Робин Кук - Intervention

“I’ve always felt New York City taxis and I could share the road.”

With a final head shake and a roll of his eyes, the policeman handed back Jack’s driver’s license. “It’s your funeral,” he said, washing his hands of the affair.

Irritably, Jack picked up his bike, climbed on, started pumping, and rapidly pulled away from the police car even before the officer had climbed back into his cruiser. Soon the frenzy of the traffic, the icy wind, and the sustained exertion cooled his hot blood. Reaching the optimal speed of nearly twenty miles per hour, he was able to make the lights all the way to 42nd Street. As he waited for the green, panting for breath, he had to admit the policeman had been right. Hungry cabdrivers were always going to stop for a fare without regard for their surroundings. By failing to be a defensive rider, Jack was slipping into the patho logically destructive behavior that had put him at risk in the af termath of his wife and daughters’ deaths. Jack knew that he couldn’t afford such selfishness. Laurie and John Junior needed him. If the family was going to beat the neuroblastoma, they had to do it as a team.

Arriving at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner at the corner of First Avenue and 30th Street, Jack crossed the wide avenue and made his way to the building’s driveway. Although the OCME building looked the same from First Avenue as it had when it was built in the sixties, changes had been made, particularly after 9/11. The old loading dock had been replaced by a larger parking area and a series of rollaway garage doors to accommodate the arrival of multiple vehicles with their corpses. Also gone was the herd of aged brown mortuary vans with HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORP. stenciled on the sides parked helter-skelter all over 30th Street, replaced by an orderly fleet of new white vans. And instead of having to carry his bike into the morgue, Jack just rode it into one of the garages, where he could leave it safely in full view of a much better managed security office.

Inside the OCME were more changes. With the department’s importance highlighted after 9/11, it was rewarded by the legislature with more personnel, equipment, and space. A brand-new building had been built a few blocks down First Avenue to house the expanded department of forensic biology, including, in particular, the DNA laboratory. Though the OCME of New York City had once fallen on hard times because of budget cuts, losing its famed countrywide leadership in the field of forensics, those days were past.

Jack now had more than thirty medical examiner, or M.D. forensic pathologist, colleagues across the city. The number of non-M. D. forensic investigators in the Manhattan office had been increased, their titles changed. No longer referred to as physician’s assistants, they were now called medicolegal investigators, or MLIs. There were also eight new forensic anthropologists on staff, in addition to the forensic odontologists that Jack and the other MEs could tap for appropriate cases.

Jack had also personally benefited from all the growth and change. Along with the entire DNA and serology departments, other divisions including records, administration, legal, and human resources had moved to the new high-rise building, freeing space in the old building. All medical examiners now had their own, separate offices on the third floor. In addition to his desk, Jack now had his own lab bench, which meant he could leave out his microscope, slides, and paperwork without fear it would be disturbed.

Jack walked into the building, vowing to rise above his raw emotions and focus on his work. Feeling suddenly as if he were on a mission, he didn’t wait for the back elevator but took the stairs. He quickly traversed the new sudden infant death syndrome offices and cut through the old medical records room, which now housed the warren of new investigator cubbies. The graveyard shift of medicolegal investigators was finishing up reports for the seven-thirty shift change. Jack gave a cursory wave to Janice Jaeger, the night-shift investigator he’d known since he’d started work at OCME, and with whom he frequently partnered.

He tossed his jacket into an aged leather club chair when he reached the ID office, where all the medical examiners eventually started their day. Stacked on the solitary desk were the records of the cases that had come in during the night and that fell within OCME jurisdiction, according to the medicolegal investigation team. These cases represented those deaths that had occurred in any unusual or suspicious manner, including suicide, accident, criminal violence, or merely suddenly when the victim was in apparent good health.

Jack sat down at the desk and began going through the cases. He liked to pick out the more challenging ones because they gave him the opportunity to learn. That was what he most enjoyed about forensics. The other medical examiners tolerated this behavior because Jack also did the most cases of anyone.

The normal morning process involved the medical examiner on first call for the week to come in early, usually about seven or slightly before, and go through the cases to determine which ones definitely needed postmortems, then assign them out on an equitable basis. Even Jack had the duty about a dozen times a year, which he never minded since he was invariably there anyway.

Within a couple of minutes Jack found an apparent meningitis case of a teenage boy from a private school on the Upper East Side. Since Jack was generally known as the infectious-disease guru after having made several lucky diagnoses in the past, he read the record slowly and put it aside. He thought that case might be good for him, since many of his colleagues shunned infectious cases. He truly didn’t care.

Jack slowed down on his perusal of the next case as well. It was another relatively young individual, although this time it was a female. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old woman who’d been brought into an emergency room with supposed rapid onset of confusion, spastic gait, and ultimately coma and death. There had been no fever or malaise, and according to her friends, she was an avid health enthusiast, shunning drugs and alcohol. Although her friends had been enjoying cocktails at the time of her collapse, they claimed the victim had consumed only soft drinks.

“Oh, shit!” a voice lamented, loud enough to snap Jack’s head up.

Standing in the opened doorway leading out into the empty ID room was Vinnie Amendola, one of the mortuary technicians, a newspaper under his arm. He was still holding on to the doorknob of the connecting door as if he might change his mind and flee. It was clear that the source of his outburst was Jack’s presence.

“What’s the matter?” Jack demanded, wondering if there was some emergency.

Vinnie didn’t answer. He glared at Jack for a beat before closing the door behind him. He stood in front of Jack’s desk, arms crossed. “Don’t freaking tell me you’re reverting to your old ways,” he said.

Jack could not suppress a smile. He’d suddenly realized the cause of Vinnie’s feigned anger. Prior to John Junior’s birth, when Jack would come to work early to cherry-pick the autopsy cases, he’d drag Vinnie down with him to the autopsy room to get a jump on the day. In addition to his regular mortuary-tech duties, Vinnie was responsible for coming in early to facilitate the transition from whatever the night techs were doing, although what he mostly did was make the communal coffee and then read the sports section of the Daily News.

Although Vinnie always complained about having to start autopsies earlier than the chief medical examiner decreed, he and Jack were a great team despite their merciless teasing of each other. Together they could frequently do one and a half or even two cases while others did just one.