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A00BC60=D9! GALL AND GLORY PART 1 1/ CODE THREE November 9, 2006—11:16 p.m. PARKVIEW M EDICAL C EN TER ’ S emergency department. Four miles from the hospital there had been an accident. “I have a sixteen-year-old female involved in an MVA,” a paramedic informed the triage nurse at Parkview by CB radio. “She is awake at the scene, arousable. But she appears to have some head and neck injuries as well as chest and abdominal injuries involving the steering column.” The girl’s Volkswagen Jetta had jumped the curb and hit a telephone pole at high speed. Although she was wearing a seat belt, the front end of the car was crushed and the steering wheel driven back into her, pinning her to her seat. Rescue personnel had tried to move the seat back, but the tracks were jammed and they were forced to squeeze her out the best they could. Using all his strength, a fireman pulled the wheel a few inches away from the girl while paramedics carefully tugged on her until she was freed. “We’re arriving code three in four minutes,” the paramedic said. Ted Cogan, the senior trauma surgeon in the hospital that evening, came down to the emergency department from his on-call room on the second floor just as the paramedics were wheeling the victim into the hospital. Cogan was a tall man of medium build made to look even taller by the clogs he was wearing, which, when HE TRAUMA ALERT WENT OFF IN T 12 D AV I D C A R N O Y he walked on the hard, bare floors of the hospital, came out sounding like the slow clip-clop of a horse pulling a tourist carriage. Only a few minutes earlier, he’d been resting comfortably in bed, dozing. One side of his hair, graying at the temples, was standing on end and his green scrub shirt was not tucked into his pants in the front. Rumpled as he was, though, the look didn’t add years to him. Instead, it gave him a boyish charm, as if he were late for school, rather than on time for work. The paramedics steered the victim into the trauma room. White and young with blond hair, she was looking up at the ceiling, her mouth covered by an oxygen mask. In the room, the head trauma nurse, Pam Wexford, started barking orders at an intern: “We need you on that side. No, there. OK, on three, we lift.” They transferred the girl, who was strapped to a hardboard stretcher, her neck stabilized by a cervical collar, from the paramedics’ gurney to the trauma-room gurney. Cogan moved into the room, but stood off to the side, trying to stay out of the way of the emergency workers. Although he was at the top of the pyramid and technically in charge, there were few, if any, instructions he had to give in these early moments because standard procedure was in effect. The team would make sure the victim had an airway, they’d take her vital signs, start an IV, draw a blood sample, and strip off her clothes. Then they’d take preliminary X-rays of her neck, chest, and pelvis. “Dr. Cogan, so nice of you to join us.” This was John Kim, the chief surgical resident, talking and working on the girl at the same time. Kim was thirty but he looked twenty. A baby-faced Korean-American. Cogan liked him, if only because he possessed the two qualities that made just about anybody tolerable: he was competent and had a good sense of humor. “Wouldn’t miss it for the world,” Cogan said. “What happened?” “She hit a telephone pole doing about fifty.” “Ouch.” “90 over 60, Doctor,” Pam Wexford said. “Pulse 120. Hemoglobin 15.” Knife Music 13 The girl’s blood count was normal. But her blood pressure was lower than normal and her heart was running fast, which probably meant she was losing blood—the question was from where. She didn’t appear to have any major external lacerations, so they were probably looking at a fracture, some sort of chest trauma, or the laceration or rupture of an organ, Cogan thought. “We’re going to have to cut your clothes off,” Wexford said to the girl. “So please try to remain still.” The girl responded by opening and shutting her eyes and groaning. She was wearing jeans, which made the cutting more difficult, but Wexford, a real-life version of Edward Scissorhands, still managed to shred her pants, mock-turtleneck shirt, bra, and underwear in under a minute. When she was finished, Cogan went over to a counter where there was a latex-glove dispenser, and pulled out a couple of gloves. He stretched a glove over each hand, then turned his attention to the victim, who was lying naked on the gurney, her legs spread slightly apart. He noted that she was a thin, well-proportioned girl with muscular legs and a flat stomach. She had four or five superficial wounds—cuts and scratches—on her arms and face, then a deeper cut and bruise on her right shin that an intern was attending to. “How’re we doing, Cynthia?” Cogan said to the X-ray technician. “Ready when you are, Doctor.” “Pam?” “BP 90 over 60. Pulse 130.” “OK, Cynthia. Gimme a Kodak moment.” The X-ray technician moved the portable X-ray machine over to the victim. When it was in place, she told everybody to clear the room except for one intern, who was putting on a lead apron, preparing himself for the unenviable task of pulling the patient taut (by the feet) during the cervical shot. Cynthia took several X-rays, repositioning the machine for each new shot, always making sure to remind everybody to “clear” before she pressed the remote switch from where she stood behind the lead screen that prevented her from being exposed to the radiation. 14 D AV I D C A R N O Y As soon as she was done, the rest of the trauma team came back into the room and resumed their duties. A couple of zealous interns whose names Cogan always got mixed up started firing questions at the girl, who mainly responded with groans and grimaces. Intern #1: “Do you know where you are? Do you know how you got here?” Intern #2: “Miss, are you allergic to any medication?” Intern #1: “Are you allergic to antibiotics? Penicillin?” Intern #2 (touching her leg with the needle): “Can you feel that?” Intern #1: “Miss, I’m going to have to give you a rectal exam. OK?” “80 over 60, Doctor,” Pam Wexford said. “Pulse 150.” “All right,” Cogan said. “Do we have a name for her yet?” The nurse glanced at the paramedics’ paperwork. “Kristen,” she said. “Kristen Kroiter.” “Kristen,” Cogan said, speaking to the girl. “Is that your name?” She didn’t answer. She just opened and closed her eyes. “OK. I’m Dr. Cogan and this is Dr. Kim and we’re here to help you. We’re all here to help you. You’ve been in a car accident and you’re in a hospital. Do you understand that?” With the oxygen mask still covering her mouth, the answer came out sounding like a grunt, but it was affirmative enough for Cogan to continue. “I’m going to ask you a few questions and give you a quick examination so we can determine your condition. OK?” She groaned. Then, squirming a little in the restraints, she murmured through the mask, “It hurts so much.” “I know it hurts,” he said, taking her hand. “And I’d like to make it so it doesn’t hurt. But I can’t give you anything just yet because if we give you something, you might not be able to tell us where it hurts, and we need you to tell us where it hurts so we can make it better.” He examined her eyes, then said, “Eyes are equal and reactive.” Lungs were next. Knife Music 15 “Kristen,” he said, “I want you to try to take some deep breaths.” As he listened with his stethoscope, a wave of pain appeared on her face every time she took a breath. But her lungs appeared to be clear. “Breath sounds equal and present bilaterally,” he announced to the team. Then to her: “Does it hurt when you breathe?” She had trouble answering him so he told her if she didn’t want to speak that she could just squeeze his hand. She could squeeze his hand, couldn’t she? She could. Next, with his free hand—his right—he began to examine her chest. Her skin was warm and moist—she was sweating; Cogan noticed sweat building up on her forehead. He worked his way slowly across her chest, pressing gently on her rib cage, feeling for tender spots. Suddenly, she screamed, and Cogan felt one of her fingernails dig into his hand. He quickly let up on the spot. “OK,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He pressed down again, this time more gently on the left side of her abdomen. She didn’t scream but groaned instead, then closed her eyes and said, “Please.” “Tender left upper quadrant with possible crepitance of left lower ribs,” he announced. Just then Cynthia, the X-ray technician, came back into the room and said, “Film’s ready, Doctor.” “Thanks. Kristen, can you hear me?” The girl opened her eyes. “You’re doing good,” he said. “I have to go away for a minute, but Pam here is going to take care of you while Dr. Kim and I take a look at what’s going on inside of you. But we’ll be right back.” Cogan got one more reading on her vital signs—her blood pressure and pulse were holding steady—then he went to the other side of the room, where Kim had put the X-rays up on the light box and was looking at her chest X-ray. He was looking at her lungs. White was air. Black was nothing, emptiness, a non-functioning lung. They were looking at white. “No pneumothorax,” Kim said, informing Cogan of what he, 16 D AV I D C A R N O Y too, saw: neither lung had collapsed. “But she’s got rib fractures. Left ribs 9-11. That’s why she’s having trouble breathing.” Rib fractures were extremely painful. They turned grown men into babies. “I think that’s it,” the younger doctor went on after a moment, looking at her neck and pelvic X-rays. “C-spine is clear and her pelvic films are normal.” “Doctor,” Wexford said, her voice more urgent than it had previously been. “Her blood pressure is falling. She’s getting more tachycardic.” Both surgeons turned around and looked at the machines. She was 80 systolic. Her heart rate was up to 170. Her hemoglobin down to 12. Kim looked at him, his face tense. They both were thinking the same thing. “Do you want me to do a wash?” Kim asked. “I’d better do it,” Cogan said. He went back over to the patient and asked a nurse for a peritoneal lavage tray. “Quickly, please,” he said. His voice remained calm but the whole team immediately went on alert, for everybody knew that Cogan, unlike some surgeons, made such demands only when the situation truly called for it. A “wash” was short for a peritoneal lavage, a procedure in which a saline solution is injected into the peritoneum, the membrane lining the abdominal cavity, then aspirated back into the syringe. If the saline solution comes back bloody, it means there is blood where there shouldn’t be. Cogan made an incision in the girl’s belly button, then carefully pushed a narrow piece of plastic tubing into the hole he’d made. Next, he attached the tubing to a syringe filled with saline solution and, with his thumb, slowly squeezed the plunger on the syringe, gradually pushing the saline solution into the girl. When the syringe was almost empty, he carefully began to pull up on the plunger, aspirating the fluid back into the syringe. What came back was a deep red. “Grossly bloody,” he said, handing the syringe to a nurse. Knife Music 17 Then, after a brief pause, he said “OK, ladies and gentlemen. I think she’s got splenic rupture. Hang more fluid, cross her for six units, and let’s get her to the OR stat.” With that order, the whole team began to focus its efforts on transferring the girl, along with her IVs, from the fixed gurney she was lying on to one that had wheels and was mobile. “Kristen,” Cogan said to the girl, taking her hand. “You’re doing good, but we’re going to take you upstairs so we can take a look at what’s going on inside you if we have to. Do you know where your parents are? We need to get their consent if we have to operate. Is there a number where we can reach them?” He knew she probably wouldn’t be able to answer him, but the rules said he had to at least make an attempt to contact the parents of a minor before he operated on her. Her eyes were vacant. She looked at him, then closed them. “OK, let’s go,” Wexford said loudly. “Head or feet, Dr. Kim?” Kim took the feet at the front end of the gurney and pulled, while Pam pushed from the back where the girl’s head was. The team’s job was finished. The girl was officially Cogan’s patient. 2/ WHY TODAY? March 31, 2007—4:25 p.m. D ETECTIVE H ANK M AD DEN wipes his brow in the late Saturday afternoon sun. It’s hot, too hot for March, and Madden’s head is throbbing—from the heat and from the fresh-cut grass of the outfield. His allergies have been wreaking havoc on him all week, but that hasn’t kept him away from the newly refurbished La Entrada Middle School field in Menlo Park where his son is pitching in his team’s opening game of the Alpine/West Menlo Little League. The batter steps back into the batter’s box. The kid thinks he’s Barry Bonds. Same stance. Same cool cockiness. It makes Madden smile because there’s his son, standing on the mound just like Greg Maddux. He knows that Henry, whom the other boys call Chico because of the hint of his mother’s Hispanic features, is imitating Maddux. All he can talk about when he’s at home is Maddux. Twelve years old. He knows every statistic, has every baseball card. He has the motion. The leg-kick. The umpire’s hand goes up in a fist. The pitch is a strike. He never lets it show, but Madden takes immense pleasure in watching that motion. The sheer power it generates. Sometimes he smiles after a good inning or if one of the other parents comes up to him and compliments his son. But mostly he stands there with his hands in his pockets, silently watching the game, looking decidedly unpartisan, a man in his late fifties with a small head of re- S TANDING BY THE VISITOR ’ S DUGOUT, Knife Music 19 ceding gray hair combed carefully back, a thin man who wears glasses and keeps a neat, trim mustache. Many years ago, when he was his son’s age, he’d also stood off to the side of the Little League field near his home, watching the games, not able to play himself. It pains him to think of those days. As a boy, he had polio. The illness had left him with a short right leg and a drop foot. At school they’d called him Chester. He was that character on Gunsmoke who walked with a limp. Marshall Dillon’s deputy, Chester. It took him fourteen years to make detective. Just fourteen, he likes to tell people. The amount of time has not made him bitter; on the contrary, it has made him feel superior, for he feels he’s worked harder, studied more, and is better prepared than any of his counterparts. And if there’s anything he’s tried to instill in his son, it’s his work ethic. In the off-season, they watch videotapes of the Padres’ and A’s pitching staffs, among the best in the league, then drive over to La Entrada where his son pitches to him. The only problem is that Madden isn’t a good catcher. Anything a few feet too far to the left or right of him he has trouble getting to, which frustrates Henry because it embarrasses him to watch his father scramble awkwardly for the ball. He thinks he looks goofy. “I know I look goofy,” Madden admits. “So don’t make me move. That should be your priority.” The advice has paid off. Today, his son is pitching strike after strike. The catcher barely has to move his mitt. After each out, Henry glances over at his father, who nods in approval. No words, not even a smile, just a nod. Then, in the middle of the third inning, Madden’s beeper goes off. He winces. It’s the number of another detective, Jeff Billings. He waits a moment, then takes out his cell phone, turns it on, and speed-dials the number. When Billings answers, he asks, “What’s up?” “Where are you?” “I’m at my kid’s Little League game. It’s opening day.” “Pete’s looking for you,” he says, referring to their boss, 20 D AV I D C A R N O Y Detective Sergeant Pete Pastorini. “Why aren’t you answering your phone?” “I didn’t want to be reached.” “Funny.” “It’s true.” “Well, he got a call a little while ago from someone in the DA’s office and had to go out and meet some people.” “What people?” “The parents of a girl who say she was raped by her doctor.” Madden feels his throat tighten and his heart jump a little. It always happens, the moment he hears a doctor is involved. He can’t help it. He hates that he can’t help it, and he hates that Billings knows he can’t, which only makes his heart race faster. Taking a breath, he looks at the mound. Another strike. Henry still hasn’t allowed a hit. Damn, he thinks. Why today? Why now? “You’re the one on-call,” he says. “Why don’t you take it?” Technically they’re all on-call, but they have an official schedule where each detective is assigned to specific off-hours blocks. That ensures that at least one detective will be able to respond quickly and soberly. “He wants you, Hank,” Billings says, hiding his envy well. There’s only a faint hint of resentment in his voice. “Don’t ask me why. But he sounded anxious.” If the sergeant had requested him, it must be important. It must be something he didn’t feel Billings, the youngest and least experienced in the group, could handle. “OK,” he says. “Where am I going?” 3/ PARTING THE RED SEA November 10, 2006—12:34 a.m. “Beautiful, Dr. Kim,” he said as he left. “If you don’t make it as a surgeon, you have a bright future as a tailor.” “Believe me,” said Kim, who was closing the girl, “I’ve considered it.” By the scrub sink, Cogan pulled down his mask, stripped off his gloves, and removed his gown. Then he washed his hands and face, first with hot, then cold water. After he was finished, he checked his shoes for blood and wiped them clean with a paper towel, which he always did before meeting with a patient’s family. “They’re outside, in the waiting room,” the desk nurse, Julie, informed him. “Mother and father.” At this late hour, the OR was practically deserted. Just a skeleton staff remained. “She insured?” Cogan asked. “Through the father’s company.” “Hey, you wouldn’t have any of your famous herbal tea packets stashed away there, would you?” The nurse smiled. “What’s in it for me?” “I’ve got cookies.” “What kind?” “Homemade chocolate chip. Remember O’Dwyer, the guy who was in the fight the other night? His wife hooked me up.” C OGAN WALKED OUT OF THE OPERATING ROOM . 22 D AV I D C A R N O Y She thought about it. Then, looking inside her desk drawer, she said, “It’s your lucky night, Cogan. I’ve got apricot.” “I’ll be back.” He pushed a button on the wall that opened the automatic OR doors and walked through them, down the hall to where the couple was seated on a vinyl couch. “Mr. and Mrs. Kroiter?” They stood up anxiously. “Yes.” “Hello, I’m Dr. Ted Cogan. I’m a surgeon. Please. Sit down.” The couple probably would have been glad to continue standing, but Cogan was the one who wanted to sit. He’d been standing for the last two and a half hours. “Your daughter was in a car accident,” he began. “We’re not exactly sure what happened—we don’t know what caused the accident—but the paramedics said her car jumped the curb and she hit a telephone pole.” He paused briefly to let them absorb what he said, then continued, “She came into the hospital and we realized she was bleeding internally, so we took her to the operating room. It turned out she’d ruptured her spleen, and we had to do a splenectomy. The operation was uneventful, and she’s doing very well. She has a few broken ribs and some minor cuts and scratches, but otherwise there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s on her way to the recovery room as we speak.” “Does that mean she’s OK?” the girl’s mother asked. Cogan looked at Mrs. Kroiter. More and more, he noticed, his initial impressions of people were rooted less in looks but in temperament. Beauty registered, certainly, but his primary concern— the first question he invariably asked himself—was, “Is this person going to be difficult?” The couple didn’t look difficult. She was dressed in a nylon warm-up suit, purple and green, Nike—something she might wear for a quick trip to the mall or Safeway. The husband had on a jacket and tie. Business looking. Nothing flashy. Funny, Cogan thought, he prefers to face the public in his standard uniform, even at two o’clock in the morning. Mrs. Kroiter was slender, in her early forties, as was the husband. She had short hair, dark Knife Music 23 eyebrows, and blue eyes that were puffy and red, presumably from crying. The husband was bald but it didn’t hurt his looks, for he had a military air to him, good strong bone structure in his face, and blue eyes like his wife, but brighter, more alert, and seemingly more patient. One of those guys who played football in high school even though he probably shouldn’t have, he thought. “Mrs. Kroiter,” he said, “your daughter has sustained a very serious injury, but if all goes well she should recover from it.” “So she’s going to be OK?” “Again, you have to understand, your daughter’s just come out of surgery. We had to remove her spleen. Everything went very well. She’s doing very well.” The husband put his arm around the wife, who was seated next to Cogan, and extended his right hand across her. “Bill Kroiter,” he said in a deep, confident voice. Cogan shook the hand. “Cogan, you said your name was?” “Yes.” “You performed the operation?” “That’s right.” “The spleen, that’s an organ?” “Yes. The spleen filters your blood and protects against bacterial infection. The body—especially the adult body—can function fine without it, but a major infection will always be a possibility. We gave your daughter an injection in the operating room to protect her from the bacteria to which she will be most susceptible, streptococcal pneumonia. She’ll have to take antibiotics until she’s twenty-one, and she’ll have to be very careful when she has a cold or feels at all fluish.” It went like that for a while. The couple asking questions and Cogan trying to answer them as clearly and succinctly as he could. But he kept having to repeat himself. It was the same with most families. They didn’t trust you at the start (they didn’t trust doctors), but if you could manage to give the same answers and tell the same story over and over, they started to believe you. And 24 D AV I D C A R N O Y then, of course, there was always one final question: Could they see her? “Sure,” Cogan said. “But just for a minute, OK?” He explained that they preferred not to have people visiting with patients in the recovery room. In the morning, she’d go to the floor—she’d be put in a room where they could visit with her as much as they wanted. “If you could hold on a moment, I’d just like to make sure she’s settled in,” he said. “And if you have any more questions, I’ll be available during the day. The nurses will know how to track me down.” Cogan walked back to the OR. Posted at the entrance, just above the button for the automatic doors was a large sign that read: “AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY. PROPER OPERATING ROOM ATTIRE REQUIRED.” “She out yet?” he asked Julie, the desk nurse, a woman in her late thirties who was strikingly good-looking above the waist but had inherited her father’s short, stocky or—as she sometimes called them—“fugly” legs. “Not yet,” she said. “Here.” She handed him a mug of steaming tea. “Don’t burn yourself.” “Thanks.” He sat down in a chair next to her. As he took tiny sips of tea, he stared down at the floor. He was thinking about how much sleep he could get. If he went to sleep in fifteen minutes, after he was through with the girl’s parents, he could probably get three, maybe three and a half hours… “You ever been to a spa, Ted?” He looked up. “What?” “You ever been to a spa?” “Yeah. With my ex. She was a firm believer in paying to be pampered.” “You never went alone, though?” “No.” “But what if you wanted to meet someone?” “Would I go to a spa?” Knife Music 25 “Yeah.” He shrugged. “I think you’d be better off at Club Med.” “But everybody’s looking there. It’s a meat market.” “I’d tend to think that would increase your odds.” “But I don’t want to go to a place where everybody’s looking. It’s, you know—” “Unromantic,” he said. “Exactly.” He told her she was going to have to get over that part. The fact was that after you get married, it doesn’t matter where you met your husband. Wherever you met him was going to seem romantic. Or not, depending on how they were getting on. “I met my ex-wife on a chairlift, skiing at Heavenly Valley,” he said. “Not bad, right? But what does it count for now?” She looked at him sympathetically and nodded. “So you really don’t think a spa is the way to go?” He laughed. She’d already decided. “Sure,” he said. “Why the hell not?” Then, standing: “Hey, what’s going on in five?” They both looked over at the door to operating room number five. Through a small window in the door, they could see glimpses of a commotion. “Who’s in there?” he asked. “Dr. Beckler. Emergency gall bladder.” “Really. How’s the bug up her ass doing?” “Thriving, last I checked.” “I’m going take a closer look.” “Be careful.” Cogan took another sip of tea, set the mug down, then put his mask on and went into the operating room. There were four people in the room: resident surgeon Dr. Anne Beckler, an anesthesiologist, a nurse, and the patient, an extremely fat woman who was sprawled out on the table, the right side of her belly split open where Beckler had made a six-inch incision. “Can you hold her open or can’t you?” Beckler was shouting at the resident, who was trying to keep the hole open so Beck- 26 D AV I D C A R N O Y ler could get her hand inside the patient and see what she was feeling at the same time. The resident was trying to reattach a small retractor that had slipped off a contraption called a Bookwalter retractor, a steel halo that was affixed to the gurney and positioned over the patient. Several small bear-claw retractors were clipped onto the halo, their claws hooked into the tissue around the sides of the wound, pulling it back and creating a generous entrance into the body. In the old days, when Cogan was in medical school, the Bookwalter didn’t exist. You had to hold wounds open “manually,” pulling the retractors apart yourself, which, in this instance, would have posed a particularly difficult challenge, because the patient was so fat that it would have taken the Incredible Hulk to hold her open for more than a few minutes without a rest. And the resident, Evan “DocToBe” Rosenbaum, was no Incredible Hulk. He was a skinny, five-foot-eight, twenty-nine-year-old from Long Island whose parents, the story went, had bought him a personalized license plate for his first car that read “DOCTOBE.” Rosenbaum spent all his free time playing golf, desperately trying to make up for his inadequacies as a surgeon. He was a 20-handicap surgeon but a superb golfer, a skill that impressed some of his fellow surgeons far more than anything he could have accomplished in the operating room. “I got it,” DocToBe Rosenbaum answered, finally getting the retractor properly attached. Cogan estimated the woman weighed close to four hundred pounds. Each flap of fat had to be a foot thick. Rosenbaum might as well have been trying to part the Red Sea, which, in this case, happened to be more white than red. “What do you want, Cogan?” Beckler said without looking at him. “Oh, I’m fine, Anne, and how are you this evening?” “Take the peanut gallery somewhere else. I’ve got my hands full.” Beckler always seemed to have her hands full. Cogan thought it was the only way she was able to function. The only problem was that in order to maintain her superiority she had to intimidate every- Knife Music 27 body into a more frazzled state than hers. The method worked well with her underlings—nurses and suck-ass residents like Rosenbaum. But it had less satisfactory results with her fellow surgeons, with whom she was forced to use more vicious tactics, the last of which was charm. Cogan always wondered whether he would have forgiven her behavior if she’d been better looking. Not that she was bad looking—she was tall, thin, and had nice green eyes and alabaster skin. But out of uniform she dressed badly and was decidedly unsexy, almost androgynous. Cogan thought the longer she’d been one of the boys—been part of the club of surgeons—the more her exterior, from her mannerisms to her language, had become male. But on the inside she was still fiercely female or, at least, a fierce defender of feminist principles. And in that sense, Cogan, the Harvard man and an old boy if ever there was an old boy, represented to her all that was evil. He, of course, disagreed with her assessment. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Dammit,” Beckler said, ignoring him, “get the light in here. Are you sure she hasn’t had it out already?” “I checked, Doctor,” the anesthesiologist said. “It’s not on her chart.” “Check it again. She’s got scars all over the fucking place.” Cogan took the patient’s chart from the anesthesiologist and looked at it. He could see why Beckler was concerned. The woman already had four scars on her belly from previous operations. Two were from C-sections, one was an appendix, and the other could have been from any number of other procedures. “What’s the problem, Anne?” he asked. “Let me see her chart,” said Beckler. He held up the chart. “There’s nothing here about a gall bladder being removed.” “Shit.” “She can’t find it, can she?” Cogan whispered to the nurse. “No,” the nurse whispered back, “she can’t.” “Anne, why don’t you get a laproscope in there,” he said. 28 D AV I D C A R N O Y “I wouldn’t need a camera if Rosenbaum wasn’t such a lightweight.” “Well, Rosenbaum is a lightweight. And I’m not scrubbing in. So you better get a scope in there.” She shot him a piercing glance. Then she looked at the others, who were all waiting for her to respond. She was cornered and she knew it. “OK,” she said after a moment, “let’s do it. Get her on TV.” Usually, the camera, which looked liked a stainless steel wand, was used for laproscopic surgery, which was much less invasive than open surgery. Four small holes were cut into the belly. In one went the camera wand, and in the others, the surgical instruments. The surgeon could do the whole operation looking at a television screen and the patient would, in theory, be out of the hospital in two days instead of five. “To the left,” Beckler said. They all looked at the television screen. Rosenbaum was maneuvering the wand into position under the liver, where the gall bladder was supposed to be. He moved the camera around the area, once, twice, then a third time. Cogan didn’t see the gall bladder. But if the chart said it was there, it had to be there. And then he saw it. “There,” he said pointing. “Where?” Beckler asked. “On the liver.” Rosenbaum moved the camera to where he was pointing and pushed the liver to one side, flipping it up a little. And there, indeed, it was. A brown, pathetic-looking mass attached to the liver. “Wow, look at that,” Rosenbaum said. “It’s literally fused to the liver.” “Disgusting,” said Beckler. Cogan smiled—a smile no one could see through his mask. But the pleasure showed in his eyes. “Well, this surgeon’s got an appointment with his bed. It’s been fascinating as always. Goodnight, all.” “’Night, Ted,” the nurse said. “Goodnight, Anne.” Knife Music 29 Beckler didn’t answer him. “Kelly, clamp, please,” she said to the nurse. He thought of saying goodnight to her again, but then thought better of it. He’d had enough fun with her for one evening. And she was definitely not amused. 