Maggie got up from the couch and hugged Tom. “You okay?”
He fought back the tears that had flowed freely in Debbie Cooperman’s living room.
Maggie stepped back. “Anything more?”
He shook his head and doubted there would be. The official report would conclude that Bert Cooperman’s death had been a tragic accident. There was no physical evidence to refute it.
“I’ll make you something to eat,” Maggie said.
“I’m not hungry, thanks.” He looked down at his children, who were now staring up at him, sensing that this had not been a routine day. Then he hugged them fiercely, pulling them both to him. When he let go, Maggie stepped in.
“Okay, come on, kids. It’s bedtime.” She ushered the children out of the room, Molia kissing each on the top of the head as they walked past. Maggie took the stethoscope from T.J. and handed it back to Ho. “Nice to talk with you, Peter.”
Ho smiled, but it was halfhearted. “You, too, Maggie. Liza’s been meaning to call you about the church retreat. Things have been hectic.”
“I know the feeling. You sure you don’t want to stay and have something to eat? It’s no problem.”
“I better not. I’m afraid I’ve ruined a few dinners this week. I’ll be getting home in a minute. We won’t be long.” Ho waited for Maggie to leave the room, then turned to Molia. “A lot of bruises on the body. A contusion at the back of his head that likely knocked him out.”
Molia had called Ho from the accident site and met him at his office with Cooperman’s body. He left two armed police officers at the building while he went to deliver the news to Cooperman’s family. “Can you—”
“Can I tell you whether the bruises were caused by the accident or a blunt trauma before it?” Ho shook his head in frustration. “I’m sorry, Tom. I wish I could, but at the speed he was traveling and the likely impact with the water . . . He would have been thrown around the car considerably. I’d be guessing. He had a linear skull fracture indicating impact with the windshield. He also had a basal skull fracture.” Ho put his hand at the base of his skull. “I might not have even found it under ordinary circumstances, given the linear fracture.”
Molia slumped onto the couch and rubbed his face. “And a basal skull fracture is consistent with someone hitting him in the back of the head with a blunt object like the butt of a rifle before they dumped him inside his car and pushed it over the edge.”
Ho let the comment pass. “He had a subdural hematoma, also indicating a blunt trauma before he died. The problem, Tom, is that I can’t differentiate what was caused from the accident and what might have occurred before it, though I’m pretty certain something did.”
Molia gave him a look.
Ho picked up a manila envelope from the couch and tossed it onto his lap. “John Dunbar. The lab owed me a favor.”
“John Dunbar?”
Ho pointed to the envelope. “Joe Branick. I asked them to push it without drawing attention to it.”
Molia studied Ho’s face. “He didn’t kill himself either, did he?”
Ho shook his head. “Also inconclusive. But also a pretty damn good bet.”
Molia opened the package and pulled out photographs and a ballistics test. “In your medical opinion?”
“In my medical opinion I’d say the percentages are better that he did not.”
Molia studied the report. “Ballistics match.”
“No bullet, Tom. The powder burns on the hand and skull match. Same gun. Specific pattern of powder burns on the scalp, head, and face indicates a single shot fired at very close range. There was trauma to the tissue at the temple, hemorrhaging—”
“Which indicates the muzzle of the gun was either pressed directly against the flesh or very close to it.”
“Exactly, and the trajectory of the bullet through the skull is consistent with the reflex action one would expect to find in a self-inflicted wound. The bullet entered the temple and exited the rear, top portion of the skull.” He pointed to the envelope. “You’ll find some beautiful photographs in there, which I would suggest you commit to memory, then bury in your backyard.”
Molia stood to look at the photos. He thought better when he paced. “Blood test turn up something?”
“Nothing. No sign of any needle marks on the body indicating a chemical injection. I assume his lab work will also reveal no sign of any heavy metals, toxic substances, therapeutic drugs, or narcotics in the blood or urine. But that will take a couple weeks.”
