The more intriguing question was what he was calling to say. If it had to do with “blotches”—whatever that was—maybe Kipps had a health problem. Weren’t blotches on the skin a symptom of HIV/AIDS? That would certainly be something Kipps wouldn’t want to get out. And maybe he would rather kill himself than let the world know he had contracted AIDS.
That would still leave the matter of those marks on his arms and wrists, but perhaps there was something I hadn’t thought of or didn’t know that explained those.
Or maybe Kipps was calling IA about misconduct by a fellow officer: Mike Fusco. There’s probably nothing in the Newark Police Department handbook that expressly prohibits sleeping with another officer’s wife. But it was possible Kipps had some kind of other dirt on Fusco he was suddenly willing to spill. If that was the case, and Fusco found out about it, it gave him yet another reason to put Kipps on the dead side.
Or maybe, I realized as I returned to my desk, I could just face facts that I was still speculating. A larger truth was out there, waiting for me. I just had to keep plugging away until I found it.
In the time I had been gone, Tina had sent me another e-mail. “My place. Eight,” it said. “Bring a bottle of wine and your appetite.”
That sounded promising—for a skinny girl, Tina knew how to cook—and it certainly beat the repast I had waiting for me in Bloomfield, which would have involved a hasty phone call to Panda Palace. I wrote back, “Sounds great. See you then.”
I was clicking the Send button as my phone rang.
“Carter Ross.”
“Carter, it’s Powell,” he said. I could hear street noises in the background.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“I saw you posted a story about those photos I took. Pretty awesome. But why didn’t you run the pictures? Did they not come out well or something?”
“No, they came out fine. We just … they might be a little graphic for some of our readers.”
“Would you have run them if that dude was still alive?”
“I don’t know. Does it matter?”
“Well, yeah it matters. See, this goes to one of the central points of the Death Studies movement, and that is challenging the irrational fear of death in our culture. Until we change some of the basic assumptions about what it means to make the change from lucidity to morbidity, we will never—”
“Right, Powell,” I said, because I didn’t need to hear the lecture he was going to give when he became Professor Death. “Kira said you were hot to talk to me about something?”
“Yeah, I, uh … I was at the M.E.’s office today—because my internship is Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, you know? And I overheard him talking to someone.”
“Him? Who’s him?”
“The medical examiner. And he was
pissed
. I couldn’t tell about what at first. But I had never heard him that mad before. He was
fired up
. You could hear him
going off.
I thought he was going to have a conniption.”
I realized I needed to indulge Paul/Powell’s penchant for verbal meandering. So I said, “Okay. What was he mad about?”
“You couldn’t even really tell, at first. And I couldn’t, you know, just be seen hanging outside his office, eavesdropping. Technically, I’m supposed to be in the examining room, observing the autopsies, taking notes, you know? I have to be able to justify this internship to my adviser at the end of the term, and I can’t—”
I lost my patience: “Right, got it. Let’s get back to the mad medical examiner.”
“Oh, right. Well, it was tough to tell what he was pissed about, but I heard him say ‘Kipps.’ That’s the name of your dude, right?”
“Right.”
“Yeah, well, I guess somehow they had found out about the photos. I don’t know how they knew you had them—”
“I called them and told them.”
“You did?”
“It’s sort of what reporters do, Powell.”
“Oh,” he said, as if he couldn’t quite figure out why I would tip my hand like that. “Well, anyway, someone—like his boss or something—must have been asking him about the photos. And he kept saying stuff like, ‘I have no idea’ and ‘Well, they didn’t come from me,’ and ‘If I find out, I’ll fire the bastard,’ and all that.”
I smiled. I love it when government agencies go on witch hunts to figure out where a leak is coming from. It expends a tremendous amount of energy and almost never catches the real witch. Half the time the person who ordered the investigation into the leak is actually the person behind it—but knows he has covered his tracks well enough to never be caught. The other half of the time the source is someone they’d never suspect, like the intern who got the key from the janitor. They’d be better off trying to find Santa Claus’s workshop.
