The Sabbathday River (52 page)

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Authors: Jean Hanff Korelitz

BOOK: The Sabbathday River
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“Yes. This is my signature.” He looked wary now, but he wasn't ready to concede anything.
“Do you see the sample identification number in the top right corner of the form?” She pointed helpfully.
“Yes.”
“And here.” She handed him another form. “From Peyton East Diagnostic
Labs. The same diagnostic lab you use yourself, if I'm not mistaken. And here—the same identification number.”
“Yes. This appears to be the same sample.”
“As you can see, we too thought horses. We requested blood and tissue typing just as you did. But unlike you, we also wanted to rule out zebras. So we requested a toxicology screen. Would you read the results, Dr. Petersen?”
He was doing just that. He squinted at the page, then shook his head vigorously.
“No. It isn't right.” But he didn't sound at all sure.
“What isn't right, Dr. Petersen?” Judith sounded innocent.
“This result. It's a positive result for opiates. It must be a mistake.”
“You don't seem to be very confident in your own lab, Dr. Petersen.”
He was furious now. He reddened and shook his head again. “No … this, it's just a human error. We're all human. It's a fluke. The test should be repeated, that's all.”
To Naomi's surprise, Judith nodded in agreement. She went back to her table, opened her file, and extracted another pink sheet. “We thought so, too,” she told him, her tone familiar and conspiratorial. “So here.”
This time his sputter was gone. He only shook his head in wonder.
“What are opiates, Dr. Petersen?”
He was glaring at Charter, who looked—Naomi was delighted to see—absolutely stunned. But then, Naomi was, too.
“An opiate,” the medical examiner said, “is a compound derived from the opium structure. It's a narcotic.”
“Really.”
Judith sounded interested. “Can you name some opiates for us?”
He could, and he did, grudgingly. Morphine. Codeine. Methadone. And heroin.
“Heroin,”
Judith said dramatically.
“Really.
Can you see on the diagnostic form which opiate was found in the Sabbathday River baby?”
He squinted. “Morphine.” He shook his head. “They found morphine.”
“Dr. Petersen, what do you think morphine was doing in the body of this baby?”
He gave her a look. “As you know, I could not possibly answer that question.” Then he returned to the page in his hands. He was reading
the form again. “I don't believe this.” He shook his head. Charter, incensed at the unsolicited comment, looked furious. His scalp, beneath the ripple of gray hair, turned bright red.
“Is the drug easy to get?” Judith asked.
“It shouldn't be,” he said, a faint edge of accusation in his voice.
“Would, for example, Heather Pratt have access to it?”
“No. I wouldn't think so.”
“Who
would
have access to it, Dr. Petersen?” She stood with one hip thrust out, her arms folded confidently.
“Doctors. Nurses. Pharmacists, I suppose. Perhaps veterinarians. Home health workers. Someone taking care of terminally ill patients.”
“But not a woman who does embroidery for a living?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“How did the morphine get into the baby's body?” she asked.
“It could have been ingested,” he said, but he wasn't really thinking clearly, because she jumped on him.
“Really? But didn't you say the baby's stomach was empty? Didn't you testify that it hadn't been fed?”
“Oh, that's right,” he said lamely. “Yes, I said that.”
“So how do you think the morphine got into the baby's body?”
“Injection. It would have to have been injected.”
“With a needle,” Judith commented.
“Well, that's usually how it's done.”
She smiled at this. She went back to her table. From the large briefcase on the floor, she extracted a syringe with an attached needle. It was, Naomi thought, the biggest needle she had ever seen. Just looking at it made her think of the gamma globulin shots she and Daniel had endured before their graduation trip to India.
“Can you identify this, please?”
Petersen took it from her. “It's a large bore needle. Two millimeters or one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter and five inches long, I would estimate.”
Judith showed it to the jurors. “And what would such a needle be used for?”
“Oh, many things. But getting meds into the heart quickly, or getting blood out is what comes to mind. Like epinephrine, to get the heart beating if it's stopped. In an emergency room, for example, you'd punch this right in. The needle has to be thick to get through the sternum.”
“I see.” She appeared to ruminate. “Now, a needle like this must make a visible hole in the skin.”
Then he got it. He stared at it, then at her, and slowly he gave one elongated nod. “Yes. It would.”
“Dr. Petersen”—Judith cocked her head—“is it possible that a large bore needle like the one you just held was used to inject morphine into the heart of this newborn baby girl? Is that possible?” she said again, to remind him what the parameters of the question were.
He looked over at Charter. He was not pleased with Charter, Naomi saw.
“It is possible. Yes.”
“All right. Let's talk about the second baby.”
She was so crisp, Naomi thought with admiration. Judith walked back to her table, put down her notes, and picked up other notes. She never broke rhythm. It was a kind of dance.
“The pond baby. You testified, I believe, that there was air visible by X-ray in the baby's lungs, indicating a live birth. Is that correct?”
But he was still thrown. It took him a moment. “Yes. A live birth.”
“And you also testified that the baby's body had been in the water for a period of approximately four to five weeks. Is that correct?”
“It is.” Petersen nodded.
