More than 111 hours had passed since she'd responded to the 911 call and seen Merrill Liberty and Tor Petersen lying blood-soaked in a puddle outside
Liberty's restaurant. For male corpses she had no pity. For Petersen she had felt no pity. But the death of the Liberty woman unnerved her. Merrill Liberty had died only minutes before Rosa's arrival. Her blood was still steaming in the cold when Rosa squatted beside her. That's how close to life she'd been. Rosa almost felt contaminated by the evil of the woman's death.
Rosa had not expected to be lucky enough to do either of the autopsies. Like many medical examin-ers—those earthly revealers of the sins and secrets of the formerly living—Abraham was a showman. He had to do all the big cases himself. He might not have given in to her pleas if the mayor and the police commissioner—best buddies now that the homicide numbers were way down in New York—had not insisted on getting the autopsies of the two VIPs done immediately, if not sooner. And because no other medical examiner was available, Rosa had done them. Both of them.
But now she felt besieged by enemies. Potential trouble was everywhere. People wanted her to lose her job, and her job was everything to her. It wouldn't be so hard to destroy her, for there was no doubt that things happened when everybody was so damned pressed for time. Procedures went wrong. Tests went wrong. Nobody understood how understaffed they were now that the city had forced so many people to take early retirement. No one knew how hard it was to replace even one or two competent people, much less four or five. Their staff was cut . to the bone. Rosa sniffed her fingers. They smelled of soap, but she lingered in the bathroom to wash them again anyway. It was winter, the worst time for her hands. Already her skin was brittle and dry, not moist and soft as it should be.
After she opened the corpses up, Rosa did not know everything about how their former owners had lived, but she knew far more than they ever had. She could tell by a person's bones and muscles how they'd
walked, held their tools, even what tools they'd used. She knew their filthy habits by the condition of their organs, the discoloration on their skin. She could see the damage done. She knew about their sexual preferences and what illnesses they'd had, and maybe didn't even know they'd had. Rosa knew whether they'd gone to the doctor and the dentist, whether they'd played tennis or golf, or nothing at al. She knew how well they'd eaten, when they'd eaten last, and often what it had been.
The doctor with the most intimate physical knowledge of a person's life was the doctor who examined him when that life was over. Rosa was proud of the specialty no matter who made jokes about how medical examiners were forced into the specialty because they were not good enough to treat the living, and worse in her case, she wouldn't be even a medical examiner but for affirmative action. She knew people said that. It hurt her even now.
From time to time (okay, maybe a hundred times a year) people told her she was too sensitive. As if she shouldn't mind a dumb cop's accusing her of missing a cause of death, as if she shouldn't think the color of her skin was the reason the dumb cop had suggested it. But how could she not make the leap to race being at the bottom of every problem when she couldn't even walk into a department store without a security guard's eyeing her nervously. Sometimes they even followed her around right up to the moment she produced her credit card, thinking every second she was in the store that she was there not to buy, but to steal. Just because her skin wasn't white. Sure, she was too sensitive.
Sometimes Rosa liked to bug those security guards just a little by carrying an item around before she finally paid for it or putting it down and walking away. She liked to tease them with their own doubts about her honesty. But she did not really want anyone to challenge and hurt her, and always had her credit card in her hand just in case.
The truth was she'd done a damn good job on Petersen. The best. But she couldn't help feeling threatened by April Woo anyway. She thought of Petersen's nose so badly damaged from cocaine. It made her furious. He'd been white, rich, and just as stupid and sick as the poorest street kid. The man deserved to die.
Rosa ran her fingers through her hair but didn't stop to comb it back in place. She was going to put a surgical cap over her head and didn't give a damn, anyway. Absently, she washed her hands one last time, soaping well past her wrists. She rinsed, then cursed quietly because she'd already used the last of the towels. She was shaking her hands dry when the bathroom door opened and April Woo came in. The cop put her purse down on the next sink and, smelling like a mandarin orange, she took out a lipstick and refreshed her lips.
Rattled by the person she suspected of trying to destroy her, Rosa frowned into the mirror.
Woo put the lipstick away in her purse and smiled at Rosa's image in the mirror. "Hi, Rosa, I'm glad I caught up with you."
"You came here looking for me?" Rosa's tired eyes ignited.
"Yes, I wanted to apologize for last night."
"You followed me into the ladies' room to apologize?" she said sharply. "Is that your normal procedure, Sergeant, to trap your suspects on the can?"
"Uh, I'll apologize in your office if you'd prefer."
"I have an autopsy to perform," Rosa said coldly. She turned her back to the mirror and leaned against the sink, her heart beating. I didn't do anything wrong, she told herself. Why panic like this?
"Anywhere you'd like," the cop said.
"I don't think you're here to apologize." Rosa surveyed the dangerous adversary. The cop's lips were red. She wore a short red jacket over a black skirt buttoned from the waist to the knee. At her waist was a automatic. Rosa knew firsthand how much damage those guns could do. At April's knee, her skirt flared open to reveal her legs.
Rosa sniffed. She didn't think much of the looks of Asian women, even though they were highly thought of by both black men and white ones. Very few were genuinely gorgeous. More often, they had broad flat faces with deep-set, snakelike eyes. They were bow-legged and too long-waisted. Their butts were flat and they had no bosom. Asian women were not generously proportioned and open like African women. They were closed and secretive. Rosa knew from the ones who worked in the lab, from the ones with whom she'd gone to medical school, that you couldn't guess what an Asian was thinking. They were tricky and not to be trusted. Rosa didn't think she was prejudiced. She just didn't like them.
Sergeant April Woo looked like some kind of geisha with a gun as she shook her black helmet of shiny straight hair in denial. "You have a great many supporters, Doctor. I got your message. It's clear I was out of line last night. I'm sorry about that."
"Really? Why don't I believe you then?"
"I'm sure you know how much pressure we're under right now to clear this case. It's been almost a week. I guess the urgency to make an arrest was getting to me yesterday."
"What about today?"
"It's still getting to me. We've got three suspects, two of them are missing, and we've got to plug these holes."
Rosa didn't say anything.
"And Petersen's dying first kind of changed the way we had to look at the thing."