Fatal Reaction

by Hartzmark, Gini

  CHAPTER 14

  Sunday morning when I came home from Stephen’s I was surprised to find my roommate sitting at the kitchen table companionably enjoying coffee and bagels with Elliott Abelman. For the first time in months Claudia wasn’t wearing scrubs. Instead she was dressed in a brown turtle-neck and corduroy pants. She’d put her hair into a French braid and she was smiling. She looked like a completely different person.

  “Well, good morning, all,” I announced. “What’s the occasion?”

  “I’m leaving for the airport in a couple minutes. I’m going to California for my Stanford interview.”

  “And I’m on a mission of mercy,” chimed in Elliott with a grin. “I took a look in your refrigerator yesterday and realized you ladies are in danger of starving to death.”

  “Oh yes,” replied Claudia, patting her stomach. “The dietitians are always stopping me in the halls to tell me how undernourished I look.”

  The front door buzzer sounded harshly. “That must be my cab,” she announced, rising to her feet and brushing crumbs from her lap.

  “Good luck tomorrow,” said Elliott, standing up. “Do you need any help with your bag?” Obviously they teach more than hand-to-hand combat in the marines.

  “No thanks. I just have the one,” replied Claudia.

  “I’ll walk you out,” I said, itching with curiosity. From the looks of things Elliott had been there for quite a while. I was dying to hear what they’d been talking about.

  “Okay, what were you saying about me?” I whispered as soon as we were out of earshot.

  “You are out of your mind.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “This guy is terrific. I don’t know what you’re doing with Stephen. You know, somebody just told me he was listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world’s coldest human.”

  “You must be mistaken,” I replied dryly. “I know for a fact that my mother still holds that title.” All joking aside, I was less than happy with the direction this conversation was taking. “If you think Elliott is so marvelous maybe you should go out with him yourself.”

  “I would,” replied Claudia as she opened the door to the cab, “except for one little problem.”

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “He’s completely in love with you.”

  “Bagel?” inquired Elliott innocently as I returned to the kitchen.

  “Did Joe tell you about the autopsy results?” I asked, rooting in the bag for a pumpernickel.

  “Yeah, the ME thinks he bled to death from a perforated ulcer. Nasty.”

  “So what does that mean from the point of view of the police?”

  “Joe says he’ll push for a continued investigation, but he thinks he won’t get it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that barring new evidence they’ll close the case.”

  “And if Sarrek had been pulled over in Gary instead of here?”

  “They’d still probably close it.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Face up to it, Kate. Even if they could find the guy who was with him, the chances they’d be able to gather enough evidence to charge him with a crime—much less convict—are practically zero.”

  “Don’t you think you’re being unduly pessimistic?” I asked, tearing the bagel in two.

  “Well, according to what the ME told Joe, there was only something like a fifty-fifty chance that Wohl would have survived even if the paramedics had gotten there.”

  “Fifty-fifty is a hell of a lot better than the odds he ended up with,” I replied. “You know as well as I do that the guy who was with Danny fought with him to keep him from getting help. And afterwards he tried to conceal the fact that he’d been there. You don’t think that’s guilty behavior?”

  “I’m not denying that’s probably how it happened, but that still doesn’t make it murder.”

  “Stephen thinks whoever was with him was somebody well-known, someone who was afraid the paramedics or the police would recognize him.”

  “That would make sense. Remember I told you yesterday I was going to send my people through the building and recanvass the neighbors?”

  “Did you turn up anything?”

  “A witness.”

  “A witness to what?”

  “Someone who claims they saw Danny leaving his apartment around four o’clock last Sunday afternoon.”

  “When did he die?”

  “According to Joe the ME put the time of death between ten and two.”

  “Then I don’t get it. Either your witness is wrong about the time or he’s wrong about what he saw. I don’t see how it gets us anywhere.”

  “He’s positive about the time. The guy’s name is Mark Freelig. He manages the Italian restaurant across the street from the Steppenwolf Theater, a place called Biscotti’s. He says he got to work around quarter to five last Sunday. The restaurant is closed on Mondays, so he stayed over at his girlfriend’s and slept in. That’s why the police didn’t interview him on Monday when the body was discovered.”

  “What does he say he saw?”

  “Freelig lives in 12C, the apartment diagonally across the hall from Danny’s. He says he was just getting ready to leave for work when he remembered he’d left some clothes in the dryer in the laundry room. You know how it is in an apartment building. You leave your laundry in the dryer and you come back to find half of it gone.”

  I nodded, though I had no practical experience in the matter. I dropped my dirty clothes at the Chinese laundry on Harper and 53rd Street and picked them up neatly folded the next day. Mrs. Chen had a son at Northwestern and I figured with what she charged I was making a nice dent in his tuition bill.

  “So anyway, this guy Freelig decided he’d better run down to the basement and retrieve his stuff. He said he’d just opened the door of his apartment when he heard the elevator bell ring at the end of the hall and he saw Danny standing in front of it waiting for the doors to open.”

  “What made him think it was Danny?”

  “He recognized his raincoat. A real expensive gray Armani number. I guess Freelig had seen him wear it before.” I nodded. I’d seen him in it, too.

