Killer Look (6 page)

“Uncle Hal is demanding to see my boss,” Jeremy Mayers said, returning after stepping out to tell the family members that the decision about releasing Wolf Savage's body would be delayed for two days. “So she wants to talk to you first.”

Emma Parker followed Jeremy into the conference room. She greeted Mike and me and apologized for the stained lab coat she was wearing, which carried the pungent odor of formalin into our windowless space from the autopsy theater she had apparently just left.

“Have you missed me that much, Chapman?” she said. “Or do you really think we have a second case of murder by staged suicide?”

“Both true, Dr. P,” Mike said. “That's what I'm thinking right now. Only, the first job was done by total amateurs. I think we're up against a real pro here.”

She was a handsome woman, in her mid-fifties, who looked more like a corporate executive than a pathologist spending her days teasing the truth out of the bodies of the dead.

“Sounds like there's a lot more at stake in this instance,” she said.

“Big-time.”

“Set it up for me,” Emma said. Then she turned her attention to me. “Aren't you supposed to be on leave?”

Jeremy raised his eyebrows.

“This is way more interesting than how I've been passing my time, Emma. Don't shoot me down, please?”

She smiled at me and pointed at Mike to begin.

“I'm nowhere on this, Doc,” he said. “I got called in late, and to be honest with you, I've got some catching up to do.”

“You know an autopsy isn't going to tell you very much in this kind of death.”

“I'm well aware of that,” Mike said. “But you let this body go and we've got no chance to get any of the tox screening that might prove valuable down the line.”

“What do you two mean?” I asked.

“A lot of the right-to-die organizations have been promoting this method of euthanasia in their writings in books and all over the Internet,” Emma said. “It's not just the terminally ill who have been committing suicide this particular way. We've seen a significant number of cases in this office of individuals with psychiatric disorders—you know, people with auditory hallucinations and histories of repeated suicide attempts—as well as some who were substance abusers, who choose this manner of death.”

“When you say ‘this way,' Emma—?”

“So the hardline suicides are just what you'd expect them to be, Alex. Gunshot wounds, which occasionally miss the mark, as you know. Hangings—painful and run the risk of being sloppy and slow. And overdoses. Also not always a successful method,” Emma said. “When the suicide-interest groups first got into this, their
recommendations often included the use of a plastic bag over the head. Sometimes sleeping pills first, but then a bag.”

“An ‘exit bag,'” I said, repeating Mike's words.

“Exactly.”

“What kind of bag?”

“Thanksgiving's only a few weeks away,” Mike said. “You know those turkey-sized oven bags?”

“Tell me you're just making a bad joke,” I said.

“He's not, Alex,” the doctor kicked in.

“Or a thirty-gallon trash bag,” Mike said.

“The problem is,” Emma said, uncrossing her arms and sitting down at the table, “is that the bigger the bag, the longer it takes for the carbon dioxide to build up and the oxygen to run out. Panic sets in, and if the guy—or girl—hasn't fallen asleep with pills, he's usually ripping at the bag to breathe.”

“Because the will to live is so great,” I said.

“Or the dying is so uncomfortable. That's why the inert-gas method became popular, especially in countries where suicide is legal.”

“I don't get the difference,” I said. “I don't know what the gas does. In fact, I don't even know what an inert gas is.”

“Too much English lit and not enough science,” Mike said.

“Inert gases are things like nitrogen, argon, methane,” Emma said, “and helium. They don't have any toxic effect—they're also free of odor and taste—but what they do is dilute the body's oxygen when they're breathed in, especially with the head confined in a bag, usually closed with a Velcro kind of tape.”

“There's no traumatic feeling of suffocation, Coop. And it's wicked fast. The oxygen level in the blood drops dangerously low in a few seconds. Am I right, Doc?”

“Dead on. It only takes a few breaths of the gas, and I say your
subject—call him your victim—would be gone in less than one minute.”