“Then how can you be so sure it wasn’t a suicide?”
Ho chugged his beer, wincing; his eyes watered from the carbonation. He pushed his hair back from his forehead, staring at the floor as if re-creating the events. “I’m about ready to wrap this thing up, put the body back in the locker, call and tell you your instincts and a quarter will buy you a cup of coffee. Then I notice a cut across the back of the hand, just above the knuckle of the middle finger. There’s a beautiful picture.” Ho retrieved the envelope and flipped through the photographs to a blowup of Joe Branick’s hand. “You see?”
Molia remained unimpressed. “That’s a scratch. It could be from anything. It could have happened when he fell.”
“It probably did. The fact that there is a scrape is immaterial. What’s important is there is no coagulation. No bleeding.”
Molia knew enough about dead bodies to know it was of interest. “I’m listening, Peter.”
“Okay. Crash course on the human circulatory system. When a person is alive, the blood circulates. That’s why when a person is shot or suffers an acute injury red blood cells escape from the large and small vessels adjacent to the path of the trauma. In layman’s terms, you expect to see free red blood cells throughout the wounded tissue—like Cooperman’s hematoma at the base of his skull.” Ho held up his hand and made a fist. “When a person dies, the blood stops circulating. The heart ceases to function and there is no loss of blood into the tissue. The lack of red blood cells along the path of injury is a very obvious sign the person was traumatized—in this instance—shot, after he was already dead. It’s more difficult to determine when a high-caliber weapon is used, because the bullet does so much damage to the flesh and skull.”
“So why do you think that to be the case this time?”
Ho paced an area near the glass coffee table. “That was my suspicion. So I decided to do a fine-needle aspiration. A small-gauge needle, five or six times the diameter of a hair, is inserted into the skin to recover tissue samples. I took a biopsy, made a paraffin block for a slide, stained it with hematoxylin and eosin, and confirmed the red blood cells were still within the tissue. They had not leaked out of the blood vessels.”
Molia nodded. “He was already dead before they shot him.”
40
TINA DROPPED THE telephone, rushed across the hall into a darkened office, and quietly shut the door. She crouched behind the desk and pulled the telephone onto the floor, punching the red emergency button. It rang once. Jack Connally answered.
“Jack? This is Tina. Call the police.”
“Tina? . . . I can hardly hear you.”
“Jack, call the police,” she said, speaking as loud as she dared. She no longer heard the wheels of the garbage can in the hallway. The “janitor” had likely abandoned it and was now searching the offices door to door.
“Are you all right? Tina? I can hardly hear you.”
She pictured him dropping his paperback as her voice pulled him out of his chair.
“Jack, just call the police, turn off the elevators, pull the goddamn alarm, and lock yourself in the room behind your desk.”
“Tina, what is it? Should I come up?”
“Damn it, Jack—”
The door to the office flung open, the light from the hallway flowing into the room.
“Jack, call—!” she yelled.
The janitor moved quickly, ripping the phone cord from the wall. He looked down at the briefcase in her hand, smiled, and advan
ced, wrapping the cord around the knuckles of both hands, leaving a two-foot-long piece between the two. Tina circled the desk, throwing anything she could find. He deflected them, keeping himself between her and the door. She saw the firm’s fifteen-year anniversary present, a letter opener handed out to every employee, lying on the desk pad.
“The police are coming. They’ll be here any minute,” she said. “They know who you are.”
He smiled.
She feinted, threw a book at him, and grabbed the opener as she rushed for the door. He grabbed her from behind, yanking her backward. She thrust the letter opener as hard as she could, felt it embed in the man’s leg, and drove it five inches up to the blue and red Foster & Bane logo on the handle.
The janitor screamed through clenched jaws—a cry of pain. Tina wriggled free of her sweater and bolted out the door and down the hall for the emergency stairwell exit. She pulled open the emergency exit door and looked behind her. The man hobbled out of the office, a patch of blood quickly spreading on his right pant leg, a gun in his hand.
