Move to Strike (28 page)

‘He didn't shoot her.'

‘Maybe not physically but . . .' And then he saw it, that familiar look in her eye, that glint that told him she was already focusing on the bigger picture – a rare opportunity she intended to milk for all it was worth.

‘You want them both,' he said at last. ‘You lost the father and so you went after the son, and now you want them both.' He shook his head. ‘Amanda, if what we learned this morning pans out the way I think it will, you can nail the doctor to the wall. The kid could well be another innocent victim in all of this.'

‘He shot her.'

‘He's thirteen.'

‘Fourteen.'

‘Jesus, Amanda. You need to talk to David.'

‘I need to leave. I have a date with the grand jury at four,' Amanda said, moving swiftly past him towards his desk so that she might retrieve her handbag. But as she turned again to head towards the door, Tony grabbed her by her upper arm, hard, forcing her to turn and meet his eye.

‘You cannot hold onto this information,' he said, his voice close and low. ‘You cannot fail to report what you know so that you can star in your own media circus extraordinaire.'

‘You're not my boss, Tony. I can do whatever I damn well please.'

‘But it's unethical.' Tony took a breath. The truth was he liked this woman, hell, he believed he was even falling in love with her. But he couldn't sit back and let her bulldoze his best friend – he couldn't turn a blind eye to her manipulating the system of justice they had all sworn an oath to uphold, just because her ego was greater than her sense of professional responsibility, just because he had feelings for her and did not want whatever they had to end.

‘I swear, Amanda,' he went on. ‘You do this. You fail to share the information I helped you discover, and you and I are . . .'

‘What?
Over?
' she said, shaking her head. ‘For God's sake Tony, you were never that Goddamned special to begin with. There is a difference, you know,' she added, moving even closer to him so that they were now standing eye to eye, ‘. . . between fucking me and fucking me over. You breathe a word of this to your moralistic friend and I'll have you arrested for interfering with an ongoing criminal investigation. I will end your career in a heartbeat, Bishop, and take great pleasure in doing it.'

She shrugged free of his grip, turning her back on him sharply so that she might stride towards the door.

‘You're going to regret this, Amanda,' said Tony at last, not knowing if the pain in his chest was a result of the anger or the disappointment. ‘You don't know David like I do. He won't stop until he . . .'

‘Until he what, Tony?' she interrupted him, turning one last time as she reached the corner office door. ‘Brings me down?'

‘No, I was going to say until he sees that justice is done. But if he brings you down in the process, then you have only yourself to blame.'

‘Oh
please
,' she said as she reached for the handle and opened the door to leave. ‘Cavanaugh doesn't scare me. I eat men like him for breakfast – or in your case, lunch and dinner and dessert.

‘So thanks for the tip, Mr Bishop.' She smiled as she moved out of his office and into the reception area, nodding at Tony's assistant as she strode confidently past her desk. ‘Your boss is a credit to his profession,' she smiled. ‘And the District Attorney's Office shall be forever in his debt.'

T
he Chief Medical Examiner's Office was located in Albany Street, south of Copley, west of Roxbury and across the road from the Boston Medical Center's Harrison Campus. It was a short, squat building with a somewhat sad-looking exterior which, David had always felt, had a fitting relationship with the equally as depressing goings-on inside – matters of grief and loss and tragedy, of injury and illness and death. And today, despite his friendship with Chief ME Gus Svenson, and the fact that he knew he could count on Svenson's unfailing professionalism, he felt an uneasy edge to the air of melancholy that seemed to be flowing through the corridors of the examiner's rooms – perhaps because he had rushed down to meet with Svenson in what the ME had described as his ‘only window of opportunity', while he was worried about Sara and her lunch with Jeffrey Logan.

‘You look like shit,' said David, as he collapsed into the red-covered visitor's chair across from Svenson's desk. The tall, Swedish-born physician looked even paler than usual, his face dissected by the two dark circles that hung like shadows under his pale blue eyes.

