“Well, his heart wasn’t all that bad, really. There were no critical coronary occlusions, no thrombosis, no histopatho-logical evidence of a myocardial infarction. This is perfectly consistent with the patients I’ve studied with stress-induced cardiomyopathy, also know as myocardial stunning syndrome.”
Sudden emotional stress, fear, anger, grief, shock could cause sudden devastating heart failure, according to Sofer. Victims were people who were otherwise healthy, who experienced a sudden emotional jolt like the death of a loved one or a massive fright.
“Doctor, this is Special Agent Lipinski,” Nancy said. “I read your paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. None of the patients with your syndrome died. What makes Mr. Robertson different?”
“That’s an excellent question,” Sofer replied. “I believe the heart can be stunned into pump failure by a massive release of catecholamines, stress hormones like adrenaline that are secreted by the adrenal glands in response to a stress or a shock. This is a basic evolutionary survival tool, preparing the organism for fight or flight in the face of life-threatening danger. However, in some individuals the outpouring of these neurohormones is so profound that the heart can no longer pump efficiently. Cardiac output drops sharply and blood pressure falls. Unfortunately for Mr. Robertson, his pump failure combined with his moderate blockage in his left coronary artery probably led to poor perfusion of his left ventricle, which triggered a fatal arrhythmia, possibly ventricular fibrillation and sudden death. It’s rare to die from myocardial stunning but it can occur. Now as I understand it, Mr. Robertson was under some acute stress prior to his death.”
“He had a postcard from the Doomsday Killer,” Will said.
“Well, then I’d say, to use layman’s terms, your Mr. Robertson was literally scared to death.”
“He didn’t look scared,” Will remarked.
“Looks can be deceiving,” Sofer said.
When they were done, Will hung up and drank the last of his fifth cup of coffee. “Clear as fucking mud,” he muttered. “The killer bets he’s going to kill the guy by scaring him to death? Gimme a break!” He threw his arms into the air, exasperated. “Okay, let’s keep going. He kills three people on May twenty-second and he takes a breather over the weekend. May twenty-fifth our unsub’s busy again.”
Case #4: Myles Drake, twenty-four-year-old bicycle courier from Queens, working the financial district at 7:00 A.M. when an office worker on Broadway, the only eyewitness, is looking out her window and notices him on the sidewalk of John Street slinging his backpack and mounting his bicycle just as a dark blue sedan jumps the curb, plows into him and keeps on going. She’s too high up to see the license plate or credibly identify the make and model. Drake succumbs instantly from a crushed liver and spleen. The car, which unquestionably sustained some front-end damage, remains unlocated, despite extensive canvassing of body shops in the tristate area. Myles lived with his older brother and was, by all accounts, a straight-arrow. Clean record, testimonials to his work ethic, etc. No known connections to any other victims either directly or indirectly, though no one could say for sure that he’d never been to Kohler’s Duane Reade on Queens Boulevard.
“Nothing to link him with drugs?” Will asked.
“Nothing, but I remember a case when I was in law school of bike couriers supplying cocaine to stockbrokers on the side.”
“Not a bad thought-our drug theme.” He wrote: Test backpack for narcotics residue.
Case #5: Milos Ivan Covic, eighty-two-year-old man from Park Slope, Brooklyn, middle of the afternoon, plunges out of his ninth floor apartment and makes an ungodly mess on Prospect Park West, near Grand Army Plaza. His bedroom window is wide open, apartment locked, no signs of a break-in or robbery. However, several framed black-and-white photos of a young Covic with others, family presumably, are found shattered on the floor by the window. There is no suicide note. The man, a Croatian immigrant who had worked for fifty years as a cobbler, had no living relatives and was so reclusive there was no one who could attest to his mental state. The apartment was covered in only one set of fingerprints: his.
Will leafed through the stack of vintage photographs. “And there’s no ID on any of these people?”
“None,” Nancy replied. “His neighbors were all interviewed, we put out feelers among the Croatian-American community, but nobody knew him. I don’t know where to go. Any ideas?”
