The cruelest cut, p.17
The Cruelest Cut, page 17
When Connie asked how they could determine a connection from this long ago, Sennett said the answer might lie in her daughter’s DNA. He seemed reluctant to proceed, almost as if he wanted to make sure she understood. Eventually he told her they wanted to exhume her daughter’s body.
Connie sat stone-faced at the request. As we waited for her to reply, the room became eerily silent, except for the buzz of the window air conditioner. After a few moments she began to speak. This time her voice was firm and deliberate. “When Janice died, I was angry. I wrote people. I did things. I don’t care anymore. Janice is dead.”
“But someone else might die,” Sennett said.
“It won’t bring Janice back.”
“We could get a court order.”
“I’m an old woman now. You can do whatever you want. It won’t matter. I don’t want my daughter’s body exhumed on the basis of some guess. I’ve suffered enough, haven’t I?”
That was hard to argue, for sure.
Finnegan turned to Sennett. “Lieutenant, we ought to leave Mrs. Lennell for a while. Let’s give her a chance to think this over.”
Mrs. Lennell seemed relieved. She looked at her watch.
“I’ve got to be at work. Please, I must go.”
Sennett and Finnegan walked toward the door, but I stayed behind. “Mrs. Lennell, I wonder if I might have a private word with you?” I asked.
“Please, I must go.”
“It will only take a second. Can I see what you have on the murders?”
She shrugged her shoulders indifferently, then handed over a large scrapbook filled with newspaper articles, each neatly inscribed in ledger form. Dates and names. Types of murders. Age, sex, location . . . even references to newspaper articles. The murders for the most part happened several years apart. There didn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to the collection. It was a scrapbook of random killings.
“You mentioned there were several murders in particular that you notified the police about,” I asked gently. “What were the names again?”
“Danielle Ianoulli, Helene Gustafson, Virginia Ulanoff, and Peter Davidson.” Then she calmly began reciting the details as if she was reading from a history book. “Danielle was found with her belly button in her blue jeans. Helene had her stomach opened and her intestines laying on the floor. Virginia had her eyeball opened. Peter had his chest opened and his ribs taken out. I have all the information.”
I found it difficult to believe that this woman could be so detached, as she showed me newspaper articles on the murders. “Do you think I could take these with me?” I asked.
“Sure. I have everything written down.” She showed me a loose-leaf book with names and dates. I took the articles and put them in my hip pocket. “Now I must . . .”
“He wanted you to have an abortion, didn’t he?” I persisted.
She stopped and looked at me. The large glasses gave me an amplified glimpse of the sorrow behind them. She nodded slowly and mournfully. “How did you know?”
“A guess.” Maybe it was, but marital conflict wasn’t. Hamoud Ishaki’s parents split, Harold Issacson’s wife left, and I suspected that the Zielinskis had an ugly secret that ran deep in their marriage.
“He didn’t believe it was his. We had trouble conceiving, because he had a low sperm count. It was before test tube babies and all these drugs you hear about. I knew he was self-conscious, and all the doctor could do was have us keep a record of temperature, that kind of thing, so we would know when I was ovulating.”
“Did you know when conception took place?”
“We had so much trouble, I was never sure.” I could tell she was being evasive. Finally, she gave me the open look of trust that patients frequently give doctors before they admit their darkest truths. “Don had another problem.”
“What kind of problem?
“You know, the harder it was to conceive, the harder it was for him to get an erection. We talked about it with a specialist. The doctor called it performance anxiety. Don began to think it was all his fault. It made him feel depressed and inadequate. You would have thought that having his daughter would have made him ecstatic.”
“Except that he didn’t believe it was his child,” I said, sympathetically.
She nodded with surprise. “How did you know?”
“Just a hunch,” I said, trying not to sound smart.
“He studied the charts and everything and concluded that I had cheated on him. He told me he wanted an abortion, but after I had waited that long, I was not about to kill my child. I am a good Catholic. I would never have done that.”
I decided that it was time to get to the truth. “Did you cheat on him?”
She stared at me for a moment as if searching for something in my words, then she began to cry, not a sobbing cry, but the gentle flow of tears of someone who had almost emptied her emotional bank. “Never, ever. I wouldn’t do such a thing. It’s one of the commandments. I think we just misjudged the time of conception.”
Connie pulled out a small white hanky from her pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “So he waited until the child was born to see if it was his,” I said sympathetically.
She nodded again. “She was a beautiful baby. When Don saw the child, he was furious. He said it didn’t look like him or me. He said it wasn’t his. It was awful. Yelling and screaming at me in the delivery room.”
“Is that when he left you?” I asked.
“He never said a word. He left the next day.”
“And left you penniless.”
“He hired an attorney. He said the child wasn’t his.”
“Was she?”
Again a silent look.
“I never loved anyone except Don. I never slept with anyone but him. It was his daughter. He just said she didn’t look like him.”
“And you idolized Janice.”
“I had nothing else. No money, no husband, no future. Jannie was everything.”
“What about your family?”
