CHAPTER 27
May 10th
6:45A.M.
The weather was perfect and at least for a few minutes Jack wasn’t thinking and wasn’t worrying, he was just enjoying himself as the wind whistled through his bicycle helmet. He was on the West Drive in Central Park heading south, perched on top of his relatively new Trek road bike, and pedaling to beat the band. When he’d just joined the roadway up near 106th Street, he’d happened upon a group of serious, significantly younger bikers all decked out in expensive biking finery and riding custom-made bikes from Italy or France. He loved to ride with these guys because they took themselves inordinately seriously and looked down on his wearing a corduroy jacket, jeans, a chambray shirt, and a knit tie. He got a kick out of not only keeping up with them, but challenging them, particularly on the uphill sections. Because of his pickup basketball, Jack was in superb cardiovascular shape.
He had not slept that well, which seemed mildly ironic because Laurie had. Now that she’d made up her mind about her surgery, shecould relax, while the immediacy of it had the opposite effect on Jack. This morning had been his turn to wake up early and wander around the apartment, stealing long looks at his sleeping children. As he had said to Laurie the previous day, he wished it was he who was having the surgery. If that had been the case, there was no doubt in his mind that he would have been fast asleep at that point, waiting for the alarm and not being tortured by dark thoughts concerning Laurie’s well-being.
At the southeast corner of the park, Jack bid farewell to his fellow riders with a nod of his head as he peeled off, going south on East Drive while they went north. When he got to the Grand Army Plaza, he headed south on Fifth Avenue. It was his normal route, which he followed without giving it much thought. At that time in the morning the traffic was light. Although not that many years ago he used to challenge taxis on his morning commute, he didn’t do that anymore. In that regard he’d become relatively conservative now that he had family obligations.
Eventually he traveled east over to Second Avenue. This was the only portion of the bike ride that he varied on a whim from day to day. On this particular morning he took 54th Street. As per usual, he looked forward to getting to the OCME. Work was one of the ways that Jack dealt with his submerged anxieties, and whenever something was bothering him, he invariably worked harder. Yesterday he’d done four autopsies and the day before, five, such that cases were piling up on his desk, crying out to be completed. In contrast to most of the other medical examiners, he preferred to be in the pit actually doing the autopsies rather than the more sedentary aspect of sitting at his desk collating all the material to complete the death certificate. At least that was his preference unless there was a particularly challenging conundrum. Jack loved to do field work even though he was supposed to leave that aspect up to the medical-legal investigators. The problem was that Jack was trained at a forensic program thatencouraged the medical examiners to go out in the field when it would be helpful, and from day one at the NYC OCME he’d strained at the limitations.
On reaching Second Avenue, he turned south. Here the traffic was significantly lighter than usual, which gave him a chance to think. After his run out on the neighborhood basketball court last night, where he didn’t play up to his expectations with everything on his mind, he’d had another talk with Laurie about Dr. Nichols. Laurie had told him that although she didn’t mind continuing to collaborate with her regarding the autopsy she’d done with her, she didn’t have the time or energy to deal with the problem her general performance created. She said she was going to tell Chet that it was up to him but wanted to encourage Jack to lend a hand without making the situation worse. Jack had promised he’d do so, which was going to require him to be more accommodating than usual.
As was his customary habit, he rode his bike down 30th Street alongside the OCME building and entered at the loading dock. Hefting his bike onto his shoulder, he brought it inside and locked it in its usual location not far from the autopsy room. From there he went up to the ID area on the ground floor, where the day started for all the medical examiners. Since it was only 7:15 there were only two people in the room, Dr. Jennifer Hernandez and Vinnie Amendola. Jennifer was there because it was her week as a junior ME to be the on-call ME, one of whose jobs was to go over the cases that had come in overnight, decide which of them should be autopsied, and to divvy them up to the various MEs. Vinnie, one of the more senior mortuary technicians, was there to make sure the transition from the night shift to the day shift proceeded without a hitch and, maybe more important for the OCME community, to make the coffee in the communal coffee pot.
As Jack passed Vinnie, he swatted the newspaper Vinnie was holding up in front of his face, totally engrossed in the sports pages.Vinnie didn’t respond overtly because Jack did it every day. When he first started doing it years ago, Vinnie used to visibly jump and complain. But after so many repeats, he took the harassment in stride in the vain hope Jack would tire of it.
Approaching the desk where Jennifer was sitting, Jack said, “What kind of night was it? Are people still dying to get in here?”
“Very funny,” Jennifer said. “It was a relatively busy night.” Jack was known for his black humor, which some people thought was clever, others less so.
“Any intriguing cases?” Jack asked. It was his modus operandi to cherry-pick cases according to his interests, which was why he made it a point to arrive before anyone else other than the ME on call. Most of the other medical examiners tolerated this behavior because everyone knew that he did more cases than anyone else, a lot more.
“Quite a number of interesting cases,” Jennifer said. “Especially if you find getting run over by a subway train interesting.”
“Was it accidental or suicide?” Jack questioned. In general, he didn’t find such cases particularly interesting since the OCME saw about thirty of them a year. When a person got hit by a train there wasn’t a lot of question what killed the individual. Jack liked mysteries and challenges.
“Neither,” Jennifer said. “It’s possibly a little complicated, or so the MLI thought, and the MLI was Bart Arnold.”
“Complicated how?” he asked, immediately becoming interested.
“The subway part wasn’t accidental or suicide,” Jennifer said.
“You mean, someone pushed the victim in front of the train?” Jack asked. Unfortunately, that was becoming more common of late.
“Yes. According to Bart it was a homeless-appearing man who fled the scene,” Jennifer said. “The police are still going over the video feeds, and as of yet there are no suspects in custody. There’s also several eyewitnesses. But here’s the catch: There were almost twenty-four hours between the event and the death, with the patient having spentthe time in the Bellevue ICU, where she had been conscious and oriented. She had survived getting run over by the train. The terminal event was a heart attack.”
“Hmm, the plot thickens,” Jack said. “I get your point. If a good defense attorney could convince a jury that the death was due to something that was done in the hospital to cause a heart attack, a suspect could potentially get off with a slap on the wrist.”
“That’s the fear,” Jennifer said.
“Let me take a look,” he said. He took the folder from her and quickly read through Bart Arnold’s investigative report of Madison Bryant. As the head of the MLI unit, combined with his years of experience, Bart’s work was always top notch. Besides describing the victim as an NYU hospital social worker, he had laid out the problem just as Jennifer had described. Prior to the final heart attack or ventricular fibrillation, there had been no history of heart disease, and there had been no symptoms or signs of impending heart trouble during the time she was in the emergency room or in the ICU.
“It’s got me hooked,” Jack said. “Mind if I take this one to start?”
“Be my guest,” Jennifer said. “How many more do you want? There are plenty to go around today.”
“As many as you need to give me,” Jack said with a smile. Normally he would go through the rest of the stack to see what else caught his eye, but he was adequately intrigued with the Madison Bryant case. For him it was a good way to start the day and get his mind off Laurie’s upcoming surgery and JJ’s imminent psychological evaluation, the two things that were weighing him down.
“There’s a case of a high school baseball player that looks interesting,” Jennifer said. “He got hit in the chest with a baseball.”
“That sounds good, too,” he said. “Put my name on it. I’d also like to ask you to do me a favor.”
“Of course,” she said.
“If and when the NYU pathology resident Dr. Nichols decides toshow up, would you tell her she has been assigned to work with me once again?”