“But how would you know that?” I asked. “Somebody actually watches?”

“Yes. Yes, they've been observed,” Emma said. “There have been studies out of places like Switzerland, where assisted suicides are legal if they're not done for what the law there calls ‘selfish motives.'”

“Yeah,” Mike said, “like if one of your relatives had a fortune and was planning to cut you out of his will, then you wouldn't be allowed to kill him.”

“In two of the reported cases of observed deaths using helium and a plastic bag over the head,” Emma said, “the time from inhalation of the gas to loss of consciousness was ten to twelve seconds. And no attempts at self-rescue, either. Not the half hour of thrashing around in a trash bag.”

“Both speedy and reliable,” I said.

“So much so that last year the governor of Oklahoma signed a bill allowing nitrogen asphyxiation—which works the same way as helium inhalation—as an alternative execution method in capital cases.”

Mike did a thumbs-up. “Gotta love me a trendy way to knock out the bad guys. Kill them with kindness.”

“That's part of the reason Mike's so on top of this. Helium inhalation suicides have shown a striking increase in the last few years,” Emma said. “It's a brilliant—almost foolproof—way to conceal a homicide.”

I nodded in Mike's direction.

“There's an absence of specific findings at autopsy, though,” she said. “That's why Mike has to do the heavy lifting here.”

“How so?” I asked.

“There are no visible signs on Wolf Savage's body that
anything violent happened or any kind of struggle occurred,” Emma said. “I've done an external, head to toe, and there aren't even the self-scratches of someone trying to get the bag off his head and neck. That's completely consistent with this method of suicide, so it wouldn't signal anything to me.”

“But normally you'd do an autopsy, wouldn't you?”

“Required by law, Madame Prosecutor.”

“Would one be useful?”

“Could be,” Emma said in a noncommittal manner. “Oxycontin on the bedside table.”

“There!” I said. “Isn't there a doctor's name on the prescription?”

“You're behind the times, Coop,” Mike said. “The good, old Oxy isn't made in the States anymore. That bottle in the room was mail order from Canada. No way to trace it back.”

“What's the difference between Canadian Oxy and ours?”

“The reason that there was such an epidemic of abuse when Oxy was first introduced is that its active ingredient—oxycodone—was such a powerful painkiller that it was made for slow-acting release, to keep a patient sedated overnight,” Emma said. “But it was such a fine powder that addicts just crushed it and got all the effects, along with a swift high, in just minutes.”

“So the FDA changed the composition of the drug,” Mike said. “Now, it simply turns to a gummy mush if you try to crush it up to avoid the slow time-release. That's why the addicts have dropped Oxy in favor of a return to heroin. The other case the doc and I had was traditional horse as the sedating drug. The vic was an addict, so it was easy to cover up the homicide after he got himself high. Then they bagged him.”

“But you'll find Oxy in the tox study,” I said. “If Wolf ingested that first.”

“We will,” Emma said.

“And disease. The autopsy will tell you what he thought was going to kill him, if someone didn't help him find his own way to the grave.”

“Look, Alex. If Savage had an internist who called me tonight and told me that there was a diagnosis given to the man a month ago, or a week ago, that he was facing down a terminal cancer or heart disease that's on the verge of killing him—and if the same physician had the scans and images to support the diagnosis—I might bend to the request of relatives on a religious basis to just let the body go.”

“So how do you help Emma resolve this, Mike?” I asked.

“She doesn't have any info from a doctor yet about Wolf's health, for one thing,” Mike said. “I'm not the only one looking for a guy to have a reason to kill himself. And I get to go back to the Silver Needle. Everything's still in place, except for the body. I get to study the scene.”

“How did you break the other case you two had that was like this?”

“One witness too many, Coop. The dead guy's girlfriend betrayed him. The kid was a student at NYU, but a full-on heroin addict. He was into the dealer for thousands of dollars, and sleeping with the dealer's girl. She snitched on him and set him up.”

“Ugly.”