4/ DOMESTIC DISPUTE March 31, 2007—4:38 p.m. T M IDDLEFIELD R OAD , IN A DEVELOPMENT called Vintage Oaks, a gated community in Menlo Park a few blocks from Menlo-Atherton High School. Madden knows the place well. The land it’s on isn’t exactly sacred, but in the early 1990s some residents predictably accused nearby St. Patrick’s Seminary, which once owned the property, of making a “deal with the devil” when it sold forty-two acres of vacant land to Vintage Oaks’ developers for $22 million to escape financial crisis. The general area between San Francisco and San Jose is known as the Midpeninsula, and Menlo Park, twenty-five miles from each city, sits smack-dab in the middle of it. During the 1960s and ‘70s this stretch of suburban sprawl grew at a tempered rate as residents warily guarded open space with an eye toward preserving their views and avoiding traffic jams. But with the rise of Silicon Valley and the dotcom boom—and all the wealth and publicity they brought with them—the Midpeninsula went upscale in a hurry. Property values skyrocketed, few open parcels near residential areas remained off-limits to development, and the once modest Menlo Park, wedged between staid, old-money Atherton to the north and left-leaning, university-tied Palo Alto to the south, took on a bit of both its neighboring towns’ personalities. Maybe that’s why today Madden thinks the slightly snobbish yet remotely down-to-earth resiHE HOME IS JUST OFF Knife Music 31 dents of Vintage Oaks are perfect representations of their geographical location. As he drives onto the block he’s looking for, he sees that a group of kids has gathered in front of a house at the end of the street. They’re decked out in street-hockey gear, but clearly something has distracted them enough to table their game, because he just passed their abandoned goals. “Hey, guys,” he calls out through the half-open passenger-side window, pulling up alongside them. “What’s going on?” They eye him curiously, squinting in the face of the late afternoon sun. “This lady was screaming,” says a boy wearing a teal-colored San Jose Sharks road jersey, an expensive, kid-sized replica of the real thing. He’s the tallest of the bunch but is still probably no more than ten or eleven. “It sounded like Mrs. Kroiter,” offers another, this one in Phoenix Coyotes regalia. “We think they’re having a domestic dispute,” says the goalie of the group, appropriately short and stocky. The way the kid says it, so matter-of-factly, makes Madden smile. His ten-year-old daughter sometimes mimics him, using words reserved for adults, and he can’t help but find it amusing, even if the words she uses are sometimes disconcerting. “You a cop, too?” the first boy asks, nodding in the direction of the patrol car that’s parked in front of Pastorini’s unmarked Chevy Impala. “They call for back-up?” Madden doesn’t answer. Instead, he says, “Any of you guys know Timmy Gordon?” They shake their heads. “Well, Timmy Gordon was about your age when he got hit by a car three blocks from here and lost his leg. You kids should go play down at the park,” he says, hoping to scare them off. They look at him like he’s crazy. He knows what they’re thinking: This is a gated community, and it isn’t a through street—who’s going to drive fast into a cul-de-sac in a gated community in broad daylight? “Who are you?” the goalie demands. 32 D AV I D C A R N O Y “A concerned citizen,” he says, edging his car forward. “Now, move along.” Instead of parking on the sidewalk he turns into the driveway and pulls his unmarked Ford Crown Victoria in behind the less expensive of the two cars parked there, an older Audi A4 sportwagon. Next to it is a big 7-series BMW. Probably the husband’s car, he thinks. The home is at the end of a cul-de-sac, a large two-story, ranch-style house with a generous front yard, though nothing that could be described as a “spread.” For that, you have to head north another mile or two to Atherton. That’s where the homes of the truly wealthy begin—and have always begun, dating back to the late 1800s, when rich San Franciscans like Faxon Dean Atherton built estates there (then it was called Fair Oaks) to escape the city’s cold summers. Billings likes to call them “inset homes.” These are homes that you can’t see from the road. They’re set back, hidden from view by tall bushes, cement walls, or both. These people have bushes, too: a short row that lines a walkway leading up to the house and cuts through a perfectly manicured lawn. At first, there’s no hint of the commotion the boys alluded to. But in the middle of the walkway, Madden hears something that makes him stop in his tracks. It’s muffled, but there’s no mistaking what it is: a horrible moaning, guttural and anguished, mixed with inconsolable sobbing. And he knows then why Pastorini was looking for him. The domestic dispute, whatever its origins, had ended badly. Very badly indeed. He raps lightly on the front door. The door’s unlocked, so he pushes it open slowly and enters a spacious foyer with a high, vaulted ceiling. A modest but graceful crystal chandelier hangs over an impressively real-looking silk floral arrangement sitting in the middle of a round mahogany table. Peering down a short hallway, he can make out the back of man’s balding head—he’s sitting on a couch in the living room—and Pastorini nearby pacing back and forth, holding a can of Diet Coke in one hand, talking on his cell phone with the other. Somewhere off to the right, a police radio squawks. The officer responds in a hushed tone, and the woman’s Knife Music 33 wailing, which seems to be coming from the same place, suddenly stops. A moment of eerie silence, then he hears her mutter something: “I told him no police,” he thinks she said. “Godammit, I told him . . .” As her voice trails off, Pastorini looks up and sees Madden standing in the foyer. The sergeant flashes a foreboding look, then, finishing his conversation, closes the flip on his cell phone and gestures to someone out of frame to approach. When the uniformed officer appears, Pastorini leans over to the man on the couch and says in a gentle voice, “Excuse me, Mr. Kroiter, one of my detectives is here. I’m going to step away for a minute. Your pastor is on his way.” Madden takes a couple steps toward the living room, but before he gets there Pastorini intercepts him. “Come on,” he says, taking him by the arm and turning him around. “Let’s talk outside.” Madden’s not used to seeing Pastorini like this, sullen and ominous. He’s a big man, imposing, but usually very neurotic, which takes some of the bite out of him. People say he missed his calling as an opera singer. Rotund and barrel-chested, he has short legs and wears his dark, wavy hair slicked back. Whenever he yells across the office in his booming tenor’s voice, Billings, the resident comedian, responds in an Italian accent and addresses him as “Luciano” or “Maestro,” which amuses everybody but Pastorini. “I’ll Luciano you,” he says, whatever that means. He’s forever talking about cutting down on his caffeine. “You think I’m edgy, Hank?” he’ll ask the always calm Madden, whom he considers his right hand. “You think I gotta cut down?” He tries, all the time. But his way of cutting down is switching from one form of caffeine to another—from espresso to regular coffee, for instance, or, in this, his latest phase, from iced coffee to Diet Coke. He’ll go from drinking four to five iced coffees a day to eight to ten Diet Cokes. In the end, everything evens out. “What’s going on, Pete?” Madden asks when they get outside. Pastorini, spotting a small white wrought-iron bench in the entryway, decides to sit. The bench is meant to accommodate two, but the sergeant almost fills it. 34 D AV I D C A R N O Y He exhales deeply and says in a low voice: “I’ll tell you what’s going on. A couple of hours ago, I get a call from the DA’s office— from Crowley himself—asking to do him a favor. He says, ‘I know these people, they’re friends of mine, and they say their sixteen-yearold daughter was raped by her doctor back in late February.’” He pauses, anticipating a reaction, but Madden, prepared this time, doesn’t let his apprehension show. “I heard.” “Well, he tells me that a couple of uniforms are going over to their house to make a report and would I mind making sure everything is handled correctly. No big deal, right? But when I show up, this guy, Kroiter, immediately starts giving me the third degree. You know, throwing names around, and telling me about all the experience he’s had with detectives. He’s in the insurance business. Investigates insurance fraud. That’s how he knows Crowley.” Madden doesn’t care about the politics. He just wants to know whether they have a body or not. Yet he knows Pastorini well enough to know he’s telling the story the way he is for a reason. He figures the process is somehow therapeutic. So he plays along. He asks: “Why did it take him over a month to report that his daughter had been raped?” “I’m getting to that.” The sergeant takes a sip of Diet Coke, jiggling the can to rustle the last remaining drops from it. “The girl kept a diary,” he says. “Her grades were down, and her mother was poking around her room a few days ago, looking for reasons why, and discovered it.” “She wrote about it in her diary but didn’t tell anyone,” Madden says. “Not exactly. She wrote about having sex with the doc but nothing about rape.” Now Madden’s really confused. “Thing is, she was drunk,” Pastorini goes on. “The parents think this guy took advantage of her. Maybe, maybe not. Either way, I tell them, we’re looking at it as a rape case.” In California, statutory rape doesn’t exist. If an adult has sex Knife Music 35 with a minor, it’s prosecuted as a rape case. That’s all Pastorini meant. “Was she sexually active prior?” “Virgin. And the parents had a doctor confirm she ain’t anymore.” “Wonderful. And the incident took place in the hospital?” “No, the guy’s home.” Pastorini draws the can of soda to his mouth again—even though it’s empty. “Anyway,” he continues, “we finally get done with the parents and it comes time to talk to the girl and confirm all this, right? So the father goes upstairs to get her. But she won’t come out of her room.” At first, Kroiter—Bill is his first name—tried to sweet-talk his daughter into opening the door. Come on down, honey, and talk to the nice officers. That sort of thing. But when she didn’t respond, he started to get angry. Went right to: “OK, I’ve had enough of this crap, shut off the music, and come out right now!” When his voice hit a certain octave, Pastorini decided he’d better go up and try to coax her out. He was pretty good at that type of negotiation, having two teenage daughters himself. But when he didn’t get anywhere, he got a bad feeling something was wrong. He told one of the uniforms to break the lock. The room was empty. There was some music playing over her computer’s speakers, but no sign of the girl. They figured she flew the coop, slipped out the window or something. But then one of the uniforms looked in the bathroom attached to the room. “When I heard him say ‘Holy Christ,’ I knew it was bad,” Pastorini says. “How bad?” “She hung herself from the showerhead, Hank.” “Jesus.” The sergeant shakes his head slowly, staring blankly ahead. “Turned seventeen a couple of weeks ago,” he says, and takes another phantom sip of Diet Coke from the empty can. Madden notices then that the street-hockey gang is looking at them. They’re 36 D AV I D C A R N O Y not on the sidewalk in front of the house anymore, but they’re milling around in the street, doing a bad job of pretending they’re not interested. “Pete?” “What?” “Tell me she left a nice note explaining everything.” Pastorini nods, only half-hearing what he said. “On the desk. I saw something. A poem, I think.” “A poem?” “Yeah, it was typed out. Computer printout. But something was written on the bottom. Something odd.” “What’d it say?” Pastorini looks up at him, his mouth slowly breaking into an ironical smile. “You’re going to love this,” he says. “What?” “It said, ‘I will not be a victim.’” 5/ KEANU REEVES’S AURA November 10, 2006—5:45 a.m. telephone. Sometimes, because the room was dark, he didn’t know whether it was night or day or whether he’d slept fifteen minutes or three hours. So he answered the phone like this: “What time is it?” “5:45 in the a.m. Rise and shine, big boy.” It was Julie, thank God, and not the triage nurse downstairs. “Gimme a minute,” he said, his eyes still closed. “I’m telling you, Cogan, you should think about that spa.” “Find me one where they submerge you in a vat of coffee and I’m there.” “I’m perking as we speak.” “I’m glad one of us is.” “Get up. I let you sleep fifteen minutes extra.” “How kind.” After he hung up, he willed himself out of bed and went to the window and drew the shades. It was just getting light out. A dull gray day. But you never knew with northern California weather. Things had a way of burning off. By noon it could be sunny and seventy. “Beckler’s looking for you,” Julie said when he walked into the OR twenty minutes later, clean-shaven and showered. “What does she want?” M ORNING CAME NOT WITH LIGHT BUT WITH THE RING OF THE 38 D AV I D C A R N O Y “She didn’t say. Hey, Cogan, have you ever heard of a comb?” “Is that a new surgical instrument?” “The latest. Makes you look pretty, with no side effects.” “Sounds promising. I’ll be back. I’m just going to check on the girl.” He walked over to the recovery room, which was just across the hall from the OR. It had been a slow night. There were five patients in the room, including the fat woman, who was three times as big as Cogan’s patient. They were lying directly across from each other, in separate curtained-off spaces. Both the fat lady and the girl were asleep. Cogan picked up the girl’s chart. He was mainly interested in her vitals. Her blood pressure was running 110 over 60. Her heart rate was in the 80s. And her urine output near 100cc per hour. Everything was good. “Hey, Ted.” “Morning, Josie.” This was the recovery nurse, Josie Ling. Asian-American. Short and serious. Very dry sense of humor. “They let you off pretty easy, huh? Only one vic.” One victim too many, as far as he was concerned. “What are her post-op labs?” he asked. “Post-op hemoglobin 13 and most recent 13.6.” “Good.” He reached down and gently pulled down the blanket that was covering the girl. It wasn’t gentle enough, however, because she stirred. “Hi, Kristen,” he said quietly. “It’s Dr. Cogan again. How are you doing? Are you feeling any pain?” She opened and closed her eyes. She was very groggy. “You’re not in any pain, are you, Kristen?” “Not really,” she said. “Are you aware of what happened? Do you know where you are?” “I was in a car accident,” she answered. “I’m in the hospital.” “Do you remember the accident?” “Yeah.” Knife Music 39 “What happened?” “Someone turned in front of me.” “Someone cut you off?” She nodded. She was fully awake now. Drowsy but awake. He explained to her that she’d had an operation. She’d been bleeding internally, which was very dangerous. The impact of the accident had ruptured her spleen, so they had to take it out. She wanted to know whether that was bad. “Well, there are much worse things that could have happened to you,” he said. “But it’s still an operation, and we have to watch you very carefully for the next few days. That’s why my friend Josie is here. She’s here to monitor you for the next few hours before we send you to a room.” The girl’s eyes took in the nurse briefly then fell back on Cogan. “Your parents were here earlier,” he said. “They saw you right after the operation. But I suggested they go home because I knew you’d be sleeping for a while.” “Were they mad?” “No. Upset but not mad.” She looked away, distraught. “They’ll never let me get a car now,” she murmured. “I wouldn’t worry about that right now.” “You don’t know my Dad.” “I’m just going to check your dressing,” he said, trying to take her mind off the car. “Then I’ll let you go back to sleep.” “OK.” He lowered the blanket a little more, so it was just below her waist, then lifted her pajamas until her bandage was exposed. The bandage was clean, dry, and intact. It seemed fine. Next, he felt her stomach, pressing lightly, making sure it wasn’t excessively firm. Then, covering her up, he said, “Everything looks good.” “Is it going to be a big scar?” “No, not too big. Just about this long.” He spread his fingers apart about four inches. “And very thin. You know Keanu Reeves?” “Not personally.” 40 D AV I D C A R N O Y Cogan smiled. “You like him?” “He’s OK.” “Well, he was in a motorcycle accident and they had to remove his spleen. Same as you, and he looks pretty good in a bikini, right?” “I guess.” She paused, closing her eyes. Then, opening them again, she said, “But he’s a movie star. He has an aura. He could have five scars and it wouldn’t matter.” Cogan laughed. “Well, maybe you have an aura, too, and you just don’t know it.” “I better,” she said. “Because I’m not going to have a car.” 6/ A MOMENT OF FATAL IMPULSIVENESS March 31, 2007—4:57 p.m. hey’d found the girl facing forward, a leather belt around her neck, suspended with her back to the wall of the shower stall. What struck Pastorini was how close her feet had been to touching the floor. They were no more than a couple of inches above the tiles. She’d worn a pair of platform sandals into the shower and kicked them off. One sandal was in one corner of the shower, the other just in front of her. They must have had four-inch heels. Orange, decorated in a retro flower-power design. Pastorini didn’t notice any of that right away, though. When he first saw her, there was something about how close her feet were to the floor that made him think they weren’t too late, that maybe they could bring her back. So, he dove into the shower stall and lifted her up and tried to unhook the belt from the showerhead. But at five-foot-seven he had trouble lifting her high enough. That’s when the bigger of the two uniforms had to step in and help. They gave her CPR on the floor of her room. They tried to resuscitate her for almost ten minutes, even though Pastorini knew the moment he put his mouth to hers that it was hopeless. Her body was still warm, but he thought she must have been dead for at least fifteen minutes and probably longer. Both of the parents were screaming. No, God. No, no, no. And then, when it was clear that nothing could be done for her, everybody and everything just T 42 D AV I D C A R N O Y stopped for a moment. Pastorini, on his knees, looked across the room at Bill Kroiter, who’d pulled his wife’s head to his chest, impossibly trying to shield her from the unfathomable. To say anything was pointless. After he gave them a moment with her, he had the uniforms take them downstairs. Then he himself lifted the girl onto her bed and covered her with a sheet he found in a linen closet down the hall. He was sorry he moved the body, he told Madden. But he just couldn’t bear to see her lying on the floor like that. And since he’d already moved her once, it didn’t seem to matter that he put her up on the bed. “Can’t blame him,” Greg Lyons, an investigator from the San Mateo County Coroner’s Office, now says. “I probably would have done the same thing, given the circumstances.” Lyons is standing by the side of the bed, stretching latex gloves over his hands. Not far behind him, Vincent Lee, one of the county crime-scene photographers, is in the bathroom doing his job, and the bursts of light from his flash and the sound of it recharging between shots leak into the bedroom at regular intervals. “He’s pretty shaken,” says Madden, already gloved. “Been sipping an empty can of Diet Coke for ten minutes.” “Better that than a full bottle of Jack.” “True.” With his blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, neatly trimmed goatee, and round, designer glasses, you’d guess Lyons was an artist long before you’d say coroner’s investigator. He unclips his penlight from his shirt pocket and goes to work examining the body. The girl’s face is ashen, her lips a faint blue. Her eyes are closed but her mouth is slightly open, just enough to appear disturbing. Lyons, a former paramedic, starts with the neck, where the classic V-shaped line of a ligature runs across the front just above the larynx. While the natural light streaming into the room isn’t intense, Madden can make out the mark just fine. Still, Lyons plays the flashlight over the line to bring out its detail, then touches her chin and lifts it up, pushing her lips closed. The moment he lets go her mouth springs back to its original position and the gap returns. Knife Music 43 “Rigor’s already setting in,” he comments. “How long you been here?” “Twenty, twenty-five minutes—tops.” “Where’s Burns?” Lyons asks. Burns is his partner. He’s in Lake Tahoe for the weekend. “Skiing at Squaw,” Madden says. “I didn’t know he skied. The guy can’t stand the cold.” “His girlfriend’s into it. But he only goes in the spring, when it’s fifty and slushy.” Lyons nods, then lifts the girl’s left eyelid and shines the light at the eye for a few seconds, then does the same on the right. He shows Madden what they both suspect will be there: the whites of the eyes are blotched with tiny red dots—pinpoint hemorrhages, or petechiae, that are the physical evidence of ligature strangulation. He looks at her cheeks and inside her nose for more, takes a look inside her mouth and ears, then pulls the sheet back and examines the rest of her body—or the parts he can without removing her clothes. Making a circle with the flashlight, Lyons highlights a discoloration on her right arm—a small bruise in the bicep area. “Someone could have grabbed her hard there,” he says. “Looks pretty fresh.” He moves the flashlight down to her wrists. “No signs of self-mutilation. And her hands look OK.” Madden nods. “I’ll bag ‘em when you’re through.” They put paper bags on victims’ hands to preserve any trace evidence. Usually, but not always, if there was some sort of struggle, you could tell from the victim’s hands. If you were lucky, you’d find them clutching a hair or two. But the girl’s hands look clean; her nails appear to be in pretty good shape, though her nail polish, an opalescent color, is chipping in places. Later, in the crime lab, the coroner will scrape the underside of her nails for debris, then clip them and package each hand’s nails separately. Madden watches Lyons turn the girl on her side and take a cursory look at the back of her neck and arms, paying extra attention to the area where the bruise is. The skin is discolored almost all the way around the arm, though not quite. That’s the only thing 44 D AV I D C A R N O Y that gives the appearance of a struggle—that, and the heel of her right foot, which is also bruised. “She might have kicked it back against the shower wall,” Lyons says, fishing a rectal thermometer out of his bag to take the body temperature and make a rough estimate of time of death. However, before he lowers the girl’s light blue, terry-cloth-style sweatpants, Madden says, “How ’bout we make sure there isn’t any trace evidence first? We’ve got the time of death pretty much nailed down anyway.” Lyons nods. “You got some reason to suspect foul play?” “Just being cautious, Greg. There are some extenuating circumstances.” Without elaborating, Madden turns away and looks out the window, which faces the front of the house. Outside, another squad car has pulled up and a few curious neighbors are loitering on the sidewalk in front of the residence. But Pastorini’s efforts to limit the spectacle—for the sake of both the family and their investigation— seem to be paying off. He’s told officers to stay off their radios and he used his cell phone to call in a minimum number of personnel. If this was a homicide, he might call in all four general crimes detectives and even the department’s two narcotics-enforcement detectives, who are primarily assigned to drug- and gang-related cases but are also trained to assist in homicide investigations. The narcotics sergeant might show up, and even the division commander. However, in a situation like this, where they’re looking to avoid any media attention, the fewer people traipsing around the premises the better. It also doesn’t hurt that Vintage Oaks is gated and can be easily sealed off. “Anybody interesting out there?” Lyons asks, making some notations in his notebook. Madden glances at his watch. “Not really. Ambulance won’t be here for another fifteen,” he says, and just then Vincent Lee comes out of the bathroom. He’s a tiny man, no more than fivefoot-three, who has a crew-cut and a diamond stud in his left ear. He went to the same high school as Madden, Woodside—or Weedside, as locals sometimes call it, deferring to the nickname that stuck from Knife Music 45 the peak pot years of the 1970s. But Lee, who’s in his early thirties, had graduated twenty-five years after Madden. “I’m done in the bathroom, Hank,” he says. “You ready for me in here?” Madden nods. “We’ve got a couple of bruises. And since the body was moved, let’s get some shots with the belt next to the ligature marks on her neck. I want to make sure everything matches up. Oh, and give me a couple of Polaroids of the bruises. Closeups, OK?” “If you don’t mind, I’m going to take a few shots as well,” Lyons says. With digital SLR cameras becoming affordable, it had become easier—and a lot cheaper—to document crime scenes. Everybody these days seemed to have a decent camera. Even Madden had one out in the car, a Canon, that he kept around for back-up. After Lee shoots the body, Madden tells him to shoot the rest of the room, starting with the desk, where the poem, along with the girl’s cell phone, is resting to the left of the computer’s keyboard. To describe the room as that of your typical suburban teen girl wouldn’t be a stretch, but on certain levels it feels more mature than that. Perhaps Madden’s getting that vibe because on one wall there’s a giant French movie poster with an almost life-size image of the actress Renée Zellweger in black boots and a mini-skirt. It’s a poster for the movie Bridget Jones’s Diary, which translates into French as Le Journal de Bridget Jones. Running down the left side of the print is a bulleted list of seven of Bridget’s do’s and don’ts from her diary, with the last item reading “J’arrête de faire des listes,” or “I will stop making lists,” as Vincent Lee, who did four years of French at Woodside High, informs him. Yes, there are some girlish items—a small collection of dolls and stuffed animals on a shelf, a giant stuffed Sulley from Monsters, Inc. in a corner, a couple of homemade collages with pictures of friends, a flowery bedspread, and a violet Chinchilla beanbag that goes well with the aqua- and purple-colored Sulley. But overall, the room is pretty neat and relatively uncluttered. Her books are stacked three rows high on a bookshelf along with a row of DVDs 46 D AV I D C A R N O Y that appear to be in alphabetical order. Her desk, too, only has a few things on it: a flat-panel Apple iMac, printer, iPod, portable DVD player, small stack of CDs, and some framed photos. “Shame,” says Lee, who’s stopped taking pictures and is looking at one of the girl’s photo collages. “Attractive girl—and not a bad photographer.” Madden shoots him a look. He’s never comfortable talking about a victim’s looks, but especially when she’s lying dead in the room. “What?” Lee says defensively. “Am I wrong?” Then, turning to Lyons, who’s putting his camera away. “Greg? Am I?” “No,” Lyons says. He isn’t. The truth—or what Madden’s gut tells him is the truth—is that she’s a pretty girl but not a dangerous girl. Not a seductress. He’s seen a few of those in his time. Fourteen-, fifteen-, sixteen-year-old girls who’d sat there smiling back at him, knowing they held some power over boys but coveted men instead. They were adults in a children’s world—to a degree. Always to a degree. But Kristen Kroiter, judging from the pictures on the walls and on her desk, is—or rather, was—not one of these girls. “I tell ya, though,” Lyons says, coming up next to Madden, who’s standing at the desk, “she doesn’t seem like the type to off herself.” Madden picks up the cell phone now that it’s been photographed. “They don’t always,” he says as he toggles through the menu system until he hits on the call-history icon. “With the girls,” Lyons goes on, “it’s usually pills or wrists. They don’t hang themselves too often. Not their thing.” “I heard about one in the East Bay last year,” Lee says, in the middle of switching lenses. “A little older. Nineteen, I think.” “Well, maybe it’s getting more popular,” Lyons says. “She leave a note?” Madden is still staring at the phone’s screen. The girl appears to have made several calls that afternoon, though it looks to be seven calls to only two numbers, which could mean she didn’t get through every time. “Some sort of poem,” he says out of the side of Knife Music 47 his mouth, concentrating on correctly transcribing the numbers and the times they were called into his notebook. “‘Anthem for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl’ is the title.” Lyons looks at the sheet of paper. “‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl,’” he corrects him. “And it’s not a poem. It’s lyrics—to a song.” Madden stops writing and looks at him. “You know it?” “It’s from a few years ago. By a Canadian band. Broken Social Scene.” “They’re good,” Lee approves from across the room. “‘Now you’re all gone got your make-up on and you’re not coming back,” Lyons mutters, reading from the sheet. “‘Bleaching your teeth, smiling flash, talking trash, under your breath / Park that car, drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me.’” He pauses briefly, then recites the handwritten words at the bottom: “‘I will not be a victim. I can’t. I’m sorry. Don’t hate me, but you should have listened. You all should have listened.’” “Mean anything to you?” Madden asks Lyons. The investigator shrugs. “The song? Just the general angst of being a teenager, I guess.” “How ’bout this?” Madden says, hitting the space bar on the computer, waking the screen up. He points to an icon of a CD on the display. Then he hits the eject button on the keyboard and the tray slides out from the front of the computer’s bulbous base. There’s a disc in the tray, a CD-R. On the disc, neatly handwritten in permanent black ink, in all caps, are the words, “KNIFE MUSIC II.” “Ring any bells for you?” Lyons stares at the disc, contemplating it. From directly behind them, Lee fires off a shot of the gold-colored Maxell CD-R. The burst of the flash appears to trigger one in Lyons’s head as well, for he says suddenly: “You know, this is probably way off, but that’s a term surgeons sometimes use to describe the music they play in the operating room.” “Surgeons?” Madden says, startled. 