Soul Murder

11:17 p.m.

‘How did the killer get in?’ Patrese asked, when he and Beradino were in the car.

‘That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? Well, one of them, anyway.’

That the fire escape and underground parking lot were risky methods of entry didn’t mean they were impossible. The parking lot had closed-circuit TV; the fire escape didn’t. The cops would trawl through the footage and see what they could find.

Failing either of those, could the killer have been a resident?

It seemed unlikely, to say the least. They’d spoken to all the residents, albeit briefly. None of them looked as though they could harm a fly, and none had an obvious motive to do away with Redwine.

The uniforms would follow up, of course, interviewing every resident properly.

What about one of the doormen? Probably not Foxworth himself – it would be hard to do it on one’s own shift, because it would have meant leaving the front desk unattended for too long – but one of the others, who was off shift? A doorman would know all the shortcuts and hidden entrances, and his presence wouldn’t be suspicious.

But again, it came back to the same stumbling block: why?

Why had Redwine been killed, and why – the second sixty-four-thousand-dollar question – why in that way? Why burned, rather than, say, shot, or stabbed?

To hide something? If not Redwine’s identity, then something else?

To destroy something? Forensic evidence, or something less directly connected to the corpse, such as documentation or other items?

As punishment; a cruel and unusual way of murdering someone?

Or were all these delving too deep into something very simple? Had Michael Redwine been burnt to death simply because the killer had felt that was the easiest way of doing it?

Redwine had been a surgeon at Mercy, Pittsburgh’s largest and most famous hospital. Mercy was located uptown, a few blocks from The Pennsylvanian.

‘We’re going to Mercy?’ Patrese asked.

‘You got any better ideas?’

‘Matter of fact, I do.’

Patrese flipped open his cellphone and hit one of the speed dials. A woman answered on the second ring.

‘Hey, Cicillo.’

‘Hey, sis. Are you on shift?’

‘No, at home, all alone; Sandro’s taken the kids to his mom’s for a few days. Why?’

‘Can we come by?’

‘Who’s we?’

‘Me and Mark.’

‘Why? What’s happened?’

‘Tell you when we get there. We’re leaving town now. See you in fifteen.’

He ended the call. Beradino looked across at him.

‘Who was that?’

‘Bianca. My sister.’

‘The one who’s a doctor at Mercy?’

‘The very same.’

Beradino smiled.

There were two ways to find out what Redwine had been like and why someone might have wanted to kill him in such a vile manner. There were formal channels, which involved managers, bureaucrats and warrants; and there were informal channels, which involved the promise of favors owed if you were lucky and good old dead presidents if you weren’t.

Either way, there were no prizes for guessing which method tended to be quicker and more effective.

‘You’re not as dumb as you look,’ Beradino said.

‘That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.’

11: 42 p.m.

‘What was he like?’ Bianca considered the question for a moment. ‘He was Harvard med school. That’s what he was like.’

‘You mean he thought he was God’s gift?’ Beradino said.

‘In my experience, most Harvard med schoolers think God is their gift to the world rather than vice versa.’

Patrese laughed. That was his sister in a nutshell, he thought; tell it like it is, no matter the circumstances. Her patients tended to appreciate her straight talking, particularly when it came to diagnosing the severity of whatever they had. Most people with illnesses liked to know what they were dealing with.

She’d been shocked, of course, when they’d told her what had happened to Redwine. You wouldn’t wish that on your worst enemy – unless, of course, it was the fact that they were your worst enemy which had made you do it in the first place.

But doctors saw an awful lot of life and certainly too much of death, and so they didn’t tend to stay shocked for very long. Bianca was no exception.

So now she sat with her brother and Beradino in her living room and tried to think of who might have wanted Redwine dead.

‘How well did you know him?’ Beradino asked.

‘Well enough, but as a professional colleague rather than a friend. You understand the difference? I spent a lot of time in his company, but almost always at work. We rarely socialized. I knew a lot about his life, and he mine, because those details tend to get shared around when you’re talking; but if one or other of us had taken a job someplace else, I doubt we’d have stayed in touch.’

‘Personal life?’