“She thought she could handle watching him die after she got him high for the last time, but she was the weakest link,” Mike said. “We broke her on the second interview.”

“That was luck, having a witness to the murder.”

“This time, I know the helium got into Wolf's hotel room concealed in the bottom of a hand truck that came right out of 520 Seventh Avenue, where his main office is.”

“You mean those carts that have clothes hanging on them—the ones that are all over the streets and sidewalks throughout the Garment District?”

“Yeah. There were dresses hanging from the rack, so it looked like every other cart. The canisters were in the well on the bottom. That was one of the first things the cops checked out yesterday. But nobody bothered to track the helium—or the hand truck—back to its source within the office building.”

“Someone must have seen who delivered the cart,” I said.

“All I got, Coop, is that it was two young men. One tall, one medium height. Nothing remarkable about them,” Mike said.

“Just so we're clear,” Emma Parker said, pushing back from the table. “I'll stay in touch with you, Mike. The minute the family comes up with medical information, I'll give you a call.”

“I'll let you know if I get lucky at the hotel,” Mike said. “And tomorrow I'll knock on doors at the Savage offices.”

“Forty-eight hours, right? Is that a deal?”

“Deal,” Mike said.

“Stay close to him this time, Alex,” Emma said, winking at me as she headed for the door. “We don't need you disappearing again.”

“I think she's had her outing for the day, Doc. Might be time to put her back in her cage,” Mike said, tousling my hair as he walked behind me.

I didn't like that image. I flashed back to the dark, dank space in which I'd been held. But I was learning to keep my reactions—or as Mike would call them,
over
reactions—to myself.

“She knows more about the fashion world than you do, Mike. Alex might come in handy while you try to sort this out,” Emma said. “She asks good questions.”

“Yeah, like I'm supposed to be the answer man?”

“Seems to be working for you just fine, Detective Chapman.”

“Here's a question for you, Emma,” I said. “Has it ever happened, in your experience, that somebody walks in here to actually try to prevent you from doing an autopsy of the deceased, and then
turns out to be the murderer? I mean, it just seems so over-the-top obvious.”

“Actually, Alex, it's been done. Maybe not the smartest tack to take, but perhaps these two relatives didn't know Wolf's daughter—what's her name? Lily?—was back in the picture,” Emma said. “Maybe they didn't think they would meet with any resistance here.”

“Slow down, you two,” Mike said. “You don't even know who's driving this bus. Is it Uncle Hal alone? Or is it Reed? Or are they just stooges doing what someone else has suggested? I'm not saying either one of them is the killer. It's just that once you let the body go, we've lost any chance of getting what we get on the autopsy table.”

“Nobody's even heard what's in Wolf Savage's will yet, have they?” Jeremy asked.

“Tomorrow afternoon,” Mike said. “That should tell us something.”

“How do you know about that?” I asked.

“That's what the lieutenant from Manhattan South told Peterson.”

“To your point, Alex, it's not only against Jewish law to perform autopsies,” Emma said. “It's forbidden in Islam, too. And Christian Scientists prefer they aren't done. But it always gives me pause when people come in to oppose the procedure and are looking to fly the body out of the country the next day.”

“We've had this scenario scores of times,” Jeremy said. “I've got to say the objections are usually legit, but we've had our share of bodies spirited out of here, only to have exhumations ordered by a court later on. Pretty hard to enforce when they're overseas.”

I thought of a case that Mike and I had worked together, which involved the exhumation of a teenage girl for an autopsy in a room right down the hall, years after her death. Nothing that I ever wanted to see again.

I put my elbows on the table and pressed my fingers against my forehead, rubbing it to ease the headache that was coming on. “I wish I had never taken Lily's call,” I said. “Maybe she's the bad guy in all this. Maybe she's just using me as the way to get back at her father. Maybe she's—”

“Let's not rush to judgment, kid. These days you're good at seeing ghosts where there aren't
any.”