  “What else was he wearing?” I asked.

  “A Yankees baseball cap pulled down low. He was carrying a yellow and black athletic bag, the kind that’s on a strap so that you can carry it on your shoulder.”

  “Did Freelig speak to him?”

  “Freelig just called out to ask Danny to hold the elevator.”

  “And did he?”

  “No. That’s why this guy Freelig remembered it. According to him Danny was normally really friendly, so he was surprised when he didn’t hold it. Freelig figured Danny must have been in a hurry—either that or he didn’t hear him.”

  “You and I know why he must have been in a hurry.”

  “Oh, yeah. There was one more thing. According to Mr. Freelig it looked like the man’s hair was wet under the baseball cap.”

  It took me a couple of seconds to grasp the significance of this. “So what you’re saying is the guy we’re looking for cleaned up as best as he could, put his bloody clothes in the sports bag, put on Danny’s coat and hat, and hoped to make it out of the building unnoticed,” I said.

  “I bet it gave him a heart attack when Freelig asked him to hold the elevator,” observed Elliott.

  “True, but I’m still not sure where all of this gets us.”

  “For one thing it gives us a physical description of who we’re looking for.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Now we know that whoever was with Danny was close enough in size and build to wear Danny’s clothes and to be mistaken for him—at least at a distance. I’d say we’re probably looking for a white man about five foot ten, one hundred sixty pounds, between twenty and fifty years old.”

  “That narrows it down to a couple million guys,” I said dubiously.

  “There’s also a chance the security cam
era in the lobby might have picked up something. I’ve got someone tracking down the tape, but the company that has the security contract on that building isn’t open on the weekend so we won’t know until tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”

  “I also had a pair of operatives showing Wohl’s picture around last night. I sent them out to all the bars and restaurants that showed up on his American Express bill for the past two months.”

  “What did they turn up? Anything?”

  “Couple places remember him, especially where there were gay waiters. Apparently he used to spend a lot of time at a Japanese place in his neighborhood called Kamehachi.”

  “Sure,” I said, “it’s a sushi bar on Wells, just down the street from his apartment.”

  “He ate there at least once a week.”

  “By himself?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes with another man.”

  “Always the same one?”

  “It sounds that way.”

  “Description?”

  “Six feet tall, dark hair, brown eyes, good-looking, but not in the same league as your friend Stephen.”

  “Age?”

  “Between thirty and forty.”

  “That’s not exactly pinning it down.”

  “There’s more. According to what the waiters overheard they weren’t sure that it was all romance.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The consensus was the two men must have worked together.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because all they talked about was work. The waiters said every time they overheard them they were talking about the problems the company was having with some new drug.”

  Elliott was supposed to meet Joe Blades at ten-thirty. Joe had promised to show him the medical examiner’s autopsy notes and the items of evidence that had been taken from Danny’s apartment. Elliott asked if I wanted to come along. With Claudia’s words ringing in my ears I agreed to go along for the ride.

  When we arrived at police headquarters a scuffed and acrid-smelling elevator carried us to the sixth floor where the special detail investigating the Sarrek murders had set up camp. We found Joe behind a government-issue metal desk, one of twenty in the open area in the middle of the room. Phones rang and keyboards clacked while the guys with rank went about their business in partitioned areas along the back wall.

  Blades looked terrible. Since the last time I’d seen him his skin seemed to have become almost transparent from fatigue. At the sight of us he rose to his feet and offered up what was meant as a smile. On the wall behind him was an enormous ceiling-to-floor chart that was divided by black rules into lines. Each line was marked with the heading Jane Doe #1, Jane Doe #2, and on through the full complement of Stanley Sarrek’s sixty-three victims. Some of the lines were filled with physical descriptions— hair color, height, and weight—as well as a shorthand of what, at even the briefest glance, seemed horrific injuries. There were places for other information to be filled in: real names, addresses, next of kin. These were also blank.

  No wonder Blades seemed pleased to see us. Compared to the painstaking task of filling in the details of tragedy for each of the murder victims on that wall of grief, anything having to do with Danny’s death must have seemed like a relief.

  “So how’s it going?” asked Elliott as Blades led us behind a partition that had been erected to form a kind of conference area. We took seats around a chipped rectangular table of wood-grain Formica. On the portable blackboard someone had drawn a diagram in chalk. Shaped like a spider, it looked to be some kind of organizational chart.

  “This whole case is a jurisdictional nightmare. I swear, if we spent half as much time following leads as we did arguing about who’s responsible for what and who’s going to get the credit, we’d know a lot more about the women in the back of Sarrek’s truck than we do now. It also doesn’t help matters any that the fucking FBI has a procedure for everything and a twelve-page form to go with it,” complained Blades. “I swear, they do twenty minutes’ worth of paperwork every time they use the john.”

  “So when are you going to put this guy away already?” demanded Elliott.

  “Oh, we’ll put him away. But I’ve got to tell you, I’m starting to get nostalgic for the bad old days. We could save ourselves a ton of aggravation if we just took this piece of shit in the back room and beat a confession out of him.”

  “I take it he hasn’t talked.”

