Likely to Die (7 page)

 “Wrong, Loo.Who’s in them, not what. You see those skels out in the pens in the squad room? Those tunnels and rattraps are lived in by hundreds of homeless people. We walked through there this morning—you got sad old men just curled up along the wall asleep, you got junkies with crack vials littered all over the place, you got a girls’ dorm with bag ladies who are dressed like they used to be Rockettes sitting around talking to themselves. In one stretch of roadway, I saw three guys I locked up in ‘94 during a drug sweep and I think the old fat man wearing a silver lamé jumpsuit who was urinating in a corner when we walked by might actually have been Elvis—I’m not sure.”

 “Chapman,” the Chief asked, “any sign they get up into the hospital buildings?”

 “Every sign. Half of them are dressed in doctor’s scrubs or lab coats—obviously stolen from the floors. They’ve got trays with remains of patient’s meals and empty bottles of prescription pills. They use bedpans for pillows and rubber gloves for warmth. I wasn’t kidding, you open your eyes at night, in that private room your insurance company is dishing out a thousand dollars for, and you gotta see most of these creatures roaming around the hallways. It would either cure you or kill you, no question about it.”

 Mike flipped the chart to the next sheet, bringing his marker from the top corner to the middle of the page.

 “And don’t forget the third piece of this puzzle, guys. We haven’t yet mentioned the friendly folks at Stuyvesant Psychiatric Center, located just to the south of Mid-Manhattan and, of course, you guessed it—linked to both other buildings on every level above ground and below.”

 Wallace whispered to me again, trying to suppress a smile. “He’s about to do Nicholson now—he’s going into theCuckoo’s Nest mode. McGraw’ll go bat-shit.”

 Mike was off and running with his next imitation, leading us on his morning tour through all nine hundred and forty-six beds in the psych hospital. He described the patients and their varying degrees of confinement, from the locked wards that held the prisoners declared incompetent while awaiting trial, through the straitjacketed screamers, to the quiet malingerers and psychotic lifers who, by virtue of their familiarity and long-term residence, had more freedom to walk around most of the day.

 Peterson tried to make him be serious again. “Don’t tell me these patients aren’t supervised?”

 “The most severely ill certainly are, but there are some regulars who seem to have the run of the place.”

 “Meaning in and out of the building, into the rest of the Center?”

 “Nothing to stop them, Loo. Just put on their slippers and shuffle off down the hall.”

 “Past the square badges?”

 “Loo, I’m telling you, if one of them walked up to the security guards I talked to today and said, ‘Hi, my name is Jeffrey Dahmer and I’m hungry,’ these morons would give him a pass and direct him to the adolescent clinic.”

 McGraw was incredulous. “Jesus, this place was a felony waiting to happen. It’s amazing this is the first.”

 “Not so fast, Chief. Cooper’s got a few surprises for you, just to open the field a little wider. If you don’t thinkI have enough suspects to keep us busy, Nurse Ratchett’ll give you something else to worry about. I think we’ve got our best shot of finding our killer among the walking wounded of the underground, but Alex has a few stories that suggest we keep our options open.”

 6

 YOU KNOW HOW I HATE TO START OFF BYagreeing with Chapman, but most days it really does look like the inmates are running the asylum,“ I commented as I turned to my padful of case notes, ”and with a good number of problems contributed by some of the staff, too.“

 “Chief,” Peterson said by way of explanation to McGraw, who was not used to prosecutors playing a role in a police briefing, “I asked Alex to round up all the sexual assault cases she’s had in any of our hospitals during the last couple of years. My guys wouldn’t know about anything that wasn’t a homicide, so I thought it might be useful ‘cause of the way Dogen got it in this case.”

 “Sarah and I pulled everything we could think of, but it’s just a sampling. Any of your loved ones thinking about elective surgery in the near future, try the Animal Medical Center or a visiting nurse service—these big hospitals could kill you. I’ll start close to home.

 “Here at Mid-Manhattan we’ve got a few open investigations. The 17th Squad just locked up a janitor who’s only worked in the place for three months. He likes to slip into a white lab coat, look for rooms with women patients who don’t speak English—they don’t seem to question his presence, probably because they can’t. The women assume he’s a doctor, so when he pulls back the covers and starts to do a vaginal exam they submit to it. His name’s Arthur Chelenko—arrested and fired two weeks ago. Only then did Personnel get a record check. He was fired from Bronx Samaritan last year for doing exactly the same thing. Just lied on his résumé—no one checked it out—and he’s back here in business again.”

