At the Scene of the Crime (29 page)

We walked single file, with me in the lead. I thought about the chances of making a break for it on the stairs or when we got to the lobby, but either way I’d be abandoning drunken Eddie and leaving myself open for a lethal shot. I had to wait for my chance.

Fabian had obviously spent some time on planning. He directed us down the stairway and through the back hallways to the parking area. It looked as deserted as a pauper’s funeral. Pulling a set of keys and a remote from his pocket, he pressed the button and a black van next to a pillar flashed its lights. Fabian cocked his head toward it. When we got there, he pulled open the side door and ordered us in. The rear windows were darkly tinted and all of the seats had been removed from the rear portion. As we struggled to get inside, Eddie slipped and fell sideways. Fabian reached down and pulled him up, pushed him inside, and then punched him twice on the side of the face.

“Leave him alone,” I said. “Can’t you see he’s defenseless?”

My rebuke inflamed Fabian more, and he pushed me to the floor. Stepping into the space, he closed the side door after him and kicked me hard in the stomach. I curled into a ball and fought for breath.

“You want some more?” he asked.

All I could do was struggle to breathe.

Fabian stood crouching over us for a few more seconds, then plopped down in the driver’s seat. He shoved the keys into the ignition, started the van, and backed out of the parking spot. He drove about twenty feet and stopped, taking out his cell phone. I listened to the one-sided conversation as he spoke.

“Yeah, Vanderberg? You got the broads with you? Okay, I’m by the ashhole’s
Lexus. You know where it’s parked? Okay, bring them down here and we’ll club ’em and stick ’em in the van.”

He turned to us and grinned malevolently, his prognathic jaw making him look like a caricature. “This will look real neat. Two middle-aged ash-holes in a car with two hookers, and they all die in a fiery crash.”

“Why are you doing this?” Eddie said, his voice cracking. “What did I ever do to you?”

Fabian smirked, then said, “Shut up. Be a man.”

Eddie began to sob and Fabian turned away with a laugh. I rolled onto my side and edged closer to Eddie, reaching my hands down toward his back pockets. If I could get his dual-purpose mouth mirror there was a chance, albeit a slim one, that I could free myself. He rolled away at my touch and I worked closer to him, not daring to whisper. Fabian turned toward us.

“What are you two doing?”

“These damn plastic bands are cutting into our wrists,” I said, managing to tap Eddie’s behind with my fingers. I hoped he would realize what I was trying to do. “Can’t you loosen them?”

Fabian emitted a low chuckle, the air whistling through his gaping crossbite. “Don’t worry, you won’t have to suffer much longer.”

My fingers caressed the cheek of Eddie’s large posterior, walking their way up the flat edge of his back pocket. He stiffened, but stayed put. I worked my index finger and thumb down into the pocket, my hands feeling numb from the lack of circulation. Eddie held fast, even moving up slightly trying to assist me. I felt the circular edge of the mouth mirror and moved my finger down along the beveled metal, curling around it, twisting, working my thumb around to secure the grip, then lifting, pulling.

I had it. My fingers were nimble and strong from years of working in small oral cavities with minute movements. This was proving even more challenging. I twisted the mirrored end off and felt the sharp blade between my fingers. Working it up toward the tight band that was securing my wrists, I readjusted my grip and began a sawing motion, hoping Fabian
wouldn’t choose that moment to turn around.

His cell phone rang, and I heard him say, “Yeah, I see ya. Keep coming.” He chucked again. “Nice-looking broads. Too bad we ain’t got time to have some fun with ’em.”

I continued the sawing. The blade slipped off a few times, and the pressure on my wrists was constant. Fabian shifted in his seat, then opened the driver’s door. I heard him speaking, then a loud female voice of protest, followed by a truncated scream. Noises of someone colliding with the side of the van, then moving toward the rear quickened my pace. It was now or never. I pressed the blade against the plastic band again, pressing and sawing, pressing and sawing.

It gave way with a click. My hands were free, but so numb and tingling that I doubted I could use them. Struggling to my knees, I grabbed the small metal instrument with my left hand, and worked the fingers of my right, flexing and shaking. The rear door opened and I saw Fabian holding the pistol against the head of a young blond girl with a terrified look on her face. His protruding jaw rubbed against the girl’s temple.

