“Sorry it took me so long for the tox on Omar Sheffield.” While autopsy results were available to us quickly, it frequently took weeks to run all the toxicological tests looking for foreign substances in the deceased’s brain, liver, tissue, or lungs.
“Find anything?”
“Just about everything. Omar might have been breathing when that train ran over him, but he wouldn’t have been aware of very much. He was loaded up with speedballs, more than enough to kill himself with if he’d been attempting to O.D.”
“And if someone else was trying to kill him?” Speedballs were a deadly combination of heroin and cocaine, usually mainlined right into the system.
“It’d work like a charm. Just keep pumping it into his arm.”
“But the cause of death, what have you put down for that?”
“Gross internal trauma. I mean, he died at the moment the train ran over his body, Alex. But in all likelihood the drugs could have done the trick by themselves. Somebody finds you in a hotel room in a coma, they can still get you to a hospital and try to pump the stuff out of you. Slim chance, with this amount of poison in his veins, but it might have been possible for him to survive. Run a few railroad cars over this perfectly inert body, it’s a sure thing he’s gone to meet his maker.”
“Thanks, Bob. Would you fax over a copy of the report to me?”
Lawyers were beginning to dribble into the office. I had my door open, listening for Pat McKinney’s arrival. The click of high heels on the tiles of the deserted hallway caught my attention. Pat’s office, like Rod Squires’s, was at the far end of my corridor. But there were no other women assigned to this executive wing of the Trial Division, so I stepped out to Laura’s desk to see who was walking by.
I recognized Ellen Gunsher from the back. She was junior to me, having been in the office for almost eight years. Bright enough and quite aggressive, she had taken to all of the duties of a prosecutor fairly well-except for the one that counted most. She had never grown comfortable in the courtroom and backed away from trying cases. Her surname lent itself to the unfortunate alias “Gun-shy,” and her colleagues teased her mercilessly about her retreat from the kind of professional battle that most of us relished.
Ellen had found a protector in Pat McKinney. As deputy chief of the division, he had taken her out of her trial bureau and created a special unit for her to supervise. Most of us recognized that it was a make-work kind of assignment-to serve as a contact with the NYPD’s Warrant Squad, to initiate and oversee active searches for the most dangerous of the thousands of defendants who failed to appear on their cases after bail had been granted. Many of the prisoners for whom Wanted cards had been issued were petty offenders who would turn up in the system before too long on charges of shoplifting or jumping a turnstile. Ellen’s job consisted of sifting through court papers and targeting the more violent offenders, then assigning Warrant Squad officers to make an active search for their return.
I believed that McKinney had manufactured that niche because Ellen was a decent lawyer and a nice person who was not otherwise a fit in our division. For two years I had ignored office gossip that they had been having an affair, but now the amount of time they spent together behind closed doors seemed inordinate for the nonessential nature of Ellen’s work.
I went back to my desk to gather the notes I planned to take in to McKinney to discuss the latest interviews Mike and I had done on the Caxton investigation. McKinney waved at me as he passed by my doorway. “We gotta talk.”
The case papers had outgrown a single folder. I pulled out the sheaf of reports we had worked from yesterday, took my thick legal pad including my to-do list, and headed down to the deputy’s office. I knocked on the heavy metal door.
“Come in,” Ellen called out to me. Not exactly the welcome I wanted.
She was standing by a hot plate at the far end of the room, boiling water for tea. She had opened a jar of honey and was holding two mugs. McKinney had his back to me and was talking on the phone. It was all a bit too domestic for my taste.
“How’s Mercer?” Ellen asked.
“He’s in rough shape. It was a very close call.”
“You must feel awful. I can’t imagine how you handled watching him get shot.”
I slowly moved my head back and forth, biting my lip. I had no intention of telling her anything about how I felt, and was boring my eyes through the back of McKinney’s sweaty T-shirt as though it would somehow get him off the phone faster.
“Want some tea?” she asked, holding up a third mug with a photo of McKinney’s kids under a Christmas tree emblazoned on its ceramic side.
“No thanks,” I said, raising my cardboard coffee cup at her.
“Any new leads?”
“I’ll wait until Pat gets off the phone.”
“Been up to the Vineyard at all?”
“Uh huh.” When you’re ready for full disclosure on your personal life, I’ll be happy to give you an update on my own.
“You really look whipped. Ought to try a little concealer for those circles under your eyes. Maybe you should take the next couple of weeks off. Stay up there until after Labor Day.”
Women in the workplace, I sighed to myself. Why is it that Mike Chapman could tell me how bad I looked and I could acknowledge it, but when Ellen eyeballed me and said the same thing, it sounded bitchy? Maybe I could take two weeks in the country if I was as expendable around here as you are, I thought. “I’m fine. I’ll take it easy next weekend.”
McKinney finished his conversation and sat down opposite me at his small conference table. “I want to talk to you about the case, Alex-I mean, the whole matter. I’ve been thinking that maybe the best thing-”
“Pat, would you mind if we just do this one-on-one?”
Ellen had poured the water and was squeezing the tea bags now.
“You mean Ellen? She’s a unit chief in the division. What’s the problem?”
“This discussion is between you and me. I know you’ve called a meeting for ten o’clock this morning to which I wasn’t invited. I’m planning to be there.”
“That’s a stupid idea, Alex. In fact, I’m not even sure it makes any sense for you to stay on the Caxton investigation.”
“Ellen, would you mind leaving the room, please?”
She placed the mugs on the table, and instead of answering me, she looked at Pat, who was looking directly in my eyes.
“I’m
“I’ve already done that, Alex.”
Ellen’s head was snapping back and forth between us like it was on a spring. I was infuriated that Pat had spoken to the district attorney about removing me from the investigation.
“I’ll bet he told you to stick it. He has absolutely no problem with the work I’ve been doing.”
It was a bluff, but a successful one. McKinney’s moment of hesitation revealed to me that although he had raised the issue with Battaglia, he had not been given a green light to take the case away from me.
I pushed my chair back and walked to the door. “I’ll be in Battaglia’s office. When you and the Lipton Tea lady finish your morning tete-a-tete, feel free to come in, by yourself, to get a bulletin on the case. Meanwhile, I’ll leave you to the important matter of how many of yesterday’s token suckers failed to show up in AP 17.”
I doubled back past my office, across the main corridor, and used my magnetized identification badge to buzz myself into the executive wing. Secretaries to the administrative assistant, the first assistant, and the chief assistant were setting up their desks for the day and greeted me with interest and concern.
Rose Malone was already at her word processor when I approached her desk. She was the last to leave the building most nights-sometimes with Paul Battaglia, but never before him. And she was always the first one in
