Michael Baden - Remains Silent

“You’re angry,” he said.

“You’re so right, for a change. I should have known better than to get involved with a two-timing lying son of a-”

“Involved with?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Of course you did. Don’t you listen to yourself?”

“Then I didn’t mean it in the way you’re taking it. We’re involved in a case, not romantically. You, Dr. Rosen, have a good imagination.”

“And so, Ms. Manfreda, do you. If you look at the date on the bottle, you’ll see it’s at least two years old. It should have been thrown out. Marianna and I were divorced a year ago. We were separated a year before that. Do you want a glass of wine?” There was pain in his voice.

“I’m sorry,” she said. Nothing like making a fool of yourself. “Champagne would be nice. But I’ll settle for wine this time.”

“Our marriage fell apart in less than a year. It was a marriage of opposites, full of battles. She was funny and hotheaded and never reticent.” He smiled at her. “Like you. She worked for a financial newsletter but didn’t like it. ‘I could walk away from my job and never look back,’ she told me before we were married. That’s a fantasy of mine, too- walking away- but I know I couldn’t do it.”

“Neither could I,” Manny said, entranced. No opposites here.

“No, I suppose not. Anyway, she did walk away from her job after she left me. She met someone in California and lives with him. Cooks dinner, takes his suits to the dry cleaner- that sort of thing.”

“Your suits could use a trip to the dry cleaner.”

He looked down. Some blood from that afternoon’s autopsy had landed on his cuff. “Taking them would be a full-time job.”

“Maybe we could train Mycroft,” she said.

He looked at her hard. “I’ll open the Pellegrino and put the takeout in the oven. I hope you like souvlaki.”

She realized she was famished. The wound, the threat at Turner, Mycroft’s fear, the smells of the autopsy: they all retreated in the presence of the man who was responsible for them. Food, then sleep. For one night, normalcy. A warmth spread through her that reminded her of childhood. I’m comfortable with him.

Her cell phone rang. She had left it on the table, so she hobbled over to pick it up.

It was her mother, calling from New Jersey, worried. Kenneth had told her what happened and had brought Mycroft over, and of course she didn’t mind taking care of him.

Manny was conscious that Jake had returned with their wine and was standing in the doorway, listening. “Yes, I can keep food down,” she said in answer to her mother’s questions. “Yes, I’m with a doctor. I’m spending the night here.”

Jake handed her the wine. “Of course not!” she said. He watched her blush and guessed what her mother had asked.

Manny lowered her voice. “Mommy, please, I can’t talk about him now. I’ll call you first thing tomorrow. Kiss Mycroft good night for me and tell him I love him. I love you, too, Mommy. Sleep well. Your daughter’s fine.” She hung up.

“Mommy?” was all Jake said.

She wanted to kill him.

SHE SLEPT in a guest bedroom, waking in pain from time to time not wanting to take any more of the painkiller Jake had placed by her bedside. When she hobbled down to the kitchen in the morning, dressed in chinos and a work shirt he had left for her, her heart was buoyant. His expression was grave.

“How are you feeling?” he asked. He poured her coffee into a mug with fake red blood drops running down its front. Across the blood, black letters blared: CALL THE EXPERTS. SPATTER IS OUR SECOND LANGUAGE.

“Refreshed. Invigorated. Ready for action.”

He scowled. “What can I do to persuade you to drop the case?”

“Drop it yourself.”

He had actually considered doing just that, to keep her safe. But they both knew so much already that, even if they quit, there would be no guarantee against further attacks. Besides, his obligation to Pete was too strong. He would have to protect her as best he could.

“I want you to take it easy today,” he told her. “Go home. Rest. Let your mother stay with you.”

She smiled at him. “Yessir, boss.”

“I’m serious. I don’t know who attacked you at your office, but I have the feeling it was your last warning. Next time they’ll strike to kill, particularly if either of us gets closer. So stay home, and for God’s sake be careful.”

His intensity sobered her. “You be careful, too. What’s your plan for the day?”

“I’ll see you home and then head for the office. Sometime or other, though, I’ll take the hair and bone samples to Hans Galt’s lab in Brooklyn. Maybe they can tell us something.”

“Will I see you tonight?”

He caught the appeal in her tone. “Of course, but I’m not sure when. I’ll call you. Meanwhile, I’ll ask Sam to check on you and relieve your mother if she wants to go back to Jersey. I don’t want you to move from your apartment.”

She bristled. “Look, I told you before. I don’t like anybody telling me what I can and can’t do.”

“I’m not telling you, it’s an order. If you don’t obey, the team’s dissolved.”

He means it. She bowed her head. “I’ll be good. I promise.”

Late that afternoon, Jake went to Galt’s lab. He could have done the work at the ME office, but he didn’t want Pederson to catch him at it. His boss had told him to use a private lab, so Galt’s it was. He took the bone samples down to the X-ray room.

He put on a lead apron, placed the bones on separate metal X-ray cassettes, and, one at a time, put the cassettes on the examining table, the one usually reserved for cadavers, and x-rayed them: the mandible from Skeleton Four, the metal plate from Skeleton Three, the humerus from Two, and the metacarpal and ulna from One. The metacarpal, he noticed for the first time, had an unusual bulge with a small hole in it. Funny, he thought, how even the best-trained eye- mine- can overlook something. He’d seen it happen to others a hundred times.

He shot the X-rays, developed the films, and examined them on the fluorescent viewing box. The bulge on the left metacarpal was an irregular, almost shaggy-lined bone cyst- osteomyelitis- from which pus would have oozed through the skin of the palm of the left hand during life. He’d have to take a culture- some bacteria and fungi stick around for decades- and then decalcify it, so it could be cut down and made into a slide for further examination under a microscope.

The X-ray of the humerus was obscured by a white blur. Damn. Something wrong with the film. He reshot the X-ray and developed it; the blur remained. Jake remembered Harrigan saying he needed to reshoot the X-rays on one of the skeletons because something had gone wrong. The same shot? Probably.

He studied the film. With the thousands of X-rays of bodies and bones he’d examined over the years, he’d never seen a white blur like this from any of his own autopsies. But I’ve seen it before, an X-ray from a bone in the ME museum on the sixth floor. His heart quickened. The museum’s X-ray dated from the 1930s and was of the mandible of a woman who had worked at the U.S. Radium Dial factory in New Jersey. She and her fellow workers licked the tips of their brushes to make the fine points they needed to paint the glow-in-the-dark watch dials the company featured. Yes! That was it! Many of the women developed jaw necrosis and leukemia. The woman had died of it. But this humerus had been taken out of the ground in rural Turner. Farms were there, not factories. Very strange. An idea was forming, one so sinister, so unthinkable, he tried to brush it aside, but it stayed with him.

He dialed Hans Galt in his upstairs office. Hans wasn’t there, but his assistant, Amy Fontayne, was.