Likely to Die (15 page)

 “Talking?”

 “I’d call it babbling at this point. You’ll see for yourself.”

 I got in the backseat of Wallace’s car for the short ride down Lexington Avenue to look the beast in the eye.

 11

 CAN YOU BELIEVE,“ MERCER ASKED OFChapman as he pulled up in front of the station house, ”McGraw hasn’t leaked this yet?“

 He was referring to the fact that no reporters or cameramen were circling the building like sharks, smelling the fresh blood of a suspect in a hot case.

 We got out and went into the lobby, past the uniformed sergeant on the desk, and upstairs to the squad room. This time even the precinct detectives and cops looked interested in all the activity. Every one of them would be used for some chore in nailing the pieces of the puzzle together during the next twenty-four hours.

 “Hey, Chapman, you on this dirtbag?”

 “Paulie Morelli. Damn, I haven’t seen you since your partner nailed the Zodiac killer. Did that arrest catapult your ass out of Bed-Stuy or what?”

 We were on our way up a flight as Morelli was trying to descend. “Yep. Right here to the 17th Squad. A little slow if you’re used to catching homicides.”

 “Yeah,” Chapman said, leading us up, “but if you like your women with teeth, Paulie, the Upper East Side’s the place to be. Helping us out with Dogen?”

 “I’m on my way to look for stand-ins for the lineup.”

 “Lineup?” I asked. “Somebody better slow this train down and let me know what’s going on.”

 “That’s what you’re here for, Blondie.”

 Mike steered me through the squad room. Unlike the night before, every man was actively engaged in an aspect of the case work. A few were handling the phones while others were interviewing witnesses. Alongside almost every desk, being questioned, was a civilian—some in nurse’s or doctor’s uniforms, others in outfits labeled with the name of the delivery service that employed them, and still a few in the ill-fitting, mismatched, unwashed apparel of the homeless population.

 As we walked toward Peterson’s command module, I noticed that the holding pen door was still wide open. But tonight it held only a single visitor.

 I glanced in. Sitting alone on a bench was a black man I guessed to be about sixty years old. He was slumped against the far wall, his legs outstretched in front of him. Also in the pen with him were two large shopping carts whose contents remained a mystery to me from this distance. I could see that he was wearing a plaid flannel jacket with long sleeves over a T-shirt. When my focus dropped to his lower torso, I noticed the pale green surgical pants with the drawstring waist. My eyes were riveted on the dark red stains that blotched the calves on both legs of his trousers. Gemma Dogen’s blood.

 Lieutenant Peterson was standing at the desk, phone to his ear, finishing a conversation as I entered his room. He winked at me as he spoke. “No, Chief. I won’t let that ballbreaker tell me what to do. Nope. Just thought it was smart to have her here for legal advice—search warrant, lineup, Q and A. Nope, we’re running the show, I’ll make it clear. I hear you.

 “Welcome back, Alex. Looks like we got a break. C’mon into the locker room and we’ll bring you up to speed on the day’s events.” Mercer and Mike had gone directly into the briefing area, where some new faces had been added to last night’s crew.

 Peterson made all the introductions and I took one of the seats at the table.

 “Okay, here’s what we got. The B team spent the day at Mid-Manhattan. McGraw let me bring in the A team as well and use the 17th Squad for canvassing below the buildings in the bomb shelter tunnels. My guys had the administration and medical staff interviews set up in some of the conference rooms at the medical college. Must have had thirty or forty people from neurology and the Minuit faculty lined up for their initial questioning, just comin‘ and goin’ all afternoon. Background on them, what their relationship was with Dogen, anything they saw or heard the night before her body was found—the usual.

 “Nobody’s expectin‘ any solutions on the first round. Nice and easy, getting the lay of the land.

 “About six-thirty, Detective Losenti here gets a call from two of the doctors we’d already spoken with earlier in the day—they’re both right inside, Alex. I thought you might want to talk to them yourself. The two of them left the neurological floor together to go down to the radiology department on the second floor. Had to look at some X rays in a case they’re both consulting on. Walk into the supply closet opposite the X-ray room and this guy—the one you see in the pen—is curled up on the floor taking a nap. They roust him to get him out when they notice his pants legs are covered with blood. One of ‘em stayed in the room while the other one called Losenti, whose beeper number was on the flyer we handed out asking people to call if they saw or heard anything. He was still in the hospital complex so he went right over to radiology.”