48 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Yeah. Why? That mean something?” Madden looks at the numbers in his notebook. He puts the girl’s phone down on the desk and pulls his Motorola out of its belt holster and flips it open. “Hey, Donna,” he says when he gets the weekend dispatcher on the phone. “Hank Madden. Can you do me a favor and run a couple phone numbers? I’m not in my car.” “Gimme a minute, Hank,” she says. “Let me get my computer back on. I was just restarting it.” When she’s ready, he reads the second number, the one the girl dialed four times. A short silence on the line, then her voice comes back. “Belongs to one Carrie Pinklow.” He reads her the first number, the one the girl dialed three times, the last time around three hours ago, at 1:36 p.m. “That one’s T. Cogan.” “Is that a Mr. Cogan?” he asks. Another silence, this one shorter. “Actually, that’s a doctor, Hank. Dr. T. Cogan.” 7/ SEAVER GOES THE DISTANCE Summer, 1973 HIS MOTHER had something wrong with her brain. She kept forgetting things, and no one could tell her why, so they took her to the University of Chicago Medical Center to see someone called a specialist. He remembered walking into the hospital and seeing people in white coats and his father telling him these people were going to try to make his mother better. That was his first impression of doctors, and his introduction to medicine. His mother died in 1983, when he was nineteen. But she’d been institutionalized in a Jewish nursing home for the previous six years. She died at sixty. Initially, she was very forgetful. She couldn’t remember, for instance, where she’d left things around the house. Or his father would take her shopping downtown, and he’d say, Phyllis, meet me in front of such and such store at five o’clock. But when he’d show up at five o’clock, she wouldn’t be there. And he’d end up looking for her everywhere. When he finally found her he’d say, “What the heck’s going on?” And she’d say, “I don’t know. I don’t remember a thing.” There was obviously something wrong. And later there were personality changes. Today, people recognize these as symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, but back then no one really knew what was wrong. His brother, who was almost eleven years older, grew up in a C OGAN WAS NINE WHEN HE FIRST VISITED A HOSPITAL. 50 D AV I D C A R N O Y more traditional setting. His father would come home around six after a hard day at work in the bakery and his wife would meet him with a prepared dinner and would wait on him and her boy. She waited on everybody. She saw that as the role she had to play. And in that generation that was the role you had to play. There wasn’t a lot of outward affection, hugging and kissing and so forth. And there wasn’t a lot of Ward Cleaver, Hello, Dear, and all that. But there was at least some semblance of a family with dinner on the table. By the time Cogan was nine it was all gone. They took his mother away for good when he was eleven. A few years earlier, his older brother had gone to ’Nam. He was in the Marines. It made for a strange adolescence. His father worked long hours then went out at night sometimes, leaving him home alone. It was at night, after he finished his homework, that he played ball. He would stand outside in the driveway, pitching old tennis balls into a wooden box filled with Styrofoam in the back of the garage. The hole in the box was the exact height and size of the strike zone. For hours, he’d throw balls into the box. Once, he threw fifty straight strikes. “Who’s pitching tonight, Teddy?” one of the neighbors, a widower named Sid Feinberg, would always ask when he took his dog out for his nightly walk. “Seaver,” he said. “I thought he pitched Sunday.” “We’re going for the pennant. I had to send him on one day’s rest.” “Is that wise?” “Well, it’s the top of the seventh and he’s pitching a two-hitter with thirteen strikeouts.” “Pull him,” Feinberg said. “Pull him before it’s too late.” “No way. He’s going the distance.” Tom Seaver was his favorite pitcher. And Seaver always went the distance. “We’ll see,” Feinberg called out as his dog dragged him away. “I’ll be back for the ninth.” His mother’s illness had made him a pitcher. Had it made Knife Music 51 him a doctor, too? He often wondered about that. All those visits to the hospital. All those men in white coats. Surely there’d been a transference. In the beginning of the tenth grade, he met a girl, Melissa McCumber, at a high school science competition that was held at Northwestern University. She was tall, gawky, a year older than Cogan, and went to Frances Parker, a small private school that Cogan’s friends said was for “rich bitches.” And although Melissa McCumber was rich—or at least her stockbroker father was—she was not a bitch. In fact, she was one of the few truly nice girls Cogan had met. On Sundays, when it was warm, she would invite him to her house in Lincoln Park to go swimming. It took a bus, a train, and some walking to get there, but he always thought it was worth it. Her friends would come over and they would play games and Mrs. McCumber would interrupt them, bringing them sandwiches and drinks by the pool. The McCumbers’ refrigerator was always full— full of sodas, meats, pickles, and leftovers—and Cogan could take whatever he wanted. Mrs. McCumber encouraged him to. “Please, Teddy, eat this,” she’d say. “It’s just going to go bad otherwise. The girls won’t eat it.” The first time he visited the McCumbers, he took the train and bus back home. But when Mrs. McCumber found out he’d taken public transportation across town after dark, the next time she insisted that he stay for dinner and that Mr. McCumber—Bill— would take him home when they were finished eating. Nothing was ever said, but Melissa must have told her parents what his situation was like at home: that his father worked long hours and often came back late (he never talked about dating, but Cogan had heard the rumors), and that he was basically going home to a Swanson frozen dinner. That had to be why Mrs. McCumber always had an extra steak or plenty of chicken for him. “Please, join us, Teddy,” was how she asked. And when he sat down, he looked around the table and said to himself, This is the way it’s supposed to be. This is what I want to have when I get to this stage in my life. Bill McCumber was a heavyset man who’d had the lower part 52 D AV I D C A R N O Y of his right leg blown off in the Korean War. He wore a prosthetic and walked with an awkward limp, but it didn’t stop him from playing golf most weekends. Usually, he wasn’t around during the day; he’d come home just before dinner and sit down in the living room, prop his legs up on the coffee table, and have a cocktail and a cigar and read the newspaper. He was jovial and loud, almost the opposite of Cogan’s father. But Cogan admired Bill McCumber, for he felt he was a man who truly knew how to enjoy life and would continue to enjoy it no matter what misfortunes befell him. Cogan saw that as true strength. A real virtue. Riding home in Mr. McCumber’s Cadillac, they talked about sports and geography. Cogan had a foreign coin collection and knew something about the countries whose coins he’d acquired and more about the countries he hadn’t, like Mongolia and those African republics that no Americans except the CIA ever visited. Someday, of course, he wanted to go there. He wanted to travel, and traveling was a passion of Mr. McCumber’s. Every year, he’d take the family somewhere new. That year, they were going to Egypt to see the pyramids. The next year, maybe Scandinavia. As he drove, Mr. McCumber described previous trips and planned new ones. Cogan never said much. He nodded a lot or said, “Wow, that’s great,” though secretly he wished Mr. McCumber would take him along on the family’s next trip. Whenever they arrived in Cogan’s neighborhood, the conversation would invariably die down. Budlong Woods was Jewish and middle class; it was made up of small houses and drab brick apartment buildings. Every time they pulled into the narrow, single-car driveway that served as his pitching mound, Cogan felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment. He wanted to escape the Cadillac as quickly as possible. “Thank you for taking the time out to drive me home,” he’d tell Mr. McCumber. “I appreciate it.” Then he’d step out of the car and dash inside the house. It must have happened seven or eight times before one day Mr. McCumber stopped him. “Hold on a second,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” Knife Music 53 Cogan looked at him, a little petrified. “Have you considered college at all? Did you have one in mind?” Cogan said, no, not exactly. He liked Northwestern a lot. It was good academically and a Big Ten school, which was good for sports. He’d considered going there, but it depended on what money he could get—on whether, really, he could get a scholarship, because, frankly, his father couldn’t afford to send him to a private school. His brother had gone to a state university. Mr. McCumber nodded. “You and Melissa have become good friends, haven’t you?” Cogan didn’t know how to respond. He wasn’t sure what Mr. McCumber was trying to get at. Did he think he had the hots for his daughter? “I guess we have,” he answered timidly. “We have similar interests.” “She thinks very highly of you. She says you’re a good ball player and quite the student. Near the top of your class.” “She’s been very nice to me. You and Mrs. McCumber, too.” “You know, I tried to send her away to school last year,” Mr. McCumber went on, seeming to ignore his response. “But she didn’t want to go. She’s very close to her mother, and she didn’t want to leave her friends here.” There was a short silence. Cogan still didn’t know what he was driving at. “I thought with your mother having passed away, and your father—I understand he isn’t around that much. I thought you might be interested in going away to school. To a boarding school.” “I don’t know. I don’t really know anything about boarding schools.” “Well, I think you’d be a good candidate for a scholarship. I could sponsor you—I could put in a word at my alma mater, the school I went to in Massachusetts. I give them a nice contribution each year. We could put in an application. Would you like to do that?” Cogan shrugged. “Sure.” 54 D AV I D C A R N O Y Mr. McCumber smiled. “OK, then,” he said, becoming more himself. “We’ll get to work on it. Good man.” They shook on it. He didn’t think much about Mr. McCumber’s offer until Melissa, a week later, showed up at his baseball practice to angrily and tearfully condemn her father. “He says we’re getting too involved,” she said. “That’s why he wants to send you away.” Cogan looked at her, dumbfounded. “What do you mean, involved?” he asked. “We’re friends.” “He doesn’t want us to go out.” “But we’re not going out. We’re just friends.” “Sure. But you know, Teddy—you know how close we’ve gotten. And you know—I think you do—that I like you more than as a friend.” Cogan, standing there behind the backstop on that sunny day suddenly realized he was at the center of some larger drama that was taking place completely in his absence. He’d assumed he was such a tiny part of the McCumber family’s life. Another weekend visitor. Another of Melissa’s many friends. And here he’d somehow become elevated to this exalted status, having to be sent away. Sent away—it seemed far too serious. Sure, she may have liked him. That didn’t shock him. There had always been hints of that, though less than she was trying to make him believe now. But to have to be sent away because of it seemed awfully drastic, especially since her parents seemed to like him. He couldn’t understand that. How could they want to send him away after they’d always welcomed him into their home and said nothing but good things about him? “I don’t get it,” he said. “I thought your parents liked me.” “They do,” she said. “So what do they care whether we’re friends or involved or whatever?” Melissa fell silent. “What do they care?” he pressed her. She couldn’t look him in the eye when she told him. Knife Music 55 “You’re Jewish, Teddy,” she said. “And they don’t want me dating Jewish boys.” “But we’re not dating.” She fell silent again. Then, after a moment, she said: “They don’t even want me to have feelings for Jewish boys.” “Well, stop them, for Christ’s sake.” “I can’t.” Later, when he got home, he told his father about the incident. He told him about Mr. McCumber’s offer and how it was some strange ruse to keep him from seeing his daughter, whom he didn’t want to see anymore anyway. His father took in all his bewilderment without saying a word. Then, after, a moment, he said: “You know, they sent your great uncle Adam to die in a concentration camp for a similar offense. The family who was hiding him gave him up to the Gestapo because he became involved with one of the daughters.” He paused, then added: “Things have improved for your generation. Now there is guilt about it. They know what they are doing is wrong, but they want to make it right.” His father said the McCumbers liked him. “But why didn’t they talk to me?” Cogan asked. “Why didn’t they ask me how I felt?” “Because your feelings are irrelevant.” That only made him feel worse. “Do you like this girl?” his father asked. Sure, he liked her. But he didn’t want to date her. And he certainly didn’t want to marry her, which is what her parents probably thought. “Well, then maybe you should consider her father’s offer. Is it a good school?” Yes, it was. Very good, supposedly. “And it won’t cost anything?” “Mr. McCumber gives a lot of money to the school. He says he can get me a scholarship.” “Then be nice to Melissa. Keep spending time with her.” “But her father’s an anti-Semite.” 56 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Yes. But he doesn’t want to be. So you may as well take advantage of that.” So he did. And that’s how he ended up at Andover. Then Yale. Toward the end of college, when he was trying to decide what he wanted to do with his life, he spoke with his brother, Phil, whom he looked up to, and who, after the war, had become a high school teacher. He told his brother that he liked biology but studying human behavior was what really interested him. He was taking a lot of psychology classes. He was a double major, biology and psychology. And he’d heard some people up at Harvard were looking at the biological basis of mental illness, which he thought might be a good way to combine the two disciplines. He told his brother he was seriously considering getting a doctorate in psychology. “Teddy,” his brother said, “there are one hundred and one guys out in the street with PhDs in psychology who are today driving taxis. They can’t get a job. It’s real fun, it’s interesting to watch or to read about human behavior. But big fucking deal. You like psychology, go into psychiatry. You’ll have a job. Make a living. Why don’t you go to school for something that you can make a living at? Do yourself a favor and apply to medical school.” He’d thought a little about applying to medical school but had decided against it because a lot of the pre-meds he knew at Yale were real a-holes. They were high-strung tightwads. They wouldn’t share their notes for class. They wouldn’t tell you what books they were reading to prepare for a test. They were real borderline personalities, and he just couldn’t see spending the next four years with them. But reflecting on his brother’s advice, it didn’t sound like such a stupid idea. It was the Reagan years, the economy was good for some people, but as things stood, if he went into psychology and got a PhD, he probably would have a hard time getting a job when he got out. So he applied to medical school. In his application and in interviews, he talked about how his mother had Alzheimer’s and how he wanted to pursue a course of study in that direction. But once he got to medical school and did a couple of rotations in psych, he realized he was seeing very few Knife Music 57 Alzheimer’s patients because Alzheimer’s, it turned out, was a neurological condition, not a mental condition. What he ended up with instead was a lot of burnt-out schizophrenics who heard voices, talked to televisions, and were kept heavily medicated on Thorazine and other major tranquilizers. The resident he was working for would jack his prescriptions up to the highest “acceptable levels,” then leave the hospital to meet with a married woman. “Best thing for them, best thing for us,” he’d say as he left. At first, Cogan found his philosophy reprehensible, but as the weeks passed he gradually began to see his point. No one seemed to be making any progress. He began searching for something else to do. His next stop was clinical medicine. He decided he wanted to be a cardiologist. But he got as far as doing the medicine clerkship when he realized he was seeing a lot of mundane, chronic problems that in the long run were going to bore him to death. Then came a rotation on surgery. And the surgeon—the resident he was involved with—was a cool guy, very bright. He’d done medicine already and hated it. He was fully trained, board certified and everything, and had gone back and trained in surgery, which told Cogan something. They hung out together. When he was on call, Cogan would be on call with him. He’d tell Cogan he needed a pack of smokes, and Cogan would go out and get them and get kudos for it. That’s sort of how you got in the club. You fetched cigarettes and did what you were told. Then, one day, you scrubbed on a case, the resident let you do something, he took you under his wing. And all the while he was doing that, he was building you up, making you feel enthusiastic about surgery. Until you began to think, “I like this stuff, I can do this.” And that’s how Cogan became a surgeon. 8/ JENGA April 1, 2007—8:09 a.m. MADDEN FEELS UNEASY ABOUT THE CASE. And it’s not just because a doctor is involved or that the girl’s father is so certain that the doctor’s actions, not his, led to his daughter’s death. Part of him can’t help but empathize with the Kroiters. He, too, has a daughter. She’s only ten, but he can easily imagine her at Kristen’s age. And he doesn’t doubt he would have reacted just as the Kroiters had if he’d discovered she’d slept with the doctor, a forty-three-year-old man, even if she’d insisted the sex was consensual. He’d want to hammer the guy, too. No, what’s bothering him is how delicate the case seems. It reminds him of that game Jenga he plays with his family sometimes. You stack up the blocks and build a nice, stable tower. Then you take turns sliding out a block, hoping the tower doesn’t topple on your turn. Usually, it’s easy to pull blocks in the earlier rounds. But after your sixth or seventh go, things get pretty dicey. Pick the wrong block or fail to slide it out just right and the tower goes down with a loud clatter. The problem with this case, Madden thinks, is that he already feels like he’s on round seven. It’s just after eight in the morning, and he’s seated at his desk in his home office, his notes spread out on the desk in front of him. Yesterday, after they’d removed the girl’s body, he’d spent another two hours at the house, searching her room for evidence and skimming the contents of her Mac before it F ROM THE BEGINNING, Knife Music 59 was taken away for a computer forensic specialist to examine. He’d also spoken with her parents, which was easily the most painful part of the evening. They talked about their other children—an older daughter in law school at UCLA, and a son, a senior at Dartmouth, and how Kristen, their youngest, had expressed some interest in going back east for college. They showed him pictures: last year’s family Christmas gathering, Kristen in a hospital bed recovering from her car accident, Kristen, much younger, on the beach at Half Moon Bay. From the pictures, the girl looked more like her mother, a trim and proper woman with a streak of tomboy that made you think late thirties rather than early forties. She worked as a substitute French teacher and dabbled in interior design. Dressed simply and elegantly in silk khaki pants and a navy blue silk blouse, a string of pearls around her neck, her short hair neatly coifed, Elise Kroiter sat there silently at first, staring at the coffee table, reminding him of a stroke or advanced Alzheimer’s victim whom the nursing home staff had dressed up for a Sunday family visit. But when her husband began to recount the events leading up to that crushing afternoon, she broke from her shell and let her impressions be known. As she spoke, Madden detected a sense of challenge in her eyes; they were aimed squarely at her husband, and they seemed to say, This is one conversation you won’t monopolize. In fact, you will never monopolize a conversation again. No, Kristen hadn’t seemed depressed, she said. Moody, yes— “like all teenage girls”—and maybe a little complacent. But the thing that had concerned them was that her grades had been suffering at school. Two teachers had alerted them that she’d nearly flunked two exams and failed to turn in several assignments on time. She wasn’t her usual self, they said. Which is why Elise Kroiter took it upon herself to go poking around her daughter’s room. She thought she might be on drugs or something. She found the diary instead. And Madden’s search? Had it turned up anything? Well, he told them, aside from the CD-R and the calls she’d made, he’d discovered a nearly empty bottle of Percoset with Cogan as the pre- 60 D AV I D C A R N O Y scribing physician, as well as a more promising piece of evidence linking her to the doctor: a pair of scrub pants with a Parkview Hospital logo stamped on them. They were buried in a drawer and appeared to have a small stain with dried seminal fluid in the crotch area. Encouraging as that sounded, he didn’t want to raise their expectations. Even if it came back positive for Dr. Cogan’s DNA, he said, it didn’t prove anything. They needed more. It was then that the father said, “Please let us know how we can help, Detective. We’re devastated, but we still want to see that son of a bitch brought to justice. He killed her.” The way he said it, so flatly and unemotionally but with utter conviction, disturbed Madden. He wasn’t surprised that Kroiter believed Cogan was somehow responsible for Kristen’s death (the alternative was too ghastly), but his tone just struck him as too assured. “Well, Mr. Kroiter,” he felt obligated to clarify, “we haven’t determined that your daughter’s death was a homicide.” “You will,” he said. Sitting at his desk now, Madden sighs deeply, takes off his glasses, and rubs his eyes. He’s been up for two hours, working on the report. His children call the small spare bedroom that doubles as his office “the computer room” because he’d set up a pretty fancy computer, his one real toy, on the desk, along with a color printer and a scanner. There’s little else in the room: A fold-out couch, one large bookshelf filled with mostly non-fiction books (Madden doesn’t care much for novels and only goes to movies for his children’s sake), and a line of family photos on the window sill. On the wall, there’s a framed picture of him with the three other detectives from the general crimes unit, Billings, Burns, and Fernandez, as well as various diplomas and award plaques. Though there’s space for it, a feature from the San Jose Mercury News that his wife, Maria, had framed for his birthday, sits on the floor, propped against the bookshelf, mostly hidden from view. Only if you venture to that far corner of the room and face back toward the door will you see that the headline reads: “Handicap Doesn’t Slow Detective in Race to Catch Criminals.” Ask him Knife Music 61 why it hasn’t found a place on the wall and he’ll humbly mutter something about not feeling comfortable about tooting his own horn, he’s no show-off, and the frame would be in the closet if it hadn’t been a gift from his wife. Nicaraguan by birth, she was Pastorini’s housekeeper when they first met, and though they seemed an unlikely match—she barely spoke English, he barely spoke to women—their marriage had only gotten better as she became more fluent in English and he in Spanish. After thirteen years, he liked to tell people it worked because she thought he was too good for her and he thought she was too good for him—and that wasn’t far from the truth. The truth about the article is that it embarrasses him for a different reason. Buried in the middle of the piece is a reference to the sexual abuse he calculatingly divulged years ago to extract sympathy. At the time, the acknowledgment had been easily rationalized, a trifling revelation to which he was entitled, to help level the playing field and get the promotion he’d so badly wanted. But today it only represents pity. He looks at the headline and can’t help adding a multiplier. “Double Handicap Doesn’t Slow Detective . . .” As a boy, while being treated for polio, a physician had sexually assaulted him. He told the reporter who’d interviewed him for the article that initially he hadn’t known he was being abused. The doctor was crafty and, ironically, patient. Madden’s mother liked reading the magazines in the waiting room, and after their first visit, the doctor suggested she might be more comfortable remaining there, particularly since the boy seemed embarrassed to have her in the room during parts of the check-up. “I was nine,” he told the reporter, “I didn’t know what was required or not. But I’d had these exams before. I’d been to several doctors. So it seemed OK.” For instance, the doctor would hold his testicles and ask him to cough. Or he’d give him a rectal examination to make sure that his chronic constipation wasn’t “flaring up.” After a few visits, though, the man made incremental adjustments to the routine. His hand lingered a little longer. An extra finger was added to the rectal exam. Then it was not a finger at all. 62 D AV I D C A R N O Y “This may hurt a little,” the doctor said, voicing the gentle warning he usually delivered before pricking him with a needle. “But not for long.” Suddenly and excruciatingly, when he heard the man’s zipper open behind him, he realized he’d been terribly betrayed; everything before had been a ruse. He let out a scream—or at least tried to—but the man covered his mouth, stifling the cry, as he raped him. When he was through, the doctor pretended nothing happened; it had been as if he’d performed his regular examination. The only difference was this time, after he finished writing some notations in his chart, he handed Madden a box of tissues and said, “Henry, there’s a bathroom next door. Why don’t you take a moment and clean yourself up back there? There’s nothing to be embarrassed about. Just use hot water.” He remembered taking the tissues without saying anything. He was in a daze, certain he knew what had happened yet unable to totally believe it. Before he could get to the door, the doctor stopped him, gently squeezing his arm. “You know, Henry, whatever happens in a doctor’s office is never discussed by the patient or the doctor with anyone else,” he told him. “And that means your parents, too. It’s the law.” He never said anything about the incident. And he never asked anybody whether it really was a law, because law or not, he thought his father would think it was his fault, that he deserved it. “The guy was an idiot, he had it coming to him,” his father used to say about people who made bad decisions and had bad things happen to them as a result. He was ashamed that he hadn’t seen it coming or reacted more quickly once he heard the man’s fly open. He should have jabbed him with his elbow or tried to knock over the scale; the loud noise probably would have made him stop. And that was the part he knew his father would never understand—that he hadn’t fought back. So he didn’t say anything for a long time. Of course, years later, he realized he was completely wrong; he should’ve spoken out, for it would have prevented others from being abused. “I truly regret that,” he told the reporter, who would end up rewarding his candidness with a modicum of restraint. She provided enough detail without revealing too much. Knife Music 63 “When asked why he was drawn to detective work,” she wrote, “Madden reveals that his motive is partially personal. As a boy, while being treated for polio, a physician sexually abused him. He says that he was unable to confront the truth for many years, until he confided in a fellow officer who was working on a similar case. He regrets not saying anything earlier, for it could have prevented the physician, who was only brought to justice when Madden was in college, from abusing other patients. “‘One day, he picked the wrong kid,’ the detective said. ‘I’m sorry I wasn’t that kid. I won’t let it happen again.’” After