Fatal Reaction (5 page)

We settled into our places, Elliott behind his antique oak desk and I in an armchair of confessionally soft leather. Declining coffee and having serious second thoughts about the wisdom of having come in the first place, I immediately launched into an account of the little I knew about the circumstances of Danny’s death. I also filled him in about the pending negotiation with Takisawa and explained that it would leave Stephen and me little time to track the police investigation of his death.

“The way things stand right now you’ll be lucky if there even is an investigation,” replied Elliott as soon as I’d finished.

“What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.

“I guess you must be too busy to read the papers,” he replied with good-natured disbelief. “But the police have their hands pretty full with this Stanley Sarrek thing.”

Of course. Richard Speck, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer. Stanley Sarrek was the latest in a long and hideous line. How stupid of me not to have put it together. Ever since his arrest the newspapers, the media, the very air seemed filled with nothing else. It was amazing how the actions of one psychopath could cast a pall over an entire city.

That Sarrek had been apprehended at all, much less in Chicago, was the sheerest of accidents. He’d been pulled over in a routine traffic stop. When the officers asked for his driver’s license they noticed what looked like bloodstains on the running board of Sarrek’s truck. When they made him open up the refrigerated trailer of his double rig they found the mutilated corpses of sixty-three women stored like so many flash-frozen sides of beef. It was, the media breathlessly assured us, a new record for a single serial killer.

“Do you really think it will have that much impact?” I asked, knowing full well what the answer would be.

“Are you kidding? This creep Sarrek picked his victims at random from all over the country. The cops don’t I even have a place to start. There’s no way to narrow it down. It’s even worse for the medical examiner’s office—worse than a plane crash even. At least when a jumbo jet goes down they have the passenger list to start from and some idea how everybody died. Not only that, but the bodies have been so mutilated that identification is going to be next to impossible—we’re talking body parts—and the fact that they’ve been refrigerated will make it hard to pin down any time of death.

“Just the whole process of identifying the victims is going to take months. In the meantime, the family of every woman who’s gone missing anywhere in America in the last ten years is on the phone frantically trying to find out whether their wife or daughter is one of the ones who’ve turned up in the back of the truck.”

“I understand that,” I replied, “but what happened to those women doesn’t make finding out who killed Danny Wohl any less important.”

“I’m just telling you how it is, Kate.”

“But you didn’t see his apartment,” I practically sobbed. “There was blood everywhere. It was his home and he ended up fighting for his life in his own living room and dying in a puddle of blood. What happened to those women is terrible, but it’s even worse if it keeps us from finding out what happened to Danny.”

“So what exactly do you want me to do?”

“Find out who killed him.”

“You realize what that kind of investigation involves? Are you sure you really want me to do this? You’re not just acting on impulse?”

“Of course not,” I replied. Suddenly it seemed very clear. “It’s bad enough that Danny is dead. It will be worse if he ends up the victim of an indifferent bureaucracy just because he had the bad luck to die when some homicidal psychopath got pulled over in Chicago.”

“Why don’t we wait a little before we jump into this,” urged Elliott. “Let’s give the police a little bit of time to do their job.”

“You said it yourself. They couldn’t even if they wanted to. They don’t have the manpower and the external pressures of the Sarrek investigation are too great.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Oh come on! Which do you think is going to get first priority from the cops—investigating the death of a gay lawyer who was going to die of AIDS anyway or gathering enough evidence to convict the serial killer of the century?”

Back at my office I asked Cheryl to bring us both a cup of coffee and shut the door behind her. There was no question about what I was going to do. Even if Guttman was wrong about what was at stake there was really no way I could say no to Stephen. Personal considerations aside, we are talking about a man who once recruited an entire twelve-man lab from NIH and moved them to Chicago over a three-day weekend. Any reservations I might have had about taking a leave of absence from Callahan Ross were sure to be quickly overridden.

