William Diehl - Seven ways to die

As the bird dove behind a building, a chill streaked through him. He shook it off.

“You okay?” Kate asked.

“I’m fine,” he said. “I was thinking about options.”

“Options?”

“Yeah. Like ruling them out, narrowing the field. Take Stembler. When I mentioned options he just phased out. He was so busy worrying about the consequences of Handley’s death suddenly he didn’t care who killed Raymond or why.”

“The hauteur of the successful business man,” Kate said.

“Right. What happened to Raymond no longer has any validity in his world.”

They reached the door to the coffee shop and he looked up as he held the door open for her, his eyes tracing the arc of the falcon as it swept through the spires of Wall Street.

“Maybe he wasn’t a specific target.”

“What do you mean?”

“Suppose his murder was nothing personal. Suppose his addiction put him in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“You mean an accident?”

“No. Maybe Raymond was picked at random. Maybe he was the victim of some perverse, unthinkable kind of rage.”

In the autopsy lab, Wolfsheim and Annie Rothschild had completed their work and replaced the parts of Handley’s body they had removed for analysis. Annie Rothschild, who had some medical experience before becoming a police officer, had been working as Wolfsheim’s denier, his assistant, when he performed autopsies.

A petite brunette in her early thirties, Rothschild had all the rigid criteria for a spot on the squad but it was Wolfsheim who had recommended her after watching her at trial during a difficult cross examination by a high profile defense attorney. She had lured the lawyer with simple “yes” and “no” answers on some details of a particularly brutal homicide. Thinking he could make a fool of her on the stand, he had thrown some intricate pathology questions at her.

To his chagrin, she not only had acquitted herself admirably with her keen knowledge of forensics but had led the lawyer into uncharted waters. Watching her dismantle the lawyer’s defense, Wolfsheim realized that Rothschild had carefully orchestrated her performance as a witness to make the lawyer look like a fool. His client was convicted and Annie had become a prime candidate for the TAZ.

While they were completing their work they had both listened through earphones to the initial debriefing Cody was conducting in the HQ so both of them knew what had been accomplished thus far. They washed up and crossed the hallway.

Wolf entered the room rumpled and enervated like a sigh waiting to be uttered, his eyes temporarily atrophic from the demands of minute scrutiny, his fingers gnarled by restless and constant exploration, his shoulders bowed by the relentless probing and dismemberment of what had once been Raymond Handley.

As always, his psyche was momentarily askew. He performed each autopsy compassionately. They were constant reminders of the finite line between life and death, between the human body and a corpse without a soul.

And there had been the physical demands: cutting open the body and dictating his findings into the microphone that hung just over his head; looking for signs of mischief in the intricate collaboration of veins, capillaries, and arteries that stitched together the pulpy organs that had supplied and supported life to the now smelly, inanimate mess that lay before him; collecting blood and fluids and slicing sections of bones; examining the lifeless eyes and slicing open the skull to reveal what secrets the brain might reveal; weighing heart, liver, lungs, kidneys and the myriad other elements of the once miraculous human machine that he was dissecting in his quest for whatever explicitly had destroyed it.

Wolfsheim finally set free a sigh, took the cup of black coffee Vincent Hue offered him, shook off his momentary lapse of objectivity and smiled at her.

They knew what had killed Raymond Handley.

And this one was a beaut.

It wasn’t what killed Raymond Handley but in what order. Handley’s homicide was a masterpiece of misdirection, leaving a conundrum that Cody and his crew would ultimately have to pull out every stop to unravel. Why had this killer resorted to such deviltry murdering Handley when killing him straight out could have been so much simpler?

That was Cody’s problem. But Wolfsheim wasn’t ready to spring that question. He had his own method of briefing the members of the TAZ. Briefing was, he liked to say, a continuous educational process. So he began by reviewing what the squad already knew.

Wolfsheim sipped his coffee. Then he began his lecture, his build-up to the autopsy findings.

“Micah and Bergman did a great job on entry,” Wolf said. “That was great tracking. And Annie followed up sweeping the whole scene. What we can ascertain for sure is that this was a prepared crime scene. The killer came in first, probably with a key supplied by Handley, and set up the scene of the crime in the library.

“I think we will also assume from the tracks in the carpeting that Handley came in, went straight to his bedroom, undressed, and then walked barefooted to the library where the killer was waiting. Handley walked with the killer to the chair and willingly permitted the killer to handcuff his hands and feet to the arms and legs of the chair. This is when it gets dicey.

“As you know,” he went on, “we try to ascertain the initial cause of death and the last event prior to death and if there is a time lapse between the two. For instance, let’s say a woman is hit by a car. She is rushed to the hospital where it is determined she has catastrophic blunt trauma. Also internal bleeding. Examination shows a broken rib has pierced the heart and she is bleeding internally. Loss of blood has been severe. The rib is removed and the heart is sewn up but the woman dies. Initial cause of death was blunt trauma. The last event prior to death was shock caused by internal bleeding. The time lapse was continuous so the final ruling would be that the cause of death was trauma from the automobile accident.

“In this case, the initial cause of death appeared to be a stabbing or piercing of the throat which was a catastrophic wound. It was a slash from left to right which cut the jugular, all other blood vessels and the windpipe. However, the absence of blood puts the initial cause of death in doubt. Further examination of the body revealed a small puncture wound in the left carotid artery, similar to that left by the insertion of an IV. We also know that approximately two liters of blood were drawn from the body using the IV as a siphon. That’s almost half of the body’s blood supply and would have resulted in extreme trauma to the heart. The result would be a lowering of blood to the brain, shock to the heart. Ultimately lethal.”

“Where did the blood go?” Winters asked.

“Don’t rush me,” Wolfsheim snapped back without looking at her.

“Sorry.”

“That’s okay, you’ll learn,” he answered with a wisp of a smile. “Continuing. There’s another wrinkle. We completed an examination of the blood which shows us it contained toxic levels of both nitroglycerine and yohimbine. Point three milliliters of nitroglycerine and ten milliliters of yohimbine, which you probably know as Yohimbe, a fast-acting aphrodisiac when administered orally. Yohimbine is an alpha-2 adrenergic block agent. A dose of yohimbine this high has numerous side effects, including rapid heart rate, high blood pressure, overstimulation, and seizures.

“The two drugs are additive and would cause an almost immediate and deadly drop in the blood pressure.”

He paused for another sip of coffee while the TAZ squad waited impatiently for the big kahuna to continue.

“The question is, which came first? Based on the condition of the heart and brain, it is my conclusion that the Yohimbe was administered first. I’m sure he took it willingly and chased it down with the drink on the table which was bourbon. The killer then began to masturbate Handley. Then he was given a second drink which contained the nitro tablet, and the killer began to service him orally. Handley was approaching a state of ecstasy and it was easy to slip the handball into his mouth and tie it in with the towel. That stifled any screaming. With the introduction of the nitro, Handley was brought to orgasm-and probably suffered extreme pain similar to angina. Then the killer injected the needle and began the exsanguination. Handley’s blood pressure already had dropped dangerously low with the administration of the drugs, and with the loss of blood he was probably brain dead within five minutes followed shortly thereafter by a fatal heart attack.