Likely to Die (2 page)

 “Like what kind of questions, Mike?”

 “Like can you tell if she was raped before she was killed or after? Like does establishing the time of death have anything to do with the speed at which the sperm deteriorates, because of interference from her body fluids?”

 “Now you’re talking my language. Of course he’ll let me keep a case like that. What do you need from me?”

 “I think you’ll want to get down here as soon as you can. Have your video guys meet us, too. The Crime Scene Unit has already processed the room and taken photos, but they had to move really fast. I’m just worried we all may have overlooked something that might turn out to be important, so I’d like your crew to go over the whole area and record it. Once the story breaks, the place’ll be crawling with press and we won’t be able to preserve it.”

 “Back up, Mike, and start at the top. Where are you?”

 “Mid-Manhattan Medical Center. Sixth floor of the Minuit Building.” East Forty-eighth Street, right off the FDR Drive. The oldest and largest medical compound in the city. The victim must have been transported there for an attempt at treatment after she was found.

 “Well, where shall I meet you? Where’s the scene?”

 “I just told you. The sixth floor at Mid-Manhattan.”

 “You mean the victim was killed in the hospital?”

 “Raped and killed in the hospital. Big wheel. Head of the neurosurgery department at the medical college, brain surgeon, professor. Name’s Gemma Dogen.”

 After ten years at my job, there were very few things that surprised me, but this news was shocking.

 I had always thought of hospitals as sanctuaries, places for healing the sick and wounded, comforting and easing the days of the terminally ill. I had been in and out of Mid-Manhattan countless times, visiting witnesses as well as training medical personnel in the treatment of sexual assault survivors. Its original red-brick buildings, almost a century old, had been restored to recapture the look of the antiquated sanitarium, and generous patrons of more recent times had lent their family names to a handful of granite skyscrapers that housed the latest in medical technology and a superb teaching facility—the Minuit Medical College.

 The familiar knots that tied and untied themselves in my stomach whenever I received news of a senseless crime and a sacrificed human existence took over control from the pounding noise inside my head. I began to conjure mental images of Dr. Dogen, and scores of questions—about her life and death, her career and family, her friends and enemies—followed each other into my mind before I could form the words with my mouth.

 “When did it happen, Mike? And how—”

 “Sometime in the last fifteen to twenty hours—I’ll fill you in when you get here. We got the call just after midnight. Stabbed six times. Collapsed a lung, must have hit a couple of major organs. The killer left her for dead, soaked in blood, but she actually held on for a bit. We got her as a ‘likely to die.’ And she did, before we got anywhere near the hospital.”

 Likely to die. An unfortunate name for a category of cases handled by Manhattan’s elite homicide squad. Victims whose condition is so extreme when police officers reach the crime scene that no matter what herculean efforts are undertaken by medics and clerics, the next stop for these bodies is undoubtedly the morgue.

 Stop wasting time, I chided myself. You’ll know more than you ever wanted to know about all of this after a few hours with Chapman and Wallace.

 “I can be there in less than forty-five minutes.”

 I got out of bed and closed the window, raising the Duette shade to look out from my apartment on the twentieth floor of an Upper East Side high-rise across the city as it began to come awake on this gray and grisly day. I have always enjoyed the crisp chill of autumn, leading as it does into the winter holiday season and the snowy blankets of January and February. My favorite months are April and May, when the city parks blossom with the green buds of springtime and the promise of warmer days of summer. So as I scanned the horizon and saw only a bleak and cheerless palette, I figured that Gemma Dogen might also have scoffed at the great poets and agreed with my personal view that March, in fact, is the cruelest month.

 2

 SORRY, MA’AM, THERE’S NO PARKING INfront of the hospital.“

 The uniformed cop was waving me away from the curb as I pulled in shortly before 7A.M. , so I rolled down the window of my brand-new Grand Cherokee to explain my purpose and knock ten minutes off my arrival time by avoiding the multistory underground parking lot which was two blocks farther south.

