"What were the names?" Laurie asked. She felt a shiver of excitement. This curious, unexpected yet potentially important snippet of information was exactly the reason she had wanted to talk with Janice. It made her feel more strongly that her medical-examiner colleagues who ignored the experience and expertise of the forensic investigators and the mortuary techs did so at their professional peril.
"Solomon Moskowitz and Antonio Nogueira. I wrote them down with their accession numbers." Janice handed the paper to Laurie.
Laurie took the paper and looked at the names. Whether she was actively seeking a major diversion from her own personal problems she didn't know. What she did know was that she had found one.
"Thanks, Janice," Laurie said sincerely. "I've got to hand it to you. Associating these cases might be important." One of the problems of there being eight medical examiners at the OCME is that such associations could slip through the cracks. There was a Thursday-afternoon conference where cases were vetted in an open forum, but it usually involved only the more academically interesting or even macabre ones.
"Don't mention it," Janice said. "It makes me feel good when I think I'm really part of the team and contributing."
"You most certainly are," Laurie responded. "Oh, and by the way, when you put in the request for Morgan's chart, will you also ask for Moskowitz's and Nogueira's as well?"
"I'll be happy to," Janice said. She made a notation on a Post-it and put the reminder on the side of her monitor.
With her brain in a twitter, Laurie hustled out of the forensic investigator's office and took the elevator up to the fifth floor. Concerns about BRCA1 and even Jack were pushed to the back of her mind. She couldn't take her eyes off the two names on the paper that Janice had given her. Going from one curious case to four was a huge leap. The question was simply whether these four cases were indeed related. For her, this was what being a medical examiner was all about. If the cases were related by a common drug or procedure, and if she could figure it out, then she would have the rewarding opportunity to prevent more deaths. Of course, such information would also tell her if the deaths were accidental or homicidal, and that thought gave Laurie a shiver.
Entering her office, Laurie quickly hung up her coat behind the door, then sat down at the computer. She typed in the accession numbers of the two cases, learning that neither had been signed out as of yet. Mildly disappointed, she did get the names of the two doctors who had done the autopsies: George Fontworth had posted Antonio Nogueira, and Kevin Southgate had posted Solomon Moskowitz. Having seen Southgate down in the ID office earlier, she picked up her phone and dialed his extension. She let it ring five times before hanging up.
Returning to the elevator, Laurie descended to the first floor and wended her way back to the ID room. She'd hoped Kevin would still be there, talking with Arnold, and she wasn't disappointed. She waited patiently for a break in their animated conversation. The two incessantly argued about politics: Kevin, the inveterate liberal Democrat, and Arnold, the equivalent conservative Republican. Both had been at the OCME for almost twenty years and had come to resemble each other. Both were overweight with ashen complexions and were haphazard about their hygiene and dress. In Laurie's mind, they were the stereotypical coroners in old Hollywood movies.
"Do you remember posting a Solomon Moskowitz about two weeks ago?" Laurie asked Kevin after apologizing for interrupting. As usual, he and Arnold seemed to be just shy of exchanging blows. They frustrated each other, since neither had a snowball's chance in hell of changing the other's entrenched opinions.
After joking that he couldn't remember the cases he did yesterday, Kevin's doughy face screwed up in thought. "You know, I think I remember a Moskowitz," he said. "Do you happen to know if it was a Manhattan General case?"
"That's what I was told."
"Then I remember it. The patient had an apparent cardiac arrest. If it's the one I'm thinking about, there wasn't much on the post. I don't believe I've signed it out yet. I imagine I'm waiting for the microscopic to come back."
Yeah, sure, Laurie thought to herself. Even in the busiest of times, it didn't take two weeks to get slides. But she wasn't surprised. Kevin and Arnold were notorious for failing to get their cases out on a timely basis. "Do you remember if the patient had had recent surgery?"
"Now you're pushing your luck. I tell you what, why don't you stop up to my office, and I'll let you go over the folder."
"Sounds like a good idea," Laurie responded. She was momentarily distracted by seeing George come in through the door to the ID room, removing his coat. Allowing Kevin and Arnold to get back to their bickering, Laurie joined George at the coffee machine.
George had been at the OCME for almost as long as Kevin and Arnold, but he hadn't picked up any of their personal habits. He appeared significantly more stylish, with pressed pants, a clean shirt, and a colorful tie, all of which were reasonably contemporary, which was how he liked to present himself. He also looked dramatically younger by avoiding the common middle-age weight gain. Although Laurie knew Jack did not hold George in high esteem professionally, she had always found him easy to work with.
"I heard your gunshot case yesterday had a surprising denouement," Laurie said.
"What an ordeal," George complained. "If Bingham ever offers to do another case with me, remind me to graciously refuse."
Laurie laughed and chatted about the case for a few minutes before switching to her real interest. As she'd spoken with Kevin concerning Moskowitz, she asked if George remembered doing Antonio Nogueira some two weeks earlier.
"Give me a hint," George responded.
"I'm guessing at the details, since I don't know them for certain," Laurie said, "but I believe he would have been relatively young, he would have been within twenty-four hours of having surgery at the Manhattan General, and he would have been suspected of having suffered some sort of cardiac catastrophe."
"Okay, I remember the case: a real teaser. I found zilch on the post and nothing to hang my hat on with the microscopic. The folder is up on my desk, waiting for toxicology possibly to come up with something. Otherwise, I'm going to be forced to sign it out as a spontaneous ventricular fibrillation or a massive heart attack that was so sudden and so global that there wasn't any time for pathology to develop. Of course, that means whatever caused it had to magically disappear. One way or the other, the heart stopped. I mean, it couldn't have been that his breathing stopped, because there was no cyanosis." He shrugged and gestured helplessly with his hands.
"So the microscopic didn't show much in the coronary vessels?"
"Minimal."
"And the heart muscle itself looked normal? I mean, like something capable of causing a sudden lethal arrhythmia. Was there any sign of inflammation?"
"Nope! It was completely normal."
"Do you mind if I look at the folder later this afternoon?" Laurie asked.
"Be my guest! Why the interest? How did you hear about it?"
"I heard about it from Janice," Laurie said. "I'm interested because I had a case surprisingly similar yesterday." Laurie felt mildly guilty about not mentioning the two other cases, but not guilty enough to bring them up. For one thing, her suspicion that they were connected in any way was purely speculative, and second, at this early stage she couldn't help but feel proprietary about what she was beginning to think might be some kind of series.
Leaving the ID office, Laurie descended a floor and sought out Marvin. She found him in the mortuary office. As she had hoped, he was already in his scrubs.