“I’m Robert Nussman. I was Julia’s boyfriend.”
“I don’t mean to be a bother,” Laurie said, moving to leave. “I can come back at another time.” She did not want Bingham to get wind of this.
“No, it’s all right,” Robert said, holding up a hand. “Please stay. I’ll only be here a moment.”
“Terrible tragedy,” Laurie said. She felt the need to say something.
“Tell me about it,” Robert said. He suddenly looked very sad. He also acted as if he needed to talk.
“Did you know she took drugs?” Laurie asked.
“She didn’t,” he said. “I know that’s what you people say,” he added as his face flushed, “but I’m telling you, Julia never did drugs. It just wasn’t in her nature. She was totally into health. She got me into running.” He smiled at the memory. “Last spring she had me do my first triathlon. I just can’t figure it. My God, she didn’t even drink.”
“I’m sorry,” Laurie said.
“She was so gifted,” Robert said wistfully. “So strong-willed, so committed. She cared about people. She was religious: not overly, but enough. And she was involved in everything, like pro choice, the homeless, AIDS, you name it.”
“I understand you identified her here at the scene,” Laurie said. “Were you the one who found her?”
“Yes,” Robert managed. He looked away, struggling with tears.
“It must have been awful,” Laurie said. Memories of finding her brother crowded in with graphic intensity. She did her best to dismiss them. “Where was she when you came in?”
Robert pointed toward the bedroom.
“Was she still alive at that point?” Laurie asked gently.
“Sort of,” Robert said. “She was breathing off and on. I gave her CPR until the ambulance got here.”
“How did you happen to come by?” Laurie asked.
“She’d called me earlier,” Robert said. “She said to be sure to come over later on.”
“Was that customary?” Laurie asked.
Robert looked puzzled. “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess.”
“Did she sound normal?” Laurie asked. “Could you tell if she’d taken any drugs yet?”
“I don’t think she’d taken anything,” Robert said. “She didn’t sound high. But I guess she didn’t seem normal either. She sounded tense. In fact, I was a little afraid she was planning on telling me something bad, like she wanted to break up or something.”
“Was there some problem in your relationship?” Laurie asked.
“No,” Robert said. “Things were great. I mean, I thought they were great. It’s just that she sounded a little funny.”
“What about that broken statue by the front door?”
“I saw that the second I came through the door last night,” Robert said. “It was her favorite possession. It was a couple of hundred years old. When I saw it was broken, I knew something bad was going on.”
Laurie glanced over at the shattered statue and wondered if Julia could have broken it while in the throes of a seizure. If so, how did she get from the foyer to the bedroom?
“Thank you for your help,” Laurie said. “I hope I haven’t upset you with my questions.”
“No,” Robert said. “But why are you going to all this trouble? I thought medical examiners just did autopsies and only got involved with murders, like Quincy.”
“We try to help the living,” Laurie said. “That’s our job. What I’d really like to do is prevent future tragedies like Julia’s. The more I learn, the more I may be able to do that.”
“If you have any more questions, call me,” Robert said. He handed Laurie his card. “And if it somehow turns out that it wasn’t drugs, please let me know. It would be important because . . .” Suddenly overcome with emotion, he wasn’t able to continue.
Laurie nodded. She gave Robert her own business card after scribbling her home phone number on the back. “If you have any questions for me or if you think of anything I should know, please give me a call. You can call anytime.”
Leaving Robert to grieve in private, Laurie left the apartment and boarded the elevator. As she was riding down, she recalled that Sara Wetherbee had said that Duncan had invited her over the night he’d overdosed. Laurie thought both Duncan’s and Julia’s invitations to their significant others were odd. If both were doing such a good job hiding their drug abuse, why invite someone over the very night they were indulging?
Laurie returned the key to Patrick the doorman and thanked him on her way out. She was a half dozen steps from the door when she turned around and went back.
“Were you on duty last night?” Laurie asked him.
“Indeed I was,” Patrick said. “Three to eleven. That’s my shift.”
