In situations involving herbal medicine, the cases would be signed out as accidental poisoning, with the cause of death attributed to the specific poison involved. It would be the exception, not the rule, if herbal medicine was mentioned at all.
Although Jack thought his crusade of exposing the risks of chiropractic and other forms of alternative medicine was still a great idea and more than worth pursuing, his enthusiasm was being dampened by these tactical obstacles. Fourteen cases over some indeterminate period of time was not enough to attract the public’s attention. When he had started, he’d envisioned a grand exposé involving hundreds of cases capable of dominating the media for days. Jack could already assume that was not going to happen.
As Jack’s zeal for his crusade sagged, his problems at home only loomed larger. His out-of-control emotions, as the recent minor episode with Vinnie exemplified, were a clear sign he still lacked focus. For a few moments Jack debated whether he should stick with the alternative-medicine idea in hopes of solving the problems of researching it or whether he should switch and try to find something more engrossing.
The ring of the telephone startled him out of his reverie. He glared at the phone with a sudden flash of anger, suppressing an urge to rip the blasted cord out of the wall. He didn’t want to talk to anyone.
But what if it was Laurie? Perhaps there’d been a sudden change for the worse with JJ’s condition. Perhaps she was calling from Memorial’s emergency room. Jack snatched up the handset and barked, “Yes?”
“Hey, big guy,” Lou Soldano rumbled. “Am I catching you at a bad time? You sound harried.”
It took Jack a moment to reboot his brain. He’d been so certain it would be Laurie calling about some kind of disaster. “It’s okay,” he said, struggling to calm himself. “What’s up?”
Next to Laurie, Lieutenant Detective Lou Soldano was one of his favorite people. In many ways, Lou and Jack’s friendship had a curious twist. Before Jack had come on the scene, Lou and Laurie had dated for a time. Luckily for Jack, their relationship had changed from rocky romantic to pleasant platonic, and when Jack and Laurie began dating, Lou championed Jack on multiple occasions. At one particularly difficult juncture, it was Lou’s belief that Jack and Laurie were made for each other that probably saved the day.
“I wanted to give you some follow-up,” Lou said, “on that suicide gunshot case you called me about Tuesday. You know which case I’m talking about?”
“Of course. The woman’s name was Rebecca Parkman. That was the case that the husband was dead set—excuse my pun—against his wife having an autopsy, supposedly for religious reasons.”
“It appears he had other reasons, too,” Lou said.
“I’m not surprised. Although the entrance wound was somewhat stellate, it wasn’t stellate enough, which suggested it was not a contact wound. How far away did I guess the gun was when it was fired?”
“Two inches!”
“In my entire forensic career, I’ve never seen a suicide with a gunshot wound to the head that wasn’t a contact wound.”
“Well, with your suspicions we got a warrant and burst in on the guy. And guess what, he was entertaining this young chick. Can you imagine? Two days after his wife is supposed to have killed herself, he’s boffing this cheerleader type.”
“Did you find anything incriminating?”
“Oh, yeah!” Lou said with a confident chuckle. “In the dryer we found a recently washed shirt of his. Of course it looked clean, but the lab guys found some blood, which turned out to be the wife’s. I think that’s pretty damn incriminating. I have to give it to you guys at the OCME. Chalk up another victory for justice.” One of the things that had propelled Jack and Lou’s friendship was Lou’s high regard for forensic pathology and what it could do for law enforcement. Lou was a frequent visitor to the OCME, and a frequent observer of autopsies on criminal cases.
“Hey, how’s that new kid of yours?” Lou asked.
“It’s a struggle,” Jack said, without supplying any details. He hadn’t told Lou about JJ’s illness, nor did he want to. At the same time, he didn’t want to lie. Wasn’t life with an infant a struggle for everyone?
“Isn’t it, though?” Lou laughed. “Talk about changing one’s lifestyle. I remember with my two I didn’t sleep for months.”