‘Should I take your honesty to be a sign of your concern, or a general observation as to my . . .' Gus was obviously looking for the word, ‘. . . shittiness?'

‘Both,' said David, managing a smile.

Svenson shrugged. ‘I am tired,' he said. ‘Two of my ten medical staff are at home sick, my chief administrative officer has just resigned, my technicians are overworked and underpaid and the governor is calling for my head following our inability to get on top of our backlog.'

David nodded in sympathy. It was no secret that the dedicated bunch who worked at the Boston ME's headquarters were seriously outnumbered by the turnover of cases that came their way – now somewhere north of 30000 a year.

‘That sucks,' said David.

‘It is what it is,' returned Svenson.

David nodded again. ‘So what can you tell me?' he asked at last.

‘Nothing you would not expect,' said Svenson, reaching across his busy desk to find a clear plastic file labelled with the name of Stephanie Tyler. In that moment David felt a deep and hollow sadness at the sight of his old friend's name on the cover of a freshly typed autopsy report.

‘Cause of death was a single, high-velocity gunshot wound to the chest. The bullet entered at the sternum and fractured the third, fourth and fifth ribs before tracking through the heart.

‘Damage to the heart was extensive and thus difficult to define. But the vascular injuries most likely include damage to structures including right atrium and aorta, main pulmonary artery, aortic arch and right pulmonary vein.

‘The bullet also tracked through the right lung, with a linear path of gas containing small metallic and bone fragments from the ribs. The exit wound was large with the directionality and bevelling of bone, along with the gunshot residue on the subject's skin and clothes, telling us she was shot at roughly a thirty-degree downward angle, at point-blank range.'

Gus sat back in his seat and threw up his hands as if to say, ‘
that's the basis of it – with further detail enclosed to give further macabre descriptions of the harsh finality of death
'.

‘What about the rest of your findings, the bloods, toxicology . . . ?'

‘The basic tests show results all within normal range for a woman her age, but given a number of her organs had been removed I . . .'

‘
What?
' said David, unsure he had heard the ME correctly.

‘Her organs. Ms Tyler's driver's licence showed she had volunteered
herself as an organ donor. And you know the good people from the New England Organ Bank are notoriously quick off the mark.'

‘But Stephanie had been dead too long for the NEOB to recover any living organs. Her blood supply was drained, her body deprived of oxygen.' David well knew that in order for an organ to be viable for transplant, either the body must be kept on a ventilator to keep the organs of a brain-dead patient ‘alive', or the organs removed and transplanted (often ‘on ice') to reduce what doctors referred to the organ's ‘anoxic' time – the lapse between the death of the donor and the transplant to the recipient.

‘This is true,' said Gus. ‘But Ms Tyler was very specific in her request. Tissue – like bone, skin, corneas and so forth – can be used in transplants up to twenty-four hours after death. And in regard to her other major undamaged organs – her liver, kidneys, pancreas, brain . . . they were removed for the purpose of research.

‘David,' said Gus, perhaps reading the look of disappointment on his attorney friend's face. ‘You know how these things work. The NEOB are zealous in their recovery of usable organs and tissue. If time had been shorter and less damage procured, I am sure they would have taken every viable organ in her body.'

Gus stopped there. Everyone knew the donation recovery people had an important job to do, but David knew that Gus and his fellow workers at the ME's Office were sometimes irked by the bank's workers' efforts to cajole the relatives of recently deceased loved ones into signing away their beloved's body parts mere hours after their death.

‘I didn't know,' said David.

‘I am sorry,' said Gus. ‘But in the end it mattered not.' And David knew that Gus was trying to tell him that despite the organ donations, there was no argument as to what had caused Stephanie Tyler's death.

‘Mannix tells me she was your friend, yes?' offered Gus.

‘We went to college together,' David replied.

Gus nodded.

‘Have you given the report to Carmichael?' asked David after a pause.

‘Of course,' replied the ME. ‘She called me early this morning, asked me to dispatch a messenger as soon as the report was ready. I believe she . . .' Svenson hesitated.