“Get in there, bitch,” he said.

I took this moment to jump forward, reaching with my left hand to grab the elongated barrel of the pistol, and plunging the sharpened point of the mouth mirror into Fabian’s left carotid. The gun popped, sending a round whizzing by my head and into the roof of the van. I threw my weight forward and we both were on the hard cement, rolling, punching, and kicking. Suddenly his resistance evaporated and he began to go limp. I pushed myself up on my hands and knees and saw the pelican man’s lips twisting back over the huge jaw in a deadly grimace, bright arterial blood gushing like a broken pipe onto the gray floor.

I secured my grip on the pistol and saw one of the girls staring at me in terror.

“Find his cell phone,” I said. “Call nine-one-one.”

Vanderberg was standing a few feet away and began talking as I straightened up and walked toward him.

“Doctor Link, I can explain everything,” he said, his voice quavering. “They forced me to tell, to cooperate. Forced me to tell them where you were. I had no idea—”

He stopped talking when my left fist collided with the front of his mouth. The punch, one of the first I’d thrown in anger in many, many years, knocked him backwards, sending him down to the concrete floor. His head made a popping sound as it hit the ground, which gave me an almost sadistic sense of satisfaction. His eyes rolled back into his head, exposing the white scalera momentarily, then the irises snapped back into place. He rolled onto his side and began coughing, spitting out a pool of blood with at least three broken porcelain crowns from his front incisors.

“They’re coming,” Eddie said.

“Good,” I said. Vanderberg was up on his elbow but still spitting out bloody saliva. “It looks like you’re going to need a good dentist. I’ll see if I can convince my buddy Eddie to squeeze you in sometime. “That is, if I can convince him to start doing prison work pro bono.”

The reporter, a large, middle-aged woman with an expression of perpetual concern, looked up from her notebook. “When I was on the crime beat I watched all your trials, you know. The Roberts kidnapping, the Hailsham Farm murders, Lonnie Burke, the Cannibal killings—all of them. I remember them vividly.”

Dr. Stork lifted his chin just enough to allow him to spread his tented fingers in a gesture of acknowledgment. “That was all a long time ago,” he said. His voice, which in court had held a rich, persuasive timbre, was high and cracked.

“People like reading about them, which is why I want to do a feature on you. Victor Marino said Lester Stork’s the dean, simply the man who invented the modern criminalist.”

“That’s very kind, but he exaggerates.”

Susan Bruce was increasingly frustrated; the old man seemed immune to flattery, and getting material was proving an ordeal. She wondered again if he’d slipped into senility.

“I was thinking about the Menendez case on my way over. I thought for sure his alibi witnesses would get him off, but you made it so clear he did it.”

She wondered if he’d remember but Stork, his face half hidden in the fading late afternoon light, nodded. “Those two—Perkins and . . . Seymour, wasn’t it? Not very credible, really.”

Christ, as though she remembered. Nothing wrong with the old man’s memory, then, it was more as though he found the topic of his career boring. His manner, too, was so far from what she remembered in the courtroom.
There, he’d been everyone’s favorite uncle, imperturbably explaining the evidence until any verdict save “guilty” would have been absurd. Now he was just a tired old man.

Still, Ms. Bruce was not easily put off a story. “Enough for reasonable doubt, I thought, until you testified.”

“We had overwhelming physical evidence. The blood alone would have been sufficient. When an alibi conflicts with the physical evidence . . .” A wave of his thin hand completed the thought.

The reporter jotted a note. “And you made Dr. Danziger sound so—” she looked around, as though the word she wanted was on one of Stork’s bookshelves “—forced. You know, as though he was just reciting lines from a bad script.”

Stork nodded. “He was.”

“And you weren’t?” Perhaps she could needle him into becoming engaged.

Stork shrugged his thin shoulders. “The evidence pointed incontrovertibly to Mr. Menendez’s guilt. All I had to do was lay it out, as simply as possible. Danziger had to account for that which couldn’t be denied—the blood, for instance—while trying to supply a scenario that exculpated his client. Foolish to challenge Occam’s Razor.”

