Verwandte Artikel zu Chain of Custody

Chain of Custody - Softcover

Levy, Harry

 
9780449004494: Chain of Custody
Softcover
ISBN 10: 044900449X ISBN 13: 9780449004494
Verlag: Fawcett Books, 1999

Inhaltsangabe

Praised by newspaper reviewers as an unusually compelling courtroom-cum-medical thriller, the author's debut novel pits an attorney and former surgeon against a cabal of vengeful judges and corrupt police officials who frame him for murder. Reprint.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Harry Levy, M.D., studied at Columbia, New York University, and Yale. He was the director of the widely acclaimed feature documentary Interned, which recorded his year as an intern. He went on to become a preventive-medicine specialist and is currently the executive editor of Cyberounds®, a website for health professionals.

Aus dem Klappentext

geon-turned-attorney Dr. Michael Malone is living a nightmare. DNA evidence places Malone at the blood-soaked murder scene of his estranged wife, a deputy DA who was suing him for custody of their only child. But Malone fears he is more than the prime suspect. He is the prime target--in a far-reaching conspiracy of merciless revenge and police cover-up. As the legal system threatens to crush an innocent man, a cat and mouse game with a shadowy adversary becomes a matter of life and death. Plunged into a vortex of deception and betrayal, Malone races to clear his name, following the only truth he has left: Trust no one.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

CHAPTER 1
The air whistled between the dock planks, sounding asthmatic. If Figlio
didn't come soon I was going back to bed, to recover from my unfortunate
habit of saying yes too quickly to friends.

It was nearly nine. The silence of a Sunday morning on Wall Street was
disturbed only by the seagulls as they noisily traded garbage futures in
midair. Figlio's excuse would be reasonable -- there'd be nothing for me to
get angry about. Not his fault, Your Honor, I take full responsibility. The
Defendant can't help himself. NYPD's only water-based detective had an
unruly work life -- we all knew that. Whereas mine, in some fundamental way,
is very predictable.

My name is Dr. Michael Malone. I used to be Assistant Chief of
Cardiovascular Medicine and Interventional Cardiology at Mount Zion
Hospital and an honorary police surgeon as well (I have kept the cardboard
parking permit on my dashboard to ward off parking tickets). Ten years ago,
I successfully treated Detective Figlio's arrhythmia. We've been friends
ever since. Although Figlio would deny it, if asked.

Now I practice law rather than medicine. A change of heart, a change of
venue is the way I view it, though some former medical colleagues still
act, all these years later, as if a cult is holding me against my will and
I'm the one who needs an intervention. Barney Glass believes my switch
proves that evil will inherit the earth, but he's a urologist and they tend
to exaggerate.

My reasons were less cosmic: it bothered me that too few patients stopped
smoking, really dieted, or exercised or took the medicine I'd so carefully
chosen for them, and just went ahead and died earlier than they should
have. On top of which I felt on-call for everyone except myself, without
any time to do anything other than coronary artery rotorootering.

Of course such memories can be self-serving. Sally, my soon-to-be ex-wife,
who's a Deputy D.A., said I was a "competitive shit" who just wanted to
"stick it to her." An ironic choice of words because in the preceding
months, before I declared my law school plans, she'd initiated a unilateral
withdrawal from the sexual playing field. My mom was more disturbed about
the career change ("I let him watch too much TV as a kid and TV makes
people restless") than she's been about the divorce, which should give you
a good clue as to how I get my priorities screwed up. But it was my choice,
she shouldn't blame herself. As for television, only last week I was
regaling another litigator with the helpful pointers you can pick up
watching late-night Perry Mason reruns.

In an attempt to save our marriage I'd agreed to see a therapist to examine
Sally's notion that I was really a mean-spirited creep. The elderly
gray-haired woman, with a German-accented lisp that suggested that she was
in personal communication with Freud, declared that I had an "unconscious
desire to exhibit myself in courtrooms to compensate for a lonely
childhood." I didn't buy her logic then and don't now -- in my experience
courthouse groupies are the same people you see staring blankly on the
subways. If you're really looking for a good crowd for display purposes,
you'd do better at Yankee Stadium.

