chart, unfolded the segment, and reread the Post-it note she’d written to herself to show the segment to a cardiologist. Putting Sobczyk’s chart aside but open to the EKG, she then checked to make sure none of the other charts had any EKG associated with the resuscitation attempts. She hadn’t remembered seeing any, but she wanted to be certain.