“Did you happen to see Julia Myerholtz yesterday evening?” Laurie asked.
“I did,” Patrick said. “I’d see her most every evening.”
“I suppose you’ve heard what happened to her,” Laurie said. She didn’t want to offer any information the doorman might not be privy to.
“I have,” Patrick said. “She took drugs like a lot of young people. It’s a shame.”
“Did she seem depressed when she came in last night?” Laurie asked.
“I wouldn’t say depressed,” Patrick said. “But she didn’t act normal.”
“In what way?” Laurie asked.
“She didn’t say hello,” Patrick said. “She always said hello except for last night. But maybe that was because she wasn’t alone.”
“Do you remember who was with her?” Laurie questioned with interest.
“I do,” Patrick said. “Normally I can’t remember things like that since we have a lot of traffic going in and out. But since Ms. Myerholtz hadn’t said hello, I looked at her companions.”
“Did you recognize them?” Laurie said. “Had they been here before?”
“I didn’t know who they were,” Patrick said. “And I don’t think I’d ever seen them. One was tall, thin, and well dressed. The other was muscular and on the short side. No one said anything when they came in.”
“Did you see them when they went out?” Laurie asked.
“No, I didn’t,” Patrick said. “They must have left during my break.”
“What time did they come in?” Laurie asked.
“Early evening,” Patrick said. “Something like seven o’clock.”
Laurie thanked Patrick yet again and hailed a cab to return to her office. It was almost dusk. The skyscrapers were already lit and people were hurrying home from work. As the cab headed downtown in the heavy traffic, she thought about her conversations with the boyfriend and the doorman. She wondered about the two men Patrick had described. Although they were probably co-workers or friends of Julia’s, the fact that they had visited the same night that Julia overdosed made them important. Laurie wished there was some way she could find out their identities so she could talk with them. The thought even went through her mind that they could have been drug dealers. Could Julia Myerholtz have had a secret life her boyfriend wasn’t privy to?
Back at the medical examiner’s building, Laurie went first to George’s office to see if he’d returned from the dentist. Obviously he had come and gone; his office was dark.
Disappointed, Laurie tried the door, but it was locked. Not being able to talk with George, she’d had the sudden idea to get the address of the other overdose, Wendell Morrison.
Leaving her coat in her room and picking up some rubber gloves, Laurie went down to the morgue. She found the evening mortuary tech, Bruce Pomowski, in the mortuary office.
“Any idea of the dispensation of the Myerholtz remains?” Laurie asked. “Have they been picked up?”
“Was she one of today’s cases?” Bruce asked.
“Yes,” Laurie said.
Bruce opened a thick ledger and ran a finger down the day’s entries. When he got to Myerholtz, his finger ran across the page. “Hasn’t been picked up yet,” he said. “We’re wa
iting on a call from an out-of-town funeral home.”
“Is she in the walk-in?” Laurie asked.
“Yup,” Bruce said. “Should be on a gurney near the front.”
Laurie thanked him and walked down the corridor toward the walk-in refrigerator. In the evenings the environment of the morgue changed considerably. During the day it was full of frantic activity. But now as Laurie walked she could hear the heels of her shoes echo through the deserted and mostly dark, blue-tiled corridors. All at once she remembered Lou’s response when they’d come down Tuesday morning. He’d called it a grisly scene.
Laurie stopped and looked down at the stained cement floor that Lou had pointed out. Then she raised her eyes to the stacks of pine coffins destined for Potter’s Field with unclaimed, unidentified remains. She started walking again. It was amazing how her normal mental state shielded the ghastly side of the morgue from her consciousness. It took a stranger like Lou and a time when the morgue was empty of the living for her to appreciate it.
Reaching the large, cumbersome stainless-steel door of the walk-in, Laurie put on her gloves and pressed the thick handle to release the latch. With a hefty yank she pulled the heavy door open. A cold, clammy mist swirled out around her feet. Reaching in, she turned on the light.