‘It's okay, Gus, we checked with the courthouse. We know that she has an appointment with the grand jury at four.'

Gus lifted up his hands as if to again say: ‘
It is what it is
'. ‘I am sorry you did not know,' he said. ‘About the organs I mean.'

‘It was the bullet that killed her, Gus,' said David, not wanting to place any heavier burden on the exhausted ME before him. ‘You should go home, take a load off,' he added, standing from his lumpy fabric chair.

‘Yes, but I have a morgue full of patients to examine. I do believe that I need some rest, however,' he said, standing to see David to the door, ‘. . . as lately I find myself talking to my horizontal subjects.'

‘They ever talk back, Gus?'

‘Unfortunately no. For if they did they would tell the world what happened to them,' said a sad-eyed Svenson. ‘And we could all go home and get some much needed sleep.'

Five hundred and seventy-five thousand – that's how many people live in Boston, MA. And if you double it, to nearly 1.2 million, that's how many people are estimated to travel to Boston from neighbouring areas to work, shop, eat and play on any given day.

Now work out the odds
, David thought to himself as he hit the ground with a thud,
of my running into – literally – the man I currently despise most in the world, a good two blocks from where I was headed
.

‘Jesus,' said Logan, steadying himself on a street sign. He had obviously been distracted, walking while reading a sheet of white paper, which he now stowed quickly in his inside jacket pocket.

‘David, of all people I . . . I'm sorry. Gosh, are you okay? You
are
in a hurry! Is everything all right?' He offered his hand to help David get to his feet. ‘I've just dropped Sara back at your offices and my car is parked in a garage on Tremont so . . . Here,' he took a breath, ‘let me help you up.'

‘I'm fine,' said David, using the pole to pull himself to standing. ‘I'm running late for a meeting. My cab got a flat and . . .' This was half true. There was no meeting but David's taxi had got a flat tyre. He had hailed a checker cab outside the ME's Office and asked the driver to get him back to the city pronto. The cab hit a pothole and blew a tyre on Tremont, forcing David to help the cabbie push the vehicle to the side of the road before running north towards School Street where he had cut east on his way
back to his offices on Congress. His cell was out of batteries and for some reason he felt an all-encompassing need to get back to Sara – the anxiety of it all resulting in him failing to look where he was going.

‘You look pale,' said Logan.

‘I've just come from the ME's Office,' David offered as some form of explanation.

‘Ah – the autopsy report,' said Logan, his eyes now narrowing just a fraction. ‘Nothing untoward, I hope . . . I mean, of course what happened to Stephanie was untoward, but nothing
unexpected
. . . ?'

‘No, Jeffrey,' said David. ‘Nothing unexpected – if you are referring to our expectation that the shot from the big game rifle that blew your wife's internal organs to smithereens would be listed as the official cause of death.'

He met Logan's eye, a flicker of understanding between them.

‘Well,' said Logan, breaking eye contact, ‘I suppose in the very least we know what we are up against.'

‘Sure,' said David, unable to stop himself. ‘Another kick-ass rifle, but this time in the guise of a system we like to refer to as “justice”.'

Logan shook his head. ‘If my son had taken a gun to his suppressors some two hundred and thirty years ago, not far from the
very spot
we are standing,' he said, gesturing at his feet for effect, ‘during the war that gave us independence – the same war that enabled us to build the very system of justice of which you speak, well . . . he would have been championed as a
hero
. But since his abuser was his mother, his freedom has been snatched by the very . . .'

‘How was lunch?' asked David, unable to listen to another word of Logan's bullshit.

‘Ah,' said Logan – and David sensed the man was not used to being cut short mid-soliloquy. ‘It was fine, lovely. You have quite a lady there, David. A real catch. And now I understand why you hold on to her so desperately.'

‘Excuse me?' said David, his blood starting to boil.

‘Oh, please. I am sorry. There was no offence intended. It is just that . . . as an expert in relationships, I could not help but notice that . . .' He shook his head. ‘Really, it is nothing.'