 “In jail?”

 “No. He made bail—he’s out pending indictment and trial.”

 McCabe, Losenti, and Ramirez—the three detectives who’d get stuck with doing the legwork—were taking down all the information and I passed them copies of Chelenko’s rap sheet, with his address and pedigree information.

 “Any history of violence?” Wallace asked.

 “Not according to his sheet. But, of course, we’ve got to factor in the grudge motive, or the possibility of a frenzied response if his intention was a sexual assault and Dogen struggled with him.

 “Then there’s Roger Mistral. Anesthesiologist. Got a heads-up from the D.A.‘s office in Bergen County, New Jersey, when they heard about the murder on the morning news. They convicted Dr. Mistral of rape last month—found him in an empty operating room having intercourse with a patient he’d resedated with a horse tranquilizer after she came out of surgery for a foot injury.”

 “What does that have to do with Mid-Manhattan?”

 “Maybe nothing. We’re checking his records, too, though. Would you believe that the state licensing people here in New York, the Office of Professional Discipline, issued a ruling right after the jury verdict that his conviction won’t be final until he’s sentenced in May? Well, they did. So he’s still allowed to be doing per diem work anywhere on this side of the Hudson River for another six weeks.”

 McGraw asked if we knew his whereabouts for the past forty-eight hours. “Can he account for his time since Monday night, when Dogen was back in town?”

 “Nobody’s talked to him yet,” I ventured in response. “His wife kicked him out after the Jersey trial so we don’t have a current address on him. Rumor has it that he sleeps on an examining table in one of the X-ray rooms in whatever hospital he’s spending his time in ‘cause he’s too cheap to spring for a hotel. Somebody from the team will have to talk to him when he shows up for duty tomorrow. We’re checking all the local staff.”

 “Talk to him?” Chapman broke in. “I’d like to beat the crap out of him. The only difference between what he did to an anesthetized patient and necrophilia is that the body was still warm. What the hell is that kind of thing all about?”

 “Come to my lecture for the Lenox Hill Debs tomorrow night, I’ll try to explain it. Now, Sarah Brenner has an active one. She’s got a complaint about an attending ob-gyn. He’s a world-renowned fertility expert with an office on Fifth Avenue. He’s got privileges at Mid-Manhattan, as well as three other East Side hospitals, so he’s in and out of here all the time. No record—name’s Lars Ericson. Victim claims he raped her when she came into town from New Hampshire last month.”

 “Has he been collared yet?”

 “Not—”

 McGraw barked at me. “What are you waiting for?”

 “Well, Chief, the victim suffers from multiple personality disorder—she’s thirty or forty different women, depending on what day of the week you talk to her. It seems that two or three of her personalities wanted to have sex with Dr. Ericson, but at least one of the others didn’t want to consent. Sarah’s trying to figure out which one made the complaint.”

 Wallace passed behind me to grab a soda out of the refrigerator, whispering as he bent over, “Welcome to the wacky world of sex crimes. This should be an eye-opener for the Chief.”

 McGraw wasn’t amused.

 “Then we have our stalker: Mohammed Melin. Remember De Niro inTaxi Driver? Well, this guy makes him look easy. Melin drives a yellow. Owns a medallion. Seems he had some kind of prostate infection, so he showed up in the emergency room here late one night. A young resident treated him—she’s a very good doctor, and she’s lovely as well. Examined him, prescribed some medication, and simply rubbed a little salve onto his penis—fifteen minutes of tender loving care and she hasn’t been able to get rid of him ever since that encounter.”

 “Actually, Chief, that’s how it started with Coop and me,” Chapman interjected. “One stroke and I’ve been following her like a slave for ten years. Love reallyis a many-splendored thing.”