 I looked around the room at the faces of the detectives. It was 9:30 at night and everyone had been going since dawn, but the optimism of breaking the case so quickly boosted everyone’s spirits and brought them back together as a team.

 “What does he say?”

 “He’s either playing dumb now or we got a real psycho on our hands. A few of the guys have tried to talk to him and got nowhere. I want Chapman and Wallace to take him into one of the interview rooms and see if they can make any progress with him. It’s gonna take hours. He mumbles, says the only name he has is Pops, and the stuff on his pants is red paint. Stepped in a bucket of red paint. Then out of the blue he apologizes for ‘what happened to the lady.’ ”

 “Is it possible?”

 “It’s blood, Alex. Human blood. I ain’t tested it yet but I’ve seen enough of it to last me six lifetimes. That’s why I wanted you here. Figure out what we can take with or without a warrant, how you want this handled so we don’t jeopardize any evidence we seize. I’m not interested in McGraw’s suggestions. He can spend his time doing all the media spin he wants, we’ll finish off this investigation my way.

 “Used to be an expression, forty years ago, back when he and I were in the Academy together and things were different in New York. Used to say about a boss who’d never worked his cases like a real detective that he couldn’t find a Jew on the Grand Concourse. No offense, Alex.”

 “Forget it, Loo,” Chapman said, “Sherlock Holmes couldn’t find a Jew on the Grand Concourse anymore.” An area of the Bronx that once had been home to thousands of upwardly mobile Eastern European immigrants was entirely Hispanic today.

 “What’s the lineup for? I mean, who can ID this guy doing what?”

 “Almost everyone we’ve talked to saw someone on a hallway or in an elevator or a stairwell Tuesday evening or night. I don’t know if we’re talking about one person in the medical center or a dozen different prowlers or a lot of wishful thinking. But we’re gonna let some of these hotshots take a gander at Pops and see if he looks familiar.”

 “I don’t think a lineup makes any sense at this point, guys. We don’t have any witnesses who claim to have heard anything in Dogen’s office or seen someone leaving it, do we? Let’s not waste our time with it.”

 “Alex, we got a lot of people—housekeeping, nurse’s aides, medical students—who were on and off those hallways all night. I’d like to see if anybody can put this guy in the general vicinity. You can keep working on whatever you want. This can’t hurt.”

 “Sure it can, Loo. Suppose he’s our guy, and nobody’s ever seen him before. It’s premature at this point.

 “The most critical thing is to get those pants off him and get them to the labimmediately. Let’s get that blood tested and make sure it matches Dogen’s. Have you got Crime Scene here to photo him?”

 “Yeah, Sherman’s waiting.”

 “Fine. Get a few shots of him as he is. Make sure they shoot his legs, too, to show he isn’t injured anywhere. Go over his hands and arms to see if she was able to scratch him—”

 “Done that. Negative.”

 “Well, Chet didn’t think he gave her the chance. You got something to put on him when we take his pants?”

 “We’ve got more surgical outfits here than Scrubs has. Yeah, we’ll give him a clean pair.”

 Chapman asked the lieutenant what had been found in the shopping carts that were inside the pen.

 “One of them happens to be Pops’shome, Mr. Chapman. Now, I certainly don’t want to search his home without a warrant, do I? So we’ve just parked it right there in my driveway for the time being. It’s a two-car garage, you might have noticed. The other one belongs to Pops’s good friend, who’s being questioned now by Ramirez.”

 “And your eight ‘guests’ from last night, they’re gone?”

 “Don’t be ridiculous, young lady. Ralph,” Peterson looked at Losenti, “who are my friends visiting today?”

 “We’ve moved them over to the Anti-Crime Office, Loo. Watching the basketball game tonight. Just fed them a tasty assortment of ribs from Wylie’s. Why would they want to leave?”

 Peterson laid out his plan. Chapman and Wallace were to take Pops into the room used for lineups to begin their interrogation. That way if he and I wanted to observe any of it, we could view them through the two-way mirror that allowed us to see into the room, although the men on the other side couldn’t see out.

 “We won’t have fillers to run the lineup for at least an hour, but there’s a lot of other things to be done. Alex, what would you like to get to work on?”

