Blindsight Read online

  “Well, I don’t like it one bit,” Laurie said. All this was reminding her of the concerns about compromise she’d had when she’d arrived a half hour earlier.

  “You don’t have to like it,” Lou said. “Not many do.”

  Laurie flipped open the file on Duncan Andrews. She leafed through the papers until she came to the investigator’s report. After reading for a few moments, she looked up at Lou. “I’m beginning to get the big picture,” she said. “The deceased was some kind of financial whiz kid, a senior vice president of an investment banking firm at only thirty-five. And on top of that there is a note here that says his father is running for the U.S. Senate.”

  “Can’t get much more political than that,” Lou said.

  Laurie nodded, then read more of the investigator’s report. When she got to the section noting who had identified the deceased at the scene, she found a name, Sara Wetherbee. In the space left to describe the witness’s relationship to the deceased, the investigator had scrawled: “girlfriend.”

  Laurie shook her head. Discovering a loved one dead from drugs carried an ugly resonance for her. In a flash her thoughts drifted back seventeen years to when she was fifteen, a freshman at Langley School. She could remember the bright sunny day as if it had been yesterday. It was midfall, crisp and clear, and the trees in Central Park had been a blaze of color. She’d walked past the Metropolitan with its banners snapping in the gusty wind. She’d turned left on Eighty-fourth Street and entered her parents’ massive apartment building on the west side of Park Avenue.

  “I’m home!” Laurie called as she tossed her bookbag onto the foyer table. There was no answer. All she could hear was the traffic on Park peppered by the inevitable bleat of taxi horns.

  “Anybody home?” Laurie called and heard her voice echo through the halls. Surprised to find the apartment empty, Laurie pushed through the door from the butler’s pantry into the kitchen. Even Holly, their maid, was nowhere to be seen. But then Laurie remembered that it was Friday, Holly’s day off.

  “Shelly!” Laurie yelled. Her older brother was home from his freshman year at college for the long Columbus Day weekend. Laurie expected to find him either in the kitchen or the den. She looked in the den; no one was there, but the TV was on with the sound turned off.

  For a moment Laurie looked at the silent antics of a daytime game show. She thought it odd that the TV had been left on. Thinking that someone might still be home, she resumed her tour of the apartment. For some reason the silent rooms filled her with apprehension. She began to move faster, sensing a secret urgency.

  Pausing in front of Shelly’s bedroom door, Laurie hesitated. Then she knocked. When there was no answer, she knocked again. When there was still no answer, she tried the door. It was unlocked. She pushed open the door and stepped into the room.

  In front of her on the floor was her brother, Shelly. His face was as white as the ivory-colored china in the dining room breakfront. Bloody froth oozed from his nose. Around his upper arm was a rubber tourniquet. On the floor, six inches from his half-opened hand, was a syringe Laurie had seen the night before. On the edge of his desk was a glassine envelope. Laurie guessed what was inside because of what Shelly had told her the night before. It had to be the “speedball” he’d boasted of, a mixture of cocaine and heroin.

  Hours later the same day, Laurie endured the worst confrontation of her life. Inches from her nose was her father’s angry face with his bulging eyes and purpled skin. He was beside himself with rage. His thumbs were digging into her skin where he held her upper arms. A few feet away her mother was sobbing into a tissue.

  “Did you know your brother was using drugs?” her father demanded. “Did you? Answer me.” His grip tightened.

  “Yes,” Laurie blurted. “Yes, yes!”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” her father shouted. “If you’d told us, he’d be alive.”

  “I couldn’t,” Laurie sobbed.

  “Why?” her father shouted. “Tell me why!”

  “Because . . .” Laurie cried. She paused, then said: “Because he told me not to. He made me promise.”

  “Well, that promise killed him,” her father hissed. “It killed him just as much as the damn drug.”

  Laurie felt a hand grip her arm and she jumped. The shock brought her back to the present. She blinked a few times as if waking from a trance.

  “Are you all right?” Lou asked. He’d gotten up and was holding Laurie’s arm.

