Forbidden Birth

by William Rubin

  As I walked down the front steps of the precinct and into the bright afternoon sun, a sick feeling came over me. We were much closer to the beginning of this twisted case than to the end of it.

  Chapter 29

  Lukewarm nine-hour old coffee, stale, mangled blueberry tarts, and yesterday’s bagels sat on the small pinewood table between us. Doctor Singh sat across from me in the St. Barnabas ER staff lounge. He wore light green scrubs and had large bags under his eyes from one too many late night shifts, I suspected.

  “So, Doctor Singh, tell me about April Cassidy. You treated her early in the morning of Friday the 22nd.”

  “That is right,” Singh said with precision. “She was an assault victim, a rule out rape patient,” the dark-skinned Doctor said as he flipped through her thin manila-colored hospital chart. Let us see, her vaginal swabs came back negative and her blood work was normal, except hmmm, she was about twelve to fourteen weeks pregnant. Were you aware of that, Detective?”

  “Yes, yes I was, Doctor. Anything else? The officers who brought her in mentioned she had some blood on her.”

  “Quite right. A very small amount. Just enough to analyze for blood type. I am afraid it was not helpful. The sample was O positive, the most common blood type, which any of more than a hundred million people in the U. S. have. April was A negative, meaning it was not her blood. What I found more interesting though were her injuries,…” Singh said as his voice trailed off.

  “Go on, Doctor. I know all the injuries were superficial, so what was interesting about them?”

  “Well, it was the timing of the injuries. Most were from the assault and rape attempt the police saved her from, but two were from some hours earlier. Specifically, she had a small circular wound near her navel and a larger bruise across her face. April was struck across the left cheek in an assault earlier the same day and had something done, some kind of procedure I believe, at the same time. She signed out before I could explore these injuries further. Perhaps her OB/GYN would know more. I recommended she follow up for medical care the next day,” Singh replied as nurses, technicians, and other doctors shuffled in and out of the room.

  It was a half hour after the change of shifts. Everyone had finished taking report on the day’s patients from the prior shift and was now looking for a sugar and caffeine boost to take them through the next few hours.

  “Any idea who April’s OB was, Doctor?”

  “I am afraid not.”

  “The officers who brought her in thought she was acting a bit suspicious, as if she was trying to hide something. What was your impression, Doctor Singh?”

  “She was more nervous than most patients. At the time, I attributed it to illegal activities that resulted in her injuries, prostitution or drugs, for example. Now I believe her behavior may have stemmed from a desire to hide her pregnancy. She did sign out right after we mentioned getting X-rays, which of course would harm an unborn child. I am not sure why she would want to keep her pregnancy a secret from us. But I do have, shall we say, a hunch about it.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I think April may have known her first attacker and was trying to conceal his identity. She had too few injuries to explain her forced abduction and the fact that she may have undergone an invasive, unwanted procedure. April may have cooperated up to a point and then resisted when events unfolded in an unexpected manner.”

  “Interesting theory, Doctor,” I said as I took it all in. Singh’s theory jibed with Marone’s earlier observations about inconsistencies in April’s story. At last we were making some progress.

  Chapter 30

  “Kev, what’d you find out?” I asked into my cell phone as I drove northeast along Crescent Avenue before making a right onto East 187th Street. As we spoke, a warm breeze streamed in through the driver’s side window of my 1974 Firebird. Boom boxes played rap and Spanish music as locals congregated in front of storefronts and on the stoops of apartment buildings. The neighborhood had changed a lot from when I called it home in the 1980s. The predominantly Italian area now housed a significant Albanian and Spanish population. But many venerable institutions were still going strong, including the Arthur Avenue Retail Market and Madonia Brothers Bakery, both just south of where I lived on Arthur Avenue, from birth until age seven.

  I turned left and drove north along Southern Boulevard where it bordered the Bronx Zoo. A flood of childhood memories washed over me: warm Sunday afternoons spent with my family watching the seals and polar bears being fed and the squirrel monkeys chasing each other about behind thick windows of plexiglass. Then thoughts of my mother started to creep in and my breath became shallower. I literally shook myself, took a deep breath, and tried to concentrate on what Kev was telling me.

  Kennedy filled me in as I worked my way over to and then northbound on the Bronx River Parkway. Most of what he found at April Cassidy’s rental home was of little help. Phone bills, bank and credit card statements, and her unopened mail were all unremarkable. I pictured April’s adolescent style bedroom in my mind as Kennedy described their search. Posters of ballet, modern dance, and Broadway shows covered the pink walls. The room was, I guessed, the last safe refuge in April’s troubled life before she died.

  Stuffed in a shoebox under the bed were the only leads that came out of the four hour ransacking of April’s home. Kennedy found sonogram printouts from two weeks earlier. Each had RACHEL RAQUEL printed at the bottom surrounded by smiley faces and hearts. An appointment card for a week from now with her OB, Carl Dietz, accompanied the images. Buried under a ticket stub from the The Lion King and a few other mementos, was our other lead.