“How are your children?” Jack asked.
“They aren’t kids anymore,” Lou said. “My baby girl’s twenty-eight, and my baby boy is twenty-six. I tell you, it goes by fast. But they’re fine. How’s Laur?” Laur was Lou’s nickname for Laurie.
“She’s fine,” Jack said, and before Lou could follow up, Jack added, “Lou, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”
“Hell, no! What’s on your mind?”
“Do you use alternative medicine?”
“You mean like chiropractors and acupuncture and all that kind of shit?”
“Exactly! Or homeopathy or herbal medicine or even some of the more esoteric therapies involving buzzwords like energy fields, waves, magnetism, and resonance.”
“I have a chiropractor I go to once in a while to get adjusted, especially when I don’t get a lot of sleep. And I tried acupuncture to stop smoking. Somebody here at headquarters recommended it.”
“Did the acupuncture work?”
“Yeah, for a couple of weeks.”
“What if I told you alternative medicine isn’t risk-free? In fact, what if I told you cervical manipulation by chiropractors kills people every year? Would that influence you?”
“Really?” Lou questioned. “People die?”
“I just did a case Monday,” Jack said. “A twenty-seven-year-old female who died from having arteries torn in her neck. It was the first such case I’d seen, but I’ve looked into it over the last few days. I’m surprised at the number of cases I’ve found. It’s influenced my opinion of alternative medicine.”
“I never knew people died from chiropractic treatment,” Lou admitted. “How about acupuncture? Anyone die from that?”
“Yes. Laurie had such a case.”
“Jeez!” Lou remarked.
“What if I told you alternative medicine really doesn’t deliver the kind of health benefits it claims? That beyond providing a placebo effect, it doesn’t do much at all. You know what the placebo effect is, don’t you?”
“Yeah, that’s when you take some kind of medicine, like a sugar pill, that actually has no medicine in it, but you feel better.”
“Exactly. So, to reword what I’m saying, what if I told you alternative medicine doesn’t do anything other than provide a placebo effect, but in the process puts you at risk?”
Lou laughed. “Maybe I’ll just go out and buy me a bottle of sugar pills.”
“Lou, I’m being serious about this. I want to understand why you won’t question the rationale of going to a supposed health provider, paying good money, possibly putting yourself at risk of death, when I’m telling you all you’re getting is a placebo effect. Help me understand.”
“Maybe it’s because I can go and see this chiropractor guy.”
“I still don’t understand. What do you mean you go because you can go?”
“It’s harder than hell to get in to see my general practitioner. His office is like a fort with a couple of witches who act like they need to protect him from me, the grunt. And when I do get in to see him, he tells me to lose weight and stop smoking, as if that’s easy, and I’m in and out so fast that half the time I forget why I went in to see him in the first place. Then I call up the chiropractor, they take your call right away and are pleasant. If you want to speak to the chiropractor, you can. If it’s an emergency and you want to come in right away, you can. And when you do get into the office, there’s not the hour-long wait, and when you see the therapist, you don’t have the feeling he’s rushing you through an assembly line like a hunk of meat at a slaughterhouse.”
For a few moments there was a silence. As a benefit of controlling his own emotion to a reasonab
le degree, Jack could hear Lou’s breathing. The man was mildly vexed. Jack cleared his throat. “Thank you!” he said. “You’ve taught me something I needed to know.”
“You’re welcome,” Lou said with little sincerity.
“I said I have been looking into alternative medicine, and I’ve been mystified by the general public’s willingness to embrace it despite the fact it appears to me to be nearly worthless efficacy-wise, yet it costs the public billions upon billions of dollars a year. Herbal medicine alone, I found out, rakes in some thirty billion, which reminds me, do you take any herbal medicine?”
“Occasionally. When my weight spikes over two hundred pounds, I go on a weight-loss kick, which includes an herbal product called Lose It.”
