“Well, Mr. Ring seems to think there’s some sort of cover-up going on, something conspiratorial, and based on the direction of his questioning, he seems to have information that buttresses this.”
Strange, I thought. It didn’t sound to me as if the Post was holding off on investigating these cases, as Abby had stated so emphatically.
“He’s under the impression,” the commissioner continued, “that your office is stonewalling, and that it’s therefore part of this so-called conspiracy.”
“And I suppose we are.”
I worked hard to keep the annoyance out of my voice. “And that leaves me caught in the middle. Either I defy Pat Harvey or the justice Department, and frankly, given a choice, I would prefer to accommodate Mrs. Harvey. Eventually, I will have to answer to her. She is Deborah’s mother. I don’t have to answer to the FBI.”
“I’m not interested in antagonizing the justice Department,” Dr. Sessions said.
He did not have to outline why. A substantial portion of the commissioner’s departmental budget was supplied by money from federal grants, some of which trickled down to my office to subsidize the collection of data needed by various injury prevention and traffic safety agencies. The Justice Department knew how to play hardball. If antagonizing the feds did not dry up much-needed revenues, we could at least count on our lives being made miserable. The last thing the commissioner wanted was to account for every pencil and sheet of stationery purchased with grant money. I knew how it worked’. All of us would be nickel-and-dimed, papered to death.
The commissioner reached for the letter with his good arm and studied it for a moment.
He said, “Actually, the only answer may be for Mrs. Harvey to go through with her threat.”
“If she gets a court order, then I will have no choice but to send her what she wants.”
“I realize that. And the advantage is the FBI can’t hold us accountable. The disadvantage, obviously, will be the negative publicity,” he thought aloud. “Certainly, it won’t shine a good light on the Department of Health and Human Services if the public knows we were forced by a judge to give Pat Harvey what she is entitled to by law. I suppose it may corroborate our friend Mr. Ring’s suspicions.”
The average citizen didn’t even know that the Medical Examiner’s Office was part of Health and Human Services. I was the one who was going to look bad. The commissioner, in good bureaucratic fashion, was setting me up to take it on the nose because he had no intention of aggravating the justice Department.
“Of course,” he considered, “Pat Harvey will come across as rather heavy-handed, as using her office to throw her weight around. She may be bluffing.”
“I doubt it,” I said tersely.
“We’ll see. ” He got up from his desk and showed me to the door “I’ll write Mrs. Harvey, saying you and I talked.”
I’ll just bet you will, I thought.
“Let me know if 1 can be of any assistance.”
He smiled, avoiding my eyes.
I had just let him know I needed assistance. He might as well have had two broken arms. He wasn’t going to lift a finger As soon as I got back to the office, I asked the clerks up front and Rose if a reporter from the Post had beers calling. After searching memories and digging through, old message slips, no one could come up with a Clifford J Ring. He couldn’t exactly accuse me of stonewalling if, he’d never tried to reach me, I reasoned. All the same, I was perplexed.
“By the way,” Rose added as I headed down the hall, “Linda’s been looking for you, says she needs to see you right away.”
Linda was a firearms examiner. Marino must have been by with the cartridge case, I thought. Good.
The toolmarks and firearms laboratory was on the third floor and could have passed for a used-gun shop. Revolvers, rifles, shotguns, and pistols covered virtually every inch of counter space, and evidence wrapped in brown paper was stacked chest high on the floor. I was about to decide that everyone was at lunch when I heard the muffled explosions of a gun discharging behind closed doors. Adjoining the lab was a small room used to test-fire weapons into a galvanized steel tank filled with water.