‘Divorced. Couple of teenage boys.’

‘Nasty split?’

‘Quite the opposite, far as I know. In fact, I remember him telling me once both he and his wife – Marsha, she’s called – had been sacked by three successive sets of divorce lawyers because they weren’t being greedy enough.’

Beradino and Patrese laughed. Cops appreciated a dig at lawyers as much as anyone else; more than most, in fact.

‘Wife and kids still in Pittsburgh?’

‘No. They went out west, to Tucson. He used to go and see them several times a year. Hung out with the kids, stayed over at their house.’

‘He and Marsha still sleeping together?’

‘You’d have to ask her that. But I don’t think so. Maybe that was why they split up to start with. He told me once he thought of her more as a sister than anything else.’

‘He have anyone else serious?

‘Not that I know of.’

‘No,’ said Beradino thoughtfully. ‘I can’t imagine they’d have been too happy with him playing happy families with his ex, whatever the real story.’

‘But I doubt he ever lacked female company. He was handsome, he was smart, he was successful.’

‘And arrogant.’

‘Yes, and arrogant. Most surgeons are. It comes with the territory. You ask them, they’d call it self-confidence. Patients like a surgeon who’s sure of what he’s doing. The last thing you need when someone’s about to open you up is to find they’re suddenly iffy about the job.’

‘He was a good surgeon?’

‘One of the best. A real pioneer, always looking for new techniques, new ways to make things better. There are people walking round Pittsburgh today who are still here because of Michael Redwine; not just because he saved their lives, but because he did so with methods and equipment which simply didn’t exist several years ago, and which he helped bring into being.’

‘He ever make mistakes?’

For the first time, Bianca paused.

The house was suddenly quiet, which in Patrese’s experience was an event about as frequent as Halley’s Comet. If it wasn’t Sandro’s endless practicing – he was a violinist with the Pittsburgh Symphony – it was the noise generated by three kids blessed with the kind of energy that ought to be illegal.

Vittorio was in ninth grade, Sabrina seventh and Gennaro sixth, and Patrese loved them all to bits. Acting the goofball uncle with them, taking them to Steelers games, playing touch football with them in the backyard till sundown – and telling them that Gramps and Gran were now in heaven, and holding them close when they cried.

‘All surgeons make mistakes,’ Bianca said eventually.

‘You sound very defensive about that.’

‘Yes, well…Listen, people expect doctors to be perfect, get everything absolutely right every time. But it doesn’t always work like that. We’re human, our knowledge is imperfect, some symptoms aren’t always clear-cut.’

‘I don’t think Mark intended it to be a value judgment,’ Patrese said softly.

Bianca might have been his big sister, but he was still protective of her; that was the Italian male in him.

And he understood her defensiveness, too. Doctors were no different from cops – they looked out for one another. You dissed one, you dissed them all; that was how they saw it.

So they covered each other’s backs. Like most professions, medicine was in essence a small world; you never knew when you might need someone to help you out, so you didn’t go round making unnecessary enemies. And old habits died hard, even when the person you were protecting was no longer around.

‘I’m just looking for why someone might have wanted him dead,’ Beradino said.

Bianca nodded. ‘I understand. I’m sorry.’

‘No need.’

‘OK. Every time you lose a patient, you consider it a mistake, even when you know deep down you couldn’t have done anything more. That’s just the way you feel. And Mike had his fair share of those. I mean, brain surgery, the stats aren’t that great. You don’t open up someone’s skull unless things are pretty bad to start with. But those ones, I’m not counting; they’re not mistakes, not really.

‘Then there are the ones where, perhaps, if you’d done something different, you might possibly have saved them. But in those cases you don’t know till it’s too late anyway, and you can drive yourself mad if you dwell on it. If everyone’s vision was as good as their hindsight, every optician across the land would be out of work.’

‘People sue you for those ones?’

‘Sure. If you could have done something different, they’ll say you should have done. So the lawyers get involved, everyone starts slinging writs around, and if you can, you settle before it gets to court, goes public and damages your rep. Comes with the turf, doesn’t mean you’re suddenly a crappy surgeon.’