  “I’m fine,” Laurie said, slightly embarrassed. She extracted herself from Lou’s grip. “Let’s see, where were we?” Her breathing had quickened. Perspiration dotted her forehead. She looked over the paperwork in front of her, trying to remember what had dredged up such old, painful memories. As if it had been yesterday, she could recall the anguish of the conflict of responsibility, sibling or filial, and the terrible guilt and burden of having chosen the former.

  “What were you thinking about?” Lou asked. “You seemed a long way off.”

  “The fact that the victim had been discovered by his girlfriend,” Laurie said as her eyes stumbled again onto Sara Wetherbee’s name. She wasn’t about to share her past with this lieutenant. To this day she had trouble talking about that tragic episode with friends, much less a stranger. “It must have been very hard for the poor woman.”

  “Unfortunately, homicide victims are often found by those closest to them,” Lou said.

  “Must have been a terrible shock,” Laurie said. Her heart went out to Sara Wetherbee. “I must say, this Duncan Andrews case is certainly not the usual overdose.”

  Lou shrugged. “With cocaine, I’m not sure there is a usual case. When the drug went upscale in the seventies, deaths have been seen in all levels of society, from athletes and entertainers to executives to college kids to inner city hoodlums. It’s a pretty democratic blight. A great leveler, if you will.”

  “Here at the medical examiner’s office, we mostly see the lower end of the abuser spectrum,” Laurie said. “But you’re right in general.” Laurie smiled. She was impressed by Lou. “What was your background before joining the police?”

  “What do you mean?” Lou asked.

  “Did you go to college?” Laurie asked.

  “Of course I went to college!” Lou snapped. “What kind of question is that?”

  “Sorry,” Laurie said. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “And I don’t mean to be testy,” Lou said. “Sometimes I’m a bit self-conscious about where I went to school. I only got to go to a community college on the Island, not some Ivy League ivory tower. Where’d you go?”

  “Wesleyan University, up in Connecticut,” Laurie said. “Ever heard of it?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it,” Lou said. “What do you think, all police officers are ignoramuses? Wesleyan University. I might have known. As Billy Joel says, you uptown girls live in an uptown world.”

  “How did you know I was from New York?”

  “Your accent, Doctor,” Lou said. “It’s as indelible as my Long Island Rego Park accent.”

  “I see,” Laurie said. She didn’t like to think she was such an open book. She wondered what else this man could tell about her from his years as an investigator.

  Laurie changed the subject. “Where you go to school matters less than what you do while you’re there,” she said. “You shouldn’t be sensitive about your college. Obviously you got a good education.”

  “Easy for you to say,” said Lou. “But thanks for the compliment.”

  Laurie looked down at the papers on her desk. Suddenly she felt a little guilty about her privileged background of a private secondary school, Wesleyan University, Columbia Medical School. She hoped she hadn’t sounded patronizing.

  “Let me take a quick look at the third case,” Laurie said. She opened the third folder. “Louis Herrera, age twenty-eight, unemployed, found in a dumpster behind a grocery store.” Laurie looked up at Lou. “Probably died in a crack house and was literally dump
ed. That’s the usual overdose we see. Another sad, wasted life.”

  “In some respects maybe more tragic than the rich guy,” Lou said. “I’d guess he had a lot fewer choices in life.”

  Laurie nodded. Lou’s perspective was refreshing. She reached for the phone and dialed Cheryl Myers down in the medical investigator’s department. She asked Cheryl to get all the medical records she could on Duncan Andrews. She told her that she hoped to find some medical problem that she might be able to relate to his pathology.

  Hanging up the phone, Laurie glanced over at Lou. “I can’t help it, but I feel like I’m cheating.” She stood up and gathered all the paperwork.

  “You’re not cheating,” Lou assured her. “Besides, why not wait until you have all the information, including the autopsy? Then you can worry about it. Who knows, maybe everything will work out.”

  “Good advice,” Laurie said. “Let’s get downstairs and get to work.”