Mike and I left the Medical Examiner's Office shortly before five
P.M
.

“I'll shoot you home,” he said. “I'll just be a few hours and then we can grab some dinner.”

“Doctor's orders, Mike. You heard Emma tell you to keep me close,” I said. “Aren't you going to the hotel?”

“Yeah.”

“One more look around? Check out the suite the housekeeper said someone had used?” I asked. “C'mon. It's the kind of thing I'm useful for. An extra pair of trained eyes is always good.”

“Got my extras, Coop,” Mike said. “Mercer's meeting me there.”

“It's not his case either. Not even in the same ballpark.”

“Yeah, but he's the man on the job I trust more than anyone. He's got the bones for this kind of detail work.”

Mercer and Mike had partnered together in the elite Homicide Squad about a decade ago. Both of them loved working painstaking investigations, but while Mike especially enjoyed the fact
that homicide victims didn't need handholding, Mercer craved supportive human interaction. So he transferred to the Special Victims Squad, where he savored the emotionally charged work and the task of restoring dignity to a surviving crime victim as much as I did.

“I thought you said that if I stayed sober, I could hang with you.”

Mike looked at his watch. “I guess two extra pairs of eyes don't hurt.”

We were in Mike's car for only a minute before I got a text from Lily Savitsky and read it to him. “‘Thanks for taking me seriously. I really need to talk to you as soon as possible.'”

“Tell her you're done. The only conversation she's having is with me.”

I texted that message back to her, along with Mike's cell number.

“It's you I need to talk to,” Lily responded, and I repeated it aloud. “And I need the name of a good lawyer.”

Mike threw the car into park and asked me for Lily's number. “Ms. Savitsky? Mike Chapman here. It's my case now, do you understand that?”

He paused and waited for an answer.

“Alex Cooper is off-limits. Understand that? She's not allowed to recommend lawyers for you and she's not authorized to take information about this investigation if that's what you've got. She's not anchoring your swim team any longer, okay?” Mike said. “You call her or text her again and I'll consider that to be harassment.”

“Thanks for dealing with her for me,” I said. “You think she's looking for a lawyer on the estate issue, about Wolf's will? Or a criminal lawyer?”

“That's one of your not-so-good questions, Coop, in case Dr. Parker is interested. There's no angle of Lily Savitsky's life that should be of interest to you now, okay?”

I couldn't help thinking about Lily—how she had reconnected with me though there was only the slimmest thread that linked our lives twenty years back, that she had come to get to know her father, or think she had, only recently, and that now she was tangled in the unhappiness of how he came to die.

It was a short drive across Thirty-Fourth Street, then north to get to Thirty-Ninth Street, halfway down the block between Seventh and Eighth Avenues. We parked across from the Silver Needle Hotel. The small shops that lined the sidewalk were closing for the evening.

Even though the manufacturing of fine garments had been driven offshore, all the businesses on these blocks still reflected the long history of a neighborhood that was centered on that trade. These were the storefronts where all the trimmings and notions, buttons and zippers, lace veils and ribbons that gave each outfit a unique look were concentrated and sold.

“Window-shopping?” Mike asked as I waited for him in front of one of the stores while he reported in to the lieutenant about our conversation at the ME's Office.

“I can't count the number of times I used to come into the city with my grandmother,” I said, “taking the train to Grand Central Terminal from the suburbs, to walk over here to the Garment District so she could get the special things she needed to make my clothes.”

“Give me a break,” Mike said. “You and homemade dresses?”

My mother was the child of Finnish immigrants who had come to America in the early part of the twentieth century and settled on a farm in New England, which mimicked the landscape of their Scandinavian home. I remembered everything about it from visits—the two-seater outhouse wallpapered in old
LIFE
magazine covers, the rich aromas of the wood-burning fireplace, the sauna that was heated up on Saturday nights only—and ended with a running jump into the frigid waters of Billy Ward Pond.

