Likely to Die (3 page)

 “Using that term very loosely, kid. Body was like Swiss cheese—lost most of her blood. I’d bet she was unconscious when the killer left her. Could have been lying there for hours, then got a last spurt of oxygen good for a few gasps, which is what the guard heard. Doctors came running up from the ER and tried to hook her up to life support and get her into surgery to inflate the lung and size up the internal damage but she was too far gone for that. Nothing could have saved her. ‘Likely to die’ was a gross understatement of Dr. Dogen’s condition.”

 “ME give you a time the stabbing occurred?”

 “What do you think this is, the movies? After the autopsy, and after I interview the coworkers and friends and neighbors who tell me when they last saw Gemma and spoke with her, and after I tell the pathologist that I’ve narrowed the killer’s window of opportunity down to fifteen minutes on the day the good doctor disappeared, he’ll look me in the eye with great sincerity and give me exactly the time I just spoon-fed to him.”

 A single professional woman, no children, no pets, no one to depend on her for contact. I tried to push any personal comparisons out of my mind and concentrate on the facts Mike was feeding me, but I kept bringing up the image of my own corpse, lying behind a locked door on the eighth-floor corridor of the District Attorney’s Office, with people passing by it all day and nobody checking on whether anyone was inside. Was it possible?

 “You think she could have been in that room all day and not a soul knew about it or looked for her? That’s really gruesome.”

 “Alex, she had a schedule just like the one you try to keep. She’s lucky her right hand and left hand showed up in the operating room on the same day. She taught at the medical school, did surgery next door in the hospital, lectured all over the world, consulted in major cases wherever she was called in, and in her spare time had the government fly her over to war zones like Bosnia and Rwanda for trauma work, like for charity—and that’s just the stuff I can scan from the date book on top of her desk for the month of March.”

 “What was her schedule yesterday?”

 “I had the dean of the medical school check it out for us when I woke him up. Dogen had been out of town over the weekend and had been expected back in the city sometime on Monday. But she wasn’t due at the hospital until eight o’clock Tuesday morning—yesterday—when she had been invited to participate in a surgical procedure by a colleague. Everybody on the team had scrubbed and was in the OR, the patient was anesthetized and had his head shaved and was waiting—and they got this amphitheater where all the med students can watch—”

 “I know, it’s a very prestigious teaching hospital.”

 “Well, she just never showed up. The surgeon, Bob Spector, sent one of the nurses out to call. Got the answering machine, which was still playing the message that Dogen was out of town. Spector just picked out a couple of the young residents or attendings from the peanut gallery to work with him, bitched about Gemma and her overambitious schedule, and went right on drilling a hole through the middle of some guy’s cerebellum.”

 “That will teach me to call Laura more regularly and let her know my whereabouts,” I mumbled aloud. Too often I put myself “in the field,” while I raced from the Police Academy to a squad room to the rape crisis counseling unit at a hospital, squeezing in lunch with a girlfriend along the way. There were days when Laura, my secretary, had a hard time keeping up with me and figuring out where I was.

 “What are you daydreaming about, Blondie? If you’re missing too long the judge just tells somebody to check the dressing room in the lingerie department at Saks—probably find you strangled by whoever didn’t get to the sale items as fast as you did. Whoops—turn around and wave good-bye to McGraw.”

 The Chief was making his way back to the elevator, pausing long enough to call out to Chapman, “Show Miss Cooper around, Mike, then let her get on down to her office to get to work. I’m sure she’s got things to do today.”

 “Let’s go. Did you catch the question last night?”

 Mike was referring to the Final Jeopardy question on the quiz show to which both of us shared an addiction. “No, I was on my way to the Garden for the game.”

 “Gotcha, then. Category was transportation. How much would you have bet?”

 “Twenty bucks.” Our habit was passing ten dollars back and forth every few days, since we had different strengths and weaknesses, but this didn’t sound like too esoteric—or religious—a topic.

 “Okay, the answer is, the U.S. airport that handles the greatest volume of cargo in the country every day of the year.”

 Just my luck, a trick question. It couldn’t be O’Hare because that would be too obvious, and it specified cargo, not passengers. I was running all the major cities through my mind as we walked down the hall toward Dogen’s office.

