Linda Fairstein - Likely To Die

“Keep in mind, there was an awful lot of blood here, even on her hands and arms. I’ll get to that in a minute, when we talk about why she was untied. But thereis a different sort of coating on that finger, either from dragging herself through some of the pooled blood or-I guess it just never occurred to me-by intentionally putting her finger in the blood, like to draw something. I’d like to see your pictures before I jump to any conclusions that suggest she was writing.

“I’m surprised you’re such a doubter, Chapman. Wasn’t it you who had the case with me a couple of months ago? The guy who was shot six times in the back on a subway platform, but ran up two flights of stairs and onto the street ‘til he found a phone booth to make a call. Then he collapsed and died.”

“Yeah, ‘Lucky Louie’ Barsky, the loan shark. Last gasp for a phoner to his mother, to tell her she could live off whatever she could find in the shoe box marked ‘12D Black Croco Loafer’ on the third shelf of his bedroom closet. Lucky for him he survived to make the call. Unlucky for Mom, I was there with a search warrant before she could find a stepladder. His ex-girlfriend had ratted on him and knew where the dough was stashed. I guess miracles do happen, Doc.”

Mercer brought us back to Dogen’s killing. “So you think she was untiedafter the stabbing?”

“No bindings were found at the scene, isn’t that right? Only the gag. So after she was disabled-whether that was with the first couple of thrusts or after all of them-it would seem that he untied her then and moved her to the floor.”

Mike was seated at the table again, shaking his head back and forth. “So he rapes her while she’s unconscious and bleeding like a stuck pig from some, if not all, of these wounds?” He leaned back in his chair, then it dropped forward with a crashing noise under his weight as he pounded both of his fists on the table. “Can you believe that some perverted sicko gets sexually aroused by the sight of a bloody corpse? I’ll never understand your end of this business, Mercer, I swear it. How does a guy get it up after he’s mutilated and savaged a woman’s body? I swear, there should be a death penalty all its own for this kind of crime, and I’d be the executioner. Dammit.”

Kirschner’s even voice picked up the narrative. “What I’m about to say doesn’t make this crime any better, Mike, but perhaps your killer wasn’t as stimulated as he thought he might be. It’s pretty clear to me, the way Mike described the position of Dogen’s body, the removal of her underwear, and the lifting of her skirt to expose her genitals, that some kind of sexual assault was contemplated or attempted.

“But it wasn’t completed. No sign of seminal fluid, neither on the body nor within the vaginal vault. No sperm. I did swabbings of the vaginal and anal orifices, and you’ll get lab results on those, but I think we’ll come up with a negative.”

Mercer grimaced. “You thinking like I am?” he directed the question to me.

I was crestfallen, too. For the past few years, Mercer and I had come to rely on DNA evidence and its stunning genetic fingerprinting techniques to resolve a growing number of rape cases. Even when the victim survived the attack, as most do, and picked out her assailant in photo arrays and lineups, the reliability of DNA testing to confirm her identification had dramatically increased the success rate of prosecutions all over the country.

“I guess I was counting on evidence we’re not going to have,” I said, the dejection apparent in my tone. “I just assumed that we’d get seminal fluid and develop a print ready for comparison when we find our suspect.”

“That’s a luxury I don’t think we’re going to have in this case, Alex.”

“Any chance the guy used a condom, Doc? That’s why you’re not finding any semen?”

“Unlikely, Mike. I mean, it’s entirely possible. But most of the time condoms leave substances in the victim’s body that we would detect at autopsy or in the lab. Whether it’s the lubricant or the spermicides, there’s-”

“Well, I mean, can you tell if she was even penetrated?”

“There’s no trauma, either vaginally or anally. Now, that doesn’t tell us much in and of itself about vaginal penetration.”

Mike didn’t have the experience with sexual assault cases that Mercer and I did, so I went on with the facts to which Kirschner had alluded. “More than two-thirds of adult women who are raped don’t sustain any kind of physical injury or trauma, Mike. Someone who’s sexually active isn’t likely to exhibit internal damage. The vaginal vault is pretty elastic, and if she was unconscious when the rapist penetrated, there’d be even less likelihood of meeting resistance.”

Kirschner was a step ahead of me. “What I find even more unusual, though, is that there was not a shred of any other trace evidence suggesting an attempt at a sexual encounter. If he had actually tried to penetrate, I would have expected to find some ofhis pubic hair in our combing of hers.”

A standard part of evidence collection in rape cases, as well as at autopsies, is a combing of the victim’s pubic hair. Frequently, the rapist’s own hair becomes entangled and left on the victim, and becomes another means of forensically linking a perpetrator to his prey.

“When you’ve got a rape, the crime sceneis the victim’s body. It’s the only crime for which that’s true. I’m convinced there is too little evidence here to believe our attacker committed a sexual assault.”

“So now all we gotta figure is what stopped him,” Mercer said. “Anything from getting scared off by noise in the hallway to losing his erection. Maybe Mike’s right in this case. If his intention was to rape Dogen, but he had to use more force than he had planned to subdue her, he might have been disgusted or simply unable to maintain an erection.”

“Don’t forget,” I added, “with a lot of the psychiatric types living in and under the medical center, you’re starting out with some candidates who are sexually dysfunctional even though their intention may have been to complete an assault. Are we back at square one, guys?”

“I hate to disappoint you, Alexandra, but I don’t think the solution to this crime is going to come frommy work ormy laboratory. Chapman knew as much about how Gemma Dogen died before he got here this morning as he does now. He just didn’t know where each of those knife wounds landed, internally, until we opened her up. I’m sorry I can’t give you any more help right now but your killer didn’t leave the kind of incriminating evidence we had all hoped for.

“If you find him before too much time goes by,” Kirschner said, turning to the two detectives, “his body and his clothing are likely to tell more of the story than Dogen’s. Whether or not she was able to scratch or bite or hit him, I have no idea. But he certainly must have left that room looking like he’d come from an abattoir. He’d have had more blood on him than anyone except a surgeon leaving the operating theater.”

Chet reminded us to forward the crime scene photos to him as soon as we had them, collected his Polaroids, and excused himself, noting that he had half an hour until he began his next procedure at three o’clock.

Mike, Mercer, and I gathered our belongings and walked out of the room. “I’m taking a pass on those sandwiches, Cooper. Want a cup of coffee across the street before we go on?” Mercer asked.

I had absolutely no appetite, either. “Sure, maybe it’ll take the chill off.” We walked back up the ramp and out onto the sidewalk.

“You taking Coop over to see Dogen’s apartment?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll be at Mid-Manhattan doing interviews. Coming by the station house later, kid?”