THE TIRES SPUN on the slick carport pavement, spewing white smoke to mix with the gray carbon spitting from the car’s exhaust. Then the rubber gripped and the Barracuda lurched backward, fishtailing into the parking lot and kicking up gravel. The two officers dove out of the way, falling to the ground. Sloane kept the car in reverse, propelling it backward across the lot, through the laurel hedge, and over the sidewalk. Car horns blared. Tires screeched. He dropped the steering column into drive and punched the gas.
Three minutes later he merged the Barracuda onto Highway 1. With its V-8 engine and none of the modern smog-control gadgets that drain cars of their raw power, it was surprisingly fast. The speedometer pushed past eighty before the engine gave a shudder of displeasure. Sloane cut north over Highway 280, waiting to hear the sound of police cruisers coming up quickly behind him. None did.
He flipped open his cell phone and hit “Redial.” The extension at Tina’s desk rang, but she did not answer. Her voice mail picked up.
“Tina? Tina, are you there?”
He took the downtown interchange, exiting at Fourth Street, where the freeway came to an abrupt end. He blew the light at the bottom of the exit and gauged the progress of a multicar MUNI streetcar on his left. The tracks ran parallel with the road, and Sloane was going to have to make a left turn across the tracks at Sansome Street. He punched the accelerator, hesitated when he couldn’t pull clear of the bus, then decided to go for it. He turned sharply, heard the sound of metal scraping and the hiss of air brakes, thought he’d made it, then felt the streetcar clip the back bumper, sending the back end of the Barracuda skidding sideways into a parked car. No time to leave a note—he accelerated and kept going. As he neared Battery Street he picked up the phone, and was about to push “Redial” again when it rang in his hand.
“Tina?”
“David.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at the office—”
“Get out. Do you understand me? Get out as quickly as you can. Tina? Tina!”
He tossed the phone onto the seat and grabbed the gun from the gym bag as he turned down the alley going the wrong way and lurched the Barracuda to a stop in a delivery zone at the back of the building. The back door was locked. He looked for police cars as he rushed up the alley to the front of the building, but saw none. Moving methodically left to right, he pulled progressively harder on the locked series of glass doors until the door on the far right flew open. He hurried across the lobby. The night security guard stood at a counter yelling into the telephone.
“Tina, are you all right? Tina?”
Jack Connally pushed buttons on the console, his movements jerky and uncertain. “Mr. Sloane,” he said as Sloane reached the counter. Connally’s eyes widened at the sight of the gun. He raised both hands shoulder high.
Sloane rushed past him, stepped inside an elevator, and hit the button for the nineteenth floor. The doors did not close. He hit the other buttons, but they, too, would not remain lit. The computer. The elevators were locked down. He needed his card.
He rushed back to the desk. “Jack, turn on the elevators.”
“Take it easy—”
“Jack, turn on the damned elevators.”
Connally hesitated.
“Turn the elevators back on. She’s in trouble up there.”
Connally shook his head, hands shaking. “I can’t. It takes a minute after shutdown for the computers to start back up.”
Sloane looked to the door at the end of the lobby. Nineteen floors, but he couldn’t just stand here. Then the stairwell door flew open and Tina burst out, slipping on the marble floor, out of breath, yelling, “Jack, get down!”
He started for her, then stopped, everything slowing, moving as if through a pool of thick oil. Tina rushed past the security desk, and Connally stepped out as she did. The stairwell door crashed open again against the wall. Flashes of light and the pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic gunfire reverberated like applause. Connally’s body jerked in spasmodic reflex from the bullets ripping through him, like a tin can being kept aloft, each hit redirecting him until the shots stopped and he fell.
With Connally no longer obstructing his aim, the gunman swung his arm like a pendulum and locked on Tina.
41
YOU’RE CERTAIN?” Molia asked. “The biopsy is legitimate, I mean as far as evidence?”