She paused again.

‘And?’ Patrese said, not unkindly.

‘And then there are the real fuck-ups.’

‘Redwine have any of those?’

She nodded. ‘One.’

The technical term was ‘wrong-site surgery’, which barely hinted at how catastrophic such incidents were, and how insultingly, ridiculously amateur they seemed.

Wrong-site surgery was, in essence, when the surgeon operated on a perfectly healthy part of the patient’s anatomy, and left the offending area untouched.

The consequences tended to fall into two categories: drastic, and fatal.

Redwine had been scheduled to remove a blood clot from the brain of Abdul Bayoumi, a professor of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh.

It was a routine enough operation, especially for a surgeon of Redwine’s standing; he’d done hundreds in his career.

The clot had been on the left side of Bayoumi’s brain.

Redwine had cut into the right-hand side.

Only when he’d got all the way through the skull did he realize his mistake.

He’d immediately closed up the incision, made another one on the correct side, and removed the clot.

In 99 per cent of cases, that would have been it; a near-miss, a bureaucratic snafu, and a story on which the patient could dine out when he’d made a full recovery.

But Bayoumi had suffered complications – Bianca wasn’t sure of the exact details – on the side of the brain where Redwine had made the first, erroneous, incision.

The complications had spread, multiplied, and worsened.

Within six hours, he was dead.

‘How the hell can that happen?’ Beradino asked. ‘Don’t you guys,’ he caught himself – ‘sorry; isn’t it standard procedure to have a checklist or something, so this kind of thing gets caught before it occurs?’

‘Sure it is,’ Bianca said. ‘There’s a three-step procedure, the Universal Protocol, which is absolutely standard. First, you check the patient’s notes and make sure they tally with the surgery schedule. Then you use indelible markers to spot the site where the surgeon’s going to cut. Finally, the entire operating team takes a time-out before the start and agrees that this is what they’re supposed to be doing.’

‘So how can something like this happen?’

‘Because a system is only as good as the people using it.’

‘And?’

‘And in an operating theatre, the surgeon is God. He’s captain of the ship; his word goes. So if he says we cut on the left, we cut on the left. And if the notes say otherwise, who’s going to tell him, and get yelled at, or worse? Shoot the messenger, you know. Everyone stands around looking at each other, and no one does a thing.’

‘Redwine was one of these surgeons?’

‘One of them? He was the archetype. He prided himself on not marking sites, as he claimed he could always remember. He didn’t think he needed to write things down, like the rest of us mortals.’

‘Christ on a bike,’ Patrese said.

‘Don’t blaspheme, Franco,’ Beradino said instantly. ‘You know I don’t like it.’ He turned to Bianca. ‘How often does this kind of thing happen?’

‘Per month, per week, or per day?’

Patrese and Beradino looked at her in astonishment.

‘Are you serious?’ Patrese said.

‘I never joke about my work, Cicillo, you know that.’

Patrese pursed his lips and blew out; Beradino shook his head.

‘And this guy’s family – Bayoumi – they’re suing?’

‘I think so.’

‘Bayoumi.’ Beradino turned the name over, as though inspecting it. ‘Arab?’

‘Egyptian, I think.’

‘What kind of family?’

‘Wife, one son.’

‘How old?’

‘Early twenties, far as I know. Student at Pitt.’

Patrese knew instantly why Beradino was asking. Ask a bunch of Americans chosen at random to play word association with the phrase ‘young Arab man’, and it was a dollar to a dime that ‘hothead’ wouldn’t be far away.

Call it racism, call it common sense; people did both, and more, and they wouldn’t stop till white kids flew airliners into skyscrapers too.

Tuesday, October 19th. 11:24 a.m.

Dr Bayoumi’s wife – widow – Sameera lived out in Oakland, the university district. Her apartment was one of three in a large, rambling house with a porch out front and Greek columns propping up the veranda roof.

Mid-morning but with all the curtains still closed, as if to block out hope as well as light, she offered them Egyptian tea: hot, strong and, at least to the palates of two Italian-American detectives, undrinkable without three heaped spoonfuls of sugar.

