Linda Fairstein - Likely To Die

“I’ll hold while you look for it.”

I put the receiver down on the desk, scanned my notes, and found the reference to the drawer that held both a series on ethics and another on specific medical topics like tissues. I opened it up and saw that crammed right in between the two was a green Pendaflex holding the file I was looking for.

I cradled the phone on my shoulder as I separated the sides of the folder and removed a thick sheaf of papers. “Curveball, Mercer. ‘Met Games’ looks like it’s all about Coleman Harper. This stuff goes back a lot longer than Dietrich’s archives do. It’s Dogen’s notes from her first year at Minuit. Harper was finishing his internship just like he told us. Only these records make it clear that Gemma’s the one who blackballed him from Mid-Manhattan and the neurosurgical program.

“Spector got him parked over at Metropolitan Hospital while he tried to appeal the decision.” I flipped through some of the documents. “Met Games is right. Spector was trying to find supporters uptown who would go to the mat for his boy Harper, and Dogen dug her heels in to track the guy’s every move. It’s too much to skim through right now but it looks like she’s been documenting every mistake Harper’s ever made in the past ten years-and there are plenty of them.”

“Like what?”

“She’s got a few things circled in red ink-someone up at Met who wasn’t happy with his technical skills in the operating room, another one complaining to Spector that Harper had a poor medical knowledge base. And it’s clear they weren’t going to keep him there, either.”

I looked at Dogen’s meticulous handwriting in the margin of the files. “Her notes read like Coleman Harper had something on Spector-like some secret about his personal life. At least, that’s why she thinks he’s backing Harper for admission, even though by most accounts he wouldn’t make it at Minuit.”

“Good hunting.”

“Look, I’ll bring these with me. And I think I’ll swing by Minuit on my way home. I’ve got my ID with me so maybe someone from security can let me in Gemma’s office. That way I can examine her folders there before Spector gets on to us during the week.”

“No. That’s a serious, emphatic, Battaglia-inspired capitalN, capitalO. There’s absolutely no way of knowing who’s around there on a Sunday afternoon and who you’re gonna bump into. Remember, we know we’ve got one loose cannon running around out of control. Who knows whether DuPre left anything at the hospital that he’s coming back for.”

“Mercer, I can’t get in there on a Sunday unless someone from security opens the door for me. It’s not exactly a big risk to take in the middle of the day-”

“No! Get it? First of all, a lady was killed in that room just a couple of weeks ago, remember? Second, we don’t know who to trust in that entire hospital, do we? Go directly home. Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars, and definitely do not stop at Minuit Medical College. Am I understood?”

“What if Mike gets back and can meet me there?”

“You really are stubborn, girl.”

“I’ll be good, Mercer. See you later.” I didn’t want to lie to him and tell him I wouldn’t go to Mid-Manhattan. I was only a couple of blocks away and anxious to see what was in Dogen’s office now that I knew what to look for. I could always get the Police Department to secure her apartment by this evening so no one could get into it even if they had keys. But we’d have far less control over circumstances at the medical school if someone wanted to purge her files, unless we acted quickly.

I gathered up the folders, turned off the radio, and walked across the room to put on my raincoat. April fifteenth was only ten days off and Coleman Harper was once again waiting for a decision about whether he would be admitted to the neurosurgical residency. I wondered how much of Dogen’s determination not to tell the Board at Minuit whether she was leaving was tied to the ten-year struggle she had waged to keep him out of the program. How desperate had he been to get in this time? And were there other candidates whom she had tracked and thwarted in exactly the same way? Gemma Dogen’s principles had made her a lot of enemies and I thought about how powerful a motive revenge could often be.

I reached out to unlatch the chain on the back of the door. There was a flash of movement over my left shoulder that startled me and in the split second that my head whipped around to look for its source I was slammed against the wall into the corner where it met the door frame. A fist pounded into the rear of my skull, blinding me with its force and causing me to drop everything in my arms as I shrieked from pain. The second blow landed on the knuckles of my hands, which I had instinctively thrown up behind me to cover my head. Again my forehead crashed into the doorjamb as my arms flailed behind me, striking wildly at the body that was pressing in against my back.

I braced myself against the wall and turned to confront my tormentor, hoping to reason with him when I looked him in the eye. But my feet slipped on the shiny tops of the dozens of folders that had dropped to the floor and spread across it like a giant-sized version of fifty-two pickup. My left leg slid out from underneath me as I pivoted and fell onto one knee, staring up to see Coleman Harper plowing his fist into the place on the wall where my face had just been.

I screamed at him to stop but he pushed me onto my back and straddled me, one of my legs locked in place beneath me, as he pinned my shoulder to the floor and stuffed something that smelled like a dirty sock in my mouth to muffle my shouts. Harper’s eyes were darting madly around the room while he pressed his knee into my abdomen, holding my throat with his left hand and trying to keep both of my wrists in his right. It seemed as though he was searching for something to use as a weapon but hadn’t decided yet what it would be. I knew I could probably break loose of his hold but the pain was burning fiercely in my forehead and I was trying to conserve every ounce of my strength to counter whatever his next move would be.

Likely to die.

My mind was cartwheeling as I tried to figure some way to defend myself against whatever device he would turn on me. The only person who knew where to find me-Mercer Wallace-was hours away from here with no idea that I was in any danger. There would be no one to save me from Coleman Harper if I couldn’t do it myself.

I watched his facial expression change as he looked from shelf to shelf mentally evaluating the deadliness of the objects his eyes passed over. I prayed he hadn’t seen the expensive set of kitchen knives I had noticed in the next room when Mercer and I first visited the apartment. Silently, I begged the neighbors to turn off their blaring television set instead of cluttering their home with more of that wretched-looking pottery that the salesman was offering. I wanted them to hear the struggle, which I knew was going to get worse.

From my twisted position on the floor, I could see the coat closet Harper had secreted himself in before my arrival. It had been emptied out for delivery to the thrift shop, too, no doubt, and had given him an ideal place to hide while I searched the files and until I left. If only I hadn’t called Mercer to brag about my discovery. Maybe he would have let me walk right out the door.

Stay calm, I tried to tell myself. He doesn’t have a weapon because he didn’t come here to kill people. He didn’t expect me or anyone else to be in Gemma’s home. It isn’t like the night he went to her office intending to pay her back for ruining the career he had wanted for himself.

I closed my eyes and willed myself out of the apartment with all the faith in me, but I opened them again when the doctor spoke to me and I found I was still very much in the middle of this bad dream.