Reacting to her mind-set of only moments earlier, Laurie viewed the interior of the walk-in cooler from the perspective of a nonprofessional person, not the forensic pathologist she was. It was definitely horrifying. Bare wooden shelves lined the walls. On the shelves was a ghoulish collection of cold, dead bodies and body parts that having been autopsied and examined were waiting to be claimed. Most were nude, although a few were covered with sheets stained with blood and other body fluids. It was like an earthly view of hell.
The center of the room was crowded with old gurneys, each bearing a separate body. Again, some were covered, others naked and blankly staring up at the ceiling like some sort of macabre dormitory.
Feeling uncharacteristically squeamish, Laurie stepped over the threshold, her eyes nervously darting around the gurneys to locate Julia Myerholtz. Behind her the heavy door slammed shut with a loud click.
Irrationally, Laurie spun around and rushed back to the door, fearful that she’d been locked into the cooler. But the latch responded to her push and the door swung open on its bulky hinges.
Embarrassed at her own imagination, Laurie turned back into the refrigerator and began methodically going through the bodies on the gurneys. For identification purposes each body had a manila name tag tied around the right big toe. She found Julia not far from the doorway. Her body was one of those that had been covered.
Stepping up to the head, Laurie drew down the sheet. She gazed at the woman’s pallid skin and her delicate features. Judging by her appearance alone, if she hadn’t been so pale, she could have been sleeping. But the rude, Y-shaped autopsy incision dispelled any hope that she might still be alive.
Looking more closely, Laurie saw multiple bruised areas on Julia’s head, an indication of her probable seizure activity. In her mind’s eye Laurie could see the woman bumping up against her statue of David and knocking it to the floor. Opening up Julia’s mouth, Laurie looked at the tongue, which had not been removed. She could see that it had been bitten severely: more evidence of seizure activity.
Next Laurie looked for the IV site where Julia had injected herself. She found it as easily as she had the others. She also noticed that Julia had scratched her arms the way Duncan Andrews had done. She had probably experienced similar hallucinations. But Laurie noticed Julia’s scratches were deeper, almost as if they had been done with knives.
Looking at Julia’s carefully manicured nails, Laurie could see why the scratches were so deep. Julia’s nails were long and immaculately polished. While she was admiring the woman’s nails, Laurie noted a bit of tissue wedged beneath the nail of the right middle finger.
After finding no other tissue under any of the other nails, Laurie went to the autopsy room for two specimen jars and a scalpel. Returning to Julia’s side, she teased a bit of tissue free and put it into one of the specimen jars. Using the scalpel, she sliced a small sliver of skin from the margin of the autopsy wound and slipped it into the other specimen jar.
After covering Julia’s body with the sheet, Laurie took the two samples up to the DNA lab, where she labeled them and signed them in. On the request form she asked for a match. Even though it was fairly obvious the woman had scratched herself, Laurie thought it was worth checking. Just because the M.E.’s office was overworked was no reason not to be thorough. Still, she was relieved that it was evening and the lab was empty. She wouldn’t have wanted to explain the need for this test.
Laurie walked back to her office. With everyone else gone, she thought she might take advantage of the quiet and turn her attention to some of that paperwork she’d been so studiously neglecting.
Still feeling slightly tense from her strange reaction to the cooler door closing, Laurie was ill prepared to deal with what awaited her in her office. As she rounded the corner of the doorway, preoccupied with her thoughts, a figure shouted and leaped at her.
Laurie screamed from someplace deep down in her being. It was a purely reflex response, and of a power that caused the sound to reverberate up and down the cinderblocked hallway like some charged subatomic particle in an accelerator. She’d had no control. Simultaneous with the scream her heart leaped in her chest.
But the attack that Laurie feared did not occur. Instead her brain frantically changed the message and told her that the terrifying figure had cried “Boo!”—hardly what a mad rapist or some supernatural demon would yell. At the same time her brain identified the face as belonging to Lou Soldano.