 I ignored him and went on with my litany. “Now Mohammed waits outside the hospital in his cab whenever he’s in the area. Elena Kingsland—she’s the doctor—finishes a shift, walks out of the hospital exhausted in the middle of the night. She steps off the curb to hail a cab and there’s Mohammed. No charges against him yet, if you can imagine it—just sitting in his taxi on a public street, not doing anything to anybody according to the Penal Law. Twice he’s been caught in the hospital, roaming around trying to find Kingsland at 3 or 4A.M. Those arrests for trespass have been misdemeanors, so he’s been walked in and out of the system both times. We’ve been trying to work him up for something more serious. Finally found a welfare fraud and we now have a warrant for his arrest on that case, but he hasn’t been around in at least three weeks.”

 That was all I had on the list for Mid-Manhattan Hospital. Wallace watched me put down the first pad and reach for the next one in the pile, where I had gone on to note incidents in other facilities.

 “Hey, Alex, don’t forget that one I’m sitting on in Stuyvesant. We’ll have an answer on that in a few weeks.”

 “Tell them about it, Mercer. I didn’t even include it in the roundup. Sorry, my fault.”

 “There’s a twenty-six-year-old woman in the psych wing. She was emotionally disturbed as a teenager. Tried to kill herself with an overdose when she was seventeen. Been in a coma ever since. Almost ten years and the most she can do is move her eyelids from time to time. They’ve had her on life support, in long-term care, at Stuyvesant for all that time.”

 I remember being struck by the horror of that story four months ago when Mercer first came to me with the case. It still hurt to hear him describe the unthinkable.

 “Well, she’s about four weeks away from giving birth. The fact that she hasn’t been conscious for a decade didn’t stop somebody from climbing on top of her bones and raping her. The security’s real tight on her wing, so if it’s not her old man—her parents and sisters are her only visitors after all these years—it’s obviously some sick bastard who works there.”

 McGraw and the others who had not known about the case were shaking their heads in amazement.

 “Suspects?” Lieutenant Peterson asked.

 “Everyone from the broom pushers who swab her cubicle to the head shrink on the service,” Mercer responded. “Cooper got us a court order so we could draw blood and do DNA on the fetus. Then we’ll be getting the same thing from every one of the guys who had access to her. We’ll nail him.”

 I continued on my institutional odyssey around Manhattan in which not a single private or public hospital seemed to have been spared the indignity of some kind of sexual assault on the premises within the past three years. Occasionally, the assailants were health-care professionals themselves; frequently, they were technical workers who were assigned to the departments essential to the operation of these little villages—maintenance, food services, janitorial staff, aides, and messengers. Sometimes they were patients, free to move about from one area of the hospital to almost any other, and often they were interlopers who wandered into these enormous structures with no business being inside at all.

 “Obviously, we’ve got to look at everybody—from the professional staff to the underground population.” I had already learned the hard way that it was better to cast a very wide net at the start of an investigation in order not to overlook any potential suspects.

 By the time we had gone around the room and each of the detectives had described his actions for the day, it was close to ten o’clock. McGraw told Wallace to turn up the volume on the television and switch it to Fox 5 News to catch the headline stories. One of the guys who had retired from the squad was now covering the crime beat for the station, and from the posture of attention McGraw suddenly assumed it was obvious he had leaked something to his former protégé in order to get his face on the tube.

 Mike shook his head and suppressed a snide remark as all our business stopped so McGraw could admire himself on the screen, telling the public that his detectives had a lot of great leads and expected to have someone in custody by the weekend. The guys in the room didn’t appear to be surprised by his phony optimism, just annoyed. The moment the camera lens shifted to the Mayor’s face, McGraw rejoined our group.

 “Who’s got the autopsy?”

 “The Chief’s doing it himself in the morning,” Chapman answered. “I’m observing.”

 Good news for me. I had enormous respect for the Chief Medical Examiner, Chet Kirschner, and an easy relationship with him. I was likely to have preliminary results of the procedure by tomorrow afternoon.

 “Motives,” McGraw went on. “Who’s thinkin‘ what?”

 “Could be a straight-out sexual assault,” Jerry McCabe offered. “Pick from any one of your categories of guys walking around these empty halls at night. Late Monday, around midnight, say, he comes across a woman alone in her office. She’s strong. Thinks she can fight him off. Can’t overcome the knife. Bingo.”

 “Just as easy for it to be a burglary, and Dogen surprised him in the middle of it,” countered Wallace. “Even though the wallet’s still there, doesn’t mean there isn’t something missing and we’re not yet aware of what it is.”