 “Time’s up. Got a guess?”

 “Miami?” I asked tentatively, thinking of all the kilos of drugs that passed through there on a daily basis but knowing that the show’s creators weren’t apt to be banking on contraband.

 “Wrong, Miss Cooper. Would you believe Memphis? It’s where all the Federal Express planes go and get rerouted to whatever their final destination is. Interesting, huh? Pay up, kid.”

 “Why? Did you get it right?”

 “Nope. But that isn’t the issue inour bet, is it?”

 Mike knocked on the heavy wooden door with its elegant gold stenciled lettering that spelled out Dogen’s full name and title. Mercer Wallace swung it open and I reeled at the sight of the light blue carpet drenched in so much human blood. It was incredible that she could have had a single drop left in her veins, much less the strength to have tried to drag herself out of harm’s way as she obviously had. It was moments before I could look up, and it would be days before I could get that shade of deep scarlet out of my mind’s eye.

 3

 MERCER REACHED HIS HAND OUT TO STEERme around the stained portion of the floor and across Gemma Dogen’s office to the area near her desk. Raymond Peterson, the lieutenant in charge of the Homicide Squad and a thirty-year veteran of the force, was talking into his cell phone, his back to me as he stared out the window, which overlooked the East River and the shoreline of Queens. One of the guys from the Crime Scene Unit was still hunched over the open file drawers, rubber-gloved hands poring through folders to consider which surfaces he might dust for latent prints.

 The usually laconic Peterson was obviously agitated as he shouted into the telephone, “Bullshit. I don’t care how many guys you have to pull off that security detail or authorize for overtime. We need ‘em here to go through the garbage. Yeah, that’s exactly what I mean. Garbage. Whoever did this had to be covered with the deceased’s blood when he left this room. Not a pail goes outta here until it’s searched for clothing, weapons—”

 Chapman was shaking his head at Mercer and me. “Every container in this hospital has waste items covered with blood in it. It’s a medical center, not a nursery school. We’re never going to break the case that way.”

 “Gotta do it, man,” Mercer responded. “Probably be a huge loss of time and manpower, but you just can’t ignore it.”

 “Good morning, Loo,” I said to Peterson, calling him by the nickname used to address police lieutenants throughout the department. “Thanks for letting me in on this one.”

 He punched the end button on his phone, then turned and smiled in my direction. “Glad to have you here, Alex. These clowns think you might be able to help us shed some light on it.”

 I was grateful for Peterson’s acceptance. He and Chief McGraw were from the same era in their NYPD training—a time when females were not allowed to be either homicide detectives or prosecutors. They had both entered the Academy in 1965 when murder was considered men’s work only. Paul Battaglia had changed the face of our business a decade later when he opened the ranks to young women who were graduating from law schools in great numbers. The New York County District Attorney’s Office had grown to six hundred lawyers in the 1990s. Now half of the assistant D.A.s who handled every crime from petit larceny to first degree murder were women.

 “I gave Alex the broad strokes, boss. You got anything you want to ask her while we got her here?”

 “I’ll have a lot more for you after the autopsy, Alex. Sexual assault seems to be the motive. Doesn’t look like the place was ransacked for valuable property. Wallet’s still in the desk drawer. Right now we’re all assuming she was raped. The guy gagged her with a piece of cloth to keep her quiet—we got that over at the lab. Skirt, panty hose, underwear were removed. You think how long she lay around in here will make any difference in whether they find any, uh, well, things, that might link a killer to her?”

 “You mean like DNA evidence?” I asked.

 Chapman interrupted. “He means that the fact he decided to become a cop and not a priest still doesn’t make it any easier for him to talk about body functions and sexual organs. He’s Irish Catholic, Cooper, first and foremost. What are the chances that there’s gonna be semen in the doctor’s vagina and will it be useful to us? That’s the kind of stuff he really wants to know.”

 “Too many variables at this point. If the killer ejaculated, and if he did that in her vaginal vault or on her body, then I’d expect to find seminal fluid,” I started. “Unless your killer wore a condom. Believe it or not, now there are even rapists who carry condoms with them.”

