Malicious Intent (20 page)

Anya left the toast on her plate and finished the lukewarm tea. She wondered whether Mohammed Deab had agreed to psychiatric evaluation. If he pleaded not guilty, he may never be assessed. In the unlikely event of him claiming diminished responsibility, the prosecution was compelled to have him examined by a psychiatrist. Once on the record, Brody would know what sort of psychopathology he was dealing with. ‘I know it’s out of my area, but have you thought about getting Vaughan Hunter to review Deab? The man sounds as though he’s got some kind of personality disorder and Vaughan does seem to know a lot about domestic violence situations.’

‘Hadn’t decided that yet, but you’re right. I’ll see if I can get Mohammed to agree to an assessment.’

‘Thanks for breakfast.’ Anya wiped her mouth with the serviette and stood. ‘What time will I meet you at Long Bay?’

‘I’ll save you the drive and pick you up around two.’

25

Anya plugged in her PowerPoint presentation and glanced around the lecture theater as stragglers filled the remaining empty seats. More faces appeared each week. Put the word

‘forensic’ in a lecture’s title and it pretty much guaranteed a full house. Anya introduced the day’s topic and a croaky voice from the back row interrupted.

‘Excuse me, but will this be in the exams?’

The most predictable question had taken all but thirty seconds to be asked. All these students cared about was passing exams, jumping through the right colored hoops in the right order. If something wasn’t open to examination, they didn’t want to know about it. It often frustrated Anya that the medical system perpetuated exam-obsessed students who lost sight of the real reason for learning.

Anya addressed the man with uncombed shoulder-length hair and a five o’clock shadow despite the early hour. ‘If you graduate, what area do you hope to specialize in?’

‘Emergency medicine,’ he answered.

A couple of people in his vicinity snickered.

‘You don’t believe that forensic pathology is worth investing effort in?’

‘I didn’t mean that. It’s just, unless you want to deal with 156

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dead, not live people, it doesn’t seem all that big a priority.’

Anya felt a surge of annoyance, but kept her tone reasonable.

‘Learning about death, procedures families go through when their loved one has to have a postmortem, decisions crime scene police and medical examiners make is highly relevant and should be a priority for you. What happens when you have to inform the relatives of the young motorcyclist killed by a car, that the death is now before the coroner? How do you prepare them for what lies ahead? Your emergency medicine couldn’t save him, but knowledge about what happens next might prevent his family suffering unnecessarily.’ She let her gaze scan the room. ‘How many of you hope to enter general practice?’

Half-a-dozen hands shot up.

‘There’s an area that doesn’t have much to do with forensic pathology, or does it? What if you arrive for a routine house call and find your elderly diabetic patient dead on the floor? The surgery’s full, you’re running late. He was a bit doddery and often confused his doses. You conclude he died of an accidental insulin overdose and write out a death certificate, thereby saving the grieving wife the trauma of a postmortem. All in all, you’ve done a good job. No pathology involved.

‘Within days of the cremation, you notice the house up for sale and his wife flaunting a much younger man. You begin to wonder about the death and call the pathologist. Thinking back, there were two vials next to the bed, one half full, the other almost empty. You check the scripts with the chemist.

He’d only filled the vial the day before because the wife had said she’d broken one.’ The room had fallen silent, and she knew they were all listening. ‘Congratulations. You just helped someone get away with murder.

‘What I have to teach you is highly relevant to your future practice of medicine, even though it’s not in the exams.’

A chorus of pens clicked into the off position and three people, excluding the scruffy one, elected to leave by the back door. Anya couldn’t blame them. With first-term exams only KATHRYN FOX

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weeks away, each student faced days and nights of study to survive the course. Right now practicing seemed lifetimes away.

For the next forty-five minutes, Anya showed slides from a multitude of perplexing homicide cases and fielded questions about rape, murder and the process families endured to bury homicide victims. She always tried to humanize the victims to help students appreciate loss of life but stressed that there was a fine line between sympathy and empathy that should never be crossed. Sympathy was appropriate. Feeling pain
for
someone else was human and revealed compassion. But if doctors put themselves emotionally in the families’ position, and felt the
same
pain, they lost all objectivity. And that spelled disaster for an investigation.

