People fail, everything fails, the magic we’re born believing in and working for and then doubting and finally fearing eventually rusts, rots, fades, breaks down, withers, dies, and turns to dust, and for me the response is always the same. I clean up. It’s what I do and I’m doing it now as I stand at a long glass interactive table with data projectors under it that display computer images of documents and photographs I lightly touch with my bare hands to slide out of virtual files and move and flip through as if they’re pages of paper, to zoom in and out, as I review Gabriela Lagos’s autopsy, lab, and investigative reports.
Nearby on a curved wall her virtual image glows hugely and grotesquely in 3-D, and I’ve been going back and forth from the glass table to a smaller one where a wireless keyboard and mouse are set up. It’s as if I’m in that room with the tub and its scummy water and bloated body and I can see every vein and artery etched greenish-black beneath translucent skin that’s slipping and underneath where it’s blistered and red from full-thickness burns. I move images in a way that gives the sensation I’m walking around and looking as if I’m there, as if it’s up to me to work the scene instead of my former deputy chief Dr. Geist, in his late seventies now and comfortably ensconced in an upscale northern Virginia retirement home.
When I call him he’s cordial enough at first, saying it’s a nice surprise to hear from me after all these years and how much he loves retirement, consulting on a case here and there, not as many as he used to, just enough to keep his feet in it because it’s important to keep the brain young. He gets more condescending and gruffer as the conversation goes on and then he’s combative when I push him on the details of Gabriela Lagos, the same details he and I argued about in 1996. But now I know what I didn’t then.
On the third of August, he responded to her home at one-eleven p.m. and quickly determined her death was an accident because he’d already determined it. He knew what he was going to find and how he would interpret it, and that’s the part I didn’t put together until tonight.
“I remember her body in the tub and there was water in it, maybe filled up halfway,” he says to me over the phone and it’s about half past ten and I can tell he’s been drinking. “An obvious drowning that wasn’t suspicious. I seem to recall you and I had a professional difference of opinion.”
“In hindsight are you sure there was nothing staged about what you saw?” I wonder if the years might have covered his lies until he can’t make out the reason for them anymore or maybe he’d like the chance to finish up his existence on earth as an honest man.
But unsurprisingly I find him the same as I left him. He says he remembers how hot and airless it was inside her house and that flies blackened the bathroom windows, the droning of them infernally loud as they batted between the drawn shades and the glass. The stench was so terrible a cop threw up and then two others began to gag and had to escape into the yard. Gabriela Lagos had been drinking vodka before taking a hot bath and this increased her risk for an arrhythmia, which rendered her unconscious, and she drowned, Dr. Geist recites to me.
There was nothing unusual about the scene; he says what he’s said before, his story not changing because nothing has happened over the past seventeen years to cause him to revisit or revise or cover his ass. Before I called he probably hadn’t thought about the case in almost that long.
“And nobody straightened up the bathroom in your presence or perhaps before you got there,” I suggest.
“I can’t imagine it.”
“You’re absolutely sure of that.”
“I don’t appreciate the insinuation.”
“The kitchen door that led outside was unlocked and you must have noticed the air-conditioning had been turned off, Dr. Geist. And it wouldn’t have been turned off by her while she was still alive. It was late July and in the high eighties.”
I go through photographs on the data table as I talk with him. The thermostat with its turned-off switch. The unlocked door and through its windowpanes a large, densely wooded backyard where it would have been easy for someone to access her house after dark and tamper with the crime scene. Someone who knew what investigators would look for, someone well informed and comfortable with conspiracies, with created perceptions and outright lies, and not even Dr. Geist would have been so brazen as to commit a criminal act. But he would have overlooked certain details if persuaded by a government official that it was in the best interest of everyone.
“Her blood alcohol level of point-oh-four very likely was due to decomposition.” I move that report in front of me next. “There’s no toxicological evidence that she consumed any alcohol.”
“I seem to remember the police found an empty vodka bottle, an orange juice carton in the kitchen trash.” His nasty tone and arrogant argument are like a recording he’s played many times before.
“We don’t know who was drinking vodka. It might have been her son or someone else —”
“At the time I knew nothing about the son and what he eventually was accused of, accused of largely because of your insistence to turn the case into a sensation and create a damn uproar,” he interrupts me rudely and that is nothing new with him. “It’s not the job of a forensic pathologist to make deductions and I’ve always said you’d be better served if you wouldn’t get so damn involved. I might have thought you would have learned that after you resigned, which of course was a dark day for all of us.”
“Yes, and I have no doubt that my position in this very case had a little something to do with that dark day and its resulting in your having a few good years with no chief second-guessing you and creating uproars before you retired and made a very good living consulting on cases, mostly federal ones. I apologize for calling so late but I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important.”
“I was always respectful in my assessments of you as hardworking and competent,” he says and I can only imagine what spiteful reviews he gave about me to whoever might have weighed in about my staying on as chief. “But you’ve always gone too damn far. The body is what you’re responsible for and not who did it or didn’t do it or why or why not. We’re not even supposed to care about that or the outcome in court.”
He lectures me the same way he used to and my dislike of him is as fresh as it was the last time I saw his stooped gait at a meeting after I’d left Virginia for good. He greeted me with his hawkish face and yellow teeth as he pumped my hand, sorry to hear the news, but at least I was young enough to start over or maybe I could teach at a medical school.
“I have a copy of the entire file, including call sheets,” I say to him and by now he’s openly belligerent. “And I’ve noted that the FBI called you about a matter that must have related to the Gabriela Lagos case since it’s in her file and marked with her accession number.”
“She was of interest because she had a security clearance to work at the White House. Something to do with art exhibits and she used to be married to an ambassador or something. I need to go.”
“The Assistant Special Agent in charge of the Washington field office, Ed Granby, called you at three minutes past ten a.m. on August second, 1996, to be exact.”
“I fail to see what you’re getting at and it’s getting very late.”
“Gabriela’s body wasn’t found until the next day, August third.”
Before he can butt in or get off the phone I go on to remind him it was believed she died on the early evening of July thirty-first and on August third a concerned neighbor noticed her newspapers on the driveway and windows swarming with flies and called the police.