the article came out, people behaved differently toward him. At times, he could tell they were being more cautious in how they chose their words. When certain topics came up, he no longer was a detective but a victim, which he found profoundly disturbing. Happily, Pastorini obliged his request that people “cut the bullshit” and relax and be “the insensitive bastards” they really were around him. But sometimes they took their comments a little too far. Maybe they were overcompensating, but most of them, especially guys like Billings and his partner, Fernandez—and even Pastorini occasionally—were just being pricks for the sake of being pricks. The Martin and Lewis of the office, Billings and Fernandez were constantly joking around. They had this shtick where they’d match up random people in fictional fights. “Madden versus the guy behind the deli counter at Luttiken’s,” they might say. Then they’d go around soliciting opinions and have people comment on the fighters’ strengths and weaknesses. Each week there were two new fighters. And each week they’d declare a winner. For some reason, everybody found it amusing. Madden isn’t thinking about all that now, though. He puts his glasses back on, and starts typing on the computer. He’s highlighted the main issues of the report and is now making a list of questions to ask the girl’s friend, Carrie Pinklow, whom she called a few hours before her death and was with her the night the alleged rape took place. The report is based entirely on events that had transpired in the diary and the interview with the girl’s parents. The rest of the file is the diary entries themselves—not the whole diary, just the entries 64 D AV I D C A R N O Y that are relevant to the case, which adds up to twenty-five pages of the girl’s clear, bubbly handwriting. The selected pages chronicle a period of about five months. They start in November, when the girl had to have an emergency operation, and finished in late March, about a month after she’d had sex with Cogan, the surgeon who’d performed the operation. It’s a bizarre little story, Madden thinks. Months after being treated at the hospital, Kristen ends up at Cogan’s home late one night after a party, drunk and practically unconscious. Her best friend, Carrie, had brought her there because she was worried about her condition but didn’t want to take her to the emergency room out of fear both girls would get in trouble with their parents. Cogan agreed to let Kristen stay the night in his guest room. Then, according to the diary, he had sex with her while her friend slept in the living room. Madden looks at the two photographs he has of Cogan. One is a driver’s license picture, the other a photograph from the local newspaper announcing his marriage to Jennifer McFadden six years ago. The first he got from the DMV, the second from an Internet search. Theodore Charles Cogan. Born December 10, 1963, in Chicago. Yale Undergrad. Harvard Med. Trauma surgeon at Parkview Med. He’s good-looking, Madden thinks. Intense eyes and a pleasant, confident smile. A doctor—a surgeon, no less—with his looks can have any woman he wants, he thinks. Why, then, the girl? No, Madden, he says to himself. The question isn’t why. It’s why not? “Why” is intellectual. “Why not” is impulsive. And poor judgment is ninety percent impulsive. His mind begins to drift. He imagines the scene that night— the girl in the doctor’s guest room. Cogan sits down on the bed, starts talking to the girl. Then, lightly, he touches her. Maybe it’s by accident. Maybe it’s a test. But he touches her and she doesn’t seem to mind. Then he lets his hand stray underneath her shirt. And while he’s doing it, he isn’t asking himself why he’s doing it. The point is Knife Music 65 he can do it. So, why not? “What are you doing, Daddy?” Madden turns around. His daughter has walked into the room and is standing behind him. “Daddy’s doing his homework,” he says. She comes and sits in his lap. “Who’s that?” she asks, pointing at Cogan’s picture. “He’s a doctor.” “Did he do something bad?” “Maybe.” “What did he do?” “Something you’re too young to hear about.” “Is it X-rated?” “Yes.” “Are you going to catch him?” “I don’t know. It’s going to be very difficult to prove what he did. I’m not sure I can.” “That’s why you’re doing your homework?” He smiles. “Yeah, that’s why.” A short silence. She’s buttered him up, now it’s time for the kill. “Can I play on the computer?” she asks. “Did you eat breakfast?” “Uh-huh.” “You sure?” “Ask Mommy.” Madden looks at his watch. It’s eight-fifteen. “Just give Daddy ten minutes,” he says. “Then you can play. But only for half an hour. You have to get ready for church.” “I can’t get to the next level in a half an hour,” she says. “Sure, you can.” “I didn’t last time.” “That’s not my fault, is it?” “Can’t we go to a later service?” “The longer you keep Daddy from doing his homework, the less time you get to play,” he says. “By my calculation, you’re about to lose a minute.” 66 D AV I D C A R N O Y She jumps off him. “That’s not fair,” she says. “You didn’t say anything before.” Madden looks at his watch. “There it is. You’re down to twenty-nine.” “Cheater,” she says, and runs out of the room. 9/ THREE BALLS DANCING November 10, 2006—6:57 a.m. COGAN HAD TO SEE that morning. Residents like Kim also did rounds, but when Cogan was in the hospital he had to see his patients twice a day— once in the morning and once in the afternoon. There was O’Dwyer, the big, burly guy who’d gotten cracked in the back by a bar stool and almost lost a kidney. Sanchez, who’d been shot in the leg very close to his groin during a “dispute” over money with a friend. Hart, the Mr. Fix-it, who’d fallen off his roof at ten in the evening. And Traynor, an ungrateful son-of-a-bitch dotcommer who’d wrecked himself on his motorcycle for the second time in two years. When they brought him in four nights ago, Cogan didn’t recognize him because he was so racked up. It took twelve hours of surgery and three surgeons to put him back together. But when he woke up a couple of days later in the ICU, Cogan realized he’d worked on him before. “Hey, didn’t I put you back together a couple of years ago?” he’d asked. “Déjà vu, Doc,” replied the kid, who was twenty-six and liked to boast to the nurses that he was worth ten million. “Déjà fucking vu.” The second accident only seemed to have made him more ungrateful, and Cogan should have known not to joke with him, but this morning, after he finished his examination, he let one slip out: HE GIRL WAS THE FIRST OF SEVERAL PATIENTS T 68 D AV I D C A R N O Y “You know, if you’re going to continue to hurt yourself like this you might think about getting paid for it. Evel Knievel made a nice living breaking his bones.” “Is that supposed to be funny?” “It’s a polite way of saying maybe you should give the bike a rest for a while. Like indefinitely. You don’t seem to have much luck with it.” “They pay you to give personal advice?” “No, that’s a freebie.” “Well, just do your fucking job and I’ll do mine.” “And what would your job be?” “To get the fuck out of here.” “Let me know when that position opens up, I’d like to interview for it. Does it come with stock options?” “I wouldn’t touch it if it didn’t.” The list of people went on. These were his trauma patients. He would see them during their hospital stays, then once or twice afterward to make sure his work was holding up. But beyond that, they would see their regular doctors or be passed on to specialists. He went to see his elective surgery patients next. Although he was trained as a trauma surgeon and performed that function four nights a week at Parkview, he was boarded as a thoracic surgeon, which meant he was a specialist in chest surgery. In some hospitals, the main reason trauma surgeons took elective cases was to make extra money because they were paid by the number of operations they did. But Cogan, who was on salary, took them for reasons that didn’t offer an immediate pay-off: to stay sharp in his area of expertise, establish a reputation outside trauma, and to appear productive to hospital administrators. He wasn’t planning on leaving Parkview tomorrow, but he knew he would someday, and he wanted to be able to pick his next destination. Sometimes he wondered whether the extra work was worth it, for there were days when he felt burnt out and longed to leave the profession altogether. When he was really fried, he prescribed himself a vacation, and his attitude and outlook would improve. But in the last eighteen months he’d noticed that the medicine seemed to Knife Music 69 be having less and less of an impact. Even after he upped the dosage to a whole month away from the hospital, the all-too-familiar funk returned within a few days. He tried not to let the little things get to him, like cocky dotcom douchebags who were making more than him. Or Mrs. Ellen Richter’s hemorrhoids. But inevitably they did. Mrs. Richter, age sixty-five, was the first of three lung-cancer patients he saw that morning. Cogan had removed a malignant tumor along with a third of her right lung two days earlier. Her prognosis was good. She might live five years. But this morning a complication had developed completely separate from the cancer. Mrs. Richter had hemorrhoids—she now had pain above and below—and she wanted to know what Cogan could do about it. She wanted him to operate on her again. Demanded it, in fact. “Isn’t there some laser surgery you could do?” These were the moments that Cogan found most frustrating. A patient in Mrs. Richter’s position should have been happy. She’d gotten through a life-threatening operation. He’d taken out her lung cancer. He might not have cured her, but she was far better off now. And she should have been happy he’d done what he could for her. But here she was, demanding he fix her hemorrhoids at seven in the morning. “I understand you’re uncomfortable, Mrs. Richter,” he said. “But right now, you don’t need a surgeon. Right now, we need to get you through this without another operation. I’d rather see you use some cream for the hemorrhoids.” “I used the cream.” “Well, maybe we can try another one. I’m more concerned with the balls. How are you doing with the balls?” Cogan was talking about the small device, an incentive spirometer, lying on the bed next to her. Made out of clear plastic, it housed three small balls that would, when you inhaled with proper gusto into the device’s mouthpiece, rise in their respective compartments. “Show me what you can do,” he said. Mrs. Richter picked up the device, put it to her mouth, and 70 D AV I D C A R N O Y drew a breath with as much force as she could muster. One ball rose halfway up in its compartment, but the other two didn’t rise at all. “OK,” he said. “That’s better than yesterday.” He told her she had to breathe into the device for fifteen minutes every hour. They needed to get her lung capacity up and make sure she didn’t get an infection. “I’ll be back this afternoon and I want to see those balls dancing.” “It’s hard.” “I know it’s hard. But it’ll feel good when you get them all going. I promise.” His next patient was younger, a woman in her fifties named Greer, who was very aware of her body and constantly monitoring it. “This seems more like the episodes I was having when you brought Dr. Fein to see me,” she said, describing some pain she was having in her breasts. “With the exception of last night and the night before, my fever was 101 and my breasts felt really heavy and tender. I thought I was getting an infection.” She was wearing her own sleeping gown, a thin pajama top that was almost halfway open. She probably left it unbuttoned so she could more easily monitor herself, but unlike a patient he saw yesterday, a forty-two-year-old woman who’d been in a car accident five weeks earlier and hit the steering wheel with her chest, Greer was quite comfortable exposing herself and having doctors and nurses examine her. Yesterday’s patient had bruised her sternum and heart, a myocardial contusion. She had large, pendulous breasts that she clearly felt uncomfortable revealing. From the get-go, he’d noticed she was very uncomfortable with his examinations, which automatically put him on alert. He was always careful not to give any wrong impressions when he was examining his female patients, but with certain women he could sense that he really needed to take extra precaution. When he examined women, he always had a female nurse or resident present at the examination. It was to protect him as well as Knife Music 71 the patient, because if anything went down—if the patient had a complaint—there was another woman there to act as a witness. In the three years Cogan had been at Parkview, two doctors had lost their jobs for allegedly doing inappropriate exams. “I know you took some pain meds yesterday,” he said to Greer without examining her. “Did you take anything today?” “I took one pill last night. But other than my breasts, I feel fine. I got all three balls dancing.” “Really? Lemme see that.” She picked up the device and inhaled deeply. “Wow,” he said. “There’s a woman down the hall who can barely get half of the first one.” “Well, when you first gave it to me, I thought you must be crazy.” “Very good. I’ll be back.” His last patient was in the worst shape of the three and the youngest at thirty-six. She was El Salvadorian and had three children, and Cogan felt bad for her because she was going to “box.” That was slang that meant she was going to die, and although he hadn’t liked the phrase when he’d first heard it, over the years he’d found that it had become an integral part of his vocabulary, so much so that he rarely used the d-word anymore. The woman had breast and lung cancer. They hadn’t caught either very early, and now they were carving her up in an attempt to save her. She’d had both breasts and an entire lung removed. She was now weighed only eighty-five pounds. If she were fifteen years older, Cogan wouldn’t have operated on her, but she was thirty-six and she had three kids and he wanted to try everything he could, even though he’d had to argue with administrators to get the OK. But now things had taken a turn for the worse. She had a lump on her shoulder that he was worried was a metastasis. He’d done the lung operation three weeks ago. Now the cancer was spreading. She was going to box. “Hi, Mrs. Dominguez. How are you doing this morning?” Mrs. Dominguez didn’t say anything. She just made a face and gave a little shrug of her shoulders. Cogan wasn’t sure whether she 72 D AV I D C A R N O Y understood what he’d said or just didn’t want to talk to him. Her English wasn’t good, so he always brought along an interpreter. There were a couple of nurses on the floor who spoke Spanish, and he would ask one of them to accompany him when he went to see Mrs. Dominguez. “Ask her how her pain is,” he said to the nurse, Claudia, who was standing next to him. “Is she in pain?” Claudia translated what he said and Mrs. Dominguez immediately became more animated. She spoke quickly, rattling off an answer. “She says she has trouble breathing. She has pain in her chest. In her arms. In her back.” “Ask if she took anything this morning.” “She took a pill about half an hour ago.” “Did it help?” “A little, she says.” “OK. Well, tell her I don’t want her to be afraid to say anything if she’s in pain. She should ask one of the nurses to come find me and I’ll up the dosage. OK?” “OK,” Mrs. Dominguez said after she heard the translation. “Tell her I just want to examine the lump on her shoulder.” After Mrs. Dominguez nodded her consent, Cogan slid her pajama down her arm and pressed down lightly on the lump, which was just a little smaller than a golf ball. It felt spongy. “I want you to tell her that I have to do some tests on that. I’m not going to do them now because I want her to rest. But this afternoon I’ll come and do a test.” Claudia translated what he said. “She wants to know if you are going to do another operation on her.” “Hopefully, we won’t have to do a biopsy,” he said to the nurse. “I’m just going to stick a needle in there and see what comes back. Hopefully, the lab will be able to tell just from the fluid. Don’t translate it like that. But tell her something along those lines.” Whatever she said was good, because Mrs. Dominguez seemed relieved. Knife Music 73 “Thanks, Claudia,” he said to the nurse. Then to Mrs. Dominguez: “You hang in there, OK?” Claudia translated what he said. “OK,” Mrs. Dominguez said. “I’ll be back this afternoon.” Whenever he met with patients who were in the advanced stages of cancer, he thought of Dr. Liu, an oncologist at the hospital who was known for his brutal honesty. Liu was Chinese, and although he spoke English well, he spoke with a harsh Chinese accent, which only seemed to add to the brutality of his medical analysis. For instance, a patient who had lung cancer that had reappeared after a brief remission would ask with trepidation how things looked, and Liu, ever so bluntly, would respond: “You have lung cancer. You are going to die.” Just like that. No sugar-coating. No posturing. Many left his office in tears, wondering how their doctors could have sent them to Dr. Liu. But remarkably, a few weren’t angry. A few said thank you. They liked him because he was very up-front and knowledgeable about his field. He knew the literature. He knew his patients. He followed them very closely. And they appreciated it. You have cancer. You are going to die. Thank you for telling me. Thank you very much. Cogan couldn’t do it. Even if some people appreciated it. He couldn’t shut the door like that, slam it in their faces. He always left it open a crack. “If it was me,” his ex-wife had once argued, “I’d want to know I was going to die. And I wouldn’t want to waste my time or money on awful treatments that weren’t going to work.” “Easy for a healthy person to say,” he replied. But these people were desperate. Desperate to cling to any hope. And to extinguish that was cruel. “I tell them the truth,” he said. “With certain types of cancer, I tell them there’s little chance the treatment will work. But they don’t want to hear it. They say, there must be something you can do. And the truth is, there’s always something you can do. That is the cruelty of modern medicine.” 74 D AV I D C A R N O Y “No,” she said. “It’s you who doesn’t want to hear it, Ted. It’s your denial. You know what’s right but you let people convince you otherwise.” “Maybe,” he said. “But it doesn’t matter. The result is the same.” “Someday it might not be.” “Yeah, someday I’ll be the one doing the dying.” “I didn’t mean that.” “I know,” he said. “I know what you meant.” 10/ SHADES OF RED April 1, 2007—12:05 p.m. PINKLOW LEADS THE WAY OUT TO THE BACKYARD, TO A glass-topped metal table that’s shaded by an umbrella. The house isn’t as big as the Kroiters’, but it’s still nice, and looks like it’s been renovated in recent years, with an extra room added behind the garage. Her parents are recently divorced, Carrie explains, and while she spends most of her time here, she does occasionally stay with her father, who’s “temporarily” living in a two-bedroom apartment in Los Altos. After they’re seated, Madden takes out a small notepad from the inside pocket of his sports jacket and opens it in front of him on the table next to his coffee mug. Then he takes out a microcassette recorder and sets it on the table between them. “Did you get shot?” she asks. “Excuse me?” “Your leg. Did you get shot?” “Oh, no. I had polio as a boy,” he explains. “Do you know what that is?” She makes a face like, Please, give me a break, I’m not an idiot. Then she says, “Roosevelt had it.” “Yes, that’s right.” “You don’t look that old. I thought they had a vaccine.” “I’m fifty-eight,” he says. “I was one of the last reported cases.” ARRIE C 76 D AV I D C A R N O Y “I’m sorry,” she says, suddenly expressing heartfelt concern. “That’s too bad.” “If you don’t mind, I’d like to record you, Carrie. I don’t like to miss anything. Is that OK with you?” “OK. But if I start to break down or anything, you have to promise to turn it off. I’ve been crying all morning. I still can’t believe it.” “Fair enough.” Madden looks at her. She’s pretty but in a much different way than her friend. It’s all up-front, there’s nothing beneath the surface. She has dark straight hair, a nice complexion, a small nose, and bright blue eyes. But she’s short and a little on the thick side—one of those girls whose bone structure will never allow them to be truly thin. Like her mother, who he met on the way in, she has a chest, and from the cut of her tight v-neck T-shirt, she’s not afraid to make sure everybody knows it. In her diary, in her less complimentary moments, Kristen had used such nouns as “flirt,” “drama-queen,” and “big-mouth,” to describe her best friend. And although his reading may have colored his initial impressions of Carrie, nothing indicates that Kristen was too far off in her assessments. Yes, Carrie’s eyes look a little puffy from crying, but she’s also taken the time to apply a healthy dose of make-up, along with a shade of lipstick that he considers unnecessarily red for this type of interview. Even if she does seem prepared for the likelihood that in the days ahead she’s going to be at the center of a public drama, she is nervous. Her jaw is working hard on a wad of chewing gum, and he’s noticed her picking at the cuticles on her fingers. “She called you a few times yesterday on her cell phone,” he says. “Yeah, I spoke to her. And we IM’d back and forth a little.” “And how did she sound?” “She was pretty upset, I guess.” “You guess?” “Well, yeah. She wasn’t a happy camper. She said the police were coming over to interview her and she’d been trying to reach Dr. Cogan to warn him.” Knife Music 77 “Did she reach him?” “She said she spoke to him for, like, thirty seconds and he brushed her off as soon as he heard her voice. He told her he couldn’t speak to her and to please stop calling him. He wasn’t trying to be mean, he said, but he couldn’t talk to her. Then he hung up.” “And that was what upset her?” “Well, more like the combination of everything. With the police coming, she knew he was going to get in trouble, that he might lose his job. But at the same time she was angry at him for not listening—and her father, too.” You should have listened, Madden thinks. You all should have listened. “She said she couldn’t deal with it,” Carrie goes on. “She didn’t know what she was going to do. I mean, this had been going on for a couple of days—ever since her parents found her diary.” “But she didn’t mention anything about wanting to kill herself.” The girl falls silent. She stops chewing her gum and looks down at the table, fidgeting in her seat. “Carrie, did she say something?” he urges. “She might have.” “What did she say?” “Well, it wasn’t like she said she was going to kill herself, but she just made some comments.” She looks away again, tears welling up in her eyes. Then she covers her mouth with her hand and her expression becomes that of someone who’s truly distraught. “I have . . . this friend,” she says. Madden waits patiently for her to collect herself. “I have this friend,” she starts again. “Her older sister was living back east. In New York. When the whole 9/11 thing happened.” Madden looks at her, raising an eyebrow. “Yeah.” “Well, the older sister knew this guy. He called her that morning and said, ‘You won’t believe this, but this plane just hit the tower 78 D AV I D C A R N O Y next to me. It just plowed right into the building.’” He nods, hoping the detour would lead back to the main road. “The thing is,” she says, “they ended up chatting on the phone for like almost a half an hour. I mean, they were just kind of joking around like they normally would, and he told her to turn on the TV and stuff.” “And she didn’t encourage him to get out,” he says, guessing the end. “Yeah. And he ended up dying. And the thing was, all his friends and her family blamed her for it. I was just a kid then, but I always remembered that. And how it really messed her up. She was never the same.” At the Kroiter home yesterday, he didn’t have any tissues with him. But this time he’s stocked. He peels one off the travel Kleenex pack he has in his coat pocket and hands it to her. “Thanks,” she says, and dabs her eyes. “I’m not here to blame anyone, Carrie. I’m only trying to piece together what happened.” “I know.” She puts the Kleenex to her nose and blows. He waits for her to continue. After a moment, she says: “She was talking about how she’d been watching An Officer and a Gentleman. You know, that old movie with Richard Gere in it. Have you seen it?” “I think so,” Madden says, not sure he had. “Well, it was like one of her favorite movies. And there’s a scene toward the end where Mayo—the guy Richard Gere plays— there’s this scene where Mayo’s friend Sid kills himself because his fiancée rejects him. You know, it’s very tragic, and we always cried when we watched it. Every time. And she was just talking about how she understood how he felt and why he’d do it. She never had before, but now she did.” A little astonished, Madden looks at her. “How did Sid kill himself?” he asks. “He hung himself in the shower.” Again, his eyes blink involuntarily. They can’t hide the impact of her response. Knife Music “Why?” Carrie asks. “Is that how she did it?” “Your mother didn’t tell you.” “No.” Her voice fills with panic. “Is that how? Is it?” He nods. “Turn it off,” she says. “The tape. Please, turn it off.” 79 11/ THE COUNTDOWN November 10, 2006—7:30 a.m. COGAN WENT DOWNSTAIRS to the cafeteria for breakfast. He took oatmeal, two bananas, a yogurt, and orange juice, then carried his tray slowly out into the middle of the dining room, looking for someone to sit with. He saw Kim with a couple of other residents, then, further on, Bob Klein, a vascular surgeon, sitting alone reading the San Jose Mercury News. Klein saw him coming and waved him over. “Rough night?” he asked, setting the newspaper aside. “One MVA,” Cogan said. “Sixteen-year-old. Drove Daddy’s car into a telephone pole. Broke a couple of ribs, ruptured her spleen.” “White or black?” “White girl.” “Heard you had a run-in with Beckler.” News traveled fast. No doubt thanks to Rosenbaum. “Just gave her a little friendly advice.” “I’m sure.” A Jew with an all-American face, Klein looked ten years older than he should have. He was two years younger than Cogan but his hair was a shade grayer, and he had a permanent stressed look in his eyes. Cynical and self-deprecating, he’d once said, “I’m just one of those people who needs eight hours of sleep every night but who was stupid enough to pick a profession where that’s impossible.” A FTER HE WAS FINISHED WITH ROUNDS, Knife Music 81 For Klein, everything seemed to revolve around sleep and the conspiracy to deprive him of it. Everyone was a suspect, even—and especially—his family. Klein yawned. “My wife and kid are killing me,” he said bluntly. “I’ve got this presentation this afternoon. So last night, I say to Trish, since I put Sam down the night before, and I have some computer work to do, she should put him down. So she tries to put him down for a few minutes and then he starts screaming, ‘Daddy, I want Daddy,’ and she comes back and says, ‘Bob, he wants you.’ So I get up, and I go in, and she says, ‘Oh, just put him down, it’ll take a few seconds.’ So I’m sitting in the bed with him and I’m reading Ninja Turtle books. Half an hour later, he’s still knocking around the bed, so I walk into our bedroom and ask Trish, ‘Did the babysitter give him a nap or something?’ But she doesn’t answer. She’s lying there, snoring, out cold.” “That’s what babysitters do, because a nap is good for them,” Cogan said. “The kid sleeps and they just kick back for a while. But the kid’s wired later and you’re screwed.” “Exactly. But going back to the bed and laying down with him,” Klein went on, determined to give a full report of his suffering. “Now it’s eleven o’clock and he’s still wired. Every time he’d try to get out of the bed, I’d say, ‘Sam, if you get up out of this bed, Daddy’s gonna lock you in this room.’” “You gotta hammer them a little harder than that. Maybe he’s a little young, but Christmas is always a good thing. You guys celebrate Christmas or Hanukkah? I forget.” Klein’s wife, Trish, wasn’t Jewish. “Hanukkah.” “All right. So you say, ‘If you come into Mommy and Daddy’s room one more time, you lose a day. No present on the fifth day.’ Hammer him with that. That usually does the trick.” Klein nodded, impressed. “Since when did you become Mr. Child Psychologist?” “Remember Jane, the school teacher with the kid?” Klein mulled the name over. “Jane . . . Jane . . . dark hair? Big chest?” 82 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Bingo.” “I think I need one of those. But without the kid.” “No, what you need, my friend, is the countdown.” “Countdown to what?” “To a better life. This is what you do: Next time you’re participating in the whole sexual-act thing with Trish—and I know it happens every once in a while—when you’re on the home stretch, you say, ‘I’m going to count to ten, and when I get to zero, I’m going to come.’ They love it. Drives ’em crazy.” Klein laughed. “You’re shittin’ me. She’ll laugh.” “You think she’ll laugh ’cause we’re sitting here in this godforsaken cafeteria in the early morning hours after a sleep-deprived night. But in the heat of the moment, there is no laughter, only respect. You need to take command of your sexual situation—as limited as it may be. You’ll sleep better at night, and more importantly, so will she.” “That’s what you got for me? That’s your solution to all my problems?” “That’s what I got.” Klein yawned again then took a sip of coffee. After a short silence, he said, “You on the market?” “Why?” “Trish has this new friend. She’s looking to get fixed up. Thirty-six, recently divorced, works in the PR department at Sun Microsystems. Smart.” Cogan said he appreciated the offer but he’d already had his fill of smart, recently “liberated” divorcées. They had worn him out, both mentally and physically. “What if I said she’s got the body of a twenty-six-year-old?” “I’d say I know a twenty-six-year-old with the body of an eighteen-year-old.” “Really?” “Smart, too. And not always in a hurry, on some mission to make up for lost time.” “Just have a drink with her,” Klein said. “An hour. It’s no big deal.” Knife Music 83 “I know.” “She’s not looking for any big, involved thing, if that’s what you’re afraid of. You know, she just wants to dip her toe back in the water. Have some fun.” Three months ago, he would have gladly taken Klein up on the offer. But he’d had a real run of late, dating a different woman every couple of weeks, looking for someone he wanted to stick with for a while but not quite finding her. He told himself he was looking for someone who could just hold his interest. But sometimes he was afraid he was looking for perfection. Whatever the case, he’d pushed hard for a while, and come away feeling he’d failed. Now he was tired of the feeling. He explained this all to Klein but Klein really didn’t get it, which Cogan had expected. It was hard for a married man to understand how a single man, with all the freedom in the world, could turn down a date with a woman the married man thought was attractive, because if the married man was in the single man’s position he’d jump at the opportunity. The only explanation Klein could come up with was that there must be something truly wrong with Cogan. “Must be nice,” Klein said wistfully, picking up a small piece of paper next to his tray that noted the cafeteria’s upcoming lunch specials. “To pick and choose like that from a new menu with new items every day. And if you’re not hungry, well, you go light. Me, I’m looking at the same menu every day, rain or shine. Meatloaf.” “Come on, Trish is better than meatloaf. She’s at least a cutlet.” “Yeah, when she feels like it. Hell, she can be filet mignon when she wants. But it’s not like I can put in a request with the maitre d’ and it shows up.” They ate in silence for a minute. Then Cogan said, “I went to see a patient this morning. A kid, twenty-six. Some dot-com dickhead. Pudgy face. Ponytail. Says he’s worth ten million. Thinks he’s big shit. But the thing is, he keeps crashing his bike. Second time in two years he’s been through trauma. And we’re not talking little crashes. We’re talking about this guy really fucking himself up. 84 D AV I D C A R N O Y We’re talking twelve hours in the OR. I mean, this last time, he barely made it. And he treats me like it’s my job in life to put him back together. So today I told him, hey, maybe it was time he laid off the bike. And he says to me, ‘Do they pay you to give advice, too?’ And I’m thinking, Why did I save this motherfucker’s life? To take this abuse?” “Hey, we’ve all been there, Ted. We all get crappy patients every day. Between them, the administrators, and my wife, it’s enough to put a guy over the edge.” “I know.” “Try coming home at seven o’clock after dealing with some of these schmucks and now your three-year-old boy needs to be entertained and watched and put to sleep. And you don’t want to give any more because you’ve given all day. Trish is the same way. There’s no give. If I say to her I’m getting hammered at the hospital, she’s going to say, ‘Hey, I’ve got the same story.’” Everybody had it worse, Cogan thought. It wasn’t supposed to be this way. He wasn’t supposed to be sitting here each morning, complaining. He should have been exhilarated. He should have been talking about how he’d saved that girl’s life last night. But instead he was complaining about some asshole he shouldn’t have saved. The good things somehow got lost. Overwhelmed. Outweighed. Lowering his voice, he said: “This is between you and me. It doesn’t leave this table, OK?” He waited for Klein to agree to the terms, then quietly told him he’d been thinking more and more about splitting Parkview. “And going where?” Klein asked. “I don’t know. To start my own business.” “Private practice? It’s a haul, too, man. There isn’t the kind of money there used to be in it.” “No. I mean a completely different business.” “Give up fixing people?” “Yeah. Shit, between the Internet and the venture-capital firms looking at biotech companies, there’s gotta be a ton of consulting out there.” “You mean, like Teddy Cogan, cyber-M.D.?” Klein said, Knife Music 85 laughing. He made it sound as if Cogan would be starring in his own new sitcom. “I’m not kidding.” Klein considered it. He took a contemplative sip of coffee, then said, “Give up patient care. Sure, I’ve thought about it. I thought about going to B-school. Trish and I talked about it when Richardson left last year.” “Really?” It was the first Cogan had heard about it. “But I don’t want to be a regulator, Teddy. I don’t want to be the director of some health plan. Even if there is more money in it and you have more control, none of the business-side stuff appeals to me. I didn’t grow up wanting to be a bean counter.” “Me neither.” “We both know we’re in too deep to let it go,” Klein went on, seeming to relish his resignation. “We spent a third of our lives getting a degree to do what we do. So they changed the rules on us. We’ve still got too much time invested. To make it at something else would take . . . what? Five, ten years? Who knows? We’d both be pushing fifty by then.” “If I had to do it over again, Bob, I wouldn’t do this. God, I wish I could start over.” “And that bothers you?” “Sure.” “Welcome to midlife, pal.” They both sat in silence for a little while, then Cogan heard himself say unexpectedly: “I had this dream a couple of nights ago.” He was back in college, going out for the baseball team, he told Klein. It was tryouts, his senior year. The only thing was, he was the age he was now: forty-three. He’d just never graduated. He had one more year left of eligibility. And the coach introduced him to the players. He said, “This is Teddy Cogan, he played with the team a while back, then decided to take some time off. Now he’s back and will be trying out with the rest of you.” He started doing the drills and the conditioning work. And he found himself running well, keeping up with everybody. He felt good. Then it was his turn on the mound—he was a pitcher—and 86 D AV I D C A R N O Y he started to throw, and he realized he didn’t have the velocity he used to. He couldn’t strike anybody out. But he was craftier. He was getting guys to ground and fly out. And he made it through a couple of innings without allowing any runs. Walking off the mound, he thought, Hey, maybe I have a shot here. After the last day of tryouts, they posted a list of the people who made the team. Cogan put his things away, all his equipment, then went over to where they’d posted the list—right next to the coach’s office—and looked for his name. He went down the list. Down, down, he was looking at the names. Then, right near the end, he saw his. It said: Cogan T. But next to his name there was another name. And next to that it said: Chest Wall Mass. Suddenly, he realized he was reading a schedule for surgery. And that he was due in the OR in a few minutes. Klein smiled. “I have the same dream. Only there’s no team. It’s just me and a couple of cheerleaders. And my beeper goes off.” “I’m telling you I was good,” Cogan said. “I was pitching well.” “I’m sure you were. Bring your mitt to the OR next time and we’ll toss a mass around after an operation. We’ll see what you’ve got.” “I’d love to.” 12/ EMERGENCY VISIT April 1, 2007—12:12 p.m. recorder. It’s the second time he’s had to stop and restart the tape. “That night. You went to a party. It was a college party?”Carrie doesn’t answer at first. She’s still wrestling with the fear that people will think she could have prevented her friend’s death. A few seconds pass. Then, finally, she says: “Yeah. My brother goes to Stanford. He’s in a frat there and they were having a big party.” “How’d you get in?” “What do you mean?” “Were they carding at the door or did you just walk right in?” “Well, we were there early. We went over to watch some basketball game.” “And you were drinking?” “Yeah.” “What were you drinking?” “I had a couple punches. I think it was rum punch. But I wasn’t really drinking. That was sort of a deal we had. That one of us could drink and the other couldn’t. I mean, it’s not like we drank a lot. I don’t even like to drink.” “But Kristen was drinking?” “Yeah, you know, I guess she just sort of felt like it. She kind M ADDEN PRESSES THE RECORD BUTTON ON THE MICROCASSETTE 88 D AV I D C A R N O Y of had a bad week at school and she just wanted to have a good time.” “So then you’re at the party.” “Yeah. It was fun. We were dancing and stuff. Then all of a sudden Kristen was gone. She went upstairs to the bathroom and threw up. I guess she’d also had a couple of beers during the party. You know, someone handed her a beer and she took it and after the punch she said it didn’t seem strong at all. But that’s what gets you sick. Mixing.” “Then what happened?” “Then she was in pretty bad shape. They had to take her to Jim’s friend’s room. That’s my brother, Jim. And she was pretty out of it. We were slapping her and putting cold water on her face but she wasn’t responding. So it got pretty scary. And that’s when we decided to take her to Dr. Cogan’s house. Because we didn’t want to take her to the emergency room. Our parents would have killed us if they’d found out. And because Jim thought the frat might get in trouble because she was underage. So I suggested we drive over to Dr. Cogan’s house and see if he was home before we went to the hospital.” “And how did you know where Dr. Cogan’s house was?” “Because we’d followed him a few times. I kind of had a crush on him. I think—” He waits for her to finish the sentence, but she doesn’t. So he says: “You think what?” “It doesn’t matter.” “Maybe it does.” “I was just going to say that I think she wrote about that— about how I had a crush. She told me she did.” Madden allows himself a smile. Kristen had written about it. Nice and consistent, he thinks. “OK,” he says, “then what happened?” “Well, he was home. At first he didn’t want to let us in, but we kind of begged him.” “So he did?” “Yeah. He checked her out. He was mainly concerned she’d Knife Music 89 taken something else. You know, some drug or something.” “And she hadn’t.” “I didn’t think she had. And she said she hadn’t. And so we mainly just started walking her around and trying to get her to drink water.” “Who was we?” “Me, Dr. Cogan, and Gwen Dayton, who goes to the U. I think she’s a junior.” “Do you remember how long that was?” “Maybe an hour.” “And what time was it?” “When we were walking her around?” “When you finished.” “I think around one. Maybe a little later. At some point I know Jim called my mom to tell her I was staying in his room at school. My curfew was midnight.” “And what time was Kristen’s curfew?” “Hers was usually eleven. But she was going to stay over at my house.” “But she didn’t?” “No, because my mom always waits up for me. And she would have freaked if she’d seen her. I mean, she might not have freaked that bad, but she would have told Kristen’s parents and they definitely would have freaked. Jim told mom that we were driving Kristen home and that I was going to stay with him. She was OK with that.” “And then you just stayed at Dr. Cogan’s?” “Yeah. I mean, Kristen was crashed out in his guest room. So we asked him if she could stay. He didn’t want her to at first. But then I promised I’d get her out of there early—by eight. My brother would come back and get us.” “And where’d you go?” “I went to sleep in the living room. On the couch.” “And then what happened?” She’s silent. “I think you already know,” she says. “That’s part of the reason why you’re here, isn’t it?” 90 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Yes, but I’d rather hear you say it.” “I’m not sure I should. I’m not sure that’s what Kristen would have wanted.” “I don’t think it’s a question of what Kristen wanted at this point,” he says. She looks away. Then down at the ground. “Carrie, did Kristen have sex with Dr. Cogan?” 13/ DICK-NAR November 10, 2006—10:04 a.m. C OGAN WENT BACK UP TO THE OR. H E HAD two minor operations scheduled that morning, both bronchoscopies, which he could do in an hour with any luck. They were really pre-op ops: You ran a tube down the patient’s trachea, then you ran a camera and biopsy tools down the tube and took a sample of a suspected lung cancer. No cuts on the outside. And no anesthesia. The patient was awake during the whole operation, though heavily sedated. He eased into what he expected to be a fairly standard day. Once, he’d been asked to describe a typical day at the hospital to a group of high school students who’d come for a tour of the emergency department. At first, he hadn’t been sure how to answer. Part of the problem was that his day—and he said this—was really a night and a day. He was almost always in the hospital for a twentyfour-hour shift. In the daylight hours, his work was very structured. He had operations scheduled, usually in the morning, and appointments to see patients. But at night, he never knew what to expect. He could sleep through the whole night without having to go to work. Or he could be up the whole night, treating one victim after another. Unfortunately, he didn’t get to choose when people hurt themselves. But if he had his choice, everybody would hurt themselves between six and ten in the evening. He’d make it a law, if he were president. A FTER BREAKFAST, 92 D AV I D C A R N O Y The students laughed. Then one girl asked, “If you don’t sleep at night, how do you stay awake during the day?” “Coffee,” he said. “Lots o’ coffee.” And it was true. Cogan was a regular customer at the coffee cart out in the courtyard. On warm days, he’d go outside and sit at one of the half dozen or so umbrella-covered tables. It was almost like sitting at an outdoor café. He’d drink a latteé, kibitz with other doctors, and flirt with nurses, who took as many cigarette breaks as he took coffee breaks. His fifteen minutes there were some of the most cherished moments of his job. He didn’t tell the high school students that, though. Nor did he talk about the petty squabbles that forever seemed to dog him. These kids didn’t want to hear about office politics. They wanted to hear about blood and guts. How could he tell them that working in a hospital was just as much about stroking people’s egos and gossiping behind their backs as it was about saving lives? Sometimes, he thought the problem was that during the years doctors were supposed to be developing personalities, they were holed up in libraries and labs. Too often, the result was a fully developed adult male or female of the species, performing the duties of a highly skilled profession with the social skills of a teenager. Anne Beckler was just such a person. That morning, he didn’t see her coming, he just heard her voice bearing down on him from behind. “Hold up a minute, Cogan, I want to speak to you.” Her voice had an emotionless, authoritative tone to it, the kind a police officer uses when he asks you to step out of your car and show him your driver’s license and registration. Cogan turned around slowly and faced her with a gracious, if somewhat phony, smile. He’d just come out of the OR after finishing the second bronchoscopy. “What’s up, Anne?” “I notice you’ve managed to successfully avoid me the whole morning.” “It’s ten o’clock. I don’t think that qualifies as the whole morning. But I’ll take it as a compliment. Successfully avoiding a blood- Knife Music 93 hound such as yourself for even an hour is an accomplishment.” “Why are you such a dick, Cogan?” “Well, I’ve given it some thought,” he said. “And this is what I’ve come up with. Really, I’m more of an ephemeral dick than a permanent dick. See, I’m only a dick when I sense someone is about to be a dick to me. I make a preemptive dick strike, so to speak.” “And what leads you to assume that someone is going to be a dick?” “I have dick-nar.” “Dick-nar?” “Dick sonar.” “Interesting. It’s a shame that you don’t also possess the ability to sense when your opinion is not needed in an operating room.” “That is a matter of opinion.” “For the record, I was just about to put the scope in when you dropped by. I would have gotten through the operation fine alone. I don’t appreciate you making my surgical decisions in front of my resident.” “It was a friendly suggestion. I was just trying to help.” “Look, just because you’re a trauma surgeon doesn’t mean you can come waltzing into anybody’s operating room and start calling the shots.” “I was lonely.” “I’m serious, Cogan.” That was the problem, he thought. She was serious. “Look, Anne. Don’t pull that trauma bullshit with me. We all decide what we want to be woken up for in the middle of the night. It’s not my fault you get all the gall bladders and I get all the glory. You decided to be general. Not me.” “It’s not about that. It’s about attitude.” “I don’t know what you want from me,” he said, “but you’re not going to get an apology. When I really do something wrong, I’ll be glad to apologize. I’ll get on my knees and beg for your forgiveness.” “I want you to stay out of my operating room.” “Show me the pink slip and I will.” 94 D AV I D C A R N O Y “What?” “The pink slip. The ownership papers. If it’s yours, I want some proof of purchase.” That did it. That was the last straw. She wanted to hit him. He could see it in her eyes. Slap him right across the face. But she didn’t. She just stuck her index finger in his face and said, “You—” “Have a good day, Anne. If you’d like to discuss this in a more civilized manner over coffee in the courtyard, I’m buying.” She wanted to say something else, but before she could, he turned around and walked away, back in the same direction he was heading before she stopped him. “Stay out of my OR,” he heard her call after him. Such a confrontation might have disturbed other surgeons, but Cogan was unfazed. He had no intention of trying to rectify the situation with Anne Beckler. It was impossible, as far as he saw it, so he didn’t let her worry him. That was the only way to win the game. You didn’t let people like Beckler get under your skin. And you didn’t let the little things bother you. You got good shock absorbers and rode the speed bumps like they were flat road: fast and smooth. 14/ SAY IT April 1, 2007—12:16 p.m. HE MUST HAVE WAITED A GOOD FIVE SECONDS, but Carrie still won’t answer. “Did Kristen have sex with Dr. Cogan?” he says again. Still nothing. No reaction. He can’t figure out why she has reservations. Is she simply feeling overwhelmed? Or is she just playing some twisted version of the loyal friend? “What do you think of Dr. Cogan today?” he asks, deciding to take a different tack. “Today?” “Yes, right now.” “I don’t know,” she says uncomfortably. “I think you do. Kristen wrote about it. She said that you didn’t think he was very nice to her.” “That was her problem, not mine.” He smiles inwardly. Now he’s getting somewhere. “Do you think Dr. Cogan made love to her or do you think he just wanted to have sex with her that one time for his own personal gratification?” “I don’t know. You’d have to ask him.” “Did she tell you she’d had sex with him?” “She didn’t have to tell me. I saw them.” He blinks. “Excuse me?” M ADDEN WAITS. 96 D AV I D C A R N O Y “I saw them.” “That night, you saw them having sex?” “Yes,” she says, and he thinks, Jackpot, a witness, I’ve got a fucking eyewitness. “I heard something—a sort of grunting— coming from the guest room. I mean, where I was sleeping—that couch—was right up against the guest room wall. So I tiptoed over and looked in the room. The door wasn’t even closed all the way.” “And what’d you see?” “He was on top of her, humping her.” “He was naked?” “Yeah.” “And what was she doing?” “She was just laying there kind of moaning, I guess. And then all of a sudden I heard her say, ‘Fuck me. Fuck me like you mean it.’” The remark floors Madden. Not because of the profanity, but because Kristen had written those exact words in her diary. “I’ll never forget that,” Carrie goes on. “I was totally shocked. I mean, she was a virgin. It doesn’t seem like something a virgin would say, does it?” Madden doesn’t know what to think. “What happened after that?” he asks. “Well, I went back into the living room and put a pillow over my head. I was very upset.” “Because your best friend was having sex with a guy you had a crush on?” “Not that. I wasn’t thinking about that. I wasn’t into him anymore at that point. That was, like, a three-week thing.” He doesn’t want to lead her too much, but he feels he’s got to give her a nudge. “So, it was just that they were having sex?” “Yeah,” she answers. “I mean, he was a man. You know, and pretty old, too—like my father’s age. And there he is naked on top of my friend, grunting and stuff. I was kind of disgusted.” “And did you say anything to him the next morning?” Knife Music 97 “To Dr. Cogan? No, I didn’t see him. I called my brother at, like, seven-thirty and he came over and got us. We just kind of slipped out.” “And did Kristen say anything to you?” “Not until the next day. I pretended to be surprised. I didn’t want her to think I was a peeping tom or anything.” “And you didn’t see Dr. Cogan again?” “I didn’t.” “But Kristen did?” “She called him, and went over to his house, I think.” “But he brushed her off?” “Yeah, he told her he couldn’t see her anymore.” “Why?” “Because he could lose his job.” Madden flips back a couple of pages in his notepad. He looks for the quote he wants. When he finds it, he says, “Kristen wrote: ‘I can’t tell if Dr. Cogan means to be hurtful, but there have been moments during the past few weeks when I’ve felt completely rejected.’ Did her mood reflect that?” Tears begin to well up in Carrie’s eyes. “Probably.” “Probably?” “To be honest,” she says, “at the time, I didn’t really care. I could see she was hurting and I was kind of happy about it. You know, serves her right and all. She wanted it and she got what she deserved.” “Did she ever tell Dr. Cogan that when she had sex with him it was her first time?” One tear, then more, stream down her face. It pains Madden to watch. “No,” she murmurs after a moment. “I don’t think so.” “Why not?” he asks softly. “Because she didn’t want him to know.” Madden reaches into his pocket and hands her another Kleenex. Her eyes move up to meet his. They seem to ask for some reassurance that she hadn’t really screwed up. “Was I a bad friend?” she asks. 98 D AV I D C A R N O Y Her words have an echo to them—they seem to hover over the yard long after she’s said them. “Was I?” “Of course not,” he says. As she weeps, Madden looks over at the large windows of the living room. Standing there next to Carrie’s mother, watching them with a drink in his hand, is Bill Kroiter. They exchange glances, then Kroiter turns around and walks away, out of Madden’s line of sight. 15/ A MINOR ACT OF RECOGNITION November 10, 2006—4:49 p.m. They were a little less encompassing than morning rounds. Really, he was just coming by to say hi, and let everybody know he hadn’t forgotten about them. The girl was one of the last patients he saw that day. He hated finishing the day on a low note, so he saw his difficult patients first, then the ones he found more pleasant. He remembered as a boy facing dinner with a similar philosophy. Instead of pushing his vegetables to one side, he ate them first, then moved on to the food he really liked. It had seemed more satisfying that way, leaving nothing to lurk on the horizon to taint the taste of the chicken or beef, which he could then enjoy singularly and thoroughly. Maybe that was why he had no trouble doing his homework before he went out to play ball. He never wanted anything hanging over his head while he pitched. The girl had been moved to her own room, but when he arrived she was not alone. There was another girl sitting in a chair next to her bed, which caught Cogan a little by surprise. He thought at least one of the girl’s parents would be there, particularly the mother. “Hello, Kristen,” he said. “How are you feeling?” “All right.” C OGAN HAD STARTED AFTERNOON ROUNDS JUST BEFORE FOUR P.M. 100 D AV I D C A R N O Y He flipped through her chart, looking at her vitals. Her urine output was up to 200, which was pretty standard for young patients. He’d have to tell the nurse to decrease her fluids. “I’m just going to ask you a couple of questions and check your bandage,” he said, setting the chart down at the foot of the bed. “Then I’ll let you get back to your program.” “Oh, I don’t care about that,” the girl said quietly. “There’s nothing good on TV right now.” He slipped his stethoscope under her gown from the top and gave her heart and lungs a quick listen. He told her to breathe deeply. When he was through, he lifted her gown a little from the bottom and examined her bandage. While he was examining it, she asked: “How long do you think I’ll have to stay here?” “Maybe three or four days,” he said. “We have to make sure you don’t get an infection.” “Do you think I could have my mom bring in my DVD player?” He lowered her gown. “I don’t see why not. You like to watch movies?” Her face reddened a little. “Sure,” she said after a moment. “She wants to be a director,” the other girl chimed in. “Really?” he said. “You’re studying to be a director?” “Well, we’re in high school,” Kristen explained. “You can’t study to be a director in high school. They don’t have any classes.” They were friends from school, he soon learned. But the other girl—her name was Carrie—had been shuttling between her parents’ homes because they were separated. She eventually might go live with her dad, but then he was only in a two-bedroom apartment, and it was in a different school district. Kristen was on her way home from Carrie’s dad’s house when she had the accident, which had made Carrie feel guilty because they had sat around talking too long and Kristen had to rush to make her eleven o’clock curfew. Carrie felt it was her fault Kristen had been in the accident. But Kristen said it wasn’t. They were both pretty girls, Cogan thought. They reminded him of the girls he’d liked in high school. Thin, clean-cut, and a tad Knife Music 101 demure. They didn’t have the cool confidence and hard faces that he remembered many of the most popular girls having. Carrie had short dark hair, big bright eyes, but a plain nose and slightly plump cheeks. The more ethereal of the two, Kristen had brushed her hair and pulled it back into a ponytail since that morning. She had fine light hair, more golden-brown than blonde. With the ponytail, he could see her face better, and he realized she was more interesting than he’d previously thought. It was not a face that immediately struck you as beautiful. Perhaps because her skin was not perfect: she had a spattering of pimples on her forehead and a few scratches from the accident. But, when you took them away, there was something there. Part of the allure, he thought, was how her personality played out on her face, because they seemed to complement each other perfectly. In her looks, he could feel a certain reticence—a sort of reluctance to let go and shine brightly. Her face was holding something back. And a similar theme seemed to run through her disposition. Both girls appeared nervous. But while Carrie revealed her tension with a steady stream of chatter, Kristen sat back and listened and kept her comments to a minimum, even though Cogan sensed she had strong opinions. Every time she made a comment, he felt her retreat, fearing she’d embarrassed herself. And he saw the same movement in her face and eyes. “Is it true she almost died?” Carrie asked. “Well, if we hadn’t operated on her, yes, she would have died,” he explained. “But we figured out pretty quickly what was wrong and took care of it.” Carrie seemed impressed. She looked at Kristen, and Kristen gave her a look like See, I told you. “I have to ask you a couple of questions,” he said, cutting off the small talk. “This may seem silly, but have you passed gas?” Kristen blushed. Her friend, meanwhile, had to look away and cover her face to keep from laughing. “I told you it would sound silly, but it’s actually very important. You see, when you have an operation like the one you had, where we go into your belly, your bowels and stomach go to sleep. 