Free Likely to Die by Linda Fairstein

time to time. They’ve had her on life support, in long-term care, at Stuyvesant for all that time.”
     I remember being struck by the horror of that story four months ago when Mercer first came to me with the case. It still hurt to hear him describe the unthinkable.
     “Well, she’s about four weeks away from giving birth. The fact that she hasn’t been conscious for a decade didn’t stop somebody from climbing on top of her bones and raping her. The security’s real tight on her wing, so if it’s not her old man—her parents and sisters are her only visitors after all these years—it’s obviously some sick bastard who works there.”
     McGraw and the others who had not known about the case were shaking their heads in amazement.
     “Suspects?” Lieutenant Peterson asked.
     “Everyone from the broom pushers who swab her cubicle to the head shrink on the service,” Mercer responded. “Cooper got us a court order so we could draw blood and do DNA on the fetus. Then we’ll be getting the same thing from every one of the guys who had access to her. We’ll nail him.”
     I continued on my institutional odyssey around Manhattan in which not a single private or public hospital seemed to have been spared the indignity of some kind of sexual assault on the premises within the past three years. Occasionally, the assailants were health-care professionals themselves; frequently, they were technical workers who were assigned to the departments essential to the operation of these little villages—maintenance, food services, janitorial staff, aides, and messengers. Sometimes they were patients, free to move about from one area of the hospital to almost any other, and often they were interlopers who wandered into these enormous structures with no business being inside at all.
     “Obviously, we’ve got to look at everybody—from the professional staff to the underground population.” I had already learned the hard way that it was better to cast a very wide net at the start of an investigation in order not to overlook any potential suspects.
     By the time we had gone around the room and each of the detectives had described his actions for the day, it was close to ten o’clock. McGraw told Wallace to turn up the volume on the television and switch it to Fox 5 News to catch the headline stories. One of the guys who had retired from the squad was now covering the crime beat for the station, and from the posture of attention McGraw suddenly assumed it was obvious he had leaked something to his former protégé in order to get his face on the tube.
     Mike shook his head and suppressed a snide remark as all our business stopped so McGraw could admire himself on the screen, telling the public that his detectives had a lot of great leads and expected to have someone in custody by the weekend. The guys in the room didn’t appear to be surprised by his phony optimism, just annoyed. The moment the camera lens shifted to the Mayor’s face, McGraw rejoined our group.
     “Who’s got the autopsy?”
     “The Chief’s doing it himself in the morning,” Chapman answered. “I’m observing.”
     Good news for me. I had enormous respect for the Chief Medical Examiner, Chet Kirschner, and an easy relationship with him. I was likely to have preliminary results of the procedure by tomorrow afternoon.
     “Motives,” McGraw went on. “Who’s thinkin‘ what?”
     “Could be a straight-out sexual assault,” Jerry McCabe offered. “Pick from any one of your categories of guys walking around these empty halls at night. Late Monday, around midnight, say, he comes across a woman alone in her office. She’s strong. Thinks she can fight him off. Can’t overcome the knife. Bingo.”
     “Just as easy for it to be a burglary, and Dogen surprised him in the middle of it,” countered Wallace. “Even though the wallet’s still there, doesn’t mean there isn’t something missing and we’re not yet aware of what it