  Twelve perfume-scented love letters from a recent ex-boyfriend lined the bottom of the pink Candies shoebox. The letters, an oddity in this age of e-mails, smartphones, tablets, and laptops, spoke of a love affair that started with passion and fire and progressed to heart-felt tenderness and romance before it was abruptly broken off by April four months ago. The last few letters, unopened by April, begged for forgiveness and reconciliation with promises to never “hurt her again.” All were written by a pharmacist from Ossining, New York named Gerry Buehler. A promising lead, indeed!

  Kevin and I would soon be paying our pharmacist friend a little visit. Right now, though, I had other plans. I pulled into my driveway, ate a late supper with Michelle, and spent the night preparing for tomorrow’s impromptu visit with Doctor Dietz.

  Chapter 31

  The Giver’s hands flew over the keyboard, checking one database after another for more potential victims. An expert hacker, he had the foresight to minor in computer science as an undergraduate. It was an easy choice for him, really. Computers are logical, orderly, and do as they are told. Interfacing with them was a welcome relief from the irrational behavior of the many fools who shared this planet with him. The Giver hacked through another internet firewall, recalling how many supposedly secure databases he had penetrated before. As with the others, he installed a program before he left the site that gave him an easy, undetectable backdoor in whenever he needed to return to it.

  The Giver used a sophisticated screening program he wrote himself. It sifted through all the tri-state computers and databases that shared the Physof software and identified any and all people who fit The Giver’s criteria. He received an e-mail alert whenever a new pregnant young woman was identified. Currently his search only included the New York Metro area, but soon his activities would be expanding westward. One by one, new names were added to his hit list, which at present tally was sixteen names long. Every few days he accessed the databases and evaluated his potential victims further. Each person was thoroughly researched before they made his final list. Google and Yahoo searches were cross-referenced. Employer, state, and federal records were tapped into. Anyone who still seemed promising then received a personal visit or two, surreptitiously of course, from The Giver. If he liked what he saw, the person was then acquired.

  Upon acquisition, The Giver extracted whatever he need
ed from the victim. Depending on his mood, the circumstances of the acquisition and processing, and what was left when The Giver was finished, the individual was either released or disposed of, though of late, he much preferred the latter. It was an elegant system that served him well and would continue to for as long as he needed it to.

  The Giver leaned back in his chair, stretched, and yawned. He rotated his head in a circle a few times and massaged his neck, realizing a short break was needed. He straightened himself, closed his eyes, and cleared his head. He spent the next ten minutes in focused relaxation, his mind clear of any and all thoughts. It was a method he developed, quite by accident, a long time ago. The Technique, as he called it, was a way to shut out the world around him while nourishing the world within him.

  At first The Technique was a coping method, an escape from the childhood and adolescent abuses of a prostitute mother and her string of degenerate boyfriends. Over time, the boy discovered the real power of his Technique lay not in its ability to provide escape for him but in its ability to allow him to tap into and exponentially grow his own power. He used The Technique to increase his physical and mental endurance, allowing him to work while others rested. The results were astounding. A sickly, introverted boy, he grew into a powerful man by late adolescence. He honed himself into an Olympic caliber swimmer and gymnast in college and excelled farther and faster in academics than anyone believed was possible.

  He saw it clearly now and had for many years. He was his first and greatest achievement. The molding and transformation of himself from an insignificant little boy into a powerful man, then into The Giver, made everything else possible. The Giver was his own perfect prototype. Soon he would purge this earth of its many undesirables and repopulate it in his own image.

  The countdown to Armageddon had already begun. Soon nothing would be able to stop him. Nothing and no one. It was all just a matter of time.

  Chapter 32

  I pulled my car into a parking space in front of Doctor Carl Dietz’s office in the Medical Arts Atrium at Manning Medical Center. The Firebird kicked up small bits of gravel and a few stray twigs as it came to a stop. The sky was overcast and dark, threatening rain at any moment.

  “I’m Detective Ravello,” I said, my badge extended towards Dietz’s receptionist. “I’m here to see Doctor Dietz about a former patient.” The receptionist was a middle age, bespectacled, red-haired woman, about sixty pounds overweight by my best estimate. She wore a look of practiced indifference on her doughy, white face. My next statement changed all that. “It’s a murder investigation. Doctor Dietz was one of the last people to see this woman alive.” That got the receptionist moving. The fat on her arms jiggled as she turned, picked up a phone, and announced my presence to the person on the other end of the line.

  “The Doctor will be with you shortly, Detective. Please have a seat,” she said with cautious, concerned eyes.

  I sat in the cramped, dreary waiting room, flipping through two-year-old issues of Fit Pregnancy and read a brochure from a company that processed and stored umbilical cord blood from newborns. It was an expensive new technology, hyped by the company to parents as “essential in safeguarding your newborn’s long term health and well-being.” Five minutes after I sat down in the waiting room, a tall woman came up to me.

  “I’m Anne Halloway,” the woman said in a gravelly, low-pitched voice. “Doctor Dietz asked me to show you to his office. He’ll have a break between patients in just a few minutes.”

  We walked down a narrow corridor, over a worn gray carpet, and past faded mauve colored walls to the office at the end of the hallway. I sat in a chair in front of the Doctor’s chipped, imitation oak desk. Sloppy piles of medical journals, unsigned patient lab results, and a few unopened bills vied for space on Dietz’s desk with a small computer and keyboard. A lone sliver in the center of the desk remained free from clutter.