102 D AV I D C A R N O Y They literally turn off. So it’s very important for me to know whether you passed gas because that means they’re back—” “Yes,” she said before he could finish, “I did.” Carrie started laughing. “Stop it,” Kristen told her friend, barely keeping a straight face herself. “It’s not funny. It’s important. You heard him.” “I’m sorry,” Carrie said. He told her she’d probably be able to start eating “clears” by the next morning. Clears were Jell-O, soup, and ginger ale. “Is that something I should be trying to do?” she asked. “What do you mean?” “I mean, should I be trying to pass gas?” “No, you don’t have to. Just be aware whether it’s happening or not, that’s all.” “I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.” He could have told her she was lucky, he could have been asking her a lot more embarrassing questions. He could have told her about the woman whom he’d just seen who was obsessed with her hemorrhoids. But he didn’t. Instead, he said, “I think the most important thing for you to do now is to try to get out of bed and walk around a little bit. I’m going to tell the nurse to decrease your fluids, and we’ll probably take you off the IV. We’ll switch your pain medication over from the morphine drip to Percoset, which is a milder painkiller but still very strong. And we’ll take it from there. I won’t be back until tomorrow afternoon but Dr. Kim, the other doctor who came to see you, will be around, and the nurses have my pager number if you need anything.” “OK,” the girl said. “I think that’s it for now.” Just as he was about to go he looked down and saw a blue backpack sitting on the floor next to Carrie’s chair. An emblem caught his eye. It was the head of a bear, the mascot of MenloAtherton High. “Do you guys go to MA?” he asked. “Yeah, uh-huh,” Carrie said. “We’re both juniors.” Months later, Cogan would look back on this moment, this Knife Music 103 minor act of recognition, and regret it more than almost any other. He’d wish he could turn back time and walk out of the room without saying another word. But instead, he said: “My next-door neighbor’s kid goes there. Josh Stein. Do you know him?” The girls looked at each other questioningly. “Dark hair,” Cogan said, helping them. “Pretty tall. Glasses.” “Yeah,” Carrie said after a moment. “I think I know who you mean.” Then, turning to Kristen, “Remember that kid in our history class last year? Josh.” Then, back to Cogan, “A little bit geeky, right? He has a laptop he carries around. He and his friends are always playing computer games.” “That’s him.” “We don’t really know him,” Carrie said a little snobbishly. “But we know who you’re talking about.” “Well, be nice to him. He may be a little geeky now, but when he shows up at your tenth reunion you’re going to be surprised. Believe me, I know how these things turn out.” “Why?” Kristen asked. “Were you like that when you were in high school?” “No. Not at all.” “What were you like?” He smiled. “About ten pounds lighter.” Then, after a beat, “I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember, try to walk around a little.” “I will,” she said. CROSSING THE LINE PART 2 16/ THE ACCIDENTAL WOMANIZER April 1, 2007—2:16 p.m. white, with a porch and two balconies, both on the second floor of the three-story building. Standing in the main parlor, Jim Pinklow, Carrie’s older brother, age eighteen, is somberly offering the detective who’s come to interview him a little history lesson: In the 1950s the house served as the University’s admissions building, which is why today it’s commonly referred to as Rejection House. Despite the moniker’s negative connotation, according to Jim the house generally shares a positive standing among the women on campus—though a bad reputation tends to elicit more derogatory nicknames for both the brothers and the dwelling they inhabit. Jim’s fairly short, five-foot-seven or so, a shade stocky like his sister but a decent looking kid with a tight haircut and intense blue eyes. He tells the detective he’s never liked the smell of the house, especially on a Sunday after a big party, when the hardwood floors, sorely in need of a fresh coat of polyurethane, are still damp with beer. During the pledge period he and his fellow recruits, who live in freshmen dorms, would often spend the afternoons after blowouts trying to rid the floors of their stench. They would use Pine Sol and lemon-scented cleaners, even something that promised spring freshness. They tried everything, and by evening the odor would come back. Fainter, yes, but it would be there, lurking, waiting for the next batch of kegs to intensify it. T HE FRAT HOUSE IS A RELATIVELY SIMPLE LOOKING STRUCTURE, 108 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Well, this is it,” he says, leading the detective into a smaller side-room that has a large, heavily cushioned, black leather, halfmoon sectional couch and big-screen TV. “This is what?” Jim looks at the detective. He’s a weird old bird, this one, he thinks. Mr. Gimpy. “This is where it started, I guess.” That same Sunday afternoon, Cogan, wearing a pair of Ray Bans, sitting at an umbrella-covered table, drinking a lemon-flavored Calistoga sparkling water, is watching a blonde get a tennis lesson on court five. “What do you think?” asks his friend, Rick Reinhart, who’s sitting to his left, across the table, facing the same direction. Cogan looks again. As hard as he’s studying the blonde, Reinhart is studying him. It’s a habit of Reinhart’s. He’ll tell a guy to check out a woman, then instead of looking at her himself he looks at the guy. Once Cogan asked him about it, and Reinhart, discounting it, said, “I’m just watching your reaction.” But Cogan thinks it’s weirder than that. He thinks Reinhart loves the moment so much, when he checks out an attractive woman he wishes he could see the expression on his own face. “She’s hot, isn’t she?” Reinhart says. But it comes out sounding more like a lament than an exuberant declaration. It’s true, Cogan thinks. She is hot—in a certain way. Petite and slender, she has a perfect tan, the kind you really had to work on, that plays well with the white of her tennis skirt. If she has a weakness, it’s her face. Not that she’s bad-looking. But she wears too much make-up, and it seems to affect the way she plays tennis, because she isn’t moving much for the ball. It’s as if she fears she may break into a sweat and threaten the perfect but delicate mask she’s created. “What do you want me to tell you?” he says. “She’s goodlooking.” “But you wouldn’t go out with her, would you?” Knife Music 109 Oh, shit, Cogan thinks. Why does he set himself up like this? Why does he care? “What level of ‘going out’ are we talking about?” “Whatever the fuck I’m doing.” “I don’t know if I could handle that.” Reinhart doesn’t really react. He just nods; he appears to chalk up the response, like he’s taking a poll. They watch her for a moment, then Reinhart says, “She does offer to pay for some meals.” Cogan isn’t sure whether he’s talking to him or just thinking aloud. With his right hand, Reinhart nervously slicks back his dark, receding hair, then adjusts his Nike tennis shirt. He’s neither as tall nor as athletic as Cogan: Reinhart’s on the thick side, a heavy breather with big bones and a wide, handsome face. Thirty-eight and a plastic surgeon, his nickname is “The Rhino” partly because of his surname, partly because of his hardcharging style in whatever competitive activity he participates. As a kid, much to his dislike, he’d been called Rhino (“I was pretty heavy back then,” he’ll admit). He’d escaped the name when he went off to college, but then one day at the club he’d charged the net to get to a drop shot. He got to the ball but was unable to stop and ran straight through the net, snapping it from its moorings. Ever since then he’d become affectionately known as The Rhino, a name he accepted because Cogan had convinced him that, unlike Rhino, it had a singular, macho quality to it. “Whenever we go out, she insists on splitting the check,” he says. “And that’s refreshing. But I’ve got to be the one to organize everything. I’ve got to pick the restaurant, the movie. She never says, ‘Hey, why don’t you come over and I’ll make you dinner,’ or anything like that. It’s the little things, Teddy. She’s in the game, but she doesn’t move. She does nothing away from the ball to get open. There I am, scrambling in the backfield—” Reinhart stands up and does his best Joe Montana imitation, dropping back a few steps with an imaginary football in his right hand, shifting back and forth, juking imaginary defenders. “There I am scrambling, and she’s just standing there. And wham, I get creamed.” He makes believe he’s been hit by a 270-pound line- 110 D AV I D C A R N O Y backer, rolls backward onto the grass, and lies down with his arms spread out at his sides. After feigning unconsciousness for a few seconds, he gets up and says, “Do you know what she did?” “No, what?” “She didn’t get me anything for my birthday. Not even a card.” “Ouch.” “Didn’t even offer to take me out.” “I thought she was out of town for your birthday.” “She was. But she could have set something up for when she got back.” “Sit down, will ya? You’re making me nervous.” Reinhart sits down. But he can’t stay down. As soon as he hits the chair, he bounces back up, as if the chair is electrified. He says, “Do you think she appreciates that I set this lesson up for her? I had to call her to remind her about it. She would have blown it off if I hadn’t said anything.” “She’s playing you, man. She likes you.” “She’s got one wheel on the off-ramp.” Just as he makes the proclamation, the woman—Lisa is her name—comes to the fence and calls out to him. She motions for him to come over. Without so much as a glance at Cogan, Reinhart walks down to the tennis court and speaks to her. Then he heads back up toward the table. “I’m going to get a drink,” he says. “You want anything?” “A drink drink?” “Yeah.” “We’re playing, man.” “Just a Bloody Mary. We’ve got time.” Cogan looks at his watch. It’s just after two. “We’re playing in fifteen minutes.” “I’ll be OK.” “What’re you getting for her?” Reinhart murmurs something. “What?” “A bottle of Evian,” he says louder. Then he points a warning finger at Cogan and says, “Not a word, Teddy. I don’t want to hear Knife Music 111 it.” He turns and walks away toward the pool and clubhouse. “Are those whip marks on your back, Doctor?” Cogan calls after him. “It’s amazing what kind of force the human vagina can generate. It’s got tremendous torque. Very impressive, isn’t it, Dr. Reinhart?” “Shut up,” says Reinhart. Carrie and Kristen came around 4:30, just as the North Carolina–Clemson game was about to tip off. Jim remembers the time because he was crashed out on the couch in the parlor room, watching the game with five or six guys, when the girls walked in. He and two other freshmen had spent the last hour lugging cases of Coors and Keystone Light up from the basement and dividing the cans into tubs. Afterward, they placed the tubs and some back-up cases behind three fixed bars on the first floor and two they’d set up in the backyard, where the pre-party was about to begin. If they were having a smaller party, they’d go with kegs, but the frat president, Mark Weiss, preferred cans for big parties because it meant people could drink faster—you didn’t get these long lines at the kegs. Cans were efficient. They also made it easier to measure how much people drank. And that was important for controlling a party, as well as for future planning. These are the things that most outsiders don’t understand, Jim tells the detective. A frat house isn’t just a group of guys who get together to get shitfaced. It’s a business—there are budgets to meet, funds to raise, and plenty of administration. And if you aren’t careful—if you aren’t efficient—the enterprise will fail. Admittedly, his sister, Carrie, didn’t quite see it that way. She looked at the house as a “PG-rated Chippendales, her own guy-land in the middle of Blahsville,” and she had been ready to soak it all up the moment she walked in. She didn’t even wait to be introduced. She just walked into the TV room all jovial and asked in her loud voice, “Hey, who’s playing?” as if she knew everybody. She’d met a couple of the guys be- 112 D AV I D C A R N O Y fore; that was true. “But, man,” Jim says, “I just wish she could be a bit more reserved and not try to dominate a room every time she walks in.” The other guys didn’t seem to mind, though. They got right into it with her, jabbering away about which teams were going to make the Final Four in this year’s tourney. As was her way, Carrie took the opposing view every chance she could, even though Jim doubted she had any idea what she was talking about. She kept mixing up players and teams. But the more mistakes she made, the more the guys seemed to take to her. “Truth is,” he says, “I barely noticed Kristen at first. Maybe it’s because my sister’s more outgoing. Also, she has pretty big tits, and she was wearing a tight T-shirt. I saw some of the guys checking her out.” “And you were more concerned with that?” “Yeah, I should’ve expected it, but I was kinda pissed she wore that shirt. Hey, can I ask you a question?” “Shoot,” the detective says. “Did Kristen leave a note or anything?” “I can’t really speak to that right now.” Jim is silent a moment. Then he asks, “But she definitely killed herself?” “An investigation is ongoing,” the detective says. “At this point, her death hasn’t been ruled a suicide or a homicide.” “My sister says that doctor’s involved. That Kristen slept with him that night. Is that true?” “I can’t discuss that,” he says. “What can you discuss?” “Not much. So, if you don’t mind, I’ll keep asking the questions and you keep answering them.” Cogan chuckles to himself as he watches Reinhart head past the lap pool toward the clubhouse. He can never understand how a person can be so together in his professional life and so messed up in his personal life. Not that he considers himself so together in ei- Knife Music 113 ther department. But the difference between how Reinhart runs his practice and how he manages his relationships with women is striking. As a doctor, he’s logical, to the point, and sensitive with his patients. For a half an hour, he can sit down with a woman who’s going to have an operation and calmly assuage her fears. Cogan has seen it. But in his social affairs he’s almost the opposite: strangely irrational and combative. They’d met a few years ago at the club, not long after Cogan’s divorce had become final, and quickly became friends. Its official title is the Alpine Hills Tennis and Swim Club. But everybody who belongs simply calls it “the club.” Set among oak trees and landscaped gardens, it’s in Portola Valley on Alpine Road, one of the routes to the beach. The road, a favorite among bicyclists, winds up into the mountains, turns into Pescadero Road, and twenty-five miles later ends at Route 1 near Pescadero Beach on the Pacific Ocean. Most people see it for what it is: an incredibly scenic drive. But it always reminds Cogan of something else: who it brings to his hospital. Alpine Road and some of the other favorite bike and motorcycle routes over the mountains are equidistant from Parkview and the university’s ER, so Parkview gets half of the accident victims, and sometimes more, depending on how busy the university is. Whenever he drives to the beach Cogan can’t help but think of them. Well, not “them” actually. The victims, the ones who boxed, left less of an impression—took less out of him—than the ones he had to talk to afterward: the mothers and fathers, the sons and daughters, the husbands and wives, the boyfriends and girlfriends. But the club is his refuge from all that. There are more exclusive clubs in the area—real country clubs with golf courses—but Alpine Hills, which costs $15,000 to join, is popular among the established younger set, particularly those who have families. This is, as Cogan likes to tell Reinhart, “Yummy Mummy Central”—the parade ground of young, attractive mothers whose blissful confidence in themselves and the secure position they’ve attained only made them seem more attractive. “Hey, buddy, what’s up?” 114 D AV I D C A R N O Y Klein had arrived. “You just get here?” Cogan asks. “Yeah, but I’ve been up since eight,” he says, putting his racket on the table. “Trish has this thing about going to Café Barrone and reading the paper.” “I thought that was Saturdays.” “Now it’s Sundays, too. She’s got these friends she meets. You know, she’ll say, ‘Kate and her husband are going this morning. They asked us if we’d join them.’ The next day it’s someone else.” Cogan sees Trish standing over by the children’s pool. She’s putting floaters around her three-year-old son’s arms. Cogan waves at her, but she doesn’t wave back. She turns away, and he knows then that the report has come in from her friend, Deborah, whom he’d taken out for the second time on Thursday, and that it’s bad. “I wish they didn’t get up so damn early, though,” Klein goes on. “They’re so fucking gung ho. Like going to a café was an expedition or something.” “Get with the program, buddy. You can’t pursue leisure in a half-ass way around here.” “Tell me about it.” Klein thinks about sitting, then decides against it, and begins stretching instead. As he goes into his routine, Cogan looks back up at the pool. “How mad is she?” “Who?” “Your wife.” Klein doesn’t say anything at first. He just shrugs. “Come on,” Cogan says. “I’m a big boy. I can take it.” “Well, what do expect? You traumatized her friend.” “I did her a favor.” “Some favor.” “What’d she say?” “Look, as far as I’m concerned, it’s none of our business. I told Trish that. It’s the risk you take when you try to set someone up. That’s all I have to say. I don’t want to get involved. I’m here to play tennis.” “Who said anything about getting involved? Just give me a Knife Music 115 report.” “Nope. It’s none of my business.” Cogan smiles. As much as he wants to, he knows it will do him no good to press Klein, who’s already trying to change the subject by asking where the other guys are. “Reinhart went to get a drink,” he says perfunctorily. “He’ll be back. Dr. Kim’s going to be a few minutes late. I talked to him this morning.” While Klein stretches Cogan wonders how much time he and Trish have spent talking about Cogan’s behavior the past couple of days. Poor Klein, he thinks. He’d probably taken Cogan’s side at first—or at least insisted that it was none of her business. But then she’d forced him to see it her way. Traumatized. That was pure Trish. And Klein knew it. He knew he’d been bullied, and worse yet, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Cogan could hear the frustration in his voice. But the thing about Klein is that he’s a compartmentalist. It’s how he copes. He puts different parts of his life in different compartments and doesn’t let them mix. When he’d said, “I’m here to play tennis,” Cogan knew he’d gone into tennis mode, and he wasn’t going to let anything distract him from that. It was his time to be away from his wife, to shoot the shit with the boys, play hard, and sweat. Anything else—his wife’s complaints about Cogan, for instance—were temporarily off limits, filed and locked away in their separate drawer. As he considers all this, Cogan’s eyes stray to court five. The woman and the club pro are collecting balls, loading up the pro’s basket for another go-round. Coming out of a bend, Klein notices what—or rather, who—Cogan is observing. “Wow,” he says. “Serious tuna alert.” He takes a few steps forward, trying to get a better look. “Who is she?” “Reinhart’s gal.” “Really? The one he wouldn’t go public with because he was afraid he’d jinx the close?” “All he does is complain about her. I think he likes her.” “How old do you think she is?” “Why?” 116 D AV I D C A R N O Y “I can’t tell anymore,” Klein says. “I mean, if that woman told me she was twenty-two, it wouldn’t surprise me. And if she told me she was thirty, that wouldn’t either. It’s disturbing, don’t you think? I’m starting to lump people by decade. My father used to do that.” “How old do you want her to be?” “What do you mean?” “If you could have her, how old would you want her to be? What’d be your optimum age?” “If I answer correctly, do I get her?” “You’ll have to take that up with The Rhino. I’m not in a bequeathing position.” Klein smiles. He likes hypothetical questions; the more absurd the question, the more he likes it. “I’ve always been partial to twenty-one,” he says. “Senior year in college, I had a good year. Come to think of it, that may have been the last time I dated a girl who was twenty-one.” He’d met Trish when he was twenty-two, he says, though they hadn’t officially started dating until she was twenty-four. “I bet she’s about that, twenty-four, twenty-five,” Cogan guesses, nodding in the direction of the court. “What’s she do?” “Sells gym memberships at 24-Hour Fitness.” “I don’t know if I could do that.” “Sell memberships?” “No, bring a young girl to the club, like Reinhart.” “She’s not that young. All that sun, she’s looking a little weathered, in fact.” “I don’t know,” Klein says. “I’d be embarrassed.” “That’s the beauty of The Rhino. He’s cultivated an image that allows him to do that. People expect nothing less. In fact, I think they’d be disappointed if he showed up with a garden-variety highly educated professional woman. He’d lose his charm.” “What about you?” “What about me?” “What image are you cultivating?” he asks, a touch of antagonism in his voice. “Well, I’ll tell you, there’s something to be said for going Knife Music 117 younger while you can—while you’ve still got your looks and people over at the next table aren’t yet asking, dad or sugardaddy? We both know youth takes on a dimension all its own the older you get.” “I’m with you on that, bro,” Klein says. “I would say, however, that the last year or so I’ve felt myself slipping into an image, and I haven’t fought it. So I suppose that’s a form of cultivation.” “What’s that?” “The accidental womanizer.” Klein raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, you end up sleeping with a lot of women—or what your married friends think is a lot. But it’s not something you aspire to do. It just happens. It’s not something you control.” “But you tried with Trish’s friend.” “Oh, no, I didn’t try. Not hard, anyway. That’s what upset her.” “But you didn’t sleep with her.” “Not yet.” Klein laughs. “After how she reacted, you think she’s going to sleep with you?” “This isn’t high school, buddy. I know you and Trish haven’t been single since the Dark Ages, but we’ve all lived long enough to know that some strange shit happens with time. People think. They sit in traffic and mull over their lives. They lie in their designer beds with their designer sheets, and between sitcoms, they ponder their futures. Something that doesn’t seem right one day can seem right the next. No one died here. No one’s been hit by a car. No one’s been diagnosed with cancer. What’s the big fucking deal?” Klein is silent. Cogan can see his mind working feverishly to digest, process, and analyze what he’d said. Klein can’t just look at the big picture and leave it at that. He always has to break things down and look at all the parts. Then, inevitably, he pushes everything that isn’t relevant to him aside and seizes on something that is. “So,” he says. “Do you call her or do you wait for her to 118 D AV I D C A R N O Y call you?” “I can’t really remember how Kristen was dressed,” Jim says in a low voice, leading the detective up the stairs to the third floor. “I just remember it wasn’t as provocative as my sister, but I still wasn’t used to seeing her all dressed up and made up.” He vaguely recollects something simple: a black skirt that stopped above her knees and a colored long-sleeve shirt. “Could you tell how drunk she was?” the detective asks, also keeping his voice down. “She was definitely tipsy,” he answers. “But she wasn’t, like, majorly stumbling or slurring her words.” “But she was drunk?” “Yeah.” “Any idea how much she had to drink?” “No. I didn’t think it had been that much, though. I mean, she wasn’t doing shots or anything. You know, I figured she’d had a few cups of punch and maybe a couple of beers.” “And that’s not a lot?” “Well, not necessarily, over a four-hour period.” “And you say you took her to the third floor because there was a line for the bathrooms on the second.” “There wasn’t a line. It was just that the stalls were occupied. Or at least she said they were. I didn’t go in.” At the top of the stairs the detective stops to glance at his notepad—Jim thinks more to buy a few seconds to catch his breath than anything else—and just then a sleepy-eyed, well-built guy wearing boxers and a T-shirt emerges from the bathroom. It’s Tom Radinsky. “Hey, P-Flam,” he mutters to Jim in a throaty voice, puttering past them, seemingly indifferent to their presence. “The guys aren’t exactly early risers on weekends,” Jim remarks, seeing Madden’s frown. It’s nearly three o’clock. “P-Flam?” Short for Pink Flamingo, he explains. It’s his given R-House name and a pathetic derivative of his family name, Pinklow. During Knife Music 119 hell week, whenever the pledgemaster called his name, he had to crane his neck and flap his arms and do what was labeled a “flamingo dance” but ended up looking more like a chicken dance. “Sometimes, when I was inspired,” he says, pulling open the bathroom door, “I’d give it a River Dance flare.” It always cracked the guys up, earning him dog calls and high fives, the frat’s currency of approval. The third-floor bathroom is identical to the one on the second floor. There are two of everything—two shower stalls, two urinals, and two bathroom stalls, most of it seeming to date back a couple of decades. The detective looks around the room. “Not exactly the Four Seasons, huh?” Jim says. “And when you found her here, she was totally out?” “I didn’t find her. I told you on the phone, I was standing outside the door, waiting for her. And when she didn’t come out after, like, five minutes, I got worried and asked a girl I knew, Gwen Dayton, to go in and check on her.” “You found her in the condition you described her in.” “Yes.” “Where was she exactly?” Jim moves further into the bathroom and points to a spot just to the left of the radiator against the back wall. “She was kind of propped up, with her legs on the floor and her back against the wall. She’d thrown up in the sink. It kind of looked like she’d sat down to take a rest.” “Then what’d you do?” “I tapped her face a few times. I didn’t really slap her—” He shows the detective how hard the blows had been by demonstrating on his own face. “Just kind of like that. Then I tried some water. And when that didn’t do anything I went downstairs to find my sister.” He must have told the cop that same story three times, but this is the first time he’s told it at the actual scene. He assumes it’s the guy’s interrogation technique. Ask each question over and over. He’s been consistent, though. He’s offered plenty of details—so many 120 D AV I D C A R N O Y that sometimes he thinks he’s boring the poor guy. He’d talked about Gwen Dayton, and how he had a crush on her. And how she’d introduced him to Kathy Jorgenson. And didn’t it suck when the girl you liked introduced you to a girl who you felt nothing for? “Then what happened?” “Well, you might say we had an ugly scene on our hands.” The fourth time he looks at Trish, he finally catches her attention. Their eyes lock for an instant; she glares at him intensely, then turns away and calls out some instruction to her son, who’s in the children’s pool in front of her. Cogan can’t take it anymore. He isn’t upset that Trish is pissed off at him. He doesn’t need her approval. But he wants to hear what her friend had said. His curiosity is killing him. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he tells Klein. “It’s not worth it, Teddy. She’s just going to give you shit. And I don’t want to be standing on the other side of the net with you in a bad mood.” “I’ve got a cup in my trunk. I’ll let you wear it.” “That’s not funny.” He heads over to the pool. Out of the corner of her eye, Trish sees him coming but pretends not to. It’s incredible how juvenile people can be, Cogan thinks as he marches up and sits down in the reclining beach chair next to her. He sits upright with the chair between his legs and his tennis shoes planted on the smooth gray pavement. For a few seconds, he sits there, watching the same group of kids splashing around in the pool that she is pretending to watch. Then, purposefully, he pulls his chair a little closer to hers so the metal legs make a scraping sound, like he’s clearing his throat. “I’m not talking to you, Teddy,” she says in a clipped voice, continuing to stare straight ahead. Her looks have always bothered him. Not because she’s unattractive, but because he’s always had a hard time describing her to people. He’d be on a date, for instance, and he’d be talking about Klein and Trish and their idiosyncrasies (for what better topic was there), and his Knife Music 121 date would ask what they looked like. Klein he could do, no problem. Attractive guy, prematurely gray—he could quickly give a pretty good picture. But Trish was tough. He had never thought she was attractive, but he knew other men who did. So, in an effort to be objective, he was always more generous than he instinctively wanted to be. She was fairly thin, he’d say, about five-foot-four, with dark hair, dark eyes, and a somewhat prominent nose. Then he’d quickly move onto her personality, which he found more interesting anyway. Looking at her now, he realizes why some men find her desirable. From certain angles she is. But he’s always felt that her real allure is in the way she carries herself. She has a stiff, regal quality to her, which she mixes with a dry, sharp wit. It had taken them a while to warm up to each other, to get beyond first impressions, and see that underneath it all they were both decent, caring people. Once they had, they realized, much to their surprise, they actually enjoyed each other’s company. “Don’t take it personally, Trish,” he says, “I wasn’t a shit to you.” That gets her attention. She turns and blinks a couple of times, surprised. “At least you admit it.” “I didn’t admit anything. I just said I wasn’t a shit to you.” It took a second for what he said to sink in. When it did, she let out something that sounded like a snort and called him a jerk. “What’s more of a dick maneuver: me telling her the truth or me just going through the motions so I can sleep with her?” “That’s beside the point,” she says. “You were cruel. You knew she liked you.” “A couple of months down the road, I say, ‘You know, the chemistry’s just not quite right, I think we should move on.’ What’s worse?” “It’s the way you tell the truth, Ted.” “It’s a gift.” “I’m serious.” “Well, usually I’m better at it. She just caught me at a bad moment. It touched a nerve or something, the way she said it.” “The way she said what?” 122 D AV I D C A R N O Y He sighs. He remembers her eyes the most, and the way they bore in on him but somehow stopped at the surface. It was as if someone had told her to look him directly in the eyes when she spoke but forgot to tell her to look for something. To really look. It all seemed like such a charade. She could have been reading from a script or a manual. “‘All I want from you is to be honest with me,’” he quotes to Trish. “‘That’s all I really want.’” It embarrasses him to repeat it because he can’t understand how someone can say it and not feel embarrassed. “What’s wrong with her saying that?” Trish asks. “She didn’t want me to be honest. She just didn’t want me to deceive her.” “So you were honest.” “Very.” “And when you said you’d be willing to sleep with her—” “I didn’t say willing. I said I found her attractive and wanted to sleep with her, but I didn’t foresee a relationship. Those were my words.” “And you didn’t think she’d find that insulting?” “I had a hunch she would. But I was kind of hoping she’d surprise me and show me a side that would make me want to have a relationship with her. I was kind of hoping she’d look me in the eyes and say very cooly, ‘Let’s get outta here,’ and take me home and fuck me silly.” “That’s what you’re looking for? Really? I don’t believe that, Ted. I think what she said touched another nerve.” He smiles. “And what nerve would that be?” She hesitates a moment, seeming to decide whether to say what she wants to say—or how to say it. But then he watches her courage build as her expression turns angry. “I think it reminded you of your ex-wife,” she declares resolutely, as if she’d been harboring the theory for a long time and was just waiting for the right moment to spring it on him. He laughs. “Come on, Trish, you’re reaching.” “I’m not saying it was totally conscious. But it triggered some- Knife Music 123 thing.” “You can think what you want, if it’ll make you feel better. But this has nothing to do with that. This was about going through the motions. About trying to make something out of nothing. It just wasn’t real, and I wanted it to get real. I’ve got to make some changes, Trish. I can’t keep dialing it in like this.” “What kind of changes?” He badly wants to tell her what’s really going on in his head, that he’s seriously considering leaving his job. But he knows it’s better that he doesn’t. He doesn’t need her or Klein debating his future, particularly when they both have big mouths. Still, he’s tempted to give her a hint, and in doing so he almost replies, too aggressively, “Big changes.” But he stops himself and says instead, calmly, “Real changes, Trish.” “Well, it’s not going to get real unless you give people more of a chance.” “I give people plenty of chances.” “Two dates,” she scoffs. “You call that a chance?” She says something else, a slew of words he vaguely senses is the rumblings of a lecture. But he doesn’t hear them because for some reason he finds himself thinking about a letter he’d received earlier in the week. Maybe it’s the cries of the children splashing around in the pool that remind him of it. Or what he’d said about chances. But suddenly and briefly, he’s somewhere else. The letter was from a woman in Connecticut he’d slept with a couple of years ago and basically forgotten. A blonde with thin, damaged hair who had a good body. “Hope all is going well for you,” the letter read. “I seem to remember your birthday being around this time. Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday and let you know I’m thinking about you. I hope I’ll get back there sometime soon and look you up.” The woman had two children, but she hadn’t told him about them until later, after she’d returned to Connecticut. He remembered that she’d made a big deal about it—she’d called him at the hospital and asked him if she could talk to him about “something important” when he got home from work. He spent the morning 124 D AV I D C A R N O Y worrying about it. Then, later, when she told him about having children, he was stunned and relieved. It was the last thing he’d expected her to say. She told him she’d had such a difficult time with her divorce the past year, she just wanted to get away from her life. She said, “I wanted to get away from myself. That’s why I didn’t say anything. Do you think any less of me?” The truth was he thought more of her. The idea of her taking a vacation from her life intrigued him. He understood that. So they kept talking for a few months until she stopped calling. Was it because he’d stopped calling? Or had she met someone? He can’t remember. A loud voice. Trish’s. “Are you listening to me?” He slowly turns his head to meet her gaze, squinting slightly behind his sunglasses as the sun peeks out from behind her head and shines directly in his eyes. “You know, I’m going to be fortyfour this year.” “So?” “I don’t know.” “What’s wrong, Teddy?” The children. The letter. He felt like another Calistoga. “I guess I just didn’t think it would be like this.” “What’s so bad about this?” she says, glancing around. “Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.” “Do you know how many people would kill for your life, Teddy? To be you?” Trish says. “Well, if you know anybody who wants to trade, tell them I’m willing to part with everything but the car. And the fish tank. The car and the fish I’m keeping.” “I’m serious.” “So am I.” A shadow over them. Reinhart. “Hey, what’s going on?” he says, Evian in hand, a little red in the face from the drink—or probably drinks—he’d had. “Are we playing or what?” “Yeah, sure,” Cogan says. Then, standing up, to Trish, “I’ll call Deborah when I get home. I’ll make it better. I promise. She’ll Knife Music 125 be good as new. Like it never happened.” “She’s expecting it.” Cogan blinks. “Excuse me?” Trish smiles. “You’re so predictable. You think you aren’t, but you are. Now go play tennis and do me a favor.” She picks up a bottle of sunscreen and tosses it to him. “Tell Bob to put some of this on. That’s the last thing I need, having him complain about a sunburn.” 17/ OPEN WIDE April 1, 2007—6:22 p.m. a diagram he’s made on a pad of yellow legal paper, a plateful of half-eaten General Tso’s chicken from Su Hong To Go and a can of Dr. Pepper nearby. The diagram, drawn horizontally across the page, is a flow chart with names and short descriptions of the various “players” involved in the alleged crime. Across the top, there’s a time line that goes from the time Kristen and Carrie arrived at the party—4:30 p.m.—to the time Jim picked up Kristen and Carrie at Cogan’s home the next day—8:15 a.m. “You want anything?” asks Pastorini. “No, thanks.” A few feet away, the sergeant is standing in front of the vending machine, scanning its contents. There’s a beep, then a thud as his selection drops into the bin. They refer to the small room as the lunchroom because it has a table, some chairs, and a couple of vending machines. But rarely does anybody actually eat their lunch in the room. During the day, most people go outside or eat at their desks. However, on Sunday nights, when they’re working overtime like they are now, and there’s practically no one in the office, the area becomes their conference room. The general crimes detectives work out of an office in the Menlo Park police department, which is located in the basement of City Hall at 701 Laurel Street. They work in an open office area, M ADDEN SITS AT THE TABLE IN THE OFFICE LUNCHROOM, STARING AT Knife Music 127 with no cubicles. Adjacent to their office area is an interview room, Pastorini’s office, and the commander’s office. The narcotics detectives, on the other hand, work out of an office in a police substation on Willow Road in East Menlo Park. It’s in an area called Belle Haven, their little pocket of inner city, gangs and all, on the other side of the Bayshore freeway that’s home to a significant number of Hispanics and Tongans. Like neighboring East Palo Alto, which in 1992 had the highest per capita murder rate in the nation with fortytwo homicides, Belle Haven, also hard-hit by the crack epidemic of the early 1990s, has seen its lot improve in recent years. While the real-estate boom has been much slower to touch these areas, a gradual and sometimes dramatic gentrification is underway. East Palo now has an IKEA, and a Four Seasons Hotel is under construction next to the freeway. Despite the upswing, however, trouble spots remain—and plenty of them. “So the friend saw them having sex?” Pastorini says. “The whole thing? That’s beautiful.” “Well, she saw about twenty seconds’ worth,” Madden replies. “But she got a good look.” Pastorini sits down at the table and tears open the pack of Twizzlers he bought and peels off a strip of red licorice. “The friend,” he says, pointing at the diagram with the drooping twine, “what’s her name?” “Carrie Pinklow. Parents are recently divorced. Lives mostly with her mother. Father’s living in an apartment in Los Altos. That’s where Kristen was coming from when she got into the initial accident that landed her at Parkview Medical.” “You sure that wasn’t a suicide attempt?” “Doesn’t seem so from the diary. She wrote that someone cut her off and she swerved to avoid the car.” “Bizarre,” Pastorini says. “And you think the bruise on her arm is from the father?” “He says he might have grabbed her arm pretty tightly at one point the day before. They were arguing. She tried to walk away and he didn’t let her go.” “This Carrie girl, she credible?” 128 D AV I D C A R N O Y “She was pretty composed, all things considered.” “But there is a jealousy factor.” “Sure. There are a lot of factors.” “You ever dealt with something like this before?” Pastorini asks. “What?” “Trying to squeeze a homicide out of a suicide?” Pastorini made it sound like Madden was trying to get orange juice from apples. The hint of a smile appears on Madden’s lips. “Not really,” he says. “Remember, we had that case a few years back where the kid decided to walk in front of a Caltrain and the parents sued the company that made his nasal spray? But nothing where an individual was involved.” “What’s the term you used on the phone?” “Foreseeable harm.” “Right.” “The intent doesn’t have to be there,” Madden explains again. “When Cogan slept with the girl, he didn’t think his actions would cause her to later kill herself. But in committing the crime of statutory rape, he was aware—or at least, should have been aware—that his actions could potentially cause her emotional injury.” “And in its most extreme form,” Pastorini finishes for him, “those emotional wounds could trigger her to kill herself.” “Exactly. All injuries flow from the initial injury. You stab a hemophiliac in the arm and she bleeds to death. So what if you didn’t know she was a hemophiliac, I can charge you with killing her. Murder three.” “But you’ve got to prove I poked her first.” “Well, I’m not sure that’s the word I’d use.” Pastorini smiles, taking pleasure in Madden’s glum reaction. “Cheer up, Hank,” he says. “You sound a whole lot better than you did when you called me this morning.” “I didn’t know we had a witness then.” Pastorini nods in agreement, his seriousness returning. Knife Music 129 “When did Kristen tell Carrie she had sex with Cogan?” he asks. “The next day.” “That’s good. That’ll help. And she’ll talk to the doc for us?” “She’ll talk.” “And you spoke to the frat?” “I was over earlier today. Carrie’s brother is a member.” At first, the brother was the only one who was talking. But with a little prodding from school officials who promised even harsher penalties if the frat didn’t cooperate, a couple of the guys confirmed what Carrie and the brother had said: the girl, Kristen, got hammered and threw up, then became a problem. The president of the frat told Carrie she had to get her friend out of there, that he “didn’t want any underage chicks dying on him.” “Nice,” Pastorini says. “The brother was over at the doc’s house, too, right?” “No, but another girl from the university was. Gwen Dayton. I haven’t contacted her yet. But I will.” He pulls out a photo from a folder that’s sitting on the table under the yellow legal pad. It’s a blown-up version of the young woman’s driver’s license photo. She’s got long dark hair, a small nose, and cheerleader looks. Her height is listed as five-eleven. “Giddyup,” Pastorini says expectedly, using his favorite Seinfeld expression. “Don’t let Billings see that. He’ll beg you to tag along.” “Don’t worry.” Pastorini takes the photo in one more time, then, getting back to business, says, “You think there’s a chance Cogan’s heard already?” “Sure, there’s always a chance.” “Well, I’d say we’ve got one more day before it really breaks. We’re looking at Tuesday morning’s papers. And then probably the evening news.” “If we’re lucky.” Pastorini sits down and chews on a couple of Twizzlers while he thinks. Madden can’t watch. There’s something grotesque about 130 D AV I D C A R N O Y the way he chews, with his mouth ajar, and that little smacking sound he makes. “It’s your call, Hank,” he finally says. “I don’t know. I talked to Gill. We could stick the friend on the phone with him and see what happens.” Gill is short for Gillian—Gillian Hartwick—the commander of their division, a tall, attractive, and well-spoken woman who will field any questions from the media. Respected by officers for her warm, confident demeanor and straightforward management style, she’s been with the force for over twenty years. “You’d have to get an OK from the DA’s office first,” Pastorini goes on. “It’s tricky. It’s always better to have the victim. Like Open Wide.” Madden feels himself grimace, then stops. He doesn’t like the expression, though he’s grown used to it, or at least thought he had. “Open Wide” was a case from almost a year ago. It had been well covered by the press, the story of a dentist who’d molested at least one and probably several of his patients while they were under anesthesia. That patient—a thirty-one-year-old woman—had woken up prematurely and caught a glimpse of the guy putting his pecker back in his pants. The sad thing was that if he’d been smart, he’d still be practicing. But when the woman called to accuse him of raping her, he panicked. Instead of denying the charge—there was, after all, no proof he’d done anything wrong—he begged her to meet with him and “work things out.” A few days later, they got him on tape offering her ten grand, and it was over. He was finished. Billings had nicknamed the case Open Wide for obvious reasons, and the name had stuck, much to Madden’s displeasure. He hadn’t been sexually assaulted in the same manner, but every time someone made the reference, he couldn’t help but picture the detectives who’d finally caught his doctor sitting around, trying to come up with a nickname for the case and having a good chuckle with each new candidate (“The Big Prick” was the one that kept sticking in his head). If he’d complained, Pastorini might have put a stop to it. But he hadn’t, it wasn’t his practice to let people know they were getting under his skin, and Pastorini Knife Music 131 had let it go, quietly content to watch his number one detective squirm. “I don’t think we should put the friend on the phone,” Madden says. “Not right away, anyway.” “What do you want to do?” “I’ve got a plan.” Pastorini chews a little slower. “Really?” “Really.” “Let’s hear it.” 18/ VISITORS April 2, 2007—2:52 p.m. A LITTLE BEFORE THREE. COGAN IS SITTING out in the courtyard of the hospital, drinking coffee with Dr. Kim. “I had my hand on her belly,” he’s saying to Kim. “And her boyfriend is giving me this look like: don’t go any further or I’m going to kill you. Big black guy. And I say to the woman, ‘Are you hungry?’ And she says, ‘Yeah.’ And I say, ‘I sure could go for a couple of Egg McMuffins right now. That sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?’ And her mouth’s practically watering. I mean, they’ve been there all night, and they haven’t given her anything to eat. So I ask her a couple more questions, and it turns out her brother and mother have had the flu recently. So I tell her it doesn’t look like anything serious. If she had appendicitis, she wouldn’t be hungry. That’s one of the symptoms. And meanwhile, as I’m explaining all this, I want to fucking kill Allison.” Allison is an attending physician, a gastrointestinal surgeon a few years younger than Kim and Cogan. “Did you say something to her?” “Hell yeah. Right after I got through with the woman, I went up to Allison and I said, ‘Why are you pulling me in on this bullshit stuff? If someone had taken five minutes to talk to this woman, I wouldn’t be wasting my time. This is shit a first-year could handle and you’ve got me in on it because you’re too fucking lazy to ask a M ONDAY AFTERNOON. Knife Music 133 couple of questions. The woman’s hungry. She’s ready to slam down five Big Macs. What does that tell you?’” “Consider yourself lucky,” says Kim. “She’s got me in on shit like that all the time. I mean, all the fucking time.” “It’s just lazy. I hate it.” “Dr. Cogan?” Cogan looks over. It’s Janine, a young nurse who only started last week. “Yes.” “There are two men asking for you. Police officers.” “What are their names?” She looks at him, a little puzzled. “Oh, I don’t know. They said they were police officers.” “Are they wearing uniforms?” “No. Just regular clothes.” He turns to Kim. “Detectives,” he says. “Probably Reed.” Then to the nurse, “Did they say what they want?” “To ask you a couple of questions.” “OK, thanks. Tell them I’ll be right there.” Cogan reluctantly gets up, groaning a little as he does so. He hates to be interrupted during a nice relaxed session of coffee and venting. “You think they want to talk to you about that old lady?” Kim asks after the nurse has gone. “Maybe. They caught the guy who did it, didn’t they?” “Yeah, two days ago.” The police occasionally interview him about victims he’s treated, especially the ones who died (“Did she ever regain consciousness, say anything to you?”), and by now he knows many of the cops by name and has his favorites. Usually, they come to the hospital shortly after the victim arrives and sometimes at the same time. But every once in a while they show up later. Cogan downs the little coffee he has left and tosses the cup into a garbage can. “All right, Dr. Kim. We’ll resume our bitching later. I’ll see you tomorrow at the club.” “See ya.” 134 D AV I D C A R N O Y The cops are sitting in the surgery waiting room. There are only five people in the room, including the receptionist, and it isn’t hard to pick out the two detectives: both are wearing dark sport jackets and ties. What surprises Cogan is that he hasn’t seen either of them before. For a second he wonders if he has seen them and just forgot. But he’s good with faces and neither registers. One is older, a slight, balding guy with glasses and a neatly trimmed mustache. The other, an earnest, clean-cut black guy, looks like he could be a Jehovah’s Witness. He has a warm, friendly smile. “Hello, gentlemen. Ted Cogan.” They stand up and introduce themselves—Detectives Madden and Burns. “Come on back,” Cogan says. “My office isn’t very big, but I think we’ll all fit.” As he leads them down the hall, he notices that the older guy, Madden, is limping. And then he notices he’s wearing a special shoe—he has a dropfoot. Strange, Cogan thinks. He’s never seen a handicapped cop. He has an urge to ask about it, but before the urge gets too strong they reach his office. The room is small, about the size of a jail cell. It has a minimal amount of furniture: a desk, two chairs, filing cabinet, waste bin, and a desktop computer and printer. Really, all he uses the room for is to make phone calls, do paperwork, and check his email. He’s rarely in his office for more than twenty or thirty minutes at a time, so it doesn’t bother him that it’s small. But it gets a little tight when he receives multiple visitors. Cogan pulls in a third chair from Dr. Diaz’s office, and when the cops are settled, he closes the door and sits down behind his desk. “What can I do for you gentlemen today?” The older one, Madden, speaks. “Do you recall a young woman named Kristen Kroiter?” Cogan blinks with surprise. The name registers—he knows it, well even—but he can’t put a face with it. Why do I know that name? he thinks. Madden continues, “You treated her about six months ago. Knife Music 135 She was in a car accident. Sixteen. I believe she ruptured her spleen.” Cogan remembers. And as soon as he remembers, he realizes he shouldn’t remember too quickly. “OK. Yeah. I think I know who you’re talking about. She’s a student at Menlo-Atherton High. Why? Did something happen to her?” “Well, it’s complicated,” Madden says. “How do you know she goes to Menlo-Atherton?” Cogan feels the heat rise in his face. But his voice remains steady. “Oh, I think she told me at some point. I think I asked her if she knew my neighbor’s kid.” As he speaks, he notices that the second detective is taking notes, scribbling on a small notepad. “I live in Menlo Park,” he adds after a beat. “He goes to MA.” “Have you seen her since you treated her?” “Well, she came in for a check-up about a month after the accident. That’s standard. And then I may have run into her a couple times at Safeway. Or was it the mall? I can’t remember exactly. Maybe one time at the mall and one time at Safeway.” “You spoke to her?” “Yes, briefly. I asked her how she felt. How things were going. She seemed to be doing well.” “And those are the only times you spoke to her.” Cogan looks up at the ceiling, his heart pounding hard. The longer he waits, the greater their suspicions will be. So he says, “I think I may have spoken to her and her friend in front of my house a couple of times. They were visiting my neighbor’s kid.” “And those are the only times you saw or spoke to her? The ones you’ve told us about?” “Yes. Why? What’s this all about?” Neither detective speaks for a moment. Then Madden looks at his partner, Burns. Burns looks back at him, then turns to Cogan and asks, “Is there any reason Miss Kroiter would say she had sex with you?” Cogan’s eyes open wide. He laughs. “Sex? Are you kidding me?” “No,” Burns says, his warm smile gone, replaced by stern eyes. 136 D AV I D C A R N O Y Cogan looks at him dumbfounded. “You’re fucking kidding me.” “We’re not doing that, either.” Cogan falls silent, a depressed look coming over his face. A hundred thoughts run through his mind at the same time. A dozen emotions. They had promised not to say anything, he thinks. They were never there. It was weeks ago. Back in February, wasn’t it? What had happened? Stay calm, Cogan. Stay calm. “What exactly did this girl say I did?” he says at last. “Well, it’s complicated,” repeats Madden. “How complicated could it be? What did she tell you?” “Well, that’s just it. She didn’t tell us anything. She died. Saturday.” If the reference to sex had felt like a punch to the gut, this one is more like a Mike-Tyson-in-his-prime uppercut to the chin. The lights go out for a second; he’s truly in shock. “Come again?” he says. “Looks like a suicide,” Burns replies. Cogan stares at them in utter horror. “What police department are you guys from?” Burns looks at Madden, and Madden says, “Menlo Park.” “No, I mean what unit?” “Homicide.” By the time they met, Madden had known Cogan for two days. He didn’t know him know him, of course. But he’d built an image of him: from a driver’s license photo, from what two parents had thought, from what one girl had said and one had written, and from his own insights. In plotting Cogan’s downfall, he’d taken that image and put it through the paces, running it over and over through a scene he’d carefully constructed in his mind. Take after take, he’d watched Cogan walk toward him in the hospital waiting room. Sometimes Cogan was apprehensive. Sometimes courteous. Sometimes jovial. And sometimes impatient. It didn’t matter. For whichever Cogan showed up, Madden was prepared. Knife Music 137 “What if he’s hostile?” Burns had asked, driving to the hospital. Madden didn’t think he’d be hostile. He thought he knew him well enough to know that. He counted on him to be calm. That’s, after all, what he was paid to be: calm during a crisis. There was no reason to expect him to be overly jittery or nervous, especially since he didn’t know why they wanted to see him. The alleged incident took place over a month ago, he reminded Burns. There was a reasonable chance Cogan would have concluded he was past it. The plan was simple: get Cogan to answer as many questions as possible before he demanded to know what was going on. Madden knew from talking to Carrie that the one thing he feared the most was that people would find out he’d let the girl, a former patient, spend the night at his house. That was not a crime, but it looked bad, and he’d told both girls that he could lose his job if the hospital brass found out about it. So Madden doubted Cogan would be forthcoming about the girls’ visit. And if they could get him to lie about that, they were in business. It would show he was hiding something. Of course, they might never get there. As soon as they mentioned Kristen Kroiter, Cogan might tell them he had no comment and they should speak to his lawyer. He might have thought long and hard about what transpired that night and what he would say if anybody ever asked him about it. Madden had met a few like that. The thinkers. The ones who’d rehearsed what they were going to say, knew exactly how they would react once they were confronted, even months after a crime. And sometimes it wasn’t to deny their deeds, but to accept them. He remembered the dentist, Parker. When they’d arrested him at his home, the guy hadn’t looked the least bit perturbed. There was even the hint of a smile on his lips as they read him his rights. It was as if he knew this day had been coming and was resigned to it. Even when his wife broke down in shock, the guy’s face had remained placid. He’d reached the end of a story that he knew the ending to—that he’d watched many times over—and he seemed to have found some release in finally living it out. Now it was Cogan’s turn. When Madden first saw him, 138 D AV I D C A R N O Y the only thing that surprised him was how tall he was. Later, he realized his mistake. He was wearing clogs, which added a good two inches to his height. But the height had thrown Madden for a second. He had seemed bigger than he really was, and everything else—his looks, his demeanor, his smile, even the way he walked—seemed exaggerated as a result. As they walked down the hall toward Cogan’s office, Madden felt a flush of anger: he understood exactly why those girls had gone to the trouble of befriending the kid next door just so they could create an opportunity to run into Cogan. For a second he hated him for that ability, and for his strong jaw and disarming smile. And then he hated himself for thinking that way, for being the least bit jealous. To clear his mind, he looked over at Burns, who was already looking at him. Burns nodded, and looked away. Whenever they went to a hospital, he could sense Burns was watching him. Madden had gotten over his fear of hospitals long ago, but every once in a while a smell or sound would get to him and he’d feel his throat tighten. Today, in the waiting room, it had happened. The tightness came and it must have showed on his face because Burns turned to him and asked, “You all right?” “Yeah, fine,” he said. And as soon as he said he was fine, he was. They had a strange understanding, Burns and him. Burns took the lead on many of the cases that came out of Belle Haven. He had a chameleon-like quality that had always impressed Madden. “He has range,” Pastorini once said. And it was true. In Belle Haven and East Palo Alto, Burns was black. But west of the freeway he was all white. He’d been good today. The perfect supporting player, Madden thinks as they make their way out of the hospital. He keeps seeing the look on Cogan’s face when Burns asked him about having sex with the girl. And when they told him about the diary. Had it been genuine disbelief? Hard to say, he thinks. Very hard. He doesn’t know what kind of actor Cogan is. Doesn’t know him well enough to know that. Not yet. But he will, he promises himself. Neither of them speaks until they get outside. Then, at the bot- Knife Music 139 tom of the entranceway’s steps, Burns asks, “What do you think, Hank?” Madden doesn’t say anything at first. He just stops at the curb and looks at his watch. His timer is at thirty-five seconds, ticking down from two minutes. “I think we’ve got a ball game,” he finally says. Then he pulls out his cell phone and speed-dials the sergeant’s number. “We’re done,” he tells Pastorini. “Wait thirty seconds and have the girl call.” Cogan is alone in his office no more than two minutes when the phone rings. For a moment, he sits there staring at it as if it’s some mysterious foreign object that he’s seeing and hearing for the first time. Nothing has changed: the room is exactly as it was when he entered it. And people are still moving around outside his office, doing their jobs as if nothing had happened. Yet everything seems intensely askew. He doesn’t know where to begin, who to call or what exactly to do. He knows he has to get a lawyer, but which lawyer? Who’s good? And who to call to find out who’s good? The phone rings again. His initial impulse is not to answer it, but suddenly he hopes it’s Klein or Reinhart or anybody he knows. So on the fourth ring, just before the call slides into voice mail, he picks up. “Cogan,” he says. “Hello, Dr. Cogan?” “Yes?” “This is Carrie Pinklow. I don’t know if you remember me.” Her voice wavers nervously, “Kristen’s friend. I tried to reach you earlier today but you were out.” “Yes?” “I don’t know how to say this, but something terrible has happened.” “I know. The police were just here.” “Oh, my God. So you know. It’s just awful,” she says, speaking in an irritating staccato. “I can’t believe she killed herself. The 140 D AV I D C A R N O Y police talked to me, too.” “And what did you say when they came to talk to you?” “I didn’t know what to tell them. It was all in her diary. Everything that happened that night. You know about the diary, don’t you?” His tone suddenly turns sharp. “They said you made some comments. What did you tell them, Carrie?” “I told them—I had to. I told them we went to your house. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Are you going to get in trouble?” He lowers his voice. “Did you say anything about Kristen having sex with me?” “They asked me about it.” “Shit.” “It was in her diary. There was nothing I could do. And then they said she called you Saturday afternoon. What did you say to her?” “I didn’t say anything. Why on earth would she kill herself? Over something I said? Is that what they were implying?” “I know. It’s just awful,” she repeats. “Christ. Why didn’t you tell them she made the whole thing up?” “I don’t know,” the girl says. Cogan covers his face with his hand, exasperated. Rubbing his eyes, he lets out a long sigh. “Do you think it would help if I did?” she says suggestively. “It’d be a good start, don’t you think?” Just then he hears voices outside his door. A nurse talking to a doctor. “Look, I have to go,” he says. “But this is bad, Carrie. Really fucking bad. I’m very sorry about your friend, but I’m in a heap of trouble here. A huge heap. And it’s my own goddamn fault.” 