  Normally Laurie changed into her scrub clothes in her office, but with Lou there, she opted to use the locker room. When they got off the elevator on the basement level, Laurie directed Lou into the men’s side while she went into the women’s. Five minutes later they met up in the hall. Laurie had on a layer of normal scrub clothes, then another impermeable layer, then a large apron. On her head she wore a hood. A face mask dangled from around her neck. Lou had on a single layer of scrubs, a hood, and he carried his face mask.

  “You look like one of the doctors,” Laurie said, eyeing Lou to make sure he’d put on the right clothing.

  “I feel like I’m going into surgery instead of to see an autopsy,” Lou said. “I didn’t wear all this the last time. You sure I have to wear this mask?”

  “Everyone in the autopsy room wears a mask,” Laurie said. “Because of AIDS and other infectious problems, rules have become much stricter. If you don’t wear it, Calvin will bodily throw you out.”

  They walked down the main corridor of the morgue, passing the stainless steel door to the walk-in cooler and past the long bank of individual refrigerated compartments. The refrigerator compartments formed a large U in the middle of the morgue.

  “This place is certainly grisly,” Lou commented.

  “I suppose,” Laurie said. “It’s less so when you’re used to it.”

  “It looks like a Hollywood set for a horror movie,” Lou said. “Whoever picked out these blue tiles for the walls? And what about the cement floor? Why isn’t there any covering? Look at all the stains.”

  Laurie stopped and gazed at the floor. Although the surface was swept clean, the stains were unspeakable. “It was supposed to be tiled long ago,” she said. “Somehow it got fouled up in New York City bureaucratic red tape. At least that’s what I’ve been told.”

  “And what are all those coffins doing here?” Lou asked. “That’s a nice touch.” He pointed to a stack of simple pine boxes piled almost to the ceiling. Others were standing on end.

  “Those are Potter’s Field coffins,” Laurie said. “There are a lot of unidentified bodies in New York City. After their autopsies we keep them in the cooler for a number of weeks. If they go unclaimed, they are eventually buried at city’s expense.”

  “Isn’t there someplace else they could store the coffins?” Lou asked. “It looks like a garage sale.”

  “Not that I know of,” Laurie said. “I guess I’ve never thought about it. I’m so used to seeing them there.”

  Laurie pushed into the autopsy room first, then held the door for Lou. In contrast to the previous morning, all eight tables were now occupied by corpses, each with a tag tied around its big toe. At five of the tables the posts were already under way.

  “Well, well, Dr. Montgomery is starting before noon,” one of the gowned and hooded doctors quipped.

  “Some of us are smart enough to test the water before we jump in the pool,” Laurie shot back.

  “You’re on table six,” one of the mortuary techs called out from a sink where he was washing out a length of intestine.

  Laurie looked back at Lou, who had paused just inside the door. She saw him swallow hard. Although he’d said he’d seen autopsies before, she had the feeling that he found this “assembly line” operation a bit overwhelming. With the gut being washed out, the smell wasn’t too good either.

  “You can go outside anytime,” Laurie said to him.

  Lou held up a hand. “I’m all right,” he said. “If you can take this, I can too.”

  Laurie walked down to table six. Lou followed her. A gowned and hooded Vinnie Amendola appeared.

  “It’s you and me today, Dr. Montgomery,” Vinnie said.

  “Fine,” Laurie said. “Why don’t you get everything we’ll need and we’ll get started.”

  Vinnie nodded, then went over to the supply cabinets.

  Laurie put out her note papers where she could get to them, then looked at Duncan Andrews. “Handsome-looking man,” she said.

  “I didn’t think doctors thought that way,” Lou said. “I thought you guys all switched into neutral or something.”

  “Hardly,” Laurie said. Duncan’s pale body lay in apparent repose on the steel table. His eyelids were closed. The only thing that marred his appearance aside from his pasty white color were the excoriations on his forearms. Laurie pointed to them. “Those deep scratches are probably the result of what’s called formication. That’s a tactile hallucination of bugs under or on the skin. It’s seen in both cocaine and amphetamine intoxication.”