  “Not except to ask for a lawyer. I’m telling you, this squirrel is one slick sociopath. They’ve got three separate interrogation teams going at him in shifts, including two from some crack FBI unit, and so far nothing. Nada. In the meantime we’re going through his driving log, trying to piece together where he’s been, and working with local law enforcement to see if we can’t make some identifications. The trouble is there may be sixty-three lines on that chart out there, but a lot of the bodies were dismembered, so it’s hard to know exactly how many victims there were. Just documenting what’s being done so that it can be used at trial is going to take six months. We have a family coming in later today from Wisconsin to see if they can ID their daughter. It’s a start, but even if we put a name up on that board we’ll still have sixty-two more blanks to fill in.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you taking the time to help us out,” I said.

  “Like I was telling Elliott yesterday,” replied Blades, “I’m not sure that what happened to your friend is ever going to add up to murder, but it sure stinks to high heaven.” He opened the manila folder that lay on the table in front of him and turned to Elliott. “I made you copies of the preliminary police report and the crime-scene photos. There’s also a fax of the medical examiner’s notes and a copy of the list of items taken from the apartment and put into evidence.”

  As Elliott flipped through the photos I forced myself to concentrate on the evidence list.

  “What’s this about a plastic needle cover?” I asked Blades.

  The detective stooped to produce a cardboard box from beneath the table. Inside were individual plastic bags containing items the police had removed and tagged as evidence. He fished out one of the smaller ones and laid it in the middle of the table. Inside was the plastic sheath for the needle of a hypodermic syringe.

  “We found it under the living room couch,” he explained. “It looked to me like it must have been lying on the floor and got covered up when the couch got turned over.”

  “Did you find a syringe anywhere?” I asked.

  Blades shook his head.

  “You’ll see in the autopsy notes the pathologist indicates the deceased had a needle puncture on his arm,” said Blades.

  “Which one?” demanded Elliott.

  “On the back of the left upper arm,’’.-replied the homicide detective.

  “Which means that since the victim was right-handed, he could have conceivably given himself some kind of injection,” offered Elliott.

  “Yeah,” replied Blades, “but why would he? You don’t shoot up drugs in the back of your arm.”

  “Maybe it was something he was taking for his AIDS,” countered Elliott. “Vitamins. Anything.”

  “I think all the AIDS medications he was taking were oral,” I reported. “But it can’t hurt to ask his doctor.” Elliott turned his attention to the contents of the box. Looking over his shoulder, I didn’t see much of interest: Danny’s address book, an accordion file filled with bills and receipts, all of which Elliott already had copies.

  “The phone company just came through with a printout of Wohl’s phone records,” Blades said, pulling another piece of paper out of the folder. “We haven’t had time to run a check on the numbers, but I made you a copy anyway.”

  I took a look at the sheet Blades slid across the table in my direction. Before Danny and Stephen left for their trip to Japan there were dozens of calls every day, but the number dwindled to a trickle while they were abroad. During the forty-eight h
ours preceding Danny’s death there were three calls, all on the Saturday he and Stephen arrived back from Japan. There was an incoming call at four forty-six for seventeen minutes followed by a twenty-six-second call to Stephen’s home number. Five minutes later Danny made an outgoing call that lasted just under two minutes. Besides the call to Stephen I recognized that the other numbers were all at Azor Pharmaceuticals.

  As I drove to Azor Pharmaceuticals the business of the phone numbers nagged at me. While Elliott was confident that the identity of the mystery man who was in Danny’s apartment when he died would emerge from the scores of numbers that appeared earlier in the month, somehow I kept coming back to the three calls that were made the Saturday Danny returned from Japan. I was convinced they were important.

  I remembered that Blades had said there was no cassette tape among the evidence the police had gathered. Presumably whoever had been with Danny when he died had taken the trouble to remove it from the answering machine and take it with him. Granted, the evidence he was attempting to conceal may have come from any one of the half-dozen short incoming calls received at Danny’s number during the ten days he was in Japan. However, I figured it was safe to assume that whoever was with Danny when he died knew him well enough to be aware of the trip to the Orient—and when he was scheduled to return. That put the focus squarely on the calls received the day immediately preceding his death.

  Of course, there was also the chance of some other perfectly logical explanation for the cassette tape’s absence—perhaps it had broken before Danny had left for Japan, and he hadn’t had the chance to replace it before leaving for his trip—but then there would have been no record of calls received by his number. No, the cassette was important.

  As soon as I arrived at Azor I pulled a copy of the company’s internal phone book out of Danny’s desk drawer and began looking for anything that matched the incoming calls received by Danny to the numbers I had copied from the sheet Detective Blades had shown us. It took me a while because I had only numbers and the book was arranged alphabetically according to department, lab, or employee, but eventually I found a match. The two-minute call had been made to Carl Woodruff’s office. I couldn’t find the other number, though it was clearly one of those assigned to Azor Pharmaceuticals. I checked the cover of the internal directory and noted that it had been more than six months since it had been last updated. Perhaps the number had only been recently assigned. For the hell of it I picked up the phone and dialed the number. It rang four times before the company’s internal voice-mail system picked it up.