Skeleton justice mm-2 Read online

  Skeleton justice

  ( Manny Manfreda - 2 )

  Michael Baden

  Michael Baden

  Skeleton justice

  (Manny Manfreda – 2)

  The harsh buzz of the doorbell shocked the knife out of Annabelle Fiore's hand.

  She jumped back to avoid being nicked by the blade as it clattered to the floor. Just what I need right now… chop off my own toe.

  As Annabelle put the knife safely on the counter, the microwave clock rolled to 7:00. The Linggs were unfashionably punctual. She had been counting on their tardiness to give her time to finish making the salad.

  But Rosemarie and David weren't expecting to be entertained. Her friends were here to distract her from pre-opening-night jitters, relax her-they'd be happy to sit in the kitchen while she cooked. Annabelle crossed the foyer and opened the door of her Greenwich Village brownstone. The final aria from Tosca, piped through her high-end sound system, tumbled into the rain-darkened street.

  "Welco-"

  A person dressed in black-not Rosemarie, not David-pushed Annabelle backward. A hand, gloved despite the balmy night, grasped her forearm. A steel-toed boot kicked the door closed.

  Annabelle opened her mouth. The quick intake of breath needed to scream accelerated her downfall. A cloying, harsh scent burned her nose and mouth as a thick square of damp cloth pressed into her face. The bold tones of the Roger Selden abstract paintings on the foyer wall faded into the distance. Annabelle's knees buckled, and the gloved hand released its grip.

  Falling, she glimpsed a flash of metal.

  Her attacker's fist opened, revealing a small glass vial. Annabelle's last coherent thought formed. Why me, dear God, why me?

  Get back where you belong.

  Dr. Jake Rosen could hear his boss saying it as he looked down at Annabelle Fiore. The opera singer's olive skin had blanched to white; her arms lay stiffly at her sides. Jake reached out to touch her wrist. Her eyelids fluttered.

  The living are not your concern.

  That's what Pederson would say if he knew his leading forensic pathologist was at St. Vincent's Hospital conducting a physical exam of a living victim. As deputy chief medical examiner of the City of New York, Jake spent most of his working hours at crime scenes or in the autopsy suite of the morgue. The chief ME, Charles Pederson, frowned on unauthorized field trips.

  Gently, Jake turned Fiore's right arm to examine the inner side. There, in the crook of her elbow, was a tiny puncture where a needle had been inserted to draw blood. He studied it closely. No multiple attempts, not even much bruising around the site.

  The emergency room physicians and residents who had treated Fiore the night before wouldn't have noticed this. They had saved the opera singer's life by evaluating her injuries from a medical standpoint. To them, the lack of trauma at the blood-extraction site was good news: no treatment required, so they could focus all their attention on her compromised central nervous system. To Jake, that tiny, perfect puncture was significant.

  Whoever had attacked Fiore knew how to extract blood from a vein. This was not the work of an amateur. Not a random act of violence.

  His gaze traveled down the length of her arm. There, near the wrist, were three distinct bruises. Her assailant had gripped her arm tightly and held her until she stopped struggling. Just as with the first four victims.

  Jake hadn't examined them, but he'd been briefed by Vito Pasquarelli, lead detective on the case. The first attack had occurred over a month ago. A young mother on the Upper West Side had responded to a knock on her door in the middle of the day. The next thing she remembered was waking up groggy from ether-induced unconsciousness. She, and the police, had assumed the attacker had come to rob her. Except nothing was missing from her home.

  It wasn't until hours later that she noticed the tiny needle mark in the crook of her arm. The police shrugged it off. She hadn't been harmed. It was weird, but weird was status quo in New York. File a report and move on.

  Then it happened again. A teacher in the Bronx, an investment banker in Battery Park City, a foreign tourist attending a pharmaceutical conference in midtown. None of them seriously hurt, all of them thoroughly freaked-out. It didn't help that somewhere along the line the tabloids started calling the stalker "the Vampire."