  “Would you like anything while you wait?”

  “Coffee, milk and two sugars would be great,” I said pleasantly. Without another word she scurried off faster than expected for a woman of her size. My eyes wandered over the contents of the small office, looking for anything unusual or out of place. Photos of Dietz with colleagues at medical conferences alternated with copies of his medical credentials on the side walls of the office. Behind Dietz’s desk was a large black leather chair and a wall-to-wall bookcase overflowing with various texts. Nelson’s and Harrison’s guides to pediatrics and internal medicine shared space with countless books on surgical obstetrics, fetal ultrasound, and gynecologic pathology. Old medical journals jutted out and pictures of Dietz with his wife and three children were haphazardly interspersed, filling out the shelves. Just as I finished evaluating Dietz’s office, Halloway returned with my coffee.

  “Here you are, dear. Milk and two sugars, just like you asked.” The nurse stood stiffly in front of me, hands clenched in front of her at her waist. An awkward period of silence passed as I sipped the steamy, hot coffee. Finally, Halloway said, “It is such a tragedy about April Cassidy. Such a nice young girl. It’s a shame she had such misfortunes. Doctor Dietz and I were trying so hard to help her through them before she died.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, Doctor Dietz had really taken April under his wing. He knew she was having trouble adjusting to New York and making it as a Broadway dancer. He always offered plenty of encouragement, tried to assure April that everything would work itself out. He tried so hard to be a good father figure for her as well as her doctor. And it was working. She was just keeping her head above water until…well, those attacks and the problems with the baby just seemed too much for poor April to bear. If the murderer hadn’t gotten her first, there’s no telling what would have happened to her. She was filled with such sadness, I—”

  “Hello, Detective Ravello. I am Carl Dietz. It is a pleasure to meet you,” Dietz said as I turned towards him and rose to shake his soft, clammy hand. I had been half sitting, half leaning on the edge of his desk before Dietz appeared, surprising both Halloway and I with his presence. Dietz shot the nurse a disapproving look as he motioned towards the chair I had been sitting in earlier.

  “Please, have a seat, Detective. How can I help you today?”

  “I better be getting back to the morning’s patients. Nice meeting you, Detective,” Anne said before she made the briefest of eye contact with Dietz and then left the room. As I settled into my chair, I reminded myself to play it casually with Dietz and see where that got me.

  “It’s all very routine, Doctor. You are, I am sure, aware one of your patients, April Cassidy, was murdered a few days ago. I need to ask you some questions about her.”

  “Very well. April has been, or should I say had been, a patient of mine for almost a year. In the beginning I provided routine gynecologic care; a pelvic exam, an updated Pap smear…. Happily she became pregnant almost four months ago,” Dietz said with a proud smile. “She was very excited about the pregnancy and doing quite well with it until the recent attacks. At her last visit, on Friday, that had of course changed. She was so upset and shaken by the attacks,” the doctor said as his smile faded into a somber frown.

  “Can you tell me more about how April and the baby were doing at her last visit with you. Did April provide any details about her attacks that went beyond what the newspapers reported?”

  “April did remember waking up in the midst of some kind of procedure during the first attack. She didn’t recall what the attacker looked like, but he had a long thin needle and was working around her belly. She was then hit in the face and drugged to knock her out. The next thing she remembered was being dumped out of the car just prior to the second attack. As I said, she was quite shaken up by the attacks, but aside from minor injuries there was no real damage to her. The baby was another story. I believe someone was trying to trigger an abortion with the procedure April had. As a result of the procedure I believe they performed on her, the fetus would not have developed normally. I recommended
an abortion as the best option for mother and child,” Dietz said quietly.

  “Was she raped?”

  “Definitely not.”

  “Any idea who might have wanted the baby dead?”

  Dietz pulled off his large tortoise frame glasses and rubbed the bags under his eyes with the tips of his fingers. With a tired sigh he continued, “The baby’s father was Johnny Briganti, a bouncer at the strip club April worked at. He had been urging April to have an abortion. He is the only suspect I am aware of.”

  “Would he have had the medical expertise to make this abortion attempt?”

  “Possibly,” Dietz said as he stared at me with weary red eyes. “Briganti did attend medical school for two years and was involved in research towards a combined MD/PhD for two more years. His clinical work was still ahead of him in medical school, so he had not yet done a rotation in OB/GYN. And Briganti is very resourceful, from what April told me. If he couldn't perform the procedure, I’m sure he could have led April to the place it was performed without arousing her suspicion. Once there, he could have drugged her and restrained her for the procedure. He and his accomplices didn’t get very far in their abortion attempt, though, before April woke up. They probably were scared by her regaining consciousness. They knocked her out and then decided to stop and get rid of her before she could identify them.” Dietz paused, an intense look of concentration written across his face as he considered his words. “Briganti is a hoodlum, from what I gathered from April. I’m sure he wouldn’t hesitate to do such a thing and he would have the connections to pull it off,” Dietz said with indifference and a nonchalant wave of his right hand.