“Now, Dr. Petersen,” Judith moved in, “would you agree that some decomposition would have taken place after four or five weeks in the water?”
He frowned. “Well, certainly.”
“And this decomposition, would it necessarily be visible to the naked eye? For example, in the kind of photograph Mr. Charter showed us a few minutes ago?”
“Not always,” Petersen said. “Decomposition may be more evident internally than externally. Bacteria in the gut, for example, are strong activators.”
“In other words, the bacteria that's already inside the body begins work to decompose the body.”
“Yes.”
“I see,” she considered. “Now, this bacteria, it produces gas in the process of decomposition, does it not?”
Again, he saw where she was headed, but the fight seemed to have gone out of him.
“It often does.”
“And how would gas appear on an X-ray?”
The medical examiner looked at her dully. “Very like air, I would think.”
“‘Very like air?' If gas appeared very like air, what criteria would you use to tell them apart?”
“It would not be possible to tell them apart.”
“Oh? In that case, perhaps you do not mean to say ‘very like air.' Perhaps what you mean to say is
identical
to air,” she said firmly.
“All right. Identical. On X-ray.”
“So it's possible, is it not, that what you identified as air on the pond baby's X-ray might actually have been gas produced by decomposing bacteria?”
He nodded grudgingly. “Yes, it's possible.”
“Now, you did not testify to any ligature marks on the baby's neck, or other abrasions or signs of strangulation of the baby. Is that correct?”
“There were none,” he agreed.
“So, without visible ligature marks or signs of strangulation, and without an ability to point to the X-ray and be certain that there are pockets of air in the baby's lungs and intestines, what other evidence do you have that this baby had in fact breathed after birth?”
He gave her a stony look. “My finding that the baby breathed after birth was based on my interpretation of the X-ray evidence.”
“But you yourself stated that what you identified as air might conceivably be decompositional gases!” she said with theatrical confusion.
“My finding might have been in error,” he conceded, though with bitterness.
“Your finding might have been in error,”
Judith repeated. “Like your finding on the Sabbathday River baby, in other words.”
“Objection!”
Charter exploded. “Mrs. Friedman has no call to insult the witness.”
Judge Hayes concurred, and Judith was chastised.
“Dr. Petersen,” she said when she resumed, “babies do sometimes, tragically, die during or just before birth, do they not?”
“They do,” he agreed.
“What are some causes of fetal death at these times?”
“Well, the placenta can detach prematurely from the wall of the uterus, inducing labor and cutting the blood supply to the infant. This
kills the baby in utero. Or the placenta can be abnormally placed, blocking the birth canal. This is known as placenta previa. Or the umbilical cord might be knotted, rendering the fetus incapable of respiration. Or the umbilical cord might be looped around the baby's neck, strangling it.”
“There are quite a few possibilities, aren't there, Doctor?”
“There are,” he agreed, but he added hastily that an attentive physician or midwife could almost always prevent these tragedies. Charter, from his table, groaned audibly.
“Ah,” Judith said sadly, “but as you know, Heather Pratt did not have an attentive physician or midwife. She gave birth unattended. Now, in your opinion, would an unattended birth give rise to a greater likelihood of these conditions?”
“The conditions themselves, no. But a bad outcome from one of these conditions, yes.”
“A bad outcome being a stillbirth, yes?”
Petersen said yes.
“Then you do feel there is a greater likelihood that this baby died before birth or during birth, rather than after birth?”
“I didn't say that!” He was clinging to his dignity now. “I said it was
possible.”
“It's
possible
that this baby died during birth and was born dead, exactly as Heather Pratt has consistently claimed?”
“I am not familiar with Heather Pratt's claims.”
“It's possible that this baby was born dead.”
“It is,” he said tersely.
“It's possible that this baby was not”—she walked back to her table and read from her notes his own words—“asphyxiated ‘due to manual strangulation and obstruction of the external airway.'”
A look at Charter. A brief nod. “It is possible.”
“In fact, you have no incontrovertible evidence at all that the death of this baby was due to any unnatural cause, do you?”
He thought about this for a long moment. Clearly, he was searching for a way to disagree, but there wasn't one.
“No incontrovertible evidence, no.”
“And yet you testified to the contrary,” she said sharply. “Why is that?”
“The other scenario is also possible.”
“That may be, but you did not present strangulation as one possible scenario. You claimed that it was the definitive scenario. Why did you do that?” She sounded caustically authoritative now, like a mother who'd caught her child in a lie.
“I might have been in error,” he said again, and the skin of his scalp was sheened with sweat now.
“Yes,” Judith commented. “So you said earlier. I'd like to ask you again, Dr. Petersen, whether you think of yourself as a thorough and professional medical examiner.”
“I
am.”
Though he sounded childish when he said it. “Of course I am.”
“But you made assumptions, didn't you?” She walked briskly to Heather and placed a hand where it had probably never been before: on Heather's shoulder. “Because you didn't particularly care that this young woman's life is up for grabs here. Because it wasn't very important to you that an
error,
as you put it, might destroy her future and her daughter's future. So you thought of horses, and you left it to someone else to think of zebras. Isn't that right?”

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