She concluded with a quiz accompanying the photo of a deceased elderly male lying on his back in a room. The body appeared intact, but the muscles and some of the bones in the face and neck were exposed, the skin notably absent. One student quoted the case of a psychopath with a fetish for removing faces. Another thought the attack had to be personal, given the degree of facial disfigurement. They argued among themselves about whether or not the culprit had prior surgical knowledge.

Anya enjoyed the power that came with knowledge as she showed the next slide – two cats sat next to the body. No one offered any further explanation for the mutilation.

Finally, Anya admitted that the man had died of natural causes. A female voice loudly proclaimed, ‘It’s obvious. The cats ate their owner.’

A collective gasp filled the room.

‘Zara is correct. That’s exactly what happened. When the owner died, the cats, locked inside, had to fend for themselves.

That meant feeding on the only meat available. As the slide shows, they went for accessible areas like the face and neck.’

Anya couldn’t tell whether the distasteful expressions in the front row were in response to the gory details, or to the fact that a beloved ‘Fluffy’ wouldn’t think twice about eating the hand, or face, that had fed him.

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‘That’s it for today, and before you discount pathology as a career option, just remember, we’re the ones called when even the best doctors have failed.’

The group applauded loudly. Two fresh-faced women asked about postgraduate employment opportunities. Anya explained the training requisites and the relatively new field of forensic medicine.

As she unplugged her laptop and gave the two women the Web site addresses for the local forensic societies, she noticed Zara Chambers waiting with a piece of paper folded in her hand.

‘What’s new in the world of diatoms?’ Anya asked.

‘Not much. I’ve actually been going through some old slides and I think I’ve found another case involving those fibers we looked at.’

Anya abandoned her computer. ‘Exactly the same?’

‘I thought they looked identical and Dr. Latham agreed.’

‘Do you know the age, history, condition of the person?’

Zara propped herself against the lecture table, backpack between her legs.

‘Name was Alison Blakehurst, a doctor who died in a hotel room about six months ago. Toxicology showed a combination of alcohol, benzodiazepines and codeine.’

Another suicide. Another woman, this one by different means. Anya sat on an adjacent stool and tried to approach the case logically. ‘Did she have any history of mental health problems?’

‘Not that I know of. She was being sued by the family of a teenager who bled to death after a pregnancy termination.’

That was enough to drive even the most rational person to despair, as she knew from living with Martin in England during the investigation of a death in intensive care. Along with the victim’s loved ones, the toll on the staff involved and their families was enormous.

Zara dug around in her backpack and retrieved the crumpled articles and some handwritten notes.

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‘I did a search on some of the newspaper Web sites and found a couple of stories on her. One is about when she was found, and the other is a feature from the
Australian.
They interviewed her parents and husband. Her dad just happened to be a professor of pediatrics and an active member of the Right to Life association.’

Anya had to admit to being impressed by Zara’s diligence and resourcefulness.

‘I didn’t know you could print off old stories. I’ve always used microfiche at the library.’

Zara smiled to reveal slightly crooked top teeth. ‘No one’s used microfiche since the Dark Ages. They’re fossils compared to the Net. You can print just about anything – law reports, transcripts from TV and radio, lectures from other universities.

I would have thought you’d use it all the time in your job.’

The student’s lack of tact didn’t surprise Anya. ‘Any more on Dr. Blakehurst?’

‘Oh, yeah.’ She recited from her own notes. ‘Apparently Alison had a drug addiction as an intern and was put on restric-tions by the medical board. She married a gastroenterologist and, throughout the marriage, agreed to regular drug screens.

She worked at a women’s health center and was allowed to prescribe anything but Schedule 8 drugs, which I guess are narcotics. That’s where she referred the patient to an abortion clinic. I don’t think she was there during the procedure and the paper doesn’t say why she got sued instead of the surgeon.’

‘It’s usual for the lawyers to name every doctor in the suit, including the referring GP.’

Zara appeared taken aback, then returned to her story.

‘The article goes on to quote someone from a consumers’

group demanding mandatory drug testing for doctors.’ She rolled her eyes as if bored. ‘And the Doctors’ Benevolent Society says how much stress doctors are under, and how they have such high addiction rates to drugs and alcohol, and how they have a high suicide rate, blahdy, blahdy.’

