“Did you hear what he said?” I asked.
“‘Killer look’? It’s just an expression, Coop.”
We’d spent more than an hour being toured through the Savage offices and the building’s basement, including the loading dock, where all the hand trucks were stored. Nothing seemed to distinguish any of them from the others. All were dinged and dented, with wheels that had rolled over garbage and in fuel that dripped onto the busy street.
We were walking up the ramp to the sidewalk and it was the first time we’d been alone together since leaving Hal Savage.
“I wasn’t worried about his turn of phrase, Mike. I mean the ‘sick’ thing.”
“What?”
“Hal practically has me on the suicide motive. I mean, once you peel back the curtain, there are lots of reasons that Lily may not have known about what could have depressed her father, and that’s before we even know anything about his screwed-up personal life,” I said. “She probably didn’t realize the bigger implications of the Kwan takeover plan.”
“I hear you,” Mike said. “I’m on the same wavelength. What are you talking about? That he dissed his secretary by calling her ‘the girl’?”
“No, no. When he got really annoyed with me because I was skeptical about Wolf killing himself before the big launch, he said that he was ‘so sick and tired’ of hearing me go on, basically.”
“Happens to the best of us, babe. What offended you?”
“Nothing. Think of the suicide note, okay? Didn’t it read ‘I’m so sick’?”
“Yeah. Over and out. That was the whole note.”
“I know that ‘sick and tired’ is a pretty common expression, but think about it. This one cuts both ways.”
“How?” Mike asked.
“Well, if you buy into the suicide theory, then you have to believe that all the man wanted to say is that he was ill. Pretty shorthanded way of announcing it. Nothing about physical pain. Nothing about how much he was suffering or how long he thought he had to live. And certainly nothing about his business setbacks.”
“Nobody said he was Shakespeare.”
“But suppose this is a murder, which is certainly where you were headed at the end of the day. Imagine that the whole scene was staged.”
“Got it.”
“Have you compared Wolf’s handwriting to Hal’s? To his son’s?” I asked. “Or maybe the two brothers spent so much time together their speech patterns were similar.”
“You’re going—where?”
“That at some point, Wolf Savage wrote a note complaining to someone that he was ‘so sick and tired’—of something,” I said. “Let’s assume that it had nothing to do with his impending death, since in this scenario, he doesn’t know he’s going to die. Is this how he talked? Was he complaining to someone?”
“Basically, was the piece of paper he wrote on altered? Or torn?” Mike said. “I don’t have the original. All I saw was a copy.”
He took his vibrating phone out of his pocket. “Chapman here. Hello?”
“You’ve still got work to do,” I said, thinking about the note and walking down the avenue toward the car while Mike talked into his phone.
“Yeah. We’re just across town. See you in fifteen minutes.”
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Emma Parker. She’s got something to show us. Wants us pronto.”
We sped up our pace. “You think she’s getting any external pressure to make a decision on the release of the body?”
“She wouldn’t say what it’s about, but the commissioner’s walking on eggshells till she tells him what she’s doing.”
Mike squared the block and drove back to the East Side. It was noon by the time we were admitted to the ME’s Office and seated at Dr. Parker’s conference table again.
“You want to know who we talked to?” Mike said. “What we learned in Savage country?”
“Not till I’ve walked you through my morning,” Emma said. “Kind of a roller coaster of a day so far.”
She leaned over the table, cued up her laptop, and projected an image on the large screen hanging on the wall.
“This is from the Mayo Clinic records, which came through a few hours ago,” she said. “Wolf Savage had a thorough work-up. No sign of heart disease, nothing neurological. Colonoscopy normal. Just one sign of trouble, which could have set him off. See this?”
Emma used a pointer to tap on the screen, over the area of the right lung.
“That murky white stuff?” I asked.
“Yes. That’s what the initial X-ray showed, which caused the docs to do a CT scan of his chest.”
“Are we looking at lung cancer?” Mike asked. “I’ll get off my high horse if that’s how sick the guy was. We better get this body out of here now.”
“My first thought, too,” Emma said. “But there are a lot of false positives with lung imaging. That’s why they sent him for the scan, which also kept the question mark about a malignancy wide open.”
“C’mon, Doc. What diagnosis did they give him? What kind of treatment?”
“Slow and steady, Detective. I want you to get this information just the way that I did, okay? They wanted Mr. Savage to stay another day, but he refused. He checked himself out. Told the team that he’d see his own internist at home.”
“Did they prescribe anything for his pain?” I asked. “Oxy? Anything like that?”
“No meds. He was completely asymptomatic. No pain, no cough, no other indication of a malignancy. There was nothing to prescribe unless he stayed the extra day and finished the diagnostic process, but he told them he had too much going on at work to stay.”
“Do they know if he followed up back here?”
“No. Three phone calls to his office went unreturned.”
“So he was really sick after all,” Mike said.
“I walked this over to NYU Hospital,” Emma said. The great university medical center was just adjacent to the ME’s Office. “Talked to the top pulmonologist. He thinks it’s not lung cancer at all—a false positive on the X-rays and CT scans. That what we see on the screen is a very mild aspiration pneumonia.”
“Meaning what?”
“That a piece of food—or even saliva—went into Savage’s lungs instead of down the esophagus to his stomach. Common in older folks, more especially in men. It causes the irritation, the inflammatory lesions that are the infection you see in the images. They often masquerade as cancer.”
