The images of the bruises on her mother's body, the dead look in her mother's eyes, the sound of her mother weeping while she was raped and the groans when she was kicked, punched, and slammed against the wall had always acted as the inspiration for Rosa's work. It was her mother's blank-faced pain that drove Rosa to look unflinchingly at the most horrible of human damage and decay, day after day, so she could tell the world how and when that damage had occurred. Rosa's mother used to tell Rosa the secret of survival was to whisper to herself, "I am still and free at my center."
Rosa took in the long slender skirt, the silk scarf, and the well-tailored jacket of the Chinese detective and wondered what kind she was. She'd known only two Chinese detectives. One had worked in Harlem and was terrified of the dead at any stage of decomposition. She considered him a wimp. The other had been fired for corruption. She didn't figure April for being scared or corrupt.
"So what are you doing here, Sergeant Woo?" she said, smiling and striving to speak as softly as April had.
April sighed. "It's been a long day. We've got trouble with this Liberty case. I need some help."
"I could use some help, too," Rosa said. "You know poor Malcolm is in the hospital."
"Still?" April adjusted her coat over the back of her chair.
It was clear to Rosa that she'd been there long enough to get comfortable. .
"Yeah. His doctors can't find out what kind of pneumonia he has. We have better labs here." She snorted with disgust.
"You have a heavy load?"
Rosa glanced down at her hands, rubbed them quickly together. "Nothing I can't handle. How long have you been here?"
"Five minutes. The guard downstairs said you hadn't left yet, but he didn't know where you were. Not operating, by the look and smell of you."
Rosa's eyes caught the butt of April's gun sticking from the holster at her waist. "No, I always change after every procedure. Can't risk contamination, you know." She sniffed her hands again, couldn't seem to help it. They smelled bad.
"Yourself or the customers?"
Rosa smiled. "My patients, you could say. I'm a bit of a nut about cleanliness. Can't place too high a premium on every level of professionalism, you know." She rubbed her hands, wishing she could wash them again.
"So I've heard. That's why I'm here. Someone from your office called Petersen's widow this morning with information about Petersen's tox report. How come?"
Rosa shook her head. Her hair, hanging loose and unencumbered by a surgical cap, brushed her shoulders. "No one from here would ever give out information before the detectives on the case got it."
"Well, Mrs. Petersen said she was informed her husband died of a cocaine overdose. That was news to us."
"He didn't die of an overdose. The report did come in, and Petersen had high levels of cocaine in his blood and urine. It was even in his hair. But I could have told you that during the autopsy. You walked out before I finished. You missed the head, remember?"
"What did you find, a bullet in his brain?"
"Very funny, Woo."
This was the second reference to the mistake in an autopsy report made by the ME's office less than a year ago. The report was on a man who'd been a flier from a seventh-floor window. The ME's report, hers in fact, gave the fall as the cause of death. The police, however, had found bloodstains all over the room from which the man had fallen. They'd requested a second look at the body. Dr. Abraham performed the second autopsy. He found a bullet lodged in the man's skull. It turned out the gunshot wound, not the fall from the window, had killed him. Rosa's face registered no anger. She'd come to terms with that blunder.
"What I found, Sergeant, if you'd bothered to read my report, was a septum so badly damaged by cocaine use that had the man lived, he would have needed surgery fairly soon to prevent his nose from collapsing." Rosa reported this in her haughtiest voice.
"I have not seen your report, Doctor. It hasn't come in to our office yet. Are you saying now that Petersen died of a drug overdose?"
"I think I stated clearly enough in the death report that Petersen's cause of death was a perforated infarction. A massive heart attack to you." Rosa checked her watch. It was late. She wanted to end this and go home.
"Are you certain the perforation couldn't have been caused by something else?" The cop shifted suddenly to new ground with the soft voice of a practiced interrogator.
Air whooshed out of Rosa's mouth as anger finally overtook her and she furiously rejected the possibility. "Not a chance. Why do you suggest such a thing?"
"I don't know, maybe it was something Petersen's widow said that got me thinking, and this whole question of the cocaine. Could somebody have given him bad shit?"
"Bad shit? As far as I'm concerned, it's all bad shit. You have any idea how badly damaged that guy was? It was amazing he could still walk around." Rosa shook her head.
"The other thing is Petersen's widow stands to inherit something like a hundred million dollars on her husband's timely death. She had a strong motive, and if he was such a hopeless addict, maybe she helped him along."
Rosa laughed. "That ditz I saw on TV?"
"Money can be a pretty powerful motivator, don't you think?"
Rosa finally sank into her chair. "God, this is heavy. 1 don't know, maybe for some people. We each have our weakness. For Petersen it was the nose candy. He died because of it. For some people it's love of money, for others it's just love. What is it for you, Woo?"
April shook her head. "I wouldn't kill for anything, except to save a life."
"I didn't mean that. 1 meant what's your weakness?"
"Face," April replied without hesitation.
Rosa smiled. "Me, too. 1 don't like being dissed by anybody. So you now think you're working a homicide angle here. That would be a pretty big diss to me, you know. That would hurt pretty bad. 1 don't know how I'd handle that."
"It's just a thought," April murmured. "So, you don't think it's a possibility?"
"Aren't we friends? Don't you realize what it would do to me?"
"This isn't personal," April insisted. "1 have only the highest admiration for you. I'm not trying to do anything to you. 1 just want to find out why Merrill Liberty was killed."
"It seems clear enough to me and everyone else associated with the case that her husband murdered her."
"We haven't come up with a why. Without a why we don't have a strong case to prosecute."
"That's not my problem. That's your problem. The guy's taken off. They were friends; maybe he's a doper, too."
The cop shook her head.
"All 1 can say is Petersen was loaded with cocaine. The physical effort of running for a taxi, or even lifting his hand for one, would have been enough to overtax his heart. Seeing his lover assaulted could easily have caused the massive MI." Rosa tied it up neatly. What else could the cop want?
The cop sat in the dark, watching her like a cat. She shook her head some more. "It doesn't play. Ducci says the bloodstains indicate that Petersen died first."
"So what does all this have to do with me?" Rosa was illuminated by her desk lamp. Suddenly she felt at a disadvantage and moved the beam away from her face. She knew exactly what it had to do with her. The corrupt cop wanted to twist the facts. It happened all the time. But she wasn't going to let anybody cast doubt on her work.
"If Petersen died first, he might have been the target, and Merrill Liberty might have been an afterthought."
"He died of a heart attack. You saw his face. Blue," Rosa insisted.
"Any cyanide in his blood? That also would make him blue."