He pointed his palms toward the heavens. “I got nothing on this one.”
Case #6: Marco Antonio Napolitano, eighteen-year-old, recent high school graduate. Lived with his parents and sister in Little Italy. His mother found the postcard in his room and the coffin image sent her into hysterics. His family looked for him unsuccessfully all day. Police found his body later in the evening in the boiler room of their tenement with a needle in his arm and heroin works and tourniquet beside him. Autopsy showed an overdose but the family and his closest friends insisted he wasn’t a user, which was borne out by the absence of needle tracks on his body. The kid had a couple of juvies, shoplifting, that sort of thing, but this wasn’t a major bad guy. The syringe had two different DNAs, his and an unidentified male’s, suggesting someone else had shot up with him using the same works. There were also two sets of fingerprints on the syringe and the spoon, his and another’s, which they ran through IAFIS and came up empty, ruling out about fifty million people in the database.
“Okay,” Will said. “This one’s got possible linkers.”
Nancy saw them too, perked up and said, “Yeah, how about this? The killer’s an addict who murders Elizabeth, trying to knock off her Duane Reade for narcotics. He’s got a gripe against Marco and overloads a syringe, and a score to settle with Myles, who’s his supplier.”
“What about David?”
“He’s more like a mugging for cash, which also fits with an addict.”
Will shook his head with an exasperated smile. “Pretty damned soft,” he said, writing: Possibly an Addict??? “Okay, home stretch. Our man takes a two-week break then starts up again on June eleventh. Why the pause? Is he tired? Busy with something else in his life? Out of town? Back in Vegas?”
Rhetorical questions. She studied Will’s face as his mind churned.
“We’ve run down all the eastbound moving violations issued on major routes between Vegas and New York during the intervals between the postmarked dates on the cards and the dates of the murders and we’ve got nothing of interest, correct?”
“Correct,” she replied.
“And we’ve got passenger manifests for all direct and connecting flights between Vegas and metropolitan New York for the relevant dates, correct?”
“Correct.”
“And what have we learned from that?”
“Nothing yet. We’ve got several thousand names that we’re rerunning every few days against all the names in our victims’ databases. So far, no hits.”
“And we’ve done state and federal criminal background checks on all the passengers?”
“Will, you’ve asked me that a dozen times!”
He wasn’t going to apologize. “Because it’s important! And get me a printout of all the passengers with Hispanic surnames.” He pointed toward a stack of files on the floor near the window. “Pass me that one. This is where I came in.”
Case #7: Ida Gabriela Santiago, seventy-eight-year-old killed by an intruder in her bedroom with a. 22 caliber bullet through her ear. As Will suspected, she hadn’t been raped, and aside from the victim and her immediate family, there were no unaccounted fingerprints anywhere. Her purse had indeed been stolen and remained unrecovered. A footprint from the earth below her kitchen window showed a size twelve distinctive waffle pattern that matched a popular basketball sneaker, Reebok DMX 10. Given the depth of the print and the moisture content of the soil, the lab techs estimated the suspect weighed about 170, roughly the same weight as the Park Avenue suspect. They had searched for connections, especially with the Lopez case, but there were no recognizable intersects between the lives of the two Hispanic women.
That left Case #8: Lucius Jefferson Robertson, the man who was literally scared to death. There wasn’t much more to say about him, was there? “That’s it, I’m fried,” Will announced. “Why don’t you sum it up, partner?”
Nancy earnestly flipped through her fresh notes and glanced at his Key Observations. “I guess I’d have to say that our suspect is a five-ten, 170-pound Hispanic male who’s a drug addict and a sex offender, who drives a blue car, has a knife, a. 22 caliber and a. 38 caliber gun, shuttles back and forth to Las Vegas either by car or air, and prefers to kill people on weekdays so he can kick back on weekends.”
“One heck of a profile,” Will said, finally cracking a smile. “Okay, so bring it all home. How does he pick his victims and what’s with the fucking postcards?”