“No symptoms at all?” Mike asked.
“In a very mild case, he might have developed a fever—maybe not even for a day or two after he left Mayo. Had he not been so impatient, they would have caught it the next day. If we can find his local doctor here in town, Savage might have taken a short course of antibiotics, but that’s about it.”
“So nothing that was going to kill him?” I asked.
“A good aspiration pneumonia can certainly do that, but by the time it did, Wolf Savage wouldn’t have been walking around the city, going from work to his hotel. He’d have really been laid low, likely to have spiked a fever, maybe even become delirious and therefore oblivious to anyone around him.”
“But if he went to his doc here, when he got home from Mayo?”
“An antibiotic could knock it out in a normally healthy adult. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth the trouble to set up an exit bag and all the drama that went with it just to do the job.”
“So you’re right back on the fence about how Wolf died?” I said. “We’ve actually got some facts that might have led him to suicide.”
“Did I say my morning ended with that diagnosis?” Emma said, digging her hands into the pockets of her lab coat. “Or do you want to see what I asked you to come back here for?”
“Too hot to handle in a text?” Mike said.
“Boiling hot,” Emma said, reaching for her laptop and removing the image of Wolf Savage’s lungs from the screen. “Fasten your seat belts.”
“Ready to roll.”
“You know it’s routine for us to enter the deceased’s DNA in the crime-scene databank.”
“Of course,” I said. Since the 1990s, the creation of two vastly different systems of DNA analysis had revolutionized the criminal-justice system. The one most familiar to the public through newspaper accounts and television shows is the one in which the genetic profiles of convicted offenders are entered into the databank. This ever-growing pool of felons and predators—more than ten million of them now—allows law-enforcement agencies to compare evidence in unsolved cases to the known criminals.
The databank to which the ME’s Office had access is for crime-scene evidence. They could input evidence from a variety of sources—whether unidentified remains or fluid on the clothing of a victim—to memorialize the evidence in hopes of an eventual match in the convicted offenders’ databank. Eventually, they could upload the results to the national CODIS system as well.
“I decided it would be smart—no matter what my decision is—to have some of Wolf Savage’s DNA in the system.”
“But you made a promise to the family not to autopsy yet,” I said, anxious about the conversations we’d just had with Reed and Hal.
“I’ve kept that promise, Alex. You know I would. But we had the plastic bag that was placed over the head of the deceased,” Emma said. “It came in with the body, of course. And I figured if we analyzed the bag for trace evidence—skin cells and such—it might help us resolve whether the man hurt himself, or had some help shuffling off his mortal coil.”
“That makes good sense.”
“There were several sets of fingerprints on the bag that Savage used. I’d expect that to be the case, even if he acted solo, because we don’t know where or from whom he got the bag. So I asked the lab to get me skin cells that had sloughed off onto it,” she said. “As well as salivary amylase.”
“You mean DNA from the point inside the bag where his saliva hit the plastic?” I said.
“Exactly. They worked up a profile for me—several profiles, actually—and we entered them into the crime-scene databank last night.”
“Several profiles?” Mike asked.
“Yes. Like I said, Savage isn’t likely to have been the only one who touched the bag, so we have a few other genetic prints to consider,” Emma said. “But that doesn’t mean we’ve got a known killer. It could just as easily be that someone handled the plastic before the day it came into the possession of the deceased.”
Mike sat back in his chair and put his feet up on the conference table.
“And here I thought you were going to declare this a homicide and solve it for me at the very same time,” he said. “I feel like I’m on a seesaw.”
“I’m afraid I haven’t solved anything at all,” Emma said. “I came back in from NYU an hour ago and found this report waiting for me on my desk. The biologist who got the results doesn’t even want to enter it into the computer system until we figure out the consequences.”
Emma Palmer came around behind Mike and me and put two pieces of paper side by side on the table between us. I had studied thousands of DNA analysis reports over the last decade when matching or excluding suspected sex offenders. I had learned the methodology so that I could present it to jurors clearly and withstand challenges by the most knowledgeable adversaries. I was familiar with the peaks and valleys, the alleles and chromosomes—every technical term that made this science so formidable, beyond any and all doubt.
“Who have we got here?” I said, looking from one page to the other. Most people thought DNA profiles printed out of a computer with passport photos attached, identifying the subjects of the search. That was a myth. All I could see were the loci—the points on each profile—that were identical to each other.
“Help me with this,” Mike said.
“It’s not a match,” I said. “Yes, you’ve got a lot of markers in common, but then you’ve got just as many more that don’t line up.”
“That’s Wolf Savage on the left,” Emma Parker said. “No question about that.”
“Then whose profile is on the other piece of paper? It must be a relative of his, Emma,” I said, speeding through thoughts that a strong Y chromosome might prove a link to either Wolf’s son, Reed, or his brother, Hal. “Did you get this off the plastic bag?”
“That would almost make sense, Alex, wouldn’t it?” she asked, picking up the paper and flapping it in the air, grimacing as she walked to the head of the table. “But this is the genetic profile of the vic that was fished out of the East River two weeks ago. The young woman whose body has still not been claimed.”
Mike practically fell off his chair. “Tanya Root? You’re telling me there’s some kind of genetic link between her and Wolf Savage?”
“I’m willing to bet you, Mike, that Wolf Savage is actually her father.”