“If there’s a table available, I’d like you to bring out my unidentified case from yesterday. I want to repeat the external exam.”
Vinnie didn’t respond.
“Did you hear me?” Laurie questioned with a hint of pique. She was now certain he was not acting like himself. He was even avoiding eye contact.
“I heard you,” Vinnie said. “When there’s a table available, I’ll bring it out.”
“On three,” Laurie said, holding the floater’s ankles. She then counted, and together they shifted the corpse off the table and onto the gurney. She then walked away without another comment.
Laurie stopped by Jack’s table on her way out. “It looks like you’ve got a child,” Laurie said. She hung back and avoided looking directly at the preteen girl’s face. Children, particularly infants, were always difficult for Laurie, despite her active attempt to be professional and to keep emotion from her work.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack said. “And a rather heartbreaking case as well, so to speak. Do you want to hear?”
“I suppose,” Laurie said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Jack picked up the child’s heart from a tray and opened the edges of a slice he’d made to view a porcine aortic valve replacement. “A suture became loose after the initially successful replacement and got tangled in the valve. One suture out of a hundred! It’s a tragedy for everybody: the surgeon, the parents, but of course, mostly for the child.”
“I hope that surgeon can learn from his or her mistake.”
“That’s the hope,” Jack said. “He’s certainly going to hear about it. Are you off to work on yesterday’s case?”
“I am,” Laurie said.
“Good luck!”
“Thanks for not pushing me earlier to explain myself.”
“You’re welcome. But I’m getting awfully curious and want to hear about what you’ve got by the end of today. I’m assuming your watching the security tapes last night was a lot more fruitful than I had imagined.”
“They were interesting,” Laurie teased. “On another subject, Vinnie is not acting at all like himself today.”
“Really? That sounds very unlike Vinnie. I did notice he called me Dr. Stapleton when I stopped at your table. It’s usually something a lot more derisive.”
“Maybe it’s me, as I did deliberately hijack him this morning. But I did give him the option to wait and work with you.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Jack said as Laurie moved on.
Laurie removed her Tyvek coveralls in the locker room and disposed of them before heading upstairs in her scrubs. The first stop was Sergeant Murphy’s office, where she turned over the information she had involving the pickpocket episode seen on the security tape. Then she asked about John Doe.
“I haven’t heard a damn thing about your case from yesterday,” the sergeant confessed. “But I expect to hear something today. If I don’t, I’ll give Missing Persons a call myself. If they’d received any calls about a missing Asian male, they would have let me know.”
Laurie thanked the sergeant before climbing a flight of stairs and dropping in on Hank Monroe, the director of identification in the anthropology department. Laurie knocked on the closed door. It seemed that Hank, in contrast to most everyone else, preferred his privacy.
Hank Monroe was no more help than Sergeant Murphy had been, saying that the Missing Persons Squad had admitted they had yet to run the victim’s fingerprints on any local database, much less on the state or federal level. “As I believe I told you yesterday, they usually wait at least twenty-four hours or so, because the vast number of cases are solved by someone calling in within that time period. But as soon as I hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
From the director of identification’s office, Laurie went up to toxicology and stopped in to see John DeVries. “So far the screen for drugs, poisons, or toxins has shown absolutely nothing,” John said with an apologetic tone. “I’m sorry. You did get the essentially negative blood alcohol, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Laurie said. “And I appreciate you making the effort to do it so quickly.”
“We’re happy to help,” John said in his new persona. “But I want to emphasize that just because the toxicology screen is so far negative, it doesn’t necessarily mean there is none present. With some of the more potent agents, so little is needed to kill someone that the only way to identify it is to look for it specifically. What I’m trying to suggest is that if you have any reason to suspect a specific agent, you have to tell us, and we’ll specially look for it. Even then we can’t guarantee success, even with the trick of running the sample through the mass spec twice.”
“I understand,” Laurie said, and she did. She had been involved in several poisonings over the years. One had involved finding the agent at the crime scene, the other by discovering evidence that the perpetrator had purchased the material. But in her current case, neither of those opportunities was available.
“We’re not totally finished,” John added. “If we find something, I’ll be sure to give you a call.”
Next Laurie went down to the fourth floor and entered the histology lab, bracing herself for Maureen O’Conner’s invariable humor. She was not disappointed, nor was she disappointed about getting her slides overnight. As usual, Maureen came through with both.
Descending yet another floor, Laurie entered her office, eager to get to work. In order not to be bothered, she shut her door, which she rarely did. Next she deposited the tray of histology slides next to her microscope and turned on her monitor.
Her final act of preparing to get to work was to take out her cell phone and give Leticia a call. She actually felt proud of the fact that she’d resisted calling until almost ten. She thought it showed marked restraint, at least in comparison to the previous day. Leticia agreed.
“I’m surprised you didn’t call earlier,” Leticia said teasingly when she first answered.
“I’m surprised myself. How are things going?”
“Couldn’t be better. We’re staying in this morning, then going out to the park this afternoon. The sun is supposed to come out after noon.”
“Sounds like a plan,” Laurie said. While she had been talking to Leticia, she’d gotten out the photo she’d made from the security tapes and compared it to the photo in the new case file. It seemed that there was a definite resemblance between the man she’d just autopsied and one of the men in the photo. Actually, more than she expected.
After hanging up with Leticia, Laurie got the two security disks out of her bag and slipped the first into the DVD drawer. Then she put the photograph of the floater next to the monitor to make it easy to compare. With her mouse, she advanced the DVD to the appropriate time and pressed play.
The image was from camera five, and the timing was that of the victim rushing down the stairs to the subway platform. Within seconds, the two pursuing men appeared at the top of the stairs. At that point, Laurie stopped the action and then moved it forward frame by frame. As the action advanced and the men became larger and larger, Laurie alternately got a good view of first one and then the other. Although the two men resembled each other in terms of size and dress, one had a more or less full, oval face, while the other’s was lean and narrow. Of course, the more obvious difference was that the thinner man was carrying an umbrella, while the full-faced one was not.
Laurie advanced the frames until she had the best view of the full-faced man, as it was clear the man she’d just autopsied also had a full, oval face. At that point, with the security tape halted, she picked up the photo of the tattooed gentleman in the cooler and put them side by side.
For several minutes Laurie stared alternately at the photo and the image on her monitor. In a sense, she was disappointed. From the initial comparison using the photo she’d made at home and the photo taken at OCME, she’d been optimistic and had counted on the identification being easy: It was going to be either a yes or a no. She hadn’t expected a maybe, which seemed to be the situation. It was close. Alternately she looked at photos and then at the monitor image, again advancing the monitor image a frame at a time.