issues all at the same time, as the mess on his desk suggested he was doing at that moment.
“What time do you want to head home?” Laurie questioned to change the subject. She was anxious to leave. She’d made it a point, with effort, not to call Leticia for Leticia’s benefit. And since Leticia had not called her, she’d been out of touch for longer than she felt comfortable with. She wanted to know when Jack was willing to leave so she could use it as an excuse to call to let Leticia know when they’d be home.
Jack shrugged. “How about after I write up what I’ve found here. It’s pretty interesting—at least to me.”
“Are you talking about the hair dryer?” Laurie asked.
“I am indeed,” Jack said as he picked up the appliance. “Remember the case I was just beginning when you’d finished your case.”
“The Delta cabin attendant. What did you find?”
“I found what you found: nothing. Well, it was nothing, if you discount the insignificant uterine fibroids. So I called down to Bart Arnold and asked if he could send one of the MLIs back to the woman’s apartment and gather up all the handheld appliances from the bathroom, which he did. I got the hair dryer and that dental contraption. What’s it called?”
“Waterpik.”
“Anyway, the Waterpik was fine, but look at this hair dryer!” Jack picked up the apparatus and applied the contacts of a voltmeter to one of the prongs of the plug and the remaining casing. He then leaned back so Laurie could read the gauge.
“Zero ohms!” she said, reminding her that she’d had a similar case the first year at OCME. “Low-voltage electrocution.”
“Which is why the boyfriend saw her walk out of the bathroom before collapsing and dying.”
“But it looks like a new hair dryer!”
“I agree, which makes the case doubly interesting. Take a peek inside at that black wire.” Jack pointed with a screwdriver.
“It looks like it’s been stripped, going over that metallic edge of the dryer’s chassis.”
“My opinion exactly. When the young woman got out of the shower, maybe even standing on a damp floor, and turned on the hair dryer, she got zapped.”
“It was a homicide, then, for certain,” Laurie said. “Good pickup. Did she have any burns, like on the soles of her feet?”
“Nothing,” Jack said. “But that’s not too surprising, since one-third of low-voltage electrocutions don’t have any burns.”
“How did you remember that?”
“I didn’t,” Jack admitted. “I just read it before you popped in.”
“Do you think the boyfriend did it, maybe while the victim was on her trip?”
“It would be my guess, but it might be hard to prove. One way would be to find the boyfriend’s fingerprints somewhere inside the hair dryer, which is why I’m wearing gloves. Whose ever prints are in there is guilty of murder.”
“Good pickup,” Laurie repeated wistfully. It was just the kind of case she wished she’d come back to. It required experience, knowledge, and a certain creativity to put it all together, and in return it provided a true feeling of accomplishment that justice might be served.
“So how long will you need to write up the report about the hair dryer?”
“About a half-hour.”
“Okay. As soon as you finish, come down to my office and we’ll head home.”
“Has everything been okay with Leticia and JJ?”
“Apparently I’m not quite as indispensable as I thought. Everything’s gone smoothly. Leticia even told me not to call so often.”
“In so many words.”
“In so many words.”
“I have to say, such a comment seems mildly inappropriate.”
“I have to agree with you.”
“See you in thirty minutes.”
Laurie pulled out her cell phone as she walked the quiet third-floor hallway. With Jack’s comment as encouragement, she dialed Leticia. She waved as she passed the deputy chief’s door, but Calvin Washington was too busy to notice. As she approached her office, Leticia still had not picked up. As she entered, she began to count the rings. By the time she’d put down her bag and the two computer disks, she’d reached ten. By the time she’d hung up her coat, she was nearing fifteen. Finally, on the seventeenth ring, the phone was picked up. By that time, Laurie’s heart rate had reached approximately one hundred and fifty.
“Hello,” Leticia said calmly, to the point of suggesting boredom.
“Is everything all right?” Laurie blurted, although she was already reassured that everything was fine by Leticia’s forced serenity.
“We’re doing just fine,” Leticia said.
“The phone rang so long.”
“Well, that was because we were having a little bath here after a particularly dirty diaper.”
Once again Laurie felt mildly embarrassed at her overreaction. “I just wanted to let you know that we’ll be home in an hour or so.”
“We’ll be here,” Leticia said.
“How about dinner?”
“That’s next on the agenda.”
“Tell the little guy we miss him.”
“I’ll let him know,” Leticia said apathetically.
Laurie hung up the phone feeling some ambivalence. It was obvious Leticia was annoyed at the call, but so was Laurie, at Leticia’s inability to cut her a little slack on the first day. Laurie recognized that a dozen or so calls over the course of the day was over the top without there being any problems. At the same time, Laurie realized she should be giving Leticia a little slack as well, since calls could be distracting with the amount of attention a one-and-a-half-year-old child required.
Sitting down at her desk, Laurie picked up the lab slip that Jack had mentioned. It indicated the BAC, or blood alcohol level, was 0.03 percent, meaning it was well under the legal limit, but not zero, suggesting the man had had a drink or two within a couple of hours of his death, a fact that Laurie confidently felt had nothing to do with his demise.
Adding the lab slip to the victim’s case file, Laurie caught sight of a plain white envelope on her keyboard with her complete name typed out: Dr. Laurie Montgomery-Stapleton. Stuck to the front was a Post-it note from Marlene saying the envelope had been found in the foyer, having been slipped under the front door. Taking out the single sheet of white paper it contained, Laurie unfolded it and saw it was a short typed message addressed to her simply as “Doctor.”
Doctor,
Excuse me for interfering, but I have been threatened if I do not do so. I happen to know that there are some terribly nasty people who wish you to stop your investigation into the natural death of an Asian man on the A-train subway platform. If you do not do this immediately, you and your family will suffer serious consequences. Going to the police about this warning will cause the same consequences. Be smart. It is not worth your time.
Although having caught her breath on the first reading, as Laurie read it again a slight smile formed at the corners of her mouth. When she read it a third time, the smile turned into a suppressed giggle. When Laurie asked herself who could have been responsible for writing such a note, she immediately thought it had to have been Jack. Childishly inappropriate, it was his type of humor, and he did want her to stop obsessing about the case. In fact, the more she thought about it, the more sure she was that it had been Jack. The strange way he’d asked her if she’d been in her office before visiting his was a dead giveaway. It was also an indication that he expected her to run to him and be all out of sorts, having gotten such a scary letter. She then read it for the fourth time, and again laughed. It was so improbable. If someone was concerned about her investigation and wanted her to stop, the last