19/ PROFESSIONAL ADVICE April 2, 2007—3:35 p.m. COGAN CALLS IS KLEIN, THOUGH HE DOESN’T actually call him; he pages him. Klein gets back to him quickly, in less than a minute. “Hey, buddy, you getting out of here?” he asks when Cogan picks up. “Soon. You busy?” “Just got a couple things to finish up. Why? What’s up?” “Can you come down? I need to talk to you.” “Sure. What’s up? Girl troubles?” “You could say that.” “Really. Which one? Do I know her?” “This one’s serious, Kleiny. Real serious.” “Oh,” he says, taken aback. Then, after a beat, “I’ll come right down.” When Klein arrives a few minutes later, he enters the office hesitantly, almost gingerly, as if he fears he’s about to be reprimanded by a superior. Cogan knows he’s scared him a little. As long as he’s known him—about five years—he’s never used the word “serious” to describe a situation he had with a woman, even his worst break-ups. “Sit down,” he tells Klein in a low voice. And then, when he’s seated, “Look, I can’t tell you everything right now, because I don’t HE FIRST PERSON T 142 D AV I D C A R N O Y know where this thing’s going. But I’ll give you the truncated version. You remember that girl I was telling you about, the girl I treated, who was in the car accident? The one I kept running into?” “Yeah, the one I met that day I stopped by.” Cogan had forgotten about that. “That’s right. She and her friend were out in front of the house with my neighbor’s kid when you drove up. Well, I never told you this but one night two or three months ago they stopped by my house late at night. The girl was drunk, practically unconscious. They’d been to a party—” “The same girl you treated?” “Yeah. Same one. It was the night of your birthday. After we went out.” Klein vaguely remembers something about it. “I called you after I came home. I heard them in the background and asked you who they were, and you said ‘No one, just an old girlfriend and her friend.’ That was them?” “Actually, there were three.” Cogan explains why the girls had come—that Kristen’s friend had brought her there because she remembered where he lived and hadn’t wanted to take her to a hospital because they were afraid they would get in trouble with their parents. They pleaded with him to help them. At first, he said no—he could get in trouble if he did. But they begged him to, and he gave in. Under normal circumstances he would have sent them on their way. But the truth was he was pretty buzzed himself after their outing that night. He’d actually had more to drink than he thought— even more than Reinhart—so his judgment wasn’t a hundred percent. “How bad was she?” Klein asks. “She wasn’t good. But compared to some of the shit that comes through here, she was OK.” He decided he’d take a quick look and if he couldn’t handle it, he’d send them to the hospital. Well, they walked her around and gave her water. An older girl—a college girl—was there, too, helping. They basically babysat her for half an hour, and she started to get better. Then, at some point, they stuck her in the guest room Knife Music 143 and she went to sleep. At eight-thirty the next morning, the friend came back and picked her up and that was the end of that. He didn’t hear anything about it until today. “So the girl spent the night?” “Yeah.” Klein makes a face and shakes his head. “Look, it was incredibly poor judgment. I know it was. But at the time, I was just trying to help. I mean, we’ve all been in a situation like that when we were kids.” “The thing is,” Klein says, “when you become a parent you stop thinking like a kid.” “Please, I don’t need any of Trish’s high-and-mighty crap right now. And if you tell her about this, I’ll kill you. Not a word to anyone.” “Sorry, man. So, go on, what happened?” It got worse. A lot worse. As he said, he hadn’t heard anything about it until today. The girl, Kristen, who’d spent the night had come to see him once after that night. She thought she might have left her earrings in his house. She’d brought him a present, which he thanked her for, but told her he couldn’t accept. Afterward, he told her she couldn’t come to his house again, that he could get into trouble if she did. She seemed to understand his position. And when he ran into her at the Safeway the next week, everything seemed fine. They said hello. Everything was cordial. That was back in March. Then about half an hour ago he got word there were two cops looking for him. He couldn’t imagine they had anything to do with the incident. He’d worried about it for a couple of weeks, but when nothing came of it, he’d put it out of his mind. As far as he was concerned, it had never happened. “How’d they find out about it?” He looks at Klein. “You’re not going to believe this,” he says, not believing it himself. “The girl kept a diary. And her mother found it and read it.” “You’re kidding. Online? On MySpace or something?” “No. On paper. In a notebook, I guess.” “I didn’t know kids did that anymore.” 144 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Apparently so.” “And she wrote about how she was over at your house?” He lowers his voice even more, almost to a whisper. “Not only that. She wrote about how she had sex that night—with me.” “Jesus.” “No, wait. It gets worse. On Saturday, she killed herself.” Now it’s Klein’s turn to be shocked. “She’s dead?” “That’s what they’re telling me. And it just so happens she called me a few hours before it happened.” “And you spoke to her?” “That’s just it. I told her I couldn’t speak to her. I think she was about to tell me what had happened—you know, warn me about her mother finding the diary—but I cut her off. I mean, I was nice about it. I told her she was a terrific girl and all but I really couldn’t have any more contact with her. I wasn’t an asshole, I swear. But I guess I was kind of abrupt. I had a call on the other line. Who knew? Who fucking knew?” Klein sits there silently for a moment, staring at the ground. Maybe he’s thinking about what it would be like if the same thing had happened to him, thinks Cogan. Or maybe he’s considering whether I slept with the girl. “I didn’t do it,” Cogan says, suspecting the latter. “This is something she fabricated. She made it up.” Klein looks up at him and nods. “So what are you going to do?” “I’m not sure. I’ve got to get a lawyer.” “Have they charged you with anything?” “Not yet.” “Is that enough proof, the diary?” “I don’t know. Apparently, the girl told her friend that it happened. And now the friend told the police that she saw us having sex.” “Christ.” “Do you know who represented Hanson?” Hanson was a doctor who’d been accused of examining a pa- Knife Music 145 tient’s breasts unnecessarily. In the end, he hadn’t been prosecuted, but the hospital let him go. “I don’t remember,” Klein says. “That was like three years ago.” “Do you think Reinhart would know somebody?” “Didn’t you date a criminal lawyer?” “Which one?” “The one with the BMW convertible. Carol. Karen—” “Carolyn,” Cogan says. “Yeah. Didn’t she do sexual-harassment-type cases?” “You know,” he says, pulling his Blackberry out of his pocket, “I think you’re right.” “You still got her number?” “I’m looking.” He does a listing by first name and sure enough, there it is: Carolyn Dupuy. “Carolyn Dupuy,” he says to Klein, who mutters something that sounds like, “Thank God for technology.” Cogan looks at his watch. It’s a quarter to five. He may still be able to catch her. He picks up the phone and dials the number he has for her office. Klein says, “When was the last time you spoke to her?” “I don’t know. Two, two and a half years ago.” “How’d you leave things?” “She’d take a call,” Cogan says. “I think.” Just then the receptionist at Stevens, Clark, & Kirshner comes on and he raises his hand, signaling Klein to keep quiet. “Does Carolyn Dupuy still work there?” “Yes,” says the receptionist. “Transferring.” A secretary picks up. “Carolyn Dupuy’s office.” “Is she in?” “Who’s calling?” “Ted Cogan. Tell her it’s important.” The line goes silent. A few seconds later, he gets the secretary’s voice again: “Hold on, she’ll be with you in a moment.” And in a moment, Carolyn comes on. 146 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Is this the world-renowned Dr. Ted Cogan?” she says in her smooth, deep broadcaster’s voice. “I think infamous is more apt at this point.” “To what do I owe the honor?” “I need professional advice, Carolyn.” “I told you that a couple of years ago.” “I’m serious. I’m in a bit of trouble here. Actually, it may be a lot of trouble. And I’m looking for an attorney—a criminal attorney. I was hoping you might be able to recommend someone. Are you still doing sexual harassment cases?” There’s a short silence. “This is interesting,” she says after a moment. He can practically see her smiling. “What have they got you on?” “It’s complicated,” he says, echoing Madden’s words. “But I’m basically about to be charged with having sex with a minor.” “How old was she?” “Sixteen.” “Don’t tell me you didn’t know.” “I didn’t do it. She was a patient.” “This really does sound interesting. Who’s on the case? Did they send someone to talk to you yet?” “Yeah, a couple of detectives. They showed up here about two hours ago.” Cogan glanced at Madden’s card, which was sitting on his desk next to the phone. “Some guy named Henry Madden.” “Hank Madden,” she says. “You should be honored. They usual put him on the bigger stuff. Major crimes. Even homicides.” “Yeah, I know. I didn’t tell you the other part. The girl’s dead. They found her Saturday. They said it looks like she killed herself.” “Oh, boy.” Suddenly, she isn’t so cheery. “This Madden,” he says. “You know him?” “Sure. He’s good. Very good. And he’s not so keen on doctors.” “What do you mean?” “There was an article about a year ago in the Mercury. I’ll have to dig it up for you. Did you say anything to him?” “Too much I’m afraid. Look, can I come talk to you? Or can Knife Music 147 you refer me to someone? I need to get the ball rolling here.” “Now?” “Yeah. Or soon. Over the weekend. I’ve got to get someone by Monday.” Silence again. He hears her flip the page on her calendar. “What are you doing tomorrow?” she asks. “Say, around ten?” He looks at Klein. They’re supposed to play tennis at eleven. “Nothing,” he says. “That’s fine. Where do you want me to meet you?” “Where else? Your favorite.” “The Creamery?” “Why not?” “I’ll be there,” he says. “Ten.” “Looking forward to it.” “I’m sure you are.” Cogan hangs up the phone. Then he puts his elbows on his desk and covers his face with his hands. “You OK?” Klein asks. “Yeah,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “Do me a favor. Don’t tell Kim why I can’t make tennis. I’ll talk to Reinhart tonight.” Then, after a beat: “I’m sorry, man. I’m really sorry.” 20/ PROBABLE CAUSE April 3, 2007—10:06 a.m. C OGAN AWAKES WEARY AND ANXIOUS after a night of the worst kind of sleep. He’d gone to bed early, around eleven, and though his body was exhausted his mind was full of energy, and it kept waking him even when his body had shut down. Once, he thought he’d slept several hours, but he looked at the clock and it only read twelve-thirty. He’d slept twenty minutes. Finally, at two, he turned on the television, and gradually drifted away to a roundtable of talking heads rehashing the political crisis du jour, only to wake again for good at six-thirty. It begins raining around eight. The gray dreariness of the day seems completely appropriate, a sign of his plight, and when he looks outside all he can do is shake his head and say, “Just perfect.” But as dismal as the day seems, all is not totally bleak. Due to the poor weather, the usually crowded Peninsula Creamery in downtown Palo Alto is only half full, and he’s able to secure a booth in his favorite spot, near the window—a positive omen, he thinks. Aggressively quaint yet thoroughly modern, Palo Alto’s picturesque downtown is a small grid eleven blocks long and five wide that contains everything from fast-food joints to trendy eateries with French and Italian names, to boutiques and art galleries. Trees line the streets and parking can be hard to find, especially on weekends when University Avenue, the city’s main drag, gets an influx of outHE NEXT MORNING T Knife Music 149 of-towners dropping in on their way to and from Stanford Shopping Center, the other nearby shopping mecca. Carolyn arrives fifteen minutes later. He looks up from his coffee and newspaper and there she is, standing over him, smiling, a small wet umbrella held out away from her jeans, dripping. “Hello, Ted.” They look at each other a moment, each seeming to gauge how the other has faired against time. “Hello, Carolyn,” he says, getting up and kissing her on the cheek. Whenever he runs into an old girlfriend he always wonders why he’d broken it off with her. Invariably, she seems attractive, and usually more attractive than he remembered. For a brief moment he forgets about all the things that had bothered him and returns to that initial impression he had—that initial thing that had attracted him in the first place. Carolyn is attractive. She has a dark Mediterranean complexion and dark, fine hair that she tends to wear up in a bun, like she’s wearing it now, with strands left hanging over her ears and a few over her forehead. Her eyes, also brown, are a little too small for her face, and she borders on taking too much sun, but he always liked how she put herself together. She tries to present a restrained, conservative image, but there are hints of a wilder, more passionate side that becomes even more apparent with a few drinks. He’d always thought she was sexiest when she was a little sloppy, when everything wasn’t quite tucked in and her hair was tousled. He couldn’t think of anybody who could wear a run in her stocking better. They’d stopped seeing each other for a basic, mundane reason: he’d been unwilling to go to the next level, whatever that was. She’d broken it off with him, but he’d convinced himself that she’d really been bluffing and that he could have had her back if he’d made the effort. And he might have (or so he told himself) had her timing been better. Sometime during their fifth month of dating she called him at work and asked him to come over that evening “to talk.” He could tell from the tone of her voice that she was in action mode. Things 150 D AV I D C A R N O Y weren’t going exactly as she wanted them to go, and now she was determined to right the course or abandon it altogether. The problem was he hadn’t gotten much sleep over the previous week. He’d been working on a difficult case—a patient was boxing on him after a lung operation—and trauma had been unusually busy. So he asked her whether she could hold off for a couple of days until he was less stressed and more clear-headed. But she insisted they talk, she had her mind set, and they ended up breaking up over the phone. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea we see each other anymore,” she said after he pressed her to reveal what she wanted to talk about. “I just don’t think this is going anywhere, Ted. What do you think?” “Let’s just do it,” he said. “Let’s just get it over with.” They saw each other again, of course. They’d even slept together. But he could never forgive her for that day—he couldn’t bring himself to forgive her for being so thoughtless. Maybe it was just an excuse. That’s what Trish had said. But even if it was an excuse, he thought it was a good excuse. Looking at her now, he still thinks it was a good excuse, but it takes him longer to remember. How old is she? They’d dated two and a half years ago, so that would make her what, thirty-four or thirty-five? Holding up well, he thinks. He wants to compliment her, but at the same time, doesn’t want her to get the wrong impression. He decides on a perfunctory tone: “You look great—as usual.” Her reply is equally perfunctory. “Thanks,” she says, angling into the booth across from him. “Here comes the waitress. I’m dying for a coffee.” They order; she takes an omelet, he the bagel and lox platter. Another server pours them coffee from a retro, silver coffee pot—a touch for which The Creamery, a 1950s-style diner that has an ArtDeco-meets-techno veneer, is known. Everything in the place seems to be either steel colored or black, except for the servers’ T-shirts and the napkins, both of which are white. Empty, the room may have seemed cold and sterile, much like the trauma room. But filled with people the coldness is replaced by a sort of hip casualness. It’s Knife Music 151 a place where you feel you can say profound things in a few words, effortlessly. That’s what he’d once told Reinhart anyway. And on other days, under different circumstances, he might have been effortless. But today he finds himself laboring uncomfortably as he sets out to tell Carolyn what had led him to call her yesterday in a panic. He starts from the beginning—from the time the girl came into the hospital—to the time the detectives showed up. She listens to him almost without commenting. Every so often she asks him to clarify something. She has a little trouble at first telling Kristen and Carrie apart, and it doesn’t help that he’s a little loose with his pronouns. But aside from a few interjections, she doesn’t challenge him and reserves her judgment, even when he tells her he let the girl spend the night at his house. She just nods, takes a sip of orange juice, and goes back to eating. After he finishes, there’s a short silence. Then she says, “Why would the girl write and then tell her friend that she had sex with you, when she didn’t? And why would the friend say she saw you having sex?” He can’t tell from her tone whether she believes him or finds his story hard to believe, and it bothers him that he can’t. “I have no idea,” he says. “In all your dealings with her, she seemed like a nice, sane, stable sixteen-year-old girl?” “Except for being accident-prone, yeah.” She nods. “You said she was attractive.” “She was.” “How attractive?” He thinks about it for a second, forgetting both the animosity and sadness he has for the girl. “On a scale of one to ten she was about an eight, though she didn’t think so. But if she’d decided to stick around, she would have been a knockout by senior year.” His eyes become emotional with the thought. “I know she would have. I know these things.” * * * 152 D AV I D C A R N O Y The waitress comes. Carolyn doesn’t say anything as she clears their plates. She just sits there, observing him. He can’t tell what she’s thinking. But she’s wearing one of those well, I see you haven’t changed grins. I see the same old Ted is alive and well. And she seems glad he is. But then she remembers why they are here—or he thinks she does—and the smile fades and she suddenly says, “Oh, I have something for you. You should see this.” She reaches into the back pocket of her jeans and fishes out a folded-up piece of paper. The San Jose Mercury had done an article on the detective who’d come to see him, Henry Madden. “Handicap Doesn’t Slow Detective in Race to Catch Criminals,” the headline reads. It’s an actual photocopy of the article, not something that had been pulled from the Internet or LexisNexis, the research service. “Look on the second page,” she says. There, at the top, she’d highlighted a certain paragraph. Half-mumbling, he reads it aloud: “When asked why he was drawn to detective work, Madden reveals that his motive is partially personal. As a boy, while being treated for polio, a physician sexually abused him. He says that he was unable to confront the truth for many years, until he confided in a fellow officer who was working on a similar case. He regrets not saying anything earlier, for it could have prevented the physician, who was only brought to justice when Madden was in college, from abusing other patients.” “Jesus,” Cogan says after skimming the rest of the piece. “The guy’s doing his therapy in the papers. What did people think of this when it came out?” “In my office?” “In general.” “I don’t know. I think it was part of the department’s attempt to give cops a human face. It was a few months after those Hispanic kids got beat up in Redwood City. People looked at it pretty cynically. But Madden’s for real. He’s a decent guy. Well respected.” He shakes his head, lost to a sudden rush of anxiety. “I’m done, Carolyn,” he says morosely. “I’m fucked. The guy’s clearly got a nasty chip on his shoulder for docs. I saw it in his eyes when he was interviewing me. He’s tried and convicted me already.” Knife Music 153 She looks at him sympathetically—the first sympathetic look she’d given him the whole meal. She reaches out and takes his wrist and says, “Look, these cases are very difficult to prove. Yes, it’s unfortunate they have an eyewitness. But that’s far from a slam dunk.” “No bullshit.” His tone is more confrontational than he intends it to be, but he’s nervous. It makes her pull back. “If you were a doctor,” he goes on, “what would you tell me? What would my prognosis be?” She lets out a defensive laugh. “I’m serious,” he says. “I’m sorry. Do you want me to use medical terms?” “Use whatever terms you’d like.” She pauses and takes a breath. She appears as uneager to answer the question as he was uneager to ask it. “Well, from what you’ve told me, it looks like they have probable cause.” “Meaning?” “They can arrest you.” “Why haven’t they already?” She explains that they could have. But it’s possible they’re gathering evidence for a grand jury hearing. If they can get a grand jury to indict him, they can arrest and indict him at the same time. In some cases, they arrest the defendant, then go to the grand jury. But in delicate cases like this, prosecutors often go to a grand jury first to see whether they can get an indictment before arresting. If they can get one, it also means that the defendant won’t be allowed to testify at his grand jury hearing. She says that as a former prosecutor, that’s how she’d proceed. “I wouldn’t want you speaking before the grand jury—a respectable, well-spoken guy who’s saved a lot of lives and is an upstanding citizen. It’d be a risk.” “So where does that leave me?” Cogan asks, not quite sure whose side she’s on. “I don’t think they’re going to arrest you in the next couple of days. They clearly don’t want to make it appear that they knew they were going to arrest you when they went to see you at your office.” 154 D AV I D C A R N O Y She explains that if they’d gone to his office, asked some questions, then arrested him, whatever he said could be thrown out in court. “I’d argue that, knowing they were going to arrest you, they should have read you your rights immediately.” “And now?” “Now I could still argue that your remarks should be thrown out. But at least the detectives could say they hadn’t gone to your office to arrest you; they’d gone just to question you. My bigger concern is that they’re trying to build a murder case against you.” He stares at her, knowing he’s heard her correctly but wishing he hadn’t. “Murder? Why? Because I told her I couldn’t speak to her anymore?” “No. That in and of itself wouldn’t be a crime. It’s very difficult to hold another person accountable for someone else’s suicide. Even if you’d been nasty to her on the phone and said she was fat and unattractive and that she had no reason for living.” “Then what?” “Well, the exception might be if you’d committed a crime previously that had impacted her. There’s something called foreseeable harm. You may not have intended to cause her to commit suicide, but by sleeping with an underage girl, the law says you knowingly inflicted an emotional injury. And if it could be proven that initial injury led to her suicide, you could end up with a manslaughter charge. You’d probably be looking at two-to-five.” “You’re serious? That could happen?” She nods. “That’s probably what Madden’s after.” “Earlier, you said, ‘I would argue.’ Does that mean you want to represent me?” She sits back in her chair, a look of anguish crossing her face. At first, she seems ready to say no, but then she bites her lip nervously and he knows she’s in. “If you want,” she says, “I’ll take it— in the beginning, anyway. I’ll make some inquiries, and we can see where things stand. I’ll do that as a friend. But only if you want me to.” “Really, you’d represent me?” She seems almost embarrassed. “What’s wrong with that?” Knife Music 155 “Nothing. I’m just surprised. Surprised in a good way.” “It’s an interesting case. I think any criminal lawyer would want to take it.” “I’m not questioning your motivation.” “If I had some strange illness that was in your area of expertise, you’d help me, wouldn’t you?” “I’d do what I could. And if I didn’t think I could handle it, I’d get the best person I knew to handle it.” “Just my point,” she says. He doesn’t respond. He looks down and his eyes drift to the check, which the waitress has placed closer to him. He wonders how much this all is going to cost. Not the lunch, but the attorney fees. At least if Carolyn represents him, he thinks, his money, or part of it anyway, will go to someone he knows. Two and a half years ago, he’d been at Bloomingdale’s in the Stanford Shopping Center debating whether to spring for the two-hundred-dollar perfume ensemble or the four-hundred-dollar gold necklace for her birthday. And now he’s looking at handing her firm fifty grand, probably more. Go figure. When he looks up again, she’s staring at him over her coffee mug. She’s holding it in both hands, taking little sips. He stares back at her, not liking her confidence. It can only mean one thing: she’s taken. “Are you seeing someone?” he asks. “Yes.” “Nice guy?” “I think so.” “What will he—” Cogan stops himself. “What will he what?” “Nothing.” He was going to ask what her boyfriend would think if he knew that she was going to represent him. But then he thought better of it. He didn’t want to give her the pleasure of answering. “I should tell you something else,” he says. “What?” “I was close to taking another job.” 156 D AV I D C A R N O Y “Really?” She seems mildly surprised. “At which hospital?” “Not at a hospital. At a venture-capital firm. A big one. The company has a number of biotech holdings. We’d just started talking numbers.” Now she’s genuinely shocked—so much so that she doesn’t seem to know quite what to say. “God, I remember you talking about doing some consulting. I mean, you were going to . . . but I didn’t think—” “Well, that’s what I wanted to do—dip my toe in the water before I made the big leap. But they want a full-time guy.” “And you were close?” “They made an offer. An attractive one.” “I don’t know what to say, Ted. I’m sorry.” He smiles and shakes his head. “You know, it’s funny. Business is all about risk and gain. Medicine is all about taking the safest course of action. They’re such different worlds. A businessman knows risk and knows he can lose or gain in a huge way. In medicine, if there’s a complication or a problem, you’re often asked by your peers, ‘Why did you do that? That was clearly the riskiest path to take.’ The mental set is completely different. In medicine, you’re chastised for taking the riskier path. But in business, if you’re a risktaker, you can really score.” “Or really lose,” she says. “Well, yes. But mistakes aren’t so frowned upon. They come with the territory.” After he finishes talking, he looks her in the eyes, almost daring her to say something about why he’d let those kids into his home that night. Why had he taken that risk? Where was the possible gain there? He wants to explain to her that back then, he didn’t feel he had anything to lose. There was no new job sitting on the table that night. There was nothing. She stares back, that faint smile of hers hovering ever so slightly on her lips. This time he doesn’t like it. It’s one of those smiles that an older woman bestows on a younger man when she’s charmed by his innocence. He hadn’t minded seeing it in his twenties, and even his early thirties, but now it only grates on him. Knife Music 157 “So, when do you think they’ll arrest me?” “I don’t know,” she says. “But the important thing is that you remain calm when they show up, especially if they do it at the hospital. Don’t say anything. I’m going to give you all my numbers. You can always page me. If I can’t come right away, I’ll have somebody else come.” He nods, clenching his jaw, suddenly reminded of the blunt Chinese doctor, Dr. Liu, who told people they were going to die. He looks out the window of the restaurant, depressed. Outside, it’s still pouring, and there’s a BMW sitting at a stoplight, its windshield wipers going full blast. With each swipe of the wipers, he hears the good doctor’s voice. You have lung cancer, you are going to die. You have lung cancer, you are going to die. The blades are like metronomes. 21/ BLUE FORD April 11, 2007—6:03 p.m. WEDNESDAYS LATER, AROUND SIX, STANDING AT THE KITCHEN window, Cogan notices a patrol car cruise past the house. It slows, and as it does, his chest tightens. When it doesn’t stop, he breathes a sigh of relief and tells himself he’s being paranoid, a patrol car usually checks the neighborhood twice a day—once in the morning and once late in the afternoon. But twenty minutes later, when the unmarked blue Ford sedan pulls up in front of his house, he has a sinking feeling his paranoia is justified. Breathlessly, he watches Madden and his partner get out of the car. They’re in no hurry. They stand for a moment next to the car and straighten their ties. Then they head slowly up the walkway to his front door. The doorbell rings. He knows what to expect when he opens the door, but for some reason when he finally does, his eyes open wide. He looks at the detectives as if they’re complete strangers, even aliens. “Dr. Cogan,” Madden says. “Sorry to disturb you. But I’m afraid you’re going to have to come down to the station with us. We have a warrant for your arrest. You’ve been charged with rape in the third degree, and you should know that anything you say can and will be used against you . . .” And so it is, just as he’d imagined it would be only no one’s watching. He’d somehow expected a small crowd. Or the disbelievWO T Knife Music 159 ing stares of doctors and nurses as they led him out of the hospital. For that he’s thankful: that they’d spared him the embarrassment and come here, not the hospital. The only person to see him leave his house that day with the detectives is a little girl out riding her new bike. And she doesn’t even know what’s happening. “Hi, Dr. Cogan,” she calls out to him gleefully, as she usually does. “Hi, Katie,” he calls back. He doesn’t think of it then, but later, when they’re a few blocks from the station, he realizes that he was about her age the last time he’d taken a ride in the back of a cop car. It had been almost thirty years. Back then, he’d cried, afraid of what his father would do to him when he found out he was a shoplifter. Now he wishes his father were still alive to punish him. Buy KNIFE MUSIC from Amazon.com, OverlookPress.com or from your local book retailer.