She was darker-skinned than they’d imagined. Like many Egyptians, and Sudanese, she was of Nubian descent, Arab by culture rather than race.

They spoke in near-whispers, mindful of the enforced twilight and the evident numbness of Sameera’s grief.

Beradino, sensing that Sameera would expect the elder and more senior man to take the lead, did the talking.

‘As far as you knew, Mrs Bayoumi, was your husband’s operation routine?’

‘I think so.’

‘Dr Redwine didn’t seem unduly concerned, when you met him beforehand?’

‘No.’

‘And afterwards?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How did Dr Redwine seem to you, after your husband died?’

‘I haven’t seen him since then.’

‘Not once?’

‘No.’

‘Have you tried to see him?’

‘Of course. But always, he busy. I remember something Abdul always like to say. With great power comes great responsibility. But Dr Redwine not see it like that.’

‘Would you say the hospital has been unco-operative?’

‘Yes. Very. Not just like that, blocking him from me. I ask for documents, records, and they no interested. Treat me like fly to swat. So I call lawyer.’

She handed them a glossy brochure from the firm in question, a medical malpractice specialist. Patrese glanced at it. Swanky downtown address, shots of a happy but industrious multi-ethnic workforce that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a Benetton commercial, and a commitment in bold typeface to ‘help you down the path to a better tomorrow’.

‘What are your motivations for bringing proceedings, Mrs Bayoumi?’

To many Americans, accustomed to a culture where legal representation can seem not just a right but a duty, the question might have sounded odd. But Beradino figured Sameera had enough first-generation immigrant still in her to make recourse to the law a last rather than a first option.

The consideration she gave the question before answering showed him to be right.

‘Abdul and I, we had our own, how you say, parts in the marriage,’ she said eventually. ‘He go to work, I make the home, look after Mustafa. When Mustafa grow up, we keep the parts the same. Abdul still work, I make home, Mustafa live here still. We all happy that way. Maybe not modern, American, but it work for us.

‘And now Abdul gone, where will I find job? I am not educated, not college. Companies, they see my resumé, they say no, no interview, even. So how do I live? That’s why I call lawyer.

‘I want – all I want – is money Abdul earn between now and he retiring. Not a dollar more. I know it not millions, but it enough. That why lawyer, nothing more.

‘I know we can do nothing to make Abdul come back. If you talk of revenge, no, I don’t believe in that. And if the hospital say sorry…’ She made a sound to suggest she thought it unlikely.

‘And Mustafa. What does he think?’

‘Mustafa his own man now. You must ask him.’

‘I understand he’s a student at Pitt, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘What’s he studying?’

‘Chemistry.’

‘So that’s where we’d find him now? In the chemistry department?’

‘Not today. Today, he on outreach. At mosque, in Homewood.’

‘We’ll go talk to him there,’ Beradino said. ‘Thank you, Mrs Bayoumi.’

‘May I ask favor?’

‘Sure.’

‘How you say in slang? Go easy on him. For Arab boy, father is most important man in world. To lose that is very hard for him. So for me too. Mustafa is my world now. He my only son. Allah blessed us with him, no more. I lose one man, I no lose another. I do anything for that boy, you understand? Anything.’

1: 09 p.m.

Homewood, Patrese thought; always Homewood. It seemed less a geographical area than a vortex, forever dragging him back in.

On the sidewalk, a handful of youths waved at them, their gestures heavy with sarcasm. Patrese waved back, deadpan, his mind miles away.

After a few seconds, he glanced in the rear-view mirror and saw exactly what he expected; a couple of them flipping the detectives the bird, another pair dropping their pants and mooning.

Patrese laughed. Beradino, swiveling round to follow his gaze, was angry.

‘Stop the car, Franco. Let’s go bust their asses.’

‘Ah, they’re just screwin’ around.’

‘To a marked cop car? You let that go, you let anythin’ go. Zero tolerance.’

‘You don’t like black people?’

‘I got nothin’ against black people. I’m a good Christian man, Franco. Jesus says that we should accept all men equally. I just don’t like these black people. If they were white people actin’ this way, I wouldn’t like ’em any better. Shoot, I’d probably like ’em worse.’ He pointed forward. ‘There, that’s the mosque.’