 “First, I want to call Battaglia, just to give him a heads-up before he hears it on the late news. I think I’d like to speak with Sarah Brenner and get her up here with me to work on this. I’ll need a second hand to get busy on warrants once this gets moving, and she’s the one I’d most like to have on board. Then I might as well get started reinterviewing the doctors who found Pops and the guys who are going to view the lineup.

 “Oh, Mike, do me a favor and call Maureen. Tell her no matter what she hears on the news, she’s still going in tomorrow for us. It’s all set up, we might as well see what intelligence we get out of it, and know exactly what’s happening in there.”

 “Fine. Use the phone in my office to make your calls and I’ll try to find you another room for the interviews.”

 “Coop, does Steve’s Pizza deliver this far south?” Wallace asked.

 “What’s wrong with the joint around the corner?” Peterson interrupted.

 Chapman settled it. “It’s gonna be a long night, Loo. You don’t want any of us to have agita, do you? Steve’s is the absolute best and the guy would deliver to Jersey for Cooper. It’s only on Seventy-first Street—he’ll have it here in twenty minutes. Know the number?”

 I could dial it in my sleep. I called out the number and heard Chapman order six large pies, extrathin crust, everything on them, and hold the anchovies off two slices for Miss Cooper. “And put it on her tab, okay?”

 It would be foolish of me to think I was telling Battaglia something he hadn’t already heard, especially because of his wife’s position on the board at Mid-Manhattan. It didn’t disappoint me, then, when he told me he thought I’d be calling this evening.

 “How do you think it looks?”

 “I don’t even have my foot in the door yet, Paul, but there’s an awful lot of blood on this guy’s clothes. Peterson tells me they also looked his body over to make sure it wasn’t from a wound of his own and he’s completely clean. I think we’ll be here a few hours. I won’t call ‘til morning, but you know where to find me.”

 Sarah had already put the baby to bed when I reached her. She and James were finishing a quiet dinner together. “I’ll take a cab right up there to meet you.”

 “Are yousure you should be doing this? I don’t want to skip over you and give someone else the chance but I don’t want you to do this if it wipes you out or endangers the pregnancy.”

 “You know I wouldn’t. I’d love to work with you on this. I’ll stay a few hours tonight and we’ll see where it goes. I’ll just need an extra chair to stick my feet up on every now and then. See you in half an hour.”

 “I’m ready, Loo,” I said, walking out into the squad room to meet up with Peterson.

 Wallace was leaning against the door of the holding pen. I could hear him talking to Pops and asking if he’d be good enough to come along and tell his story one more time. As they walked single file down toward the lineup room, I told the lieutenant that I wanted to see the notes on the interviews with the two physicians before I spoke with them.

 “Chapman, get off the phone and bring Cooper here your paperwork.”

 Mike was using a desk in the far corner of the room. He hung up, grabbed his folder, and came back to Peterson’s office accompanied by a well-dressed man of about fifty-five.

 “Mr. Dietrich, I’d like you to meet Lieutenant Peterson, my boss, and Alexandra Cooper—well, she’s sort of my boss, too,” Mike added, laughingly. “She’s the assistant D.A. on the case. This is William Dietrich, the director of Mid-Manhattan.”

 “How do you do? I’d like to thank you for everything you’ve done so far, lieutenant. We’re all just stunned by Dr. Dogen’s murder. I, uh, I was wondering if there’s anything you can tell me at this point—”

 Peterson cut him off. “We know how your people feel, Mr. Dietrich. As soon as there’s anything we can go public with, you’ll be the first to know.”

 Dietrich’s artificial skin bronzer and touched-up black hair added to his aura of unctuousness. He was the number one man at the hospital complex and in the desperate position of trying to control the public image of a medical center in complete chaos.

 The lieutenant walked back to his desk to get another cigarette, and Dietrich tried the personal approach with me.

 “I’ve checked you out today, Alexandra—you don’t mind if I call you that, do you?”

 “Not at all, Mr. Dietrich.”

 “You’ve got quite a good reputation, I mean, for this kind of atrocity.”

 Checked me out with whom, I wondered. Now he moved to the hands-on approach, standing beside me and lifting my elbow with his fingers to gently guide me away from the direction of Peterson’s room for a private talk.

 “I’m a great admirer of your father’s, Miss Cooper. He’s really a legend in the medical profession. He’s enjoying his retirement, I take it?”