“Listen to me, Mr. Goldberg. I’m looking into the case under the direct orders of the chief medical examiner, Dr. Laurie Montgomery.You are to supply me with all the help I need, or you will be hearing directly from her. Do I make myself clear?” Aria was never troubled by exaggeration or white lies.
“Of course,” David said. He turned back to his monitor to get the information. While he was writing the address and phone numbers, Aria asked another question.
“Did you manage to talk to any of Kera Jacobsen’s neighbors?”
“Yes, I spoke with the woman who lives in apartment 4A, across from Kera Jacobsen’s 4B. Their entrance doors face each other. Her name is Evelyn Mabry. I remember because her surname is the same as my mother’s maiden name. She apparently was the last person to see Kera Jacobsen alive, which, by the way, is the best way of determining the time of death, contrary to all the forensic TV shows.”
“And when was that?” Aria asked.
“Friday late afternoon.”
“Did you get the feeling this Evelyn Mabry was good friends with Kera Jacobsen?”
“Not at all,” David said. “My impression of Miss Mabry is that she’s a mildly paranoid recluse and a hoarder. There was barely room to stand in her apartment.”
Aria could understand the recluse part but not the paranoia or hoarding. “Did you ask Evelyn Mabry about whether Kera Jacobsen had many visitors, particularly boyfriends?”
“I was thinking more about possible drug dealers, not boyfriends, but yes, I did ask her. She said that in the past Miss Jacobsen had late-night visitors once or twice a week, usually midweek, but that had dropped off of late.”
“Men or women?”
“She couldn’t say for certain because she never saw them, just heard them arrive and occasionally heard them leave.”
“What about Friday night?” Aria asked. “Did you ask her if Miss Jacobsen had any visitors then?”
“Of course I asked her about Friday night,” David said with mild offense. “She said she went to bed early and didn’t hear anything.”
“Do you expect the police to be doing any investigation?”
“I don’t,” he said. “The precinct’s detective squad wasn’t even notified. What’s to investigate?”
Plenty, she thought, but didn’t say.
“Listen,” David said. “The police don’t want to make work for themselves, especially with all these overdoses that we’re seeing. Just notifying the detectives means a lot of paperwork. You have no idea.” He handed her a three-by-five card. She took it but then immediately handed it back.
“Dr. Montgomery says we have to do this investigation in tandem,” she said, purposefully avoiding the wordsupervision. She had no intention of being supervised by anyone, much less by a physician assistant, yet she knew how to make it look like she had. “How about your number along with the names and contact info for the cops that took the nine-one-one call. And what’s Kera Jacobsen’s address?”
He added the additional information to the card.
“All right,” Aria said, taking the card and standing. “I’ll be in touch.”
David started to respond, but she was already weaving through the gaggle of desks on her way to the elevator.
CHAPTER 10
May 8th
6:42P.M.
Aria walked north along the east side of First Avenue, passing the famed and busy Bellevue Hospital on her right. Although it was almost sevenP.M., sunset wouldn’t come for an hour or so. Despite wearing only a cotton blouse, her favorite pair of jeans, and her resident jacket, Aria wasn’t cold in the slightest although she knew things would change after the sun went down. Overhead, the sky was shockingly clear with only a few puffy clouds. To her right, the tops of the tall buildings were bathed in a golden glow of late-afternoon sun.
As soon as she had exited the OCME high-rise, Aria had placed the call to Dr. Henderson as he had requested in his text. As she did so, she had felt her pulse mildly quicken. It was rarely a good sign to be contacted by the front office, particularly after hours. Adding to her unease, she’d never had any dealings with the head of Pathology despite lots of dicey run-ins with the director of the pathology residency program, Dr. Gerald Zubin. Aria was well aware she was not considered a team player and accordingly had been continuallybalanced on a knife edge from the first days of her residency. Right out of the gate she’d bucked the system by refusing to do tasks dictated mostly by men and only because that was the way it had always been done. Her argument was that rules had to make sense. Even more disruptive, she’d made it a point to do as little scut work as possible, particularly during that first year of residency, when a lot of nonsense trickled down to those on the lower rungs of the totem pole as a kind of hazing. Yet through it all, here she was, poised to make it to her final year of residency in a little more than a month, provided the chief of the Pathology Department hadn’t been looking for her to try and suggest otherwise. Still, she was confident she could handle just about anything at this point, since she had proved she was significantly smarter than most of the male authority figures occupying the front office.
Although she’d been a tad anxious when the chief of the department had answered the call, the anxiety had quickly evaporated as his tone was congenial from the get-go and the conversation turned out to be remarkably benign. Instead of him being pissed that she’d violated some old, senseless rule or tradition of academic medicine like not taking the Forensic Pathology rotation seriously, he’d been surprisingly gracious, even indulging in a little small talk about how nice the weather was before getting to the reason for the call. “I would very much like to talk with you, preferably right now if you are available,” he’d said. Asking to see her right away was mildly ominous, but his tone wasn’t accusatory and in truth she was more curious than concerned.
As she passed the old, squat, and crumbling OCME Forensic Pathology building on the corner of 30th Street, she thought about the conversation she’d just had with David Goldberg. She’d not learned much, but what she had learned supported her intuition that the unknown father certainly needed to be found to learn of his possible role in the fatal dose of illicit drugs. She had almost laughed that afternoonat Dr. Montgomery’s flowery paean of forensic pathology as “listening to the dead tell their stories.” It was so hokey. Yet now, Aria had to admit that Kera Jacobsen seemed to be communicating with her on some level via the mother’s describing Kera as being recently “down,” and through the neighbor who said that Kera had been having late-night visitors once or twice a week. All this meant there was covert sex going on, meaning one of the couple or both didn’t want their liaison to be public knowledge, which was mildly suspicious in and of itself, and that the potential arrival of a little one didn’t bring joy to one or both of the participants. From Aria’s experience, it had to be the mysterious father who was less than enthused, ergo the tragic outcome.
Just beyond the OCME building loomed the multi-block New York University Medical Center. Cars were backed up while attempting to get into the parking garage. Aria had to squeeze through the waiting autos to continue north until she could enter the building that housed the Department of Pathology. Although she’d never been in Dr. Henderson’s office, she was familiar with its location since it was down the hall from the director of the pathology residency program’s office, where she’d been called on the carpet on far too many occasions.
