Linda Fairstein - Likely To Die

“Indeed. Gemma was devastated by the event, of course. The procedure was a new one that had been developed in our program by James Binchy, one of our finest surgeons. Quite a radical operation, and a very long one-six, seven hours. That’s why Binchy invited Gemma over to assist him. Unfortunately she became a bit too involved, personally, with the family. Wanted very much for the experiment to succeed-for the girl’s sake and for the larger picture.

“Gemma hadn’t lost very many patients on the table. Took this rather hard. Had to break it to the husband herself. He was wild with grief.”

“Wild-atGemma?”

“Mad at the world. One of those ‘she had everything to live for so why did you let her die’ tirades. Truth is, of course, that Carla Renaud couldn’t have lived more than another month without an attempt at the surgery. Binchy wasn’t trying this out for sport, Miss Cooper. It was the only hope for the Renaud girl and it didn’t work. How does this fit into your questioning?”

Mike was standing in the doorway and answered for me. “Like I said, Doc, we’re looking at every angle. Last December, right before Christmas, an ex-con found his way into a cancer clinic at New York Hospital and slashed the face of a doctor who had treated the guy’s child five years earlier. The teenager had died of leukemia, despite everybody’s best efforts, and the father just never came to grips with it.

“Agatha Christie here is considering whether Renaud’s widower might have harbored this same kind of vengeance for Gemma.”

Dogen’s face puckered and grimaced as he tried to call up old conversations about the matter. “Well, I remember the husband-he was a barrister, wasn’t he?-I know there was talk of lawsuits against Binchy and Gemma and so on. But I’m quite sure nothing came of it. Poor lad was disconsolate at his wife’s death. Had at least expected she’d survive the surgery and die in his arms. But it seems to me he was reasoned with in the end and I’m not aware Gemma ever heard from him again. Not that I’d have any reason to know that for sure.”

“You want to get back to business, Blondie, or you think maybe Dr. Dogen can help you with your horoscope, too?”

Mike and I split up the pile of hundreds of DD5s and began to go through them in detail, picking out points about which to question our cooperative witness. Creavey sat at the far end of the table, sorting through a duplicate pile of police reports, using his own skills and methods to try to reconstruct a version of the investigation.

When we reached the autopsy report, Mike passed the several-page document over to Dogen. “There’s no reason to hold back these details from you, Doc. It’s pretty tough stuff but at least the medical terms will make sense to you. Why don’t you read it and then we can answer any questions you have.”

The mild-mannered physician started at the top with the paragraph describing the deceased’s physical appearance and dimensions. Before he had gotten very far, he stood up and walked to a corner of the room, slumping himself into a chair and running his hand back and forth over his mouth as he tried to absorb the information about the number of stab wounds and the frenzy of the attack.

We sat silently for almost five minutes, then Mike tapped my arm and pointed to the door. As we left the room together, Creavey followed along with us. For a quarter of an hour, the three of us walked around the pool, taking in the brisk spring air while we left Geoffrey Dogen with the haunting pathologist’s portrait of his friend, his former wife. It was obvious he had been crying when we rejoined him and he blew his nose before speaking to us.

“Well, I knew Gemma was a fighter. Looks like your man didn’t expect her to be, did he?”

I let Mike take the lead. “My partner thinks that’s one of the reasons to assume she knew her killer. Someone who’d be aware she might be alone in her office in the middle of the night and that she wouldn’t freak out to see him come in. Maybe it started as a conversation, something he thought he could reason with her about. But he was obviously prepared for the assault if he didn’t get his way.”

“And then she was bound and gagged?”

“That’s what the ME suggested. But almost any one of those stab wounds would have disabled her. If the first thing he did was that blow to the middle of her back, he could have tied her after that and then continued the assault.”

“But certainly there would have been screams-”

“And no one to hear them. It’d be easier to raise some of the dead in the morgue than anyone on that hallway at 2A.M. once it was cleared of all its other occupants. Even if Gemma had gotten out one shriek before she was gagged, another thrust of the knife would have silenced her.”

“What do you make of the attempt to sexually assault her in this-well, condition? The man would have to be insane, don’t you think?”

“I think that’s exactly what he’d want us to think. If you’ve ever seen Mid-Manhattan, you’d know it’s full of lunatics-I mean, the resident population. More than likely, the killer tried to stage this to look like an attempt to rape Gemma just to throw us off course.”

Mike loaded a pack of slides into the viewer. “These are some photographs of the crime scene, Doc. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Gemma’s office but I’d like you to have a look.”

“I’ve been there several times. Even have a few photos of it. Gemma sent them-‘Me in my natural habitat,’ as she labeled them.”

Mike pressed the button that rotated the slides around the carousel and the images from the first run flashed onto the wall-sized screen. Dogen’s head was still as he focused on the shots, many of them repeats of different angles of the dark bloodstains soaked into the carpet.

Interspersed with those were photographs of Gemma’s desk and chair, then of the rows of bookshelves that stood above her file cabinets and drawers full of X-ray film.

“ ‘Ere you go,” Creavey said, breaking the silence by pointing at a large object on Gemma’s desk, sitting like a paperweight atop an inch of documents. “ Tower Bridge, Doc. Front and center.”

“I bought her that from a stall in a market on the Portobello Road. Shape of the bridge, so she loved it. If you take us back a slide or two, Chapman, I can point out people in some of those photographs she’s got on the bookshelf. Took a few of them myself.”

Mike clicked the loader and reversed direction. Dogen called out names as he recognized snapshots, many of them taken in London years ago judging from the styles of the clothing. It was clearly an exercise that meant more to Dogen than it did to our investigation, but in light of the emotional toll on him, Chapman seemed happy to indulge the gentle man.

“Whoops. Hold it there, will you?” Dogen rose to his feet and squinted as he walked closer to the screen. “You probably know this-I can see you’ve been very thorough in your work. You’re aware that her chain is missing from the bookshelf?”

Chapman and I exchanged puzzled glances. “What chain? What are you talking about?”

“Another of her Tower Bridge obsessions. You see this hook on the end of the metal support?” There were pairs of slender steel arms that held the lengths of bookshelves along one entire wall of Gemma’s office. Dogen was standing beside the screen pointing at the curved end of the brace that protruded directly next to the side of her large office desk.

“This is where Gemma hung her spare set of keys. The round hook fitted over the point of the arm and that way the two essential keys she needed-her office and her home-were always ready for her to grab in case she didn’t want to carry an entire handbag around with her. You know what I mean,” Dogen said, looking over at me.