 Before I could speak, a gruff voice barked out at the young recruit and my head snapped around to see Chief McGraw slamming the door of his unmarked car. “Let her be, officer. Unless you want to find yourself walking a beat on Staten Island. Pull it in behind my driver, Alex, and stick your plate in the windshield. I assume we’re headed for the same place.”

 Dammit. Danny McGraw was no happier to see me heading for a murder scene than I was to see him. Once police brass were on the location, they liked to tighten their control of the circumstances and not yield to direction from prosecutors. He’d probably berate Chapman for getting to me so early, preferring that we not learn about cases like this one until he had a complete opportunity to brief the Commissioner. I fished my laminated NYPD vehicle identification placard out of my tote and wedged it above the steering wheel facing out, announcing my presence as official police business. The numbered tags were harder to get than winning lottery tickets, and most of my fellow bureau chiefs considered them the best perk of our job.

 I stepped out of the Jeep into a puddle of filthy slush and hustled to catch up with McGraw so that I could follow him through security and up to meet the detectives. The square badgers—cop slang for unarmed guards who stood watch at hospitals and department stores, movie theaters, and ball games—looked more alert than usual this morning, and were themselves flanked by real police at each information booth and elevator bank. Everyone we passed recognized the Chief of Detectives and greeted him formally as we strode quickly down the enormous central corridor of the medical center, through four sets of swinging double doors, until we were led by a detective I had never met before into the hallway marked Minuit Medical College.

 McGraw was moving at twice his usual speed, which I guessed—from his repeated glances at the two-and-a-half-inch heels I was wearing—was an effort to leave me behind in his wake, so he’d have a few minutes alone with his lead detectives before I got my nose into things. But his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit was no match for the aerobics of my regular ballet lessons, and the Chief was so short of breath when we reached the med school elevators that I was tempted to suggest he stop off at cardiology on our way up to the neurosurgery department. Like a lot of his colleagues, McGraw didn’t remember that Ginger Rogers did all the same things Fred Astaire did in those great old movies—except that she did them going backwardand wearing heels the height of mine.

 When the doors opened, the three of us got on and I pressed six. I tried to chat up the young detective and give his boss a chance to recover, but he was stone-faced and uninterested in offering any information while McGraw was in earshot. It was a relief to reach the floor and see the familiar faces of the Homicide Squad’s B team, one of the four units into which its workers were divided, gathered in the lounge. Shirt sleeves rolled up, fresh steno pads with notes scribbled on them in every hand, coffee cups scattered on each table surface, and bodies storing adrenaline to pump them through the days and nights that would inevitably follow—barring some lucky break in the case that might solve it sooner.

 My arrival prompted a range of reactions from the guys. A few friendly salutations by name from those who were pals of mine or had worked other cases with me, a couple of grunts accompanied by “Hello, Counselor,” from those who were indifferent to my participation, and two who ignored me altogether.

 McGraw’s robot whispered something into his ear and the pair continued on past the lounge to a door halfway down the hall, after the Chief signaled me to wait for him out here. George Zotos, a detective whose work I had respected for years, chuckled as he walked over to talk with me. “Chapman’s gonna have trouble sitting down when McGraw gets through with him. Last thing he wants here at this hour is a D.A.—and a dame, no less. The Commissioner’s been at a conference in Puerto Rico and is flying back ‘cause of this. Chief’s got to meet him at Kennedy at noon with every fact in hand, and preferably with a killer ID’d. Sit down, have some coffee, and I’ll go get Mike for you. He’ll bring you up to speed.”

 He offered me his own brew, light with three sugars. I screwed up my nose at the sweet smell and asked if there were any containers of black around. George pointed to the cardboard box with half a dozen unopened cups in it and I found one with a B penciled on the lid, which was lukewarm but strong enough to get me started.

 By the time McGraw let Chapman out of the room to find me, I had slugged down two of the cups, thumbed through the morning tabloids that had been left on a couch in the corner, and rehashed the basketball game with several of the men. I learned that the room the Chief had been taken to was the office of the deceased, where she had been slaughtered and left for dead, although she had not been found until many hours later. There were no obvious suspects and no easy leads, no trail of bloody footsteps heading to the laboratory of a mad scientist with a homicidal streak. This team was settling in for the long, tedious professional job that each of them loved, with assists to follow from the forensic crews in the medical examiner’s office and the criminalists who would pore over every fiber and substance placed in their steady hands.

