With the hair curler “autopsied” on her desk, Laurie got out her camera and arranged the pieces to show the aberrant connection. Then she stood up to shoot directly down. As she peered through the viewfinder, Laurie felt pleased about the case. She couldn’t suppress a modest smile, knowing how different her work was from what people surmised. She’d not only solved the mystery of the poor woman’s untimely death, but had potentially saved someone else from the same fate as well.
Before Laurie could take the photo of the curler, her phone rang. Because of the degree of her concentration, the ringing startled her. With thinly veiled irritation, she answered. It was the operator asking Laurie if she would mind taking a call from a doctor phoning from the Manhattan General Hospital. She added that he’d requested to talk with the chief.
“Then why put him through to me?” Laurie demanded.
“The chief is tied up in the autopsy room, and I can’t find Dr. Washington. Someone said he’s out talking with the reporters. So I just started ringing the other doctors’ numbers. You were the first to answer.”
“Put him on,” Laurie said with resignation. She sank back into her desk chair. She was quite confident it would be a short conversation. If someone wanted to talk with the chief, they certainly would not be satisfied talking to the lowest person in the hierarchy.
After the call had been put through, Laurie introduced herself. She emphasized that she was one of the associate medical examiners and not the chief.
“I’m Dr. Murray,” the caller said. “I’m a senior medical resident. I need to talk to someone about a drug overdose/toxicity DOA that came in this morning.”
“What is it that you’d like to know?” Laurie asked. Drug deaths were a daily phenomenon at the M.E. office. Her attention partially switched back to the hair curler. She had a better idea for the photograph.
“The patient’s name was Duncan Andrews,” Dr. Murray said. “He was a thirty-five-year-old Caucasian male. He arrived with no cardiac activity, no spontaneous respiration, and with a core body temperature that we recorded at one hundred eight degrees.”
“Uh huh,” Laurie said equably. Holding the phone in the crook of her neck, she rearranged the pieces of the hair curler.
“There was massive evidence of seizure activity,” Dr. Murray said. “So we ran an EEG. It was flat. The lab reported a serum cocaine level of 20 micrograms per milliliter.”
“Wow!” Laurie said with a short laugh of amazement. Dr. Murray had caught her attention. “That’s one hell of a high level. What was the route of administration, oral? Was he one of those “mules’ who try to smuggle the stuff by swallowing condoms filled with cocaine?”
“Hardly,” Dr. Murray said with a short laugh of his own. “This guy was some kind of Wall Street whiz kid. No, it wasn’t oral. It was IV.”
Laurie swallowed as she struggled to keep old, unwanted memories submerged. Her throat had suddenly gone dry. “Was heroin involved as well?” she asked. In the sixties a mixture of heroin and cocaine called “speedball” had been popular.
“No heroin,” Dr. Murray said. “Only cocaine, but obviously a walloping dose. If his temperature was one hundred eight when we took it, God only knows how high it had been.”
“Well, it sounds pretty straightforward,” Laurie said. “What’s the question? If you’re wondering if it’s a medical examiner case, I can tell you that it is.”
“No, we know it is an M.E. case,” Dr. Murray said. “That’s not the problem. It’s more complicated than that. The fellow was found by his girlfriend who came in with him. But then his family came in as well. And I have to tell you, his family is connected, if you know what I mean. Anyway, the nurses found that Mr. Duncan Andrews had an organ-donor card in his wallet, and they called the organ-donor coordinator. Without knowing that the case was an M.E. case, the organ-donor coordinator asked the family if they would permit harvesting the eyes since that was the only tissue besides bone that might still be usable. You understand that we don’t pay much attention to organ-donor cards unless the family agrees. But this family agreed. They told us that they definitely wanted to respect the decedent’s wishes. Personally, I think it has something to do with their wanting to believe their son died of natural causes. But, be that as it may, we wanted to check with you people as a matter of policy before we did anything.”
“The family truly agreed?” Laurie asked.
“I’m telling you, they were emphatic,” Dr. Murray said. “According to the girlfriend, she and the decedent had talked about the problem of the lack of transplant organs on several occasions and had gone together to the Manhattan Organ Repository to sign up in response to the Repository’s TV appeal last year.”
“Mr. Duncan Andrews must have given himself some dose of cocaine,” Laurie said. “Was there any suicide note?”
“No suicide note,” Dr. Murray said. “Nor was the man depressed, at least according to the girlfriend.”
“This sounds like a rather unique circumstance,” Laurie said. “I personally don’t think honoring the family’s request would affect the autopsy. But I’m not authorized to make such a policy decision. What I can do is find out for you from the powers-that-be and call you back immediately.”
“I’d appreciate it,” Dr. Murray said. “If we’re going to do something, we have to do it sooner rather than later.”
Laurie hung up the phone, and with a degree of reluctance, left her disassembled hair curler, and returned to the morgue. Without donning the usual layers, she stuck her head through the door. Immediately she could see that Bingham had departed.
“The chief left you to carry on by yourself?” Laurie called out to Paul.
Paul turned to face her. “Thank God for small favors,” Paul said, his voice slightly muffled by his mask. “Luckily he had to get upstairs to the news conference he’s scheduled. I suppose he thinks I’m capable of sewing up the body.”
“Come on, Paul,” Laurie said by way of encouragement. “Remember Bingham treats everyone like an incompetent at the autopsy table.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind,” Paul said without conviction.
Laurie let the door close. She used the stairs at the far end of the morgue to go up to the first floor. There was no sense waiting for the elevator for a single flight.
The first-floor corridor was crowded with media people, and it was all Laurie could do to get to the double doors leading into the conference room. Over the heads of the reporters she could see Bingham’s shiny bald pate reflecting the harsh lighting set up for the TV cameras. He was taking questions from the floor and perspiring copiously. Laurie knew instantly that there was no way she’d be able to discuss Manhattan General’s problem with him.
Standing on her toes, Laurie scanned the crowded room for Dr. Calvin Washington, the Deputy Chief Medical Examiner. As a six-foot-seven, two-hundred-and-fifty-pound black man, he was usually easy to pick out of a crowd. Laurie finally spotted him standing near the door that led from the conference room into the chief’s office.
By going out into the main reception area, then cutting through the chief’s office, Laurie was able to approach Calvin from behind. When she reached him, she hesitated. Dr. Washington had a stormy temperament. Between his physique and his moods, he intimidated most people, including Laurie.