Chromosome 6. Chapter 10, 11
CHAPTER 10
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MARCH 5, 1997
2:15 P.M.
NEW YORK CITY
‘EXCUSE me, Laurie,’ Cheryl Myers said, standing in the doorway to
Laurie’s office. Cheryl was one of the forensic investigators. ‘We just
received this overnight package, and I thought you might want it right
away.’
Laurie stood up and took the parcel. She was curious about what it could
be. She looked at the label to find out the sender. It was CNN.
‘Thanks, Cheryl,’ Laurie said. She was perplexed. She had no idea for
the moment what CNN could have sent her.
‘I see Dr. Mehta is not in,’ Cheryl said. ‘I brought up a chart for her
that came in from University Hospital. Should I put it on her desk?’ Dr.
Riva Mehta was Laurie’s office mate. They’d shared the space since both
had started at the medical examiner’s office six and a half years
previously.
‘Sure,’ Laurie said, preoccupied with her parcel. She got her finger
under the flap and pulled it open. Inside was a videotape. Laurie looked
at the label. It said: Carlo Franconi shooting, March 3,1997.
After having finished her final autopsy that morning, Laurie had been
ensconced in her office, trying to complete some of the twenty-odd cases
that she had pending. She’d been busy reviewing microscopic slides,
laboratory results, hospital records, and police reports, and for
several hours had not thought of the Franconi business. The arrival of
the tape brought it all back. Unfortunately the video was meaningless
without the body.
Laurie tossed the tape into her briefcase and tried to get back to work.
But after fifteen minutes of wasted effort, she turned the light off
under her microscope. She couldn’t concentrate. Her mind kept toying
with the baffling question of how the body had disappeared. It was as if
it had been an amazing magic trick. One minute the body was safely
stored in compartment one eleven and viewed by three employees, then
poof, it was gone. There had to be an explanation, but try as she might,
Laurie could not fathom it.
Laurie decided to head down to the basement to visit the mortuary
office. She’d expected at least one tech to be available, but when she
arrived the room was unoccupied. Undaunted, Laurie went over to the
large, leather-bound log. Flipping the page, she looked for the entries
that Mike Passano had shown her the previous night. She found them
without difficulty. Taking a pencil from a collection in a coffee mug
and a sheet of scratch paper, Laurie wrote down the names and accession
numbers of the two bodies that had come in during the night shift:
Dorothy Kline #101455 and Frank Gleason #100385. She also wrote down the
names of the two funeral homes: Spoletto in Ozone Park, New York, and
the Dickson in Summit, New Jersey.
Laurie was about to leave when her eye caught the large Rolodex on the
corner of the desk. She decided to call each home. After identifying
herself, she asked to speak to the managers.
What had sparked her interest in telephoning was the outside chance that
either one of the pickups could have been bogus. She thought the chances
were slim, since the night tech, Mike Passano, had said the homes had
called before coming and presumably he was familiar with the people.
As Laurie expected, the pickups indeed were legitimate, both managers
attesting to the fact that the bodies had come in to their respective
homes and were at that time on view.
Laurie went back to the logbook and looked again at the names of the two
arrivals. To be complete, she copied them down along with their
accession numbers. The names were familiar to her, since she’d assigned
them as autopsies the following morning to Paul Plodgett. But she wasn’t
as interested in the arrivals as the departures. The arrivals had come
in with longtime ME employees, whereas the bodies that had gone out had
done so with strangers.
Feeling frustrated, Laurie drummed her pencil on the desk surface. She
was sure she had to be missing something. Once again, her eye caught the
Rolodex which was open to the Spoletto Funeral Home. In the very back of