‘Trophies, maybe,” Marino suggested. “Pelts from the hunt. Could be some hired gun who likes to keep little reminders of his jobs.”
“I would think a hired gun would be too careful for that,” I countered.
“Yeah, you’d think so. Just like you’d think Jeb Price
would be too careful to leave a film box in the fridge,” he said ironically.
Peeling off my gloves, I finished labeling test tubes and ether specimens I had collected. I gathered my paperwork and Marino followed me upstairs to my office.
Rose had left the afternoon newspaper on my blotter. Harper’s murder and his sister’s sudden death were the front-page headline. The accompanying sidebar was what ruined my day: CHIEF MEDICAL EXAMINER ACCUSED OF “LOSING” CONTROVERSIAL MANUSCRIPT
The dateline was New York, an Associated Press release, and the lead was followed by an account of my “incapacitating” a man named feb Price after catching him “ransacking” my office yesterday afternoon. The allegations about the manuscript had to have come from Sparacino, I thought angrily. The bit about Jeb Price must have come from the police report, and as I shuffled through message slips, I noted that the majority of them were from reporters.
“Did you ever check out her computer disks? I asked, tossing the paper to Marino.
“Oh, yeah,” he said. “I’ve been through ’em.”
“And did you find this book everybody’s in such a tizzy about?”
Perusing the front page, he muttered, “Nope.”
“It’s not there?” I broke out in frustration. “It’s not on her disks? How can that be if she was writing it on her computer?”
“Don’t ask me,” he said. “I’m just telling you I looked at maybe a dozen disks. Nothing recent on
’em. Looks like old stuff, you know, her novels. Nothing about herself, about Harper. Found a couple of old letters, including two business letters to Sparacino. They didn’t excite me.”
“Maybe she put the disks in a safe place before she left for Key West,” I said.
“Maybe she did. But we ain’t found ’em.”
Just then Fielding walked in, his orangutan arms hanging out of the short sleeves of his surgical greens, his muscular hands lightly coated with the talc lining the latex gloves he had been wearing downstairs. Fielding was his own work of art. God knows how many hours each week he spent sculpting himself in some Nautilus room somewhere. It was my theory that his obsession with body building was inversely proportional to his obsession with his job. A competent deputy chief, he had been on board little more than a year and was already showing signs of burnout. The more disenchanted he got, the bigger he got. I gave him another two years before he retreated to the tidier, more lucrative world of hospital pathology, or became the heir apparent to the Incredible Hulk.
“I’m going to have to pend Sterling Harper,” he said, hovering restlessly at the edge of my desk.
“Her STAT alcohol’s only point oh-three, nothing in her gastric that tells me much. No bleeding, no unusual odors. The heart’s good, no evidence of old infarcts, her coronaries clear. Brain’s normal.
But something was going on with her. The liver’s enlarged, around twenty-five hundred grams, and the spleen’s about a thousand with thickening of the capsule. Some involvement of the lymph nodes, as well.”
“Any metastases?” I asked.
“None on gross.”
“Put a rush on the micros,” I told him.
Fielding nodded and briskly left.
Marino looked questioningly at me.
“Could be a lot of things,” I said. “Leukemia, lymphoma, or any one of a number of collagen diseases– some of which are benign, and some of which aren’t. The spleen and lymph nodes react as a component of the immune system–in other words, the spleen is almost always involved in any blood disease. As for the big liver, that doesn’t help us much diagnostically. I won’t know anything until I can look at the histologic changes under the scope.”
“You want to speak English for a change?” He lit a cigarette. “Tell me in simple terms what Doctor Schwarzenegger found.”
“Her immune system was reacting to something,” I said. “She was sick.”
“Sick enough to account for her flaking out on her sofa?”