The unexpected horn blast from the approaching police boat resonated across
the harbor, scattering the seagulls and sending a jolt of adrenaline into
my food-starved arteries. Behind me two vehicles, a windowless
black-paneled van and a late-model domestic sedan, rumbled across the
crumbling pier. Something was up. Show time in the wasteland. Hopefully,
soon Figlio and I would sit down at Odeon with the fancy people for brunch
or squeeze into the tiny booths at Bodega, its new sibling, where they
still serve breakfast, and I'd get the chill out of my bones.

A scraggly civilian crew member with an unkempt ponytail tossed a mooring
line to shore just as the launch bumped hard against the pier tires, and
the transmitted force knocked him to the deck. Unhurt, he quickly bounced
to his feet and jumped ashore to secure the rope.

Two uniformed attendants hopped from the van, opened the rear doors, slid
out a gurney, and gingerly carried it onboard, as if they were setting up
for a picnic. Figlio came out of the cabin and met them on the aft-deck,
looking tough in his navy blue windbreaker, the yellow NYPD letters
stitched across the back.

Like explorers declaring possession of a newly discovered land mass, the
three of them stood on opposite sides of the tarpaulin-covered mound,
exchanging papers. When the dialogue ended, the two attendants nudged the
body onto the gurney, hurriedly disembarked, and drove off, tires
screeching, as if time still mattered. You didn't need an M.D. degree to
know their human package was definitely dead on delivery.

I caught Figlio's eye. He acknowledged me with a slight wave of his hand,
which could have meant, I'm sorry I'm late, or You'll have to wait a little
longer, and then launched himself into an animated conversation. Figlio
came from a long line of talkers and the man and the woman he was speaking
to, both of whom had the intensity of detectives, never had a chance to say
much. After a few minutes they too departed, probably feeling useless.
Finally Figlio turned to me and called out, "Still hungry, doc?" I nodded
vigorously, the last effort before slipping into hypoglycemic shock. "Gimme
a second," Figlio shouted, and ducked inside the cabin before I could
protest.

When he emerged I could see he was going to apologize for all the delays. I
saved him the trouble. "Looks like you had a successful outing."
"Yeah, we caught one that big," he said, stretching his arms as far apart
as skeletally possible, the way my father began his fish tales. When I was
small my father had taken me out into the Manhattan waterways with his
friends. My first reel-in was a used condom. "That's a Hudson River
whitefish, son," my father told me. When I'd asked where's the head, they'd
all laughed so hard the boat almost capsized, and I'd never fished again.
"Let's boogie. I'm starving. Where's your car?" Figlio asked, his appetite
undiminished by his human catch.

"At the garage. Someone broke the window and lock on the driver's side last
night. Cut my hand."

"Shit. Let's grab a cab," he said, uninterested, as cops are, in the
ordinary crime all around us.

Bodega was doing a brisk business by the time we sat down to breakfast -- it
was crowded with a mix of truck drivers, hookers, and rainbow hair-colored,
multipierced young artists dressed in various shades of black -- but our
orders came quickly, as if we'd phoned ahead.

I forked a melon ball from my fruit salad while Figlio submerged his
pancakes in globs of maple syrup.

"We've been looking for that floater the whole fucking night," Figlio
declared. He paused to saw off a piece of breakfast sausage. "You lucked
out. I could still be out there. Those Christmas jumpers are tough. Third
one this month."

Christmas jumpers sounded festive, but I was sure it wasn't. "Christmas
jumpers?" I asked, letting my eye drift pointedly toward the puddle of
butter coagulating on his plate.

"If you jump in the summer, you're up the next day. But when it's colder,
especially if you land in deep water, you'll get trapped under the ice, and
we won't find you till spring, when the waters start to warm up." I rolled
my eyes. "It makes the gases form inside and float you up. Holidays get a
lot of people down,...

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Verlag
Fawcett Books
Erscheinungsdatum
1999
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
044900449X
ISBN 13 
9780449004494
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
340
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