Chromosome 6

by Robin Cook

  Lou’s face was stubbled with a heavy growth of whiskers. He had on a wrinkled blue shirt with the top button undone and his tie loosened and askew. His Colombo-style trench coat looked like something a homeless person would wear.

  “I wish,” Lou grunted. “I’ve seen about three hours of sleep in the last two nights.” He walked over, said hello to Laurie, and sat down heavily in a chair next to the scheduling desk.

  “Any progress on the Franconi case?” Laurie asked.

  “Nothing that pleases the captain, the area commander, or the police commissioner,” Lou said dejectedly. “What a mess. The worry is, some heads are going to roll. We in Homicide are starting to worry we might be set up as scapegoats unless we can come up with a break in the case.”

  “It wasn’t your fault Franconi was murdered,” Laurie said indignantly.

  “Tell that to the commissioner,” Lou commented. He took a loud sip from his coffee. “Mind if I smoke?” He looked at Laurie and Jack. “Forget it,” he said the moment he saw their expressions. “I don’t know why I asked. Must have been a moment of temporary insanity.”

  “What have you learned?” Laurie asked. Laurie knew that prior to being assigned to Homicide, Lou had been with the Organized Crime unit. With his experience, there was no one more qualified to investigate the case.

  “It was definitely a Vaccarro hit,” Lou said. “We learned that from our informers. But since Franconi was about to testify, we’d already assumed as much. The only real lead is that we have the murder weapon.”

  “That should help,” Laurie said.

  “Not as much as you’d think,” Lou said. “It’s not so unusual during a mob hit that the weapon is left behind. We found it on a rooftop across from the Positano Restaurant. It was a scoped 30-30 Remington with two rounds missing from its magazine. The two casings were on the roof.”

  “Fingerprints?” Laurie asked.

  “Wiped clean,” Lou said, “but the crime boys are still going over it.”

  “Traceable?” Jack asked.

  “Yeah,” Lou said with a sigh. “We did that. The rifle belonged to a hunting freak out in Menlo Park. But it was the expected dead end. The guy’s place had been robbed the day before. The only thing missing was the rifle.”

  “So what’s next?” Laurie asked.

  “We’re still following up leads,” Lou said. “Plus there are more informers that we’ve not been able to contact. But mostly we’re just keeping our fingers crossed for some sort of break. What about you guys? Any idea how the body walked out of here?”

  “Not yet, but I’m looking into it personally,” Laurie said.

  “Hey, don’t encourage her,” Jack said. “That’s for Bingham and Washington to do.”

  “He’s got a point, Laurie,” Lou said.

  “Damn straight I got a point,” Jack said. “Last time Laurie got involved with the mob she got carried out of here nailed in a coffin. At least that’s what you told me.”

  “That was then and this is now,” Laurie said. “I’m not involved in this case the way I was in that one. I think it is important to find out how the body disappeared for the sake of this office, and frankly I’m not convinced either Bingham or Washington will make the effort. From their point of view, it is better to let the episode just fade.”

  “I can understand that,” Lou said. “In fact, if the goddamned media would only let up, the commissioner might even want us to ease up. Who knows?”

  “I’m going to find out how it happened,” Laurie repeated with conviction.

  “Well, knowing the who and the how could help my investigation,” Lou said. “It was most likely the same people from the Vaccarro organization. It just stands to reason.”

  Jack threw up his hands. “I’m getting out of here,” he said. “I can tell neither of you will listen to reason.” He again tugged on Vinnie’s shirt on the way out the door.

  Jack poked his head into Janice’s office. “Anything I should know about this floater that’s not in the folder?” he asked the investigator.

  “The little there is, is all there,” Janice said. “Except for the coordinates where the Coast Guard picked up the body. They told me that someone would have to call today to make sure it wasn’t classified or something. But I can’t imagine that information will matter. It’s not like anyone could go out there and find the head and the hands.”

  “I agree,” Jack said. “But have someone call anyway. Just for the record.”

  “I’ll leave a note for Bart,” Janice said. Bart Arnold was the chief forensic investigator.