“Occam’s Razor?” Susan Bruce’s passage through journalism school hadn’t included medieval English scholasticism.

Stork looked at the woman, with her blank, expectant air of impenetrable ignorance, and sighed. He thought again how glad he was that he could measure the remainder of his life in months, if that.

“A philosophical concept. In essence, it says that the simplest explanation that fits all the known data is most likely to be correct. Sy Danziger challenged Occam every time he testified. Occam usually won.”

Ms. Bruce thought about this, wondering at the turn things had taken, then looked up abuptly. “Would you mind talking about how you got started?”

“How I got started?” He blinked uncertainly at the sudden shift in topic.

“Hmm. I know you became ME here in—” she flipped back through her notes “—fifty-nine, and that before that you were in Chicago, but I don’t have anything on your background. I mean, how does someone become the country’s leading medical examiner? When you were a little boy, did you say ‘When I grow up, I want to be a forensic pathologist’?”

The old man gave a wheezy sniff. “Hardly.”

“They do today, you know. Everybody wants to be a criminalist. Look,” she made a sweeping gesture, as though the little office were filled with applicants, “there’s a whole department here at the university.”

Stork shook his head. “They’re in for a disappointment. The glamour’s on television. Squalor and lies, that’s the reality. There’s rarely any mystery, you know. The obvious person did the crime, and a six-year-old could solve it.”

“Oh, that Occam thing.” The reporter was momentarily flummoxed, then decided to approach it from a different direction. “Won’t you tell me about your first case? I’m sure that would be interesting.”

“My first case? That would be—” he pointed at her notepad “—the Barton matter. Didn’t we already talk about that?”

“No, not your first case here, your first case ever.”

“Well, I had cases as an assistant, in Chicago, but that was a long time ago. Let’s see . . .”

“No. I mean, the case that got you started. Back in Minnesota, I think it was.”

“Minnesota.” He stopped, seeming struck by the name. “Yes, but there was nothing interesting, really. Just one thing led to another, I suppose.” That was the way it had always seemed to him, anyway, when he thought about it. Which he hadn’t, for years.

“Isn’t that where you began your career? I was sure I read somewhere . . .”

“Maddie.”

Ms. Bruce stopped, unsure whether Stork had said something, or if it had been a noise out in the hall. “Were you speaking to me, Dr. Stork?”

Now the yellow light from the window fell on his white head, and she saw
him in profile. “Maddie, that was her name. Madelaine Birney, but I called her Maddie.”

“What about her, Dr. Stork? Was she involved in your first case?” He suddenly seemed very, very far away.

“Involved.” He turned to face her. “Yes, she was involved in my first case.”

Something in his manner made her hesitate. “Would you like to talk about it?”

He looked away again. “You won’t have heard of her, of course. Of her murder.”

“I’m sorry, no.”

“I haven’t thought about the case in many years. I used to, but not for a long while. Odd.” He blinked uncertainly. “I used to be able to see her. See her, lying there. But now . . .”

“Maybe it would be better if . . .” The reporter leaned forward, as though to rise, but Stork held his hand up and she sank back into the chair.

“She was what got me started, what you wanted to hear about. My career as ‘the dean of American criminologists’ started with Maddie Birney, in Sioux Junction, Minnesota, in nineteen fifty-four. I thought you wanted to hear how I got started?”

“I did, but . . . are you sure you want to tell me?”

There was a long pause, and she thought he was going to withdraw again, but then he said, “If you would be kind enough to pour us some more tea, I’ll get the file.”

 

“I never wanted to be a doctor. I wanted to be a singer, if you can imagine that. But my father was a doctor, and his father before him, and he made it clear there’d be no money for anything as ‘useless,’ as he put it, as music school. He also told me I wasn’t good enough to even think of it, and I dare-say he was right. In any case, I wasn’t one to defy him. So I went to medical school, and at first it wasn’t so bad. I found I rather enjoyed the technical side of it, the lab work, anatomy, that sort of thing. And I had a good memory, and enjoyed learning all the obscure names and facts, then
regurgitating them on exams. It was only when I got into my third year and had to start dealing with living people, the part my classmates couldn’t wait for, that I knew how big a mistake I was making.”