“They loved Don. When they found out that he thought Jannie wasn’t his, they abandoned me. Every one of them. They were good Catholics. In their eyes I never confessed my sins.”
Connie Lennell picked up a scrapbook from one of her cartons and started looking at the pictures.
“Can I see that?”
In response she handed me the scrapbook, and I started leafing through the pages. “That’s Jannie on her first day in kindergarten,” Connie pointed out. “She was so cute. Always anxious to be involved.”
I turned to the next page. “And this?”
“That’s Jannie in the school play. She loved being the fish.”
I flipped through the pages—Jannie on a pony, Jannie opening a Christmas gift, Jannie being a real person who no longer existed. Then, something at the front caught my eye.
“What is this?” I asked, staring at clear plastic Ziploc bag with some whitish objects in it.
“Those are Jannie’s baby teeth. I don’t know why I saved them, but I did.”
I gazed stupidly at the small ovoid pebbles for a moment. “Mrs. Lennell, you have the potential answer right in front of you.”
“What?”
“The teeth. We can use them for the DNA match.”
She stared at the keepsake, a jewel never to be lost. “I can’t. I can’t give them up. It’s my memory. I don’t care what happens anymore.”
“Yes you do,” I insisted. “You care about the people who could have been saved, who may yet be saved. I’m sure you do.”
She looked around the room, her gaze roving from photo to photo. It was as if she were glancing at old friends.
“There’s a chance that you, too, could be saved, Connie.”
“What do you mean?”
I walked over to the window for a moment and looked through the city-grimed panes at Finnegan and Sennett standing by the car. Finnegan had a cigarette in his hand and was puffing casually. I remembered Connie’s words—the police couldn’t or wouldn’t. “I mean that you have been carrying the guilt of something you didn’t do for over twenty years,” I said, caught up in the heat of discovery. “It’s time you did something for yourself. You did nothing wrong. Prove it. This is your chance. If the DNA matches with the other victims, we will establish a connection to all these murders. A killer is on the loose, maybe the same one that killed your daughter.”
“But if the DNA matches the other murdered children, won’t it mean that this person was the father? That would mean I cheated on Don. I swear by Our Lord Jesus Christ, that never happened.”
“I believe you, Connie. Something has happened to you and several other people. How it has happened, I don’t know, but it has ruined lives and killed children. This killer has killed at least three times, maybe more. Who knows how many?”
“Finding the killer won’t bring Jannie back,” she said gazing absently into the distance.
“Remember how you felt when you sent that letter to Dr. Issacson?”
“I sent that letter because I knew he ran an abortion clinic. That’s what it said in the paper. I wanted him to know how wrong it was.”
I was desperate. In that small plastic bag was the answer. In the heart of Connie Lennell was a grief so walled off and a religious fervor so permanent that almost no amount of persuasion could penetrate them. “Whatever the reason,” I said, “you also wanted to find your daughter’s killer. At one time you had a passion. You lost it in fighting the bureaucracy, and in your own misery. People can only take so much, and then they give up. It’s human nature. Now you have a second chance.”
She looked at me, and this time her eyes were focused intently.
“I talked with Dr. Issacson,” I told her. “He understands, Connie, he understands. He doesn’t want to kill babies. He wanted to help unfortunate girls. He told me he understood how you felt.”
“I’ll bet he did . . .” she retorted bitterly. Then her face opened as if releasing the evils of the world from a tight-packed box. “Really?”
I nodded. She looked for a moment. Tears welled in her eyes again and this time flowed in rivulets down her cheeks. “I have nothing,” she said through her tears. “My husband is gone. I have had the scarlet A on my chest all my life.” She took the small bag that contained the teeth and held it close to her chest, as if she were holding her child. Then she handed it to me. “Jannie was my one connection to society. If these teeth will help, then use them. Please.”
I took the small plastic bag and folded the top. Then I hugged her. She flinched slightly at the unaccustomed warmth, then hugged me back with all her strength.
When I walked back out to the car, I didn’t feel triumphant. I only felt sadness and confusion. Marital loyalty, the possibility of infidelity, the chance of abortion. It was unsettling.
Sennett was still standing next to the car with Finnegan. “What did you find out, Ben?”
“Well, I have baby teeth from the dead girl.”
Sennett raised his eyebrows. “That should be enough to run a DNA test,” he said, a touch of excitement in his voice.
“Mrs. Lennell also told me about the other murders that she thinks were similar.”
Sennett seemed pleased with my discovery. “See, I told the chief that you had something special. Have you got the names?” he asked.
“Sure.” I handed the newspaper articles over to him. He took out his cell phone, called Homicide in Detroit, and gave them the names and dates. “I want everything on my desk tomorrow,” he demanded.
By now it was late afternoon and we still couldn’t decide whether to have the DNA tests on Janice Lennell’s teeth run in Chicago or Detroit. It wasn’t much of a decision. The prospect of driving another five hours made up our minds for us. We decided to take the specimen back to Detroit the next day and booked a room at a Holiday Inn near the loop. I thought it was a little fancy, but Sennett assured me it was on the department.