  “Thanks, Janice,” Jack said. “Now get out of here and get some sleep.” Janice was so committed to her job that she always worked overtime.

  “Wait a second,” Janice called out. “There was one other thing that I forgot to note in my report. When the body was picked up, it was naked. Not a stitch of clothing.”

  Jack nodded. That was a curious piece of information. Undressing a corpse was added effort on the part of the murderer. Jack pondered for a moment, and when he did, he decided it was consistent with the murderer’s wish to hide the victim’s identity, a fact made obvious by the missing head and hands. Jack waved goodbye to Janice.

  “Don’t tell me we’re doing a floater,” Vinnie whined as he and Jack headed for the elevator.

  “You sure do tune out when you read the sports page,” Jack said. “Laurie and I discussed it for ten minutes.”

  They boarded the elevator and started down to the autopsy room floor. Vinnie refused to make eye contact with Jack.

  “You are in a weird mood,” Jack said. “Don’t tell me you’re taking this Franconi disappearance personally.”

  “Lay off,” Vinnie said.

  While Vinnie went off to don his moon suit, lay out all the paraphernalia necessary to do the autopsy, and then get the body into the morgue and onto the table, Jack went through the rest of the folder to make absolutely certain he’d not missed anything. Then he went and found the X rays that had been taken when the body had arrived.

  Jack put on his own moon suit, unplugged the power source that had been charging over night, and hooked himself up. He hated the suit in general, but to work on a decomposing floater he hated it less. As he’d teased with Laurie earlier, the smell was the worst part.

  At that time in the morning, Jack and Vinnie were the only ones in the autopsy room. To Vinnie’s chagrin, Jack invariably insisted on getting a jump on the day. Frequently, Jack was finishing his first case when his colleagues were just starting theirs.

  The first order of business was to look at the X rays, and Jack snapped them up on the viewer. With his hands on his hips, Jack took a step back and gazed at the anterioposter-ior full-body shot. With no head and no hands, the image was decidedly abnormal, like the X ray of some primitive, nonhuman creature. The other abnormality was a bright, dense blob of shotgun pellets in the area of the right upper quadrant. Jack’s immediate impression was that there had been multiple shotgun blasts, not just one. There were too many beebee-like pellets.

  The pellets were opaque to the X rays and obscured any detail they covered. On the light box they appeared white.

  Jack was about to switch his attention to the lateral X ray when something about the opacity caught his attention. At two locations the periphery appeared strange, more lumpy than the usual beebee contour.

  Jack looked at the lateral film and saw the same phenomena. His first impression was that the shotgun blasts might have carried some radio-opaque material into the wound. Perhaps it had been some part of the victim’s clothing.

  “Whenever you’re ready, Maestro,” Vinnie called out. He had everything prepared.

  Jack turned from the X-ray view box and approached the autopsy table. The floater was ghastly pale in the raw fluorescent light. Whoever the victim had been, he’d been relatively obese and had not made any recent trips to the Caribbean.

  “To use one of your favorite quotes,” Vinnie said. “It doesn’t look
like he’s going to make it to the prom.”

  Jack smiled at Vinnie’s black humor. It was much more in keeping with his personality, suggesting that he had recovered from his early-morning pique.

  The body was in sad shape although bobbing around in the water had washed it clean. The good news was that it had obviously been in the water for only a short time. The trauma went far beyond the multiple shotgun blasts to the upper abdomen. Not only were the head and the hands hacked off, but there was a series of wide, deep gashes in the torso and thighs that exposed swaths of greasy adipose tissue. The edges of all the wounds were ragged.

  “Looks like the fish have been having a banquet,” Jack said.

  “Oh, gross!” Vinnie commented.

  The shotgun blasts had bared and damaged many of the internal abdominal organs. Some strands of intestines were visible as was one dangling kidney.

  Jack picked up one of the arms and looked at the exposed bones. “A hacksaw would be my guess,” he said.

  “What are all these huge cuts?” Vinnie asked. “Somebody try to slice him up like a holiday turkey?”

  “Nah, I’d guess he’d been run over with a boat,” Jack said. “They look like propeller injuries.”