“You know the story, Mike. Long before my father became successful, my maternal grandmother moved in with us when she was widowed. She brought a lifetime of her practices with her,” I said, pointing at the colorful spools of thread that lined the shelves inside the front door, “and making clothes for my mother and for me was one of them. She'd get her silver needles and thread from a shop like this, then grosgrain ribbon down the street to trim my holiday outfits, and lace from around the corner to make collars for my party dresses.”

“Sweet thought,” Mike said, turning around to cross the street. “You should take up a craft like that. Calm your nerves.”

The young man at the front desk of the Silver Needle called the manager, who was expecting Mike. They had met the night before.

Charles Wetherly asked Mike where he wanted to begin. The answer was the room in which Wolf Savage had died.

“Mercer will be here any minute,” Mike said to me as we stepped off the elevator on the tenth floor.

Crime-scene tape dangled from the doorknob of Suite 1008. Wetherly unlocked the door and we all entered the suite.

“Detectives came back early this afternoon,” Wetherly said, looking around the large sitting-room area. “They dusted for fingerprints, just like you ordered.”

We avoided objects and arm rests with black dust and each found a place to sit.

“Have you had a chance to look more closely at the hotel register, Mr. Wetherly?” Mike asked him.

“I told the officers who came first thing yesterday that there had been no other guests checked in to rooms on this floor. Not for days. No reservations, no guests.”

“But you didn't mention that every room on this floor was registered to Wolf Savage.”

“Excuse me, Detective. They're all registered to Velvel Savitsky, like I told you,” Wetherly said. “And I have no idea who that is. Or had none, I should say. Not until your men informed me.”

“Don't you think it's unusual that one guy had an entire floor?”

“Not at all.” Charles Wetherly was flushed, clearly nervous about being questioned. “It's very common in this business, Detective. We're half a block from Fashion Avenue.”

The “Fashion Avenue” name had been added to lampposts as signage in the Garment District all up and down Seventh Avenue back in the 1970s. That's how the thousands of people who worked in the industry knew the street.

“When Oscar de la Renta was alive, he kept the top two floors for his design staff when they worked late and for his models—they often came here to relax, be made up, and have their hair done for events. Most of them didn't even stay in the rooms overnight.”

Charles Wetherly listed a who's who of prominent designers who kept blocks of rooms in the Silver Needle and neighboring hotels. Each floor of this one was named for a fashion magazine. There were
VOGUE
,
GLAMOUR
, and
ELLE
suites, while others were
ESQUIRE
,
VOGUE HOMME
, and
GENTL
EMAN
'
S QUARTERLY.
The walls of the lobby and the hallways were covered in a blue pinstripe fabric, like an elegant suit.

“Do you have a practice?” Mike asked. “Do you require these companies to make reservations, or to give you the names of the people who'll occupy the suites?”

“Of course we do. First of all, we have to let housekeeping know what to prepare for and clean up after. We have to restock the minibars, change the key cards, replace the flower arrangements, let security know what's happening on every floor,” Wetherly said. “Every department has to be notified—day and night—about who's under our roof.”

“Who's ultimately in charge of all that?”

Charles Wetherly cleared his throat. “It's my responsibility, of course. I share it with the head of security, who happens to be a retired detective.”

Mike put on a pair of vinyl gloves and pushed back the door to the next room. He was studying it from the threshold, and knowing his style, he was scrutinizing the death scene for any details the men might have missed the day before.

“Did Savage use this suite often?” he asked.

“Quite a lot, Detective. Usually his secretary would call ahead to ask us to get the room ready, if it was for an evening. Peonies were his favorite flowers, no matter what the season. We knew what wines he preferred, and that he liked small-batch bourbons.”

“That's for evenings,” Mike said. “Did he use it during the day?”

“That, too,” Wetherly said. “In those instances, the secretary never called. Never. It was Mr. Savage himself who phoned the desk.”

“Those were business appointments, or sexual assignations, would you guess? The nooners, I mean.”