“That’s not good,” Jack said. “As your friend, I’d advise you not to use it. Many herbal weight-loss products, especially those from China, are accidentally contaminated with lead salts or mercury salts, or both. On top of that, often the natural plant content has been known to be purposefully contaminated with dangerous pharmaceuticals to be assured that there will be some sort of a mild positive effect, meaning weight loss. My advice is to stay away from such remedies as much as possible.”
“You are such a wonderful bearer of good news today. I’m so glad I called.”
“I’m sorry,” Jack said. “But I’m pleased you’ve called. You have actually taught me something I needed to know, although probably something I didn’t want to know—namely, why the public is so willing to embrace alternative medicine and resistant to hear why they shouldn’t.”
“Now you have me curious,” Lou said. “What did I teach you?”
“You taught me that conventional medicine has a lot to learn from alternative medicine. The way you described your experiences with the two is truly telling. Alternative medicine has good customer relations with their patients, treating them like people, making the visit a positive social experience, even if there is no real curing going on. Conventional medicine, on the other hand, too often is the opposite, acting more as if they are doing you a favor. And worse still, if conventional medicine thinks they cannot help you, they ignore you; you’re out in the proverbial cold.” Jack couldn’t help but think that’s where he and Laurie were right now, treading water while they waited until JJ’s allergy to mouse protein went down, if it was going to go down. That was not a given.
“Why do you say you didn’t want to know that?” Lou asked.
Jack had to think for a moment, because the question had to do with his crusade, which had to do with JJ’s illness. Jack did not want to talk about JJ. “I didn’t want to know because learning that there is a legitimate reason for people to want to use alternative medicine means that my efforts to expose its limitations and even its risks will probably fall on deaf ears.”
“Sometimes I think you are the most irritatingly arcane person I know. But let me add another reason why people will fight you tooth and nail about alternative medicine: Alternative medicine doesn’t seem scary. If you say a handful of people die every year from going to an alternative-medicine therapist, they won’t blink an eye. Thousands upon thousands more people die who go only to conventional medical doctors than the people who go to a chiropractor. In fact, people who go to chiropractors want to believe in chiropractic specifically because they don’t want to go to conventional doctors, where they might get a diagnosis that will involve discomfort and pain and possibly death. At the chiropractor, that never happens. Everything is optimistic, every complaint can be treated, and it doesn’t hurt, and even if it is placebo, who cares?”
There was another period of silence until Jack said, “You’re right!”
“Thank you. Now let’s get back to our respective work, because we’re on city time. And one last thing, keep the forensic tips coming, because this last one on Sam Parkman was right on target.”
“But isn’t there going to be a problem with the Parkman case about the blood being circumstantial evidence? I mean, there’s no way to prove when the wife’s blood got on the shirt. The defense can argue it was a month ago or a year ago.”
“That’s not going to be a problem. The cheerleader girlfriend is singing at the top of her lungs, trying to avoid being considered an accomplice. The DA is very happy and considers the case a slam dunk.”
After Jack hung up the phone, he sat unmoving for a time. What little wind he’d had remaining in the sails of his alternative-medicine crusade was gone. Again, he felt discouraged. He took all his notes and dumped them back into the large envelope. Then, instead of returning it to his center drawer, he opened his bottom drawer containing the framed photo of Laurie and JJ, and tossed it in. He then kicked the drawer shut.
Prepared to get down to real work, Jack reached for his inbox with the intention of lifting out the material onto his blotter to begin to sort it. But his hand never made it. His phone’s jangle again pierced the room’s stillness. Sure it would be Lou with another thought about the alternative-medicine issue, Jack answered the phone as informally as he did earlier. But the caller wasn’t Lou. It was perhaps one of the last people in the world Jack expected to hear from.
16
11:30 A.M., FRIDAY, DECEMBER 5, 2008
NEW YORK CITY
Dr. Jack Stapleton, I presume!” The clear, mellifluous tenor voice came over the receiver like a breath of fresh air. It was somehow familiar to Jack, and his brain desperately scanned though its auditory memory bank.