  Although Jake didn't subscribe to the media melodrama, he did understand the public's fear. New Yorkers, blase about drive-by shootings and shoves onto subway tracks, were terrified by a guy with a needle. He'd seen it often enough in his medical training-hulking football players who stoically endured compound fractures, then passed out when the nurse arrived to give them a tetanus shot; gang members who survived knife fights, only to whimper when it was time to be sewn up. Needles were scary.

  And now the Vampire had nearly killed someone, a famous someone, not with his needle, but with an overdose of ether. Jake pulled a stethoscope from his pocket. He'd had to search to find one; it wasn't an instrument he had much use for in the normal course of his day. Fiore stirred slightly as he listened to her heart. The beat was steady, but the rate was slow, consistent with having been drugged into unconsciousness. This is where the Vampire analogy fell apart. Vampires, the kind who lived in Transylvania and flapped around in black capes, didn't anesthetize their victims. And apparently, New York's vampire wasn't too adept at it.

  Of course, even a trained anesthesiologist could easily make a mistake with ether. That's why it wasn't used much anymore. And if you were administering the drug via a soaked rag, getting the dosage right became even more problematic. Perhaps the biggest surprise was that an overdose hadn't happened until Fiore, the fifth victim.

  Annabelle Fiore's central nervous system had been seriously depressed. She would have died had her friends not arrived shortly after the attack. The effects still hadn't worn off. Jake would have liked to ask her some questions, but although she stirred slightly as he examined her, she was only semi-conscious. An interview would have to wait.

  Jake turned away from the hospital bed just as a short, rumpled man entered the room.

  "Hey, you made it!" Detective Vito Pasquarelli shook Jake's hand enthusiastically. "Thanks for coming. Have you looked at her?"

  "Yes. It's hard to draw much of a conclusion, given that I didn't get to examine the others. But if their blood-draw sites were as perfect as Ms. Fiore's, I'd say you're dealing with someone with some medical training."

  Pasquarelli nodded. "What about the ether?"

  "Hard to know if the overdose was accidental or intentional. He seems to have given her quite a bit more than the others." Jake ran his hand through his hair, moving his style further along the scale from casually wild to unkempt. "But here's a thought that occurred to me. I know you said none of the victims is acquainted with any of the others. But you might want to ask them if they have any ties to a person who works around laboratory animals."

  "You mean like rats and mice? Why?"

  "When researchers conduct experiments on animals and then have to autopsy them, they often kill them with an overdose of ether. That's the most common use for the drug these days."

  Vito perked up as they walked toward the elevator. "And a medical researcher would know how to draw blood, right?"

  Jake nodded. "And how to test it. Which is what I'd like to do."

  "Our CSI guys already did that. No trace of drugs in any of them. Nothing hinky."

  Jake grinned. "Funkiness is in the eye of the beholder. Send the samples over to me. I'd like to run my own tests."

  "You got it." The packed elevator arrived and the men descended in silence.

  "What do you think he does with it?" Vito asked as the impatient crowd pushed past them into the lobby.

  "I think he tests
it, just like I'm going to do with it," Jake said.

  The detective looked relieved.

  Jake raised his hand in a mock toast. "Unless he drinks it."

  Manny studied herself in the full-length mirror and heard her mother's voice echoing in her head. Philomena Manfreda, you are not leaving the house like that.

  Sighing, she pulled off yet another outfit and tossed it onto the growing pile on her bed. As a solo practitioner with her own civil rights practice, Manny had a closet that was stuffed with suits for every lawyering occasion: suits to help convey her erudition to judges, suits to charm juries, suits to woo new clients. Plenty of cocktail dresses, too-opera, theater, five-hundred-dollar-a-plate charity bashes-all pressed and ready to go. But ask her to come up with the perfect outfit to wear to share a plate of antipasto with a man who dissected bodies all day, and she was utterly at a loss.

  Manny reached for one more hanger in her overstuffed closet. Vogue had devoted three pages to gushing about this dress. If it didn't work, she was giving up. Slipping on the purported miracle garment, she turned to face the bed.

  "Well, what do you think?"