  Lou shook his head. “I can’t understand why people take drugs,” he said. “It’s beyond me.”

  “They do it for pleasure,” Laurie said. “Unfortunately, drugs like cocaine tap into parts of the brain that developed during evolution as the reward center. It was to encourage behavior likely to perpetuate the species. If the war against drugs is to succeed, the fact that drugs can be pleasurable has to be admitted and not ignored.”

  “Why do I have the feeling you don’t think much of the Just Say No campaign?” Lou asked.

  “Because I don’t. It’s stupid,” Laurie said. “Or at least shortsighted. I don’t think the politicians who dreamed that scheme up have a clue to what growing up in today’s society is like, especially for poor urban kids. Drugs are around, and when kids try them and find out that drugs are pleasurable, they think the powers-that-be are lying about the negative or dangerous side as well.”

  “You ever try any of that stuff?”

  “I’ve tried pot and cocaine.”

  “Really?”

  “Are you surprised?” Laurie asked.

  “I suppose I am, to an extent.”

  “Why?”

  Lou shrugged. “I don’t know. I suppose you don’t look the type.”

  Laurie laughed. “I guess he looks more the type than I do right now,” she said, pointing to Andrews. “But when he was alive I bet he didn’t look the type either. Yeah, I tried some drugs in college. Despite what happened to my brother, or maybe because of it.”

  “What happened to your brother?” Lou asked.

  Laurie looked down at the body of Duncan Andrews. She’d not meant to bring her brother into the conversation. The comment had slipped out as if she were talking with someone with whom she was close.

  “Did your brother overdose?” Lou asked.

  Laurie’s eyes went from Duncan’s corpse to Lou. She couldn’t lie. “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Fine,” Lou said. “I don’t mean to pry.”

  Laurie turned back to Duncan’s body. For a second she was immobilized by the thought it was her brother’s body before her on that cold table. She was relieved to be interrupted by Vinnie returning with gloves, specimen bottles, preservatives, labels, and a series of instruments. She was eager to get started and put these reveries behind her.

  “Let’s do it,” Vinnie said. He began applying the labels to the specimen jars.

  Laurie opened the gloves and put them on. She put on her goggles and b
egan a careful exterior examination of Duncan Andrews. After looking at Duncan’s head, she motioned for Lou to step around to the other side of the table. Parting Duncan’s hair with her gloved hand, she showed Lou multiple bruises.

  “I’ll bet he had at least one convulsion,” Laurie said. “Let’s look at the tongue.”

  Laurie opened Duncan’s mouth. The tongue was lacerated in several locations. “Just what I expected,” she said. “Now let’s see how much cocaine this fellow has been using.” With a small flashlight and a nasal speculum, she looked up Duncan’s nose. “No perforations. Looks normal. Guess he hadn’t been sniffing much.”

  Laurie straightened up. She noticed Lou’s attention had been directed at a neighboring table where they were busy sawing off the top of a skull. Their eyes met.

  “You okay?” Laurie questioned.

  “I’m not sure,” Lou said. “You actually do this every day?”

  “On average, three or four days a week,” Laurie said. “You want to go outside for a while? I can let you know when we do DePasquale.”

  “No, I’ll be all right. Let’s get on with it. What’s next?”

  “I usually check the eyes,” Laurie said. She studied Lou. The last thing she wanted was for him to pass out and hit his head on the concrete floor. That had happened to a visitor once before.

  “Continue,” Lou urged. “I’m fine.”

  Laurie shrugged. Then she put her thumb and index finger on Duncan’s eyelids and drew them up.

  Lou gasped and turned away.

  For a moment even Laurie was taken aback. The eyes were gone! The pulpy red sockets were filled with pink-stained wads of gauze. It gave the corpse a ghastly appearance.

  “Okay!” Lou said. “You got me. You set me up and you got me. I’ll have to give you that.” He turned back to Laurie. The bit of facial skin visible between his mask and his hood was blanched. “Let me guess: this was some sort of initiation ordeal for the rookie.”