“So I had to walk away at that point because, you know, I’m supposed to be—”
“In the examining room, right.” I cut him off.
“Yeah, but anyway, everyone in the office was totally buzzing about it. It wasn’t hard to hear him. I was talking to one of the secretaries about it, and you know what she said she heard him say?”
“What’s that?”
“She said that he said, and I quote, ‘What you’re asking me to do is unethical.’”
“What was he being asked to do? Did she know?”
“No. That’s just what she said he said.”
“Hmm…”
“Anyhow, I thought you’d want to know,” he said. “I gotta run. I volunteer at a funeral home on Tuesday nights. I’m doing it for credit, so I have to be on time.”
“Have fun with that. Thanks for the call.”
“Later.”
So the medical examiner was being asked to do unethical things. And he was understandably upset about it.
I just hoped he was upset enough to unburden his worries to the
Eagle-Examiner
.
* * *
From a reporter’s standpoint, public employees are wonderful creatures because they have no way of hiding from us. Within a few mere keystrokes, I can learn their full name, date of birth, and annual salary—time was, in the days before identity theft became so rampant, I could even get their Social Security number. Maybe that all sounds a little invasive of their privacy, but the framers of the Constitution didn’t
want
public officials to have privacy. They were deeply suspicious of anyone with authority and wanted citizens to have lots of tools with which to resist tyranny.
As such, I was able to learn in fairly short order that Essex County Medical Examiner Raul Ibanez was born on August 9, 1964, and was paid $177,716 a year to slice and dice dead folks and make pronouncements about them. A few keystrokes later and I was looking at a Google Maps overview of his home on Lenox Avenue in Westfield. It looked like a nice crib, though his trees needed some trimming.
I looked at the clock, which told me I had just enough time to ambush the medical examiner and still make it back to Tina’s by eight—but only if I hustled. So I grabbed my peacoat and made like a man in a hurry.
The best way to explain Westfield, New Jersey, is that someone cracked open an upscale shopping mall above it, then sprinkled all the stores onto the streets below. As such, I could have given directions to Ibanez’s place as I would give directions to a food court: take a left at the Victoria’s Secret, pass the Williams-Sonoma, take another left after the Banana Republic.
After making the turn on a suitably genteel suburban street, I found Ibanez’s nicely appointed home on the left side. It had a basketball hoop mounted on the garage, healthy shrubs lining a slate walkway, and a handsome red door with a brass knocker that I was soon putting to use.
A smallish man with a neat goatee and a thin semicircle of hair around his otherwise bald head soon answered. He was wearing suit pants and a button-down shirt—no scrubs for this doctor—but had ditched the jacket and tie. He had a wireless device clipped onto his belt.
“Dr. Ibanez, I’m sorry to trouble you at home, but I thought it would be better to see you here than at your office. My name is Carter Ross and I’m a reporter for the
Eagle-Examiner
. I’m the guy who posted that story with the autopsy photos today.”
He exerted an effort at keeping himself impassive, though I got the sense hearing my name was like a small kick in the nuts. I was, after all, the guy who had ruined his day.
“What … what are you … I have no comment,” he said quickly, with a slight accent, and I expected the statement would soon be followed by a whole lot of red door being slammed in my face.
But he kept the door open. This was encouraging. Maybe he didn’t want to comment, but he did want to talk. I might be able to leverage what little information I had into a whole lot more—with help from a little semieducated bluffing.
“Dr. Ibanez, I can totally respect that. But I gotta tell you, you seem like a nice guy, and I don’t want to have to end up writing a story about you needing to answer charges from the state ethics board, you know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t know if the state even
had
an ethics board for medical examiners—much less what this guy was being asked to do that was unethical—but the words “ethics board” were like another shot to his bits. Since pretending to know more than I actually did seemed to be working, I continued:
“I just see how this is all coming together—I’m sure you’ve heard the AG’s office has looked at this thing—and I hate to see you being railroaded on this.”
That got him.