Zara had a lot to learn. She was just the type of self-driven 160

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overachiever who could run into problems herself, and not through too much empathy.

‘How did the case finish up?’

‘A week after the suicide, the coroner exonerated the doctors. Apparently the teenage girl had a bleeding disorder that hadn’t been diagnosed. She’d never had surgery before and rarely got periods so there wasn’t any way of knowing she’d be a bleeder. Turns out her mother had Von Willebrand’s disease too, and the daughter didn’t know. If she’d told her mother about the abortion, it could have saved a lot of hassle.’

Anya wondered if Zara had somehow missed adolescence.

Surely, she could at least sympathize with a teenager’s decision to keep a pregnancy secret. The girl may have wanted to protect her family, or even have been scared of their reaction. Anya tried to imagine Zara’s family and could only picture a field full of hockey players elbowing each other out of the way. Because winning was all that counted.

Zara picked up her bag and swung it over one shoulder, flicking her plait out of the way. ‘One of the articles mentions that the husband thought she’d gone off with some sort of cult or commune, judging by the way she was dressed in a cheesecloth outfit the night she died.’

‘Gone off, as in gone missing?’

‘Yeah, by the sounds of it. I’ve got to go to a class, but if there’s anything else I can do –’

‘Yes, there is. You might be on to something important.’

Four relatively young women, four sets of unusual fibers.

Each disappeared for a time before coming back to commit suicide. Anya felt the hairs on her arms and neck stand on end.

‘I’m going to need you to search the system and database for any other cases.’

‘The computer system doesn’t help. We tried that already.

Things aren’t labeled consistently. The word “fiber” appears in almost everything.’

Anya didn’t envy the task, but it had to be done. These women weren’t dying of natural causes. The fibers said something KATHRYN FOX

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about where the women had been – and they might have inhaled them from the same place.

‘It’ll have to be done manually, or you’ll have to read each computerized PM report and decide whether the fibers mentioned are the ones we’re after.’

‘That’s thousands of reports!’ Zara sighed. ‘It’ll take months, and I’ve still got my nitric acid project to do.’

‘Maybe Peter can give you some time off. I’ll see if we can get electron microscopy on the sample we took to Professor Blenko. If we can get a breakdown of the constituents, we can compare it to charts and hopefully find out where it comes from. With this many cases, the cost is justifiable. Besides, if we find out what it is, you might want to write it up for one of the medical journals.’

Zara’s back straightened. The ultimate carrot – a published paper – was enough to entice any ambitious medical student; she’d be scoring a match-winning goal.

‘I’ll get onto it first thing in the morning,’ she said, and scuffed off.

On her way back to Annandale, Anya thought about the four women. What did they have in common? They came from vastly different religious, cultural and social backgrounds. Even so, each had a lot to lose, in terms of face, family and community life. Zara had mentioned a cult. That could explain their disappearances and failure to contact families, and even their odd behavior and clothes. Clare Matthews and Fatima Deab had strict, nonforgiving families. The doctor had a lot to live up to morally and medically. Debbie Finch had a sexual predator for a father. In that context, a commune made a lot of sense.

The women were just the type to escape their lives and join a welcoming, touchy-feely group. They were all vulnerable.

But what sort of commune trained its members to kill themselves?

26

Searing pain shot through the woman’s chest and left shoulder.

Any movement made the pain almost unbearable. Despite desperately trying to keep still, her body rocked up and down. In her line of sight, branches above thrashed in the wind and speckles of sunlight shot through tiny holes they left in their wake. She could hear someone breathing quickly, panting, and realized it was her own body fighting for breath. Suddenly, a crack sounded and the ground dropped a few centimeters, her contorted body lurching with the movement. She tried to move her legs but nothing happened. There was no feeling in them. Were they broken? She had no idea where they even were relative to the rest of her body. Trying to scream seemed futile. All that came out was a whimper. She licked her dry lips and tasted something metallic. Blood. Before she could wonder where the blood came from, her body jerked with what had to be the branch threatening to snap under her weight. With her right hand, she clawed at a branch up higher.