Robin Cook - Blindsight

As usual, Laurie took a seat near to the door. When the discussions became too administrative or political for her taste, she liked to slip away.

The most interesting part of these weekly conferences usually occurred before the meeting was called to order. It was in these casual conversations beforehand that Laurie was able to pick up interesting tidbits and details of particularly baffling or gruesome cases. In that respect, this Thursday’s meeting proved no different.

“I’d thought I’d seen it all,” Dick Katzenburg told Paul Plodgett and Kevin Southgate. Dick was a senior medical examiner assigned to the Queens office. Laurie’s ears perked up.

“It was the weirdest homicide I’d seen,” Dick continued. “And God knows I’ve seen some strange ones.”

“Are you going to tell us or do we have to beg?” Kevin asked, obviously as eager for the story. Medical examiners loved to swap “war stories” that were either intellectually stimulating or grotesquely bizarre.

“It was a young guy,” Dick said. “Done in a funeral home with the aspirator that they use for embalming.”

“He was bludgeoned to death?” Kevin asked. So far he was unimpressed.

“No!” Dick said. “With the trocar. The aspirator was running. It was as if the kid was embalmed alive.”

“Ugh,” Paul said, obviously impressed. “That is weird. It reminds me of the case-”

“Dr. Montgomery,” a voice called.

Laurie turned. Dr. Bingham stood before her. “I’m afraid there is something else I have to discuss with you,” he said.

Laurie felt queasy. She wondered what she’d done now.

“Dr. DeVries came to see me,” Bingham said. “He complained that you have been coming in his lab bothering him about some test results. Now I know that you are eager for those results, but you’re not the only one waiting. Dr. DeVries is swamped right now. I don’t think I have to tell you. But don’t expect special treatment. You’re going to have to wait like everyone else. I’ll thank you not to harass Dr. DeVries any further. Do I make myself clear?”

Laurie was tempted to say something like DeVries had a hell of a way of going after more funding, but Bingham turned away. Before Laurie had a chance to dwell on this, her third reprimand in four days, Bingham called the meeting to order.

Bingham began the conference, as usual, by summarizing the statistics for the previous week. Then he gave a short report on the status of the Central Park murder case since it had been so much in the news. He again rebutted the media’s charges of mismanagement of the case on the part of the medical examiner’s office. He concluded by advising everyone not to offer any personal opinions.

Laurie was certain that last remark was directed at her. Who else had been offering opinions from within the medical examiner’s ranks?

Following Bingham’s talk, Calvin spoke about administrative issues, particularly concerning how reduced city funding was affecting operations. Every other week one service or supply was being curtailed or eliminated.

Following Calvin’s talk, each of the deputy medical examiners from the other borough offices gave summaries. Some of the people present yawned, others nodded off.

When the borough chiefs were finished, the floor was opened up for general discussion. Dick Katzenburg described a few cases, including the rather grisly one at the Queens funeral home.

Once he was through, Laurie cleared her throat and began to address the group. She presented her six overdose cases as succinctly as possible, careful to delineate the demographic differences that set them apart from usual overdoses. Laurie described the deceased as single yuppies whose drug use came as a surprise to friends and family. She explained the cocaine was mainlined although not mixed with heroin.

“My concern,” Laurie said, avoiding looking at Bingham, “is that we are seeing the beginning of a series of unusual overdose deaths. I suspect a contaminant in the drug is to blame, but so far none has been found. What I’d like to request is that if anybody sees any cases similar to the ones I’ve described, please send them to me.”

“I’ve seen four myself over the last several weeks,” Dick said once Laurie was through. “Since we see so many overdose/toxicity cases I didn’t give the demographics much thought. But now that you mention it, all four seemed like overachievers. In fact, two were professionals. And three of the four took the cocaine intravenously, the fourth orally.”

“Orally?” someone echoed with surprise. “An oral cocaine overdose? That’s pretty uncommon. You usually only see that in drug-smuggling “mules’ coming from South America whose condoms break.”

“I’m never surprised what druggies do,” Dick said. “One of the cases that I had was found wedged in the refrigerator. Apparently he got so hot, he had to crawl into the ice box for relief.”

“One of mine climbed into a refrigerator, too,” Laurie said.

“I had one also,” Jim Bennett said. He was the chief at the Brooklyn office. “And now that I think about it, I had another who ran out into the street stark naked before he had a terminal seizure. He’d taken the drug orally but only after attempting to take it IV.”

“Did these two cases have the same unlikely demographics for a drug overdose?” Laurie asked Jim.

“Sure did,” Jim said. “The man who ran out in the street was a successful lawyer. And the families in both cases swore up and down that the deceased didn’t do drugs.”

Laurie looked to Margaret Hauptman, who headed the Staten Island office. “Have you seen any similar cases?” she asked.

Margaret shook her head.

Laurie asked Dick and Jim if they would mind faxing over the records on the cases they’d described. They immediately said that they would.

“One thing I have to mention,” Dick said. “In three out of four I’ve had a lot of pressure from the involved families to sign the case out as natural.”

“That’s a point I want to underline,” Bingham said, speaking for the first time since the beginning of the discussion. “With upscale overdose deaths like these the families will certainly want to keep the whole episode low profile. I think we should cooperate in this regard. Politically we cannot afford to alienate this constituency.”

“I don’t know what to make of this refrigerator aspect,” Laurie said. “Although it brings me back to the contaminant idea. Perhaps there is some chemical that has a synergistic effect with cocaine vis-á-vis causing hyperpyrexia. At any rate I’m concerned that all these deaths are coming from the same source of the drug. Now that we have this many cases we ought to be able to prove it by comparing the percentages of its natural hydrolysates. Of course we will need the lab to cooperate.”

Laurie looked nervously at Bingham to see if his expression changed with her reference to the lab. It didn’t.

“I don’t think a contaminant is a given,” Dick said. “Cocaine is fully capable of causing these deaths all by itself. On the four cases I’ve seen, the serum level was high. Very high. These people took big doses. Maybe the cocaine wasn’t cut with anything; maybe it was one-hundred-percent pure. We’ve all seen that kind of death with heroin.”

“I still think a contaminant is involved,” Laurie said. “With the general intelligence of this group of victims, it’s hard for me to believe that so many would mess up if it were purely dose related.”

Dick shrugged. “You may be right,” he admitted. “All I’m saying is let’s not jump to hasty conclusions.”

Leaving the conference, Laurie felt a strange and disturbing mixture of excitement, yet a renewed frustration and anxiety. Within a couple of hours her “series” had doubled from six cases to twelve. That was ominous. Her intuition about the number of cases increasing was already coming to pass, and at an alarming rate.