There was a plaque on the building’s front wall. In 1932, it read, Pittsburgh became home to the first chartered Muslim mosque in the United States.

‘What a claim to fame,’ said Beradino, deadpan. ‘Personally, I’d still take the four SuperBowls, you know?’

They stepped inside the main door of the mosque.

It didn’t seem like Osama’s nerve center, that was for sure. No firebrand preachers hollering death to the Great Satan or burning the Stars and Stripes; no rows of prostrate worshippers facing Mecca. Only the rows of shoes lined up inside on gray plastic shelves gave a hint as to the religion of those within.

It seemed more like a social club than a place of worship. People walked in groups or stood around chatting. Patrese and Beradino, watching this, noticed something pretty much simultaneously; most of the mosque-goers were black rather than ostensibly Arab. They could have been in pretty much any major city.

‘Help you?’ a man asked.

‘We’re looking for Mustafa Bayoumi,’ Beradino said.

‘You’ll find him in the outreach center.’ The man extended an arm to his left. ‘Through the double doors, then first right.’

They followed his directions and, after a couple of further inquiries, found Mustafa alone in an office, entering some data on a computer terminal.

Mustafa was skinny, with cheekbones you could cut your wrists on, hair blacker than Reagan’s when he’d been hard at the Grecian 2000, and a neatly trimmed beard. Like his mother, he looked substantially more black than Arab.

Still tapping the keyboard, he looked up. ‘Help you?’ he said.

They sure were polite round here, Patrese thought. That was two more offers of help than he’d usually get in a year in Homewood.

‘We’re with the Pittsburgh police department,’ said Beradino quietly, ‘but we’re not going to flash our badges, because we don’t want to embarrass you or cause a scene. We just want to ask you a few questions.’ He nodded towards a couple of chairs. ‘May we?’

He sat down without waiting for Mustafa’s assent. Patrese followed suit.

Beradino gestured around the room.

‘What is it you guys do here? Outreach – what’s that?’

‘It’s, er, reaching out.’

Beradino laughed, pretending to be offended. ‘Hey, educational standards at the PD ain’t that bad just yet. I worked that one out for myself.’

Mustafa smiled too. Patrese said nothing, but he admired Beradino’s approach; relax them, put them at ease, find common ground.

‘Sorry. Outreach is helping people, mainly. We have a day-care facility, programs for entrepreneurs and released inmates, and a health clinic.’

‘Pretty impressive.’ Beradino sounded as though he meant it. ‘Who funds it all?’

‘We receive an annual grant from a non-profit organization called the Abrahamic Interfaith Foundation. In addition, Islam obligates all those who can feed their family to give two and a half per cent of their net worth in alms. Many of us give considerably more, both in time and money. Then there are book sales, telephone fundraisers, auctions, banquets; you name it, people have pitched in and helped out.’

‘Very good. We could use some of that community spirit round my way. But listen, Mustafa – you don’t mind if I call you Mustafa, do you? – we’re not here to admire your work, you know that. We’d like to ask you some questions about Dr Michael Redwine.’

Mustafa’s face darkened. Patrese supposed that was only natural.

‘The man who killed my father, you mean?’

‘I’m sure he didn’t mean to kill your father.’

‘If you shoot someone, detective, and you mean only to wound them, but instead they die, you’ve still killed them, haven’t you?’

Patrese hoped that neither of them saw him wince.

Beradino chose not to answer the question, and parried it with one of his own. ‘You know Dr Redwine was killed yesterday evening?’

‘I saw it on the news.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘How does that make you feel?’

‘Does it matter, how it makes me feel?’

‘It does if I’m asking you.’

Mustafa took a deep breath. ‘All right. I hope he suffered more than any of us could possibly imagine. That enough for you?’

‘Suffered, as in burning in hell?’

‘I don’t care how. It’s not a fraction of what he’s caused my mother and me.’

‘OK. Let me ask: where were you yesterday evening?’

‘At home. I got back about five, and didn’t go out again till this morning.’