 Chapman shook his head in disbelief as I went on. “I’m sure the medical team that attempted to save her was more interested in trying to revive her than in evidence collection, so there’s no way to know whether anyone even did an internal exam yet. The ME will do it during the autopsy anyway. Was she facedown or faceup?”

 “Facedown when the guard found her,” Mercer told me.

 “Well, if she was in here for hours, facedown is better.”

 “Why’s that?” Peterson asked.

 “Gravity, Loo. The semen is less likely to run out of her body that way. And the sooner she died after the assault, the smaller the chance her own body fluids would have participated in the deterioration of the sperm. So there may be something of value.

 “Next problem,” I went on, “is that somebody has to give us a clue about when the last time she had intercourse was. You could have intact semen from a lover or gentleman friend deposited a day or two ago. If your killer was dysfunctional or didn’t ejaculate, you may have a motive for him to get enraged and stab his victim, but the semen will be from an earlier encounter that was entirely consensual. Red herring. Mike, when you talk to the ME, make sure they do a pubic hair combing. That’s a possible for DNA, too.”

 “Here’s what we’ll do,” the lieutenant said. “There’s no point batting this around until we’ve got more specifics. Not just about this stuff, but the whole situation. The Chief’s setting this investigation up as a task force. He’s gonna give me detectives from a few other commands to work with the Squad; Mercer and some more guys from Special Victims because of the sexual assault angle.”

 “Where’s our base gonna be?” Mercer asked.

 “We’ll handle it out of an office in the 17th Precinct. Chapman, you’ll be going to the autopsy and dealing with the medical examiner, right?”

 Mike nodded and lifted his pad again to take some notes.

 “I also want you to sit down with someone from hospital administration. Get a complete breakdown and description of every one of these buildings—how they’re connected, what the access is, where every door and lock and guard is supposed to be, and where they actually are. I want a list of every employee in the medical center—doctors, nurses, students, technicians, messengers, bedpan cleaners. Every patient, ambulatory or not. Every name from that nuthouse psychiatric hospital next door—and I don’t want to hear any crap about ‘privileged information.’ They cooperate or they’ll all be in straitjackets by the time I get done with them.”

 Mercer also had his pen poised ready for his assignment.

 “Wallace, you start with the personal side. Find the ex, interview her neighbors and colleagues, get a picture of her habits and hangouts. Zotos will do this part of it with you. We need a location check—every other crime that’s occurred on premises here—and then move on to every other hospital in this city.”

 “Done, boss.”

 “After that, check with medical centers in Philly and Washington and Boston—see if anything like this has happened anyplace else. I’ll get somebody to supervise the garbage detail, and I’ll set up the tips hotline this afternoon. Alex, have your people check all your records for anything with a similar M.O. or connected to a medical setting.”

 “We’ll start on it right away. I’d also like to have a look at Dr. Dogen’s apartment if I can. I don’t mean for evidence—Mercer can do that. But when he’s finished, I’d like to go back with him once. It always helps me to get to know the victim, to get a sense of her life.” In murder cases, unlike rapes, there was no survivor for me to work with, no way to get inside the spirit that was destroyed by death. And if there was no family member to entrust that being, that life, to me for the purpose of the investigation there was no other way to come to know it.

 “No problem, boss. I’ll have the apartment processed today, then we can go back with Cooper whenever she’d like.”

 “Okay, Mercer. But be sure and have it sealed up—I don’t want any relatives or friends taking anything out of there until we know the lay of the land.”

 “What do you say we all meet at the end of the day and see what we got?” Chapman asked of Peterson.

 “Exactly. Be back at the 17th Precinct station house at seven o’clock. I’m sure the Chief will want a briefing on the situation, so come prepared. You, too, Alex.”

 I thanked him again and followed Mike around the perimeter of the soiled carpet toward the door. As I looked down to avoid stepping on Gemma’s deadly trail, my eye caught on a thick blotch of deep red color that almost looked like an intentional design set against the pale blue dhurrie. It was even and clear, quite a contrast to the ragged discoloration that marked the rest of the deceased’s path from the point at which the assault had started.