  The mound of clothing quivered slightly. A small spot of auburn emerged, followed by two big brown eyes: her toy red poodle, Mycroft. The dog surveyed her latest attempt, then laid his head between his paws and whined.

  "You're absolutely right." She studied her reflection in the mirror. "Too… contrived."

  She returned to the closet and yanked out her favorite black slacks. Why make such a big production about getting dressed to meet Jake anyway? The man was oblivious. She could appear in a muumuu from Wal-Mart or any couture outfit and he wouldn't notice because his eye would be plastered up against a microscope.

  They had met in the line of duty, the last time working together to bring justice to the long-dead victims of a killer who had preyed on defenseless patients in an upstate psychiatric hospital. They'd flirted over dead bodies in the morgue and bonded by escaping attempts on their lives. The Lyons case was solved and now they were… what? Having a rendezvous? That implied romantic getaways to inns in the Berkshires or beach houses in the Hamptons. Dating? No, that would require regular phone calls and invitations to movies or concerts.

  Instead, Manny spent hours in Jake's laboratory looking at gruesome crime-scene photos, peering at slides of poisoned-tissue samples, comparing exit-wound patterns. Then, for a nightcap, they would discuss the autopsies he had performed that day, before falling into bed under the watchful eye of a taxidermied raven-his honorarium for speaking about murder to the local Edgar Allan Poe club.

  But whatever she had going with Jake Rosen, it sure beat the hell out of attending the annual Bar Association dinner dance with Evan Pennington III or going to Knicks games with that yahoo bond trader, Troy what's his name.

  So why was she agonizing over what to wear? Maybe because, for once, Jake had actually called her up and invited her to have dinner in a charming little Italian trattoria. No sharing pepperoni pizza on a stainless steel morgue gurney tonight-this was a real dinner date. The place had great food, but it wasn't pretentious-fancy. She didn't want to arrive overdressed, showing how thrilled she was to be out with him.

  Why is my confidence so undercut? This guy spends his days dissecting people's brains, and now he's messing with my head.

  Manny zipped the pants, pulled on a pink silk knit sweater, slipped her feet into fuchsia snakeskin Manolo slingbacks, and checked her reflection. The look was chic, classy, but casual. Not bad. Not bad at all.

  When she reached for Mycroft's Goyard carrier, monogrammed with the initials MM, the little dog shot off the bed and jumped in.

  "That's right, Mikey, we're going on a date. And you're the chaperone."

  Jake looked up from the case folder he'd brought with him to Il Postino in time to see Manny crossing the street toward his sidewalk table. Red hair flying, hips swaying, high heels tapping, Manny made quite a few heads turn as she strode through the early-evening crowd. It pleased him that she didn't seem to notice the effect she had.

  Now she caught sight of him and waved. He rose to greet her and she kissed him lightly before settling Mycroft under the table.

  "Where are your groupies?" Manny asked.

  "Huh?"

  "You're quite a celebrity-front page of the New York Post." Manny grinned as she took the newspaper from her bag and read the headline aloud, "'ME Enters Vampire Investigation.' That must've really pissed Pederson off."

  Jake stared at her.

  "Your jaw's dropping. You want to be careful of that, eating outside in New York. Flies, you know."

  Jake started to laugh. Why did it surprise him that Manny had immediately grasped the trouble that trip to St. Vincent's had brought him? No sooner had he exited the hospital than he'd been besieged by a horde of TV and print reporters. His natural reaction was to answer their questions briefly but honestly. Stupid-when would he ever learn? Somehow, they had managed to spin his responses into lead stories, and their flashing cameras had splashed his startled face across all three New York dailies and the evening news.

  "I wish you'd've been with me yesterday," Jake said. "You would've known to throw a jacket over my head and 'No comment' me out of there."

  "How did Pederson react?"

  "Let's just say I thought I was going to have an opportunity to brush up on my CPR."

  The post-Fiore lecture had gone on and on: "violating jurisdictional boundaries;" "no regard for chain of command;" "no understanding of limited resources…" For Pederson, work was all about protecting his turf, hoarding his budget, and ramping up his media coverage. With one unauthorized trip, Jake had managed to score a trifecta of violations.

