Pandemic (A Jack Stapleton & Laurie Montgomery Novel, Band 11) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Robin Cook, MD, is the author of more than 30 books and is credited with popularizing the medical thriller with his groundbreaking and wildly successful 1977 novel, Coma. He divides his time among Florida, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts.

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1

Later that morning . . .

Monday, November 5, 10:30 a.m.

By 10:30 in the morning all eight autopsy tables at New York City's Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, known colloquially as the OCME, were in use, as the team tried to catch up with demand. Over the weekend there had been a backup of ten bodies that had not been considered forensic emergencies and had been left for Monday morning. Besides those ten, six new cases had come in between late Sunday afternoon and early that morning. Table #1, the table farthest from the stainless-steel sinks, had seen the most action. This was the table favored by Dr. Jack Stapleton. Since he was almost always the first doctor in the "pit" in the morning, he got to choose his station, and he always told Vinnie Ammendola, the mortuary tech with whom he usually teamed, to nab it. Situated at the periphery, it was a little bit separate from the main commotion in the autopsy room when all the tables were in use. At that time Jack was already starting his third case. Most of the other tables were still on their first.

"So!" Jack said, straightening up. He had just carefully shaved away the blood-soaked, matted hair from the right side of the victim's head. He had been very careful not to distort the wound he wished to expose. What was now obvious was a completely circular dark-red-to-black lesion an inch or two above the woman's right ear, surrounded by a narrow circular abrasion. The patient was on her back, with her head rotated to the left and propped up on a wooden block. She was naked and so pale she could have been mistaken for a wax-museum model.

"Is the entrance wound round or oval?" Jack liked a didactic style and frequently used it even when other people weren't listening, as often happened when he was working with Vinnie. Vinnie had a habit of zoning out on occasion. But this morning Jack had an attentive audience. Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano, an old friend of Jack and Jack's wife, Laurie, had shown up. Over the years Lou had come to truly appreciate the enormous benefits forensic pathology could provide to law enforcement, particularly when it came to homicide investigation, which was his specialty. Whenever there was a case that Lou thought could be helped by forensics, he made it a point to observe the autopsy. Although there hadn't been any such cases for a number of months, that morning there had been three.

"I'd say circular," Lou said. Lou was standing across from Jack on the patient's left side. Also on that side was Vinnie. Next to Jack was a second mortuary tech, Carlos Sanchez, who had been newly hired by the OCME and was now at the very beginning of his orientation and training. As one of the more experienced techs, Vinnie generally broke in newbies by having them work closely with him. Jack was accustomed to the routine and usually didn't mind, provided it didn't slow him down too much. Jack was one of those people who didn't like to waste time and had little patience for incompetence. So far, he wasn't all that impressed with Carlos. It wasn't anything specific, more an attitude thing, as if the man wasn't all that interested.

"I agree," Jack said. "Vinnie?"

"Circular," Vinnie said, rolling his eyes. Vinnie and Jack had worked with each other so many times over so many years that they could anticipate each other. Vinnie knew that the tone of voice Jack had used strongly suggested he was about to start a "teaching" session, which invariably meant the autopsy would end up taking considerably longer than otherwise, keeping Vinnie away from the coffee break he always took after the third case was over. Vinnie was a coffee addict and his last cup had been just after seven that morning.

"Mr. Sanchez?" Jack asked, ignoring Vinnie's mild acting out.

"Huh?" Carlos blurted.

Jack turned to look into the eyes of the new hire, just visible through the man's plastic face shield. "Are we keeping you from some other, more interesting engagement, Mr. Sanchez?" he asked sarcastically, but then let it go. He turned back to Lou. "It is definitely circular, meaning the bullet entered perpendicular to the plane of the skull. More apropos, it is certainly not what is described as stellate or jagged. Now, do you see any stippling around the periphery of the wound?" The little red dots in the skin that sometimes surrounded gunshot wounds resulted from gunpowder residue emerging from a gun barrel along with the bullet.

"I don't see that much except on the ear," Lou said, trying to be optimistic.

"There is a bit on the ear and also some on the neck," Jack said, pointing. "Obviously the full head of hair absorbed most of it."

"I don't think I'm going to like where you're going with all this," Lou said. The victim was the wife of one of Lou's detective colleagues who also worked out of the NYPD's Homicide Division.

Jack nodded. There was no doubt that Lou had become quite forensically knowledgeable over the years of their friendship. "There's more. Let's use a wooden dowel to align this entrance wound above the right ear with the exit wound below the left mandible."

Vinnie handed Jack the wooden rod he had leaned against the autopsy table. Grasping it at both ends, Jack held it so that it rested on the crown of the patient's head but lined up with the two wounds.

Lou reluctantly agreed. "I'm getting the picture: The pathway of the bullet is definitely downward."

"I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news," Jack offered, hearing the disappointment in his friend's voice. "Unfortunately, what we see here is not a contact wound. My guess at this point would be that the gun barrel had to have been about two feet away and maybe as much as thirty inches. And the trajectory was definitely oriented caudally. Are you aware of the statistics about this?"

"Not exactly," Lou said. "But I know it's not what I was hoping. Jesus, I've known this guy for more than twenty years. I've even had dinner in their home out in Queens a dozen times, especially after I got divorced. They had their problems, like all couples. But hell! They have two grown kids."

"Ninety percent or more of small-arms suicides are contact wounds, meaning the barrel of the gun is up against the skull when discharged. In only about five percent of suicides is the bullet path downward, and an even smaller percentage where it's directed from the back to the front, both of which we see here."

"So you don't think this was a suicide?" Lou asked, almost plaintively.

Jack shook his head.

"Can we get on with this freakin' autopsy," Vinnie complained.

Jack flashed a dirty look at his favorite mortuary tech. Vinnie ignored it. "I'm having caffeine withdrawal."

"Was there a suicide note?" Jack asked, returning his attention to Lou.

"Clutched in her left hand," Lou said with a nod. "One of Walter's service automatics was in her right hand. She was lying on their bed on her back. It was a mess."

"And he had called you?" Jack said.

"Yeah," Lou said. "We'd been together most of the evening after being called out on that first autopsy we did. Walter found her dead when he got home, or so he said. I was the one who put in the nine-one-one call as I was leaving my apartment on my way over to see him. I got there before anyone else, and the man was beside himself. It was godawful. Not that I haven't seen worse."

"Well, we'll have to see how it plays out," Jack said. "Maybe there was a third party involved. But I certainly will not be signing this out as a suicide. I'm definitely thinking homicide. But let's do the autopsy and go from there."

"Hallelujah," Vinnie said, making a rapid sign of the...