When I got to the room, I called Jordan. She said everything was fine and to tell Sennett she appreciated the police watching the house. I did too, I figured I’d sleep easier. I was wrong. After listening to Sennett snore all night, I spent breakfast trying to convince him he should get a sleep study. He wasn’t buying what I was selling. From the distracted look on his face I knew his mind was elsewhere.
I tried making some small talk on the way back from Chicago, but for the most part, Sennett seemed deep in thought. Around Kalamazoo, however, he started talking, his voice was low and solemn. “Doc, did you ever lose anyone you thought you could save?”
I looked at him for a moment, not sure of what he was getting at. “Yeah, it’s inevitable that some patients will die.”
“No, I mean where it was your fault.”
Sennett stared ahead at the road, staying in the right lane and easing the accelerator a touch. I knew he wasn’t looking for doctor-speak.
“When I was a first-year resident,” I told him, settling back into the car seat, “the chief resident sent me in to do a bronchoscopy on an indigent patient from the clinic. That’s a procedure where you examine the inside of someone’s lung. The patient had a cancer treated a few years prior and had been coughing up some blood.”
“What happened?”
“I remember the situation as if it were yesterday. We were in the old county hospital. It was the middle of the summer, hot with no air conditioning. Only screens and fans to circulate the air. It must have been ninety degrees outside, and under the operating gown it was sweltering. It sounds terrible, but the county hospitals were a good place to learn.
“I had been a resident for about two months. In the operating room, it was just me and the second-year resident. I had performed a couple of the procedures before. At that stage of my education you could never do enough of them.”
“Was there an attending physician there?” Sennett asked.
“Back in those days the residents ran the service. There was always someone you could call if you needed them.”
“So what happened?”
I described the procedure in detail, how I put the long metal bronchoscope into the patient’s lung and saw what I thought was a lesion.
“What happened?”
“I inserted an up-biting cup forceps into the bronchoscope and reached in to take a bite. As soon as I pulled the forceps out with the tissue, blood started erupting from the bottom of the scope.”
It was difficult for me, even now, to discuss the episode. Nurses and other doctors running into the room, blood everywhere, and me sitting there with a feeling of abject helplessness as the patient bled to death. After listening to the story, Sennett stared ahead at the road. It took a few moments for him to speak. “That poor guy. What did you say to the family?”
“There was no one there. He was by himself. I didn’t know who to talk with.”
“You must have been devastated.”
“Honestly, I felt like I was viewing this happening to someone else. I didn’t know what to think. I went through a period of self-recrimination, wondering whether I had the right stuff to do this kind of work.”
“What did you do?”
“I decided that I was not going to quit. Instead, I went to the library and started reading about what I had done wrong. They had a conference the next Saturday, and I had to present the case. I was pretty nervous. The chief was there and all the other residents, but I didn’t try to hide anything and didn’t try to blame anyone else. I told it like it was. It was pretty amazing the support I got from the other residents and the staff. They really helped.”
“Did you do another one of those procedures?”
“The next week. It went without a hitch. But I have never forgotten the episode. Every time I go into the operating room, I think about that case and what happened. Things like that have a way of humbling you.” Sennett watched the road intently, his face grim. “George, I know you too well. You didn’t ask me that question just to find out if I had made any mistakes in my life.”
There were no challenges on the road, especially in the right lane. Yet Sennett barely breathed. “It’s all these murders. I wanted to ask you how you deal with things when they go really bad. I feel that this murderer is inside my head.”
“Sometimes the truth can be hard to pin down,” I replied. “Just look at Connie Lennell and her newspapers and boxes of memorabilia scattered around her apartment. Her search for the truth seems to have no end.”
“Maybe it has. We’ll have to see if Mrs. Lennell has given us anything substantial within the contents of that plastic bag.”
“What about the other two deaths in the newspaper articles?” I asked.
“I don’t know. I just don’t know.” The confusion in his voice insinuated itself in me like a cold, damp fog.
I looked at Sennett’s face. His jaw was set, his eyes narrow and steely. Then he reached over, picked up his cell phone, and dialed Florence Clevenger. “Hey, Flo,” he said, his voice surprisingly cool. “I’m dropping something off.”
Chapter 22
Iwas irritable during the entire ride home. It was the kind of unsettling crankiness that lasts all day and demeans my afternoon patients’ complaints. By the time I picked up Jordan at her office, I thought I was starting to come out of my funk. On the way home I related my visit with Connie Lennell. It was almost as an afterthought inside the foyer when Jordan told me Carl Fairchild had invited us to his house for dinner tonight.
I was tempted to call with our regrets, but I felt obligated. He was a colleague and, behind his intellectual arrogance, a pretty interesting person. If he were extending the hand of friendship, I would take it. Then Jordan reminded me of their conversation at the art institute, as they discussed the nuances of Van Gogh’s painting. The words charming and interesting didn’t help my cause. So we went.