Even so I had my misgivings. I was currently billing close to 260 hours a month, a crushing load even by this firm’s macho standards, and unlike most of my partners who surrounded themselves with a cadre of ambitious associates, I preferred to work alone. It helped that I was blessed with a secretary who was smart enough to do much of the routine work I would normally shunt off to a first-year associate. For more complex legal legerdemain I relied on a brilliant lawyer named Sherman Whitehead who’d joined the firm the same year I did. Sherman was a nerd-savant whose complete lack of interpersonal skills guaranteed that he would never achieve partnership— much less meet a client. However, he was a nimble legal thinker and realistic enough about his fate to not spend all his time jockeying for my attention or approval. Until today Cheryl and Sherman had been enough.

But the real problem was even bigger than that. What I really needed was not more help but less work. In the years immediately following Russell’s death I’d found a haven from my grief at the office. The work anesthetized me and in consequence I’d piled it on greedily. Besides, I’d had things to prove. Now I wanted something else. I wanted a life. I wanted to read novels and go to the movies. I wanted to stop giving dictation in my sleep and to carve out some small corner of the week that had nothing to do with the law, or business, or my obligations to the firm that had somehow managed to invade the very fabric of my life. Recently I’d made some efforts to cut back on my workload. I’d started playing squash again and was volunteering a couple of times a month at the free legal clinic in my neighborhood. Now this.

Not surprisingly, my secretary greeted the news of my new responsibilities with well-considered trepidation. If, as Guttman had suggested, I was indeed on the high wire, then it was Cheryl who was standing at ground zero holding the net. There was no getting around the symbiosis inherent in our situations. When I was overwhelmed, so was Cheryl—and at about a quarter of my salary at that. And even though we didn’t talk about it, we both worried what effect the additional pressure would have on her at night while she was enrolled in law school at Loyola. Six courses shy of graduation, the day was rapidly approaching when I would lose her. I viewed the prospect roughly the same way I would the pending amputation of a limb.

Cheryl was smart. She was funny. Loyal as a soldier, she compensated for my shortcomings, lied to cover my ass, and put up with my mother. While I pretended to be above office politics, she resolutely kept her ear to the watercooler and watched my back for me.

For the remainder of the day, between meetings and telephone calls, Cheryl and I barricaded ourselves in my office going through my files like a pair of triage nurses at the scene of an accident. Those too volatile or complex to survive a change in counsel went onto the stack of files that I would attempt to juggle on top of my duties at Azor. Matters that could be routinely moved ahead by associates went into another. The rest would, with a wink and a prayer, be allowed to lie dormant until either the ' deal between Azor and Takisawa had been hammered out—or it blew up in my face.

CHAPTER 5

The telephone woke me from the darkness. Numbly I groped for the receiver as research abstracts and financial projections slid off the bed and onto the floor, scattering dust bunnies silently through the darkness. I struggled to focus on the glowing digits of the clock radio. It was five o’clock in the morning.

“Hello,” I croaked. As a rule I try to avoid all human contact until after seven o’clock and at least two cups of coffee.

“It’s me, Stephen.” He was calling from atop his exercise bike. I could hear the babble of CNN over the whirring of the gears. “I was thinking it would be a good idea if you sat in on the ZK-501 project council meeting this morning.”

“The what?”

“The weekly research meeting. I’m going to announce the Takisawa visit and I think you should be there.”

“What time?”

“It starts at seven.”

I groaned.

“I take it that’s a yes?”

I groaned again. Usually I make it a practice to at least be civil to my clients, but then again my clients usually don’t call me at home at five o’clock in the morning.

“I hope you had a chance to look over that material I sent you.”

I muttered something under my breath and was relieved that Stephen chose to interpret it in the affirmative. I’d stayed at the office until nearly midnight and still hadn’t had time to read through the box of materials that Stephen had messengered over to acquaint me with the ZK-501 project. I’d taken them home and tried to read them in bed, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that of the dozens of scientific abstracts I’d tackled, I’d hardly understood a single word.