“I can't answer that, Detective. We wouldn't be in business very long if we traded in that kind of gossip.”

“It's not gossip anymore, Mr. Wetherly. It's actually evidence now.”

“Evidence of what, Mr. Chapman? The man killed himself. You might consider letting him rest in peace.”

“You must have known him fairly well,” Mike said. “You sound very—well—protective of him.”

“I became acquainted with him over the years,” Wetherly said. “He was a good customer. Very gracious to me.”

“He was a player, too, am I right?”

“I wasn't supposed to be quoted on that,” Wetherly said, looking to me to intervene.

“It seems pretty obvious from a glance through the pages of the
New York Social Diary
, even beyond just counting the number of failed marriages,” I said. “Look, how many of the other major designers who kept suites here used them in the afternoon?”

Charles Wetherly was the soul of discretion. Or trying to be. He wouldn't name names.

“Oscar de la Renta?” I asked.

“I never had the honor of meeting Mr. de la Renta, ma'am. He was generous to his staff and his guests, putting them up here, but he never set foot in this hotel.”

“Donna Karan?”

“A lot of her models stay here during Fashion Week twice a year. But no, she doesn't use the hotel.”

We threw back as many names at him as he had listed to us, but none seemed to have used the Silver Needle for afternoon affairs.

Mike backed away from the bedroom without going in. He turned and walked over to the door on the opposite side of the room.

“Where does this lead?” Mike asked.

We both knew the answer. He was testing Wetherly.

“This suite, where Mr. Savage died, is 1008,” the manager said. “That door would open into 1009.”

Mike turned the knob with his gloved hand, but it didn't budge.

“They are individual units, detective. Mr. Savage liked to have the entire floor at his disposal. Twelve rooms. Two of them are one-bedroom suites, like this, and the rest are singles,” Wetherly said. “We're a small hotel. A sliver building, if you will.”

“I gotta say I'd be at a loss to know what a man would do with so many rooms, Mr. Wetherly,” Mike said. “My whole apartment would fit in that marble bathroom inside. And I like my women
one at a time, when I can even get that action going. Twelve bedrooms? That's a big slumber party.”

“I'm sure I can't give you a good reason either, Mr. Chapman. And I'm no more interested in your social life than I was in his,” Wetherly said, frowning at Mike's last remark. “Housekeeping said the other rooms on this floor were rarely disturbed, even on the occasions that Mr. Savage used this suite. They were dusted regularly and freshened up, but there was no sign of occupancy.”

“So what did you make of that?” I asked.

“I think Wolf Savage liked his privacy respected, Miss Cooper. He didn't want anyone else sharing the space with him. He told me that once when I tried to buy back two rooms at the end of this hallway for a week during the height of the fall buying season. He wouldn't hear of it, no matter how high the price the prospective guests offered.”

“By ‘the space' you mean the entire tenth floor?”

“Exactly. It was a luxury Mr. Savage could obviously afford.”

“Now, if I remember correctly,” Mike said, twisting the knob again, “this wasn't locked yesterday.”

“That's right, Detective,” Wetherly said.

“But Mr. Savage liked them all open, you said.”

“Entirely his decision, Mr. Chapman. Sometimes when he was entertaining in this suite, he locked the doors from inside here with his key card. Mr. Savage had a master card that worked on all the locks on this floor. Usually, they were open.”

“You responded when the housekeeper found the body, am I right?”

“With my head of security, yes, I did.”

“And the doors to the two adjacent rooms, were they locked, or unlocked?”

“I believe they were unlocked, Detective. Mr. Savage was here alone, as you know.”

Mike glanced at me. “I don't know, Wetherly. I can't think of any point in time I'd consider more private than when someone's about to end his life. Might have been a good moment for Savage to engage the locks, right? Make sure no one entered accidentally.”

“I'm not an investigator, sir. I don't know what someone in that position would be thinking,” Wetherly said. “I hope never to know.”