  "You know he thinks you're angling for his job." Manny tapped the newspaper. "He sees this as grandstanding."

  "I didn't know they'd be lying in wait for me," Jake protested. "And I don't want to be chief ME. Balancing budgets and sitting through endless meetings-no thanks."

  "I know you like nothing better than being elbow-deep in an abdominal cavity, looking for signs of unnatural death." Manny reached for his hand resting on the table. "You have to remember that not everyone understands the appeal."

  The soft touch of Manny's fingers took the sting out of her words. Her ability to go straight to the crux of a problem had caught his attention the moment he'd met her; her beauty had dawned on him a little later.

  "Yeah, this little escapade of mine has had unintended consequences. Pederson has explicitly warned me off the Vampire case."

  "So you're dropping it?" Manny's eyes opened wide, then, as she caught sight of the blue case folder beside his plate, crinkled into a smile. "You scared me there for a minute-thought you were going soft."

  The waiter approached the table, introduced himself as Luigi, and rattled off the specials.

  "I'll have the wild prawns," Manny said without hesitation.

  Jake continued to scan the menu. "Do you know that shrimp are scavengers? I once autopsied a pilot whose plane crashed into the ocean. Had to take half a dozen off his body. Funny, too, because the poor guy had shrimp in his stomach-his last meal. Gave new meaning to the word payback."

  The waiter looked pale. Manny's stomach grumbled loudly. "You know, I may just go vegan tonight. I'll start with a large salad…"

  "Careful, E. coli gives leafy greens serial-killer potential," Jake whispered.

  Manny shuddered. "If I had your job, I wouldn't be able to stomach anything more than applesauce and dry toast."

  "I'll get you a position as a morgue assistant." He slipped his arm around her and squeezed her shoulder. "The Diener Diet! The newest way to lose weight. I bet you could get on Oprah with that."

  Her flimsy shoe, which had been tracing a delicate pattern up and down his calf, crashed down on his instep like a guillotine. He grinned. The pain was worth it.

  After the waiter finally left with an uncontroversial order of salad, appetizer, pasta, and steak, Jake set about making amends
.

  "I was hoping you'd help me brainstorm." Jake edged the case folder toward Manny, and caught her glancing at the label. "Will you take a look for me?"

  Manny twisted around to face him and flipped the folder open. "Other men seduce women by telling them they're beautiful and sexy. You do it by whispering pathology reports in my ear."

  Jake grinned. "I admire you too much to take such a hackneyed approach. Look at this."

  Manny and Jake began to sort through the paperwork, focusing on the test results from Vampire victims that he had brought with him. Jake stared at the jumble of numbers and medical terminology. What was it the Vampire was looking for in this blood? None of the toxicology reports showed substances normally associated with drug abuse, so the victims weren't linked through a shared drug habit. Another door closed.

  By the time the appetizer arrived, the waiter had to struggle to find a paper-free spot on the table to set Jake's calamari.

  Manny stared at the reports. "No motive?"

  "None. Pasquarelli thinks he's a nut. But there's more here. These are organized blood draws. They don't have the characteristics of a disorganized mind. The victims didn't know what happened to them until they woke up and saw the holes in their skin or the blood droplets on their clothes, the swelling, the beginnings of black-and-blue marks. Hallmarks of neat, precise, and carefully plotted attacks."

  "The Devil Bat," Manny muttered.

  Jake gulped from his glass of ice water and waited. Manny was usually very analytical, yet totally open to every possibility, able to see connections a more cautious mind would overlook. That passion, that lightning response, had attracted him in the first place. But sometimes her sudden reversals, the wild leaps in her thought process, left his relentlessly logical mind floundering.

  "A forties horror movie with Bela Lugosi," she explained. "Used to watch the reruns with my father when I was growing up."

  Signs of a misspent youth, he thought, but he didn't say it aloud, or else the spike of her heel would be in his calf, rather than massaging it.