Ho raised both hands. “Hold on, Tom. Nobody said anything about evidence. Remember, this guy was never supposed to come out of the reefer. Besides, the biopsy alone is pretty thin.”
Molia leaned forward. “Which means you didn’t stop there.” Tom Molia knew Peter Ho; he knew that beneath the facade of the country doctor, Ho was a highly gifted coroner, tops in his class at Johns Hopkins, and a man as dedicated to his job as Molia was to his own.
Ho paused. “I decided to get more tissue. I went through the mouth, underneath the palate; it’s the least likely place anyone would look . . . I recovered enough to confirm the fine-needle aspiration.”
Molia thought through the information, talking out loud. “So, then, how did he die, Peter? You said he had no signs of physical trauma except the scratch on the hand. If there were no chemicals in his system, how did he die?”
“For certain?” Ho shook his head. “I don’t know. But to a coroner this is type-one stuff, Tom. You don’t see this every day. In fact, the closest I’ve ever come may have been when I was still back at Johns Hopkins. I worked on a couple of kids who drowned in a boating accident. Tragic. The father said they fell overboard while he was passed out drunk. The parents were estranged, and the district attorney thought the father had suffocated the kids and dumped them overboard—some sadistic act to get back at the ex-wife.”
“Jesus.”
“My job was to find out which it was. When a person suffocates, the blood stays in the vessels and the cause of death is from a general lack of oxygen, usually the brain failing first, then the heart. There’s a circulatory collapse like what we’re talking about here. That could explain the lack of blood leaking into the tissue, as with an acute injury, like a gunshot or stabbing.”
“So you’re saying our guy looks more like an asphyxiation than an acute injury,” Molia said.
“Exactly.”
“Someone suffocated him.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“You just—”
“The major findings in someone who dies slowly from a lack of oxygen, suffocation, are splinter hemorrhages visible over the surface of the heart, lungs, and thymus gland in the neck. A less prominent finding would be swelling of the brain. Given the condition of this guy’s head, that would be pretty close to impossible to determine. To do that I’d have to cut him open—hello, autopsy . . .”
“Then—”
“I just think he died quicker than that.”
“Why?”
“There’s no indication of a struggle, Tom. You’d expect to see marks on the
body, bruises, like Cooperman. This was not a small man. He was fit. Muscular. If he had been suffocated, you would expect to see something about the nose and mouth, broken blood vessels. Something. Cuts and scratches on his hands, bruises on his arms. Except for the hole in his head, this guy showed nothing. I know he was dead before he was shot. But I don’t know how.”
“Any guesses?”
Ho shook his head. “There are very few drugs I can think of that would not leave telltale signs and be detected viscerally or through chemical analysis.”
“But there are some?” Molia asked.
“Some. Carbon dioxide for one. But what I’m getting at, Tom, is whoever did kill this guy—and Cooperman, if you’re right—they were no amateurs. It’s as close to perfect as I’ve ever seen. They knew what they were doing, and they did it extremely well.”
They sat listening to the hum of the fan, like millions of mosquitoes in flight.
“I’m sorry I involved you in this, Peter,” Molia said. “My ego.”
“It’s my job, too, Tom.”
“Nobody is going to find out you did anything, Peter. I’ll keep this under my hat.”
“What are you going to do?”
“They killed a cop, Peter.”
“But you have no evidence. You don’t have anything.”
“I know. But something always comes up. There’s no such thing as a perfect crime. Something always falls through the cracks, Peter—you know that—and when it does, I’ll be there to catch it.”
“Just don’t let them carry you into my office in a bag, Tom.”
“I’ll be all right.”
Ho stood. “I’m going home to have dinner with my wife and kids. I suggest you go in there and do the same.” He left the beer bottle on the coffee table, walked to the screen door, and pulled it open.
“Peter.” Ho turned. “Thanks,” Molia said.
The Jury Master Page 18