  Jack then began a careful examination of the exterior of the corpse. With so much obvious trauma, he knew it was easy to miss more subtle findings. He worked slowly, frequently stopping to photograph lesions. His meticulousness paid off. At the ragged base of the neck just anterior to the collarbone he found a small circular lesion. He found another similar one on the left side below the rib cage.

  “What are they?” Vinnie asked.

  “I don’t know,” Jack said. “Puncture wounds of some sort.”

  “How many times do you suppose they shot him in the abdomen?” Vinnie asked.

  “Hard to say,” Jack said.

  “Boy, they weren’t taking any chances,” Vinnie said. “They sure as hell wanted him dead.”

  A half hour later, when Jack was about to commence the internal part of the autopsy, the door opened and Laurie walked in. She was gowned and held a mask to her face, but she didn’t have on her moon suit. Since she was a stickler for rules and since moon suits were now required in the “pit,” Jack was immediately suspicious.

  “At least your case wasn’t in the water for long,” Laurie said, looking down at the corpse. “It’s not decomposed at all.”

  “Just a refreshing dip,” Jack quipped.

  “What a shotgun wound!” Laurie marveled, gazing at the fearsome wound. Then looking at the multiple gashes, she added, “These look like they were done by a propeller.”

  Jack straightened up. “Laurie, what’s on your mind? You didn’t come down here just to help us, did you?”

  “No,” Laurie admitted. Her voice wavered behind her mask. “I guess I wanted a little moral support.”

  “About what?” Jack questioned.

  “Calvin just reamed me out,” Laurie said. “Apparently the night tech, Mike Passano, complained that I had been in last night accusing him of being involved in the theft of Franconi’s body. Can you imagine? Anyway, Calvin was really angry, and you know how I hate confrontation. I ended up crying, which made me furious at myself.”

  Jack blew out through pursed lips. He tried to think of something to say other than “I told you so,” but nothing came to mind.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack said limply.

  “Thanks,” Laurie said.

  “So you shed a few tears,” Jack said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “But I hate it,” Laurie complained. “It’s so unprofessional.”

  “Ah, I wouldn’t worry about it,” Jack said. “Sometimes I wish I could shed tears. Maybe if we could do some kind of partial trade, we’d both be better off.”

  “Anytime!” Laurie said with conviction. This was the closest Jack had come to an admission of what Laurie had long suspected: his bottled-up grief was the major stumbling block for his own happiness.

  “So, at least now you’ll drop your minicrusade,” Jack said.

  “Heavens, no!” Laurie said. “If anything, it makes me more committed because it suggests just what I feared. Calvin and Bingham are going to try to sweep the episode under the carpet. It’s not right.”

  “Oh, Laurie!” Jack moaned. “Please! This little run-in with Calvin will only be the beginning. You’re going to bring yourself nothing but grief.”

  “It’s the principle,” Laurie said. “So don’t lecture me. I came to you for support.”

  Jack sighed, fogging up his plastic face mask for a moment. “Okay,” he said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing in particular,” Laurie said. “Just be there for me.”

  Fifteen minutes later, Laurie left the autopsy room. Jack had showed her all the external findings on his case, including the two puncture wounds. She’d listened with half an ear, obviously preoccupied with the Franconi business. Jack had had to restrain himself to keep from telling her again how he felt.

  “Enough of this external stuff,” Jack said to Vinnie. “Let’s move on to the internal part of the autopsy.”

  “It’s about time,” Vinnie complained. It was now after eight and bodies were coming in along with their assigned techs and medical examiners. Despite the early start, he and Jack were not significantly ahead of the others.

  Jack ignored the friendly banter evoked by his hapless corpse. With all the obvious trauma, Jack had to vary the traditional autopsy technique and that took concentration. In contrast to Vinnie, Jack was oblivious to the passage of time. But again his meticulousness paid off. Although the liver had essentially been obliterated by the shotgun blasts, Jack discovered something extraordinary that might have been missed by someone doing a more haphazard, cursory job. He found the tiny remains of surgical sutures in the vena cava and in the ragged end of the hepatic artery. Sutures in such an area were uncommon. The hepatic artery brought blood to the liver, whereas the vena cava was the largest vein in the abdomen. Jack didn’t find any sutures in the portal vein, because that vessel was almost entirely obliterated.