“Railroaded?” he said. “Oh, for the love of…”
“It’s happened before. If this thing spills out all big and ugly, they might be looking for a scapegoat. Look at all the players here”—right, whoever they were—“you think any of them are really going to fall on their swords? Really, who’s going to fall on his sword? You’d be an easy target.”
I was really winging it now, but Ibanez was too wrapped in his own drama to recognize it.
“Oh, damnit. Damnit! Are you … Who’s saying that? Where are you getting that?”
“You know I can’t tell you. Let’s just put it this way: it’s the same place I got the photos from. And it’s someone who’s in a position to know you’re being asked to do something unethical.”
That, of course, was true, in a manner of speaking. That Paul/Powell was in that “position” because he happened to be skulking outside Ibanez’s office was immaterial. The doctor brought his hands to his forehead and massaged his temples. His cheeks were getting flushed. I went in for the kill.
“We’re off the record here. So why don’t you just tell me this thing from your perspective, beginning, middle, and end. And when I put this all in the newspaper, I’ll try to make it look as good for you as I possibly can.”
I thought I had him right where I wanted him: cornered, scared, a little off balance. Total capitulation was just moments away.
But I guess I had cornered him a little too much because he came out fighting. What I heard next was, I imagined, the same version of Raul Ibanez that Paul/Powell had heard earlier in the day.
“You know what? You know what? You want to write something in your paper? You write
the facts
. I’m not … I … I give them the mechanism. I give them the cause. But the manner, that’s … I’m not … I’m not a detective. I give them the science. That’s my job.”
He started jabbing his index finger at me: “
That’s
my job. And I did my job. They’re the ones not doing their job. You tell
that
to the damn state ethics board! You tell
that
to your damn sources! You tell them I’m going to get this all documented. They want to railroad me? Let ’em try. Let ’em try!”
There appeared to be a Mrs. Ibanez coming down the stairs to learn what all the yelling was about. But I never got a glimpse of more than her feet because the next thing I saw was what I suspected I might get all along: an up-close view of his red front door being slammed in my face.
My last official act of the evening was to slip my business card through Ibanez’s mail slot, just in case he decided he needed to yell at someone in the middle of the night. Then, having done enough damage for the evening, I flipped the “off duty” light in my mind and started driving toward Tina’s.
Except, of course, my brain kept trying to pick up passengers the whole way. Even as I did my requested wine shopping—a connoisseur, I always insist on a silly name or a pretty label—I thought of what I could read into Ibanez’s performance.
The doctor was absolutely correct, of course: a medical examiner makes objective determinations as to the mechanism of death (in this case, a bullet traveling at high velocity) and the cause of death (that Darius Kipps didn’t have much of a head left by the time the bullet departed his person). When it comes to mechanism and cause, a homicide and a suicide can be virtually identical. From a purely medical standpoint, those ligature marks on Darius Kipps’s arms and legs were about as involved in his demise as a shaving nick.
No, those go more to the
manner
of death, which is what really counts, legally. The manner of death is a more subjective call on the medical examiner’s part, and it relies on what he can learn from the body
and
what he’s been told by investigators.
I didn’t know what the investigators had told Ibanez, of course. But in the face of what appeared to be foul play, someone had informed Ibanez no more investigation would be done, giving him little choice but to rule the manner of death a suicide. And he considered going along with that unethical.
Or at least that was my best guess. By the time I reached Hoboken, I hadn’t come up with anything better.
* * *
The last available street parking spot in Hoboken was snatched up in late 1995. So rather than join the legion of people circling patiently for the next one, I parked in a garage. I was just getting out of the car when I got a text from Tina. “Hopping in shower. Let yourself in.”
Tina’s door code, 2229, was easy to remember, thanks to the handy, if slightly disturbing, pneumonic she had given me: it spelled the word “baby.”
Tina’s condo was a one-bedroom on the fourth floor with a view of Manhattan that made you feel like you owned the world. I took in the panorama for a second, then went over by the bathroom door, which was slightly ajar.