 “Whew, Blondie,” we could all hear Chapman exclaim as he started back up the hallway to the lounge, “the sight of you first thing in the morning turned that man into a beast. There’s no accounting for taste, huh?”

 Chapman was in his element. While I would spend parts of every day wallowing in the emotional aspects of this woman’s loss and wondering who would miss and mourn for her, Mike was ready for the chase. He liked working the murders because he didn’t have a breathing victim to worry about—while aiding the recovery process of such a victim was the feature I valued most about dealing with survivors of sexual assault. It was so much more rewarding than homicide cases, where all we could hope to do was avenge the death of the deceased by caging up a killer who would spend his empty days testing the weaknesses of the system. Without any means of restoring the human life that had been lost, there could be no such thing as justice.

 I watched Mike walk toward us, pleased that whatever McGraw had said to him had not wiped that trademark grin off his face. His shock of black hair was uncharacteristically messy, a sign that what he had seen during the night had disturbed him. I knew, even though he wasn’t aware of it himself, that he ran his fingers through his hair constantly when something upset him more than usual. His navy blazer and jeans, the dress style he had adopted while at Fordham College fifteen years earlier, were the equivalent of a uniform for Chapman and set him apart from most of the brown- and gray-suited members of the elite Homicide Squad.

 “Let’s sit over in that corner so I can tell you what I got here,” he gestured to me, hoping for a bit of privacy within the open area of the lounge. “D’you hear any news this morning? This break on the air yet?”

 “I had WINS on the radio on my way over here. Not a thing. The garbage strike and union negotiations are still the lead story. Followed by the price tag on Princess Di’s latest gift from that Saudi prince.”

 “That’ll give us a few hours. You get video?”

 “Sure. Bannion will be here himself to do it.” I had called the head of our technical unit at home to make certain we’d get the best job done. “He promised to be here by eight.”

 “Here’s what we got. Gemma Dogen—female, Caucasian.” Mike was flipping his steno pad to the front page, but didn’t need to look at his notes for the basics. “Fifty-eight years old, but I gotta tell you,” Chapman editorializing now, “that was a good-looking old lady—”

 “Fifty-eight isn’t exactly old, Mikey.”

 “Well, she was no cupcake, kid. When I think sex crime, I think a young, attractive woman who gets—”

 “That’s one of your problems: you think with your own personal, private parts. And they’re probably no bigger than your brain.” Rape cases, especially when the assailant is a stranger, rarely have anything to do with sexual acts as we know them in consensual settings. It’s a hideously violent crime in which sex is the weapon chosen by the offender to control, degrade, and humiliate his victim. Mike knew all of that as well as I did.

 “Anyway, she was a very fit, very strong fifty-eight-year-old who put up a good struggle. Medical doctor. Divorced, no kids.”

 “Who’s the ex and where is he?”

 “As soon as somebody tells me, I’ll let you know. I’ve only been on this a few hours more than you and we didn’t get a lot of help in the middle of the night. Most of her colleagues and the staff have just started coming into the building during the past hour so I expect to get some more answers soon.”

 I nodded as Mike went on talking. “From the scene in her office, the personal side looks pretty sterile. No family photos, no dog or cat snapshots, no handmade needlepoint pillows with cute proverbs and initials. Just rows of textbooks, dozens of file drawers with X rays and medical records, about thirty plastic models of the brain—and what used to be a fairly attractive Oriental rug that’s now bathed in blood.”

 “Who found her?”

 “Night watchman was going around just before twelve, last check of the floor. He’d been through that corridor twice earlier and heard nothing. This time, he said there was a moaning sound. He’s got a master key, opened Dr. Dogen’s door, and called 911, right after he threw up—fortunately for the guys from Crime Scene, in the hallway.”

 “She was still alive?”