“Well, it doesn’t sound worrisome to me, if that’s what you are asking.”
“I suppose not,” Ben agreed. “But it makes me uncomfortable. What I was going to ask you was to get in touch with Vinnie Dominick and ask where Vinnie and his guys had placed Satoshi and his family. You said it’s probably one of their collection of safe houses.”
“That was my understanding.”
“Would you mind asking for me? I’d like the address and the phone number, if there is one. I’ll feel better if I know how to get in touch with him if need be, and he’s not answering his cell. I certainly would not tell anyone.”
“They don’t like to reveal any of their safe houses for obvious reasons, the main being because it’s then no longer a safe house. I know Satoshi was told under no uncertain terms not to reveal where he was temporarily living. I know Fukuda-san is arranging more permanent housing. Anyway, I’ll ask and explain your reasons. I mean, they are already entrusting you with a heck of a lot of their hard-earned money. I can’t see why they wouldn’t trust you with the address of one of their safe houses.”
“It will let me sleep better,” Ben confessed.
20
MARCH 26, 2010
FRIDAY, 9:40 a.m.
The floater had taken more time than Laurie had originally imagined, because the autopsy required tracing more than a dozen bullet tracks through the victim’s body, the majority through the chest and abdomen. Most had hit against bone and were diverted, but some had pierced the body through and through.
About midway through the case, Lou had decided he’d learned all he was going to learn and left. So it was Laurie and Vinnie who had slogged through, painstakingly following each shot and gathering bullets and bullet fragments as they progressed.
At first Laurie had tried to bring Vinnie out of his apparent funk by actively attempting to get him to participate in the dissection, but she eventually gave up. Instead, with the part of her brain she didn’t need to devote to the physical work, she tried to imagine how the previous day’s case could be related to the case she was doing. Could it be some sort of vengeance killing? There was no way to know. Besides, Laurie was the first to question whether there was a relationship or not, and she found herself progressively eager to find out. What was going to make her more confident was to study the photo she’d made and view the security tape again, holding a photo of the current case to compare. Even then she knew she probably was not going to be one hundred percent certain but maybe certain enough to question its potential meaning. Laurie thought seriously that one of the pursuers in the security tapes she’d watched at home was the man she was autopsying at that very moment. But she was being realistic. It was never that easy to identify people, especially looking at a photo or a film of a live person as compared to a corpse that had been floating around in the river.
The one thing Laurie was particularly thankful for was Jack’s sensitivity. She knew he knew that it had to be the security tapes where she’d seen the floater, but he didn’t push her on the issue. Instead, he’d respected her wish to do the legwork on her own and gain professional confidence by going so.
“Thank you for helping me on this case,” Laurie said to Vinnie, preparing to help him lift the body onto the gurney. “I’m sorry it was so long.”
“No problem,” Vinnie answered, but without emotion.
“Now I want to ask another favor.”
Vinnie looked expectantly at Laurie without speaking.
“If there’s a table available, I’d like you to bring out my unidentified case from yesterday. I want to repeat the external exam.”
Vinnie didn’t respond.
“Did you hear me?” Laurie questioned with a hint of pique. She was now certain he was not acting like himself. He was even avoiding eye contact.
“I heard you,” Vinnie said. “When there’s a table available, I’ll bring it out.”
“On three,” Laurie said, holding the floater’s ankles. She then counted, and together they shifted the corpse off the table and onto the gurney. She then walked away without another comment.
Laurie stopped by Jack’s table on her way out. “It looks like you’ve got a child,” Laurie said. She hung back and avoided looking directly at the preteen girl’s face. Children, particularly infants, were always difficult for Laurie, despite her active attempt to be professional and to keep emotion from her work.
“Unfortunately, yes,” Jack said. “And a rather heartbreaking case as well, so to speak. Do you want to hear?”
“I suppose,” Laurie said, with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.
Jack picked up the child’s heart from a tray and opened the edges of a slice he’d made to view a porcine aortic valve replacement. “A suture became loose after the initially successful replacement and got tangled in the valve. One suture out of a hundred! It’s a tragedy for everybody: the surgeon, the parents, but of course, mostly for the child.”
“I hope that surgeon can learn from his or her mistake.”
“That’s the hope,” Jack said. “He’s certainly going to hear about it. Are you off to work on yesterday’s case?”
“I am,” Laurie said.
“Good luck!”
“Thanks for not pushing me earlier to explain myself.”
“You’re welcome. But I’m getting awfully curious and want to hear about what you’ve got by the end of today. I’m assuming your watching the security tapes last night was a lot more fruitful than I had imagined.”
“They were interesting,” Laurie teased. “On another subject, Vinnie is not acting at all like himself today.”
“Really? That sounds very unlike Vinnie. I did notice he called me Dr. Stapleton when I stopped at your table. It’s usually something a lot more derisive.”
“Maybe it’s me, as I did deliberately hijack him this morning. But I did give him the option to wait and work with you.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Jack said as Laurie moved on.
Laurie removed her Tyvek coveralls in the locker room and disposed of them before heading upstairs in her scrubs. The first stop was Sergeant Murphy’s office, where she turned over the information she had involving the pickpocket episode seen on the security tape. Then she asked about John Doe.
“I haven’t heard a damn thing about your case from yesterday,” the sergeant confessed. “But I expect to hear something today. If I don’t, I’ll give Missing Persons a call myself. If they’d received any calls about a missing Asian male, they would have let me know.”
Laurie thanked the sergeant before climbing a flight of stairs and dropping in on Hank Monroe, the director of identification in the anthropology department. Laurie knocked on the closed door. It seemed that Hank, in contrast to most everyone else, preferred his privacy.
Hank Monroe was no more help than Sergeant Murphy had been, saying that the Missing Persons Squad had admitted they had yet to run the victim’s fingerprints on any local database, much less on the state or federal level. “As I believe I told you yesterday, they usually wait at least twenty-four hours or so, because the vast number of cases are solved by someone calling in within that time period. But as soon as I hear anything, you’ll be the first to know.”
From the director of identification’s office, Laurie went up to toxicology and stopped in to see John DeVries. “So far the screen for drugs, poisons, or toxins has shown absolutely nothing,” John said with an apologetic tone. “I’m sorry. You did get the essentially negative blood alcohol, didn’t you?”
“I did,” Laurie said. “And I appreciate you making the effort to do it so quickly.”