All this had happened in the blink of an eye, and by the time Laurie was capable of responding, her fear had changed to anger.
“Lou!” she cried. “Why did you do that?”
“Did I scare you?” Lou asked sheepishly. He could see that her face had turned to ivory. His ears were still ringing from her scream.
“Scare me?” she yelled. “You terrified me, and I hate to be scared like that. Don’t ever do that again.”
“I’m sorry,” Lou said contritely. “I suppose it was juvenile. But this place has been scaring me; I thought I could get you back a little.”
“I could bop you in the nose,” Laurie said, shaking a clenched fist in front of his face. Her anger had already subsided, especially with his apology and apparent remorse. She walked around her desk and fell into her chair. “What on earth are you doing here at this hour anyway?” she asked.
“I was literally driving by,” Lou said. “I wanted to talk with you, so I pulled into the morgue loading dock on the chance that you’d be here. I really didn’t expect you to be, but the fellow downstairs said you’d just been in his office.”
“What did you want to talk to me about?”
“Your boyfriend, Jordan,” Lou said.
“He’s not my boyfriend,” Laurie snapped. “You’re really going to irritate me if you persist in calling him that.”
“What’s the problem?” Lou asked. “It seems to me to be a relatively accurate term. After all, you go out with him every night.”
“My social life is no one’s business but mine,” Laurie said. “But for your information, I do not “go out’ with him every night. I’m obviously not going out tonight.”
“Well, three out of four ain’t bad,” Lou said. “But look, down to business: I wanted to let you know that I talked with Jordan about his patients being professionally bumped off.”
“What did he have to say?” Laurie asked.
“Not a lot,” Lou said. “He refused to talk about any of his patients specifically.”
“Good for him.”
“But more important than what he said was how he acted. He was really nervous the whole time I was there. I don’t know what to make of that.”
“You don’t think he was involved with these murders in an
y way, do you?”
“No,” Lou said. “Robbing his patients blind—no pun intended—yes, shooting them, no. He’d be killing the golden goose. But he was definitely nervous. Something’s on his mind. I think he knows something.”
“I think he has plenty of reason to be nervous,” Laurie said. “Did he tell you that Cerino threatened him?”
“No, he didn’t,” Lou said. “How did he threaten him?”
“Jordan wouldn’t say,” Laurie said. “But if Cerino is the kind of person you say he is, then you can just imagine.”
Lou nodded. “I wonder why Jordan didn’t tell me.”
“Probably he doesn’t think you could protect him. Could you?”
“Probably not,” Lou said. “Certainly not forever. Not someone as high profile as Jordan Scheffield.”
“Did you learn anything helpful talking with him?” Laurie asked.
“I did learn that the murder victims did not have the same diagnosis,” Lou said. “At least according to him. That was one harebrained idea I had. And I learned that they are not related in any other obvious way vis-á-vis Jordan Scheffield other than being his patients. I asked about every way I could imagine. So, unfortunately, I didn’t learn much.”
“What are you going to do now?” Laurie asked.
“Hope!” Lou said. “Plus I’ll have my investigative teams find out the individual diagnoses. Maybe that will tell us something. There has to be some aspect I’m missing in all this.”
“That’s the way I feel about my overdose cases,” Laurie said.
“By the way,” Lou said. “What are you doing here so late?”
“I was hoping to get some work done. But with my pulse still racing thanks to you, I’ll probably take the paperwork home and tackle it there.”
“What about dinner?” Lou asked. “How about coming with me down to Little Italy. You like pasta?”
“I love pasta.”
“How about it then?” Lou asked. “You already told me you aren’t going out with the good doctor, and that’s your favorite excuse.”
“You are persistent.”
“Hey, I’m Italian.”
Fifteen minutes later Laurie found herself in Lou’s Caprice heading downtown. She did not know if it was a good idea to have dinner with the man, but she really hadn’t been able to think of a reason not to go. And although he’d been somewhat rude on previous occasions, now he seemed nothing but charming as he regaled her with stories of growing up in Queens.