I let my face fall back into my pillow, but the reality that Stephen Azorini was now my boss was enough to prevent me from going back to sleep. I rolled out of bed and padded down the long hall that ran down the center of the apartment I share with my roommate Claudia Stein.

I live in Hyde Park, which most people know as the home of the University of Chicago. For the last fifty years it has been a neighborhood poised on the brink of gentrification. Socially, racially, and economically diverse, it is exactly the kind of community that social progressives invariably call for and yet inevitably flee as soon as it gets dark. My partners at Callahan Ross assumed I lived there in order to be close to Stephen, whose apartment a few blocks away was one of his ways of keeping close ties to the university. My parents had no such illusions. They just thought I’d chosen the neighborhood to piss them off. The truth was actually much more straightforward. Claudia was a surgical resident at the University of Chicago and she got withdrawal symptoms whenever she was more than ten minutes away from the mayhem of the emergency room.

Claudia was in the kitchen when I got there, pouring herself a cup of coffee and looking out the window through the steel bars of the burglar grille. She is a tiny woman, barely five feet tall, who wears her dark hair in a single braid that falls down her back like a schoolgirl’s. In spite of her size she manages to convey a brand of instantly recognizable toughness, the kind that surgeons get after a couple years of sewing up bullet holes. She was dressed for work in her usual green scrubs and running shoes, but in her hurry to get to the hospital she’d managed to put the top on backward so that the label was in front and the V neck revealed her vertebrae.

“What are you doing up so early?” she demanded ungraciously. “Are you sick or something?”

“I have an early meeting,” I growled, helping myself to coffee. “Did you know your shirt’s on backward?”

“Yes. I turned it around on purpose,” she replied. “I caught one of the anesthesiologists looking down my shirt yesterday in pre-op.” She shot me one of her you-couldn’t-possibly-be-naive-enough-to-find-this-surprising looks.

“So what’s happening on the fellowship front?” I asked. Claudia was due to complete her residency in June and was going through something of a career crisis. Having decided to specialize beyond general surgery, she had applied to fellowship programs in two wildly different areas: eye surgery and trauma. Since then, she could have learned a foreign language in the time she’d spent debating between the two.

“Stanford ophthalmology has invited me to come out for a visit and I’m going to spend a day at Northwestern trauma next week.”

“Are those your two top choices?”

“I think so.”

“So which one do you think you’ll pick?”

“They have to pick me first.”

“Assuming they both do, which one will you choose?”

“I don’t know.... After last night I’m thinking of switching to pediatrics and signing up for the Peace Corps. Diarrhea and ear infections are sounding pretty good to me today.”

“Why? What happened?”

“The paramedics brought in a fifteen-year-old kid from one of the projects who’d had the bad judgment to disagree with someone who happened to be carrying an assault rifle. When they brought him in he had holes in his stomach, his liver, his lung, and his spleen. As we’re wheeling him into the OR he looks up at me and asks ‘Will I be okay?’ Can you imagine, I looked that kid in the eye and told him I was going to take care of him. Then I watched him bleed to death on the operating table. And why? Because some brain-dead piece of shit had an advanced weapon capable of shooting someone eleven times in as many seconds. When I came home last night I had to throw my underwear away because it was so full of that kid’s blood. Now what kind of person would choose to see that kind of thing every day?” She looked at me as I if expecting some sort of answer, but there was none.

“You have to remember all the times they don’t die,” I i said. “That and the fact that they don’t die because you ' were there to take care of them.”

“Yeah,” she replied bitterly. “I patch them together and send them out onto the same shitty street.”

“I’ll grant you that the idea of getting rich removing cataracts from nice little old ladies is sounding good this morning,” I ventured, “but I promise you you’d be bored out of your mind inside of six months.”

“But would that be so bad?” sighed Claudia as her beeper went off. “Sometimes I think you and I have got it all wrong. Work is supposed to be boring. It’s your life that’s supposed to be interesting.”