Jack was silent a moment. Listening more closely he could hear a slight wheeze. Someone was still on the line but deliberately not speaking. Almost half a minute went by before Jack said, “We’re going to be here awhile unless I get a bit more information.”
“It’s one of your oldest and dearest friends.”
The voice was again familiar, but Jack could not quite pin it down. “Since I’ve never had a surplus of friends, this should be an easy task, but it’s not. You have to give me another hint.”
“I was the handsomest, tallest, smartest, most athletic, and most popular of the Three Musketeers!”
“Will wonders never cease,” Jack said, now at ease. “James O’Rourke. Although I can grant you the other less significant qualities, I’m going to contest the tallest.”
James burst out with his familiar high-pitched laugh, which grated on Jack’s nerves like sandpaper on the tips of his fingers, just as it had when they met at Amherst College in the fall of 1973.
“The moment I hear your voice, do you know what I visualize?” James said with another giggle.
“I can’t imagine,” Jack said.
“I see you walking out of Laura Scales House at Smith College, lugging the bust of Laura Scales, with your face as red as mine would have been. It was hilarious.”
“That was because Molly stood me up,” Jack said, quickly defending himself.
“I remember,” James said. “And you did it in broad daylight.”
“I brought it back the next month with great fanfare,” Jack added. “So no harm done.”
“I remember. I was there.”
“And you’re hardly the one to be throwing stones,” Jack said. “I can remember the night you carried out the club chair from Dick inson House at Mount Holyoke College because you were pissed off at . . . what was her name?”
“Virginia Sorenson. Beautiful, sweet Virginia Sorenson! What a doll!” James said with a hint of nostalgia.
“Have you heard from her since—”
“Since I went into the seminary?”
“Yeah.”
“No, I haven’t. She was sweet but hardly understanding.”
“I can see her point, considering how tight you guys were. Do you regret your choice?”
James cleared his throat. “The difficulty of having to make the choice has been a source of both joy and sadness, which I would prefer to discuss over a glass of wine and a roaring fire. I have a place on a lake in northern New Jersey where I’d love to have you and your wife come some weekend.”
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“That might work,” Jack said vaguely. It seemed a surprising invitation after not having heard a whimper from James since they graduated from college in 1977. Of course, it was also Jack’s fault, since he hadn’t tried to contact James, either. Although they’d been good friends in college, their postgraduate interests had been totally divergent. With the last member of the Three Musketeers, it had been different. Jack had been enthralled by Shawn Daughtry’s field of Near Eastern archeology, and they had stayed reasonably in touch until the death of Jack’s first wife and children. After that, Jack didn’t keep in touch with anyone, not even family.
As if sensing Jack’s thoughts, James said, “I have to apologize for not getting in touch with you when you moved here to the city. I heard you were here, working at OCME. I’ve always meant to give you a call to get together and laugh at old times. No one seems to realize when you go to college what a wonderful experience it is. At the time it always seems so hectic, with some giant paper or exam weighing you down. And when someone tries to tell you how special college is while you’re there, all you can say to yourself is, Oh, sure! If this is the best that it gets, I’m in serious trouble!”
It was Jack’s turn to chuckle. “You’re so right. It’s the same with medical school. I can remember my old family doc telling me medical school was going to be the emotional highlight of my professional career. At the time I thought he was crazy, but it turns out he was right.”
There was a short pause in the conversation as the two old college friends silently reminisced. But then James’s attitude and tone abruptly changed as he broke the silence. “I suppose you’d like to know why I have suddenly called you out of the blue.”
“It’s crossed my mind,” Jack admitted, trying to sound casual. James’s voice had become decidedly somber, almost grave.
“It’s simply that I am in desperate need of your help, and I pray that you will be willing to indulge me.”