  “Chet, get over here,” Jack called. Chet McGovern was Jack’s office mate. He was busy at a neighboring table.

  Chet put down his scalpel and stepped over to Jack’s table. Vinnie moved to the head to give him space.

  “What’cha got?” Chet asked. “Something interesting?” He peered into the hole where Jack was working.

  “I sure do,” Jack said. “I got a bunch of shotgun pellets, but I also have some vascular sutures.”

  “Where?” Chet asked. He couldn’t make out any anatomical landmarks.

  “Here,” Jack said. He pointed with the handle of a scalpel.

  “Okay, I see them,” Chet said with admiration. “Nice pickup. There’s not a lot of endothelialization. I’d say they weren’t that old.”

  “That’s my thought,” Jack said. “Probably within a month or two. Six months at the extreme.”

  “What do you think it means?”

  “I think the chances of me making an identification just went up a thousand percent,” Jack said. He straightened up and stretched.

  “So the victim had abdominal surgery,” Chet said. “Lots of people have had abdominal surgery.”

  “Not the kind of surgery this guy apparently had,” Jack said. “With sutures in the vena cava and the hepatic artery, I’m betting he’s in a pretty distinguished group. My guess is that he’d had a liver transplant not too long ago.”

  CHAPTER 8

  March 5, 1997

  10:00 A.M.

  New York City

  Raymond Lyons pulled up his cuff-linked sleeve and glanced at his wafer-thin Piaget watch. It was exactly ten o’clock. He was content. He liked to be punctual especially for business meetings, but he did not like to be early. As far as he was concerned being early reeked of desperation, and Raymond had a penchant for bargaining from a position of strength.

  For the previous few minutes he�
�d been standing on the corner of Park Avenue and Seventy-eighth Street, waiting for the hour to arrive. Now that it had, he straightened his tie, adjusted his fedora, and started walking toward the entrance of 972 Park Avenue.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Anderson’s office,” Raymond announced to the liveried doorman who’d opened the heavy wrought-iron and glass door.

  “The doctor’s office has its own entrance,” the doorman replied. He reopened the door behind Raymond, stepped out onto the sidewalk and pointed south.

  Raymond touched the tip of his hat in appreciation before moving down to this private entrance. A sign of engraved brass read: PLEASE RING AND THEN ENTER. Raymond did as he was told.

  As the door closed behind him, Raymond was immediately pleased. The office looked and even smelled like money. It was sumptuously appointed with antiques and thick oriental carpets. The walls were covered with nine-teenth-century art.

  Raymond advanced to an elegant, boulle-work French desk. A well-dressed, matronly receptionist glanced up at him over her reading glasses. A nameplate sat on the desk facing Raymond. It said: MRS. ARTHUR P. AUCHINCLOSS.

  Raymond gave his name, being sure to emphasize the fact that he was a physician. He was well aware that some doctors’ receptionists could be uncomfortably imperious if they didn’t know a visitor was a member of the trade.

  “The doctor is expecting you,” Mrs. Auchincloss said. Then she politely asked Raymond to wait in the waiting room.

  “It’s a beautiful office,” Raymond said to make conversation.

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Auchincloss said.

  “Is it a large office?” Raymond asked.

  “Yes, of course,” Mrs. Auchincloss said. “Dr. Anderson is a very busy man. We have four full examining rooms and an X-ray room.”

  Raymond smiled. It wasn’t difficult for him to guess the astronomical overhead that Dr. Anderson had been duped into assuming by so-called productivity experts during the heyday of “fee-for-service” medicine. From Raymond’s point of view, Dr. Anderson was the perfect quarry as a potential partner. Although the doctor undoubtedly still had a small backlog of wealthy patients willing to pay cash to retain their old, comfortable relationship, Dr. Anderson had to have been being squeezed by managed care.