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"You hear anything yet about Dr. Ichiko from the autopsy?" Mike asked.
We both knew that no reliable tests existed to permit forensic pathologists
to make an unequivocal diagnosis of drowning. Instead, that conclusion is
usually reached by the circumstances of the person's death.
"Water in the lungs?" I asked.
"Yeah, but Dr. Kirschner says it's not significant. When there's as much
turbulence as there is at those falls, water gets forced into the organs even
after death. There's a fracture to the skull-"
"And that doesn't give us a homicide?" Mike asked. "Somebody splitting his
head open before he jumped in for a whirlpool spin?"
"Kirschner's not ready to declare," Peterson said. "He wouldn't expect
someone to go over those falls and hit the rocks below- voluntarily or
not-without cracking his head fatally."
"But the wound," I asked, "wouldn't the antemortem injury look different than
the postmortem?"
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"The doc says no. The water causes more profuse bleeding, Alex, and it
prevents clotting. So the blood leaches out and makes it impossible to
differentiate."
"Anything on time of death?" Mike asked.
"Ichiko had washerwoman skin," Peterson said, referring to the profound
wrinkling that occurs after long immersion. "But the doc tells me that can set
in earlier than I thought-maybe within half an hour-when the water temperature
is as frigid as the river is right now. This one's dicey. On the good-news
front, we may be able to lay Aurora Tait to rest."
"What happened?"
"Missing Persons found an FBI report that's about twenty-five years old with
that name on it. They're sending the dental records out today."
"Is there any family?" I asked. "Where's she from?"
"Parents are dead. There's a brother back home. Outside of Minneapolis."
That hometown location wouldn't surprise any old-timers in law enforcement.
Before the 1990s' cleanup and Disneyfication of midtown Manhattan at
Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue, the area was known as the Minnesota
Strip. Unhappy teens from all over the Midwest would make their way to the big
city, most often by buses that disgorged them at the Port Authority building,
where seasoned pimps-acting as Good Samaritans-would embrace them, offering to
feed and shelter them until they found jobs and lodging. Within weeks, those
too weak to escape the grasp of these men would be addicted to some form of
drug and selling their bodies to pay the price. Aurora Tait may well have been
one of those girls.
"Look, Coop and I have some things to take care-"
"First stop is a change of clothes, and then you're taking her down there to
see the district attorney. He hates to be last to know about capers like
these."
"You've spoken with him?" I asked.
"Let's just say he prefers it when he thinks you're sitting safely behind
your desk. I told him this shooter wasn't aiming for you," Peterson said.
"Nobody-not even Tormey-knew you were going to be at the college today, did
they?"
"That's right."
"Okay, Chapman. Take her downtown before you do anything else."
"We need a lift back to the Bronx so I can pick up my car."
Peterson sent us off in an RMP-radio motor patrol car-and by two-thirty we
were standing at Rose Malone's desk, waiting for Battaglia to call us in.
"Hey, Mr. B," Mike said, "how come you always miss the fireworks? You think
all the action's in the white-collar crap, while Coop and me are busy cleaning
up the mean streets. Well, howdy, Miss Gunsher. How'd you find your way in
here without holding on to McKinney's hand? I didn't know your sense of
direction was that sharp."
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Of course Ellen would be here for this. McKinney had to dump her somewhere
once her lack of courtroom ability had been memorialized in some lousy trial
results a few years back. He had created GRIP-the Gun Recovery Information
Project-a useless little unit that tried to imitate the feds' successful
efforts to track the illegal handguns that flooded the city and were used to
commit violent felonies.
"Good afternoon, Mike. Alex," Ellen said, with undisguised gloating. She had
undoubtedly told Battaglia that we had ejected her from last evening's
proceedings. He continued to tolerate her as a staff member rather than
acknowledge that she had been one of his rare hiring errors-a "celebrity
scion," as we called them, whose mother had been a prominent reporter useful
to Battaglia in Ellen's early days, but of doubtful worth now since she'd been
fired from the network.
"I guess it would have been stupid of me to think you might have been in
court this morning, Alex," Battaglia said. "Who's this professor you went to
see?"
"His name is Noah Tormey." Ellen was taking notes as I spoke. "I think Mike [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]